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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

“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.”

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

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.

So what I’m wondering is this: Did they screw up, or did they do this on purpose? Did they organize as a for-profit, promising to funnel profits back into the organization, so they could effectively exclude incumbent politicians from climbing on their bandwagon?

In The Fallacy of the God Gene, Jeff Schweitzer tries to correct some misinformation about religion he claims to have found in the NYT and USA Today … (gosh, the newspapers aren’t experts in religion? Who could have guessed?) …, but in the process he discredits himself with his own imaginative leaps.

“Religion was born not from some god gene, but of fear of the unknown, of the drive to control the uncontrollable, of the need to have mastery over one’s fate in the face of an uncertain world,” he says — to which the only sensible reaction is to imagine an old Jewish women with a heavy Brooklyn accent saying, with a sneer on her face, “And you were there?”

What he presents is a plausible hypothesis, but nothing more. Yet he presents it as if it’s verified, undoubted scientific truth.

Then he has the audacity to say …

[Science and religion] seek fundamentally different answers asking completely different questions using incompatible methods of inquiry. Religion seeks to search for and understand purpose; science does not. Science is a tool of rationalism, which seeks an objective truth that can be verified with reproducible data. The two ideas cannot be reconciled.

This is wrong in so many ways, but let’s start with the most glaringly funny aspect of that comment.

He says science doesn’t seek to understand purpose, but he’s just been lecturing us on the purpose of religion, then he piles on with his wild speculation about the history of religion, which is not “verified with reproducible data.”

To quote my favorite character on Lost, “Sure, dude.”

You were there during the development of religion and you were able to peer into its inner workings.

It’s hard to believe that a person can so unaware of the silliness of his position, but self-deception is at the very core of most people’s rejection of religion.

People accept or reject God for both intellectual and moral reasons, but you can usually tell a lot about how well a person has come to grips with the moral side of belief by how bad his intellectual arguments are. Someone who realizes how deeply his philosophy is affected by his moral thinking will be a lot more hesitant in his philosophical assertions.

Today I realized that these folk are just following an old rule my dad used to tell me. Always try the easy thing first.

When I was in college I did not follow this rule on a day when my key got stuck in the ignition and I couldn’t turn it or get it out. I ended up taking apart the steering column. All I really had to do was wiggle the steering wheel.

These tech support people who assume (1) user error, (2) user stupidity, or (3) somebody other than them needs to fix the problem are just playing the odds. One of those three answers is probably correct, and they’re just trying the easy thing first.