Link Banana

In addition to upgrading to WordPress 2.5 yesterday, I also added related content links to the site’s entries. It’s done using the Similar Posts plugin by Rob Marsh — who happens to be a Jesuit, a fact I find fascinating.

For now they’re only visible on the single-entry view, but if you’re ever bored you can click around and find a cornucopia of things you either missed or forgot. I, the sole writer and editor of this site, have spent a few hours finding stuff I’d already forgotten about. For a site that turns three months old tomorrow, my mind should be thoroughly embarrassed about that fact.

Also of note: I made a single massive list of every single post available as a way to view the archives. I should tell you that the sight is not for the faint of heart.

The Economist did a recent survey about political positions in the two countries with a number of interesting results.

The gap between Britain and America is widest on religion: no surprise there, as Britain is famously a post-Christian society and Americans are, if anything, rediscovering the faith of their fathers. But the difference in views is so wide that even British Conservatives are a great deal more secular than American Democrats are. The two are a bit closer on social values (abortion, homosexuality and so forth), and they overlap on ideology (mainly, how active the state should be), with Britain’s Tories to the right of America’s Democrats.

They overlap again on how free their countries should be to intervene militarily (both the Tories and Labour are more hawkish than the Democrats). Britons are more international than the Americans, keener on free trade and globalisation. Views coincide most nearly on climate change—ironically, the area where the two governments have been least in step.

It worth giving the first graph in that article a look (as it summarizes the findings well), the more comprehensive second graph is here.

Dolores Labs is quickly becoming the go-to source for entertaining data that I’m not comfortable calling science. Another example: they’ve asked people to judge faces by age, politics, and intelligence. They present the pictures as they were rated along those axes.

Though Friday’s entry was a tangential meditation on Los Angeles, last week’s Correspondent’s Diary at The Economist is rather good. Two quotes from visiting the Navajo, one of the few casino-less tribes. From Tuesday, on their relationship to the United States:

Just because Navajos are exceptionally good at negotiating between cultural worlds does not mean they do not make mistakes. A few weeks ago the Navajo Times carried a story about a move to create a Diné medal of honour for those who have served in the armed forces. The speaker of the Navajo legislature apparently thought this would be a good idea. Navajo veterans did not. Explaining that only Congress can award military medals, they crushed the plan by a vote of 34-0. Three of the intended recipients responded that they would rather have a sheep.

And from Thursday, on gambling in America:

Indian casinos exist because of what psychologists call cognitive dissonance and everyone else knows as hypocrisy. Americans wish to gamble. Yet they cannot bring themselves to liberalise gambling, which is, after all, a sin. So it is necessary to allow a few exceptions to the general rule. These include Nevada, riverboats (which are often little more than casinos surrounded by moats) and Indian tribes.

This completely pointless (and if memory serves, illegal), but I found Spock Lincoln rather amusing. Click the title for more.

(via Boing Boing)

Making it through Kelefa Sanneh long New Yorker piece about visiting Trinity United Church of Christ did nothing to increase my affinity for the publication, but he did make an interesting point.

Across the street from Trinity’s main entrance is a small building with a sign that says, “St. Matthew Gordon AME Zion.” Its presence, for anyone who notices it, is a reminder of the scrappy little church that Trinity used to be, and of the scrappy little churches all over the city, each harboring dreams of fruitful multiplication. For Wright, black Chicago’s highly competitive religious market was a challenge and a spur; for a different preacher, in a different era, it could be a threat. The media frenzy has obscured, and postponed, the real test facing the church. Bad press does no real harm to a church that relishes an air of opposition, and that relies on cheerful givers, not on mainstream sponsors. (On the contrary, Moss told NPR, the controversy “has brought the entire church together.”) But the next challenge will become increasingly clear. After thirty-six years with Wright at the helm, an idiosyncratic megachurch is trying to change its leadership without changing its identity. Once Wright’s moment in the media spotlight is over, his church will have to figure out how to get along without him.

It should come as no surprise that the United States has essentially the lowest “environmental taxes” — as a percent of total tax revenue — of the OECD, an organization of mostly rich countries. I was surprised that New Zealand “beat” the US, and that Australia was solidly in the middle of the pack.

These details from Eduardo Porter depress me.

Americans are not less generous than Europeans. When private charities are included, they probably spend more money for social purposes than Europeans do. But philanthropy allows them to target spending on those they personally believe are deserving, instead of allowing the government to choose.

Mr. Glaeser’s and Mr. Alesina’s work suggests that white Europeans support a big welfare state because they believe the money will probably go to other white Europeans. In America, the Harvard economist Erzo F. P. Luttmer found that support for social spending among respondents to General Social Survey polls increased in tandem with the share of welfare recipients in the area who were in their own racial group. A study of charity by Daniel Hungerman, a Notre Dame economist, found that all-white congregations become less charitably active as the share of black residents in the local community grows.

For The New Republic, Eve Fairbanks may or may not be reading too much into the effectiveness of Wikipedia editors:

To test the air, I undertook my own little, highly unscientific experiment. I made a professional-looking but somewhat negative edit on each of the candidate’s pages. For Hillary, I wrote a line on the hopelessness of her chances even when you count superdelegates; for Obama, I added a phrase about his loss of some white support. My Obama edit was fully scrubbed within three minutes, by an editor I’d never even seen before. My Hillary edit languished untouched for four hours until Schilling finally got around to deleting it. But, even then, he carefully preserved my skeptical text and pasted it onto the separate history-ofHillary’s-campaign page, a gesture of acceptance. It has remained there, a little wart on Hillary’s Wikipedia face, untouched, ever since.

