Beyond some point, there seems to be little gain in satisfaction from bolstering your private spending. When mansions grow to 15,000 square feet from 10,000, for instance, the primary effect is merely to raise the bar that defines an adequate home among the superwealthy.

By contrast, higher spending on many forms of public consumption would produce clear gains in satisfaction for the wealthy. It’s reasonable to assume, for example, that driving on well-maintained roads is safer and less stressful than driving on pothole-ridden ones.

But that raises an obvious question: If wealthy taxpayers would be happier to drive slightly less expensive vehicles on better roads, why are so many of them vehemently opposed to the higher taxes needed for improved infrastructure?

One possible explanation is that they suffer from a simple cognitive illusion when they think about how higher taxes would affect them.

Continuing the benefits of paying for well paved roads, but an example of what conservatives should think if they genuinely value the concept of the stable family and a society in which crime is low. It is a proven that the more education a society has, the lower the crime rate. That applies to groups of people. If you find a suburb with a lower than average crime rate, regardless of race, religion or immigrant status, you’ll find people with more post secondary education than the national average. Thus if you want stable families, which those neighborhoods tend to have and you want to live in a society where it is generally safe to walk down the street, you should want to take the necessary steps to have  society, the nation, move towards accomplishing that goal. Yes it costs money, but as with any thing of value, you have to pay for it – unless you’re some kind of dirty hippie socialist or the kind of conservatives and rightie libertarians we have now. Let’s assume that conservatives and libertarians are sincere in their desire to have a stable prosperous and safe society. If they are and are still against paying reasonable taxes, than they would seem to have the very same attitude of the welfare queens that live on in the fetid imagination of the far Right. They want something for nothing, they want a free ride.

What a Drag – Here’s one reason we’re stuck in slow growth mode: the budget crunch among state and local governments. All governors are making cutbacks. Conservative governors are making the cutbacks including hundreds of thousands of laid-off employees and then shouting – see – the economy sucks. Part of the reason it still sucky, to some degree, is because thanks to these governors and the belief in the great mythical gods of austerity, there are fewer people with pay checks to buy stuff.

Sneaker Pimps – 6 Underground, from the 90s. The beginning of blending sounds – rap, jazz, lounge, nu-jazz.

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Would you like a shot of hazelnuts with that insanity: Romney and super PAC spent over $15 million in Florida. Gingrich and his backers spent $4 million.

We need to get this ten-year old one of those Newt Gingrich janitorial jobs than she would not be so poor.

White Shoulders

YOUR white shoulders
I remember
And your shrug of laughter.

Low laughter
Shaken slow
From your white shoulders.

by Carl Sandburg (1878–1967).  Chicago Poems.  1916.

The idea of a simple, cheap and widely available device that could boost brain function sounds too good to be true.

Yet promising results in the lab with emerging ‘brain stimulation’ techniques, though still very preliminary, have prompted Oxford neuroscientists to team up with leading ethicists at the University to consider the issues the new technology could raise. They spoke to Radio 4′s Today programme this morning.

Recent research in Oxford and elsewhere has shown that one type of brain stimulation in particular, called transcranial direct current stimulation or TDCS, can be used to improve language and maths abilities, memory, problem solving, attention, even movement.

Critically, this is not just helping to restore function in those with impaired abilities. TDCS can be used to enhance healthy people’s mental capacities. Indeed, most of the research so far has been carried out in healthy adults.

TDCS uses electrodes placed on the outside of the head to pass tiny currents across regions of the brain for 20 minutes or so. The currents of 1–2 mA make it easier for neurons in these brain regions to fire. It is thought that this enhances the making and strengthening of connections involved in learning and memory.

The technique is painless, all indications at the moment are that it is safe, and the effects can last over the long term.

Ritalin does not work in exactly the same way though it is thought that by increasing brain levels of dopamine and norepinephrine ( especially the latter) the effect is to boost brain process much in the way amphetamines or cocaine do. Just because transcranial direct current stimulation or TDCS is not ingested does not mean the effects on nerve cells are any less powerful or safer – the human body being one big electro-chemical vat – or as Sarah Silver says, you’re just molecules honey. Some of the most effective science fiction from my point of view are like the movie Limitless. They took what we know about the mood enhancing effects of cocaine and the enhanced concentration effects of Ritalin or methylphenidate ( which is also approved to treat cognitive dysfunctions) and imagined a future drug that improved on those enhancements with added intelligence. The ethics of Ritalin and TDCS are still up for debate, but there is no putting these genies back in the bottle. It is more likely that the major parts of the debate will be whether the average person will have to get treatments from a licensed professional or you’re be able to order your own TDCS from Amazon. Or whether it is appropriate for children.

