Texas (are you surprised?) Republican congressman Michael Burgess stays classy:

“Watch a sonogram of a 15-week baby, and they have movements that are purposeful,” said Burgess, a former OB/GYN. “They stroke their face. If they’re a male baby, they may have their hand between their legs. If they feel pleasure, why is it so hard to believe that they could feel pain?”

I’ve known since practically forever that competing car dealers cluster together because everybody gets more business that way, but I had forgotten exactly how the phenomenon was supposed to work. As I discovered a week or so ago when I tried to explain it to my granddaughter.

However Professor Robert Paul Wolff, despite being almost my age, forgets nothing. See?

One of the more interesting out-of-the way corners of the field of Economics is what might be called the pure theory of location. If we assume that consumers are completely rational and have perfect knowledge, that all the retail outlets selling a particular commodity offer identical instances of the commodity at the same price, and that consumers make their buying decisions solely on the basis of how close a retail outlet is to where they are [and of course that all consumers prefer the closer outlet], once one retailer has entered the field, where is the rational place for a second retailer to locate?

You might think the answer would be something like: Not too close to the first retailer, but maybe half way between that retailer and the edge of the space in which the consumers are located. You might think that, but you would be wrong. The correct answer is, right next door to the first retailer.

To see why this is so, consider a one-dimensional world in which everyone — retailers and consumers alike — is located somewhere along a line of finite length. [This is of course unlikely, although not more unlikely than most of the other assumptions modern economists make, but my basic point is the same even if folks are spread out in two dimensions, such as in a city.] The first retailer to open a shop commands the entire market. Since there may be some distance beyond which some consumers are unwilling to travel, and assuming that consumers are distributed evenly along the line, the best place for this first retailer to locate is right in the middle of the line, the minimum average distance from a randomly chosen consumer.

A second retailer, who decides to enter into competition with the first, must locate either to the right or the left of the center of the line. If she chooses left, she concedes all sales to consumers lying to the right of center, because she must be farther from any of them than is her competitor. She maximizes her sales by nestling right up against the left flank of the first retailer’s shop, thereby snagging all of the business to her left. She and her competitor then can wrangle over who gets the business of any consumers who happen to be located on the dividing line between their two shops.

So now I know. Except I don't understand.

I did not know that:

Today, new problems have emerged in the process of resolving old ones, but the solution is not to go back to the past. Some people may long for an era when divorce was still hard to come by. The spread of no-fault divorce has reduced the bargaining power of whichever spouse is more interested in continuing the relationship. And the breakup of such marriages has caused pain for many families.

Yet, according to the economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, whenever a state adopted a no-fault divorce law, the annual rate of female suicide there dropped by 8 to 16 percent, and the incidence of domestic violence declined by roughly 30 percent.

Take five minutes of this and call me in the morning:

…or wife-swapping? You decide.

CNN.com:

Vladimir Putin’s nearly 30-year marriage has ended, the Russian president and his wife told state-run television in a joint interview.

“This was our joint decision. Our marriage is over,” Putin told Russia 24, standing next to Lyudmila Putin, in an interview shown Thursday. “We almost don’t see each other. We have different lives.”

News Corp boss Rupert Murdoch has filed for divorce from Wendi Deng Murdoch, the mother of his two youngest children and a woman seen as a key player in the media empire.

The news, first reported by Deadline Hollywood and confirmed by a spokesman, brings to an end the media mogul's third marriage.

You didn’t expect me to pass this one up, did you?

Apparently, eyeball licking is considered to be the new “second base” for Japanese kids, The Daily Caller reported. Teachers first started noticing an uptick in students wearing eye patches. They first blamed it on a fashion trend, only to find out it was really a surge in conjunctivitis, or pink eye…

Yesterday, while you were inexplicably and inexcusably not paying attention, Roger Ailes was awarded a $250,000 prize by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation for “innovative thinkers and practitioners whose achievements strengthen the legacy of the Bradley brothers and the ideas to which they were committed.”

Former Australian Rupert Murdoch’s Fakes News network, which Ailes serves as chairman and CEO, turns out to be committed to those very same ideas. Here’s an excerpt from Slate’s account of Ailes’s acceptance speech:

My remarks tonight are my own. They don’t necessarily reflect the views of News Corp, Rupert Murdoch, or Fox. I will say, however, that I didn’t give up my citizenship to run a news organization. So I speak here on the highest authority and greatest title anyone could aspire to: Citizen of the United States.

