I talk to Jacob Weisberg about his book "Palinisms."

Why "Palinisms" after his famous "Bushisms" — why not "Obamisms"? And many other questions:



If you'd like to buy the book, go here.

ADDED: If you need the pause button or other controls, watch the video here.

Daniel Day-Lewis will play Lincoln in a Spielberg movie.

Great choice!

ADDED: From the article (as noted in the comments by John):

Spielberg just committed to Robopocalypse, but it looks like Lincoln will be shot first.

Lincoln will be shot first!

A mathematical walk.

The Fibonacci chimes at the new Morgridge Center here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison:



Some nerdy graffiti near the math buildings:


(Enlarge.)

The courtyard at Sterling Hall:



Van Vleck:



The "Reform and Revolt" plaque:



You can read the plaque here.

TSA bumper stickers.

I don't know there original source for this, but it's going around in email:

I'm searching for video of Janet Napolitano doing a decent job of explaining the new TSA procedures.

I'm working on the thesis that such video does not exist. Please disprove it if you can. I came up with this video, which is interesting for a lot of reasons. Napolitano appears at 1:22 and is laughably unconvincing:



(Most of the video is about San Mateo County's Chief Deputy District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe threatening to prosecute for sexual assault. Love the name "Wagstaffe" in this context.)

"How Bad Are Bananas?"

"The Carbon Footprint of Everything."

Oh, the carbon footprint... What a diverse range of possibilities ran through my head when I saw the question "How Bad Are Bananas?" And how dreary the reality: The carbon footprint. Of everything.

A Madison liberal struggles to understand the 2010 elections and runs to the classic liberal explanation: The people are stupid.

Bill Lueders's Isthmus article is subtitled "The Triumph of Stupidity." He asks UW-Madison political science professor Charles Franklin how people could vote the way they did, and when Franklin answers "They're pretty damn stupid," he says "Thank you, professor... That's the answer I was looking for."

Frankly, it's an answer embraced by many people I know. One of my Isthmus colleagues sent me a study showing that Dane County, which bucked the trends on Election Day, is by far the most educated county in the state. "When conservatives cut support for education," she mused, "they do so to keep people dumb and their own interests in power."

Welcome to my world: Dane County, Wisconsin, home of people who tell themselves they are the smart people and those who disagree with them must certainly be dumb. They don't go through the exercise of putting themselves in the place of someone who thinks differently from the way they do. But how would it feel to be intelligent, informed, and well-meaning and to think what conservatives think? Isn't that the right way for an intelligent, informed, and well-meaning person to understand other people? If you short circuit that process and go right to the assumption that people who don't agree with you are stupid, how do you maintain the belief that you are, in fact, intelligent, informed, and well-meaning?

What is liberal about this attitude toward other people? You wallow in self-love, and what is it you love yourself for? For wanting to shower benefits on people... that you have nothing but contempt for.

IN THE COMMENTS: Prof. Franklin responds. I front-page his comment here.

Sex and the UW student.

Biochemistry student Charlie Gorichanaz conducted a fairly extensive survey of University of Wisconsin-Madison students. He got 3,190 responses (after emailing surveys to 38,812 students). There's lots of background on the methodology and many details and charts at the link. I'll just highlight a few things that seemed particularly interesting to me:

Gender preferences

Students were asked separately to which genders they are sexually and emotionally attracted....

Sexual attraction: Males were more likely to characterize their sexual attractions at the extreme ends of the spectrum. About 81.6 percent of males said they are completely straight with no exceptions, compared to 68.1 percent of females. Surprisingly, males were more than seven times as likely as females to say they are completely gay, with 3.1 percent versus 0.4 percent. Females were more than twice as likely as males to be at least somewhat bisexual, with 30.9 percent of females and 14.4 percent of males ranking somewhere between totally straight and totally gay. For sexual attraction, 17.5 percent of males said they were at least sometimes attracted to males, and 31.4 percent of females said they were at least sometimes attracted to females....

Emotional attraction: Females were a little more likely to be emotionally rather than sexually attracted to either gender at times, and males were more than twice as likely to be at times attracted to both genders emotionally. For emotional attraction, 37.4 percent of males said they were at least sometimes attracted to males, and 40.9 percent of females said they were at least sometimes attracted to females....

Here's a chart. [Chart #6.] I'm amused at the expression "at least two thirds straight." Time for some new slang!

There are some interesting questions about what students think is "wrong" — as summarized in these pie charts.  For example, is it wrong to have sex when you're not cheating on anyone but the other person is?

... 63.3 percent of respondents said it is wrong to take part in sexual acts with someone you know to be in a monogamous relationship, 24.8 percent said it is too complicated to answer and 2.2 percent were not sure. That leaves 9.7 percent who said being a party to someone else’s cheating is not wrong.

