The Language Guy

Israeli Linguist A Bit Too Full Of Herself

2009-11-29T15:01:00.001-05:00

An Israeli linguist seems to think she has turned the linguistic world upside down with her new meaning for the word "most." A UPN article states

Professor Mira Ariel of Tel Aviv University says her research "is quite shocking for the linguistics world" and proves some of her fellow linguists are wrong in their definition of the word "most."

She claims that we linguists believe that

"most" generally means 51 percent to 99 percent of a group of people or objects.

but that in a survey she and her colleagues did, a number of persons

understood "most" to mean about 80 percent to 95 percent of a group and not the much larger range of 51 percent to 99 percent.

One very serious problem with her claims is that no self-respecting linguist would ever say that "most" means 51 percent to 99 percent of a group or means '80 percent to 95 percent of a group.' This is just now how we use the word "mean."

Professor Ariel seems not to understand the distinction between "meaning" and "use". It very well may be that people use "most" in a proposition like "Most Ps are Q" in circumstances in which 80-95% of the relevant Ps have the property Q. But that is not what it means. That is how we use it. I am not sure how to characterize what it means but I am sure that that is not what it means.

If I say, that most Ps are Q and it turns out that 97% of the Ps are Q is what I said false? Surely not. And if it turns out that 75% of the Ps are Q, is what I said false"? Again, surely not. This may not be how people generally use "most" but the meaning of "most," whatever it is, is consistent with these two claims being true and so long as that is true, then we can be sure that Professor Ariel is wrong about what "most" means.

The Right Wing Propaganda Machine

2009-11-27T09:50:00.001-05:00

After Obama was inaugurated, he made himself excessively visible. Anyone in show business knows that you always leave them wanting more. The problem is that Obama kept himself front and center, shoiwing up on TV virtually every day. Before we had time to want to see him again, there he was announcing this or that new appointment, putting forth this or that new policy, or giving an interview. As a result, Obama fatigue has set in and that has left him very vulnerable to the lies being told by the health industry about his and the Democratic Congressional health care bill, Fox News, and whoever else feels animus toward him, including especially those who harbor ill-feeling toward African Americans.

Naturally, the Antis will say they are pure of thought and that their objections to Obama are based on his actions as well as his apparent inaction. The Rasmussen Reports don't bear them out.

Seventy-four percent (74%) of African-Americans Strongly Approve along with just 19% of white voters (see other recent demographic highlights from the tracking poll).
Among all voters, just 34% now give the President good or excellent marks on his handling of the economy while 47% say he is doing a poor job in that arena. On national security issues, 42% say good or excellent while 41% say poor.
Sixty-three percent (63%) of voters believe that political correctness kept the military from preventing the Fort Hood shootings.

So, what we see is a striking division between Blacks and Whites as to how he is doing, which is a bit of a give away that racial attitudes are coloring perceptions. That sort of thing didn't keep him from being elected but given the continued high unemployment and many other issues, he is guarnteed not to have a second term. As James Carville famously said, "It's the economy, stupid."

The last of these three items is especially interesting. It is clear that the military knew that Major Hasan was a Muslim and that he was disgruntled. Naturally in a country Bush poisoned with his constant drumbeat of "9/11", "9/11", "9/11", "9/11", "9/11", "9/11", "9/11", etc, and given the disposition of people to posit conspiracies wherever they see something they don't understand, right-wingers and various and sundry other nutcases are sure this was part of a terrorist plot.

Conspiracy theories are the refuge of those who have agendas or are laboring in ignorance. I recall the theories graduate students had about admissions policies in my university department. Early on we used a Master's exam to help determine who would be admitted to the Doctoral progrm. A minority would not be admitted and the theory emerged that we had a quota, never mind that limiting the number of students we admitted actually hurt the department economically.

I first encountered the theory that Major Hasan's actions were the result of a terrorist plot on the Dennis Miller show and that political correctness, the bane of right wing, was in full flower in this case. I was rather surprised. Naturally, the military is reluctant to jump to the view that Hasan was acting out of an anti-American or anti-military political stance. That would be beyond stupid, bordering on being imbecilic.

Not so, the right wing in America tells us. At Right Pundits we find

Why are we able to so easily label Malik Nadal Hasan a terrorist? The fact speaks for itself. He is just as much a domestic terrorist as Timothy McVeigh was labeled so for his heinous act in Oklahoma City. And while McVeigh perpetuated his act from afar in silence, Malik Nadal Hasan shouted anti-American political views at his victims as he mowed them down with automatic weapons.

The first thing I learned about Major Hasan is that he really, really, really didn't want to go to Iraq. The military is not disposed to worry overmuch about where soldiers do and do not want to be posted, but they probably should in some cases. This would have been one.

The title of this article is "Malik Nadal Hasan: Muslim Terrorist Challenges Obama’s Timidity." I suppose this could be more misleading but I don't know how. I seriously doubt that Obama told the military how it should go about its investigation or how it should present the facts to the public. Nevertheless, Obama is vulnerable to any attack on anything American by any Muslim. Its a right wing freebie.

Obama neeeds to do the following by next year at this time.

1. Get the health care bill in place.
2. Somehow get unemployment to turn around. I can think of some ways -- how about using unemployment benefits as subsidies to businesses who hire the uneployed for a year, say.
3. Get the hell out of Iraq.
4. Render Al Queda and the Talliban totally impotent.

If he does 1 and 2, it is possible that he will get a second term. If he does 1-3, he will get one. If he gets all four he will be elected President for Life.

On Be Look Professional

2009-11-19T11:26:00.004-05:00

Many years ago (1967 or so), I bought a wonderful Yamaha 250 cc motorcycle, the manual for which had this instruction for shifting gears:

Tachometer tells the moment to do.

Unfortunately, the RPMs given for gear shiftng kept this very fast motorcycle operating a little slower than a motor scooter. One evening, I told a friend who had ridden behind the original owner that the instructions couldn't be right and he offered to ride behind me and tell me when to shift. He did not look at the tachometer. He used his ears. I suppose the manual could have said.

Ears tell the moment to do.

Once I got the pitch right, I was golden. I suspect that some junior executive at Yahama persuaded his bosses that his English was excellent and he could ably translate the manual. On balance he didn't do badly.

Today, I happend across a web site while hunting for information as to what might be down the line for Blackberry phones given the buzz surrounding the iPhone and the new Androd phones. I came across this paragraph.

The Blackberry mobile phones are looking professionals and stylish mobile phone with can peoples are attract to this phone. Blackberry is the smart phones which is the most popular in the world with its charming features. It offers accessibility to an extensive variety of applications many wireless instruments across the world. It provides accessibility to an extensive variety of applications on several wireless instruments across the globe. by data and other services.

This piece of prose shocked me even more than that Yamaha manual.

This articale comes from Weblineindia, a link to which is associated with the blog title. That's what's shocking. If I have prejudices in regard to India, they are (1) Indians are very smart and very well-educated; (2) Many if not most Indians know English either natively or fluently; and (3) India has a bunch of great cuisines.

I clicked on the link and the first paragraph that popped up was this one:

Now a day ecommerce is a very popular among the internet users, so what is Ecommerce? People are habituated to sell and purchase their products or any types of items on the internet, its called ecommerce, and to online sell products you need ecommerce web...

So, it only gets worse. It is possible that these articles were written in some regional Indian language and run through some bad translating program. More likely, we are dealing with people who have big brains (see prejudice 1 above) but smal English language centers (see apparently false prejudice 2).

These articles are represented as "free content for your website or blog," which further confirms the axiom that you get what you pay for. I know that what I am writing is rather snobish, possibly even mean-spirited, for I would seem to be making fun of people who are, after all, doing their best. To that, I say, "bullshit." If I planned to publish something in German or Spanish I sure as hell wouldn't translate it myself.

Surely, if you are actually trying to inform people, to say nothing of sell things to them, you will want to do better than this:

The Blackberry Solution is used to access mobile email and personal information. Also other of the self applications are also used. But the development Blackberr software for the solution of Blackberry. Also Blackberry application, for assistance if issues arise.

This reads as if they are offering some sort of spyware ("access personal information"). If that isn't true, then they are very engaging in linguistic self-abuse.

Iran Disinformation in re Israel

2009-10-27T08:01:00.004-04:00

I watched a BBC show "Endgame" last night about how the fall of apartheid came about and I was interested in learning more so I "prayed" through the good offices of Google to "God" (the Internet) and hit upon the idea of checking out the CIA World Factbook, an excellent source for basic information. This search collected the link associated with the title of this blog. According to the report, which makes a prima facie case for the demise of Israel within 20 years with the Jews in Israel emigrating to the US, Russia, and Europe.

