I know that there’s nothing less interesting than hearing about someone else’s “weird dream.” So this isn’t about the dream as much about the frustration of the mind plunging out memories of dreams, even when you want to remember them. And I’ll keep it short.

So I had a dream about Evangeline. A couple of Evangeline’s actually. There was one that I was married to, and another that I had impregnated. I had intended to leave Eva-1 for Eva-2. But I couldn’t muster the courage to inform Eva-1 of this. I was at a party of some sort and it all came to a head because both of them were there.

Eva-1 noticed Eva-2’s pregnancy and made some deliciously biting comment about it. The sort of comment that I would put in a novel. Anyhow, the look on my face when she made the comment gave the game away and Eva-1 knew that I was the father. She was, needless to say, upset. Given that we were in a public setting, I tried to get her to keep her voice down. Here again Eva-1 made an awesome, novel-worthy comment. Here again, I can’t remember exactly what it was. Something along the lines of “I am not going to give you the dignity of speaking at a respectable volume.”

Frustrating on a personal level was that when I woke up, I *knew* I needed to write these down before the Langoliers of my mind consumed them and they were forgotten. I knew this, but I figured these lines were so awesome that of course I wouldn’t need to rush right away to write them down.

They were forgotten within the early part of an hour.

A word of caution before entering the cloud. These are real concerns, and the inefficiency of the cloud is too infrequently discussed.

A public health proposal to issue Smokers Licenses. I’ll get on board with this as soon as we issue “alcohol drinking licenses.” The arguments for alcohol licensure is stronger. If we’re going to do this, we shouldn’t just target icky people we don’t like.

Meanwhile, on the subject of alcohol, we’re actually moving in the opposite direction. I think this is okay, but our increasingly critical legislation and proposals aimed at smokers and the obese should not be allowing this to happen. Yet here we are. It’s almost as though we are inclined to regulate the behavior of people we don’t like while supporting deregulation for behavior that allows us to do what we want.

The major thing that’s pushing teachers out of the profession isn’t training or salaries, but principals.

If liberals want regulation to become more popular (or less unpopular) and/or redeem the government as being something that is here to help, they need to take a hard look at things like this.

The New York Times looks at the drug shortage.

McMegan writes about The Incredible Shrinking Sugar Bag. I believe she’s quite wrong on this. If we’re looking at rising prices or smaller packaging, we should go with the latter. It can help people by reducing spoilage, among other things.

The case for cheap purchases. Actually, it’s more about the whole “experiences and connections over things.” It corresponds nicely with arguments about money not being everything. Wise words that nobody actually lives by.

Reason looks at politicians offering subsidies to movemakers for superhero films. When I read the title “Superhero Subsidies” it actually made me think of one of the Manhunter comic books wherein Star City tries to recruit Manhunter to relocate there as a tourist attraction.

Colorado’s new pot law could lead to a black market boon! That’s not the way it’s supposed to work, but it still deals with supply deficits and a lack of financial punishment will lead in some degree to increased demand.

Maddox tells truth. The degree of signalling going on with I F***ing Love Science is significant. And, at least in my cohort, it is a degree of signalling not easily disassociated with (ir)religion and politics.

A little bit ago, Lain was in a rather fussy mood. Clancy would try to feed her, burp her, or whatever, and she just wasn’t having any of it. I volunteered to take her and walk her around the room. She was quiet within a minute and asleep within five. She’s asleep on my tummy as I am typing this.

The first three months after birth is sometimes referred to as The Fourth Trimester. I can understand why. She’s out of the womb, eating and sleeping and crying, but it still feels like she is germinating. She’s here, but she’s not here yet. Her ability to communicate is limited (she’s not smiling yet, though she can cry). She has limited motor control of her arms (and her legs, I assume, but the harness complicates that analysis). Even though I was prepared for it, the degree to which she is reliant on us is hard to fully appreciate. She lacks a sense of autonomy. Which isn’t all bad, because she doesn’t know how to object to being passed around!

Anyhow, so when I was walking around with her, she calmed down immediately. That is the closest to bilateral communication she and I actually have. The ceasing of crying is the closest she comes to expressed approval. And it feels fantastic. Now, she responds differently to being held in my lap as she is now, and being walked around. She prefers the latter. It’s only when the latter calms her down that I can get away with the former. This is ego-puffing, but it’s also a pain in the back. I get physically tired from it.

I’m not a very good singer, either in tune or body mechanics. On the former, my gift to the Lord on Sunday in church is not singing the hymnals. Lain doesn’t really care, though. When walking around alone doesn’t do the job, singing helps. I am trying to re-learn the lyrics to early They Might Be Giant songs since they tend to veer away from the (crooning) romantic. Yet it’s odd to be singing lyrics like “I built a little empire out of some crazy garbage called the blood of the exploited working claaaaass” or a song about remorse surrounding a fatal traffic accident (TMBG’s tone seems upbeat, but their lyrics can be rather dark) but those are the songs I know. On the body mechanics, my system is relatively weak and I run of breath if I’m not careful.

I had hoped to use the opportunity of an infant to quit smoking. It hasn’t worked out so far, though it’s made a dent. The biggest problem I am facing is that the cravings are the strongest during stress and uncertainty. As it turns out, there is a correlation between having an infant and having stress and uncertainty. Right now I can get away with it a little because my wife is around to look after her during my breaks. That will only last until early January. After that, it’s waiting for her to sleep and then utilizing the baby monitor. I am hoping that I have a much, much better handle on things by that point. Lain is doing her part by extracting vengeance whenever she is left alone.