‘We ask: should we use brain stimulation to enhance cognition, and what are the risks?’ explains Roi. ‘Our aim was to look at whether it gives rise to new ethical issues, issues that will increasingly need to be thought about in our field but also by policymakers and the public.’

‘This research cuts to core of humanity: the capacity to learn,’ says Professor Julian Savulescu. ‘The capacity to learn varies across people, across ages and with illness. This kind of technology enables people to get more out of the work they put into learning something.’

He adds: ‘This is a first step down the path of maximizing human potential. It is a very exciting development but we need to control the release of the genie. Although this looks like a simple external device, it acts by affecting the brain. That could have very good effects, but unpredictable side effects.’

One of the most obvious uses of brain stimulation techniques is in children as an educational or learning aid. The researchers believe that their use in children would be warranted, and that we should begin research to understand how TDCS might be used in children.

Roi notes that: ‘Parents will often send their child to piano lessons or to football lessons, wanting them to do well.’ He considers that providing people with ways of fulfilling their potential is not a bad thing.

The researchers consider whether brain stimulation could be thought of as cheating, with the idea that we can get extra cognitive abilities for no effort. Here they offer a resounding ‘No’.

The technique seems to boost the learning process in conjunction with standard education or training. There is no free ride here – people still need to work at learning a new skill or language themselves. ‘It won’t be possible to go to sleep at night with the electrodes on, wake up the next day and pass all your exams,’ says Roi.

The professors note that the device should be cheap to produce that available to pretty much everyone. Like an  iPod. Let’s assume students will be using TDSC and that it will be available to everyone. memory enhancement alone will boost scores in history and chemistry courses where memorizing some core data and concepts are essential to the tests. What if some students abject to suing the enhancements on ethical grounds , they’re organic intelligence crowd. Or some younger students have parents who fell the same way. It will not take long for testing scores to skew toward a new Bell curve. The students who do not use any electrical or chemical enhancements will start off perhaps equal based on test preparation alone. In the long term, as tests are adjusted to the new curve, the organic crowd will, on average, fall behind.  Such a huge shift in the paradigm of averages will exert tremendous pressure to adapt enhanced math and language abilities, and memory, problem solving, attention levels as the new norm.

Happy birthday Franklin D. Roosevelt 32nd President of the United States

Franklin D. Roosevelt as a child

Loved the whole Social Security, Civilian Conservation Corps, bringing down the Tammany thugs, winning two world wars, the use of Keynesian economics, victory gardens, Eleanor,  the Fair Labor Standards Act and lots of other stuff. The internment camps not so much.

Not usually my venue, but some very good graphic art here – Fashion Week posters. Why they have so many classic art posters at this event remains a mystery to me.

neo-realism and post war italian cinema from the link above.

Climate Deniers Hit New Low With Vicious Attacks on Scientists. Maybe this time will be different, but judging from the general drift of history, thugs lose. They have given up any claim to the moral high-ground. Of course they lost that when they started a concerted campaign of lies and distortions. Having gone that route maybe they figured why not roll around in the gutter.

Radical Nature – Sustainable Architecture

When Antheil met Hedy, now bona fide movie star, in the summer of 1940 at a dinner held by costume designer Adrian, they began talking about their interests in the war and their backgrounds in munitions (Antheil had been a young inspector in a Pennsylvania munitions plant during World War I.) Hedy had been horrified by the German torpedoing of two ships carrying British children to Canada to avoid the Blitz, and she had begun to think about a way to control a torpedo remotely, without detection.

Hedy had the idea for a radio that hopped frequencies and Antheil had the idea of achieving this with a coded ribbon, similar to a player piano strip. A year of phone calls, drawings on envelopes, and fiddling with models on Hedy’s living room floor produced a patent for a radio system that was virtually jam-proof, constantly skipping signals.

The patent filed in 1941 by Hedy and Antheil for a ‘secret communication system’

Hedy Lamar portrait. From my personal collection, not from the link, though they also have a nice photograph.

There is a hand drawn schematic for the Spread Spectrum (Frequency Hopping type only) device at the link. There is also a snip of one of the last interviews that Hedy gave in 1997 where she said ‘my beauty was my curse, so-to-speak, it created an impenetrable shield between people and who I really was’. Her lament that people only saw her for her beauty. While I sympathize a little, it is just a little. She had great beauty, brains, the kind of independence that few women of her generation enjoyed and she made a lot money that afforded her a very comfortable lifestyle. The rest of us mortals should be so cursed.

