Later On

I find a strong metallic taste in my food. I had this once before and finally figured out I was drinking too much of a packaged lemon juice: when I stopped that, the metallic taste went away. This time it started with the eyedrops, so I’m pointing the finger at those. (Drain into nasal cavity and sinuses, I would guess.)

Worst case I’m off of these in six weeks, and some I will discontinue sooner. Hope it’s those that are the villain.

“Administrative leave with full pay and benefits”: that’s a punishment?? And the Chancellor, who says she “takes full responsibility” also put the chief of campus police on leave while the chief, Annette Spicuzza, apparently continues to maintain that the police were surrounded, trapped, and threatened, a claim completely at variance with what we see in the video. In other words, Chief Spicuzza simply lied.

And Chancellor Katechi is lying as well, when she says she “takes full responsibility” for what was done under her authority, but refuses to resign. Instead, she’s granting paid leave to those under her command while hanging on to her post. The phrase “I take full responsibility” seems now to be totally empty, devoid of meaning. It’s said to placate people, in hopes that they will now go away. If she took full responsibiity, she would resign after an abject apology and an admission of failure of leadership. She should have been there talking with the students instead of hiding in her office and sending out the cops to mace the seated, non-violent protestors.

As James Fallows points out in his blog today, the video has gone global and the Chinese government is making much of “how the US police treat citizens.” This is laughable coming from the Chinese, but the video is vivid. And the Chancellor is keeping her job.

Here’s the NY Times story of the Chancellor evading responsibility. The comments are interesting.

UPDATE: In the comments to the NY Times story, I draw your attention to the (quite valid) point that the police, in using tear gas and pepper spray and rubber bullets and clubs/truncheons/batons (hard enough to break ribs) and other such apparatus, are doling out punishment on the spot: physical punishment, sometimes brutal. The police have somehow been given the power to dispense such summary punishments at will, which very much makes a mockery of the First Amendment, as the commenters point out. The idea of the Constitution is that citizens may be arrested and tried, not that they been beaten on the spot. That’s NOT the idea, and the notion that it is now lawful in the US for the police to beat citizens for simply gathering in peaceful protest shows just how far into a police state we have moved.

Interesting site, focusing on 40 colleges that don’t follow the traditional model. (Full disclosure: St. John’s College, my alma mater, is among them.) Via The Eldest.

This morning I had one of those shaves so smooth that you keep unobtrusively (or so you hope) feeling your face: the chin, the cheeks, the neck: all with no detectable trace of stubble.

Part of this is probably the Omega Pro 48, which is coming along quite nicely now. I worked up a fine lather with the HoneybeeSoaps.net “Old Spice Type soap”. I haven’t compared this with the current Old Spice soap (if they still make it), but it’s quite nice, contains shea butter, and makes a good lather.

I was enjoying the brush and soap so much that I lathered some extra time, building the lather on my beard after loading the brush well. And then I shaved with the vintage Merkur Slant, holding a Schick Platinum Plus blade—a wonderfully smooth and easy shave, stubble removed easily and efficiently.

Three passes, a splash of Old Spice, and I’m ready once more to continue the Great Kitchen Purge.

It’s very good that at least some few call it as they see it. Today Paul Krugman is one:

There’s a word I keep hearing lately: “technocrat.” Sometimes it’s used as a term of scorn — the creators of the euro, we’re told, were technocrats who failed to take human and cultural factors into account. Sometimes it’s a term of praise: the newly installed prime ministers of Greece and Italy are described as technocrats who will rise above politics and do what needs to be done.

I call foul. I know from technocrats; sometimes I even play one myself. And these people — the people who bullied Europe into adopting a common currency, the people who are bullying both Europe and the United States into austerity — aren’t technocrats. They are, instead, deeply impractical romantics.

They are, to be sure, a peculiarly boring breed of romantic, speaking in turgid prose rather than poetry. And the things they demand on behalf of their romantic visions are often cruel, involving huge sacrifices from ordinary workers and families. But the fact remains that those visions are driven by dreams about the way things should be rather than by a cool assessment of the way things really are.

And to save the world economy we must topple these dangerous romantics from their pedestals.

Let’s start with the creation of the euro. . .

Continue reading.

