"How to buy happiness."

"The new science of spending points to a surprising conclusion: How we use our money may matter as much or more than how much of it we've got."

I don't know why that is "surprising," but the details are perhaps worth noting. For one thing, buying a house or moving to a better house is found unlikely to bring more happiness.

And dozens of studies show that people get more happiness from buying experiences than from buying material things. Experiential purchases — such as trips, concerts and special meals — are more deeply connected to our sense of self, making us who we are....

Some meal you ate is more deeply connected to your sense of self than your home? I find that hard to believe. I think it's more that the meal is over and done with, so the happiness was consumed on the spot and remembered. The house continues and you enjoy it sometimes but are burdened by it too. You have mixed feelings over a long period of time. It's not a memory.

And experiences come with one more benefit: They tend to bring us closer to other people, whereas material things are more often enjoyed alone. (We tend to watch our new television alone on the couch, but we rarely head to a wonderful restaurant or jet off to Thailand solo.) 

That's why you might want to bring loved ones into that house of yours. And why is there no mention of the nonwonderful restaurants and nonwonderful flights overseas?

So, doing things with other people makes a difference for happiness, and our research suggests that doing things for other people can provide an additional boost. 

That's obvious and not about how you spend your money. Dropping dollars on restaurant meals and travel won't necessarily get you better social connections.

In experiments we've conducted around the world, including in Canada, the United States, Uganda and South Africa, we find that people are happier if they spend money on others. And we've found that spending even just a few dollars on someone else provides more happiness than using the cash to treat yourself.

This is why we love to pay taxes, no?

5 reasons why Yahoo will ruin Tumblr...

... and the argument to the contrary.

"Presidential speculation around Scott Walker heats up as he heads to Iowa this week."

"Walker may be shrugging off chatter about 2016, but political observers see plenty of signs he is considering a run for president after his 2014 re-election campaign is over."

He’s working on a book about his life, tentatively titled “Unintimidated: A Governor’s Story and a Nation’s Challenge.” And Walker readily admits he’s traveling around the country for high-profile fundraisers and other conservative gatherings, from New Orleans to Iowa, Washington, D.C., to California.

“We used to call this period ‘testing the waters.’ I think that’s what he’s doing,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “He can’t be explicit yet. But I think he’ll run.”

Sabato and his colleagues put Walker at the top of their list of 2016 Republican presidential contenders, noting that "Democrats tried — and failed — to strike him down in a recall election last year:

"Not only did Walker survive, but this unscheduled political war elevated him to stardom amongst conservatives across the country. If Walker were to become the Republican presidential nominee, Democrats will have helped it happen."

Obama's message: Nobody cares... no time for excuses...

Obama was addressing the graduates at Morehouse College, which is an all-male and historically black college.

Obama said that too many young black men make “bad choices.”

“Growing up, I made quite a few myself,” Obama said. “Sometimes I wrote off my own failings as just another example of the world trying to keep a black man down. I had a tendency to make excuses for me not doing the right thing.”

But, the president implored, “we’ve got no time for excuses.”

“In today’s hyper-connected, hyper-competitive world, with millions of young people from China and India and Brazil, many of whom started with a whole lot less than all of you did, all of them entering the global workforce alongside you, nobody is going to give you anything you haven’t earned,” he said. “Nobody cares how tough your upbringing was. Nobody cares if you suffered some discrimination.”

ADDED: Here's the full text of the speech.

At the Red Tree Café...

... it's getting late, so come on in here.

ADDED: I'm really not sure whether I took this photo or Meade did. It comes right around the point where he took the camera away from me.

Bob Woodward: "I think you have to kind of step back and say what’s the theory of governing here."

"And the theory is, it seems, oh, there are investigations of the IRS so we can’t interfere."

There is this leak investigation of the AP, so we can’t get involved. Oh, there is an investigation of Benghazi, so we’re not responsible. The President and the executive branch need to govern on a daily basis and you can’t purchase immunity from governing....

But some institutions have a no-surprise rule, which is you need to make sure the person at the top, who is the president in this case, he is constitutionally responsible for the whole executive branch, to be told about things that are going on that are bad. And you can’t kind of say, oh, that happened last year and they’re investigating. You need to stop the bad things right away.

