Greg Krehbiel

The Green Police

by Greg Krehbiel on 8 February 2010

I thought this was the funniest ad on the Super Bowl.

4 comments  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-02-08  ::  Greg Krehbiel

Greg Krehbiel

The quiet, creative guy in the back of the room

by Greg Krehbiel on 8 February 2010

I’ve been reading 59 Seconds, which reports on recent psychology experiments and what insights they might provide on various aspects of life.

One section asks you to imagine a room with two people in it. The first is talkative, loud, aggressive and assertive, but not all that bright or creative. The second is very smart and creative, but he’s shy and retiring. You’re asked to imagine what would happen if you went in that room, presented a problem and asked for a solution.

The loud guy in the story is supposed to be your conscious mind and the quiet guy is your unconscious mind.

The practical application is that when you’re dealing with a hard problem, study it for a moment, and then distract your conscious mind by doing Sudoku or a crossword puzzle, and then come back to the problem. While the loud guy is doing Sudoku, the quiet guy is working on the original problem.

Or that’s the theory, anyway. It fits in with the idea of sleeping on a question, which brings me to my point.

When the loud guy goes to sleep, the quiet guy seems to do all this weird stuff we call dreaming, which makes me wonder if it makes sense to pay more attention to dreams.

I have heard stories of people who keep dream journals and such, and sometimes (so I’m told) their dreams start to become more important than real life. It’s like cheap artificial reality, I guess.

Obviously you want to avoid that, and obviously you want to avoid any weird ideas about dreams channeling some cosmic whatever. But if our dreams represent (to some degree) the smart, quiet guy solving problems and such, it might make some sense to try a little harder to remember dreams.

To some extent there’s a communication between the subconscious mind and the conscious mind, because sleeping on a problem really does work. But maybe there’s more going on that we’re missing.

Or, IOW, is there a way to be more serious about dreams without being a New Age weirdo?

8 comments  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-02-08  ::  Greg Krehbiel

Craig Gibson

Is it real or is it Memorex?

by Craig Gibson on 8 February 2010

I have brought up a couple of times the growing consternation among the liberals in the press (e.g., Thomas Friedman, Paul Krugman, the good folks at the Balkinization blog) that America has become an “ungovernable nation” (whatever that means). While partisanship is undoubtedly on the rise, the partisan atmosphere of today feels more more poisonous than it did before 9/11 or in the years after the invasion of Iraq in early 2003. And yet, both Presidents Clinton and Bush were able to get a many of their pet projects through the Congress, the former with the Opposition Party is control and the latter working with smaller majorities than President Obama currently enjoys.

I agree that Senate rules need to be reformed. The filibuster should be made into a real filibuster again, and the tortuous process of individual senators being able to put anonymous holds on presidential nominations to executive branch posts needs to be done away with. However, President Obama cannot be so easily let off the hook. America is not ungovernable. She just does not have any leaders who will step up to govern.

4 comments  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-02-08  ::  Craig Gibson

John Krehbiel

The other (real) Times

by John Krehbiel on 8 February 2010

I’ll see your surprise editorial, and raise you this one. The New York Times endorses a program that emphasizes sexual abstinence.

Well sort of. They report as part of their editorial that a study seems to show that teaching abstinence is effective.

The study they tell about involved four groups.

The study, published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, a journal of the American Medical Association, was led by a husband-wife team at the University of Pennsylvania. They randomly assigned 662 African-American students in grades six and seven to one of four different programs — an eight-hour abstinence-only program stressing the benefits of delaying intercourse; an eight-hour safer-sex program stressing condom use; a comprehensive intervention that covered both abstinence and condoms; and a control group that offered health information unrelated to sexual behavior.

The program that worked emphasized telling kids that waiting for sex until they were more mature was a big advantage to them. Not nonsense about how condoms are ineffective (they’re not perfect, but they’re not useless either), not heavy moralizing, but a rational evaluation of the advantages of avoiding sexual activity until mature enough to make appropriate decisions. (although the cynical side of me wonders how many centuries that would take)

My take on this, it makes sense to tell kids that abstinence is a very good idea until they’re ready. But kids see through moralizing and hysteria, which is why the Bush-backed abstinence only programs were failures, just like the anti-drug movies we had to watch in Jr. High school. I had no direct experience with drugs at the time, but I knew enough to know that you don’t see paisley dogs on the ceiling and freak out from marijuana.