Interesting video, via Wicked_Edge:

This video is hard to watch, but the end makes it worthwhile: police in retreat after their shameful and brutal actions:

For some of the sitting protestors, police held them forced their mouths open, and pepper-sprayed down their throats.

James Fallows has a good column with several updates. This post contains quite a few useful links, including:

This eye-witness account from a professor.

This summary at Huffington Post, which quotes the police justification for use of the pepper spray: that they were trapped, surrounded, and in a tense situation where they feared they were in danger. (If you watch the video, you can tell the person making that statement had not seen the video—or else figured that the statement might work for those who had not seen the video.)

I did feel moved to send an email to the Chancellor, which might torpedo my admissions chances at UC Davis should I decide to apply:

Dear Chancellor Katehi:

Your decisions regarding the demonstrators—to use police force on non-violent protestors—demonstrates clearly your own unfitness for the responsibilities you have been assigned. You clearly do not have student interests at heart or in mind, and your decisions have resulted in completely gratuitous violence: I have seen the video.

It is not only the police who should be ashamed: You, above all, should be ashamed: the police came at your bidding and did as you asked.

In decency, should you have any, you should promptly tender your resignation with an apology. I suggest you move to some position where you do not exercise power, since you clearly cannot do that intelligently or responsibly.

You really should be ashamed. Those students were doing no harm when they were attacked, and they offered no provocation to warrant their brutal treatment. I feel quite sure that you were not there—people such as you seem invariably to be cowardly—but perhaps you can summon up the courage to resign.

Probably not, I expect.

UPDATE: James Fallows has another good post with excellent links. Do check them out. The US seems to be moving in the direction of a police state when violence like that televised is used against non-violent protesters.

For some reason I hate to throw out food. I have at times eaten semi-burned food, salty Xmas cookies, and the like, rather than throw them in the trash. And food still in the original package? Forget about it. And yet…. those ancient walnuts and pine nuts do taste quite foul, the oil so rancid that they go into the garbage. And the aged bin of brown rice that has somehow welded itself into a mass has a rank odor. No hesitation in tossing those, even with an expiration date in sight. (Oldest expiration date found in current kitchen clean-up: March 2006.)

Unfortunately I have tended to stockpile food. I like to buy “extras,” and when my cooking drifts in a new direction, those extras can hang around for years. Right now I am engaged in a Great Purge of the kitchen, and a lot of old food is hitting the garbage—and I’m making strong resolutions to cut out buying stockpiles. (In a nod to reality, my latest bottle of ibuprofen is the smallest bottle on offer, rather than the giant “economy” size that expires while still 90% full.) And if I buy flour again, I’m looking for the 1-cup bag.

I was whining about this to The Sister, who pointed out the incredibly useful site Still Tasty, a reference site. Enter a food and find its shelf life. Take brown rice, uncooked, for example:

Pantry: 3-6 months
Refrigerator: 6-12 months
Freezer: 12-18 months.

I’ve been storing in the pantry, and I think right now I can toss the lot except for the wild rice and black rice I just purchased—and those I am eating now, before they go over.

I’ll be looking at this often. I’m already thinking that the next time I buy spelt grain to cook, I’ll mark the package with black Magic Marker with the toss date, in big numerals, so that I’ll be driven to cook and eat it before it spoils.

And it looks as though I can toss pretty much my entire grain collection…

Extremely interesting article in the 12 November 2011 issue of New Scientist. The article is behind a paywall, but is readily available to subscribers, among which number you should be, you know. But this one is worth a trip to the library. Starts on page 38, is by Kate Douglas. It begins:

DECISION-MAKING was supposed to have been cracked by science long ago. It started in 1654 with an exchange of letters between two eminent French mathematicians, Blaise Pascal and Pierre Fermat. Their insights into games of chance formed the foundation of probability theory. And in the 20th century the ideas were developed into decision theory, an elegant formulation beloved of economists and social scientists today. Decision theory sees humans as “rational optimisers”. Given a choice, we weigh up each option, considering its value and probability, and then choose the one with the “highest expected utility”.

With your experience of making decisions, you have probably noticed some flaws here. There’s the risible idea that humans are rational, and the dubious notion that we would be capable of the on-the-hoof calculations of probability, even if we could access all the necessary information. Decision theory explains how we would make choices if we were logical computers or all-knowing beings. But we’re not. We are just rather clever apes with a brain shaped by natural selection to see us through this messy world.