I share the general outrage at the breadth and depth of federal government spying on every aspect of our observable behavior. But I do not share the surprise. The NSA has long been hoovering up every bit of data it could get and maneuvering lawmakers into legalizing whatever happens, or at least leaving holes big enough to drive the largest agency in the so-called intelligence community right through. In 1995 I was reading about the Clipper Chip, which was a design for a computer encryption chip with a built-in back door called, appropriately, the Law Enforcement Exploitation Field. Open discussion of such a solution to the problem of balancing public and private needs at the time led to the demise of the design, which is why such designs were never done openly again.

During that time I began a letter to my representatives in Congress and the Senate outlining my objections to Clipper. These could not be stated reasonably without giving a brief history of the NSA, information that was not widely distributed at the time. The letter turned into a brief essay on that topic, bringing together information that was publicly available but at the time considered fringy because it did not fit the dominant narrative. It’s funny how often facts fail to conform to our narratives. Now that I think of it, that in a nutshell is what psychotherapy is about, or should be. In any case, what once was fringy is now common knowledge. So if you know someone who was talking about Echelon spying on them in the last several years, they may have been right.

One thing I want to emphasize about the current round of revelations is the tiny cost of the PRISM program. All the corporations named in the slide have vigorously denied participation in very carefully worded statements. But think of it this way. What can the federal government get in terms of super-secret personnel and equipment for $20 million a year? Not enough to gather and process all the information the program reportedly gets. So who pays the rest?

Below the fold is the argument I made in my essay in outline form. The links are to the original essay, which I should move here but I haven’t gotten around to doing it. I’ve also appended the text of the first three sections.

We didn’t care about the Patriot Act, Guantanamo Bay, waterboarding or drones strikes. Hmm. Let me go out on a limb with a bold prediction: We aren’t going to care about the NSA scandal either.

The same dumb, mindlessly all-American tubbies who bought duct tape after 9/11, thought Saddam Hussein was just like Hitler, and said it was better “to fight the terrorists over there than over here” will decide the matter for us. They always do because they are the majority, and right now that majority is saying this: If you haven’t done anything wrong, you don’t have anything to worry about.

Game, set, match.

If you’re reading Bad Attitudes, you already know this. But it can’t be said too often. A major point — perhaps the major point — of our criminal “justice” system is to keep the niggers in their place. It’s criminal, all right, our justice. Since the founding of the nation, the “law” in law and order has been systematically perverted to preserve that old natural “order” so beloved by Chief Justice Roger Taney and spelled out by him in Dred Scott v. Sandford [1857].

I know personally people like doctors, lawyers, elected officials, teachers, architects, and accountants (in addition to the waiters, musicians, bartenders, comedians, and people of leisure) for whom not being high is an extreme rarity. In the broadest sense, I am acquainted with hundreds of users – and probably more people who I don't realize are users.

This bothers me not at all, since I give zero shits about whether people smoke weed. What does strike me as odd, though, is that for all the (predominantly white) people I know who use regularly, I know very few people who get arrested for anything drug related. Perhaps that is because, despite surveys showing that nearly identical percentages of black and white Americans use marijuana, new data shows that blacks are 400% more likely to get arrested for marijuana-related offenses. You're shocked, I know.

Notice that this does not say blacks are four times as likely to use marijuana, or be in possession of it, or sell it, or anything of the sort. They are four times more likely to be arrested and charged. The reason, I submit, is that the entire point of the War on Drugs is to put black males in prison. This isn't a bug; it's a feature…

Sure, the dumbass white kids from the suburbs can spend all of mom and dad's money on blow and bad acid and expensive weed for four years in college, but if there's weed to be found in the crappy black neighborhood they'll move heaven and Earth to find it. Ethan might be selling his mom's Vicodin out of their 4000 square-foot home in Barrington, but the crime is Curtis selling dimebags behind the convenience store.

I’m in Minnesota at the moment, involved with granddaughter graduations and related festivities. As I slowly improve at using the touchscreen and keyboard on her MacBook, posting will resume.

