Archive for the 'Politics' Category
February 2nd, 2012 by Wil
Wealthy Fla. man adopts adult girlfriend as his daughter.
A wealthy polo club owner in Florida has legally adopted his longtime adult girlfriend as his daughter in a legal maneuver that critics say is an attempt to shield his assets ahead of a civil lawsuit over a deadly car crash, The Palm Beach Post reports.
Goodman, founder of the International Polo Club Palm Beach, legally adopted Laruso Hutchins, 42, as his daughter on Oct. 13 in Miami-Dade County, according to court documents, the Post reports.
…
In a previous ruling, Kelley said a trust set up for Goodman’s two minor children could not be considered as part of his financial worth if a jury awarded damages to the Wilsons. According to the adoption papers, Hutchins is immediately entitled to at least a third of the trust’s assets as his legal daughter since she is over the age of 35, the Post reports.
On the down side, he can now be arrested for molestation if he has sex with her.
November 25th, 2011 by Wil
One of the authors at the Freakonomics blog has an interesting post on how he learned far more French from a three-month “fast learning” CD course than by taking five years of French classes in college. His take away from this is that the way we teach language, and indeed many topics, is faulty.
This corresponds to some of my recent experience. I took Japanese for three or so years in high school but I can barely remember how to say “hello.” Meanwhile, I’ve been casually learning German over the past two months or so, and I’m pretty impressed with the depth of my vocabulary and grammar. I’ll often be thinking some thought, or talking to someone, and I’ll test myself on whether I could make the same point in German. With surprising regularity, I can.
What’s the Freakonomics writer’s main criticism about language education? That it’s a process of learning rules, as opposed to how to speak naturally.
If we learned our first language like we usually learn second languages, it might look like this. A young child says, “I am hungry.” The parent replies, “Wait! Before saying am, you first must learn to conjugate to be in all persons and number, in the indicative, imperative, and subjunctive moods, and in the past, perfect, and future tenses.” After a few months, or maybe weeks, of this teaching, the child would conclude that it has no aptitude for languages and become mute. And human culture would perish in a generation.
He also makes this interesting point about formal methods of learning (any subject.)
Most of the learning is spent passively copying down what the teacher puts on the board or, in the high-tech version, using ghastly PowerPoint slides. This method of knowledge reproduction made sense 800 years ago, when a book cost $20,000 (in today’s dollars). The invention of the printing press has changed book prices but not how schools and universities organize learning.
This isn’t an uncommon criticism — that the kind of learning rewarded in institutions is rote learning e.g. memorizing facts, figures and vocabularies. This doesn’t capture whether the student has really learned the subject, in the sense of being able to tie it together with their existing knowledge. They haven’t had that “ah ha” moment. As a result, the student gets little joy from learning.
I believe the solution to this problem would be to burn down all high schools and colleges.
November 24th, 2011 by Wil
Years ago, I had a discussion with my girlfriend at the time in which I postulated that if a person really wanted to make the world a better place, they should work towards finding a job where they’re paid vast amounts of money which could then be invested charitably. She refused to the logic of this insight, arguing that taking such a job would somehow corrupt your soul or some nonsense. Well, the “Practical Ethics” blog offered by the University of Oxford agrees with me.
In fact, there are reasons for thinking that, if you spend your money wisely, you can do much more good by taking a lucrative career such as banking than by pursuing a conventional ‘ethical’ career such as charity work.
First, as a banker, you could earn well over £6million. By donating 50% of those earnings, you could pay for several charity workers. So you’d do several times as much good than if you were a charity worker yourself.
Second, if you decide not to be a charity worker, someone else will take your place, and so the benefit you provide would have happened anyway. In contrast, if you take a lucrative career and donate your earnings, your donations provide a benefit which would not have happened anyway.
Third, as a philanthropic banker, you can put your money anywhere. So you can fund only the very best causes. In contrast, as a charity worker, you are much more limited in your choice of where to work. Some causes are thousands of times more cost-effective than others, so this can be a big deal.
My girlfriend was guilty of a common supposition — that money itself is evil as opposed to being a neutral tool that can be applied in a variety of ways. She probably wanted to break up with me after I delivered my flawless argument, but knew that were she to do so, she would be denying herself access to my vast repertoire of sexual skills.
October 26th, 2011 by Wil
Republican New Jersey state senate candidate Phil Mitsch recently got himself in hot water when he tweeted that “Women, you increase your odds of keeping your men by being faithful, a lady in the living room and a whore in the bedroom.”
Of course, this is exactly the kind of backwards, Neanderthal thinking we’ve come to expect from Republicans. If a woman wants to keep her man, she should be a whore in every room in the house! And the backyard. And the car. And the public bathrooms at Starbucks.
Thus I have spoken, and thus it shall be.
October 24th, 2011 by Wil
I caught the new George Clooney film, “The Ides of March” last night. It seemed like it might be an intriguing political thriller.
How was it? Well the first third them across as very predictable and uninteresting. Then the second third had some great twists and turns and really caught my attention. Then the film ended. That’s right, it’s one of those movies where you’re thinking, “This is great, I can’t wait to see what happens next!” and it turns out the movie is over. It’s like Star Wars ending after Ben Kenobi gets killed and the Millennium Falcon flees the Death Star. There’s no payoff.
It’s a bit ironic, because there’s a scene in “The Ides of March” where a male character is making love to woman, but is so caught up watching the political news on television, that he loses his erection. In a way, this character is a perfect metaphor for the movie. He stands before us sheepishly and apologetically looking at his flaccid shriveled penis. He flashes a buffoonish grin in an attempt to explain his inability to complete the task at hand. Can you see him? Does he appear before you? Yes, yes he does.
