She's a Flight Risk

Jwz recently posted about this blog called 'She's a flight risk', which ran from 2003 to 2006 and is diary of sorts claiming to be written by a  twenty-something woman who is on the run from her family. The story is that her father is a very rich and well-connected member of a small European country, and he was trying to get her to marry some guy she didn't want to marry. Afraid of his power and influence, and with a fair amount of money stuffed away, she decided to go on the run.

It subsequently got taken down from the net, but jwz thankfully downloaded it and posted it.

It's definitely a great story - I read it all, and really liked it.

The question is, is it real?

Firstly, it's worth reading even if it's not. The author writes really well.

But on the substantive question, it's hard to say. The initial presumption is probably not - Occam's razor says that the more unusual a story is, the less likely it is to be true. Most people live rather boring lives, and some narratives are just too good to be true.

Beyond that, the two biggest points against it are the following. First, the idea that a rich daughter would escape pressure towards an arranged marriage by becoming a fugitive for several years, rather than just giving her father the middle finger. Sure, he'd cut off your money, but is this really better? Some people do crazy things, but this is pretty extreme without more explanation.

Second, if you were going to run away, would you start a blog to describe your experiences? It seems a bit unlikely. Then again, I can imagine that the need to connect to somebody would be pretty strong when you spent months on the run knowing nobody.

So that's the starting presumption against it being real, which seems fairly strong. But there's a reasonable amount of evidence in favor of it actually being true. At a minimum, if it's a hoax, it's clearly one that someone spent quite a bit of money and thought on, and one without a clear motivation.

First, she managed to convince a reporter from Esquire (linked at the jwz site), by at least having someone who matched her description and acted like her meet him in a very expensive hotel room with an armed guard. That on its own doesn't prove anything, but it's pretty serious commitment to a hoax. In addition, I presume that Esquire reporters are not entirely gullible, since the guy knows he'd look like a real fool if it turned out to be proven false.

There are other signs as well that are less visible. For instance, the Esquire article discusses some of the early investigations into the place where the domain was registered:

AeroBeta, Sociedad Anonima
Apartado Postal 0832-0387
World Trade Center
Panama, Republica de Panama WTC

As another commenter pointed out, the name 'AeroBeta, Sociedad Anonima' is comprised of 'Aero', meaning flight, and 'Beta', the measure of financial risk, with 'Sociedad Anonima' in companies being abbreviated 's.a.'. So hence you have 'FlightRisk, s(he's).a.'

That quite a bit of planning, no? Not only do you drop enough cash to set up a company in Panama to hide the domain registration, you give it a name that's a coded version of the website.

The other problem with the hoax theory is that there's no clear payoff. Not only was the author not angling for a book or movie deal, but she turned down a number of offers of such (reported in the Wired and Esquire articles at the time). The website wasn't selling any products, and ended up just drifting off without a clear end. This fact becomes even more stark in hindsight - we now know ex-post that there really was no obvious financial payoff to the whole thing.

For my own part, there's two other small aspects that also point to the 'genuine' side. First, there's an odd tendency for hoaxes that involve a female protagonist to be written by a man. E.g. here and here. Being male fantasy, they tend to eventually end up focusing on male fantasies of female sexuality, with the characters being lesbian, bisexual, or that kind of thing. She's a flight risk had virtually none of that, other than one or two very references that weren't particularly sexualised and instead focused on the charisma of the men in question. In that regard, at least, it suggests a female writer, or a male writer very committed to representing the protagonist as sounding more female.

Second, there's one detail in particular that seems plausible in hindsight that would have been harder to come up with at the time. Here's a line from the April 2003 entry on some of the people she encountered:

Also amongst the exiles was a fairly famous software magnate who had elected to leave the United States "not so much for the tax issue, though that played a part, but more for the everyday nonsense of regulation."

A software magnate, living in a sunny tax haven type country, back in 2003, who left due to "the tax issue" and "the everyday nonsense of regulation"? Tell me that doesn't sound an awful lot like John McAfee, who recently managed to get out of Guatemala and escape back to the US to avoid questioning by the Belize police over a murder. (Previously discussed by me here).

The point is that if I were to think of a name to add now about someone who might have been travelling in the Caribbean back in 2003, I'd pick a description of McAfee. But this one predated by many years the publicity that made him famous as a rich guy living in tax haven countries.

You add all this up, and you're left to choose between two scenarios, both of which would seem highly unlikely on their own, but one of which is very likely true. Odd, huh?

Hard to say. Overall, I'd give it about a 70% chance of being true. Then again, I'm rather gullible.

Lepanto

Apropos nothing, the great G. K. Chesterton, on Don John of Austria at the Battle of Lepanto:

Lepanto

White founts falling in the courts of the sun,
And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run;
There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared,
It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard,
It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips,
For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships.
They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy,
They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea,
And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss,
And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross,
The cold queen of England is looking in the glass;
The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass;
From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun,
And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.

Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard,
Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred,
Where, risen from a doubtful seat and half attainted stall,
The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall,
The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has sung,
That once went singing southward when all the world was young,
In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid,
Comes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade.
Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far,
Don John of Austria is going to the war,
Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold
In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold,
Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums,
Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, and he comes.
Don John laughing in the brave beard curled,
Spurning of his stirrups like the thrones of all the world,
Holding his head up for a flag of all the free.
Love-light of Spain—hurrah!
Death-light of Africa!
Don John of Austria
Is riding to the sea.

Mahound is in his paradise above the evening star,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri’s knees,
His turban that is woven of the sunset and the seas.
He shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease,
And he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the trees,
And his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to bring
Black Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing.
Giants and the Genii,
Multiplex of wing and eye,
Whose strong obedience broke the sky
When Solomon was king.

They rush in red and purple from the red clouds of the morn,
From temples where the yellow gods shut up their eyes in scorn;
They rise in green robes roaring from the green hells of the sea
Where fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless creatures be;
On them the sea-valves cluster and the grey sea-forests curl,
Splashed with a splendid sickness, the sickness of the pearl;
They swell in sapphire smoke out of the blue cracks of the ground,—
They gather and they wonder and give worship to Mahound.
And he saith, “Break up the mountains where the hermit-folk can hide,
And sift the red and silver sands lest bone of saint abide,
And chase the Giaours flying night and day, not giving rest,
For that which was our trouble comes again out of the west.
We have set the seal of Solomon on all things under sun,
Of knowledge and of sorrow and endurance of things done,
But a noise is in the mountains, in the mountains, and I know
The voice that shook our palaces—four hundred years ago:
It is he that saith not ‘Kismet’; it is he that knows not Fate ;
It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey in the gate!
It is he whose loss is laughter when he counts the wager worth,
Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the earth.”
For he heard drums groaning and he heard guns jar,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
Sudden and still—hurrah!
Bolt from Iberia!
Don John of Austria
Is gone by Alcalar.

St. Michael’s on his mountain in the sea-roads of the north
(Don John of Austria is girt and going forth.)
Where the grey seas glitter and the sharp tides shift
And the sea folk labour and the red sails lift.
He shakes his lance of iron and he claps his wings of stone;
The noise is gone through Normandy; the noise is gone alone;
The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes
And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise,
And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room,
And Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face of doom,
And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee,
But Don John of Austria is riding to the sea.
Don John calling through the blast and the eclipse
Crying with the trumpet, with the trumpet of his lips,
Trumpet that sayeth ha!
Domino gloria!
Don John of Austria
Is shouting to the ships.

King Philip’s in his closet with the Fleece about his neck
(Don John of Austria is armed upon the deck.)
The walls are hung with velvet that, is black and soft as sin,
And little dwarfs creep out of it and little dwarfs creep in.
He holds a crystal phial that has colours like the moon,
He touches, and it tingles, and he trembles very soon,
And his face is as a fungus of a leprous white and grey
Like plants in the high houses that are shuttered from the day,
And death is in the phial, and the end of noble work,
But Don John of Austria has fired upon the Turk.
Don John’s hunting, and his hounds have bayed—
Booms away past Italy the rumour of his raid
Gun upon gun, ha! ha!
Gun upon gun, hurrah!
Don John of Austria
Has loosed the cannonade.