Decision researchers had largely ignored this inconvenient reality, occasionally patching up their theory when experiments revealed exceptions to their rules. But that make-do-and-mend approach may soon change. Earlier this year, an independent institute called the Ernst Strüngmann Forum assembled a group of big-thinking scientists in Frankfurt, Germany, to consider whether we should abandon the old, idealistic decision theory and start afresh with a new, realistic one based on evolutionary principles. The week-long workshop provided a fascinating exploration of the forces that actually shape our decisions: innate biases, emotions, expectations, misconceptions, conformity and other all-too-human factors. While our decision-making may seem inconsistent or occasionally downright perverse, the truly intriguing thing is just how often these seemingly irrational forces help us make the right choice.

We must start by . . .

The whole thing is well worth reading because it’s always good to know how you are actually deciding things.

UPDATE: Hokusai in comments points to the source of published reports from the Strüngmann Forum, and I just ordered a copy of :

Better Than Conscious?: Decision Making, the Human Mind, and Implications For Institutions
Edited by Christoph Engel and Wolf Singer

Conscious control enables human decision makers to override routines, to exercise willpower, to find innovative solutions, to learn by instruction, to decide collectively, and to justify their choices. These and many more advantages, however, come at a price: the ability to process information consciously is severely limited and conscious decision makers are liable to hundreds of biases. Measured against the norms of rational choice theory, conscious decision makers perform poorly. But if people forgo conscious control, in appropriate tasks, they perform surprisingly better: they handle vast amounts of information; they update prior information; they find appropriate solutions to ill-defined problems.

This inaugural Strüngmann Forum Report explores the human ability to make decisions, consciously as well as without conscious control. It explores decision-making strategies, including deliberate and intuitive; explicit and implicit; processing information serially and in parallel, with a general-purpose apparatus, or with task-specific neural subsystems. The analysis is at four levels—neural, psychological, evolutionary, and institutional—and the discussion is extended to the definition of social problems and the design of better institutional interventions. The results presented differ greatly from what could be expected under standard rational choice theory and deviate even more from the alternate behavioral view of institutions. New challenges emerge (for example, the issue of free will) and some purported social problems almost disappear if one adopts a more adequate model of human decision making.

About the Editors

Christoph Engel is Director of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn, and a member of the Faculty of Law and Economics at the University of Bonn. He is the author of Generating Predictability: Institutional Analysis and Design and other books.

Wolf Singer is Director of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, Frankfurt, and Founding Director of the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies.

A very interesting column by Daniel Mendelsohn in the NY Times gives another interpretation of why the child rape at Penn State was handled in the way that it was. I think he has some excellent points:

WHAT if it had been a 10-year-old girl in the Penn State locker room that Friday night in 2002?

The likely answer to that question reveals an ugly truth, one that goes stubbornly undiscussed. Whichever version of Mike McQueary’s story you choose to believe — his grand jury testimony, in which a “distraught” Mr. McQueary, then a graduate assistant to the football team, “left immediately” after witnessing the former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky sodomize a young boy, or the e-mail recently leaked to the press, in which he wrote, “I did stop it, not physically … but made sure it was stopped when I left that locker room” — the mind recoils at the grotesque failure to intervene more forcefully. How could a grown man have left the scene without taking the child with him? Mr. McQueary wants us to imagine that his brain was racing during those “30 to 45 seconds,” that he “had to make tough impacting quick decisions.” But it seems clear he wasn’t thinking at all — and it’s hard not to wonder why.

I think it was the gender of the victim.

Does anyone believe that if a burly graduate student had walked in on a 58-year-old man raping a naked little girl in the shower, he would have left without calling the police and without trying to rescue the girl? But the victim in this case was a boy, and so Mr. McQueary left and called his dad (who didn’t seem to think that it was a matter for the police either).

Mr. McQueary’s . . .

Continue reading. The writer explains why the gender of the victim made such a difference in what the response would be.