This "report" noted (my words) that seismic shifts such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the deconstruction of the Soviet Union, and the fall of Apartheid can happen with surprising speed. This is true. The problem is that the report is a phony. The origin of this story comes from an Iranian web site. Read the changing headlines at the top of the page and you will see that it has an Iranian bias -- that is, a bias toward stories concerning Iran and its enemies.

I have long wondered why Iran hates Israel so much. There has never been direct Iranian-Israeli hostilities; Iran's borders don't touch Israel's; Iran is not an Arab country; Iran is Shia while most of the Arabs that Israel has engaged in military conflicts with are Sunni; Israel actually cooperated with Iran when it sold them arms in the notorious Iran-Contra affair; and etc. So, why?

The reason, according to an interesting blog, The JC.com, is that Israel is a Western country which presents the same threats to any fundamentalist Muslim society that the rest of the West does, in that it offers freedom of speech and action, something that is anathema to fundamentalist Muslims. The Mullahs know that freedom and speech and action will lead inexorably to the importation of Western values, starting with their kids wearing blue jeans, listening to and playing pop music, and, alors! dancing while touching. That will lead to the sort of sesmic shifts that the phony Iranian story noted.

I do not know whether Israel's proximity in any way has hastened the importation of Western values, any more than would have happened anyway. The Internet brings the world to everyone. However, Iran can't focus its hatred on all Western devils, including those of Europe, for that would would make their craziness all the more apparent. Focusing on Israel and the US, which have a close relationship of course, gives them traction with and influence over fundamentalist Muslims in the Arab world, especially those who are fairly frequently in active hostilities with Israel.

Usually, Iranian propaganda is overt. This time it was subtle. And way more persuasive. It gulled a bunch of dimwits to parrot its message such as those of Al Jazerra (who possibly didn't really care whether it was true or false), Global Research.ca, Ease News.net, and The San Franscisco Bay View. As in all things, it is best to do a little research before you buy into anything you read.

The End Is Nigh!

2009-05-22T09:45:00.010-04:00

It is now five minutes until midnight, midnight for the human race, as the link associated with the title of this blog indicates. Midnight, of course, represents total darkness, the end of life, or, at least, the end of human life. Cockroaches will, of course, survive whatever damage we do to the planet.

The clock in question is offered up by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and began "ticking" in 1947 and gave us just 7 minutes to live:

As the Bulletin evolves from a newsletter into a magazine, the Clock appears on the cover for the first time. It symbolizes the urgency of the nuclear dangers that the magazine's founders--and the broader scientific community--are trying to convey to the public and political leaders around the world.

This clock doesn't tick and actually doesn't even count down. After dropping to 2 minutes in 1952, it soared to 12 minutes in 1963. It then had plummeted to 3 minutes in 1984

U.S.-Soviet relations reach their iciest point in decades. Dialogue between the two superpowers virtually stops. "Every channel of communications has been constricted or shut down; every form of contact has been attenuated or cut off. And arms control negotiations have been reduced to a species of propaganda," a concerned Bulletin informs readers. The United States seems to flout the few arms control agreements in place by seeking an expansive, space-based anti-ballistic missile capability, raising worries that a new arms race will begin.

It then bounced up to an optimistic 17 minutes in 1991 but since then has been falling to 14, and then 9, and then 7, and now 5. The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty was the cause of the jump to 17 minutes. It began to fall again during the Clinton administration with the 9 minutes left "prediction" being due both to some tough talk about Russia reverting to the ways of its past and to the beginning of concerns about terrorists getting ahold of nuclear weapons. At the time of the next drop, Pakistan and India were testing nuclear weapons. Then comes a post 9/11 prediction that we had only 7 minutes to survive when the Bush Administration was talking about developing nuclear weapons capable of taking out hardened, deeply buried targets (e. g., the underground nuclear labs in Iran) as well as an announcing that the US would withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

The drop to 5 minutes in 2007 is due to concerns about N. Korea's and Iran's development of nuclear weapons and a concern with global warming.

Climate change also presents a dire challenge to humanity. Damage to ecosystems is already taking place; flooding, destructive storms, increased drought, and polar ice melt are causing loss of life and property.

While one might want to grant atomic physicists a certain expertise in the area of nuclear threats in the world, I am not at all sure that they have any special expertise as to whether or not there is global warming, not that I doubt that that there is, to say nothing of what threats it imposes or how imminent they are.

The clock of the physicists has no predictive power. It doesn't even count down the way any respectable clock does. It is like the wall clock I hear ticking right now which is powered by two descending heavy weights and which runs out when the weights touch the floor and cannot descend further. We have to reset it constantly due to our inattention to its needs and, somewhat like the clock of our atomic scientists, we have to turn it backward to reset the time. A clock that goes back and forth is no clock at all. I keep threatening to shoot this clock but my wife would have me committed to a mental hospital. I am not yet ready for that.

Much more interesting is the notion that the world will end on December 22, 2012 when the Mayan calendar runs out. I cannot say whether any Mayans think the world will end then but religious crazies are happy to tell us that the Rapture is nigh upon us. Maybe. It seems that their Doomsday Clock is a bit like that of the atomic physicists.

Bible Prophecy is driven by human free will and the evil path that nations choose. Free will can accelerate us or slow us down to the inevitable: The Apocalypse, The Great Tribulation, the "Time of Testing".

So it too can back up as well as go forward.

The author of this colorful and entertaining page gave a time frame between "SEPT 2006 and DEC 22 2012 AD." We lucked out and survived past the 2006 date. Can we make it into 2013? I think not. "13" is an unlucky number after all.

What is an American Auto Company?

2009-05-06T09:51:00.005-04:00

I see in the morning New York Times that the US government has approved the sale of most of Chrysler to Fiat. and that the bankruptcy judge has denied a claim of creditors that liquidation of the company, among other things, might yield greater value. The last time I checked, Fiat is an Italian auto maker. So we are not exactly saving an American auto company. What then are we saving?

Jobs, of course. I do not oppose this but we do need to be clear about what is going on. Had anyone suggested that we should be alert to the needs of Toyota, Honda, Nissan and Hyundai, all building cars in the USA and all suffering cutbacks, I suspect that the American people would have raised holy hell. However, the moment Chrysler and Fiat executives sign on the dotted line, Chrysler will join Toyota, Honda, Nissan and Hyundai and cease to be an American auto company.

There is another way of looking at this and that is to see any auto company building cars in the USA as an American auto company. They do hire American workers and, we hope, pay taxes here. The only downside is that should the world go to hell in a hand basket and we need the auto companies to start making tanks and other military vehicles, will these foreign owned companies agree to do this? There are complicating factors, less with Fiat than the Asian companies, and one is that we might be fighting China and China may threaten Japan and Korea should they in any way assist us. This war is very unlikely. More to the point, we could just nationalize the companies. In such a circumstances, there could be no blow back from Korea or Japan.

There are going to be some major benefits from Fiat ownership of Chrysler. The first is that there will be Americans working in the auto plants. Second, any technology Fiat has that is superior to what Chrysler had will surely be employed in the Chrysler plants. This technology will become de facto American technology. Third, any skills the American workers acquire will reside in the brains of these American workers. Should a set of American investors want to recapture Chrysler, they would acquire workers who are more skilled than before who are using more advanced technology.

You say, "But the profits will flow to Italy." I reply, "Who cares since American capital and jobs have been flowing out of the country for years and Italian capital will, in fact, be used to rehabilitate Chrysler's plants." In the 60's a couple of leftist friends trying to convert me to their way of thinking argued that nasty American companies were creating factories or buying farms in Latin American countries and rather than plowing the profits back into enterprises that benefit the people of these countries, these American companies were bring it back here. Moreover, we paid the people there a pittance. This is an hellaciously bad argument. First, note that American capital had already flowed into these foreign countries by way of building the factories or clearing the land and planting banana trees or whatever and these efforts employed people there. Second the businesses themselves employed people. Did they pay as much as they should have? "No," let's say, but when have any companies anywhere been any more generous to their employees than they had to?

As for acts of benevolence by foreigners owning companies here, I draw attention to this NY Times report last December:

workers at the Toyota Tundra truck factory here are taking classes: how to handle tools safely, how to get along better with colleagues of varying backgrounds. Some have even cleaned local parks and fed the hungry while Toyota paychecks.

I suggest that when we refer to American auto companies, we cease to refer to just those owned by Americans and include Fiat and the Asian companies mentioned earlier. What matters most is not who owns the company but the fact that it is that Americans who are being employed and that we are receiving taxes (I presume) from all cconcerned.