The Pope was in his chapel before day or battle broke,
(Don John of Austria is hidden in the smoke.)
The hidden room in man’s house where God sits all the year,
The secret window whence the world looks small and very dear.
He sees as in a mirror on the monstrous twilight sea
The crescent of his cruel ships whose name is mystery;
They fling great shadows foe-wards, making Cross and Castle dark,
They veil the plumèd lions on the galleys of St. Mark;
And above the ships are palaces of brown, black-bearded chiefs,
And below the ships are prisons, where with multitudinous griefs,
Christian captives sick and sunless, all a labouring race repines
Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines.
They are lost like slaves that swat, and in the skies of morning hung
The stair-ways of the tallest gods when tyranny was young.
They are countless, voiceless, hopeless as those fallen or fleeing on
Before the high Kings’ horses in the granite of Babylon.
And many a one grows witless in his quiet room in hell
Where a yellow face looks inward through the lattice of his cell,
And he finds his God forgotten, and he seeks no more a sign—
(But Don John of Austria has burst the battle-line!)
Don John pounding from the slaughter-painted poop,
Purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate’s sloop,
Scarlet running over on the silvers and the golds,
Breaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds,
Thronging of the thousands up that labour under sea
White for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty.
Vivat Hispania!
Domino Gloria!
Don John of Austria
Has set his people free!

Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath
(Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)
And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain,
Up which a lean and foolish knight forever rides in vain,
And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade....
(But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.)

(via John Derbyshire)

Update: If you want to hear a really awesome reading of the second stanza, listen to the last 1:30 of the broadcast here. Trust me, I've never heard a poetry reading anywhere near this radical.

Stories from an Atlanta Limo Driver

If you're ever with a Limo driver, I recommend asking them to tell you about some of the celebrities they've driven around. I was with one guy, and I just had to suggest the topic and he went on a crazy roll, including the following:

-Expressing skepticism of the claim that Kobe Bryant was a rapist, based on his firsthand experience of the sheer number of groupie women who follow around basketballers, and the gold-digging nature of a lot of them. Apparently it's common practice for these guys to pay off all the groupie women they sleep with - partly to make sure it doesn't get in the papers, partly to make (potentially false) accusations afterwards of rape more difficult ("So why did you take his money afterwards if he raped you? Are you a prostitute?" etc.). I take no stand on any of the above, just reporting what he told me.

-As part of the above, when there were enough groupie women around, some of the guys would say 'okay, one of you go with the driver too', to which he would apparently have to turn them down, noting 'I'm an old man, I've got God in my life. But if you'd caught me 20 years ago...'

-Among rappers, Usher and 50 Cent are apparently d***heads (no, really!), while Lil John and Sean Paul are good guys. P Diddy is okay, but his entourage is full of tools (stop, that surely can't be right!). Apparently it's common for no-name losers in the entourage to act much more entitled than the stars themselves, which I'd totally believe.

-Magic Johnson and Charles Barkley apparently act in real life just like you'd expect from TV - "both really cool guys".

-Apparently, he was in a limo with Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown, where Bobby Brown was talking to some business associate and Whitney went crazy and started attacking Brown and screaming - in other words, while the rumors that Bobby beat her up are true, she was also apparently nuts and not an easy woman to be around.

-Chris Brown and Rhianna both apparently seemed quite normal right before he beat the hell out of her. Go figure.

Interesting times - it's like the Taxi-cab confessionals, but with famous people.

Facts I Challenge You To Explain

In the USA, the portion sizes of nearly every food item are significantly larger than in the rest of the world.

Except for sugar packets.

For some reason, those need to be half the size of everywhere else.

Wherein Shylock and the CIA agree

Shylock, back in May 2011:

"Guantanamo, the Saudi Secret Police, or a Predator Drone. Pick one."

Former head of the CIA Michael Hayden, recently:

All three panelists trashed the Obama-era conceit that we’re a better country because we’ve scrapped the interrogation program. What we’ve really done, they argued, is replace interrogations with drone strikes. “We have made it so legally difficult and so politically dangerous to capture,” said Hayden, “that it seems, from the outside looking in, that the default option is to take the terrorists off the battlefield in another sort of way.” Rizzo agreed, and he quoted The Godfather to suggest that the new policy is bloody and stupid: “You can’t kill everybody.”

Good to know that people with way more information about this agree with me. Clearly a Shylock Holmes reader!

This bit was interesting:

[Enhanced Interrogation Techniques] were used to break the will to resist, not to extract information directly. Hayden acknowledged that prisoners might say anything to stop their suffering. (Like the other panelists, he insisted EITs weren't torture.) That’s why “we never asked anybody anything we didn’t know the answer to, while they were undergoing the enhanced interrogation techniques. The techniques were not designed to elicit truth in the moment.” Instead, EITs were used in a controlled setting, in which interrogators knew the answers and could be sure they were inflicting misery only when the prisoner said something false. The point was to create an illusion of godlike omniscience and omnipotence so that the prisoner would infer, falsely, that his captors always knew when he was lying or withholding information. More broadly, said Hayden, the goal was “to take someone who had come into our custody absolutely defiant and move them into a state or a zone of cooperation” by convincing them that “you are no longer in control of your destiny. You are in our hands.” Thereafter, the prisoner would cooperate without need for EITs. Rodriguez explained: “Once you got through the enhanced interrogation process, then the real interrogation began. … The knowledge base was so good that these people knew that we actually were not going to be fooled. It was an essential tool to validate that the people were being truthful. “

Huh. That makes a lot of sense.

Someone should tell preening John McCain:

I know from personal experience that the abuse of prisoners sometimes produces good intelligence but often produces bad intelligence because under torture a person will say anything he thinks his captors want to hear — true or false — if he believes it will relieve his suffering. Often, information provided to stop the torture is deliberately misleading.

Great. Now that that's taken care of, do you have a better argument?

How the Sausage is Actually Made

One of things that Mencius Moldbug likes to emphasise is that most Western countries increasingly aren't democracies in a meaningful sense. Sure, we vote for politicians every couple of years. But the vast majority of the important decisions about what becomes law are made by civil servants - professional government officials who decide what's going to happen. Congress has decided that the job of governing is so vast that it will just palm it off to the secretary of the relevant department to figure out what to do. They in turn will palm it off to a bunch of junior guys, who may palm it off to some corporation or lobby group or NGO.

Don't believe me? Check out the 'Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act', a.k.a. 'Obamacare'. Do you know how many times the phrase 'The Secretary Shall' [promulgate regulations, develop standards, award grants, carry out a program, establish a formula...] appears in the act? Quick, see if you can guess.

It appears 883 times.

It's not even like the politicians are even going to any great lengths to hide how little involvement they have in lawmaking. Nancy Pelosi famously declared about the Obamacare Bill, in public, that '[W]e have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it'. Not only did she not know herself, she wasn't even afraid of admitting it. So why did she pass the Bill? Someone told her to pass the Bill, and she trusts them enough to just go along with the recommendation. Who wrote it? Who knows! Some combination of lobby groups, civil servants, NGOs, and God knows who else.

So far, the Secretary has issued over 12,000 pages of regulations elaborating on the law. And in case it wasn't clear, I'm pretty certain that the Secretary herself hasn't read and understood the intended (let alone actual) effects of all 12,000 pages of regulations. Again, who actually wrote them? Great question. Care to wager on the chance that you'll be able to get a straight answer to that question if you asked the Secretary, or Nancy Pelosi?

This isn't just a Democrat thing. Moldbug has a great example about some ridiculous Executive Order on 'Protection of Striped Bass and Red Drum Fish Populations'. Does anyone imagine Bush knew virtually anything about this subject before passing the order? The mere suggestion is laughable.

The idea that most of the important legislative choices are being made by a bunch of nobody government officials is so rarely discussed in the popular discourse that you suspect most people don't really believe it. Come on, how much power can some random bureaucrat in an obscure bit of the government have to affect my life?

As if to remind you, here comes the latest dreary outrage in government overreach in the name of corporate cronyism - as of last Saturday, it's now illegal to unlock your mobile phone in the USA so that you can use it on another carrier.

As a policy, this is yet one more example of restricting consumer freedom in the name of protecting big business. WHEC helpfully informs us that:

Officials say carriers rarely went after customers that unlocked their phones...

and that's a guarantee you can take to the bank!

...but instead targeted businesses that bought throw away phones, unlocked them and shipped them overseas.

 Which is a clear problem because... um... you see...

But that's not what's shocking here. The real kicker is the following:

In October 2012, the Librarian of Congress, who determines exemptions to a strict anti-hacking law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), decided that unlocking cellphones would no longer be allowed. But the librarian provided a 90-day window during which people could still buy a phone and unlock it. That window closes on Jan. 26.