Sent from her phone:

I know various people who will not place orders on-line because they’re afraid their credit card information will be stolen, and I point out to them that they seem to have no problem handing their card over to strangers in restaurants and the like. Now the dangers of the latter are made clear in this article by Noah Rosenberg in the NY Times:

The customers went for the dry-aged sirloin and tender cuts of filet mignon, like many at New York City’s better steakhouses. And, like many, they handed their credit cards to the waiters after their meals, expecting to tip, sign and be on their way.

But in the last year and a half, at least 50 diners at restaurants like the Capital Grille, Smith & Wollensky, JoJo and Wolfgang’s Steakhouse ended up paying for more than just a fine piece of meat. Their card information — and, in effect, their identities — had been stolen by waiters in a scheme to buy and resell cases of vintage French wine, Louis Vuitton handbags, Cartier jewelry and even a Roy Lichtenstein lithograph of Marilyn Monroe.

The diners had unwittingly become pawns in a “very high-tech, evolving group of criminal organizers,” Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, said Friday during a news conference to announce the indictments of 28 people.

Seven waiters, he said, used lipstick-size electronic “skimmers” to extract data from the magnetic strips of American Express Centurion, or “black,” cards and other high- and no-limit credit cards belonging to patrons. Such customers, used to high credit card bills, would probably not have immediately noticed or been alerted by card companies to any suspicious activity on their accounts, Mr. Vance said.

Equipped with the stolen data, members of the ring allegedly manufactured counterfeit credit cards and identification cards in an Upper West Side apartment using what Mr. Vance called “the tools of their trade”: computers, scanners, encoders, embossing machines and other high-tech equipment.

The counterfeit cards, which the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, described as high-quality duplicates, were used by “shoppers” associated with the ring to make purchases at high-end retailers like Bergdorf Goodman, Burberry and Chanel, in places as far away as Boston, Chicago and Florida. But first, to make sure the cards would be accepted, members of the ring used them for things like cab rides. . .

Continue reading.

I’m back to decluttering the kitchen. I think I’ll have to work on this for successive days, working each day until I start to get tired of the keep/throw/donate decisions. I am indeed making pretty good progress in the kitchen, but there’s a lot of apartment to cover. I’m pretty sure the collection of Go books is going to UMBC Go Club.

Anyone who works in the corporate world for any time will inevitably at some point encounter business consultants—outside experts hired in hopes of growing profits and/or cutting costs. They come in a variety of types, but the spiels (and “solutions”) are remarkably similar.

I highly recommend the 1992 comedy The Efficiency Expert, starring Anthony Hopkins and set in Australia. It’s available on Watch Instantly. Give it 10 minutes and see what you think.

Upside-down lid again, I see. So it goes.

I wanted to try the Fitjar Såpekokeri with a badger brush as well. No problems, now that it’s begun working: same terrific thick lather as yesterday. Commenters have pointed out that this soap contains Sodium Lauryl Sulphate (SLS) a suractant and foaming agent to which some people’s skin is sensitive, so if you have a sensitivity to SLS, this soap would not be a good choice. For me, though, it’s not a problem and I’m greatly enjoying the lather. And with a soap this hard the puck is going to last a long time.

I do like the feel of the M&F brush. The knot is larger than some of my brushes, but it works well on the face and is not unwieldy in the least.

Three passes with the Edwin Jagger DE87 holding a previously used Voskhod blade, producing a fine smoothness, and a splash of Stetson Sierra, a fine fragrance. For me, this is a pretty good blade.

My miseating has had its cost. I’m now switching to weight-loss mode once more for a few days: strict diet lockdown.

After yesterday’s cheeseburger blowout, I wanted to take it easy, so after breakfast and a clementine snack, I went to Whole Foods for a run. My God, the usual parking lot was totally full! That was unexpected. But I parked in the non-usual parking lot and shopped and for lunch made a salad:

1 plastic tub salad greens (“Fresh herb” mix: whatever)
6 oz peeled shrimp, sautéed (protein)
1/2 little carton roasted veg
1/2 little carton cucumber salsa
1/2 little carton crumbled feta
1/2 little carton barley and kale salad (starch)
10 kalamata olives halved
1/4 sweet onion, diced
2 Tbsp Bragg’s vinaigrette

I tossed that up, ate half, felt full, and put the rest in fridge.

Afternoon snack was a carton of fresh berries from Whole Foods with my yogurt.