Dr. Mercola

2009-04-23T07:52:00.003-04:00

I followed a link on Facebook to Dr. Mercola's web site provided by a relative who was impressed by the claims Dr. Mercola had made as to the true origins of certain "organic" products. The most shocking on the face of it was that Burt's Bees, whose various lip and hand salves were well-known to me, are produced by Clorox. That may seem like a bad thing, but how bad is it really? Clorox makes an excellent product though it is hard to see how one could get Clorox wrong. Add sodium hypochlorite to water and bottle. To its credit, however, during WWII when a shortage of chlorine gas arose, Clorox chose to reduce its production, rather than dilute its product. So, the fact that Burt's Bees is owned by Clorox may not be a bad thing at all.

Dr. Mercola's employs his assassination by association technique by noting that organic Horizon milk is made by the food giant Dean. He does not say what bad practices Dean is employing other than that large scale milk producers commonly feed grain to their cows rather than letting them graze. Dr. Mercola is a big time grass guy. He wants his beef to be grass fed and his milk cows to be grass fed. He makes some claims about the superiority of grass to grain as a feed but sites no solid research.

I invite you to read how Aurora organic milk cows are treated and fed. One thing seems clear and this is that the issues are very complex. The choice is not between grains and grass. In the winter in Wisconsin, there is no grass for cows to graze on so the choices are between hay (i. e., dead vegetable matter) of various sorts and grain.

Dr. Mercola trades on our suspicion of big business. He is right to question whether these large businesses can or even want to maintain high standards in milk production. But, he provides no solid research behind the answers he gives. One of Dr. Mercola's claims is that children should be drinking raw milk. He writes

There is no substitute for clean, raw milk as a food, so far as children are concerned. Science has not yet succeeded in providing, in the pasteurized variety, those essential qualities that are the only real foundation for a healthy child.

He doesn't say how we ensure the raw milk is clean and that's the rub. I have seen dairy cows being milked by hand and by machines and the opportunities for the invasion of bacteria and other contaminants is nontrivial. Dr. Mercola also urges that one buy locally. So, I am to imagine that I should hunt down raw milk that is locally produced. Good luck since it is illegal to sell it. I invite you to read the Wikipedia section on raw milk vs pasteurized milk. I have made cheese and would love to get access to raw cow's milk but any cheese I made would have to age for 3 months (according to my last information).

Dr. Mercola engages in a florid writing style in which careful reasoning doesn't play a part. He says

Much of our nation's nutritional deficiency epidemic is caused by a "Big Business" perceived need for cheap, mass produced, convenient food products.

First, note that Dr. Mercola puts "Big Business" inside quote marks. I just did the same thing in the preceding sentence, but there is a significant linguistic difference between the two. I am using quotes to indicate that I am citing the phrase he used but he is using quote marks as what a philosopher once called "scare quotes." Moreover, in capitalizing the "B's" he further evokes scorn. This use of "Big Business" evokes Orwell's notion of "Big Brother," a notorious political pejorative, typically used by liberals. Conservatives have "Big Government." Dr. Mercola is engaging in an irresponsible practice in what purports to give sound medical and other advice. One wants accurate, unslanted advice from any doctor.

Which brings me to the most damning feature of Dr. Mercola's web site. He is a huckster, who sells a wide array of things from tanning beds, natural foods like raw honey, nutritional supplements, vitamin sprays, and juicers among many other things. Those who find his health warnings persuasive very well may find his nearly hysterical arguments for the purchase of his products and objections to opposing choices will likely find his reasons for buying his products persuasive.

I hope you will read his appeals on behalf of his tanning beds -- why you should use them and why you should use his -- and a few other products to get a taste of his style. You might also take a look at the qualifications of the physicians used in his clinc. My problem is that any doctor who purports to treat patients and offer medical and nutritional across the nation should not be engaged in selling. I have run into this sort of problem with doctors who treat sleep apnea and sell the equipment that patients need. They have access to the data supporting or not supporting the use of the products they sell and few of us could interpret the data by way of checking on his or her honesty. One has to very carefully assess the ethics of your doctor, should you, like I, have sleep apnea in an effort to answer the question whether the doctor, who has a clear conflict of interest, is acting in your best interests. I have absolutely no confidence in Dr. Mercola. I am reminded of Dr. Atkins, who not only had a medical practice and wrote diet books, he also was associated with a company that makes products for dieters.

Academic Jibber Jabber

2009-03-13T07:27:00.006-04:00

Ohio State University just voted to move from a 10 week quarter system (3 quarters per academic year plus an additional summer quarter) to a semester system, the specifics of which will be identified later. Absolutely no serious academic reason for doing this was given. Most prominent among the reasons for doing this is that it would enable students more easily to transfer credits to and out of Ohio State. That is not an academic reason.

The real reason was political

“We need to think really hard about turning our backs on the chancellor, governor and the legislature,” Faculty Council Chairman Dick Gunther, a political-science professor, told the group.

One Timothy Gerber, a music professor and chairman of the semester-conversion committee recommended this change, claiming

“We’re talking about a calendar that lets us do creative things and put students first while focusing on faculty success,” he said.

This is the sort of gibberish that gives academics a bad name. What in living hell are these "creative things" we will be able to do in a semester system that cannot be done in a quarter system. There very well may be some but Dr. Gerber doesn't -- maybe can't -- come up with one. I can see why the fraidy cats in the administration chose this man to lead the conversion effort. He would be easily influenced to "do the right thing" and cave to the politicians.

There is to me a certain dissonance to "creative things." "Creative" evokes a variety of notions of genuine importance such as "thinking" and "innovation" and "ideas" and "art" whereas "thing" is the dumbest word in English. But the real gibberish is

put students first while focusing on faculty success

I would think that putting students first would entail focusing, not on the faculty, but the students. It is also a lie that the university is going to put students first. Getting research money is way too important to the finances of the university for the administration to make that mistake. Moreover, it is in the self-interest of faculty to spend more time on research than on teaching except when preparing new courses. This isn't to say that the faculty doesn't care about teaching students. It is just not their main concern. The administration silently endorses this attitude by rewarding those who do research, especially those who bring in lots of money, for a good bit of this is legitimately raked off by the university to cover overhead.

The fact is that the quarter system allows for a much greater diversity in the education of students and theoretically even more contact hours between the faculty and students in undergraduate lecture courses. If in a quarter system of 10 weeks, undergraduate lecture courses were taught five days a week, as was common when I first arrived on the campus, there would be 50 contact hours between the faculty and his or her students. In a semester system of 16 weeks with 3 contact hours a week, there would be just 48 contact hours a week. However, if one believes, as I do, that learning requires cognitive gestation and that takes time, then there is reason to go to a semester system for it gives students 16 weeks to engage in this process. Moreover, writing good papers in more advanced undergraduate, to say nothing of graduate, courses is more productive in a semester system for the same reason.

The notion of "cognitive gestation" is vague and I can't make it more explicit but I do know from personal experience that there is "thinking" going on in learning that we are not explicitly aware of. When I was writing my dissertation, I had to face head on a problem I had not been able to solve in some 4 or 5 years of thinking about it (not all the time of course). At one point, with a Chicago Bears football game going on in the background, I had an "eureka" moment. Three facts passed through my consciousness at a "speed" I couldn't keep up with consciously but I knew that there were three facts that provided the solution to my problem that I somehow "knew" but just hadn't put together before. The trouble is that I didn't know exactly what these facts were. After 30 minutes of serious thinking I was able to bring these facts to full consciousness and see how they provided the solution to my problem. This was the result of thinking by me at a level I wasn't explicitly aware of. I have had many other instances of this and seen it in my students. Once, a student at the University of Illinois who had taken a syntax course from me a month or two ago passed by me some 30 yards away who yelled out, 'Professor Geis, I finally get it." It was a bit late for her grade but I was happy about it and she seemed to be too.

Obama Effect on AA's Test Performance

2009-01-25T08:27:00.006-05:00

Vanderbilt University's professor Ray Friedman found that at key moments during the Obama campaign, performance on tests drawn from the GRE (Graduate Records Exam) by Whites and African Americans were indistinguishable, specifically when Obama was front and center in the news in a positive way. There was a drop off by African Americans during points when Obama was not at the center of the press's attention.

In the study, tests were administered to a total of 472 participants using questions drawn from Graduate Record Exams (GREs) to assess reading comprehension, analogies and sentence completion. The tests took place at four distinct points over three months during the campaign: two when Obama’s success was less prominent (prior to his acceptance of the nomination and the mid-point between the convention and election day) and two when it garnered the most attention (immediately after his nomination speech and his win of the presidency in November).

This result represents a striking repudiation of the view that African Americans are inferior to Whites intellectually. It also confirms the view of Liberals that racism continues to negatively affect African American's intellectually. I urge you to read the story for it applies, I would suggest, to how we educate minorities here and everywhere else on the globe.