It amazed me that on an issue where pro-life sentiment is at record highs, and when the Democratic Party has moved even further to the left on the issue, that nonetheless the issue appeared to be electorally beneficial to the Democrats. My conclusion was that the Republicans framed the issue so badly that they came out on the losing end. It’s actually worse than that. Recent events (and I believe pro-lifers themselves) have actually pushed the country in a pro-choice direction.

Michael Weinreb has a worthwhile take on Big Ten’s decision to expand into New Jersey and Maryland. The Big Ten is, for my money, the most overrated conference of the major five. This isn’t going to help.

Our legislators almost slipped a law through that would have reduced royalties for web radio. Alas, it was not to be. The libertarian in me can appreciate where the artists are coming from, but this seems to be an area where… things aren’t working right.

I’m impressed that the New York Times ran this while Chris Christie laments the death of the Jersey Shore and New York recovers. I’d expect them to run it when some stupid red state with its stupid inhabitants gets hit. It brings up a good point, particularly for those who believe that the ocean levels are going to rise due to global warming.

Patrick Ruffini pens a really good article at something the GOP needs to look at. It has nothing to do with policy, and more to do with human capital. This was something that Karl Rove understood.

Kay Hymowitz takes a look at the political gender gap and thinks it has less to do with actual gender than we think. There’s something to this. It also strikes me that one of the things that makes the GOP vulnerable in the longer run is - as much as other things discussed - the increasing dissolution of the family itself.

Mitt Romney may have paid squat in taxes, but yes millionaires do pay high rates. My fear is akin to that old joke about NCAA Sanctions Committee: They get so irate at the Miami Hurricanes that they put Miami of Ohio on probation.

Some conspiracy theory sites are just beautiful. Some are not.

An indepth article on the evolution of online collegiate learning. Meanwhile, maybe we can learn something from India and institute federal universities. I actually think that’s a pretty solid idea. If anyone is interested (or maybe even if no one is), I’ll write a post on the subject.

The title of this article (”Why do we let our kids play tackle football”) had me expecting to object, but the contents and suggestions for reform are really quite reasonable.

When I was in the fourth grade, I developed a crush (to the extent that fourth graders have legitimate crushes) on a Becky Blaszkiewicz (her real name is enough along those lines that I couldn’t look her up on Facebook if I wanted to - too many z’s in inopportune places). Becky was kind of hard-boiled, for a fourth grader. Tough-minded and unpopular. Dreadfully unpopular. Relentlessly ragged upon by even people who didn’t typically do such things. I almost told her I liked her before a superficial analysis of the social structure of West Oak Elementary told me not to.

Three years later, I was in the seventh grade and there was this girl in the sixth grade named Leslie Kaufer. The divide between sixth grade and seventh being what it is (sixth graders were kind of isolated from 7-8 grade, though we went to the same school) I never knew her social standing except to say that it wasn’t good. I think she had conservative parents because day in and day out she wore homemade dresses. I barely talked to her at first, though by the second semester fate had intervened and we had some mutual friends. We sat at the same table in breakfast and at lunch.

The biggest coulda-been break came when she read one of the comic books I was drawing at the time and absolutely loved it. We still almost never spoke, but when we did, it would usually be along the lines of her softly asking “Hello. Will. When is the next Blankman coming out.” By virtue of my latent feelings and the fact that she was a girl and one of the few I talked to, she actually became the second person to read each issue as it came out. She was extremely territorial. She’d read it repeatedly and if anyone tried to talk to her, she would say something along the lines of “Shush. I’m reading.”

Ultimately, I never asked any of these girls out even when doing so became age-appropriate (Leslie would go on to date one of my friends). Given how desperate I seemed at the time, and how these were girls I actually liked other than on the level of “girls are pretty and they smell good” (especially Leslie, whom I had access to which was a rarity in itself) I would later ponder why I hadn’t ever made any effort to do so.

Becky and Leslie were not remarkably alike. They did have at least three things in common. First, they had dark hair. Second, they wore glasses. Third, in their own ways they were both similar to the woman I would eventually go on to marry. Especially when Clancy describes her grade and middle school experiences. She describes them in such a way that I want to go back and kick some middle school arse.

But ultimately, what can I say? As with Marianne I never extended real friendship (beyond the silent exchange of comic books) at the cost of social disapproval. The fact that I myself was not remarkably well regarded in middle school was not a reason to reach out, but an additional reason not to. I like to think that had I gone to school with Clancy, I would have at least been her friend and helped her through difficult times (difficult beyond the usual, even), but my own history seems to suggest otherwise. I don’t think I would have been among her tormentors, but I wouldn’t have been a help.

My inactions, as they were, did not occur in a vacuum. I mean, with the guys I shunned, I can point to specific ways that they were not just unpopular but were unpopular for a reason. But that wasn’t all of it, was it? Marianne, Becky, and Leslie were unpopular for all of the wrong reasons, but that ultimately didn’t matter as much as it should have.

Phone makers are apparently hoping to cash in on a Samsungian niche of “phablets.” That area between phone and tablet. Samsung, of course, got the ball rolling with the Galaxy Note.

I actually figured that the Note would be a failure. They seem to have moved away from the full tablet sized version, but it’s apparently become quite popular. Which is one of the reasons why it’s so important that the iPhone is no longer sucking all of the oxygen out of the room. They might actually release one of these things someday, but like the iPad Mini, only if someone else demonstrated a market for them.