My thought for today is that the GOP is the gift that keeps on giving. Take for instance Senator Saxby Chambliss from Georgia, who just added the diagnosis below to our store of medical knowledge. Media attention so far has centered on the “hormone level created by nature” passage. But don’t miss an earlier snicker from the sly old solon — the part about “folks who slip through that crack.” Unintentional? You be the judge.

My first-line news site used to be iGoogle because it brought together most of the major sources such as BBC, the Guardian, WaPo, NYT, and so on on the same page with weather and whatever other widgets you chose to add. It was a simple and useful interface that I expect was based on Google Reader, which is why they’re both disappearing at the end of October.

Long story short, I’ve switched to NewsBlur. With NewsBlur I can view headlines from any news source with an RSS feed, which means nearly everybody; we have one near the top of the page in the right-hand column, “Syndicate this site (RSS/XML)”. They’re easy to set up — RSS means Rich Site Summary but it’s often called Really Simple Syndication — so every major news source has some sort of feed, and many have specialized feeds for particular types of news.

The result of aggregating these various feeds is a presentation something like the following. Click on the image for a full-size view of it.

In addition to aggregating the wheat and not having to sort through the chaff, you can train NewsBlur to bring the types of stories that interest you by giving thumbs up or down to each story based on its title and tags.

This ability is limited by the news source’s tagging; some sources provide multiple tags, some provide few or none. You can also choose phrases in the title you want or don’t want. So it’s not everything one might want in the area of trainability, but those limitations seem to be in the content provided rather than the aggregating software. The stories you’ve flagged as uninteresting are still available, but by default you only get what you want or at least haven’t said you don’t want.

All in all, NewsBlur is a nice tool for seeing lots of headlines quickly. What I’ve found is that I hardly ever visit the actual websites of my major news sources like the Guardian because everything comes in through NewsBlur and the site itself is all duplicates. That’s not true for Talking Points Memo, almost alone among the sources I aggregate.

I’ll write more about NewsBlur soon, but for now suffice it to say that I’m seeing more news of a variety of types with a far better coverage of the world beyond the US and the UK than I used to get from iGoogle.

With the feeds I aggregate at Newsblur I hear about lots of things I was missing when I allowed Google to select the top headlines. I can page through dozens of headlines quickly and catch what interests me. Today I quickly checked out the rise in open racism in Greece, the EU split over supplying arms to Syrian rebels, and the riot police who removed 3,000 mostly female protesters blocking a road outside Cambodian Nike factory where two workers were killed by part of a warehouse falling on them.

Then there are the pieces that aren’t quite news in the classic sense and wouldn’t be found in most American newspapers. Here’s Raymond Tallis defending metaphysics against Stephen Hawking’s claim that it was dead because it hadn’t kept up with modern developments in physics. He points out problems and paradoxes at the heart of physics, including its difficulties with time and consciousness. Summarizing his defense, he says:

Recent attempts to explain how the universe came out of nothing, which rely on questionable notions such as spontaneous fluctuations in a quantum vacuum, the notion of gravity as negative energy, and the inexplicable free gift of the laws of nature waiting in the wings for the moment of creation, reveal conceptual confusion beneath mathematical sophistication. They demonstrate the urgent need for a radical re-examination of the invisible frameworks within which scientific investigations are conducted. We need to step back from the mathematics to see how we got to where we are now. In short, to un-take much that is taken for granted.

A fine subject for meditation, that last bit.

The excerpt below is from an op-ed in the New York Times by Karl W. Eikenberry and David M. Kennedy. The first is a retired general and former ambassador to Afghanistan; the second is an emeritus professor of history at Stanford. Read the whole article. It is the only intelligent and useful thing about the military you are likely to run across on Memorial Day.

…The Congressional Research Service has documented 144 military deployments in the 40 years since adoption of the all-voluntary force in 1973, compared with 19 in the 27-year period of the Selective Service draft following World War II — an increase in reliance on military force traceable in no small part to the distance that has come to separate the civil and military sectors. The modern force presents presidents with a moral hazard, making it easier for them to resort to arms with little concern for the economic consequences or political accountability. Meanwhile, Americans are happy to thank the volunteer soldiers who make it possible for them not to serve, and deem it is somehow unpatriotic to call their armed forces to task when things go awry…

The excerpt below is from today’s New York Times.