It has long been noted that how children perform in school is strongly affected by the expectations of others as to how well they can perform. My parents both had college degrees and my mother had a master's. I grew up always knowing I would be going to college. Even financial reverses in the family did not affect this expectation. Can it be a surprise that I and all my siblings as well as other persons of my generation in my extended family graduated from college? I suspect that the record of our extended family had less to do with any native intelligence we might have had than in the examples afforded by our parents and the expectations placed on us.

The results of this study make clear that bridging the difference between Whites and Blacks economically depends critically on training our teachers to act as if they expect all of their kids to succeed and doing our best to see that teachers do this. Enough African Americans have entered the middle class in the last decade and before to suggest that the opportunities will be there for Blacks if they will take care of business in our schools. We cannot expect that glass ceilings for Blacks will not hinder them for there are conservative Whites with power who will erect as many glass ceilings as they can for Blacks (and women and others who are not White and male) However, where people with power can see that their self-interest can be advanced by promoting deserving African Americans, they will usually do so in my opinion. A striking number of Whites made that sort of choice on election day and seem, according to recent polling to continue to believe that promoting Obama was a good thing for them.

I began this sermon with a reference to my family's effect on my development and so must acknowledge that it is imperative that poor families be encouraged to focus on education as a goal for all of their children. We must also enhance the Head Start program as a vehicle to improve on what the families of disadvantaged children have done for them. There is much that needs to be done by African Americans themselves to help fix what is broken in their communities and their families. The larger society can't fix this. All it can do is provide the conditions that favor a positive outcome.

There was a time when Jesse Jackson promoted self-help for the Black community. Years ago, before he entered Presidential politics, I heard a speech he gave in California in which he argued that Blacks can't claim that going hungry inhibits the ability of Black children to learn, noting that hunger didn't stop some of the same children from growing up to becoming great athletes. That is the sort of message our most influential Black leaders need to get back to instead of seeking out opportunities to engage in "cry racism" politics. With Obama in place in the White House, we have a great opportunity for people like Jackson to preach this sort of sermon.

My Dear Galileo Galilei

2009-01-02T09:08:00.007-05:00

My Dear Galileo Galilei, "It gives me great pleasure to inform you that we have reconsidered your case. A small mistake was made by our Vatican astronomers in the determination of the relationship between the earth and the sun. It was an easy mistake to make. I'm sure you will agree, since it was obvious to all that the sun moves from East to West in our skies whilst we remain in place. We regret that you were put in prison and that you were forced to recant under the threat of torture. As a result of the discovery of our mistake, it is our determination that you should no longer be confined to your home."

That wasn't the only mistake the Vatican made in the case of Galileo. They didn't much like his atomistic view of the universe. In recent decades the Vatican has tried to undo their mistake. Pope John Paul II blamed the Church's error on "tragic mutual incomprehension." This concession was beneath contempt since Galileo certainly understood the position of the Church. I suspect the church understood what Galileo was saying as well. Otherwise, why jail him, threaten him with torture in order to force him to recant, and then confine him to his house?

Thanks to protests of the faculty at Rome's La Sapienza University concerning the appropriateness of allowing Pope Benedict to talk there, the Pope canceled a lecture. It was argued that his hostility to science made him an inappropriate speaker at a public university. This seems to have put the Vatican in full retreat. At a Vatican conference on science, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the right hand man of the Pope, said Galileo was an astronomer, but one who "lovingly cultivated his faith and his profound religious conviction." Say what? How did they miss this fact about him 1633? I suspect he wasn't the only victim of the Inquisition who had profound religious convictions. By the way, what does "lovingly cultivated his faith" actually mean? Don't reply to this question. I can figure out some things it might mean, such as "he went to mass" and the like. The Vatican's sugar coating their grotesque acts during the time of the Inquisition with language like this is insulting to thoughtful person.

Good old Bertone also said, "Galileo Galilei was a man of faith who saw nature as a book authored by God." We dealt with this "language of God" nonsense in my last blog. The more religious folks talk about science and religion the stupider they seem to get. If nature were any kind of book then why in hell have we not come to understand all of nature? Does it have too many pages? Or is it that some of the chapters are written undecipherable languages? I need help here.

Charles Darwin is lucky he didn't live at the time of the Inquisition. He would have been burned at the stake for the idea that apes and men have a common ancestry (which isn't to say of course that we are evolved from apes). And the Catholic Church is lucky as well. Pope Paul, who tried to get ahead of criticism of the Church's treatment of Galileo, made peace (on his terms) with the theory of evolution by noting that it is more than just a hypothesis and is consistent with Church teachings. That has not been the last word on catholic views of evolution but the Catholic Church has the advantage of not being literalist in the way that fundamentalist Christians are.

The Language of God

2008-12-18T07:59:00.003-05:00

I have been going through all my blogs the last few days to delete a 100% perfect spam job that attached some impenetrable gob of Chinese authored by someone or some computer named "sexy." In the process, I encountered one of my blogs on religion and decided to Google "The Language of God" to see what sort of nonsense there might be out there on the internet and found that some nitwit has a book titled just that. I am a couple of years late in noticing that but gratuitous slaps at religion are never too late or too early.

In an ABC news story prompting this diatribe, I discovered that former President Clinton and the "leader of the international Human Genome Project," one Francis S. Collins, are described as conspiring to claim, in the words of Clinton,

"Today," he said, "we are learning the language in which God created life. We are gaining ever more awe for the complexity, the beauty, and the wonder of God's most divine and sacred gift."

I'm sure I have blogged on the idea that there could be a language of art or music, pointing out how silly such notions are, but worse than these is the notion that the code that determines our genetic make up is written in some sort of language

3 billion letters long, and written in a strange and cryptographic four-letter code

which is amazingly complex. Yo, dude, if this code is so complex and wondrous how in hell have humans been able to crack it? We linguists haven't been able to understand the structure of any human language. We must be dumber than geneticists or, more likely, the human genome just ain't that difficult to crack and certainly an unworthy candidate as an example of the language of anything but a very minor god.

Actually, if the human genome is a code then it isn't a linguistic system on a par with Chinese or Spanish or Xhosa, which are anything but code like. Human languages consist of expressions that refer to elements of the natural world as well as a multiplicity of quite abstract notions (justice, democracy, infinity). The strands of DNA don't refer to things outside the organizm from which the DNA is drawn.

This geneticist must be an admirer of the equally silly intelligent design (non)theory for like it, it is restricted to one phenomenon -- the origin of the species. There is no intelligent design theory of physics or linguistics or anything other than the origin of the species. Similarly, the "language" of DNA, while it might bear the slightest resemblance to the graphical representations of organic chemistry being taught way back when (and maybe even now), it bears no relationship to the "language" of physics. Are we to say that the mathematical representations in physics are not instances of the language of God or is it that He is bilingual or multilingual, with one language for the human genome, another for physics, another for statistics, and still another for syntactical structure, etc.?

How a scientist of this guy's reputation could come up with so silly a theory is beyond my simple imagination. But then, whenever my wife says I am imagining something, my reply is allways, "I have no imagination." Neither does this dude.

On Extended Warranties -- Betting Against the House

2008-12-16T08:43:00.002-05:00

Now that the gift giving season is upon us, anyone buying an appliance, electronic devices that cost more than $40 or $50 (not sure where the cut off is exactly), or automobiles will face the dread question, "Would you like to purchase an extended warranty?" A certain fear kicks in. What if the thing ceases to function properly the day after the regular warranty expires? The pricer the product the greater the fear.

Yes, I did get the extended warranty on an automobile once. It was very expensive (relative to my income) and was a new, limited edition car, a turbo-charged all-wheel drive Celica. "Sexy and sinister looking" one car magazine termed it. That warranty paid off. In the rare cases since then that I have bought extended warranties, they have not been useful. In the rest, cases when I did not purchase one, I have not regretted not purchasing such a warranty.

Extended warranties provide one with "protection," which is just what one needs when one is fearful. What if the $3,000 TV breaks down the day after the normal warranty expires? Do I go out and buy another #3,000 TV? Who can afford to do that on a regular basis?

I am here to allay your fears. Words like "protection" are very comforting. However, it is important that one think through the "logic" of extended warranties. The manufacturer or merchant who offers an extended warranty is betting you that his product will not fail until after the extended warranty has expired. If you purchase one, you are betting that the product you are buying will fail -- not during the period in which you are "protected" by the normal warranty, but during the period of the extended warranty, namely for the year or two years, etc., of the extended warranty.