I'm impressed by how many people think this is wrong. But we're not surveying them at the point when they are making a decision whether or  not to do something they are intensely in the mood to do. I imagine human self-deception is at its height over this particular point of morality. But, at least, coolly examined, a big majority knows it's just wrong. The 24.8% "It's complicated" group deserve some credit for honesty. It gets exquisitely complicated when you're looking to justify your own behavior. But it's good to get the clear reading: It's wrong! ... Isn't it? What if.... It's wrong!

Why did the NYC cops single out this woman?

Too many excessively cute doggies?

"A Chemist Explains Why Gold Beat Out Lithium, Osmium, Einsteinium."

It had to be gold.

"When October came, I thought, gee, you know, what's going to happen at Thanksgiving?"

"So I just thought, well, there must be some other people that are in the same boat. Why should they have that rotten feeling? Why should they be stuck home alone?"

What do you do when you see Thanksgiving looming ahead and no one has included you in their plans?

"Voting is a pleasure" ad, depicting female voter experiencing sexual pleasure, is criticized as "misleading" and an "attack on the dignity of women."

It's a socialist ad — in Spain — and the critics are conservative.

Geoffrey Dunn Slams Sarah Palin in Racially Charged Article at Huffington Post.

Did that catch your eye? Maybe not, since the name Geoffrey Dunn probably doesn't mean much to you,* but the title of his article caught mine: "Sarah Palin Slams Michelle Obama in Racially Charged Passage From New Book." Oh? Did Sarah Palin — and her editors — lose their minds and wield anti-black epithets and stereotypes against the First Lady? No, of course not. Here's what Dunn wrote:

In passages leaked from her forthcoming book America by Heart, Sarah Palin... has taken another cheap shot at First Lady Michelle Obama.

That link goes to another HuffPo post by Dunn claiming it was a "cheap shot" for Palin to refer to "people" saying "they've never been proud of America." Back to the new Dunn item:

In a passage on perceptions of racial inequality in the United States, Palin slams President Barack Obama, who, she asserts, "seems to believe" that "America -- at least America as it currently exists -- is a fundamentally unjust and unequal country."

And then she goes after Michelle Obama:

Certainly his wife expressed this view when she said during the 2008 campaign that she had never felt proud of her country until her husband started winning elections. In retrospect, I guess this shouldn't surprise us, since both of them spent almost two decades in the pews of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright's church listening to his rants against America and white people.

That's it?! Palin had the audacity to remind us about Jeremiah Wright's highly racial tirades? She doesn't even call Wright racist! She refers to the statements he made "against... white people." That's an astoundingly tame reference to the outrageously inflammatory sermons by Wright that surfaced during the 2008 campaign and amazingly didn't sink the Obama candidacy. Watch the video at that link. Wright is yelling at the congregation to reject Hillary Clinton because she's white.

Shamefully lame, Mr. Dunn. Even as an effort to prop up President Obama, it's lame. Do you think it benefits him for us to go back to Jeremiah Wright?

__________
* Don't you know Geoffrey Dunn is an "[a]ward-winning journalist, filmmaker and historian"? That's what it says at the post.  According to his bio:

Dunn has produced and directed more than a dozen award-winning documentary films, including Dollar a Day, 10¢ a Dance: A Historic Portrait of Filipino Farm Workers in America; Miss…or Myth?; and the recently completed Calypso Dreams.

Oh, that Geoffrey Dunn. Not to be confused with Griffin Dunne (who was so cool in "After Hours") or the Geoffrey Dunn who was born in 1903 and played the part of Mr. Lunnis in "The Leather Boys."

The (possible) return of incandescent light bulbs.

Politico reports:

... Rep. Fred Upton is promising to reexamine a controversial ban on incandescent light bulbs if he becomes chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

The Michigan Republican told POLITICO on Thursday that he's not afraid to go back after an issue he once supported but that has come under withering assault on the conservative airwaves, including on Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck's talk shows.

It's not just a right-wing thing. It has to do with beauty, freedom, and the psychological well-being of individuals who are sensitive to the quality of light. I've been stockpiling incandescent light bulbs, because I don't want to live with the ugliness of fluorescents. I've been disgusted that politicians who think such things don't matter. They lack perception of some aspects of life and yet they think it's acceptable to make decision about these things. Apparently, we're not supposed to have any feeling about the things they lack feeling about.

TSA agent: "What is this?" American citizen: "It's my prosthesis because I've had breast cancer."

TSA agent: "Well, you'll need to show me that."

Late afternoon on the prairie.

(Enlarge.)

 But we're not out in the middle of nowhere. Civilization is just at hand:


(Enlarge.)

Quite lovely, I think!