Now, my animosity towards the iPhone has almost dissipated. I have what I want, and Apple controls a relatively small minority of the market. The only dangling issue are the lawsuits, but even a billion dollar verdict can’t stop Android’s momentum. This isn’t an entirely good thing, because I worry about Microsoft Windows Phone’s continued participation in the market and I’d prefer at least three options. The last outstanding concern I’ve had is “what happens if/when Google decides it’s simply not making money off of these things?”

Most likely, either the handset makers enter into some sort of Symbian-like consortium, or the code gets turned over to Apache or a like organization. Long-term, it could get overtaken by someone else when someone figures out the next Big Leap like Apple did.

There was a brief window where I wasn’t positive that this was going to be the case. Some of my apprehension towards the iPhone was based on an underlying fear that they would actually accomplish their goal of conforming the consumers to their own designs. And this horrified me not just because their design did not match my preference, but because I was concerned that something like the phablet wouldn’t actually come to fruition. Or good smartphones with physical keyboards or even slightly larger screens.

On the other hand, I am a bit glad that Apple is the way it is. Otherwise, they’d be fewer gaps for Samsung to have exploited. If Apple had been just flexible enough to keep more people in their ecosphere, then I’d really be screwed.

Is the secret to the modern dating site specificity?
Epstein divides dating sites into three categories: the “long bar,” the “long test” and the “niche.” A hugely popular and well-known site, like the aptly named PlentyOfFish.com would be a “long bar” site

— like going to a bar that stretches on for miles, with a nearly infinite number of people to drink, date or flirt with. The “long test” sites, such as Chemistry.com, start users off with a lengthy personality questionnaire that can take up to 45 minutes to complete — a process that tends to eliminate those afraid of commitment — then requires them to wait for the site to dole out its computer-chosen matches.

But a woman who posts an attractive photo on a popular site can easily have hundreds of replies to sift through, and that’s where niche sites come in: They’re weeder-outers. Users know going in that they’ll have at least one thing in common with a prospective inamorata/o, which makes for easier first-date icebreaking.

If Ayn Rand isn’t your turn-on, the Net can certainly provide something that is. Sites like JDate, SingleMuslim or BuddhistConnect, which match singles on the basis of religion, are among the earliest and most common types of specialized dating networks. And things have only become more diverse. Neck biters can hunt for bite-ees at VampirePassions. Aviators are promised that they’ll “never fly solo again” at Crewdating, a site for pilots and flight attendants. “World of Warcraft” gamers search for love at (the somewhat male-dominated) Datecraft. Cupidtino, the “Mac-inspired” dating site for Apple fanboys and girls, boasts that it’s “packed with designers, photographers, musicians, and tons of creative types.” Single members of the Bahai faith turn to TwoDoves, and vegans can search for partners on sites like VeggieDate, VeggieFishing or VeggiePassions that cater to their desire for cruelty-free love.

It’s an interesting concept, though it seems to me that the biggest problem you’d run into that there is so rarely gender balance among anything specific. I mean, maybe DisabledCupid is on to something, but I’d expect VeggieDate to be skewed in one direction and Rand devotees to be skewed to another.

Of course, that brings up questions about gender balance in general. It is still commonly said that guys outnumber girls by a significant degree. On the one hand, statistics suggest otherwise. On the other, that may be highly dependent on age and the type of site (more below). One of the things that comes to mind are those ads I see for Zoosk, which is a dating site whose ads are pretty clearly aimed at women. I remember thinking that was smart as a pre-emptive attempt to instill balance. If you’re looking at one imbalance or another, going directly to the minority side and figuring that the majority side won’t be too put off seems like a smart strategy. Zoosk apparently focuses on the younger crowd, which if there is a general imbalance, that would be the one I would figure to have over-representation of guys.

According to Wikipedia, eHarmony (”long test”) is almost 60% female while Match.com (”long bar”) is the other way around. This has a certain degree of logic to it. Even setting aside the questionnaire, a website that filters out users would likely be of more use to women than to men. I know that when I was briefly a member of a high-maintenance (costly, among other things) dating site, it seemed that the response rate I got from women was quite good (somewhere near 100%) and I got unsolicited pings either because the balance was skewed in my favor or because the cost made it so that each message ping was considered more relevant. On the other side was LavaLife, where it wasn’t free but you were charged on a per-unique-contact basis.

The niche site is a system that can be gamed if you’re a guy pretending to be a vegetarian or a lady who pretending to like Japanese animation (well, in 2001, it may be different now). Of course, that presents its own disincentives.

ScreenRant thinks Justice League can relaunch a DC Movie universe. This really is a page that DC should take from Marvel. Green Lantern flopped, but a Green Lantern that’s part of a larger story has greater potential.

Though I support gay marriage, a lot of my attitudes towards marriage tend towards the traditional. A lot of this stuff makes my stomach churn. In part because a lot of it is put forth by my allies on SSM.

A profile on the next Archbishop of Canterbury (the Anglican/Episcopal pope).

Not to be outdone by Best Buy, who called the Treasury Department when someone tried to use $2 bills, Walmart allegedly tore up a couple $100 bills.

Is there a better way of improving online player behavior? It certainly sounds nicer than Microsoft’s. I wonder if this would work on blog commenting sections.

