New York Times :: Who's Sordid Now?
Article

> Cronyism is an important factor in our Iraqi debacle. It's
> not just that reconstruction is much more expensive than it
> should be. The really important thing is that cronyism is
> warping policy: by treating contracts as prizes to be
> handed to their friends, administration officials are
> delaying Iraq's recovery, with potentially catastrophic
> consequences.

A big factor in our domestic debacle, too.
posted by Tomohiro Idokoro @ 9:45 AM

New York Times :: The Level of Discourse Continues to Slide
Article

> Once upon a time, a party host could send dread
> through the room by saying, "Let me show you the
> slides from our trip!" Now, that dread has spread to
> every corner of the culture, with schoolchildren
> using the program to write book reports, and
> corporate managers blinking mindlessly at
> PowerPoint charts and bullet lists projected onto
> giant screens as a disembodied voice reads
>
> • every
>
> • word
>
> • on
>
> • every
>
> • slide.
>
> When the bullets are flying, no one is safe.

What I want to know as someone who's never created a PowerPoint presentation (but has sat through a few) is: what's with that 80s, Eye-on-LA, PowerPoint theme? Can't you change that?
posted by Tomohiro Idokoro @ 8:55 AM

US News and World Report :: Love.com
Article

> Clinical psychologist Neil Clark Warren was interested
> in the countless relationships he had seen fall apart.
> "There's the mystery, the complexity--and the fact that
> most people get it wrong," he says. Indeed, 43 percent
> of married couples are not together within 15 years,
> and of those who do stay together, 4 in 10 say they're
> not happy. Warren estimates that three-quarters of
> marriages are in trouble the day they get started.
>
> The reason for that dismal track record, Warren believes,
> is that Americans are just too easy, relying on the in-
> tangibles of "chemistry" to carry their relationships. "In
> this culture, if we like the person's looks, if they have an
> ability to chatter at a cocktail party, and a little bit of status,
> we're halfway to marriage," he says. "We're such suckers."

We're frustrated super-chimpanzees living in a meterosexual world. This article makes you think that you're a sucker not to use an online matchmaker.

One more fun fact from the article : "One recent study found that as many as 30 percent of people using online sites may be married." And puffers, liars, and frauds abound. But it's one of those game-theory traps. If you don't lie, you should be worried that you'll be out-lied by an equal or inferior rival.
posted by Tomohiro Idokoro @ 5:35 PM

New York Times :: May Your Days Be Long and Stressful
Article

> In addition, when intermittently dieting mice ate,
> their blood sugar levels were better than those of
> animals that were not dieting, what Dr. Mattson
> calls "a sort of anti-diabetic effect." And when he
> placed them under stress by immobilizing them with
> tiny straitjackets or making them swim in cold water,
> the dieting mice recovered much faster than the
> others.

Tiny straitjackets -- how cute!!
posted by Tomohiro Idokoro @ 9:35 AM

New York Times :: Killing Them Softly
Article

> The Bush administration announced a few weeks ago that it
> was halting payments to the Reproductive Health for
> Refugees Consortium because, it said, one of the seven
> charities in the consortium was linked to abortions in
> China. So I decided to do what the White House didn't -
> come out and see these programs we are slashing.
>
> That's where I met Rose Wanjera, a 26-year-old woman with
> one small child and another due about November (she isn't
> sure because she hasn't had any prenatal care). This month
> her husband was mauled to death by wild dogs, and she
> developed an infection that threatens her health and the
> unborn baby's.
>
> She turned to a clinic affiliated with Marie Stopes
> International, where a doctor treated her infection,
> palpated her bulging stomach and enrolled her in a
> safe-motherhood program. Unfortunately, this is the very
> aid group that the White House is campaigning against for
> supposedly being involved in abortions in China.

The cuts by this administration are unconscionable. But Kenya really needs to impose a moratorium on all new pregnancies until they are able to get this wild dog problem under control. posted by Tomohiro Idokoro @ 9:27 AM

New York Times :: Veiled and Worried in Baghdad
Article

> With an intensity reminiscent of how they feared
> Saddam Hussein, women now fear the abduction, rape
> and murder that have become rampant here since his
> regime fell. Life for Iraqi women has been reduced to
> one need that must be met before anything else can
> happen.

