John & Belle Have A Blog

This Ingredient May Also Be Found In Tequila

The main funny of this Onion article is fully encapsulated in the title: Study Finds Link Between Red Wine, Letting Mother Know What You Really Think. Until you get to the real payoff, the closer: "The Northwestern team is currently in the process of securing funding to determine what ingredient in bourbon enables one to finally wrestle one's stepfather to the ground."

It Mek

Does anyone know what the heck the Desmond Dekker song "It Mek" is about? You can listen to it here (and you should do so, because it's an amazing song), and the lyrics are here (accurate but phonetically transcribed) Is the person who's shamming being hurt (the "you") also the "she" who's "crying out fe ice water"? I mean, I assume so. So some chick is pretending to get hurt falling off a wall, and cries out for ice water, but then when he does get to her she's "cold." Insufficiently grateful? But...what...and the goat...? Help me out here, people.

Belle ♥ Steve Young

It's good to see that Coates' Dallas fandom (boos, hisses, catcalls from audience) hasn't prevented him from appreciating the magic that is Steve Young. What bliss it was to be alive in those Jerry Rice pass-receiving days! Like 2 minutes on the clock, advancing down the field with perfect tosses to Rice who would then immediately get out of bounds--beautiful, machine-like stuff. I was also glad to learn that Young himself was opposed to Proposition 8.

Bad-Ass

Bruce Lee can play ping pong with nun-chucks. Real or fake? I think it's real. Via the Derbsterino.

It's Like Hidden Valley Up In Here

...RANCH! This house in New Zealand looks as if it were the model home for a development in say 1965, and then someone's grandma moved in and never changed anything. Not just that, but it is as clean and clutter-free as can be conceived. People, I want this house. John points out that there is likely a similarly preserved ranch home somewhere in his neighborhood in Eugene, which I very much believe. It even sort of looks like John's house, from the exterior. Via.

Anyone want to hear this new Henry Mancini album?
What's that you say? Well, let me just set this orange phone down and check in the 1960 edition of the World Book Almanac, and I'll let you know.
Who wants thirds on mom's famous salad? Cottage cheese, canned pimientos, celery, lime jello--it's all in there.

Bioethics

Well, perhaps having all those ethicists floating around at Biopolis has been good for Singapore, which has announced a ground-breaking plan to pay organ donors:

Singapore is to allow compensation for kidney transplants and for eggs. A government proposal has been approved by a bioethics committee and legislation will be introduced early next year. The committee declared that reimbursement for kidney donation was acceptable as long as it is not "an undue inducement, nor amounting to organ trading".

What exactly this means for kidneys is difficult to fathom. According to the BMJ, a sum of S$10,000 was mentioned. According to the Straits Times, the health minister, Mr Khaw Boon Wan, mentioned "at least a five-figure sum, possibly even six-figure" as appropriate reimbursement. This would include expenses, such as transport and medical costs, as well as loss of earnings. Also, the donor should be covered for follow-up medical costs and higher insurance premiums as a result of losing a kidney.

Although Singapore is eager to become a hub for medical tourism, the government does not want to become tainted by a black market in organ trading. Back in July a retail magnate was convicted for trying to buy a kidney for S$23,700. He spent a day in jail and was fined S$17,000. The donors – poor Indonesian labourers -- were given two weeks' jail and a $1,000 fine and 14 weeks' jail and a S$2,000 fine.

The notion of paying women for eggs so that more will be available for research seems a particularly sound one (I feel queasier about people selling their kidneys somehow because it seems they might suffer worse health effects than they imagine). AFAIK this system already exists in the US, although it is obscured somehow; I used to know someone who made decent money selling her eggs.

Chinese Democracy=The Trudgemank

That's my verdict so far, having streamed like 3 tracks. (Trudgemank.)

Can I Freak Out In February?

Mixed Metaphor alert at the WSJ:

Great investors are taught to listen to the market. Each tick of the tape has something to say about expectations for growth, inflation, policy changes and looming recessions. The stock market is like a giant mass of pulsing plasma doing price discovery and a game of hot potato, getting stocks into the correct hands with the right risk profile. It's way too big for any one person to manipulate, let alone touch directly. Instead, millions of us provide input with our buying and selling decisions.

This explains a lot. There's no reason the expect a giant pulsing mass of plasma that's playing hot potato to behave predictably. Seriously, though, where are we headed with this, Dow 3600? I was always the bearish one, and now it's already gotten worse than I thought, and there's no reason to expect a quick turnaround. So I've revised my bearishness: bottom at 5800.

UPDATE 30 SECONDS LATER: That was depressing. Why don't you go watch the trailer for Isaac Hayes' thriller Truck Turner. See? All better now.