In 1957 in Argentina, a former SS officer named Willem Sassen interviewed Eichmann at length. The tapes, which were rediscovered only a few years ago, reveal Eichmann boasting that he had helped draft the letter ordering the Final Solution and that several times, he refused requests from fellow officers to free a favored Jew.

“I worked relentlessly to kindle the fire,” he says. “I was not just a recipient of orders. Had I been that, I would have been an imbecile. I was an idealist…”

With grad school occupying most of my attention for the last three years I haven’t kept up my currency in economic matters, to coin a phrase. For instance, I know that as compared to recoveries in recent American history the gains this time around are slower in arriving. There are signs that the economy is improving but the gains are more heavily concentrated at the top than before.

But I was surprised to read the following from Larry Elliott at the Guardian, whom I’ve recently begun to follow in part because of my new portal to everything that’s going on in the world of news, NewsBlur. So long, iGoogle, I’ve met someone else!

In any case, Elliott says this about Britain’s 0.3% growth in the first quarter:

The improvement has been a long time in coming. Britain’s national output remains more than 2% below where it was at its peak in early 2008: by this stage after previous recessions — even the Great Depression of the 1930s — all the lost ground had been recouped.

Wow! Even in the Great Depression all the lost ground had been recouped by this point in the recovery in the UK. Does anyone know what the equivalent measurement would say about the US?

Zara Stone, in The Atlantic:

Kim recently read about a relatively new cosmetic procedure that is colloquially known as V-line surgery. It involves breaking and shaving the jawline to create a V-shaped face. This surgery is popular amongst young Korean pop stars, who have their faces reshaped to give them elfin, anime-like appearances. The V-line shape gives the face a certain fragility, and its childlike appeal has won Kim over…

Back in New York, Dr. Edward Kang’s practice is benefitting from the Asian American desire to have cosmetic surgery. He has two offices. One overlooks Central Park, with baroque style fireplaces and a marbled floor. His other is in Flushing, Queens, a predominantly Asian area. Dr. Kang offers consultations and injectables in the Manhattan office and performs surgery in Queens.

“I’m all about creating a more harmonious look to the face,” he told me. His face is smooth and unlined, and his skin is bright and clear. When he talks, his hands hit the mahogany tabletop for emphasis. “Good surgery is like a vase,” he said. “Surgery gives it a nice strong base, but you see the vase.” Dr. Kang’s philosophy is about helping nature along. “I always try to copy the natural look, give face the ideal shape it should have been born with,” he said…

This is my first ever letter to the editor, in this case of the New York Times on line. Write one of your own. It’s fun!

Once again you are experimenting with centered body text. Why? Did some design school graduate with limited experience of actual reading decide that it looked cool? Cool or not, the point of type is to be read. The question of readability has been studied for centuries, with the result that 99.9999 percent of body text more than a few lines long is left-aligned today. Large blocks of centered text look attractive only to nonreaders, which is not your target demographic. Neither is graphic designers, so listen instead to anyone with the most elementary knowledge of typography.

Having different starting points for each line makes a reader’s eyes jerk back and forth in random, confusing, and irritating leaps called saccades. For more on this, type “typography centered text” into Google. Don’t bother scrolling past the first window in search of opposing views. Unlike climate warning and evolution, this question is not disputed even by fools. The whole typographical world is in agreement that a barrage of saccades will cause even lifelong readers such as myself to say the hell with it, and subscribe to the New York Post. At least Rupert’s crap is legible.

Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller rips away another of the scabs with which Obama tries to hide the diseased and festering mess he has made in Washington. Coming next week: The so-called “president” is secretly half-white!

Lois G. Lerner, the embattled Internal Revenue Service official who apologized for improperly scrutinizing the tax-exempt status of conservative nonprofit groups, is a member of the Humane Society of the United States, a liberal animal advocacy organization.

Lerner — the suddenly infamous IRS Exempt Organizations Division director — “is an active member of the Humane Society of the United States where her efforts in performing pet rescues necessitated by the 2005 Gulf Coast hurricanes were widely acknowledged,” according to her biography…

Carlson’s own history with the Humane Society is somewhat ambiguous: he loves him some animals even harder than the HSUA does. For instance, he is a strong proponent of the death penalty for animal abusers.