This is crazy stuff. The manufacturer/merchant is betting that is product is soundly enough made to function properly until at least the end of the extended warranty. He is actually standing behind his product. He could raise his price to cover the cost of his occasional duds and offer a 3 or 4 year warranty to everyone. However, he knows he will make more money by lowering his price and offering the extended warranty. When you buy an extended warranty, you are, for all intents and purposes, betting against the house and we know that when you are gambling, and buying an extended warrant is tantamount to gambling, you should never bet against the house.

The reality is that we are better off self-insuring against any product going bad during the very unlikely period of the extended warranty than to buy these extended warranties. I say "unlikely period of the extended warranty" because most things which last a year are likely to last for more than 2 or 3 more years. This is especially true of electronic devices. They tend to go bad quickly (manufacturing glitch) or after some years (wears out in one way or another). That has, at least, been my experience. If you are tempted to buy an extended warranty tell yourself this: I am now about to purchase of piece of crap that I am betting will die or need extensive repairs during the time betweenwhen the extended warranty kicks in and it expires. If you think about that, you will be protected from buying protection.

Too Happy To Post

2008-12-04T09:58:00.002-05:00

It seems that I am more engaged as a blogger when I am angry rather than happy. The combination of venting in regard to the abortion controversy, Creationism and Intelligent Design (which is anything but intelligent), the Bush Administration, Bush himself, retarded views of language, deceptive advertising, deceptive and illegal practices in the prosecution of death penalty cases, racist, misogynist, and other offensive uses of language, etc. and the results of the last general election have perhaps made me too happy to post. Election night itself brought me to tears because of the election of Obama, which meant we would not have Bush III, the large Democratic majorities in Congress, and the comments of an African-American of my generation who remarked that he could remember demonstrating to open up lunch counters in the South to African Americans by way of contrasting how things were to how they are. I was brought to tears because I participated in a demonstration to desegregate lunch counters in downtown Houston in the late Spring of 1960, a demonstration that appears directly to have caused them to open up.

Houston at the time had the most segregated large school system in the South, which should indicate the nature of the situation there at the time. I went to the all-White Rice University and hobnobbed with wealthy racists at debutante balls (an amazing social institution, but one that did provide free booze, food, and an opportunity to dance) though I was more or less penniless. I developed a distaste for rich people and racists which has stuck with me for 40 years. In any event, in late Spring of 1960, some 7 or 8 of us White Rice students went over to Texas Southern University, an all-Black school, and volunteered to join them in the upcoming afore-mentioned demonstration, a march around the City Hall building. It occupied a relatively small square of land and we managed to stretch all around it.

Shortly after we began our demonstration, some 15-20 motorcycle cops showed, which alarmed me somewhat. We were, after all, being quite peaceful. A very large number of cops showed up in the first hour, a hundred or so. I suspect they were there not to protect our right to freedom of assembly, but to protect the building. In any event, it was intimidating to say the least. There were TV crews there, of course.

The right wing uncle I lived with (free room and board to go along with Rice's free tuition for all is why I could go to Rice, so I was grateful) saw the demonstration and TV and I was marked in his eyes as a radical in training if not a radical already. My voting for Kennedy later on cemented his theory that i was at least pink. But his loyalty to family kept him from tossing me out. I am still grateful for his help.

The funny thing about this story is that the following summer, either Newsweek or Time ran a story praising one of the two big Houston papers for its journalistic excellence in some respect or another. A week later, as I recall it, Time magazine ran a story Blackout in Houston, which described a late summer agreement of African-American and White leaders to cause the integration of downtown lunch counters and an agreement by the press to embargo the news about this for a week. It was the news embargo, a phenomenon not in keeping with high journalistic standards, that upset Time. It was probably a good idea however, since, though the story does indicate word got out to some degree, it did make the integration of these lunch counters a fait accompli and so no counter-demonstrations resulted.

Why lunch counters? It seems like such a trivial thing. But as I noted above, this was a racist city and I suspect it is still is with the shift of focus being from African-Americans to Latinos (or Hispanics, whichever is now correct). There are parts of Houston now that have Thai or Vietnamese street signs (don't recall what language), so those Whites who busy themselves hating people different from themselves have a lot of work cut out for them. The lunch counters were important because a lot of African-Americans worked downtown and there was nowhere they could go for an inexpensive hot lunch. Buses and lunch counters were the first targets of the civil rights movements because they were of greatest importance to the poor.

It is my guess, with Texas Southern and Rice being about to open their doors for students for the new school year, White leaders in Houston decided that the best thing for White Houston was to get rid of the source of radical agitation so they did. Rice, by the way, is no longer all White. It is my understanding that to break the charter created by William Marsh Rice that caused Rice to be all White, the school argued, falsely I believe, that it would go broke as a no tuition school and thus needed the charter to be broken. The courts agreed. Apparently busting one provision of a charter busts the whole thing. So, Rice integrated.

Rice was very important to my social, intellectual, and political development because of the very bright students I got to know and talk with and some very smart, good professors, not just good mentors but good people. I learned about DWB (Driving While Black) from the psych professor Trent Wann, the most influential man in my life, from his stories of the travails of a good friend who taught at Texas Southern. So Rice was all White but it wasn't all bad. The students were almost all conservative, of course, since most came from Texas, a state that didn't know yet that it was a Republican state.

I apologize for this pretty self-flattering story but I assure you I was not and am not now all good. What I hope young people will take from it is the fact that though we have much that we need to do to combat racism (and the other -isms), we have come a very long way. I hope you will also take away from this the fact that protesting injustice can be effective.

Kilpatrick is on a Which Hunt

2008-11-19T08:41:00.005-05:00

It seems that James Kilpatrick, whom I must confess a near life-time disdain for, has declared that the award for November's (who knew months had this?) award for the ugliest word in English goes to which. He writes:

It grates; it pouts; it scratches. It rubs the wrong way. It rarely accomplishes anything not already well-served by that.

Actually, there are words that are way more offensive by Kilpatrick's standards. One that instantly comes to mind is church. Why? The alleged phonetic problem with which is not the initial, quite inoffensive voiceless fricative, nor the vowel, which is also inoffensive. It must be the palatal voiceless fricative "ch." Church has two of them as well as one of the ugliest vowel sounds of English, a rhoticized (r-colored) vowel I shall not attempt to describe further having years ago been shown the folly of that by an Ohio State phonetician. Why wouldn't Kilpatrick identify church as being phonetically offensive? That would be offensive to church-goers and Kilpatrick wouldn't have the guts for that.

So, Kilpatrick's phontetic objections to which are bullcrap. I think he was probably frightened by a witch when young and is fearful of any word pronounced in a similar way to witch. And, we are told it rarely accomplishes anything not accomplished by that. This too is nonsense. Consider the following hypothetical conversation:

Customer: I want one of those scarves.
Clerk: Which one would you like?

Clearly, this occurrence of which cannot be replaced by that. Nor can the which of

Clerk (alternate reply): You may have whichever one you want for $20.00.

So we have collected two types of occurrences of which that cannot be replaced by that. Much uglier than whichever would be thatever.

There are other uses of which that are not replaceable by that. Consider:

He was wearing a blue or green cap. I don't know which it was.

This counterexample, like the others, involves a choice from among a set of alternatives -- one scarf from a bunch (isn't bunch as ugly as which?) of scarves or a choice between a set of two caps.

What this nitwit should have said is that he objects to the use of which as a relative pronoun. Consider

The dog which bit me.
The dog that bit me.

I bought the dog which Mary wanted.
I bought the dog that Mary wanted.

In the continuation of my first paragraph following the example I wrote

The problem with which is not the initial quite inoffensive, voiceless fricative nor the vowel, which is also inoffensive.

Here we have a nonrestrictive relative pronoun use of which. This is clearly not replaceable by that.

The problem with which is not the initial quite inoffensive voiceless fricative, nor the vowel, that is also inoffensive.

The reality is that Kilpatrick knows little about English grammar and what he knows he doesn't understand except at a superficial grammar school level. As a linguist, I am offended that his grammatical "knowledge" is respected.

I mean, "I mean" is driving me crazy

2008-11-11T06:57:00.000-05:00

Yeah, I mean.

The phrase "I mean" very often occurs in contemporary English as an assertion preface in replies to questions by interviewers. An example of this sort of use of "mean" is:

Q: How well do you think you played today?
A: (Well) I mean I think I played a little bit better than last week.

After the Ohio State vs Northwestern football game, the very, very (academically) young freshman QB for Ohio State prefaced virtually every response with "I mean." Some others used it frequently. Some not at all. The beginning sentence in this post is from my speech. I was in a friendly argument with an uncle during a telephone call and "Yeah, I mean" prefaced an interruption by me. I heard it later in the day from a political person on CNN or MSNBC with "well" where I said "yeah". So, this is infecting the nation I fear. Sadly there is no protective medical treatment.