 F***ing who? The Librarian of Congress? Who on earth is that? And why are they determining whether I can unlock my cellphone?

If there are any Shylock Holmes readers that can prove that they knew before last week that decisions on copyright were made by the Librarian of Congress, I will personally send them a cheque for $1000.

Who wrote this awful regulation? Who decided that we needed to make criminals out of people who want to use a local SIM card while travelling in Europe before their contract is up?

Beats me. Some flunkie in the US Copyright Office of the Librarian of Congress. And how did the person get the idea to do this? Presumably the phone companies donated to somebody important, and got this disgraceful back room deal.

If you still believe the fiction that laws are made by elected representatives, you may be wondering whom you complain to to get the Librarian of Congress replaced. Oh, the halcyon days of youthful naivete! Do you think the Cathedral cares one whit about your opinion?

Every now and then the public service will step sufficiently far out of line that politicians will occasionally overrule the decision. The public assumes that this means that the rest of the regulation has been given careful oversight and assented to. Care to wager over how many of those 12,000 pages have been scrutinised by any elected official ever, given Congress couldn't be bothered writing them in the first place?

And for the remaining 99.9% of regulations, some group of guys whose titles and positions will be meaningless to you are busily deciding how the power of the state will be administered.

At least in the EU the elites have essentially given up on the farce of pretending that any meaningful decisions will be decided by the popular will.

Here in the US, the charade continues a while longer.

None of this would have been a surprise to the great Robert Heinlein, who described it very memorably way back in 1961 in his book 'Stranger in a Strange Land':

IN THE VOLANT LAND OF LAPUTA, according to the journal of Lemuel Gulliver recounting his Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, no person of importance ever listened or spoke without the help of a servant, known as a "climenole" in Laputian-or "flapper" in rough English translation, as such a Servant's only duty was to flap the mouth and ears of his master with a dried bladder whenever, in the opinion of the servant, it was desirable for his master to speak or listen. Without the consent of his flapper it was impossible to gain the attention of any Laputian of the master class.

Gulliver's journal is usually regarded by Terrans as a pack of lies composed by a sour churchman. As may be, there can be no doubt that, at this time, the "flapper" system was widely used on the planet Earth and had been extended, refined, and multiplied until a Laputian would not have recognized it other than in spirit.

In an earlier, simpler day one prime duty of any Terran sovereign was to make himself publicly available on frequent occasions so that even the lowliest might come before him without any intermediary of any sort and demand judgment. Traces of this aspect of primitive sovereignty persisted on Earth long after kings became scarce and impotent. It continued to be the right of an Englishman to "Cry Harold!" although few knew it and none did it. Successful city political bosses held open court all through the twentieth century, leaving wide their office doors and listening to any gandy dancer or bindlestiff who came in.

The principle itself was never abolished, being embalmed in Articles I & IX of the Amendments to the Constitution of the United States of America-and therefore nominal law for many humans-even though the basic document had been almost superseded in actual practice by the Articles of World Federation.

But at the time the Federation Ship Champion returned to Terra from Mars, the "flapper system" had been expanding for more than a century and had reached a stage of great intricacy, with many persons employed solely in carrying out its rituals. The importance of a public personage could be estimated by the number of layers of flappers cutting him off from ready congress with the plebian mob. They were not called "flappers," but were known as executive assistants, private secretaries, secretaries to private secretaries, press secretaries, receptionists, appointment clerks, et cetera. In fact the titles could be anything-or (with some of the most puissant) no title at all, but they could all be identified as "flappers" by function: each one held arbitrary and concatenative veto over any attempted communication from the outside world to the Great Man who was the nominal superior of the flapper.

This web of intermediary officials surrounding every V.I.P. naturally caused to grow up a class of unofficials whose function it was to flap the ear of the Great Man without permission from the official flappers, doing so (usually) on social or pseudo-social occasions or (with the most successful) via back-door privileged access or unlisted telephone number. These unofficials usually had no formal titles but were called a variety of names: "golfing companion," "kitchen cabinet," "lobbyist," "elder statesman," "five-percenter," and so forth. They existed in benign Symbiosis with the official barricade of flappers, since it was recognized almost universally that the tighter the system the more need for a safety valve.

The most successful of the unofficials often grew webs of flappers of their own, until they were almost as hard to reach as the Great Man whose unofficial contacts they were . . . in which case secondary unofficials sprang up to circumvent the flappers of the primary unofficial. With a personage of foremost importance, such as the Secretary General of the World Federation of Free States, the maze of by-passes through unofficials would be as formidable as were the official phalanges of flappers surrounding a person merely very important.

So it was, so it is, so it will continue to be.

How to find a primary care physician in America

Step 1. Go to websites like Healthgrades or RateMDs and check out the ratings of doctors in your area

Step 2. Read through the reviews, try to decipher which ones are bogus. Decide that the doctors that score well must at least be doing a good internet reputation management system, and hey, isn't that a sign that they care?

Step 3. Read through some of the profiles and figure out that the ratings are based on junk like 'he's a really nice guy' and 'he spends time with me', and if you're lucky maybe one review complaining about a specific misdiagnosis. This lets you identify some doctors that suck, leaving you with the 'all 5 star possibly bogus reviews' guys.

Step 4. Figure out that in fact the far more useful information is the quality of the medical school they went to and the quality of the hospital they interned at. There is, of course, no way to filter by this information.

Step 5. Settle on some guy that looks good based on your really half-assed search criteria of 'went to a medical school I've heard of' and 'well-rated on both websites'. Call up to make an appointment, get told he's not taking new patients.

Step 6-12. Go down the eligibility list repeating this procedure for successively less desirable doctors. Begin to realise that most of the best doctors are closed to new patients, and that the accuracy of the 'Accepting New Patients' checkbox on the website is no more than 50%. In a few lucky cases, you'll get a doctor who is accepting new patients, but the earliest appointment for a new patient is in 6 weeks time. This is less helpful if you happen to be in need of medical care, you know, now.

Step 13. Call up one of the reception desks at a place you'd previously been refused and ask when the earliest new patient appointment is if you don't care who the doctor is. Realise from the receptionist's reply that the vast number of places do not apparently have appointment management software that can actually answer that question easily, even for the doctors within their own practice.

Step 14. Using a repetition of the procedure in step 13, reach a receptionist who actually doesn't even bother to check the calendar but instead refers you to a doctor in another practice. A quick search reveals that the internet knows virtually nothing about this person or the quality of her care, except that the dates on her profile make it clear that she's only recently moved to this state, and hence doesn't have many patients.

Step 15. Make an appointment with Sally Random, MD, for two days time.

Step 16. Start thinking whether you want to make a 6 weeks time appointment with one of the better doctors for a general checkup or some junk just to get on the 'current patients' list. Decide to put it off until you find out just how bad Sally Random, MD, actually is.

Step 17. Finally figure out why everyone just goes to emergency rooms or urgent care places for medical treatment, or, in the case of my friend, only calls up specialists directly, since they actually have appointments available.

Update: Step 18. Double check on Sally Random, find out her medical degree is from some place in the Caribbean. Decide this is unacceptable, start going through the list of doctors in the medical group you're examining and just reference their medical school with lists of rankings of medical schools. Hate life.

Segregation Lives On

Not forced segregation, mind you. Like so many reactionary ideas (some of which were good, some of which, like this one, were not) it's gone and not coming back. You can measure how much it's not coming back by the infinitesimal number of Americans who would rate its absence as anything other than a clear indication of social progress.

So people like the idea that the government no longer forces people to segregate by race. So far, so good - the government certainly has no business enforcing such a policy.

People will also tell you that they don't like the idea of segregation in and of itself, even if it's not being imposed by government fiat. That, too, is a perfectly defensible and reasonable position.

But what's all the more puzzling is that notwithstanding the large number of Americans who would express such an opinion, geographically America is incredibly segregated by race. And nobody seems much bothered by it, as long as they don't have to talk about it.

Don't believe me? Check out this fascinating New York Times website that lets you visualise the demographic breakdown of each area.

Here's Chicago.

The green dots are white people, the yellow dots are Hispanics, the blue dots are black people, and the red dots are Asians.

Amazing, no? There are some parts where there's a gradual gradient across racial lines, but others where it's an incredibly sharp division.

Some of this can be explained as an effect of sorting on income. But if you look at the sharp divides between some of the black and Hispanic areas, it's hard to see much in the way of economic difference between them. Compare say zip code 60604 (94.8% black, median household income $26,930) with, say, zip code 60623 (62.9% Hispanic, median household income $28,203) or zip code 60608 (62.7% Hispanic, median household income $28,026) and it's hard to explain this as a rich area/poor area phenomenon.