(via Slashdot)

I didn’t follow “Waco” when it happened (in my defense, I was seven) and haven’t learned much about it since. Thus I was rather fascinated by Pamela Colloff’s excellent — though sometimes hard to follow — compilation of accounts of the events by those who were there, both Branch Davidians and law enforcement. 

(via brijit)

Sam Hurst’s long article for Gourmet about the farm bill is full of the needless exposition that I don’t usually like. The final point, however, is important.

While this year’s Farm Bill winds its way through the Conference Committee, grain processors, cattle feeders, and the ethanol industry still control the debate in Washington, and they all profit from overproduction. Prices are high today, but the more farmers expand production to meet the opportunity, the more prices will fall tomorrow. So raw-commodity prices stay low over the long term, and tax­payers pick up the tab to keep struggling farmers afloat from one harvest to the next. And President Bush’s veto threat still lurks if Harkin or other reformers try to add new money to the Farm Bill to pay for multifunctional reforms.

(via brijit)

A for shorter — and equally informative — explanation of the current farm bill is offered by The Economist.

Speaking of criticism… John Freeman had some useful insight into why one might — and might not — want to read criticism at all.

In a way, pre-judgement is a necessary evil of criticism: there are far more books published than anyone could possibly read, busloads of awarded writers who aren’t actually worth reading. There’s no way to approach this forest gingerly. You need a buzz saw to clear some breathing room, gain a sightline, and criticism has to have enough teeth and ubiquitous availability to be that instrument.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

I probably wouldn’t be linking to this cute/strange/odd essay from the NY Times Book Review were it not for what Austin Kleon (a recent favorite) had to say about it:

last night we watched MARGOT AT THE WEDDING, and this morning I read this essay. these poor, miserable, over-educated, imbred [sic] bastards. doomed to loneliness. this whole stupid American Hologram has somehow convinced us that we are what we consume — and intellectuals buy into it just as much as anybody else. “You’ve never read Nabokov? Oh, I could never marry you.” Losers. A nation of losers.

The opposition has announced that they’ve won, even while “official” results aren’t announced.

In a press conference at 1.30 am on Sunday morning Zimbabwe time Tendai Biti, the secretary general of the larger of the two wings of the MDC, said that preliminary results showed sweeping margins of victory across the country, even in Zanu-PF’s traditional heartland. ”We’ve won this election,” he said. ”We must savour these scenes as for the rest of our lives we’ll say we were there.”

I’m hoping this doesn’t turn out like Kenya, but I’m increasingly fearing it will.

Perhaps everyone else knows about this stuff, but in reading this article from Smithsonian I was really surprised to learn all the tools that MLB groundskeepers have that they can use to help their team.

Grandfather Emil, who became known as the “evil genius of groundskeepers,” was a whiz at what is euphemistically called maximizing the home field advantage. Over time he honed several techniques, including tilting base lines in or out so balls rolled fair or foul, digging up or tamping down base paths to prevent or abet stealing, leaving grass long or clipping it short to slow or speed grounders. He also moved the outfield fences back 12 to 15 feet to stymie the home-run-slugging Yankees. By and large, his tricks were employed selectively to bolster home team strengths and take advantage of opponent teams’ weaknesses.

They meet in the zeroHouse.

(via Magnetbox)

The complexities of the Israel-Fatah-Hamas are often lost on me. But this I was heartened by:

However, Hamas is now attempting to sell the virtues of a ceasefire to a battered people accustomed to talk of “steadfastness” and “resistance”. A group of leading thinkers is to visit universities and hold symposia to convince Gazans that a period of calm will help lift the siege and rebuild their disappearing economy.

Though that hardly means that a resolution is suddenly within sight, I can’t see this as a bad thing.

The top one’s certainly crazy, but be sure to scroll all the way down. Though there’s a lot of offensive and vulgar stuff — you’ve now been warned — along the way, the White Power Unicorn can’t be missed.

(via tumbl.us)

Though I wouldn’t vouch for the veracity of this, it’s undeniable that it’s an interesting and reasonable account:

According to a Democratic strategist unaligned with any campaign but with knowledge of the situation gleaned from all three camps, the answer is simple: Obama blew it. Speaking to Edwards on the day he exited the race, Obama came across as glib and aloof. His response to Edwards’s imprecations that he make poverty a central part of his agenda was shallow, perfunctory, pat. Clinton, by contrast, engaged Edwards in a lengthy policy discussion. Her affect was solicitous and respectful. When Clinton met Edwards face-to-face in North Carolina ten days later, her approach continued to impress; she even made headway with Elizabeth. Whereas in his Edwards sit-down, Obama dug himself in deeper, getting into a fight with Elizabeth about health care, insisting that his plan is universal (a position she considers a crock), high-handedly criticizing Clinton’s plan (and by extension Edwards’s) for its insurance mandate.

(via The Page)

It’s Science Saturday on Bloggingheads and today’s discussion is especially interesting. Yale psychologist Paul Bloom and UNC (experimental) philosopher Joshua Knobe discuss how morality comes about and persists. Fascinating stuff.