The main problem with this use of "mean" is that it is not at all transparent in meaning, which is a bad thing for the word "mean" to do to us. It is not a constituent of the utterance it prefaces and so contributes nothing to the meaning of the utterance. So, it is very different from

1. a."Ich" means `I'. Conventional meaning equivalents.
b. "I" refers to the speaker/writer of an utterance/sentence. Conventional meaning, but in this case dealing with the referent of the expression -- reference is meaning in this case.

Nor it is exactly like

2. a. I did not mean to hurt you.
b. Life without faith has no meaning.
c. Dark clouds mean rain.
d. McCain's choice of Palin is unpatriotic -- I mean, how can putting so unprepared a person one heartbeat from the Presidency when you are quite old.

So, what does "mean" mean in the odd cases we have focused on? I believe the answer is that it is an extension of the use of mean in (2d) where one is explicating the foundation or underlying "gist" of what was said (see my blog The Meaning of Meaning). It is like "what I mean is that." However this analysis does not fully square with the examples that got me interested, namely those of the football players. I think it is possible that the speaker is attempting to communicate "gist"directly and thereby direct attention away from actual wordage and the conventional meaning of what he is saying to the gist of what he is saying. This is not terribly different from (2b) where the "gist" of what was communicated is being supplied.

I could easily be wrong about this. Please advise me as to your views.

The Concept "Consumer"

2008-10-31T08:40:00.003-04:00

I have been watching CNBC recently because (a) our personal holdings have declined significantly as have most other people's and I want to know what's up with our declining economy, (b) they have beautiful women anchors and reporters and I am now, as always, a dirty old man, and (c) it is one place where you get intelligent discussion of the issues.

I was troubled yesterday -- why did it take so long, I wonder -- at the references to you and me as "consumers." Damn but if that is not a very demeaning term to use for us. I was struck by the resemblance of that concept to that of "johns," the people that prostitutes service. We are needy people and our role in the economy is to buy all manner of crap. We, however, have smartened up and are acting to bring down our personal debt rather than buying more crap. Wall Street is very unhappy about that. Since I am someone who has finally cut the cord on my fanatical desire to own the more toys by the time I die than anyone else in my economic weight class and am focusing relentlessly on cutting debt, I took offense.

One of the things that made it hard for American businesses to get products into Japan during the time the Japanese were dumping everything they made into the US besides the incredibly many obstructions businesses had to get past was that the Japanese consumer wasn't consuming as much as us. He and she were saving. That was once, in fact, a virtue we extolled -- "A penny saved is a penny earned," as Benjamin Franklin is reputed to have said That needs to be revised to "A penny saved is 0.67% of a penny earned," if it was saved in the form of purchasing into the stock market."

The thing that pisses me off about this reference to us as consumers is that we are also workers or as in the case of my wife and me, former workers. That is of interest to market people only if busineses are increasing or decreasing the number of us they employ. In this case we are viewed as little more than pawns in the great economic chess game Wall Street is playing by way of selling stakes in, real and contrived (check out the concept of a "derivative") financial instruments.

Can it be any wonder that the Bush Administration, ever the tool of the rich and powerful, treat us with so little respect -- tax cuts for rich investors (the people that control the chess board) being more important than tax cuts for us (pawns). Anyone who votes for McCain is saying, "I love being a pawn." Right now, the Bush Administration is working on all manner of ways to deregulate industry by way of favoring the rich and powerful. We are, after all, nothing more than tools. Oddly, so are the rich folks but they are so mentally screwed up that they can't quite recognize that they actually drink out of the dirty lake we drink from.

Take the good with the bad

2008-10-17T08:25:00.003-04:00

I hear athletes somewhat frequently saying during interviews that they would need to "take the good with the bad." This is an inversion of how the expression once was and for most of us (I believe) still is, namely "take the bad with the good." The obvious idea of the latter is that what we want are the good parts of something, but inevitably, taking the good parts will have undesired negative consequences. I want a piece of cake. That's the good stuff. Unfortunately, eating it is likely to have several undesirable health consequences.

I struggle to understand what "take the good with the bad" is trying to suggest. Interestingly, the second Google offering for this phrase was to The Free Dictionary wherein it was transformed into "take the bad with the good." So, it seems, Google gags on the phrase "take the good with the bad." However, I googled "young people take the good with the bad" and the fourth entry (but the first relevant one) referred me to a New York Times article. I was not suprised that page referred to was in the sports section. The title of the story was

Mets Take the Good With the Bad (Again)

This title, as it turns out, is strange given the fact that seems to have initiated the story. The first two paragraphs read:

Even when the Mets have good news to report, they still cannot shake the dark clouds.

Such was the case yesterday when the club eagerly announced signing Lance Johnson to a two-year contract extension, but then revealed that pitcher Paul Wilson may need arthroscopic surgery on his right throwing shoulder.

The problem here is that this takes the misuse of the original "take the bad with the good" to another level. The original phrase has it that one must take the bad aspects of some single thing along with the good things one wants. I presume that the same holds for the inverted phrase "take the good with the bad." However this New York Times story involves two quite unrelated things, the signing of one player and the need for surgery for another. It wouldn't be the first time a sports journalist, even with a highly regarded (by some) newspaper, used language in a way prescriptivists wouldn't like.

I have a confession to make. As I typed this blog, I found myself writing "take the good with the bad" instead of "take the bad with the good." This is a bit puzzling because I don't commonly do that sort of thing. Why would I do that? As I play with the two expressions in my head, I find that "take the good with the bad" flows more tripplingly off the tounge and sounds better to the ear (if not the brain). Am I nuts? Well, of course I am nuts. But do you share my experience?

How can we make PETA illegal?

2008-10-12T08:19:00.004-04:00

Usually when people hope to brainwash us they don't announce what their plans are exactly. PETA, however, has decided to go after sports and commercial fishing and the keeping of an aquarium or any other non-natural aquatic environment in which we imprison water creatures by causing us to think of fish as "sea kittens." They are apparently in no hurry, as perusal of their web site Save the Sea Kittens makes clear. Only a very young child, or someone dim-witted enough to buy into the advertising of McCain and Palin, are vulnerable to this sort of site.

The problem is that these people seem to be serious. Don't they have something better to do in their spare time? Or is it that Peta's national organization is going broke thanks to the Wall Street crash which has surely dried up contributions in recent weeks and need a new shtick. Since they have got all of the land and air animals covered already, the only source of new revenue is to drum up contributions for their sea kittens campaign.

I have blogged already on the Orwellian notion that language can determine thought and so am not too worried about about the term "sea kitten" causing children to see fish as warm (not so much), fuzzy (not so much), cuddly (not so much) animals. Moreover, when children get old enough to see that kittens grow up to be not so cuddly cats, as so many do, they will surely begin to wonder what sea kittens grow up to be.

We already have the term "catfish" but the presence of the morpheme "cat" doesn't seem to inspire people to want to save them from being fished or cultivated on catfish farms or eaten. Their protection, such as it is, consists of nasty projections coming out of their heads ("cat whiskers"?) that can inflict grievous bodily harm as I have myself discovered. So, I don't hold out much hope for the fate of "sea cats" as helping PETA brainwash our children and our vulnerable adults. So our sea kittens will have to stay forever young.

The thing is that for PETA to gain traction with children they ought to encourage them to have aquariums so that they can learn to love fish but PETA has ruled aquariums out. Indeed my keeping a number of aquariums once did reduce my lust for catching water creatures. They weren't pets, but they were very alive. I took notice.

Home aquarium fish will be small normally so that will perhaps cause them to be seen as lovable little things. I found a web site kids can go to find sample pet fish names. And, as an added attraction, with careful training you can get some home raised fish to accept being hand fed but I don't know how to do that exactly. However if you try to take an aquarium fish out of the water to pet them then something bad is likely to happen.

We have had "bad people -- good water mammal" movies but they haven't inspired anything more than demands that people who hunt whales stop doing so and that people who fish in ocean waters make sure they don't trap dolphins. I haven't seen or heard of any "good fish -- bad people" movies but there might be some. Of course, we have also had "bad fish -- good people movies" such as Jaws. That won't do much for PETA's ambitions. I suppose PETA will take a pro-shark position and simply demand that we quit getting into the oceans and seas they inhabit on the grounds that we are "trespassing" in their waters. So we will have to restrict ourselves to playing on the beach.

I think that the answer to this blog's question is that we can't make PETA illegal. However, if their new campaign to save the sea kittens is any indication, they have pretty much run their course as a viable organization. At least I hope so.

“You should think of that as unthinkable.”