This isn't just a Chicago thing, either. Go here and type in 'New York', 'Cleveland', 'St Louis', 'Los Angeles' or 'Las Vegas'. Everywhere you go, it's there.

So if this isn't an income thing, and it isn't a legislatively coerced thing (and I imagine it's not a 'provision of government services' thing), then what exactly is it? Do people actually just prefer to live around people of the same race, all other things equal? If you find the idea uncomfortable, don't blame me, I didn't make the city of Chicago look like that. Neither did the government. Millions of individuals, freely choosing where to live, created the map above.

It's certainly not a pleasant hypothesis. But honestly, if you look at the map, do you have a better explanation?

"You Won!" - The sneakiest trick used by poker machines

Okay, as soon as I wrote that I realized that there’s probably dozens of sneakier ones I don’t know about, but this one I have at least observed. Poker machines are designed to frame the gamble so that you think you're winning more often than you actually are.

Consider how an economist would represent a poker machine-type gamble:

Probability          Total Payoff

0.7                          -1

0.15                        0

0.05                        1

0.02                        3

0.01                        5

Etc.

What this representation makes clear is that 70% of the time, you lose money, 15% of the time you break even, and 15% of the time you win in varying amounts.

But losing 70% of the time is too depressing. So they choose to present it differently, namely:

Probability          Revenue Payoff

0.7                          0

0.15                        1

0.05                        2

0.02                        4

0.01                        6

Etc.

This distinction is subtle but highly devious. Most importantly, the chance of you ‘winning’ under this new metric is now boosted from 15% to 30%. And who doesn’t love that! 

So how do the machines encourage you to follow the second way of thinking about the gamble?

The first is crude but effective - they glaringly displaying the text ‘You Won!’ when you get the 15% outcome. To anyone with two brain cells to run together, this is nonsense – you broke even, you didn’t win. But they encourage you to feel that rush of winning even when they’re not paying you any money.

The second way they do it is that the 1 unit gets subtracted as soon as you press the button, before the spin is decided. Only then is the payoff determined, and this is done in a separate step. The logic is like you’re “paying” every time to buy the gamble, like paying for the game itself. Then the payoffs are what you get afterwards

This alternative way of phrasing it obscures the fact that you’re losing 70% of the time, as opposed to just not winning. In prospect theory, this matters a ton – people really care about the first penny of losses. But here, they encourage you to put the money you pay initially into a separate mental account, as just a base cost of playing. The “payoffs” to the game, are thus only zero or positive. Just ignore that steady drip-drip-dripping of money, it’s just the cost of doing business.

The honest poker machine would be forced to display equally brightly the text ‘You Lost!’ every time you rolled and lost money, and report payoffs at the time of the gamble realization so that people identified more cleanly which are the loss states. If you got that rubbed in all the time, maybe you’d react differently.

But then you wouldn’t play the poker machines as much. And frankly there’s dozens of ways to get people to gamble less, but nobody’s much interested in investigating what they are. Still, at least Richard Thaler would approve of this one. 

A partial defence of the Fahrenheit System

Like anybody raised outside the US, the metric system of measurements seems self-evidently better than the ludicrous imperial system. The advantages were best summed up by a French friend of mine, who said ‘Tell you what, I’ll convert to the imperial system when you can tell me without a calculator or pen and paper how many ounces there are in 4.256894 imperial tons.’ The point being, of course, that it’s trivially easy to work out how many grams there are in 4.256894 metric tonnes, because everything divides through by 10.

So you don’t have to sell me on the general principle here. But true to a slight contrarian streak (The Couch: “Slight”? Are you kidding me?) I feel compelled to advance some of the better but more overlooked arguments. A company may be good in fundamentals but still overpriced, and the same logic applies to arguments.

For the Fahrenheit/Celsius distinction, the difference is less material. We find it pleasing for round numbers like 0 and 100 to be associated with important physical phenomena like water boiling and freezing. But this really is just an aesthetic point, because you could just as easily subdivide 1F into sub-units as 1C. It’s not clear that anyone has ever proposed converting all the other units of weights and measures to metric while retaining the Fahrenheit scale of temperatures, but as far as I can tell it wouldn’t make scientific calculations obviously any harder (besides needing to re-learn the physical constants in different units, which is a one-off cost for any proposed change).

One benefit of the Fahrenheit system is that the unit of measurement is smaller – 4/9 smaller, to be precise. This isn’t inherently useful, but it does mean that more information is conveyed over the range of temperatures that you typically observe.

For instance, take the example of a car thermostat (which first got me thinking about this problem). The air conditioner in my house back in Australia lists the temperature in degrees Celsius. While the range of temperatures out in the real world is pretty large, the range of temperatures that cover 95% of my air conditioner use is essentially 19C to 25C. What this means is that I’m given 7 useful temperature settings. Which, most of the time, is fine.

But if I’ve got a Fahrenheit thermostat (which I do in my US car), this gives me 12 useful settings from 66F to 77F.

Now, I know the likely objection- “Come on, can you really tell a difference of 1 degree Fahrenheit?”

To which I respond, “Truthfully, if you gave me a blind temperature test, I don’t know - maybe some of the time, maybe not. But here’s the flip side – 1 degree Celsius is calculated as 1/100^th the difference between the freezing temperature of water at sea level and the boiling temperature of water at sea level. What on earth makes you think that this amount is also magically equal to the smallest temperature difference that humans can discern? Is there any evidence for this proposition at all?”

I found myself thinking about this when I realized that after several years of driving, I tended to automatically adjust the thermostat in units of 2 Fahrenheit. Subconsciously, I was thinking of temperature changes of roughly 1C, and just ignoring the odd numbers. And then it occurred to me that this made absolutely no sense at all. While I’m not some sensitive ninny, there were times when you really did feel marginally more comfortable at 73F than 72F or 74F.

This may just have more to do with the nature of air conditioners, where they are more likely to have a logic of ‘always turn on when temperature is above X and go at full bore until temperature drops below Y’, where X and Y are some tolerances around whatever you set the dial at. If you really could keep the temperature truly constant, it perhaps wouldn’t matter as much.

Of course, this difference was nowhere near large enough to complain if someone else set thermostat off by 1F, but if it’s just you, why are you avoiding the odd numbers in the first place?

All things considered, I’ll score this as a mild win. One cheer for Fahrenheit, I say.

Fake Accents

One of my hobbies is to try to imitate foreign accents. It's often convenient for humor purposes to be able to portray a generic person of some nationality - Yank, Irish, Brit, whatever. You need to get it good enough that that it doesn't devolve into 'half-assed Indian accent', which is the death rattle of any impersonation.

Fake accents are also great as examples of the power of suggestion. The easiest trick is to just find a few words that suggest the place in question according to stereotypes, learn to do them well, and just sprinkle them in liberally. So if you needed to suggest Irishness, you could just learn Irish-sounding versions :

'Guinness'

'Taters'

'County Cork'

'Fookin' English'.

and just use them in some combination.

'I love Guinness with me 'taters, 'specially in County Cork. But not with the fookin' English'.

etc.

If you need to actually give a randomly chosen dialogue in a foreign accent, it's considerably harder, since you can't just pick your own words. The chance of being able to convince people depends greatly on their own familiarity with the accent. The hardest is to convince native speakers, since they'll know immediately what sounds wrong. The gold standard for all this is of course Hugh Laurie - Americans who watched House are constantly surprised to find out that his normally speaking voice is strongly English. This is the real Hugh Laurie voice. You can here his House accent here and here.

My fake American accent is marginal at best. By which I mean, it's pretty good by the standard of most people's fake accents, but put me next to a native-speaking American and you can clearly tell where my flubs and weird vowel sounds are. C.f. Hugh Laurie, my American friends generally find it painful to listen to. So if the test is 'If you suspect it might be fake, can you quickly find evidence to confirm this hypothesis?', then I flunk it by a mile.

But most of the time, this isn't actually the test. The real test is 'If you didn't know in advance that it was fake, is it bad enough to raise in your mind the possibility that it might be an impersonation?'. It turns out that this is a much easier standard to beat, because most of the time people aren't on the lookout for someone using a fake accent.

