Bear Dreams

At my age, it seems silly to be awoken in the middle of the night with scary dreams and then be unable to fall asleep again. Maybe it had something to do with going to bed earlier than usual. But after a dream in which The Wife and I were trapped in our old beater car, in the snow by a riverbed, and being attacked by a grizzly bear who had been enraged by a thoughtless stunt skiier, I found myself unable to get back to sleep and I've stayed up for something like four hours. I may try to get a little more sleep later this morning, skipping breakfast if need be.

A Difficult Claim To Double-Blind Test

Can you really tell the future using asparagus? This doesn't seem like it would be any more accurate than any other kind of augury (which is to say, as good as or slightly worse than chance). But then again, I don't know how one would structure a double-blind test to really verify whether asparagus thrown on the floor can accurately predict the future any more than, for instance, a magic 8-ball.

Newt Gets Freaky

A really good online interview with Newt Gingrich. Worth a read, whether you're liberal or conservative. In particular, Gingrich offers his take on the "Republican Reboot" theme I and many others have been writing about -- he thinks that social conservatives aren't the problem and that the basic GOP coalition is just fine; but his concern is that they have taken too much of the limelight and there needs to be greater emphasis placed on agenda items offered by moatdiggers, budget hawks, and tax-cutters.

Blog, Blog, Blog... Blog, Blog Iran

This is interesting. I would have guessed that young people in Iran would use the internet to communicate in ways that are more free than their government would prefer. But I wouldn't have suspected that Iran was one of the most blog-dense countries on earth. Maybe some time when I have nothing else to do, I'll see if I can find some interesting Iranian blogs -- it would be interesting to get unfiltered views from within that country, about which we in the U.S. are so ignorant, and which is going to be of such strategic importance. In the meantime, I'll note that Iran is holding elections today, and that we should not be quick to dismiss the elections as undemocratic or meaningless, although the Iranian version of democracy does wind up looking a good deal different than our own.

Numbers Don't Tell The Whole Story

Statisticians might make sense of this but even after some consideration of how it might work, I can come up way too many explanations for this dichotomy:

A [French] woman's average number of partners has risen from under two in 1970 to over five today, while a man's has remained the same for four decades, almost 13.

Shouldn't the numbers be approximately equal? It takes two to tango, after all.

One is left with the image of an extraordinarily complex French romantic comedy with a cast of eighteen people, five men and thirteen women, variously hooking up and splitting up, and the movie doesn't end until every possible male-female couple combination has, um, coupled and combined. A long movie, but then again the French (and their neighbors the Germans) seem to have more patience for that sort of thing than we Americans.

Obviously, that isn't what's really going on. Take a look again at the report, and note that the report deals with averages. Let's say the male portion of the survey population was 10,000 individuals. Each gives their own number in response to the question of "How many sex partners have you had in your life?" and the sum total of all those answers was (close to) 130,000. Divide that by 10,000 (the sample size) and you get an average of 13 partners. Because these are averages, maybe there is a portion of the female population that is skewing the midpoint with highly promiscuous behavior, while the rest of the population has only one or two partners in their lifetimes. For instance, if a sample of 10,000 women has an average of 5 partners, but they break down into two groups -- if 1,000 women have 40 sex partners each (they're the really promiscuous ones), 8,000 have only one partner in their entire lives (their husband or analagous lifelong mate), and the last 1,000 have only two sex partners each (a husband and a lover?), then that's an average (technically, a mean average) of 5 partners per woman. A similar dynamic may skew the average for men. This strikes me as unlikely, but it is a possiblity. This is also why the "average" is not always a useful statistic to help understand what's really going on.