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Is it 2012 or 1968. You Can Hardly Tell By The Conservative Republican Candidates and Their Race Baiting

It’s commonplace to note that Newt Gingrich’s dog-whistle appellation that Barack Obama is the “food stamp president” is both racist and politically cynical. But the stereotyping of black government dependency also serves the strategic end of discrediting the entire social safety net, which most Americans of all races depend on. Black people are subtly demonized, but whites and blacks alike will suffer.

[  ]…If some whites reap some cold comfort from Gingrich’s performance, the racial hostility on display comes at a much higher cost to the American people as a whole. We have long since traded the possibility of a decent society for fear and resentment. So watch out for the next attack on “the food stamp president.” The entitlement they end might be your own.

I do not know, it might even or probably is, statistically impossible not to know someone who collects some kind of government benefit, gets some kind of subsidy or tax incentive. As one might expect in the South I am surrounded by people in civil service jobs that complain about welfare ( that no longer exists – it is work program and help feed poor children program). there are white senior citizens collecting Medicare and Medicaid who complain about those other people leeching off the system. The veterans who complain about the retirement benefits of the civil service workers and the pension plans of older generation auto and mine workers, but would scream bloody murder if you took away their well deserved benefits. It does seem as though there is a racial element or the nebulous others element to entitlements, and the resentments that follow. They’re for me, not those other people over there. Federal taxes are the lowest they’ve been since 1958. Though by way of a visit to a right-wing blog you’d think the tax rate was 60%. How can you have an honest debate with people who not only ignore the facts, they embrace falsehoods because it serves their agenda.

The other day I was writing about narcissistic extroverts. Here is an example that does not come up very often. It was his b-day January 27 - Kaiser Wilhelm II (27 January 1859 – 4 June 1941)

Arrogant, extremely vain, and always seeking praise, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany enjoyed a life of frivolity. His former chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, once remarked that the Kaiser would have liked every day to be his birthday.

[  ]..Born with a paralyzed left arm, considerably shorter than the right, Wilhelm needed help with eating and dressing throughout his life, and went to great lengths to hide his disability. He had, for example, a specially made fork to help him with his food. He owned over 30 castles throughout Germany and would visit them all occasionally, indulging in hunting – he was capable of killing a thousand or more animals in the course of a week-end’s hunt.

A lover of all things military and a collector of uniforms (he owned 600, many he designed himself), Wilhelm’s knowledge of military matters was little more than that of an overenthusiastic schoolchild. His knowledge of political matters was equally shallow, having neither the enthusiasm or attention-span to read lengthy or detailed reports.

Wilhelm’s power, he firmly believed, was God-given. Any criticism of him or his policies was, in effect, an act of blasphemy. Germany, he said, ‘must follow me wherever I go.’

Gosh, he kinda reminds me of the mentality of a few people, a whole movement in the U.S. Its on the tip of my brain.

The International Club of Cynics is probably going to cancel my membership, but I found this TED talk very inspiring – Michael Pawlyn: Using nature’s genius in architecture

How can architects build a new world of sustainable beauty? By learning from nature. At TEDSalon in London, Michael Pawlyn describes three habits of nature that could transform architecture and society: radical resource efficiency, closed loops, and drawing energy from the sun.

Pawlyn is not talking about some distant future possibilities, but used real world examples that have already been built.

The reformation brought a further hardening of attitudes. The most fervent Protestants campaigned vigorously to reinstate the biblical death penalty for adultery and other sexual crimes. Wherever Puritan fundamentalists gained power, they pursued this goal – in Geneva and Bohemia, in Scotland, in the colonies of New England and in England itself. After the Puritans had led the parliamentary side to victory in the English civil war, executed the King and abolished the monarchy, they passed the Adultery Act of 1650. Henceforth, adulterers and incorrigible fornicators and brothel-keepers were simply to be executed, as sodomites and bigamists already were.

If you look closely enough many notorious groups in history you can usually find something good. I happen to have tremendous respect for people with a strong work ethic – people in everyday jobs – frequently referred to as the nameless faceless masses – who take pride in their work are the under appreciated force that keeps everything brace up the thin veneer of what we call civilization. So if you’re looking to find something positive about Puritans you could start with their work habits. It kind of ends there as well.

So pervasive was this ideology that even those who paid with their lives for defying it could not escape its hold over their minds and actions. When the Massachusetts settler James Britton fell ill in the winter of 1644, he became gripped by a “fearful horror of conscience” that this was God’s punishment on him for his past sins. So he publicly confessed that once, after a night of heavy drinking, he had tried (but failed) to have sex with a young bride, Mary Latham. Though she now lived far away, in Plymouth colony, the magistrates there were alerted. She was found, arrested and brought back, across the icy landscape, to stand trial in Boston. When, despite her denial that they had actually had sex, she was convicted of adultery, she broke down, confessed it was true, “proved very penitent, and had deep apprehension of the foulness of her sin … and was willing to die in satisfaction to justice”. On 21 March, a fortnight after her sentence, she was taken to the public scaffold. Britton was executed alongside her; he, too, “died very penitently”. In the shadow of the gallows, Latham addressed the assembled crowds, exhorting other young women to be warned by her example, and again proclaiming her abhorrence and penitence for her terrible crime against God and society. Then she was hanged. She was 18 years old.