2008-09-24T07:25:00.004-04:00

W's deputy press secretary, Tony Fratto, told reporters, when asked what would happen if Congress does not pass some sort of economic bailout of Bear Sterns, AIG, Freddie Mac, Fanny May, and other companies that are failing or contracting this week, “You should think of that as unthinkable.” What an idea! The reasoning of Mr. Fratto presupposes a contradiction -- something that has clearly been thought of is deemed unthinkable. Funny thing about that is from a contradiction all propositions including other contradictions become provable.

As it turns out, the week is not yet over and a rescue the rich plan has not been agreed to by the Congress, and we come close to the unthinkable not only being thinkable but being a fact. One of the really troubling things about the efforts of Henry M. Paulson Jr. and Ben S. Bernanke to persuade Congress to approve their bailout plan is their arrogant presumption that their plan is the only workable one. In fact, insisting, as many Democrats have, that the executives that have driven their companies into this dire situation be stopped from profiting in any way from the bailout, is not a part of their plan but would have no impact on the workability of their plan.But Bush didn't want it. He thought it would be punitive. What a dolt! The American people want these bastards punished and punished good. Some Congress(wo)men have advocated putting a ceiling of $400,000 per year for CEO's of bailed out companies. Usually people who fail as they have are simply fired so $400,000, far from being punitive, is generous.

There are other approaches that have as much credibility as W's boys' plan. According to the Washington Post, which sketches three alternatives to the plan of Paulson and Bernanke, Simon Johnson, a former chief economist for the IMF and current MIT professor, drives a stake in the heart of the Administration plan when he claims that the plan P & B have put forward is neither comprehensive nor decisive. This last concern should trouble everyone. If this bailout fails to stop the collapse of these companies, then this could mean that we do slide into a national economic crisis affecting us all.

I have my own solution which is predicated on the most basic principle of free enterprise, the "Upward Percolation Principle" according to which capitol is formed from the profit of the sale to consumers of goods and services. I just coined this principle but I bet you could find it in some economic text.

My plan is to provide to mortgage investment companies the funds to cover all mortgage obligations that have not been paid for all homes in foreclosure or headed that way due to the failure of home owners to make a payment or two. This gives an immediate influx of cash to these companies and makes the home owners "whole." Then we convert all ARMs (Adjustable Rate Mortgages) to fixed rate mortgages at some reasonable rate close to that which homeowners had once been able to pay. This will provide a continuous influx of money to these failing compaies but will result in another shortfall for them since they depend on rises in rates of ARMs when interest rates rise. My plan is that the government provide loans to these banks at a rate lower than what they can charge consumers and businesses for new loans. This is the single bailout they get. It seems just since we are also bailing out the persons that obtained ARM mortages they cannot pay due to rises in rates.

I, of course, have no idea what I am talking about. But, does anyone else? The solution to the current economic crisis may itself be unthinkable. This is not like a math problem for which a solution is guaranteed if you can only find it. This is a problem that may have no single solution and we could end up chasing our economic tails for years. The great irony in all of this is the AIG ads that had children expressing their fears about how their parents are handling their finances which conclude with a smug little brat who announces that his parents are with AIG, that, apparently, being enough said. I have not seen an AIG ad recently. I don't expect one.

Al Queda #2 Has Alzheimers

2008-09-09T07:11:00.004-04:00

I base my claim that Ayman al-Zawahiri is suffering Alzheimer's or some other form of senility for he has recently charged that Iran is a "collaborator" with the United States in the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. That is just one piece of evidence but it is probative. In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that I have no medical degree nor any competence in physical and mental health.

There are two alternatives to this psychiatric diagnosis. One is that he is simply mentally ill, suffering from the delusion that Iran and the United States have important interests in common. The only evidence I can think of for that is both want a compliant Iraq. However, Iran wants Iraq to be subservient to them and we, or rather our government, wants Iraq to be subservient to us. Therefore, I say al-Zawahiiri has a paranoid personality and suffers from serious political delusions. In support of that analysis is the fact that al-Zawahiri lives in caves. Only crazy people live in caves these days.

The third possibility is that al-Zawahiri is so cut off from news that he has no idea what is going on. However, if his cave has all mod cons, these would include electricity and a satellite dish and receiver and a monitor. His claim is that the US and Iran both support the "hireling governments" of Iraq and Afghanistan but this similarity is like the other one. They both support the government because the US can leave only, so it says, if the government can run the country and Iraq can't fall into a state of anarchy until we leave, a state that Iran will find it easy to exploit, at least for awhile. Iran might suffer the same fate as the US has. We liberated them from Saddam (and from fresh pure running water, electricity, sewage treatment, etc. ) but the day after we were unwelcome. Iran is a Muslim theocracy, which ought to please the Iraqis, but they are the wrong kind of Muslims for the Sunnis and the Kurds (who really don't count since they already have set up an independent Kurdish state), and much more important, they aren't Arabs.

For reasons I cannot quite explain, I had the feeling in reading this that I had on listening to the Weather Underground back in the late 60's. As I listened to the latter (in teach ins that I ran at the University of Illinois) it became clear to me that being against the war wasn't good enough for the Weather Underground. One had to be against it for the right reasons, that is their reasons. The WU was promoting revolution so one had to see the Vietnam War as a colonial war and see the government as fascist. Their arguments would play out better today in connection with the Iraq War since the Bush government is much more interested in suppressing our legal rights than were the governments of Johnson and Nixon.

So, al-Zawahiri is pissed at the Iranians for making nice with the Iraq government even though Iran is as close what bin Laden wants for S. Arabia as any other large Muslim country, namely it is a state run by religious zealots. A more rational course might be to applaud Iran and bitch at, say, Jordan or S. Arabia or the Gulf States for collaborating with us.

Mr. 85

2008-09-05T08:46:00.005-04:00

Mr. Chad Johnson is, perhaps, the most infamous attention seeker in American professional sports if Mr. Terrell Owens is not. In fact, since Mr. Owens went to the Dallas Cowboys, he has dropped out the sports headlines, perhaps because he feels appreciated by the management and his team mates. He has, it seems, abandoned the field to Mr. Johnson.

Mr. Johnson is nothing if not inventive. Last season, he engaged in an unneeded leap into the air to catch a 3 yard touchdown pass which in the words of the Commissioner of the league,represented a "flagrant display of athletic ability was 'gaudy' and 'went beyond the bounds of good taste.' Certain actions on scoring a touch down have ling been regarded as unwanted such as doing flips into the endzone, diving into the endzone when it was not done to evade being tackled, and making gestures of various sorts that are seen as instances of one upmanship that are regarded as taunting. However, Mr. Johnson's action was performed while engaged in doing what he was supposed to do, namely catch footballs, preferably in the end zone. The odds are that this was a premeditated action waiting for an opportunity to be performed, as so many of Mr. Johnson's actions have been.

Johnson's unnecessary leap might be viewed as the football equivalent of dunking a basketball in some elaborate manner. If it goes in, not too many people will complain at the athleticism displayed in dunking a ball. The football commissioner's reference to Mr. Johnson's display of "bad taste" is comical, as it seems to situate football in the same social space as, say, a tea party where someones engaging in an staged loud fart would be said to be in bad taste. Perhaps I exaggerate a bit, but it is a funny choice of language by the commissioner.

Mr. Johnson makes the most of the few props available to him. Once he pulled up an endzone pylon and used it to putt the football he had carried into the endzone. In another case he pulled out a sharpy and signed the football and gave it to a fan (if I recall correctly). The problem many have with Mr. Johnson is that football is a quintessential team game. Mr. Johnson is drawing attention to himself on a touchdown reception without regard for the fact that the quarterback had to throw the ball he caught, the other receivers ran routes that drew defensive backs away from him, and sundry linemen and running backs will have blocked attackers trying to sack the quarterback before he could throw the ball. From this perspective, Mr. Johnson's antics are deplorably self-promoting however entertaining they may be. The commissioner knows that if he does not fine the man, his opponents on the field will one day display their unhappiness by taking out one of his knees.

I have long watched the NFL fight against touchdown displays and such things as dances made by linebackers around a quarterback they have sacked. Initially, the celebrations were pretty mild, but were never liked by old white guys. In my opinion, African Americans and White people take a different view of what is a reasonable public celebration. And in sports, where once Whites, but not African Americans were allowed to play, a very rigid code of sportsmanship emerged, too rigid for the tastes of the African Americans who began to be allowed to play such games. I think there is a real cultural difference between Whites and Blacks in regard to what is acceptable behavior on the field of play and what is not, which is not to say that there is not a great deal of variation in attitudes within both groups. The first quarterback sack dance was done by a White guy, for instance. The first "high five" was done by a Black person. Interestingly, as the "high five" has evolved, Whites have chased after each variation of celebratory hand gestures that has emerged as Blacks keep changing them to stay ahead of Whites (in my opinion).