None of which explains why the men have so many more partners than the women. So, why the dichotomy? I can think of lots of possible explanations and the news story reporting it doesn't illuminate which of them it might be:

• A small portion of one (or both) populations in the sample may be unusually promiscuous, skewing the average, as described above.
• The men are finding partners outside of the female population sample -- for instance, they might be choosing British or American women, eschewing French women, as sex partners, to a singificantly greater extent than French women are finding non-French men as partners.
• There may be more gay or bisexual men than women in the sample size; however, this assumes that the gay men are more promiscuous than either the straight or gay women, which is not necessarily true.
• One or both populations may be lying; the men exaggerating the true number of partners they have had to give the surveyors an impression of masculine virility, and the women downplaying their true numbers to give the surveyors an impression of modesty and chastity -- hinting that maybe the truth is more like men and women have about seven or eight partners each, which is sort of near what I would have speculated the answer would have been had the survey respondents been honest.

The truth is likely a blend of all four of these. Each is possible, but each also becomes quite unlikely when taken to an extreme. For instance, are French women really so repellent to French men that the men are all taking the Chunnel to get to London when they want a little action? I rather doubt that. But, it could be that a tourist in France for some length of time might be willing to have a "fling" while away from home, and since France is a popular tourist destination, maybe there are more opportunities for a French person to be the partner in that sort of thing than someone who lives in a less popular tourist destination like, say, Newfoundland. And we don't need to think too hard about the social incentives a person of either sex might have to misrepresent their level of sexual activity.

The point is, really understanding what's going on requires a better understanding of the ratio of the impact of these four variables. And the number that should be reported may not be the average but rather the median or in this case, maybe even the mode. Stepping back from the raw numbers one occasionally confronts and applying some thought to it reveals that the world is both more complex and interesting place than a simple number would otherwise suggest.

I'm Happy For Brett

It sounds like he's in a better place now. He'll never be sacked or intercepted again. Do you think it's in Iowa?

Get Real People

The linked article is about Brits, but the phenomenon is happening here in the States, too -- weddings are becoming out of control expensive and elaborate. Enough so that couples are delaying getting married so that they can get all the money they need to put on the show. Where on earth did this ethic come from? (Don't answer that, I already know. It was the Romans, damn their eyes.)

Seriously -- what's more important, the wedding or the marriage? The wedding is a party. It lasts a day. (Maybe more than that.) In the UK, people rent castles and manor houses and have fireworks displays. I'm sure here in the States there are fireworks and orchestras and instead of castles, people rent wineries or the Hollywood Bowl or some crap like that, so you can get married in front of 100,000 of your closest friends and then have to pay to feed them all.

Hey, go ahead and invite me and The Wife to your wedding. We'll go. We'll sit through the ceremony and make nice at the dinner you buy for us and we'll send you a nice gift. Spend all you want. But we still think we did the right thing with our wedding. Vegas. Low stress planning it, you just pick up the phone and paid professionals do all the work for you. more than enough accommodations for everyone as long as you don't feel the need to get married during the NCAA Final Four weekend. You just invite the people you want because they'll all actually go, and moreover, it's pretty much equally inconvenient for everyone to go there so it's in that way very democratic for all of your guests. The banquet food from the casino-hotel kitchens is more than good enough; no one's going to remember the food anyway. You can have a tasteful ceremony so you aren't stuck with blackjack dealers on their cigarette breaks for your witnesses. Four hours is plenty of time for a reception. Relatively affordable prices (even then, we still needed some help, so thanks Mom and Dad). None of this nonsense about getting hot-air balloons to drop off the bride at the start of the ceremony or the groom riding up wearing a coat of armor.

And, a very interesting anthropological experience waiting in line at City Hall to get your license.

The Championship Round

Well, I wish I could say my kids put in a winning performance. They didn't. The other team was visibly better; they knew the facts better and they knew the rules better and they used them to their advantage. And one of the rules of the competition is that there is only so much time for examinations, but one of my kids burned up six minutes on an examination that he could have wrapped up in half the time. So I'm pretty confident that they won't win the championship.