Let’s stand and cheer for the role of organized religion in early American history. The Puritans were as tolerant of the religious beliefs of others as they were of their personal behavior. Run by Puritans, the Massachusetts Bay Colony executed three founders of the Quaker religion (Society of Friends) Marmaduke Stephenson, William Robinson and Mary Dyer by hanging. Other members of the Quaker faith were merely horse whipped.

The full article contains a lot more history of the history of sexual attitudes. The subject is so vast that it was bound to not include some perspectives. One is that it does not go back to Ancient Greece and the relatively tolerant traditions of that society. Also the birthplace of the concept of democracy. It also comes at the subject from a western civilization centric view. Thus leaving out the history of social and sexual attitudes as they have developed throughout Asia and north Africa. Asia and India in particular with have made interesting additions. While many of the west’s hypocritical, often bizarre and repressive attitudes can only be understood in terms of religion and its emphasis on a masculine centered society, what happened to India ( and what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan). For centuries India has a stronger matriarchal element to their culture than the west. To this day many Hindu goddesses are considered very powerful and venerated along side male gods. Yet India has its own brand of Puritanism and struggles with women’s rights, especially towards the lower caste.

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That article lead me to wondering about Harriet Taylor, who was mentioned in one of several recounting of famous scandals. She might be better known to some as Harriet Taylor Mills (1807 – 1858),

Harriet Hardy was born in October 1807 in Walworth, south London, the daughter of a surgeon. Educated at home, she enjoyed writing poetry. In 1826, she married John Taylor, a prosperous merchant and together they had three children. The Taylors became active in the Unitarian Church and in 1830 a Unitarian minister introduced Harriet to the philosopher John Stuart Mill. Their affair was to last for more than 20 years, and was generally tolerated by Harriet’s husband. From 1833, the couple largely lived apart, enabling Harriet to see Mill more easily. Their behaviour scandalised society and as a couple they were socially isolated. But they inspired each other intellectually and often worked together.

Mills’ ‘The Principles of Political Economy’ (1848) has a chapter attributed to Harriet called ‘On the Probable Future of the Labouring Classes’ in which she argues for the importance of education for all in the future of the nation, both economically and socially. Her essay, ‘The Enfranchisement of Women’ (1851), considered one of her most important works, was published under Mills’s name. The essay strongly advocated that women be given access to the same jobs as men, and that they should not have to live in ‘separate spheres’ – views more radical than those of Mills himself.

Mill and Taylor were only married briefly before she died of complications due to tuberculous. In a letter written by John Stuart Mill in 1854 he seems to point to the contributions ( real written ones, not just inspiration) that Taylor was responsible for, “I shall never be satisfied unless you allow our best book, the book which is to come, to have our two names on the title page. It ought to be so with everything I publish, for the better half of it all is yours”. There is no doubt that Taylor made some contributions, but some scholars have suggested that John may have been overly sentimental and thus anxious to give Taylor too much credit. That said there is no doubt that she made significant contributions of her own, not just in the way of women’s rights, but what we think of today as basic human rights.

I mentioned Ralph Waldo Emerson as being a paleo-99 percenter recently. John Stewart Mill wasn’t just a progressive liberal, he was one of the founders.

Mill’s On Liberty addresses the nature and limits of the power that can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual. One argument that Mill develops further than any previous philosopher is the harm principle. The harm principle holds that each individual has the right to act as he wants, so long as these actions do not harm others. If the action is self-regarding, that is, if it only directly affects the person undertaking the action, then society has no right to intervene, even if it feels the actor is harming himself. He does argue, however, that individuals are prevented from doing lasting, serious harm to themselves or their property by the harm principle. Because no-one exists in isolation, harm done to oneself also harms others, and destroying property deprives the community as well as oneself.

The careful weighing of personal liberty against harm is why conservatives and libertarians tend to poach a half and idea here and there, than lay claim to be the true representatives of liberty. Mill did not get everything right, conservatives have embraced his defense of capital punishment in their sweaty little hands and rung it dry.

On the level you’re a little devil (But I’ll soon make an angel of you) [music] / words by Joe Young ; music by Jean Schwartz