Another collection of search engine queries that brought visitors to Bad Attitudes:

…a bad attitude is a heart condition that leads to sin)

…bad turkish idioms to avoid

…nasty third world people working in the USA with attitudes what's there problem

…hunker down and go with the flow

…horny gay woman wanting it bad

…pictures for ages 2-7 to color changing from bad to good for god

…what program to change bad attitude among homeless?

…attitudes starting with o

…what a christian should no about bad attitude

…people with bad attitudes don’t get far

Practically every adult American is a felon, most of us repeat offenders. Think not? Have you ever been in possession of marijuana? Sold a little to a friend? Left the scene of an accident? Lied to the police (just a couple of beers, officer)? Slipped a little something into your purse at Macy’s? Cheated on your taxes? Sold subprime mortgages? Worked for Goldman Sachs?

Why, then, do we allow nonsense like this:

Around one in every 40 American adults is ineligible to vote due to a felony conviction. While most states forbid felons in prison from voting (Maine and Vermont are the only exceptions), 19 others also forbid those on parole or probation from voting and 11 states disenfranchise felons even after they have served their time, accounting for nearly half of the 5.85m disenfranchised. That number is five times higher than it was in 1976. It includes one in every 13 black adults, and in three states (Florida, Virginia and Kentucky), more than one in every five.

If we truly wanted the United States to be an actual democracy, of, by and for the people, we would make it a felony for felons not to vote.

Watching MSNBC last night it struck me again how ignorant politicians and pundits are about bureaucracies. The subject this time was the IRS vs. the Tea Party, but it could have been Benghazi or most of the other “scandals” that flame up and burn out on our TV screens.

Few talking heads or politicians have served much time in large bureaucracies. I have, starting at the absolute bottom as a private in the U.S. Army. The experience taught me how to look on military officers, which is generally down. Obama and Clinton would have profited greatly from a similar immersion in reality, as would most of our soldier-sniffing and cop-loving patriots. Bringing back the draft would put a stop to a lot of this idiot babble about the greatest fighting men in the history of the known universe and all universes henceforth to be discovered.

All right, back to the point.

Next I became a sort of sub-boss in a much smaller bureaucracy — assistant city editor of the Washington Post. Then I was deputy director of the U.S. Information Agency’s two-man outpost in Casablanca. From Morocco I went to Laos as press attaché for the secret war (go figure). My next job was near the very top of the largest bureaucracy of them all, the federal government. From the White House I went to the Federal Aviation Administration as chief of public affairs. My only promotion in any of these bureaucracies, I’m proud to say, was the automatic one from private to private first class. My ambition seems to have been low to none, but then ambition is well known to be blind. Thus there was nothing wrong with my eyes (speaking metaphorically. In fact, my eyes suck.)

And so I am massively unastonished to learn that the top leadership of the IRS was unable to impose its will on a bunch of GS-11s in the Cincinnati office. I once spent a great deal of time and the taxpayers’ money on developing and implementing a program to modernize graphics throughout the FAA. Thirty-five years later, the Depression-era logo I thought we had killed off still shows up regularly on the evening news. The new, improved model seems to have survived only at the Department of Transportation.

You can learn more about American life from this brief interview than you can reading David Brooks for a lifetime. The section beginning at 2:24 (which was cut by many TV stations) makes this is a priceless sociological document.

This just in from Israel. What if you’re not only a woman, but a black Jewish one from Ethiopia? Can you even get on the bus at all?

The sweeping ruling comes after several years of mounting tension and legal battles over the treatment of women in Israel’s public sphere, particularly the requirement that they sit in the back on bus lines through ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods, which set off civil disobedience campaigns involving many Jews from overseas.

Norman Mailer was once asked if he thought if an atomic war would kill all mankind. Hell no, he said. We’ll smother ourselves in our own shit first. More and more, Mailer appears to have been right.

Looking on the bright side, though, small sparks of beauty may survive here and there. So take a look at this video sent along by Asher Pavel, and hope for the birds.