Nevertheless, another student finally found her voice, and spoke with confidence, command, and poise in her opening argument. The second student attorney showed remarkable grace under fire and handled an overtly hostile judge with enough toughness and cleverness to earn a personal congratulation from the judge later. And even the third attorney, the one who lost track of time, did put together a pretty good examination. My fourth attorney, who made the pretrial argument to suppress certain evidence, presented a powerful and cogent argument, thought on her feet, and demonstrated mastery of the twenty or so cases that they were given to study. The students who played witnesses scintillated -- every one of them testified beautifully and convincingly, and every one of them gave their cross-examiners a hard time.

So no, they didn't win. I don't need to wait for the official results to see that, and no one else in that room would, either. Naturally, I'm a little disappointed. But hey -- I had less than half the time to coach these kids, we had to add three walk-ons in the first week of competition, and they made it to the championship round after a grueling schedule. And they're almost all juniors. Next year, the only way to go is up.

Second Thoughts, by David Mamet

I've always liked David Mamet (the writer). He hits hard and he isn't afraid to use profanity. I mean, he really isn't afraid to use profanity. Nor is he afraid to walk headlong into a minefield and produce something that makes everyone on all sides of an issue stop and really question things again. He can also be quite funny and create a ton of tension, and he wrote one of the best lawyer movies yet made. (David Mamet the director, well, that's a subject for another day.)

Anyway, he's just written a play called November, which is running on Broadway right now. The primary characters are a bumbling and unethical President running for re-election, and his idealistic lesbian speechwriter. Mamet researched the script -- not for left versus right kinds of politics, but rather into the simple exercise of power. He emerged with a new take on left versus right politics, and decided that it's really about the interplay of optimism and realism, and that the realists are not evil. I'm a big sucker for "second thoughts" kinds of stories, after all.

As is his style, he describes the process in colorfully unappetizing ways, like his realization that people behave like swine when under stress and liberals are “brain dead” because they’ve never thought about why they are liberal. I actually disagree with him that people behave like swine when stressed; I think reality demonstrates that some behave with grace, courage, and moral rectitude. Nevertheless, his larger insight is correct – in politics (not just the politics of public policy and government, I might add, but any time power is exercised) we all strive to balance “should” with “is,” “self” with “group,” and “perfect” with “practical.” That’s the nature of the beast, and that’s why it is so endlessly fascinating.

Highway One

Sometimes I get some pretty silly ideas. Like tonight.

I'm laying in bed, not sleeping. So I try thinking about something to let my mind drift off. I imagine that I'm riding a bicycle. I figure in my imagination, I'll get tired after a while, so maybe that will help me fall asleep. No, that isn't working. So I try imagine what I'm doing on a long bicycle ride. That's when it hits me with a flash.

I'm riding around Highway One. Not California's Pacific Coast Highway. Oh, no. That's not nearly ambitious enough. Australia's Highway One, the ring highway going all the way around the continent. There are a few hardy souls who actually attempt to do this. With the exception of Uluru and Alice Springs in the middle of the continent, this one highway covers pretty much every inhabited part of Australia except for Canberra. If you take a ferry or a plane, it even runs through the island of Tasmania. And Australian names are super fun to say, like Borroloola and Warrnambool -- at least as cool as place names in Wisconsin like Sheboygan and Oconomowoc.

Now my problem is, I start actually thinking about this super-trek. How long would it take? If I could do, say, fifty miles a day on a bike, how long would it take me to do 20,000 kilometers? (Quite a while, and fifty miles a day would be pretty ambitious for me, at least until I got in shape, which a project like this would probably accomplish.)

How would I carry enough food and water to survive? In pannier bags? Maybe hitching a trailer to the bike with all the water in it and stacks of energy bars?

Then I get to thinking about the territory -- the outback is pretty rugged and pretty sparsely populated; getting new supplies out on the road would be very difficult. Perhaps I'd have to carry a tent around because there might not be anywhere to stop and stay in a structure for the night. What kinds of predators or other natural hazards are out there in Australia?

This is starting to sound like a challenge even for an experienced bicyclist like Orange Phantom. So now, with all these variables to think about, the logistical challenge of such an undertaking has taken hold of my mind and I'm more awake now than before.