"Pro-choicers think this is a scam against them."

"Now, while pro-lifers are becoming incensed and begging the couple not to abort, pro-choicers are becoming incensed and wanting the couple to be shot. Reading more closely what the couple writes, I've come to agree this is a pro-life stunt. A pro-choicer, unless a real sicko, would not go into this sort of detail about the 16-week development of the baby she may abort..."

Yes, obviously it's a stunt. I'm amazed that bloggers are willing to drive traffic to such things....

World Toilet Day is today... and it's no joke.

"Haiti is in the throes of a cholera epidemic. The disease is easily treated, and can be prevented outright if people have access to good sanitation and purified water, health experts say. But the country, debilitated by the earthquake, poverty and hurricanes, lacks access to clean water, toilets or health care. Lack of sanitation is the leading cause of infection in the world...."

This reminds me of a passage in the truly engrossing Bill Bryson book "At Home: A Short History of Private Life," describing the sanitary conditions in England in the 19th century:

[C]esspits in poorer districts were seldom emptied and frequently overflowed... In St. Giles... 54,000 people crowded into just a few streets. By one count, 1100 people lived in 27 houses along one alley; that is more than 40 people per dwelling. In Spitalfields, farther east, inspectors found 63 people living in a single house. The house had 9 beds — one for every 7 occupants....

Such masses of humanity naturally produced enormous volumes of waste — far more than any system of cesspits could cope with. In one fairly typical report an inspector recorded visiting 2 houses in St. Giles where the cellars were filled with human waste to a depth of 3 feet. Outside the inspector continued, the yard was 6 inches deep in excrement. Bricks had been stacked like stepping-stones to let the occupants cross the yard.

At Leeds in the 1830s, a survey of the poorer districts found that many streets were "floating with sewage"; one street, housing 176 families, had not been cleaned for 15 years. In Liverpool, as many as one-sixth of the populace lived in dark cellars, where wastes could all too easily seep in.

"The last thing Wisconsin needed was another rich guy to serve as fodder for the Feingold political machine. Just who did this thin-faced, white-haired guy think he was?"

Christian Schneider, of the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, has a long, juicy article about Ron Johnson:

In early April of 2010, Michelle Litjens, the chairwoman of the Winnebago Republican Party, found some local guy that was thinking of running for the U.S. Senate.   She brought him down to a meeting of a handful of conservative operatives in Madison.  He didn’t even know he was supposed to speak at this meeting, and patched together a few talking points in the car on the way down.

When Litjens introduced businessman Ron Johnson to the group, people rolled their eyes and checked their watches as he ambled through his reasons for running.  There were already a few people thinking about running for senate, and even Wisconsin political legend Tommy Thompson was considering getting in the race.  The last thing Wisconsin needed was another rich guy to serve as fodder for the Feingold political machine.  Just who did this thin-faced, white-haired guy think he was?

Six months later, everyone found out who he was.  He was Ron Johnson, Republican Senator from Wisconsin.

That's the very end of the article. The "thin-faced" business refers back to this:

In his remote cubicle, [36-year old deputy campaign manager Jack] Jablonski is holding court with the other staffers, detailing a study he read that could bode well for RonJon.  Apparently, some political scientists have determined that voters are more likely to support the candidate with the narrower face.  It makes them look more trustworthy, or something.  These researchers actually used Feingold’s 2004 race against construction company owner Tim Michels to prove their point – Feingold’s face was narrower that Michels’ giant meaty head, so study respondents correctly picked Feingold as the winner by overwhelming margins.

“Ron’s face is even narrower than Feingold’s” Jablonski points out.  “Let’s all just go home – it’s a done deal,” he jokes.

I'd forgotten about the hopes that were pinned on Thompson. You may remember that I attended the Tea Party rally at the Capitol where Thompson announced that he wouldn't run. Leaking the news the day before, Firedoglake wrote:

[T]here was really only one Republican lurking out there who would have given Russ Feingold a tough race. In this case it was Tommy Thompson... [His decision not to run] all but assures that Feingold will be able to win re-election; the two candidates currently in the race against him are running well behind....

Ha.

How about a little empathy for the people who work for the TSA?

How would you like it if your job suddenly changed to requiring you to feel people up all day long? And everyone started to hate you? And it seemed as though maybe you could be accused of committing crimes — thousands of crimes — including the molestation of children?

Well, how would you like it?
	I'd hate it, and I would sacrifice my livelihood and quit.
	I'd hate it, but I wouldn't quit because these are hard times and you don't walk away from a job.
	I'd bring my mind into alignment with the government mission and soldier on.
	I'd find a way to see the work as challenging and fun and do it with energy and good cheer.
	I'd get a sexual thrill from the power trip of feeling up people who are compelled to submit.
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