This is a long-winded path to my title, "Mr. 85." The most recent "antic" by Mr. Johnson has been to legally change his name to "Chad Ocho Cinco." Someone seems to have told Mr. Johnson that the number of the back of his jersey would be pronounced "ocho cinco" in Spanish. His first effort to get "Ocho Cinco" on the back of his uniform was nixed by his coach I believe. In this case, it was easy for Mr. 85 to comply for it was a tear off addition to his uniform. But having changed his name legally, there is nothing anyone cand do to stop him. However, the joke is on Mr. Ocho Cinco. The English phrase "eighty five" is translated into "ochenta cinco." Moreover, "85" in Spanish is, well, "85." So, I propose that the sporting world begin calling Mr. 85 by either "Mr. 85" or "Mr. Ochenta Cinco" in the interests of language correctness.

"Retard"

2008-08-21T06:54:00.003-04:00

I was greeted in the letters to the editor section of my morning paper the other day with a note damning the use of "retard" as a put down. The writer was responding specifically to its frequent use in a new, highly rated movie, "Tropic Thunder, a Ben Stiller movie. Of course, it couldn't be used in that way if it weren't negative. On the other hand this is a comedy and comedy and comedians have usually been given wide latitude.

Apparently disability rights groups have condemned its use, saying it is hate speech which, in the words of the writer, "heaps insult and harm on a group that has a long history of being stigmatized and vulnerable." He likens it to the use of terms like "nigger," "spic," and "slut" though he does not cite these specific words and he is right, of course.

In an utterance like "You retard" "retard" is being used as a noun, a use that isn't mentioned in the on line edition of the Merriam Webster dictionary which speaks to its marginal position in the language. Like a good deal of slang, it could someday be replaced by something else equally pejorative. In fact, it is likely to be repaced because put downs like this need a certain "freshness" for maximum effect. Use of the word "idiot" instead of "retard" would not have anything like the same import though it comes down to the same thing. "Idiot" is not fresh.

I have great sympathy for the position the writer takes but it is a hopeless cause. The problem is that the word "retardation," from which "retard" is derived, is in common use among those who study or provide assistance to those who have learning disabilities and such other conditions as the term encompasses. This puts "retardation" in a very different linguistic position than words like "nigger," "spic," and "slut." And it may cause the word to stick around for awhile. Ironically, every letter to the editor on the use of this word reminds us of its availability should one feel the need to put down another person.

If those who don't like hearing "retard" want to kill it off, they need to start with all the agencies and organizations that use "retardation" in their names. This use gives automatic legitimacy to "retardation."

The World's Greatest Olympian

2008-08-13T07:12:00.005-04:00

NBC is declaring that Michael Phelps is the Greatest Olympian ever. They are doing it not because it is true but because NBC is shilling its product -- TV coverage of the Olympics. They want you (if you are in the US) to watch all of his upcoming races and, while you are at it, all the rest of the coverage of the Beijing Olympics.

No one at NBC has asked the question, "What does "Greatest Olympian ever" mean? The fact is that there are really two questions here which have been compressed into one. The first question is, "What are the criteria for determining who is the greatest Olympian ever?" The second is, "Who best satisfies these criteria?" NBC seems to think that the person who wins the most gold medals is the greatest Olympian ever. Another consideration is whether or not NBC believes that only Americans count. Would they be shilling a Nigerian one wonders?

Clearly, any reasonable answer to our question would begin by considering who is the greatest Olympian in each sport, broadly conceived. Nadia Comeneci could be said to be the greatest of all time since she forced a revision in how gymnastics is scored -- too many "10's". Or, perhaps, Larissa Semyonovna, who won 4 gold medals in the 1956 Melbourne Olympiad in gymnastics and was the first female athlete to win nine Olympic gold medals. (Information and some phrases stolen from a top 20 list.) We have track and field candidates (Jesse Owens/Carl Lewis) or Al Oerter (excellence over multiple Olympics -- 4 straight discus wins, each with a world record) It seems that gymnastics, track and field, and swimming will provide the only serious candidates.

At this point we must, I think, ask the question whether sports that allow for multiple wins in a single Olympics, thanks in part to the existence of relays (swimming and track) and team medals (gymnastics) shouldn't be devalued in some way. In fact, though I think none of the great swimmers ever won such a medal one can get a medal in a swimming or track relay race even though one does not race in the finals. If one participates in the preliminary heats that is enough. In my opinion, no relay medals should count and medals from events that are fundamentally different in nature should be upwards valued. Though speed in the run up to the board in the long jump (formally broad jump) is crucial, it does require additional skills. By the same token each of the different swimming strokes requires different skills.

In my opinion, the clear winner of the "greatest Olympian ever" contest should be the Dutch athlete Fanny Blankers-Koen. She won golds "in the long jump, the high jump, and sprint and hurdling events," according to Wikipedia. There is no question that these four events require quite different skills. On second thought, perhaps it should be Comeneci for she not only revolutionized scoring thanks to her perfect performances, the different skills in gymnastics are clearly ver different. But, if we are to go in that direction the winner should, perhaps, be some male gymnast since the men do more events than the women. By now, you should be convinced that our exercise is a very, very silly one. Sadly, humans generally cannot think well enough to see how silly it is. And, even more sadly, we are going to let such people chose the President of the United States.

Is McCain Stupid, A Liar, or Just Extremely Forgetful?

2008-07-30T06:55:00.003-04:00

Harking back to my last blog, I ask whether it would be politically incorrect to discuss John McCain's age. The answer is probably, "Yes," though age per se doesn't tell us anything substantive about a candidate for President. Claims that someone is too young or too old to be President presupposes a truly idiotic use of statistics -- a claim to the effect that the average 35/72 year old male is too X to be President doesn't entail that any specific person aged 35/72 is too X to be President.

However, let's not let McCain off the hook this easily. Though I don't recall the issue ever being brought up before but whether or not a person's cognitive health and cognitive capacity and his stamina are sufficient to allow him to be a successful President is of very great importance. IMO, both Obama and McCain should be vetted by one or more panels of appropriate medical experts who are competent to diagnose how senile a 72 year old is or how much stamina he has. McCain's campaign might benefit greatly by a positive result. I know that my memory is not as good as it used to be and I am too years younger than McCain.

Perhaps the example or Reagan, who either was already in the clutches of Alzheimer's or engaged in selective memory (= some combination of lying and memory failures) when he testified under oath during a deposition in regard to Iran Contra shortly after his Presidency. The charitable view is that his brain was already damaged. I have a close relative (not a blood relative) who suffers from Alzheimer's (she's in her latish 80's) and the experience of visiting her terrifies me as to a possible fate for me or my wife or anyone else I know or any of you or McCain. She has a wonderful personality but can't remember much of anything, including especially things she has just said.

My concern about McCain derives from the extraordinary errors he is making. Any Presidential candidate who is worried about the situation on the Iraq-Pakistan border should immediately withdraw himself from the race. McCain has made clear that he is not Internet savvy, itself a troubling fact, and does not realize I think that everyone in the world with Internet access can fact check what he says, including contradictory claims made within a short period of time. Check out the contradictions on this YouTube bit, slices of real life on the John McCain Crooked Talk Express.

Political Correctness Gone Crazy

2008-07-25T14:18:00.006-04:00

It seems that a British borough council banned use of the phrase "brain storm." I want you to try to figure out why they might have chosen to do that. I am betting you can't.

It seems that these highly empathetic people, not burdened by the strictures of a Second Amendment, were worried about the harm that hearing or reading this phrase might do to the psyches of those who suffer from, well, brain storms, as this term was used in the late 1890's until the contemporary use began to be used in the 1940's.

Interestingly, even after a group of epileptics, when polled, said they found nothing offensive about the phrase, the doughty councilors have resolved to stand their ground. The irony in all of this is, of course, that in deciding to protect epileptics from unfeeling people who like to call their brain storming "brain storming" they have managed to brand epileptics as damaged or defective in some way that I suspect epileptics will find offensive.

Our deep thinking councilors have come up with the alternative language "thought shower." It is just what one might have expected from them. Let me add that this phrase is inadequate to the purpose of describing an interactive group's efforts to solve some problem collectively. A brain storm, as I understand the phrase, suggests people throwing out ideas they bounce off each other either to be shot down or developed further. A thought shower does not suggest an interactive process at all. In rain showers, the rain typically falls straight down.

I think that people would do well to wait until some aggrieved group, such as epileptics, complain about a linguistic practice before they take action. Before seeing this story the idea that "brain storm" was at all connected to epilepsy had never occurred to me. I suspect epileptics would be more concerned with being treated badly in the work place.