Dinner was the rest of the salad.

So: I’m not hungry, but a touch more would not go amiss.

At Whole Foods I had seen a guy filling a bag with some nice-looking Bosc pears, and I asked him whether he was going to cook them or eat them raw. He said he was getting them for a pear pie.

My! That sounded good. I bought two pears on the spot, thinking I would poach one.

So poaching time arrived, and I could think of nothing but sugar syrup, which I would rather not, all the same. I called The Wife for consultation and as the phone rang decided on port. That would be good. I told her my plan, and she suggested instead Amontillado sherry. That sounded terrific, and I have some.

So:

1 Bosc pear, diced (to minimize cooking time and maximize surface area)
1 pat butter
2 Medjool dates, pits removed, chopped

I sautéd that for a while. The dates are for sweetnes, the butter for richness. I added a small pinch of salt to heighten flavor.

When the dates and pears were well sautéed, I added:

1/2 c or a little more of Dry Sack sherry
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
3 star anise
zest of 1 Meyer lemon
juice of 1/2 large Meyer lemon

I simmered that covered for 10-15 minutes, and now the lid’s off and it’s reducing until it hits a glaze. Into a bowl, top with my yogurt and perhaps a dusting of Ceylon (true) cinnamon, and Bob’s your uncle: Pears Impromptu.

UPDATE: Very tasty, if I say it myself. I think walnuts (or black walnuts) would have been nice, but those I don’t keep around. The butter did double duty: at the end I reduced the sherry to nothing, more or less—all evaporated or absorbed into the pears—and the dish ended with another sauté, a little extended for caramelization. Then the topping of yogurt, and a perfectly adequate weeknight dessert.

UPDATE 2: Made it again, and liked this one even better:

1 Bosc pear, diced
1/3 c sweet vermouth
1/3 tsp (approx) vanilla extract
1 pat butter
1 Tbsp honey
1 stick of cinnamon

Bring to boil, cover, and simmer for 30 minutes. Remove lid and continue cooking until liquid is gone, reduced to a glaze. Discard cinnamon stick, spoon pears into bowl, top with homemade yogurt (I use 1% milk). Even better than before. I would have topped with those little candied crystallized violets, but I don’t have any.

I blogged some time back about the phenomenon known as “decision fatigue.” I’ve observed that I’ve been encountering this as I go through my stuff, deciding what to keep, what to toss, and what to pass along: I run out of gas more quickly than I expect.

In talking with The Wife, I have developed a new strategy. My initial strategy was to start in one corner of the kitchen (I’ve already done the bathroom, which a relatively easy) and work my way around the kitchen, leaving in my wake well-organized cupboards and drawers with just the stuff I want to keep.

Bad idea: it forces too many difficult decisions too early, and pretty soon you operating under decision fatigue.

So here’s my new approach: go quickly through the entire kitchen, making only the easy decisions. That shouldn’t take long, and will get rid of some stuff. Then the following day, go over everything again, making only easy decisions.

My hope is that it will work like this: I know I don’t want A, but I rather like B, especially compared to A. So getting rid of A is an easy decision—there it goes!—and the decision on B (being more difficult) is postponed. Tomorrow, though, when I look at B, A is no longer around. B is out there on his own, and you know? in looking through the stuff in the cabinet, I can immediately see that, compared to the other stuff, I don’t want B—so out it goes. C is a harder choice, so I’ll leave it for another time. And then in a day or two, with both A and B gone, I can see that, while C was desirable in comparison to A and B, with those no longer present, I can readily see that I don’t in fact want C.

That’s my hope. Now off to do the first easy sweep.

The US is on the wrong side of several significant moral issues, and the cluster bomb issue is a prominent one. Glenn Greenwald:

Slightly more than two months after he was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, President Obama secretly ordered a cruise missile attack on Yemen,using cluster bombs, which killed 44 innocent civilians, including 14 women and 21 children, as well as 14 people alleged to be “militants.” It goes without saying that — unless you want Rick Perry to win in 2012 — this act should in no way be seen as marring Obama’s presidency or his character: what’s a couple dozen children blown up as a part of a covert, undeclared air war? If anything, as numerous Democrats have ecstatically celebrated, such acts show how Tough and Strong the Democrats are: after all, ponder the massive amounts of nobility and courage it takes to sit in the Oval Office and order this type of aggression on defenseless tribal regions in Yemen. As R.W. Appel put it on the front page of The New York Times back in 1989 when glorifying George H.W. Bush’s equally courageous invasion of Panama: “most American leaders since World War II have felt a need to demonstrate their willingness to shed blood” and doing so has become “a Presidential initiation rite.”