Jon Last looks at the demographic arc of South Korea. The moving parts of gender selection and government meddling in reproduction are interestingly put together.

Apparently, TSA gets better uniform perks than the Marines.

Tim Harford writes of the complexities of the notion of a “living wage.”

As I assume most of you have heard, Hostess - the maker of Twinkies among other assorted goodies, is going out of business. Roger Ebert danced on their grave on Twitter, due to the unhealthiness of their product. More than a few people I know have said “good riddance.” This, in my view, is very much the wrong way to look at it.

The political arena is busy fighting it out. One side is blaming the unions that refused to budge. The unions appear to be looking at this as a moment of triumph. Yes, they’re out of the job, but they stood up to “Bain-style corporatism” or somesuch. I don’t think either of these takes are exactly right. Indications are that Hostess had some foundational problems that were what required them to appeal for renegotiated labor settlement in the first place. They’ve been in and out of bankruptcy for a while. Besides which, it is ultimately the decisions of the employees as to how to read their interest, and if they got this wrong it was due to a miscalculation rather than to a sense of entitlement. When you’re asked to take a pay cut, it’s not a sense of entitlement to refuse.

On the other hand, it’s unknown whether the company could have kept going and could have rebounded, and the union did put the final nail in that coffin. They may not have been the primary cause of the shuttering of Hostess’s doors, but they were a part of it. At least, in a “facts on the ground” sort of way. They might be getting less money, but they’d still have a job. The notion that the concessions being asked of them were “outrageous” are undermined by the fact that the other union, the Teamsters, agreed to them. (To my knowledge, it wasn’t the case that one got a sweeter deal than the other.)

There are questions, I suppose, as to the extent to which dissenting employees should have to live with the decisions made by their union, but I don’t see a clear-cut answer either way on that one. I tend not to have a remarkably favorable disposition when it comes to enforced union membership, and so in my world those who wanted to work could have continued to, but (a) there are good arguments going in the other direction and (b) even some of the workers striking may well have produced the exact same result. The company was hanging by a thread, and there is little indication to me that this was solely or primarily due to labor.

So what was it due to, then? That’s where Ebert (a paragon of good eating and health?) dances on their grave. I’ve seen a lot of arguments that Hostess’s problem is that they never diversified from sugary products in an age of health-consciousness. And thus the dancing, this is a market repudiation of unhealth. Yay! There are two problems with this.

First of all, the makers of Twinkies and Wonderbread also made Nature’s Pride. Nature’s Pride is a healthyish bread company. I have a loaf in my fridge and another in my freezer. Nature’s Pride has won accolades both for its naturalness (”no artificial preservatives, colors, flavors, trans fats or high fructose corn syrup”) and for its good taste. I don’t care much about the former, and don’t entirely agree with the latter, but as far as double-fiber wheat bread goes, theirs was the best. Nature’s Pride is the only product of theirs that I am going to miss. Given the inconsistent availability of double-fiber bread, if there is a health impact here it will be negative. Also, this wasn’t a me-tooism on their part: they were among the first to focus on factory hippie bread.

Second, this explanation is at odds with the notion that it was management’s fault. Which, maybe the blame of management is misguided. Ultimately, though, this is considered a big deal precisely because their Twinkies and cupcakes are beloved by large parts of the country. It just doesn’t seem to me that there is much room to argue that this is a repudiation rather than a product of a down economy and business practices.

I can pretty much guarantee that the void here is going to be filled by somebody. The Twinkies will be back. Ding Dongs and the distinct cupcakes will be back. Of all the products they made, it’s Nature’s Pride that is probably most vulnerable because they have the most direct competition (I am sincerely hoping that the supermarkets relying on Nature’s Pride simply go with a competitor so that I can still get my product.)

Meanwhile, this represents a shift from a moderate-sized competitor’s product being absorbed into a larger conglomeration. Maybe they’ll hire 18,000 employees or maybe/probably they will get by with less. To the extent that this is a triumph, it is for horizontal immigration and larger corporations. If you have ever complained at all about Frito-Lay’s dominance in the potato chip industry, this should not be seen as positive.

Heck, the end result could be Frito-Lay (and thus PepsiCo) inserting itself into the cakefood industry as well. Or maybe not because there are other cakefood companies looking to buy. Which suggests to me that any chest-pounding over a victory for our common health is off-base. Whether we blame management or labor, the primary end result of this is a temporary disruption of cakefood provisions and some permanently lost jobs.

My Linkluster post last week to Matt Yglesias’s comments seemed to get the most attention. So I’ve been doing some more thinking on it. I also read an article that he linked to:

According to the Institute of International Education and U.S. Dept. of State, there now there were around 720,000 international students at U.S. colleges in the 2011 academic year. They estimate that these students contribute $21 billion to the economy through tuition and spending. I don’t know where they get their estimate, but this is around $30,000 per student and that sounds like a sensible enough number for a back-of-the-envelope estimate.

So how many international students could we handle? There are currently around 21 million college students in the U.S., with around 18 million in undergrad and 3 million in graduate. If we increased the number of international students by 5 million then around 1-in-5 college students would be international. Is this unthinkably high? Well it’s still below the ratio at the colleges in this country with the most international student enrollment. At the New School, for example, about 1-in-4 students is international. Given that Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and MIT have 10% or more international students, it doesn’t appear that a high ratio holds a university back academically.

Ozimek addresses my primary concern, which is that increasing the number of foreign students would have the end result of crowding out American students. Not crowding out American students from college generally, but rather shuffling them off directional schools due to enrollment caps and the like.