You could apply the "bogus trendspotting" critique outlined in a recent Slate article to this Times' op-ed piece, in that it presents only scattershot, though emotionally resonant, anecdotal evidence to support its claim. But it is entirely consistent with the social animal (ie. evolutionary) theory of human nature -- as opposed to the rosy scenario theory of human nature which the Bush Administration adopted in all its projections regarding the war.
posted by Tomohiro Idokoro @ 8:01 AM

New Yorker :: Good Bye to All That
Article

> The Bush deficit satisfies all the requirements for a
> dangerous deficit. It is big and wasteful, and isn’t even
> an efficient way of stimulating the economy, since the
> wealthy tend to hoard their tax savings rather than
> spend them. Moreover, the deficit won’t disappear even
> when the economy is growing steadily. According to
> the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
> Development, an international research group, the so-
> called “structural budget balance,” which strips out the
> impact of the cycle, has gone from a surplus of 0.9 per
> cent of G.D.P. in 2000 to a deficit of four per cent of
> G.D.P. in 2003.

It's probably more fair to say that the wealthy don't hoard their tax savings, they invest them, thereby shifting the burden and privilege of resource allocation (the essential part of policy-making) from elected government representatives whose mandate is, theoretically, to serve society (the democratic -- and, to some extent, decision-market -- ideal) to corporate executives, boards of directors, and majority shareholders (i.e. elites) whose mandate is to maximize profit (in a system alternately known as plutocracy or most of Latin America.)
posted by Tomohiro Idokoro @ 8:05 AM

New York Times :: Alabama Voters Crush Tax Plan Sought by Governor
Article

> "Riley never came to the party leadership to try
> and figure out the best route to take," [state
> Republican chairman] Mr. Connors said. "He went
> to the teachers' union first and said, `How do we
> fix this?' instead of to his loyalists. You've got to
> leave the dance with the guy that brung you."

I don't think you wanna go nowhere with the guy who brung you to that dance. That's one dance you're stuck at.
posted by Tomohiro Idokoro @ 7:21 AM

New York Times Magazine :: The Futile Pursuit of Happiness
Article

> Among other things, this line of inquiry has led
> Loewenstein to collaborate with health experts
> looking into why people engage in unprotected
> sex when they would never agree to do so in
> moments of cool calculation. Data from tests in
> which volunteers are asked how they would
> behave in various ''heat of the moment''
> situations -- whether they would have sex with
> a minor, for instance, or act forcefully with a part-
> ner who asks them to stop -- have consistently
> shown that different states of arousal can alter
> answers by astonishing margins. ''These kinds
> of states have the ability to change us so
> profoundly that we're more different from our-
> selves in different states than we are from
> another person,'' Loewenstein says.

It is only in knowing that you cannot fully know yourself that you can even begin to know yourself.

The Onion offers this fitting companion piece :

Take-Charge, Can-Do Guy Makes Horrible Decisions
posted by Tomohiro Idokoro @ 5:07 PM

New Yorker :: What Galileo Saw
Article

> They now speculate that Europa’s global ocean
> may be more than thirty miles deep, which would
> mean that the moon has considerably more water
> than Earth. As Richard Terrile, a member of the
> nasa division that designed Galileo, has said, “How
> often is an ocean discovered? The last one was the
> Pacific, by Balboa, and that was five hundred years
> ago.”
>
> ...Randy Tufts died last year, at the age of fifty-three,
> from a bone-marrow disorder. Not long before his
> death, he was working with scientists on plans for
> an orbiter that would investigate Europa’s ocean
> more closely. In 2002, the project was cancelled,
> owing to budget cuts.

The successes of the Galileo orbiter described in this article offer a remarkable and mostly cheering tale of American pragmatism and ingenuity. Unfortunately, space exploration appears to be another casualty of the Bush administration's special economic priorities (read war and tax cuts.) One of those things apparently that free markets don't spontenously organize to promote.
posted by Tomohiro Idokoro @ 5:01 PM

New York Times :: The China Syndrome
Article

> "They tell me it was a shallow recession," [Bush] said
> Monday. "It was a shallow recession because of the
> tax relief. Some say, well, maybe the recession should
> have been deeper. That bothers me when people say
> that."
>
> That is, if you ask why he pushed long-term tax cuts
> rather than focusing on job creation, he says you
> wanted a deeper recession.

And if you're a hand-picked guest at one of the president's Potemkin public appearances, you applaud after he says it.
posted by Tomohiro Idokoro @ 9:12 AM