But one aspect of the December, 2009, attack that perhaps did merit some more critical scrutiny was the use of cluster bombs, weapons which “scatter hundreds of bomblets over a large area but with limited accuracy and high failure rates.” The inevitability of “duds” — “unexploded ordnance” — poses a great risk to civilians, often well after the conflict has ended, since — like land mines — they often detonate when stumbled into by children and other innocents long after they disperse. According to the Cluster Munitions Coalition, cluster bombs “caused more civilian casualties in Iraq in 2003 and Kosovo in 1999 than any other weapon system.” As Wired pointed out, while the U.S. used these weapons in both Iraq and Afghanistan, “neither the Taliban nor Saddam used cluster bombs against U.S. troops.” And here is how the Council on Foreign Relations describes the impact these weapons had in the 2006 Israeli bombing campaign in Lebanon:

They left dozens dead or maimed on both sides of the conflict. The reason . . . is because the “fighting in southern Lebanon was often in villages and towns where people were living.” Israel dropped up to four million submunitions on Lebanese soil, one million of which remain unexploded “duds,” according to the UN Mine Action Coordination Center. Throughout the thirty-four-day conflict, the United States resupplied Israel’s arsenal of cluster bombs, which prompted an investigation by the State Department to examine if Israel had violated secret agreements it signed with the United States governing their use. Hezbollah, meanwhile, fired thousands of cluster munitions—a Chinese-made Type 81 122mm rocket—into northern Israel, a number of which targeted civilian populations, according to human rights groups.

Given how indiscriminate and civilian-threatening these weapons are, more than 100 countries have signed a treaty banning their production and use and compelling compensation to their victims. Needless to say, the U.S. has categorically refused to join the Convention, along with the other biggest stockpilers of these weapons, such as Russia, Israel and China. The Obama administration’s refusal to join the Convention has caused tension and controversy even with its most subservient allies, such as Britian, a signatory to the treaty. The British Parliament had insisted that the U.S. rid itself of all cluster munitions at American bases on British soil, but a WikiLeaks cable revealed that “British and American officials colluded in a plan to hoodwink parliament” through “the use of a loophole to manoeuvre around the ban and allow the US to keep the munitions on British territory.”

But now the Obama administration is moving far beyond a mere refusal to join the convention banning these munitions. . .

Continue reading. Barack Obama is not the man I thought he was, nor that he pretends to be.

Very interesting post pointed out by The Eldest, who’s been to Iceland several times, always with great enjoyment (except perhaps skip the ptarmigan for dinner):

An Italian radio program’s story about Iceland’s on-going revolution is a stunning example of how little our media tells us about the rest of the world. Americans may remember that at the start of the 2008 financial crisis, Iceland literally went bankrupt. The reasons were mentioned only in passing, and since then, this little-known member of the European Union fell back into oblivion.

[See also Lesley Riddoch on the High North here - or Mike Small on Scotland in Europe here]

* Both editor and author are aware of mistakes n this piece which are due to mistranslation from Italian – apologies

As one European country after another fails or risks failing, imperiling the Euro, with repercussions for the entire world, the last thing the powers that be want is for Iceland to become an example. Here’s why:

Five years of a pure neo-liberal regime had made Iceland, (population 320 thousand, no army), one of the richest countries in the world. In 2003 all the country’s banks were privatized, and in an effort to attract foreign investors, they offered on-line banking whose minimal costs allowed them to offer relatively high rates of return. The accounts, called IceSave, attracted many English and Dutch small investors. But as investments grew, so did the banks’ foreign debt. In 2003 Iceland’s debt was equal to 200 times its GNP, but in 2007, it was 900 percent. The 2008 world financial crisis was the coup de grace. The three main Icelandic banks, Landbanki, Kapthing and Glitnir, went belly up and were nationalized, while the Kroner lost 85% of its value with respect to the Euro. At the end of the year Iceland declared bankruptcy.