There is no reason that there would have to be enrollment caps, of course. And Ozimek could just as easily reply that if there were, then that wouldn’t actually be his plan in action and so perhaps I shouldn’t criticize the plan on that basis.

I do harbor the fear, though, because enrollment caps do exist. They exist in universities that could expand if they were so inclined. They exist precisely to tighten entrance requirements and propel schools up the USNWR list and others.

My alma mater, Southern Tech, is one such school. Sotech is not exactly in the upper echelon of universities, but presently rejects over a third of its applicants and that number is climbing. Purposefully so. The problem that Sotech faces is that when it admits more students, it gets hit twice by the various rankings. First, because it’s admission profile is lower than it otherwise would be. Second, because some higher percentage of students will fail out.

The main reason that the university doesn’t limit expansion more is… money. Recruiting more international students could be a nice way around this.

There is the argument that if students are failing out then perhaps it is best not to admit them in the first place. This is often used as a knock against for-profit schools. The students are failing and therefore it’s an indication that they are being taken advantage of. Is Sotech doing the same? Maybe. On the other hand, both for-profits and Sotech are arguably doing a disservice to those who would graduate by keeping those who wouldn’t out. (Beyond which, it’s often external circumstances rather than academic profile that makes students hit graduation benchmarks).

On the other side of things, if there is so much money to be made here, why aren’t more schools already doing it? The US apparently doesn’t limit the number of student visas it gives out (this suggests we don’t). Why are schools and states leaving this money on the table?

I particularly think of some of the schools in lower population states. The University of Wyoming and the University of North Dakota - to name two - aggressively recruit out-of-state students because without them, their schools would look like the University of South Dakota (half the size of the other two).

It’s also the case that some of these states could use people. There’d be no way to necessarily hold on to them after graduation, but there is at least some degree of inertia involved. You go somewhere and you leave if you’re uncomfortable but stay if you are and if you don’t go there to begin with it would never occur to you that you would be comfortable staying. That sort of thing.

I might expect one of them to be fear of becoming an “Asian school” (not that all International students would be coming from Asia, but a significant number would).

I am also reminded on this piece about former Boston University president John Silber. Silber sought to limit enrollment to the University of Texas (where he was a high-ranking dean) because he feared what would be lost along the way towards a mega-university. It should come as no surprise that I am glad he lost that particular battle, but it would help explain why at least the more prestigious large schools might be antsy.

None of this would explain why schools like DeVry wouldn’t do it. I mean, every student is another ounce of profit for them, isn’t it? I doubt they’re worried much about student composition.

I assume that there is something holding this back. I just can’t figure out what. Despite my above-mentioned concerns, I see significant room for opportunity here. Not just as a money-making venture, but as general policy as well. If handled right. I’m not sure how much confidence I have of that.http://www.texasexes.org/alcalde/feature.asp?p=2240

Antcars are better drivers than people, leading to greater salience behind my hypothetical. On the other hand, maybe technology will improve us to the point of making it moot.

The Dutch is experiencing a crime increase after banning pot sales to foreigners and the problems pot tourism wrought. Meanwhile, Denmark is like Vince Young are not uncommon. I tend to be supportive of the NFL players’ union (in contrast to MLB and NBA), but if they ever wanted my enthusiastic support, it would be in transitioning from boatloads of money up front towards a pension program over a longer period of time.

Android is ramping up 6x faster than the iPhone and has a remarkable 75% market-share. The degree of widespread adoption genuinely surprises me (not that Apple minds, given their profit margins).

Is the solution to climate change going to be adaptation? I’m really starting to suspect that it will be.

Adam Ozimek on the lack of substance behind the criticisms of diet soft drinks. The first comment hits on my objection, which is that there is reason to believe that it might be a contributor to obesity. More.

I previously linked to an article about one-room schools. Here’s another one on the struggle of small schools in West Virginia to keep from being consolidated.

An interesting article from the Washington Post on how our cities are becoming hubs for Mexican drug cartels. I wasn’t aware the extent to which they’d made inroads on the meth market. I didn’t figure there was enough money in it for it to be worth their time.

Back when we were in middle school, a bird pooped on my best friend Clint. We were outside playing Navy Football (sort of a cross between football and rugby) and, of all of the people in the yard for the bird to poop on, it chose Clint.

Now, theoretically, a bird from up high (or even close) cannot tell a popular kid from an unpopular kid. Yet they never poop on the popular kids. It’s somehow like they know. Various other things seem to coincide with existing K-12 status. The number of popular kids that got braces - or even glasses - were comparatively few. There were some you could tell were going to go bald eventually, but when it came to the kids that actually were going bald in high school, it was middling to low.

Clancy and I are not worried that little Lain isn’t going to be smart. All indications are that she will. It might be an absent-minded sort of braininess, but we have expectations that between genes and parenting, they will likely make it through college and the biggest threat is one of motivation and not intelligence.

I am, however, worried about the bird poop. Or, more specifically, the inability of the kid to catch a break socially. That if her extreme cuteness (not that we’re biased or anything) carries on, it’ll be a cute that somehow serves her poorly or is undermined by atrocious acne or glasses-braces-everything.