The Althouse Amazon portal: easy-to-use, one-dial, heavy-duty, batteries not required (thus, not included).

By using the Althouse portal, you can buy things you want and – while paying nothing extra – make a contribution to this blog. We notice. We appreciate it. And only if it somehow doesn't get scrubbed from your talking points will we know it's you.

From the May 17, 2013 to May 18, 2013 Amazon Associates Report:

Orbit 91213 One-Dial Garden Hose Digital Water Timer

"Look, I can't speak to the law here. The law is irrelevant. The activity was outrageous and inexcusable."

The Weekly Standard has this clip of Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer this morning on ABC's "This Week," asked whether the IRS's actions were illegal:



Drudge links to this in a top-left headline reading "Law is irrelevant," which appears above the main headline: "'IRRELEVANT' WHERE OBAMA WAS DURING BENGHAZI," which links to another Weekly Standard clip of Pfeiffer — appearing, also this morning, on "Fox News Sunday" — saying "I don't remember what room the president was in on that night, and that's a largely irrelevant fact":



The double use of the word "irrelevant" seems significant, but let's notice the difference between the 2 usages.

In talking about Benghazi, the interviewer, Chris Wallace, is trying to extract a specific fact about the events, a fact that has not yet come out and that Pfeiffer might know. Pfeiffer blows out a tirade of truly irrelevant verbiage to distract us from the question asked, including the notion that the fact isn't important. Who cares where the physical body of Obama was as long as he was "in touch"?

For the birds.

The phrase "for the birds" — originally, "strictly for the birds" (I guess the strictures broke down over time) — is defined by the (unlinkable) Oxford English Dictionary to mean "trivial, worthless; appealing only to gullible people." This isn't such an old expression, according to the OED, which finds its first print appearance in  J. D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye," published in 1951: "‘Since 1888 we have been moulding boys into splendid, clear-thinking young men.’ Strictly for the birds."

But the 1957 book "American Speech" tells us about its use in speech, which goes back to 1942:

In 1942, when I entered the U.S. Army..the disparaging term that's for the birds was in common use among officers and enlisted men... The metaphor alludes to birds eating droppings from horses and cattle.

So "for the birds" is a way of saying "shit"!

This is especially amazing to me this morning as I'm pursuing a bird theme this morning, but I'd gone off-theme in the previous post to talk about Maureen Dowd's column and encountered the expression "sad sack" and learned for the first time that it's a short version of the WWII military slang "sad sack of shit."

How many more common expressions have a hidden shit theme dating back to World War II? If I encounter another one this morning by accident, it's going to feel cosmic. And don't tell me "cosmic" WWII slang for Coincidence Of Shit Metaphors In Combat.

"The onetime messiah seems like a sad sack, trying to bounce back from a blistering array of sins that are not even his fault."

Obama's in trouble, and Maureen Dowd is trying to help. I think. But lamely describing lameness? What's the solution?

The president should try candid; wistful and petulant aren’t getting him anywhere. The Republicans who are putting partisan gain above solving the country’s problems deserve a smackdown.

Oh, please. That deserve-a-smackdown sentence is typical of what Obama's been saying for months. It's the very "wistful and petulant" that's not "getting him anywhere." And saying that a smackdown is deserved is perfectly passive. There's no solution there.

Is "try candid" a solution? It's very funny to say "try candid." Try. See if it works, because that other thing you've been doing hasn't worked. Candid is another means to an end, to be tried after dissembling has failed. Try it. For what end? Obviously not for its own sake or you wouldn't say try.  The end must be partisan gain. Or... no, partisan gain is that terrible end sought by Republicans. Democrats are about solving the country’s problems.

How much attention does Maureen Dowd pay to her writing? I suspect that she giddily spins out colorful sentences. She's got a knack. But then she doesn't look at them critically. For example, that sentence I put in the post title:

The onetime messiah seems like a sad sack, trying to bounce back from a blistering array of sins that are not even his fault.

Speaking of a blistering array...  that's quite an array of images. And what's a blistering array? It's like the rays of the sun got into array and caused a second-degree sunburn. But the oldest meaning of the word "array" is military — soldiers lined up for battle. It's not really anything that sins do.