Don’t follow me on Twitter. I won’t be there. Call me retro if you want, but the last thing we need is a communication medium that restricts your thoughts to 140 characters or less. Between tweeting and texting, we’ll all be using a form of Newspeak within a generation, and the worst thing about it is that we will have voluntarily chosen it. We will have been the willing agents of our own linguistic devolution. Just give everyone an iPhone and a satellite dish and American culture will take care of the rest. We’ll be reduced to having two-hundred word vocabularies in no time.

Soon, our entire political discourse will consist of a few simple phrases that leave no room for unacceptable thoughts: Job creators good. Entitlements bad. WMD scary. All options must be on the table.

The Democrats, as always, will counter with a bold alternative: Job creators good. Responsible entitlement cuts good. WMD scary. All options must be on the table.

It will be tax cuts good, tax cuts for job creators doubleplusgood, freedom.

That’s what politics will sound like in some dystopian future America, when everyone speaks in … Oh, wait. Never mind.

President Obama himself seems to be the one about to cross the red line — that same red line we’ve crossed so many, many times before:

The United States will “shortly” begin arming Syrian rebels, looking to boost moderate factions over al-Qaida-affiliated extremists whose rise would be a national security “nightmare,” the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee told CBS News on Tuesday.

“I do think we’ll be arming the opposition shortly,” Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee said in an interview. “We’re doing a lot more there on the ground than really is known, but we do have to change the equation.”

I just have 20 short words for the president: Indonesia, Haiti, Chile, Guatemala, Dominican Republic, Cuba, Angola, Zaire, Libya, Lebanon, Iran, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Just to name a few victims of our never-ending mission to force “democracy“ on the natives.

The invariant rule, Mr. President, goes as follows: When you take the wrong train, every station you reach is the wrong one.

Shoot the shit out of others as you would have them shoot the shit out of you. McClatchy reports:

AUSTIN, Texas — After successfully firing a gun made with a 3-D printer over the weekend, a University of Texas law school student hopes to refine the prototype and ultimately distribute online files so anyone can make one…

Ultimately, Wilson wants to distribute downloadable files that can be plugged in to a 3-D printer. “It’s about empowerment of the individual over political hierarchy,” he said.

Things could be worse. You could live in Luning, Nevada, population 42.

This town is the definition of bum-fucked nowhere. It’s on U.S. Route 95 between Reno and Las Vegas. I know, just shoot me now, right? There is nothing for miles in every direction. It has to be one of the most monotonous stretches of road in the country. The entire state looks like this. There is a suffocating pall of deadness to the place that puts me in a deep lethargic funk. I don’t gamble or go the whorehouses, so that leaves alcohol as the only palliative for my Nevada angst. It works. Booze always works.

Luning, I think, saw its best days during the Hayes Administration (who didn’t?). It’s being reclaimed by the desert and will probably be a ghost town soon. There won’t be anything there but lizards, snakes, and vinegaroons. Wait, what the hell is a vinegaroon?

This is a vinegaroon:

The nearest real town to Luning is Hawthorne, which is home to a large military base where, I think, geeky Army guys operate predator drones.

That’s right, I called them geeky, so sue me. I don’t reflexively kowtow to soldiers. I don’t call them heroes and thank them for their service every third word. I find the whole “booyah” “get some” hyper-masculine culture of the military repulsive to the extreme. It is bullyish and arrogant, violent and anti-democratic. It takes one of the more unpleasant groups in our society — teenage boys, usually poor and ill-educated teenage boys — and cultivates their cruelest and most obnoxious tendencies. I find it personally embarrassing that so many foreigners only know us through the military. I saw an Iraqi on television describe our soldiers as “cowboys with no culture.” Was he wrong?

Ask an Okinawan how noble the U.S. military is, or the ex-inhabitants of Diego Garcia.

From io9.com:

Contrary to the colloquialism, a cold can of beer or soda doesn’t actually “sweat.” In reality, gaseous water is condensing out of the air and clinging to your beverage in its liquid phase, undergoing a transition in the direction of gas ➝ liquid, rather than liquid ➝ gas. The thermodynamic opposite of evaporative cooling, this process actually expends energy in the form of heat, which is absorbed by your brew.

“Probably the most important thing a beer koozie does is not simply insulate the can, but keep condensation from forming on the outside of it,” said Dale Durran, a University of Washington professor of atmospheric sciences.