Contrary to what could be expected, the crisis resulted in Icelanders recovering their sovereign rights, through a process of direct participatory democracy that eventually led to a new Constitution. But only after much pain.

Geir Haarde, the Prime Minister of a Social Democratic coalition government, negotiated a two million one hundred thousand dollar loan, to which the Nordic countries added another two and a half million. But the foreign financial community pressured Iceland to impose drastic measures. The FMI and the European Union wanted to take over its debt, claiming this was the only way for the country to pay back Holland and Great Britain, who had promised to reimburse their citizens.

Protests and riots continued, eventually forcing the government to resign. Elections were brought forward to April 2009, resulting in a left-wing coalition which condemned the neoliberal economic system, but immediately gave in to its demands that Iceland pay off a total of three and a half million Euros. This required each Icelandic citizen to pay 100 Euros a month (or about $130) for fifteen years, at 5.5% interest, to pay off a debt incurred by private parties vis a vis other private parties. It was the straw that broke the reindeer’s back.

What happened next was extraordinary. . .

Continue reading.

Certainly early experiences must happen within a limited window for development to occur. With cats, for example, kittens are socialized to be comfortable with humans only if they have adequate interaction (45 minutes or more daily, with 4 or more humans) during a critical 5-week window: from age 2 weeks to age 7 weeks. If they miss those experiences, they may become wonderful cats—Megs is an example—but they will have great difficulties being comfortable with people. (Megs has bonded to me, and she now seems to like The Wife okay, but for most other people she keeps her distance and reacts adversely to approaches. She did not get very much interaction at all during the critical period.)

Kevin Drum has an interesting post at Mother Jones on the topic:

In The New Republic this week, Jon Cohn has an eye-opening piece, “The Two Year Window,” about advances in the science of early childhood development. It opens with a description of the Bucharest Early Intervention Project, a study that removed infants from warehouse-style orphanages in Romania and adopted them out:

It was ten years after the fall of the Communist dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, whose scheme for increasing the country’s population through bans on birth control and abortion had filled state-run institutions with children their parents couldn’t support…. The new government remained convinced that the institutions were a good idea—and was still warehousing at least 60,000 kids, some of them born after the old regime’s fall, in facilities where many received almost no meaningful human interaction. [Neuroscientist Charles Nelson] prevailed upon the government to allow them to remove some of the children from the orphanages and place them with foster families. Then, the researchers would observe how they fared over time in comparison with the children still in the orphanages.

…Prior to the project, investigators had observed that the orphans had a high frequency of serious developmental problems, from diminished IQs to extreme difficulty forming emotional attachments. Meanwhile, imaging and other tests revealed that some of the orphans had reduced activity in their brains. The Bucharest project confirmed that these findings were more than random observations. It also uncovered a striking pattern: Orphans who went to foster homes before their second birthdays often recovered some of their abilities. Those who went to foster homes after that point rarely did.

This past May, a team led by Stacy Drury of Tulane reported a similar finding—with an intriguing twist. The researchers found that telomeres, which are protective caps that sit on the ends of chromosomes, were shorter in children who had spent more time in the Romanian orphanages….It was the clearest signal yet that neglect of very young children does not merely stunt their emotional development. It changes the architecture of their brains.

…”The concept of disrupting brain circuitry is much more compelling than the concept that poverty is bad for your health,” says Jack Shonkoff, a Harvard pediatrician and chair of the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child. “It gives us a basis for developing new ideas, for going into policy areas, given what we know, and saying here are some new strategies worth trying.”

What’s new here isn’t really the idea that experiences in early childhood are important. In fact, in the era following the Second World War, the idea that habits established early in life are permanent was, if anything, belabored too much. “If mothers did not nurture their infants properly,” Jerome Kagan wrote in 1999, criticizing this widespread belief, “their children would be vulnerable to a dull mind, a wild spirit, and a downward spiral…This view of development rests on the assumption that every experience produces a permanent physical change somewhere in the central nervous system, and therefore the earliest experiences provide the scaffolding for the child’s future thought and behavior.”

What Kagan was criticizing, though, was primarily the idea that . . .

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