Being a man of science, I decided to try this in the wild. For the first 40 minutes of meeting new Americans, I'd use my fake American accent, then switch to Australian. I'd then ask the person if they suspected that it was fake. Based on a pretty big sample, the percentage who suspected it was fake was between about 5 and 10%. And this is for an accent so bad that people who know me find it gratingly unpleasant to listen to. But people who don't know me just interpret the mistakes as being some sort of regional variation - the slightly Australian 'r' sounds were forgiven as being some sort of East coast/Boston twang.

It's really an example of the curse of knowledge - people who know some information are typically very bad at putting themselves in the position of someone who didn't know the information. If you know my accent is fake, you suspect that everyone will be able to tell that it's fake. But it doesn't work that way.

The other funny observation on this came from my friend SH, who watched one of my recent attempts. He said that my body language became somewhat forced. It was like, he said, watching me trying to perform a difficult calculation. I'd totally believe it - some significant part of your brain is devoted to making the words come out in a different way, and this is actually pretty hard work.

Convincing them that you're not weird after you switch accents, however, is considerably harder. Nobody said science was easy.

Cause once I blow they know that I'll be the woman

My corner solution song of the moment is 'Hyperactive', by the Dollyrots. Imagine everything you secretly like about Avril Lavigne, but in a group not yet sufficiently popular that listing to it is socially unacceptable. If that isn't a recommendation, I don't know what is.

It also raises a question that I've thought about before in the context of the Ting Tings - it seems vaguely emasculating as a guy to be a backup musician in a band with a female lead singer. This is particularly true in the case of the Ting Tings, since it's very obvious that the guy has all the musical talent out of the two - when the girl isn't actually playing any instruments in a two person group, it's a bit of a giveaway. Maybe he's just found a clever marketing scheme, similar to the way nightclubs hire attractive door girls and bartenders.

Frankly it's emasculating to be a backup musician in general (this isn't just my view, incidentally). But it seems likely that you're going to get even less attention than normal when it's a female front(man). The teenage girls seem more likely to be there because they idolise the girl. Maybe some of that will rub off onto you, but I'm sure it's less than usual. If adoring fans turn up backstage, it seems less likely that they're their for their special musical souvenir than in the case of an all-male group. This goes even more so if the girl is highly obnoxious - if you land the job as the drummer for Courtney Love or Alanis Morissette, you should really consider where you went wrong in life.

Still, as a man of science, I'm always willing to update my views. The comments to the Dollyrots video include a fair number of references to the single guy in the band being attractive. And this is true even though I had to look their names up on Wikipedia to make sure he was actually a guy, as the haircut is not exactly a giveaway. Maybe the lack of internal competition for the groupie love is more valuable than I think. At a minimum, he's certainly getting more tail than if he'd gone to medical school.

Brecher on the War of 1812

The American/British version, not the Russian/French one.

Check it out. It starts here, and is up to part 9 so far. Do yourself a favor and read it.

Seriously, if you collected these into a short book, it would be by far the most entertaining account I've read of the whole thing. Brecher starts with the observation that very few people have a clear idea what the war was actually about:

We’ve got a soundbite for all our wars except 1812 and Korea. Try it and you’ll pop up the right cliché easy as spitting. American Revolution: three-cornered hats, redcoats falling in a line like chorus girls, cold feet at Valley Forge. Civil War: big beautiful tragedy that either was or wasn’t about slavery depending on which side of the Mason-Dixon line you live on. WW II: The Greatest Generation, and Nazis’r’bad, mmmmkay? Viet Nam: tur’ble, tur’ble shame, all them fine young men.

But those two, 1812 and Korea—we don’t talk about them much. For one thing, they both ended in a draw. And like coaches always say, a military tie is like bayoneting your sister. It’s a shame, because they were both wild, funny wars — much more interesting, if you ask me, than that overrated WW II.

Maybe the problem is that both those wars featured big bug-outs by American infantry—something we don’t much like to remember. But then both those wars also had moments of real glory: Inchon and Chosin in Korea, Baltimore and New Orleans in the War of 1812.

For a taste of the awesome, check out this description of the embarrassing American performance at the Battle of Bladensburg:

Like a lot of battles, this one was a matter of deployment; the few minutes of actual noise and smoke were one of those foregone conclusions, like a Raiders game. The Americans had a couple of decent artillery units, which delayed the inevitable, but a few of those Congreve rockets whooshing overhead was enough to send the civilians in uniform thinking of going home. Yeah, if Francis Scott Key had been at the Battle of Bladensburg instead of the Siege of Baltimore, the anthem would’ve had some different lyrics: “Oh say can you see, the rockets’ red glare?/Oh God, I sure can, and I’m right outta there.” The few units of regular artillery who’d stood their ground were deserted and exposed, and the whole American line gave way.

Ha! Comedy gold.

In other news, I'm now back in the US of A, and regularly scheduled blogging will commence shortly. Huzzah!

Thoughts on growing up, on the occasion of the marriage of an old and dear friend

I tend to only see my own aging as a matter of hindsight. I suspect I am not alone in this regard. Every day you get one day older, but many years might pass by before you properly appreciate how far down the stream you have come. By the time I was willing to countenance thinking of myself as a 'young man', I knew that already the 'young' qualifier was not really appropriate - in terms of age, I was just a 'man'. When I truly was a young man, I just thought of myself as a teenager, including until well into my 20s. When you are confronted with evidence of how your life is progressing past you, you feel foolish for not noting it earlier, and feel embarrassed at the way you laughed at all those before you for whom aging caught them by surprise. Papa Holmes told me the other day that although he is much older, in many ways he still thinks of himself as he did at 18. I suspect he too is not alone in this respect. I remember a Reddit post where doctors were talking about the last words that some of their patients uttered. One of the ones that stuck with me was a guy whose last utterance was 'When did this happen? When did I get old?'

To take joy in returning to the pleasures and ways of the past is not necessarily nostalgia. Sometimes one will be clinging sentimentally to the idea of some golden age, and as a way of not letting go of one's youth, which is what I think of as being nostalgia in the true sense. But other times, enjoying the company of good people really is just a great experience worth trying to preserve. It was excellent in the past when you got to do it all the time, and it is still excellent when you get to do it now, albeit less frequently. Unlike getting old, I can proudly say that I did reflect at the time on what a rare pleasure it was to spend one's time with excellent companions.

Congratulations on getting married, old friend.

La Dolce Vita

If there is a more reliable way to produce contentment than to graze under a large mulberry tree for 20 minutes and slowly eat one's way around, I'm not sure what it is.

A feature I wish they still had on phones

I was heading back to Australia recently, and true to my disorganised form, hadn't actually figured out the address of the place I was going. I could email my friend to find out, but I was getting on the plane in 15 minutes time, and probably wouldn't receive his reply before then. Once I got to Australia, of course, I wouldn't have free internet on my phone to check the reply. I checked through my phone, but didn't have his number written down anywhere. Bother.

Then I thought about it more, and I realised that I still remembered his mobile phone number from the better part of a decade ago. By contrast, I don't think I remember just about any US phone numbers whatsoever. It's not like I'm Rain Man or anything. (The fact that I'd forgotten to ask about the address in the first place kind of confirms this).

The reason I still remembered his number is that I used to call my friend back in the day when mobile phones would display the following when you call someone:

'Calling Michael Mobile
0412 345 678'

And the simple repetition of seeing the person's number in front of you over and over meant that eventually you remembered it.

I'm not saying I'd trade the modern version of syncing and backing up contacts for the previous one. But given you're going to be looking at the screen anyway over and over before you put it up to your ear, it would be incredibly handy to have the option to display the number. That way I could remember my US friends' numbers for the cases when I don't have my phone on me, or when it's dead.

Apparently I'm the only one who cares about this, since it would be trivially easy to implement, but nobody's doing it. Ah well.

Anyway, as this post implies, my holidaying around creates a lower than normal volume of written hilarity. Part time posting to continue for the next few weeks, and full time posting to resume in the New Year.

Thought of the Day

You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your f***ing khakis. You're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.

-Fight Club

Or if you prefer the book:

This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.

-Chuck Palahniuk

Things you can infer about 'Songs of Love'

I always enjoy when someone's choice of words reveal things about them that they almost certainly didn't intend to convey.

A great example of this can be found in the wonderful Ben Folds song, 'Songs of Love'.

Let me pose the challenge in advance to you. Where was Ben Folds when he was inspired to write the song?

I've put a copy of the video below. To make sure you focus on the important part of the lyrics, I've written down the first two verses. Read through them, and see if you can infer what I inferred.

