Category Archives: Social Commentary

Rousseau Was Wrong

That’s an evergreen post title, but the science is settled:

Human facial structure evolved to tolerate punches to the head, according to new research that suggests our ancestors spent a lot of time fighting.

So they weren’t corrupted by civilization. Huh.

[Update early afternoon]

On the other hand, maybe not.

But even without this theory, there’s ample evidence that prehistoric humans weren’t gentle pacifists.

Mad Men Ads

Lileks (who has finally replaced the irreplaceable Jasper with a new puppie) has thoughts on the decline of advertising and the suckitude of the early seventies:

What’s the opposite of nostalgia? What’s the word for an exaggerated dislike of a particular time? I know I am nostalgic for things I did not experience, and only see through the pop-culture elements left behind, which communicate incomplete and occasionally misleading messages. But I have antipathy for things I experienced at the fringe of adolescence – not because it was a bad time, or I didn’t like them then, but because they seem now to be the products of a culture that was getting cheap and lazy; it was full of gimcrack baubles turned out by an exhausted system that tried to adapt to the times, but had no strength to put forth any ideas or uphold any ideas that went before. The period from 1967 to 1975, with some stellar exceptions, was just a horrible time for everything, and you can reduce it all down to one middle-aged balding dude with wet hair plastered over his head in brown polyester pants and a mustard-yellow shirt approving one thing after the other because the kids will go for it.

That’s a generalization. Somewhat. But. I’ve said this before: “Mad Men”’s exploration of the late 60s somehow avoids the fact that advertising in that era was horrible. Compare an issue of Life magazine from 1968 to its 1958 counterpoint – it’s as if style, color, art, romance, seduction, adulthood, and bright-eyed joy had been drained from the world. The ads weren’t about the product anymore; the ads were about the ads.

[Yes, I know it’s not fresh material — I’d gotten behind on my Bleatage.]

Young Blood

Is the secret anti-aging ingredient oxytocin?

The new study provides a new hypothesis for how we get old. When people are young, they produce lots of oxytocin. On top of whatever psychological effects it may have, that extra oxytocin also tells stem cells to turn into muscle cells, keeping people strong. Young people might also produce GDF11 and other molecules at high levels, and in combination, they may keep all the organs young. And once those signals start to fade in old age, the body starts to fall apart.

Theoretically, giving old people compounds like oxytocin or GDF11 may cause their cells to act young again. The compounds could be the basis for an all-purpose treatment for the diseases of old age, from osteoporosis to heart disease to Alzheimer’s.

Theoretically.

Yes, theoretically. As he notes, this is only rat experiments. Nothing with humans yet.

Piketty’s Book

Why it’s “garbage.”

Kyle Smith asked today on Twitter, if you put a check for a hundred bucks in the middle of Hillary’s new book, how many of them would get cashed? I’d say the same thing about Piketty’s book. It’s a “classic.” That is, a book that everyone wants to display and have read, but no one wants to actually read. Fortunately, some people who understand math did slog through it.

The Millennials

Why they’re doing so poorly:

Last month, another report came out extending the low scores of Millennials to precisely the anti-civic, pro-social syndrome predicted in The Dumbest Generation. It reports the findings of a survey of young adults on a variety of dispositions and beliefs, conducted by Pew Research and bearing the title “Millennials in Adulthood”. The conclusion is neatly summed up in the subtitle: “Detached from Institutions, Networked with Friends.” Overall, it found, 18-33-year-olds in America are less connected to political parties, churches, local associations, and their own country than are older Americans. They are solidly liberal, but their values seem more derived from social attitudes than from political policies, supporting same-sex marriage and “lead[ing] all generations in the share of out-of-wedlock births.” They favor an “activist government,” understood as maintaining entitlements and benefits, not as a political or economic outlook.

In other words, they judge politics by how it affects them, and we see that personal-only perspective in their social focus. They are much more connected to friends and peers than their elders are, with fully 81 percent of Millennials having Facebook accounts, and the “median friend count is 250”! They “are also distinctive in how they place themselves at the center of self-created digital networks,” for example, posting “selfies” at higher rates.

There you have the equation. More peer stuff means less civic sense. While 75 percent of Baby Boomers and 81 percent of the Silent Generation believe the phrase “A patriotic person” fits them “very well,” only 49 percent of Millennials do. Half of them, that is, have little appreciation of their country and fidelity to its traditions. They don’t much care about civics and politics and history, and they don’t know much about it, either. On the 2010 civics exam of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (the Nation’s Report Card), scores for 12th-graders fell three points from 2006 and one-third of test-takers stated that they hadn’t studied the U.S. Constitution at all during the year.

It’s not their fault. It’s ours.

Left-Lane Squatters

Washington state is cracking down on them.

I wish more states would do this. As I wrote in comments there, for decades, I’ve been saying that when I am king, all those stupid signs that say “Slower Drivers Keep Right” will be replaced with “Left Lane For Passing Only.” Because no one thinks that they are a “slower driver.” I’d also put in sensors so that you get an automatic ticket if you’re passed on the right five consecutive times without passing anyone.

The Climate Cult

Thoughts from Steve Hayward on the latest propaganda failure:

The temperature plateau and the persistent limitations and errors of the computer models strongly suggest the kind of “anomalies” that Thomas Kuhn famously explained should constitute a crisis for dominant scientific theories. What’s more, several papers recently published in the peer-reviewed literature conclude climate sensitivity is much lower than previously thought, making the problem of climate change much less likely to be catastrophic and more likely to be easily managed. But with the notable exceptions of the Economist and straight-shooting New York Times science blogger Andrew Revkin, these heterodox findings, which have steadily eroded the catastrophic climate change narrative, have received almost no media attention.

Despite all this, there has been not even the hint of a second thought from the climateers, nor any reflection that their opinions or strategies could bear some modification. The environmental community is so deeply invested in looming catastrophe that it’s difficult to envision a scientific result that would alter their cult-like bearing. Rather than reflect, they deflect, blaming the Koch brothers, the fossil fuel industry, and Republican “climate deniers” for their lack of political progress. Yet organized opposition to climate change fanaticism is tiny compared with the swollen staffs and huge marketing budgets of the major environmental organizations, not to mention the government agencies around the world that have thrown in with them on the issue. The main energy trade associations seldom speak up about climate science controversies. The major conservative think tanks have no climate change programs to speak of. The Cato Institute devotes just two people to the issue. The main opposition to climate fanaticism is confined to the Heartland Institute, the London-based Global Warming Policy Foundation, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and a scattering of relentless bloggers who have acquired surprisingly large readerships. That’s it. These are boutique operations next to the environmental establishment: The total budgets for all of these efforts would probably not add up to a month’s spending by just the Sierra Club. And yet we are to believe that this comparatively small effort has kept the climate change agenda at bay. It certainly keeps climateers in an uproar.

Well, someone has to do it.