So that's what I'm doing back on the internets now -- looking up stuff about this utterly random thing I'll surely never actually do. Oh, I may visit Australia, but to bicycle all the way around it? Get real, it's never going to happen. OP might do it, but not me. One of the linked blogs of a guy actually doing the trip shows that an experienced bicyclist has budgeted a year for the project. That's a little more vacation time than I have accrued. I haven't figured out yet how he's getting enough water to keep on going, much less food. Running out of either while in a place like the Nullarbor could be pretty dangerous. (And the ride there could be pretty monotonous -- there's a 90-mile stretch of road on the Nullarbor that is absolutely straight.)

A few answers to my questions -- Animal threats are low but not nonexistent. There are relatively few predators that would be a danger to a human camping in a tent. Foxes have been introduced and dingos are indigenous, but they mainly leave humans alone. There is a cute little carnivorous marsupial called the Spotted Quoll, but again, he's not much a threat to a human. Crocodiles, were I foolish enough to pitch a tent near a river or a hollow where they lived, could be a threat. There are rats, which bite people. Feral camels are not a hazard to humans other than by grazing on their crops. If I were on Tasmania, the Tasmanian Devil has been known to bite humans, but I hadn't been thinking about Tasmania. Kangaroos, although herbivorous, are also big and heavy and they are a traffic hazard to cars in parts of Australia's Highway One while they are moving about at night, so I might be in danger of getting crushed. The biggest danger seems like it would be from venomous scorpions and snakes. And if I were to get bit, or have some other medical emergency, I would have to rely on the Royal Flying Doctor Service for help.

So now I know a lot more than I did before, but I'm still not sleeping.

Speed Dating

After two paralegals left our firm -- one wanted to retire, the other took an offer for more money at a personal injury firm -- we're a little short on support staff. So the paralegal who assists me has been shuffled around and she's been at her wit's end. So it's worked out that I'm to be assigned a paralegal to be hired. We ran ads, collected resumes, and out of those resumes I identified five candidates who seem to have the right kinds of qualifications and experience. Today, I interviewed four of them.

It was like speed dating, without the distracting element of having to judge attractiveness. Half an hour, rapid-fire questions, trying to see through the pre-planned, best-foot-forward responses. The candidates had all taken some personality and job preference tests, and I had pages of raw data in front of me for each. At the end of the day, I can't be sure that all of that data is particularly useful, but one factor in the data was of great interest -- "impression management." That's the factor that lets me know how much the applicant is trying to "game" the answers, to give us the responses they think we want rather than the responses that are accurate.

Unfortunately, the two applicants that I liked best after interviewing are the two applicants who scored highest on "impression management." Maybe that means I'm a sucker for the "best-foot-forward" type answers. I'd like to think not, but I have to admit that I may well be vulnerable to that sort of thing. At the same time the interview must be there for a reason. So, I don't know what to do, because now all the psych testing has me suffering from double psychology back against me.

Contact Your Representative! Or, Maybe Contact This One.

Almost ten years ago, The Onion ran a famous piece of satire, about how the success of advancing the "homosexual agenda" in public schools had increased "gay recruitment." I'd be willing to believe that this piece of news parody has been taken seriously by people who really believe that there is such a thing as the "homosexual agenda" and don't realize that The Onion is a humor website. Perhaps that's because the people who take the article seriously are themselves the target of the humor.

A real homosexual's agenda is probably pretty boring. For example, see the illustration on the right.

Why is this my hobby horse? Because it seems that there are still people out there, who despite having been viciously lampooned on the subject for their ignorance, continue to crusade against homosexuals. They're in our Legislatures, claiming that the mere tolerance of homosexuals is more dangerous to America than radical Islamic terrorists. Ridiculous statements like that deserve to be widely publicized and the speakers of them deserve the ridicule that they invite upon themselves.

If you agree with me that the linked speech is anachronistic, ignorant, and an embarassment to modern political and social discourse, I encourage you to let the author of the speech know.