Pale pubescent beasts,
Roam through the streets,
And coffee shops.
Their prey gather in herds,
Of stiff knee-length skirts,
And white ankle socks.
But while they search for a mate
My type hibernate,
In bedrooms above,
Composing their songs of love.

Young, uniform minds
In uniform lives,
And uniform ties,
Run round, with trousers on fire
and signs of desire they cannot disguise,
While I try to find words,
As light as the birds,
That circle above,
To put in my songs of love.

The song is here:

In case you want to guess, the answer is below the fold (no pun intended):

One and a Half Cheers for MMA

I find myself somewhat conflicted on the subject of mixed martial arts, like the Ultimate Fighting Championships.

Far and away the best thing about them is that they've proven incredibly useful as a vast experiment in the most effective hand-to-hand combat techniques. Previously, all you had was a bunch of different martial arts - boxing, karate, jiu jitsu, what have you - and you'd just pick whatever one seemed cool to you. You'd spend ages developing techniques in that style, and learn how to counter the attacks of someone else coming at you with the same set of moves.

But this left almost completely unanswered the far more important question of what the inherent weaknesses of the style were. In other words, suppose you perfected the techniques of that particular style. What weaknesses would that leave you open to if you were attacked by someone who wasn't limiting themselves to attacking you in the same way that you were planning to attack them?

Hand-to-hand combat instructors, including places like the military, have been interested in this question for ages, and indeed had developed training that was a synthesis of a number of different styles. But UFC really caused this exploration process to explode. By providing a television spectacle and large cash prizes, it gave big incentives for the best fighters in the world to actually explore and come up with different combinations of techniques. The range of styles currently used covers a bunch of principal components (if you will) of martial arts space: ground-and-pound, submission grappling, sprawl-and-brawl (apparently rhyming names have proved popular), etc. These may not have a rich pedigree of historical tradition, but is there really any doubt that learning any one of these would prove vastly more effective than just perfecting a single traditional style?

One of the big lessons that came out of the early UFC rounds is that a lot of traditional martial arts (boxing, karate, muay thai) work great when you're both standing on your feet, but are virtually useless if the guy takes you to the ground. Which, if he's doing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, he will. And then your training will have very little to say about what you should do. MMA has injected a lot of life into the intellectual question of fighting styles, and forced a bunch of fossilised martial arts to consider honestly what their strengths and weaknesses are.

So that's cheer #1.

Cheer #2, which is really half a cheer, is related to cheer #1. As MMA has become more popular, people have started to learn MMA directly, rather than studying other fighting styles. To the extent that I think that these MMA synthesis styles are better for self-defense, this is a good thing. If you're going to have to defend yourself in a bar, you want to have the most effective way possible. And giving people knowledge that they think will help them defend themselves can actually make them worse, if it causes them to get in more fights because they think (incorrectly) that they'll win.

Did you ever notice that Bruce Lee isn't often seen fighting his way up from the ground in movies, or dealing with guys holding him in grappling moves? Do you wonder why that is? It's not that it's not possible to keep standing up. It's that you're in a lot of trouble if your fighting style relies on both people standing up and being at a distance from each other, and you don't know how to stop the other guy taking you to the ground or getting you in a clinch hold. You're in even more trouble if you're a guy who's learned karate and gets in a fight without having given this some thought in advance. MMA thus ensures that you know better what you'll actually be up against.

The only slight hitch here is that I think that MMA practitioners don't think fully about the implicit restrictions that MMA places on fights which a bar fight does not. To a lesser extent, this is particular moves like eye gouging, small joint manipulation, groin attacks etc. But the much bigger one is the ability to deal with multiple attackers at once. Skills like taking the other guy to ground in a choke hold are immensely useful in a one-on-one fight. They are disastrous if the guy has three friends around who will kick you in the head as you perform the choke hold on the ground. The more people are attacking you, the more 'stay on your feet at all costs' becomes a crucial principle.

That's okay though. People can figure that out. Overall, I'm a pretty big fan of MMA in the abstract, and am interested in what it reveals about fighting styles. So what's the issue?

The problem is that I just find it rather gross and distasteful to actually watch. Just to check, I went over to the UFC website. The current headline was "Free fight - Shogun stomps his way to a pride title", where the photo showed the guy in question stomping on his opponent, who was on the ground. The bout ended, as it usually does, with one guy on the ground being punched in the face over and over until the referee calls it off. And I just can't help but find this barbarous and unpleasant to look at. Every now and again, one of those guys on the ground is actually being beaten to death. Sure, it's rare, but it's still troubling that during every one of those deaths, the crowd was cheering the guy on doing the beating.

In other words, what I find the most gross about these events is the crowd. I personally don't like watching guys beat the hell out of each other. But lots of other people apparently do. You can dress it up in fancy terms like watching the skill and the spectacle, but at its heart, the appeal is the same as that of the circus maximus, nature documentaries where one animal hunts and kills another, and every other kind of blood porn. People find it exhilarating to watch one creature attack and kill another.

The guys in the ring are professional athletes. They know the risks, and they're paid handsomely for what they do. That's fine. It's their job.

The guys in the audience, on the other hand, are there because they like watching people hurt each other. And try as I might, I can see nothing at all to celebrate in their behaviour. People are of course free to exercise their liberty however they want. But it takes a particularly obtuse sort of libertarian to not consider the possibility that a society where more people exercise their freedom to watch the ballet might have more to recommend than one where people exercise their freedom to watch a boxing match.

This may be human nature, but it's a particularly dark side of human nature, and not one I think ought to be celebrated.

The real meaning of 'Lincoln'

At the risk of being entirely self-obsessed (the peanut gallery: a blogger? No!), I found myself thinking about  something I wrote the other day about the Lincoln movie:

The main focus of the debates back and forth was less about whether outlawing slavery was actually bad, and more about whether one should push ahead with bold civil rights initiatives that might have negative short-term consequences.

More than that, for a movie about the civil war, this had less action in the whole thing than most other civil war movies have in a given 3 minute period. Which leaves you wondering:

 -Why, when discussing the enormity of the civil war, would you focus almost exclusively on the messy politicking involved in passing the thirteenth amendment, rather than the much bigger issues of the war itself?

-Why focus relatively little on the question of the merits of slavery (unlike, say, Amistad), and focus entirely on whether it's wise to push ahead with a bold legal civil rights initiative that might have unknown short-term consequences, both political and social?

And then it occurred to me.

If you strip away the racial angle to the debates, the movie is an allegory for the passage of Obamacare. You have a bill that initially seems unlikely to pass, cunningly gotten over the line by a variety of questionable political wrangling and underhand tactics. You have a large majority of seats held by a party after a recent election, but a proposed bill that threatens to create internal divisions that the leader will need to win over. You have the bill's sponsors knowing that some folks will probably have to walk the political plank to get it passed. And you have Lincoln as Obama, the racial-healing figure not really getting involved in the messy debates, but working the crowd in the background to ensure things get passed. And sure enough, in the end everyone agrees it's a triumph.

Spielberg also donated $1 million to an Obama Super PAC, so you know that he definitely has an interest in the subject matter.

This hypothesis may sound wacky, but how else do you explain a movie called 'Lincoln', set in the middle of the Civil War, that has only 30 seconds of footage of battle, and even that as a scene-setting?

And if the 'Lincoln' movie isn't meaningfully about the Civil War, what else is it about?

Miscellaneous Joy

-A thoroughly fascinating description of how to interact with corrupt police in third world countries from John McAfee, who's had to test some of that knowledge recently. One bit that I wouldn't have thought of:

"Do not get out of the car, even if ordered to do so. Your car is your only avenue of escape. It’s a ton or more of steel capable of doing serious harm to anyone foolish enough to stand in front of it, and once underway is difficult to stop. The checkpoint police in Central America never chase anyone down, in spite of years of watching U.S. Television and action movies. It’s too much work, plus they could have an accident. It’s not worth it for an unknown quantity. And they won’t shoot, unless you’ve run over one of them while driving off. It makes noise and wastes a round that they must account for when they return to the station – creating potential problems with the higher-ups. Not that I recommend running. It’s just that outside of the car you have lost the only advantage you have."

-Richard Fernandez has a great suggestion for UN peacekeepers in Africa, given their complete inability to preserve the peace even when outnumbering the rebels by 17,000 against several hundred:

"The UN should form up their troops into a brass band to provide music and entertainment as a backdrop to proceedings. They serve some purpose that way."

 -Things which were thoroughly predictable continue to keep occurring.