So far, Lain has been healthy where it matters most. The heart/circulation thing turned out not to be a thing. There have been various little tidbits, though. As I’ve mentioned, she right now is in a harness due to a potential hip issue. Her tear ducts aren’t working greatly, so she accumulates goop in her eyes that needs to be wiped out. The latest thing is thrush. This isn’t such a big deal in itself - like the curable hip and the self-resolving tear ducts - except that the treatment involves something called Gentian Violet, which turns her mouth purple. Really, really purple.

None of this matters in any objective sense. The purple mouth that ends up getting all over her face. It’s not the cutest thing in the world (it’s like smeared purple lipstick), but she remains adorable.

My fear is that this is like bird pooping from the sky. Itself not a big deal, but indicative of one thing after another that doesn’t happen to popular kids.

The legislature candidate in Maine who was criticized for her devotion to World of Warcraft won her race.

Obama may have won the election, but Romney won one of the largest polls prior to the election: Users of Avast! anti-virus software. I saw this before the election and actually thought to myself that he was in trouble with his lead among this group (to whom I would assign some education, income, and risk-aversion) that it couldn’t bode well. Those results were certainly tighter than 7-11’s, however.

Meanwhile, in the real election, Bush won a higher proportion of the Mormon vote than Romney did. Romney won a higher proportion of the Evangelical vote than McCain did (and tied Bush).

My own “it’s just as well that Obama won” honeymoon was short-lived.

The Electoral College has its critics, but according to FP there are worse systems out there (I think there are actually some decent arguments for Lebenon’s, though).

For SuperDestroyer: Rising number of states seeing one-party rule.

I’ve previously written on players faking injuries to slow down play and how difficult it is to do anything about it. Apparently, the NFL is pretty hard core on the subject.

Megan McArdle (Who’s back! Yay!) looks at whether we should build flood gates in New York Harbor.

Suzuki is apparently pulling out of the US car market. I was wondering when this might happen. Next question: Whabout Mitsubishi? I’m honestly quite shocked that Suzuki had 246 dealerships.

Like most people, I was surprised to hear of General Petraeus’s sudden resignation on the account of an affair. Not so much that he’d had one (I don’t spend time thinking about such things), but I didn’t know that even CIA chiefs would resign due to them. I will note that some are suspicious that this had more to do with his pending testimony on Banghazi, but it’s nonetheless noteworthy that this is the explanation that was given. Anyhow, Dr. Phi - having spent time in the same room as the man - is not the least bit surprised.

Back in high school there was a coach. Coach Montgomery. We never actually saw anything occur, but the… I don’t know… familiarity with which he presented himself to the female students did not go unnoticed. Well, we partially noticed because during indoor free periods the less popular among us were having basketballs thrown at our heads while he was too busy talking to female students to notice. We didn’t like Coach M. Partially due to the fact that he wasn’t there to instill order when it was needed. But also because when he was paying attention to us, he terrified the crap out of us. He honestly struck us as a roidhead. A roidhead who would probably sleep with a female student if he had the chance.

A couple years after he graduated he was arrested. It was actually his suicide attempt that got him in the news. Our response to this was… not generous. We thought it was funny as heck. We could just imagine Big Strong Coach M scared spitless of what was an impending arrest and taking the proverbial coward’s way out. I can’t say I am remarkably proud of this response. In one sense, I am not hugely bothered by what he did. She was sixteen. A teacher (or coach) should be fired for such a thing, but I’m not sure about arrested (a subject worthy of exploration in the future) absent a degree of coercion beyond the basic power differential. A year or so after that I would be exposed to the destruction of suicide (not mine, obviously) and the funny part didn’t seem so funny anymore.

But before my better angels got a chance to catch up with me, I have to believe that I would smile all over again at having my negative confirmations of a man I disliked intensely being confirmed.

So a question for all y’all… has this ever happened to you? Wherein you’re looking at something that just doesn’t quite seem right and later it turns out that everything is unraveled in a rather public fashion?

At some point in the past, I remember seeing some interaction between a colleague of my wife and his nurse and getting a definite vibe of something. As far as I know, nothing ever came of it. It was probably nothing. Of course, if you’d asked me in all seriousness in high school, I probably would have said the same of Coach M.

-{Note: This was supposed to go up before the election. I apparently muffed the scheduling.}-

If you haven’t seen this video, it’s quite interesting. It involves a Mormon settlement in Mexico and their standoffs against the drug cartels.

Also, Steve Sailer asks:

[W]hat will happen among Mormons if Romney is defeated in sizable part because he’s so Mormon in affect, values, and behavior? Will they redouble their efforts to be even more what they are? Will they decide they have to loosen up and get funky? Will we see more ads on TV featuring Mormon Tongan NFL players?

Or, feeling rejected as a people, will Mormons go off in a new, subversive direction of … what?

Mormons aren’t a huge group (usually said to be about 9 million). And they aren’t hugely talented. They generally seem to be about the white American average — but that puts them increasingly above the American average. And they are better organized, more cohesive, and less dysfunctional than most. So, if they move in a particular direction, it could be moderately significant.

The most likely reaction would probably be to modernize by accelerating the Third Worldization of Mormonism. That would be the easy, socially acceptable path. But that way leads to irrelevance because nobody cares much about nonblack nonwhites, especially ones who choose to assimilate into polite Mormonhood rather than riot over YouTube videos.

This was written before Romney’s polling surge after the debates. What I say about now, however, was even more true then. It simply doesn’t appear to me that if Romney loses that it will have much to do with his Mormonism. There has, as Mr. Blue recently put it, a greater percentage in it for Democrats to portray him as a Dirty Jew than a Creepy Mormon. I have no doubt that Obama would have gone there had it proven advantageous, but there were more and better avenues of attack.