Sally Kern
Oklahoma State House of Representatives, District 84
2713 Sterling Avenue
Oklahoma City, OK 73127
(405) 557-7348
sallykern@okhouse.gov

I'm sure she'd be happy to hear from you.

If I Were A Prosecutor

The Elliot Spitzer scandal -- likely to result in him resigning about an hour (or $4,900, whichever comes first) from the time I write this post -- got me thinking. If I were a prosecutor (at any level, be it a local assistant state's attorney in some rural Tennessee county all the way up to the U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California) sooner or later I would have to confront a significant issue. That is, there are a lot of activities that have been criminalized that I do not think ought to be criminalized.

Soon-to-be-former-Governor Spitzer, for instance, is apparently guilty of exchanging money for sex. He did so while married, which means that he's having sex with someone who isn't his wife, but that's not a concern of the government and as a prosecutor, I wouldn't see my job as sitting in judgment or seeking punishment for the way someone treats their marriage. And maybe he and his wife had an "understanding" or an "arrangement"; if so, that's again their business and not the state's. There's no state interest there at all (unless there's a sales tax on services in that state, which I do not believe is the case in New York).

Same thing with drugs. It's difficult to believe that anyone out there doesn't know that drugs are risky and potentially harmful to your own body. But why should we save people from themselves? I don't go out of my way to punish alcoholics for feeding their addictions. Or smokers. I might pity an addict unable to control his actions, I might punish those actions when they create a substantial risk to others, but now I've qualified the activity. It's not a crime to be drunk (or at least, it shouldn't be). It is a crime to drive while drunk. Same thing for being high, I think. The social harm resulting from driving while stoned is the same as the social harm from driving while drunk; the problem is the driving while intoxicated, not the choice of substance used to create the intoxication.

Now, somewhere along the way, someone decided that the state has an interest in policing morality and in particular in policing sexual behavior, so the act of exchanging money for sex or putting acid in your veins is a crime. I can't see how the state's interests are substantially implicated, though. Regulating morality for the sake of regulating morality isn't a legitimate state interest. Once you accept that an act which hurts no one is morally repugnant to some people and therefore for that reason alone it is a crime, it's only few a very short steps to a quasi-theocracy in which a council of mandarins passes moral judgment on everything everybody does.

And some states have picked up the ball and run with it. Tennessee, for instance, criminalizes consensual adult incest. Sure, most of us have an automatic ewwww response to that, and I'm in that number. But if you've got two consenting adults, why should it be a crime? You don't have to approve of something in order to realize that it's not something people should go to prison for doing. If confronted with an adult couple who said that they were brother and sister but having sexual relations on a regular basis, my response would be, "I think that you might want to see a pscyhologist to understand why you're doing this," but I think I'd have to leave it at that -- and if they didn't see the pshrink, that really wouldn't be any of my business.

So that takes me back to the real question -- if I don't see that society has any legitimate interest in regulating or punishing a certain activity, could I prosecute it? I think I'd have to -- I just wouldn't feel very good about it. My client, were I to be a prosecutor, would be the state. The state has the power and the desire to punish certain conduct, and it hired me to achieve that result in court. I'd really feel bad about it, though; sending hookers and johns and college kids smoking dope to jail for doing something I thought was nobody's business but theirs would leave a bad taste in my mouth. So I'm not a prosecutor.

And that's why despite my interest in that avenue of career growth, I'll probably never be a judge, because I'd have a hard time punishing those crimes from the bench, too.

Meanwhile, Down The Ticket...

...Arkansas Republicans have been unable to find a candidate who will oppose the re-election bid of Democratic freshman Senator Mark Prior. This is actually less surprising than one might think. Yes, Arkansas is a conservative state. It voted for native Bill Clinton for President but aside from that has voted Republican for President in every election since 1976. But aside from that, there is functionally no Republican party in the state to speak of. There's a few Republicans up in the Ozarks but that's about it -- aside from that, it's pretty much one-party rule there. Prior's predecessor in the Senate and Mike Huckabee are the only Republicans to hold statewide office in Arkansas since Reconstruction. And that's just the way it is.