-If this is true, it seems that Kim Dotcom is learning the hard way the lessons of Patrick at Popehat's description of the Blutarsky Doctrine when speaking to the police:

"Hey man, you f***ed up. You trusted us."

Confirmed Out of Sample!

The heuristic for identifying native Turkish speakers has gotten an out-of-sample confirmation - my tailor is indeed Turkish.

You know what that is? That's some @#$%ing science right there.

"Lincoln" and the Hollywood depiction of the Civil War

I saw the Lincoln movie the other day. Regarding the earlier sort-of-prediction, you sure got the point, but not the counterpoint.

I felt conflicted about this movie. When you go into a movie called 'Lincoln', you probably shouldn't expect a balanced portrayal of the different sides of the Civil War. The movie itself focuses on the politicking involved in passing the 13th amendment banning slavery, in the wake of Lincoln's re-election. In the context of  the slaughter of 30% of Southern males between ages 18 and 40 (along with 10% of Northern males between ages 20 and 45), making a whole movie about legislative maneuvering seems almost trite. Then again, perhaps the Civil War is almost too large a subject to treat in its entirety, so you have to pick some small part to focus on, like Gettysburg, as a microcosm of the whole.

Given the choice of subject matter, they did do a good job of portraying the various characters involved, and the ideas being debated. The main focus of the debates back and forth was less about whether outlawing slavery was actually bad, and more about whether one should push ahead with bold civil rights initiatives that might have negative short-term consequences. There were scenes where the characters debated about whether blacks were actually the equal of whites, but these came across more like pantomime interludes so you could know whom to boo for. Then again, maybe with modern sensibilities being what they are, an accurate portrayal of the avowedly anti-black cause would necessarily come across that way.

The most interesting arguments in the movie are between conservative Republicans (who care more about ending the war than about ending slavery), and the radical Republicans who want abolition immediately. In the end, the former are portrayed as ultimately lacking the conviction to do the right thing, and favouring expediency. Then again, if a larger fraction of the 750,000-odd deaths had been depicted on screen, perhaps the 'end the war now' position might have been a little more understandable.

That's all fine, as far as it goes. Ending slavery was undoubtedly the right thing to do, and to the extent that the South was fighting to enslave other human beings, it's hard to disagree with Ulysses Grant's assessment that this cause was amongst the worst for which men ever fought.

So it's entirely fair to portray this as a victory of the righteousness of ending slavery. The bit I found hard to take was the portrayal of the passage of the 13th Amendment (and the Northern cause generally) as being a victory for democracy. Come on! You'd think that the movie might eventually get around to noting that the representatives of the southern states weren't in the @#$%ing room at the time, because they were busy fighting a war against the august democratic chamber that continued to claim to represent them. Kind of an important oversight, don't you think? You can call the passage of the 13th Amendment a lot of things, but it's surely not a victory for democracy. It's a God damn travesty of democracy.

The Southern position in the movie is almost an afterthought, getting perhaps 30 seconds of dialogue. They did at least give them the courtesy of making their 15 seconds where they were speaking somewhat sympathetic, when the Southern representative observes that the North isn't winning the argument with ballots, but with cannons. Seems like a jolly reasonable point to me. At least they didn't choose to make him throw in random racial epithets, which I was half expecting.

Just once, just once, I would like to see a presentation of the South on their own terms. By which I mean, present the case for the South as the men of the South would have presented it themselves. This is definitively not the presentation that Hollywood ever does. From beginning to end, the South was fighting to preserve slavery. End of story. Nowhere does it ever seem to occur to anybody that this is the Northern view of the Southern cause, not the Southern view of the Southern cause. The latter sounds so alien that you're apt to wonder why you almost never hear it. Let's roll the tape again:

"I tried all in my power to avert this war. I saw it coming, and for twelve years I worked night and day to prevent it, but I could not. The North was mad and blind: It would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came, and now it must go on till the last man of this government falls in his tracks, and his children seize the musket and fight our battle, unless you acknowledge our right to self government. We are not fighting for slavery. We are fighting for independence, and that, or extermination we will have."

- Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy - 1864

Or if that's too hard, how about even a more nuanced perspective on the war from the Northern point of view? Let's take a hyper-partisan figure in the war - Ulysses S. Grant. It turns out even he was far less of a cheerleader for the whole thing than Steven Spielberg. Of all the people who know of the Grant quote mentioned earlier, how many do you think know the full context of Grant's observations about the scene at the Appomattox courthouse?:

What General Lee’s feelings were I do not know. As he was a man of much dignity, with an impassible face, it was impossible to say whether he felt inwardly glad that the end had finally come, or felt sad over the result, and was too manly to show it. Whatever his feelings, they were entirely concealed from my observation; but my own feelings, which had been quite jubilant on the receipt of his letter, were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse. I do not question, however, the sincerity of the great mass of those who were opposed to us...

If you're looking for thematic inspiration for your Civil War movie and insist on entirely taking the Northern side, you might consider starting there.

31 Days of Vegetarianism

Out of interest, I decided to try being vegetarian for a month. (Not vegan though - that $#!^ is wack, yo.) Partly this is due to lingering ethical concerns on the subject. The other reasons were a self-control aspect, and a social experiment aspect - just seeing what it would be like.

I can report back on a few observations in relation to said experiment:

-I didn't end up missing the taste of meat very much - certainly not when it wasn't around, and even when it was in front of me it wasn't hard to do without. The bigger issue, in fact, was remembering not to eat meat. I had to restart the month (twice!) because I ate meat without thinking about it. In normal meal situations it was easy enough to remember, but things were harder when you came across food in non-meal contexts and weren't thinking about it.  The first was with Athenios at Chick-Fil-A where I ate one of his nuggets without thinking about it, and the second was at SH's party where I ate a meat hors d'oeuvre before cursing myself about 20 minutes later. Both of these were within the first week, and afterwards I got used to it.

-The much bigger inconvenience wasn't the foregone taste, but rather the impact on the available choices when eating out. You can't just go to any of your regular restaurants without checking whether they have anything reasonable, and some places (e.g. Korean BBQ) are essentially ruled out altogether. Even at the places you could eat at, there was a huge reduction in choice. It's being in East Berlin wearing a grey polyester suit and peering across at the Armani store on the other side of the wall. I feel seriously bad for vegans.

-I note in passing that virtually nobody takes any kind of intermediate position on vegetarian ethics. Attitudes tend to fall into one of:
a) Eating animals is a-ok!
b) I suspect eating animals may be wrong but I like the taste and convenience, so I just avoid thinking about the ethical angle.
c) I think eating animals is wrong, so I abstain altogether.

Both a) and c) are entirely consistent. b) is the more interesting one - it doesn't make sense as a logical position, unless you think about the cognitive dissonance aspect.

To illustrate the point, consider the alternative intermediate position between a) and c)

b2) I suspect eating animals may be wrong but I like the taste and convenience, so I try to eat less meat than I otherwise would.

Makes sense, right? If killing chickens is bad, we should stop altogether, but it's still an improvement to only kill 10 instead of 20 if you can't or won't give up altogether.

Nobody thinks this way though. So why not?

Simple - the cognitive dissonance would be enormous. You'd have to constantly be facing up to the fact that you're doing something you think is somewhat wrong. You'd be reminded of this every time you considered whether to eat meat, and likely would feel somewhat guilty whenever you gave in.

And you can't have that. No man is the villain in his own narrative.

Hence people opt to just not think about it.

Nobody wants to see how the sausage is made.

Predicting if someone is Brazilian by how they speak English

One of my minor hobbies is trying to guess where people were born based on small details about them.

A fun way of doing this is with language. When people speak English (or any other language), they often subconsciously import assumptions about pronouncing words from their original tongue. Certain sounds will get pronounced in ways that sound slightly odd to a native English speaker, but are often correlated among people who grew up speaking a particular tongue, or from a particular region. The great OKH informed me that the study of this area is called 'phonotactics', so you might call me an amateur phonotactician

The latest one I cam across is a diagnostic for Brazilians. Like all linguistic tics, it's not universal, but it's reasonably predictive - it's neither necessary nor sufficient, but it's closer to being sufficient than it is to being necessary . It's the following:

Past tense verbs (e.g. words that end in 'ed'), they will sometimes pronounce the 'ed' as a hard sound.

So, for instance, the word 'combined', they'll sometimes pronounce as 'combine-ed', with the last sound being pronounced as in the start of 'education'.