Though I don’t live in Mormonland anymore, I am still at least somewhat plugged into it and have gotten little indication that a Romney loss would involve a change in trajectory.

But a change of trajectory somewhere along the line does seem possible. The Romney loss could play a roll in it, but I think being on what will be the losing side of the gay marriage issue will be a bigger one. To be clear, I don’t think the LDS Church will ever formally or informally endorse same-sex marriage. Civil unions and such yes, but marriage never. But I think their experiences with Proposition 8 and the backlash they faced may have jarred them a little (it sure as heck would have jarred me). Not just that they were publicly reviled, but it was the conspicuousness with which they were targeted. It’s not that they don’t like attention - they clearly do - but they have always seemed at least a little wary of being seen as backwards. It’s actually a bit difficult to describe, but many southern evangelicals seem to revel in being the big, bad guy to their opponents. Mormons maintain their distinctness, to be sure, but perhaps because of a history of having been on the wrong side of public backlashes, they are reluctant to be too different.

I think there may come a point where, culturally speaking, they wish to unhitch their wagon to the evangelicals and far right of the Republican Party. We might start hearing more about their broadly liberal immigration preferences and economic liberalism that they presently seem to downplay.

The last music score in Callie, Rock Out, is now closed. The owner took a job at the university and there were no buyers. Another store in the downtown area is now vacant.

Living where I do, this isn’t the sort of thing that can be blamed on Walmart. Amazon yes, Walmart no. In at least one sense, it’s a triumph for capitalism that places like this were made unnecessary. Yet I remember when I first got here, the fact that it had a record store was a positive.

Despite the fact I knew that I would never step foot in it. Taking the above picture is literally the first and only time that I did.

Shortly after moving out here, we signed up for Amazon Prime. Though it couldn’t be justified purely in terms of dollars and cents (since we’d be getting free shipping anyway due to order size), it’s made us less reliant on what’s local. To our benefit, to Rock Out’s peril.

We are in a relatively unique situation, in that most of the big box stores are over an hour away. We have a (non Supercenter) Walmart-ish place in town (without the Everyday Low Prices), but most of our shopping has to be an hour away or two.

I do wonder, though, about what the future holds in the event of ever-increasing gas prices. The answer for many is unflinchingly increased density and the like. This has to do with personal transportation, but the outlook is considered dour for both the big box stores (often in the suburbs, often requiring a drive to get there) and shipping.

For a variety of reasons, I see Walmart and other one-stop shopping places actually weathering the storm reasonably well. Higher gas prices mean fewer trips. Fewer trips mean economizing each trip. One trip to Walmart can take care of a lot of needs. I’m less sure about the more specialized Big Box stores.

I do think it spells trouble for the Rock Outs of the world, though, even if like RO they are centrally located downtown. If I’m going to go shopping, and I’m at all worried about gas prices, I am more likely to go to a place that I know is likely to have what I need. It’s harder for smaller stores to have such inventory management.

I also, ironically enough, see a place in all of this for Amazon and the like. Going door-to-door has its advantages. It is more gas economical to deliver four things on a cove of eight houses than it is for those four people to individually go out and shop.

The biggest question for places like Amazon, and indeed postal and parcel delivery services more generally, has to do with delivery times. To be economical, it might start making more sense for house-to-house deliveries to be less-than-daily. On the other hand, since that wouldn’t work for time-sensitive items, maybe not. It mostly comes down to where they are already going and when, and how important it is to get there with what frequency.

Rising gas prices - whether due to scarcity, industry profits, taxes, or whatever else - would definitely take a toll somewhere. America, a place of extraordinary inexpensiveness by first-world standards, will become more expensive. Places like Callie will be hit harder than others. It will be interesting to see where the sacrifices are made. Or, more importantly, who will be carrying the bulk of it. I am skeptical that it will be successfully laid at the doorstep of those The Smart Set thinks ain’t livin’ right.

Jalopnik asks what old-style feature from cars do we miss the most? His answer:

As for me, there’s a lot that I could list, but I especially miss pop-up headlights. Maybe it has something to do with growing up in the 80s and 90s, but I just think they’re so damned cool, you know?

So many great cars used to have illuminators that rose from the hood on demand: the Porsche 928 and 944, the NSX (for the first few years, anyway), three generations of RX-7s, a whole plethora of Corvettes… the list goes on an on.

Mine is more general. I miss the slightly boxier design of old cars. As cars have become more aerodynamic, they ironically look like they’re trying to look cool even though the design is (I am pretty sure) for function as much as anything. There is a stupid little practical aspect to my yearning for yesteryear however. I was looking at a late-model Camry the other day and noticed that it would be hard to put a soft drink or something on the back hood because it’s not as level as the old Camry that we currently have.

Another thing - and this is relatively minor - is that it used to be a lot more common for cars to have hitches available than today. I don’t know if it is due to liability or cost-cutting, but I don’t think they offer that as much as they used to.

A last thing are a few models and model types… it’d be cool if Subaru still offered the Justy in the US. Dodge should still have a car called the Dodge Colt (well, it was actually a Mitsubishi, but Mitsubishi at least has a cool name for its current small car).