Screen Grabs From The Fish Wrapper Show Astonishing Amounts Of Disposable Income At Play

Before the Emperor's Club VIP website got taken down, reporters from the Fish Wrapper got some screen grabs of pages advertising the various "models" whose companionship was offered. The rates are on page six of the screen grabs -- you could meet the models for anywhere from $1,000 to $3,100 per hour (varying from three to seven "diamonds," as shown on each model's page), and then daily rates for their companionship goes from $10,000 to $31,000 per day.

Spitzer must have some serious money to have purchased high-priced "services" like that. Seeing photographs of him and his wife standing together to face the music, I'm reminded of an old episode of Law & Order, in which the consensus was a rich man had been killed by his wife because of infidelity. Jerry Orbach's character was skeptical, saying, "I dunno. Rich people... They're not like you and me. For starters, they've got a lot more money." Turned out that no, it was his girlfriend and not his wife who did the guy in, but that's a story for another day.

For now, I'm left wondering where Spitzer even got the money to do this sort of thing. Not on a public servant's salary, that's for sure. He was being investigated for corruption, after all, when the FBI found this.

Oh Sure, When Fred Barnes Says It He Gets Phat Dollars

I wrote a few days ago that Mitt Romney was the best of the available choices for John McCain as his running mate. Fred Barnes agrees, and for largely the same reasons I suggested. So how come I don't have a six-figure-per-year contract to bloviate like Fred? I'm just giving it away here. You guys get the same stuff that the big boys turn out -- earlier than they turn it out -- and I get the pleasure of being read by about 100 people on a good day. Only four of whom said they'd even buy a lousy T-shirt from me. Not even any ad revenue.

How Many British Troops Do You Need To Take Down 150 Taliban Armed With RPGs?

One.

No Earmarks

John McCain has a lengthy history of being a budget hawk, and one of his bugaboos has been earmarks. One of the reasons the GOP establishment dislikes McCain is that he has been very forthright about calling his fellow Republicans out for earmarking pork-barrel giveaways -- as much as he was when Democrats ran the Congress.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both have some earmarking of their own to account for; however, they apparently couldn't find any reason not to oppose earmarking themselves and therefore have both agreed to cosponsor the DeMint-McCain anti-earmarking bill. (At least, according to Glenn Reynolds, they have.)

This is a good thing, and it is good politics for McCain. First, if Clinton or Obama do earmark anything from now on, they look like hypocrites. And at least one of them needs to remember that they'll be going back to the Senate and not on to the White House, so the temptation to earmark will be great.

Second, they now get to be asked questions about any past earmarks they've made. (So does McCain, but he's pretty clean on this point.) That generates an additional campaign issue for McCain, and helps frame his candidacy as one of fiscal responsibility.

Third, Jim DeMint is really, really conservative, and highlighting McCain working hand-in-glove with him helps shore up McCain's vulnerable right flank.

Fourth, and most importantly, it shows that McCain is the leader and Clinton and Obama are following him. They'll call it "bipartisanship" instead, but the fact of the matter is that everyone knows they wouldn't have even agreed to the proposal, much less co-sponsored it, if they weren't running for President and in need of offering some sort of way to promise to fix the budget deficit. That they could only come up with an idea that McCain has been pushing for years shows that McCain is not only leading the country, he's even leading his opponents.

Most Piercing Attack Ad Yet This Campaign Season

Why the double standard, Hillary? Why?

Oopsies

I don't think it's been a big secret that New York Governor Elliot Spitzer entertains White House ambitions, so I anticipated some flack for not including him on the list of possible running mates for Barack Obama. My rationale was that Obama didn't need him, particularly.

Well, it's time to switch the description of Spitzer's White House ambitions to the past tense. Client 9 is radioactive. How ironic, considering how he got elected in the first place!