I noticed this first in two Brazilians that I know, and confirmed it out of sample this weekend with another guy - he had dark brown hair and pale-ish skin with an accent that I couldn't easily place when I heard him giving a talk. He did the hard 'ed' sound in a talk, so I googled him and sure enough he was from Brazil.

The previous one (which I noted in the comments here, but which deserves its own post) is the following:

A strong diagnostic for Turkish people speaking English is that words that end in a hard 'r' they sometimes combine the 'r' with a 'zh' afterwards (think as in Dr Zhivago, or 'Jean-Claude' in the French pronunciation). So the word 'cover', they'll pronounce almost like 'coverj', if that makes sense. They won't do it all the time, so you often have to listen for a while before they'll do it. It's not uniquely Turkish - I've also come across it in one or two Eastern European groups, although I forget which. But it's a pretty strong predictor.

I've confirmed this across a few people, but I'll report to you soon an out of sample test - I heard my tailor say it the other day when I took in a suit to get adjusted. I'm going to ask him when I return, and we'll see if I'm right.

[Update]: Confirmed - he is indeed Turkish.

Correlations, baby. Though you throw them out with a pitchfork, yet they return.

Brecher's Back!

If I had to nominate my favourite aspect of the internet, it's the ability to come across writers with uniquely interesting perspectives on the world that aren't likely to be covered in the popular press. Lots of the time, you won't agree with everything (or even most things) they write, but you'll usually at least learn something new.

Sailer, Derbyshire, and Heartiste rank highly in that department. But my two favourites both sadly were not very active recently. Moldbug was my favourite overall, with truly unusual reactionary perspectives on history and politics, but he doesn't write much any more. (The archives should be read in full). The other was Gary Brecher, a.k.a. The War Nerd, whose perspectives on military matters are both hilarious and insightful. He's been on a bit of a hiatus.

But he's back! Now writing regularly over at NSFWCorp (which is, incidentally, entirely safe for work). Initially they put it all behind a paywall, but now they've opened it up. Which, in the end, caused me to read them and subscribe - score one for freemium-based content.

Where else are you likely to read:

-An account of living in Saudi Arabia as an ex-pat, including discussing the character traits of different Muslim peoples that's neither a hagiography nor a 'they're all terrorists' screed?

-About uprisings against the Saudis that don't make the media?

-An attack on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter from someone who actually wants a strong air force?

-A genuinely funny discussion on Turkey's historical relationship with Syria?

Huzzah! I don't think I've read many of the other NSFW writers (although Pancho Montana's descriptions of the drug war in Mexico are great too), but I've signed up for a subscription purely for Mr Brecher.

Go, read!

How to improve the public attitude towards police

I know the libertarians like Radley Balko will tell you, and not without some justification, that there's already too much trust in the police. I dunno, though. My sense is that you're always going to be ruled by some gang or other, because the military advantage of numbers is overwhelming. And in the end, the police in the US are on the pretty good end of the scale of gangs to be ruled by. Don't get me wrong - there's plenty of egregious police misconduct, some of it the inevitable consequence of being tasked to enforce things like ridiculous drug laws. And even if that goes away, I think that plenty of police deeply enjoy the power of the job, and like bullies they are likely to retaliate if you question their authority. But still - I read stuff like Second City Cop, and can't help but think that in the end, these guys are not the real problem in society.

Anyway, that's all by the by. Suppose you were trying to increase trust in the police force. How might you do it?

For a period of two years in graduate school, I didn't have a car. I know you must think this a tragedy ill-befitting my social status, and you would be right. But at the time, it seemed sensible. Public transport has two major problems. Firstly, the fact that whether you get to your function on time depends on the competence of the government that day, which is always a precarious proposition. And secondly, the other people who ride public transport. The first one never goes away (except in Singapore), but for the second one at least I was riding a route filled mainly with college kids and other types low on the 'likely to stab you for twenty bucks' metric. So it wasn't too bad.

But what was strange about this period was that my attitude towards police became much, much more positive. Why? Because I had absolutely nothing to fear from them. The police are around? Great - the more, the merrier! It's like a personal security guard for wherever you happen to be walking.

The reality is that most citizens are law-abiding with respect to nearly all the laws that actually matter. The only major exception to this is that nearly everybody breaks traffic laws. Doing 70 in a 65 zone? Even if they don't pull you over (and they probably won't), they could. And they might, if they need the ticket revenue badly enough.

The net effect of this is that whenever you're driving and you see a cop car, you get the same feeling that a thug in the ghetto probably gets when they're walking and see a cop - even if I think I'm doing nothing wrong, they might still cause me trouble. I drive a little slower. I indicate earlier. I come to an over-dramatised pedantic halt at every stop sign. Why? Because Officer O'Rourke might just happen to be short of his quota this month, in which case, bad luck.

And this reaction, repeated however many times per week, ends up having an insidious mental association - police = potential trouble.

And this is completely easy to fix. Just announce a policy that traffic police will only give tickets to people driving in an unsafe manner. That's it. The rest will be reassigned to other duties.

This would have an enormously positive effect on the average person's perception of police officers - once you're not worried about some @$$hole giving you a ticket, there's nothing to worry about!

There's two reasons why this won't happen, of course.

The good reason is that traffic stops are often very useful for police to come into contact with people who have committed other types of crimes. They need to be able to pull you over for the ticket to see if you've got a body in the trunk and are acting suspiciously (or more likely, that you had a bag of pot on you).

The more neutral reason is that the people whose attitudes might be changed already support the police enough. Not only that, but the instrumental value of police support is for increasing public willingness to supply information that will help to catch crooks. And the reality is that people who only break traffic laws are unlikely to have much information about criminals in the first place. The guys who know who shot Maurice the gangbanger on 75th street have other solid reasons to not trust the police, over and above traffic tickets.

Exactly the same logic applies for why you should legalise marijuana. It affects a smaller number of people, but the principle is the same. Whenever a law is being semi-openly flouted by large numbers of people, it's usually a good time to acknowledge that it should just be ditched.

This, incidentally, was perhaps the best news to come out of the election - Colorado and Washington legalising marijuana. We'll see if the Obama administration actually lets them, but as Radley Balko notes, public opinion may finally be turning on this one.

The other was this one, which surprised me, because California voters rarely seem to encounter any freely operating business that they didn't think could be improved by some regulation or other.

It is now safe to return to social media

I logged on to facebook today for the first time in months, and I had to scroll through several pages of updates before coming across the first posts of inane election boosterism. Looks like from here on out we're in the clear again!

Now I can get back to my regular schedule of checking it once a month or so, and being reminded of why I don't bother going on there very much.

500 Days of Summer

I ended up watching '500 Days of Summer' the other day. After checking my testes at the door, it actually wasn't that bad.

For a great review of how much of a beta the main male lead is, Heartiste has a discussion here.

I remember a friend of mine once telling me that the over-arching theme of all of Oscar Wilde's work was to treat the serious things lightly, and the light things seriously. All the rest of the humour flowed from there. This helped me understand his work a lot more, but did spoil some of the surprise of it somewhat.

In the same vein, the twist to 500 Days of Summer is that they take stereotypical real-life (not movie-life) behavior of men and women , but reverse the sexes of the main characters.

(Some plot spoilers below the jump, but none that I think will impact your enjoyment of the movie).

Bad News From Election Night

LA passes a law mandating the use of condoms in porn videos.

Genius! As if the industry weren't unprofitable enough already, let's insist that their product be less desirable to consumers who, after all, are buying a fantasy, which usually doesn't include padding up. There's also zero worry about the industry moving to Ventura County, or Nevada. It's not like any Motel 6 will do as a set, you know. You need the LA ones for the certain je ne sais quoi.

Apparently some guy named Obama won re-election too. This is great news, because it means that you can now get a carbon tax / cap and trade passed by the government. If Obama had lost, you would have had to get the carbon tax imposed unilaterally by the EPA instead.

Also, I laughed watching CNN's coverage where they showed the exit poll numbers on support for Obama broken down into various groups: White, Hispanic, [Obvious Missing Category], Catholics, Suburban Voters, Anabaptists, People Missing a Leg, etc.

There's a curious omission there. Now why would that be?

Oh. Ooohhh.

Still, 93% support for Obama (Fox had the same answer) is less than I thought - I'd seen poll estimates considerably higher than that (inasmuch as you can get considerably higher than that without Pierre-Simon Laplace shooting you down with bolts of lightning for violating elementary probability theory)

Seems like another of Gavin McInnes's 'Hate Facts' - if too many people read about that, they might start asking uncomfortable questions, and we can't have that.