I believe in one sense that this election is closer than a lot of folks around here, in that those arguing that it was never close cause the state polls and projections persistently leaned in Obama’s favor were off-base. It’s moot now because I agree with the projections insofar as Romney never sealed the deal and the last-minute national movement appears to be in Obama’s direction. I consider the likelihood of a reverse-verdict to be greater, but I consider the greatest likelihood to be an Obama win that will not come down to the wire.

I believe Obama will win the popular vote by somewhere between 1.5% and 2%. If it’s closer to the latter, you can probably flip Florida into the Obama column (maybe you can anyway…).

Having said all of that, I do want to submit something else: There’s nothing wrong with a degree of poll-skepticism. They’re probably right. This year, I believe they are. But one of these years, they will be wrong. The likelihood of getting caught between shifting demographics, last-minute undecideds, cell phones*, and lower response rates will make polling increasingly difficult and the accommodations made for these realities will either fail to compensate or will create their own problems.

The polls have failed us before, and they’ll fail us again. Improved scientific technique seems likely to me to have a hard time compensating for various problems that will increasingly aggravate.

There are ways that this may favor Republicans in polling, and ways that it may favor Democrats. It depends on where the problem occurs, and how the pollsters respond to it.

My hope is that when it occurs, it will be something that brings a 9% margin down to a 5% or vice-versa and not something that flips an election. My belief that it could is one of the reasons I have been relatively uptight this cycle on the subject.

* - Yes, I am aware that cell phones are included in many polls. However, response rates from cell phones are likely to be lower and cell phone numbers are less likely to be up-to-date.

So here’s some questions: does anyone not vote for president due to the Electoral College? Do third parties benefit because people in non-competitve states feel more comfortable voting for third parties since they live in non-competitive states? If not, to both, then why not? I have some thoughts but want to hear what you think (if anything).

-{Okay, so this post directly addresses one of the previously forbidden subjects. “Comment with care” is hopefully assumed. As long as we avoid conversations about how terrible Mexicans and Mexican immigrants are, I think we’ll be okay. I mention Mexicans because it’s hard not to on these subjects, but there are greater abstract notions at play here.}-

Eric Liu has a worthwhile piece on global citizenship. I’d excerpt it but there’s no really good starting point that doesn’t take five paragraphs or more. He lists three kinds. First is global consciousness for one’s actions, which is laudable but not meaningfully citizenship. The second is more internationalism in the form of institutions, which is useful but limited in scope. The third is economic globalism, which is essentially the self-justification of the elites.

I find the notion of global citizenship unsettling. To be of everywhere is to be of nowhere. It’s nice to think that the world is of one, but… it’s just not true. States and populations within the US have conflicting interests, at times, but nothing compared to the US and China or even the US and Japan. Even countries with relatively friendly relations, like the US and India, are as much worlds apart figuratively as literally. There are times I wonder if the US has too much diversity (beyond checkboxes for race and religion) and too many conflicting interests to be a coherent nation. But the world? I don’t understand how you can have solidarity with everybody, which global citizenship implies.

The third kind that he refers to strikes me as the most problematic and potentially nefarious even. Or maybe what I am thinking about is a tangent off of that. There is a natural order of things with alliances and connections and associations. A stateless nation wouldn’t be the world as one. Rather, it would mean that Silicon Valley can more easily associate itself with Tokyo without being anchored to Fresno. It’s the forced association of borders that sends state tax dollars from New York City to Rochester and federal dollars from New York City to Minot. A lot of people - the sorts of people who ordinarily would think such thing tasteless - take a look at the overall money flow and thing that cutting off those ingrates would be awesome. Maybe they’d learn their place and all that.

But that’s just talk. Sometimes geared more towards scoring political points than anything else. As a practical matter, though, considering residents of Orissa no more or less in league with you than the people in Idaho is a fantastic way for neither of them to get the support they need. From a libertarian standpoint, the answer is “So?” From a liberal standpoint - and it’s more often than not liberalism from whence these attitudes come - it makes any social safety net (for instance) unworkable. We have to view ourselves as Americans, and take care of one another to a far greater extent that we take care of people from elsewhere. Global citizenship makes that impossible. On the other side of the world, it means that New Delhi has to make itself a colleague of the other world cities and that means it cannot be in league with rural Orissa in any real sense.

Which itself could be considered the point. Pull the people out of Idaho and (back) to California and the cities therein. As we all know, cities are superior anyway. Without the erection of borders - either formal or by driving up the cost of living and regulations to prevent people from living too close together and pricing them out - the same problems occur. If we can’t guarantee a certain standard of living of 113,000 Mexicans in Mexico, for instance, it is only a little bit easier of they all immigrated here en masse. One way or another, they’d be left behind. To repeat myself: Treating Mexicans and New Mexicans as equivalent (”We’re all citizens of the world”) would be the end to Navajo Nation. We can take care of them - to the minimalist extent that we do - precisely because we favor them over others.

The erection of national borders separating New Mexico from Mexico may be quite unfair in some sense. Someone from New Mexico can pick up and move to Texas and be a recognized citizen. Someone who works harder, is more ambitious, and is smarter who happens to be born in Chihuahua meanwhile can’t get here without some luck (family members already crossed over, for instance) or a whole lot more wherewithal (sneaking across). We can say that since the latter is smart and ambitious and a hard worker that he should be allowed over, but once we’re picking and choosing who we bring over, we’re recognizing the importance of borders.

We can open our borders and that may or may not be the end of the Republic. But if it’s not the end of the Republic, it is the end to virtually any guarantee of any standard of living supported by most Americans (and all but few liberals).