Hey, wait a second, you’re just standing in front of a mirror!
October 23rd, 2011 by Wil
In His Last Days, Qaddafi Wearied of Fugitive’s Life
But in the days right before the last days, he rather enjoyed it, reportedly saying, “This is fun! Kind of like camping.”
October 12th, 2011 by Wil
I haven’t been commenting on, or frankly, even paying much attention to the nomination process for the Republican presidential candidate. This is mainly because despite the fact that the media and blogosphere seem to have this very schizophrenic view of the race — it’s Trump! No, it’s Gingrich! No, it’s Bachman! No, it’s Perry! No, it’s Cain! — it’s been pretty obvious to me from day one that Romney will be the candidate. If you look at the last 30 years of Republican nominations, the essentially centrist, electable guy is the guy that gets the nomination. I don’t see much gained by wasting time reading about candidates who don’t really have a shot.
If I had to bet money on a Obama/Romney face-off, I’d give it to Obama right now, but Romney could be pretty formidable. And I suspect the left-wing media and blogs’ fetish for focusing on everyone but Romney could work against them. Centrists and independents will say, “well, nobody was freaking out about this guy, so he can’t be that bad.”
September 7th, 2011 by Wil
Everyone who knows me, knows that I’m an atheist, and that I think religious inspired moral values are backed by vapor. If I were going around kidnapping teenage prostitutes, violating and humiliating them sexually, and then chopping off their heads with a chainsaw and burying them in my backyard, there would be no spiritual punishment upon my passing. (To be clear, I am not doing this. It’s purely coincidence that several teenage prostitutes have gone missing in the four mile area surrounding my house.)
However, unlike many atheists, I’m not convinced that the world would be a better place if it lost its religious moral values. The Templeton Foundation (an organization which admittedly has a bias towards offering an intellectual defense of religion and spirituality) notes the following in relation to the recent youth riots in Britain.
… Arthur, dean of the education college at the University of Birmingham, led a research team that produced a 2009 report on the crisis of character among England’s underclass teenagers. The report, produced as part of the John Templeton Foundation-funded Learning For Life UK program, warned that many English teenagers living in urban deprivation were disconnected from both their communities and basic morality.
…
Not all underclass English youth are in such dire moral circumstances. Arthur found that Muslim teenagers who shared the material poverty of their white and black neighbors nevertheless were far more educated in the virtues and faithful to civil society’s values.
…
By contrast, the white and black youth the Arthur study examined were far more likely to come from broken or dysfunctional families, and to have little or no religion at all. This too is not surprising to Arthur, who said that the rapid secularization of Britain, along with a post-1960s ethos that focuses more on rights than duties, has caused young Britons to lose touch with their moral traditions.
…
“No government or other secular tradition, has been able so far to replace the Judeo-Christian moral tradition,” Arthur said.
…
A grim Arthur declared that we may have entered “a new moral Dark Age,” driven in part by the loss of faith in transcendent values and the decline in authority among society’s institutions. This is not, he fears, only a British problem.
…
“I fear that most of America is only 20 to 30 years behind us,” he said. “And I don’t believe we’ve seen the end of this. These young people have done it once, and I think they’ll do it again.”
Some of this is, I suspect, the inevitable gloomy view every older generation takes of the younger generation. And, there were a lot of youths rioting in Paris a couple years ago, and I believe many of them were Muslim. I also think there’s a lot of strong indications that to some degree morality is built into the brain — we are intrinsically uncomfortable performing immoral acts, particularly violence, regardless of our religious upbringing (well, most of us anyway — psychopaths would be a clear exception.) That said, I think this guy is onto something. And it’s fair to worry about a society that loses its religious moral center.
August 17th, 2011 by Wil
This is kind of interesting.
Pay Pal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel has given $1.25 million to an initiative to create floating libertarian countries in international waters, according to a profile of the billionaire in Details magazine.
Thiel has been a big backer of the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to build sovereign nations on oil rig-like platforms to occupy waters beyond the reach of law-of-the-sea treaties. The idea is for these countries to start from scratch–free from the laws, regulations, and moral codes of any existing place.
Sounds like my kind of town.
June 9th, 2011 by Wil
I have to say, I’m greatly disappointed in the public response to the Anthony Wiener situation. The man sent pictures of his penis over the Internet to a private citizen. So what? This has nothing to do with the fact that he’s been a very capable politician and representative of his district.
I’m doubly disappointed by the lack of support from his fellow Democratic lawmakers. There seems to be a universal attempt to create distance between Wiener and his fellow Democrats. Now is the time that Democrats should be doubling down in their support for Wiener. I argue that every Democratic politician should take pictures of their genitalia and place it on the Internet. If one man does it, it’s a crime. But how can Wiener be prosecuted if the Internet is deluged by pictures of Democratic penises and vaginas?
Of course, support from his fellow lawmakers is not the only thing needed to save Wiener. Rank and file Democrats need to get into the battle. I propose that June 10 be labeled “Wiener Day.” On this day, Democrats can identify themselves and their support for Wiener by walking around with their genitalia exposed through the crotch of their pants (you see this quite often in pornography.) The message would be clear: if you’ve got a problem with penises, then you’ve got a problem with me! If a Democrat whose genitalia is exposed finds himself or herself in conversation with a person who is looking away, or trying to pretend they don’t see said genitalia, then I would argue the Democrats should grab that person by the scruff of her neck and force their face into the sexual protuberance.
I think this effort would have one very predictable effect. Republicans would decry the public display of penises and genitalia, but they would also feel that their manhood was being questioned. Shadowy insinuations would fly that Republican penises are smaller. As such, I think you would soon, um, members of both parties hanging free in the wind.
This is the only way we can move forward as a country.