But Sad Sack has a military connotation to some of us who remember the old comic book character:



Sad Sack was "an otherwise unnamed, lowly private experiencing some of the absurdities and humiliations of military life. The title was a euphemistic shortening of the military slang 'sad sack of shit,' common during WWII."

I doubt if Dowd meant to associate Obama with a sack of shit, but she asks us to picture this sack bouncing. Bouncing back from an array of sins. So the sins are arrayed in military formation — perhaps in the sun, with second-degree sunburns — and the sack of shit (which was once a messiah) is trying to bounce, as if bouncing is a good response to an organized military attack.

Seems like a sad sack, trying to bounce back... I take it that's an accidental rhyme, just one more lump dingleberry of evidence that Dowd doesn't look critically at her writing, but it's possible, considering her reference to Obama's statement that "he dreams of 'going Bulworth,' a reference to the Warren Beatty movie in which a depressed and fading Democratic senator from California starts rapping, speaking with politically incorrect candor and dating Halle Berry." Seems like a sad sack, trying to bounce back... that could be a line in a rap. But no, it's an unintentional rhyme. Just as throwing Halle Berry into that riff about Bulworth unintentionally imputes an adultery component to Obama's Dreams From Warren Beatty.

"Hummingbird on the Left."

"Huitzilopochtli, Aztec God of Sun and War."

Huitzilopochtli's name is a combination of two Nahuatl (or Aztecan) words, huitzilin, meaning hummingbird, and opochtli, which means left — the god's name translates literally as "Hummingbird on the Left." This resulted in Huitzilopochtli often being depicted as a blue- or green-colored hummingbird or as a warrior whose armor and helmet were made of hummingbird features....

More here:

Huitzilopochtli's mother was Coatlicue, and his father was a ball of feathers....

His sister, Coyolxauhqui, tried to kill their mother because she became pregnant in a shameful way (by a ball of feathers). Her offspring, Huitzilopochtli, learned of this plan while still in the womb, and before it was put into action, sprang from his mother's womb fully grown and fully armed. He then killed his sister Coyolxauhqui and many of his 400 brothers. He tossed his sister's head into the sky, where it became the moon, so that his mother would be comforted in seeing her daughter in the sky every night. He threw his other brothers and sisters into the sky, where they became the stars.

"You know you’ve built a pretty good robot when nature itself has been fooled."

"And a group of robotics researchers at the University of Maryland got that compliment last month, when their robotic bird, dubbed 'Robo Raven' was attacked by a hawk."

"Since the time of the pharaohs, Egyptians have raised nets every autumn along the Mediterranean, to capture golden orioles, nightingales and corncrakes..."

"... as they wing their way south for the winter. It's an ancient tradition, but in recent years the custom has gotten out of hand."

A few scattered nets along the coast have metastasized into a nearly impenetrable wall of traps, stretching almost without break from the Gaza strip in the east to the Libyan border in the west. Conservative estimates set the annual death toll of migratory birds in this area at 10 million, but others say it is probably an order of magnitude more.

In some areas, especially near Libya, the birds are caught for subsistence, by people who currently have no other way to feed themselves, but the vast majority, perhaps eighty percent of the birds trapped, are sold in markets as a pricey delicacy or hocked to high-end restaurants in Cairo for up to five euros for each slight songbird.

"Seven cardinals but no hawks? Come on!"

"What the State Birds Should Be."

This has been the most depressing post I have ever put together. Three robins but no blue jay? Seven cardinals but no owls or hawks? Five filthy mockingbirds? This is what we pay taxes for, folks.

Obama "is deeply concerned both that his office... never violate its primary duty to abide by the Constitution’s checks and balances..."

"... and that he nonetheless exercise those powers to the limit as needed to protect the nation and its people."

Says Harvard lawprof Laurence Tribe, quoted in a Washington Post article amusingly titled "President Obama exercises a fluid grip on the levers of power."

"Hectored by flies, whooping cranes still struggling in Wisconsin."

"A swarm of black flies at the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge appears to be the best explanation for why endangered whooping cranes are abandoning their nests, but the pesky insects might not be the only reason the birds are struggling in Wisconsin."