See through moralizing BS? So easy even a 13-year-old can do it.

3 comments  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-02-08  ::  John Krehbiel

Greg Krehbiel

A surprising Washington Times commentary page

by Greg Krehbiel on 7 February 2010

I was catching up on the newspaper this morning and read these two articles on the cover of the Feb. 4 commentary section from The Washington Times. John might have to re-think his opinion of this paper.

Save the environment by saving money, which argues against subsidies for oil and gas, and for biofuels, and New nuclear subsidies are a terrible idea, which argues against funding new nuclear plants because they’re not cost-effective.

I’m completely in favor of eliminating subsidies for energy companies. Let them make money the old-fashioned way.

5 comments  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-02-07  ::  Greg Krehbiel

John Krehbiel

Is the present filibuster rule constitutioinal?

by John Krehbiel on 6 February 2010

First, I am writing this off the top of my head. I may have the details wrong, but the substance is right. (IOW, I’m too lazy to look it up right now)

I saw David Brooks on the News Hour the other night talking about the filibuster. The Mark Shields was saying that in previous years it didn’t take 60 votes in the Senate to do anything at all, and the continuous threat of a filibuster was making the whole Senate an obstructionistic joke.

Brooks said that this is the way the founders wanted it.

Yeah, right, just like the way the Founding Fathers wrote the Pledge of Allegiance, right?

But here’s the thing. What the constitution does say is that each house can write its own rules. But my understanding is that the wording could be interpreted to mean that each congress decides its own rules, IOW, adopt rules for each 2 year term. That’s what the House does. But the Senate has kept the same rules since the number of votes needed for cloture was decreased from 66(?) to 60 in the 1920s(?)

So most of the current Senators never got a chance to vote on their rules, as the constitution could be interpreted to require.

Oh, and somebody questioned whether the Republicans were blocking Obama’s nominees, how about this?

13 comments  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-02-06  ::  John Krehbiel

Greg Krehbiel

It’s time to stand up to the “double standard” Nazis

by Greg Krehbiel on 5 February 2010

From time to time somebody mentions how one rule applies to men and another applies to women, and they’ll say “that’s a double standard,” as if that is the final word on everything.

“Oh, no, we can’t have a double standard.”

Of course we can. And we should.

Men and women are different. For example, if some kid gets abducted, raped and murdered, it’s a safe bet that a man did it. And it makes far more sense to let your 15 year old son walk to the store by himself than your 15 year old daughter.

I’ve been told that in Haiti the violence at the food distribution centers has virtually disappeared since they’ve told the men to stay away and had the women come get the food.

Men are more predatory and violent. That’s just the way it is.

So the question is, what is the correct response when someone parrotts the “but that’s a double standard” line?

+ “Men and women are different. Get over it.”
+ “Of course it is. Your point was…?”
+ “No, it’s two standards for two situations.”

1 comment  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-02-05  ::  Greg Krehbiel

Craig Gibson

Just when we thought bipartisanship was dead…

by Craig Gibson on 5 February 2010

Not to worry! It’s alive and well….

3 comments  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-02-05  ::  Craig Gibson

Greg Krehbiel

An interesting wrinkle in the “good without God” debate

by Greg Krehbiel on 5 February 2010

George Pitcher raises a good point in Religious people do have a clearer moral code than secularists.

The idea is that there is no established “moral code of secularism” as there is for, say, an Anglican.

34 comments  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-02-05  ::  Greg Krehbiel

John Krehbiel

Just what is “bipartisanship?”

by John Krehbiel on 5 February 2010

Here’s a column I expected not to like, but wound up liking.

If the political pendulum keeps violently swinging from one extreme to the other, we are just going to get clobbered every time it smacks us in the head on the way by.

Compromise means a solution that nobody thinks is ideal, but is acceptable to most people. Not “I won the last election, now you have to do what I want.” Bush did it, Obama has (IMO) not really tried, but has left the congress to mess it up. But it just won’t work. Each time the old crew gets kicked out, the new crew tries to remake the whole government. Pretty soon, we’re Italy.

2 comments  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-02-05  ::  John Krehbiel