That's Not Really Very Positive

Somewhat depressing Washington Post article:

TORKHAM, Afghanistan, Nov. 18 -- A rise in Taliban attacks along the length of a vital NATO supply route that runs through this border town in the shadow of the Khyber Pass has U.S. officials seeking alternatives, including the prospect of beginning deliveries by a tortuous overland journey from Europe.

Supplying troops in landlocked Afghanistan has long been the Achilles' heel of foreign armies here, most recently the Soviets, whose forces were nearly crippled by Islamist insurgent attacks on vulnerable supply lines.

About 75 percent of NATO and U.S. supplies bound for Afghanistan -- including gas, food and military equipment -- are transported over land through Pakistan. The journey begins in the southern Pakistani port city of Karachi and continues north through Pakistan's volatile North-West Frontier Province and tribal areas before supplies arrive at the Afghan border. The convoys then press forward along mountain hairpin turns through areas of Afghanistan that are known as havens for insurgents.

Drivers at this busy border crossing say death threats from the Taliban arrive almost daily. Sometimes they come in the form of a letter taped to the windshield of a truck late at night. Occasionally, a dispatcher receives an early-morning phone call before a convoy sets off from Pakistan. More often, the threats are delivered at the end of a gun barrel.

"The Taliban, they tell us, 'These goods belong to the Americans. Don't bring them to the Americans. If you do, we'll kill you,' " said Rahmanullah, a truck driver from the Pakistani tribal town of Landikotal. "From Karachi to Kabul there is trouble. The whole route is insecure."

The growing danger has forced the Pentagon to seek far longer, but possibly safer, alternate routes through Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, according to Defense Department documents. A notice to potential contractors by the U.S. Transportation Command in September said that "strikes, border delays, accidents and pilferage" in Pakistan and the risk of "attacks and armed hijackings" in Afghanistan posed "a significant risk" to supplies for Western forces in Afghanistan.

A reliable supply route is considered vital to sustaining the approximately 67,000 foreign troops stationed in Afghanistan, including 32,000 Americans. Nearly half of U.S. forces operate under NATO command. Attacks on convoys have also been a problem in Iraq, where the United States has improvised effective but costly ways to keep supplies flowing.

I don't know jack about logistics, but I don't think routing things through Iran is going to be real practical...um, Turkmenistan?

Qu'est-ce que c'est?

This is an interesting New Yorker article about psychopaths, and about a man who has gotten an fMRI machine installed at a prison in Arizona. This has given him the ability to do brain scans of many more psychopaths that one can find wandering around college campuses (though there are some there too, obviously.) Not a wholly satisfactory article in that you tend to want some kind of big reveal--then he found out why people become psychopaths! But of course he didn't find anything like that. And, in fact, it seems as if he got this thing recently and won't have results for a while. There does appear to be a widely used and fairly reliable questionnaire for determining who is a psychopath, developed by the mentor of the man in the article. The main takeaway is, hey, more people should be studying psychopaths, given how they commit all these hideous crimes and all. But blah, blah, responsibility for our actions.

I don't entirely understand this worry. If we have a reliable way to diagnose and understand psychopaths, this will just amount to a better understanding of the facts we have now. I mean, in some sense we all already think that anyone who would murder his mother is, in some important sense, crazy. Whatever conclusions we currently draw about his moral culpability will still apply when we have some new, forward-looking, fMRI-backed way of determining what that craziness amounts to. "When I say, 'he's crazy and lacks empathy', I'm pointing to a specific state of affaris in his limbic system--and here's a colorful slide to prove it!" If the diagnosis were very reliable and were used to keep people locked up...this is the point at which we might have trouble. But again I feel the trouble would in large part be about the reliability of the test, not whether such a test that was perfectly reliable should be employed in parole hearings.

It also seems clear some children are obvious proto-psychopaths. Think how horrible it would be if it were your kid toruring cats and so on. Does all this freak the psych researchers out? Sounds like, yes.

Harenski recently interviewed a Western inmate who scored a 38.9. “He had killed his girlfriend because he thought she was cheating on him,” she told me. “He was so charming about telling it that I found it hard not to fall into laughing along in surprise, even when he was describing awful things.” Harenski, who is thirty, did not experience the involuntary skin-crawling sensation that, according to a survey conducted by the psychologists Reid and M. J. Meloy, one in three mental-health and criminal-justice professionals report feeling on interviewing a psychopath; in their paper on the subject, Meloy and Meloy speculate that this reaction may be an ancient intraspecies predator-response system. “I was just excited,” Harenski continued. “I was saying to myself, ‘Wow. I found a real one.’ ”

One in three...I feel like the other two were lying to themselves, if they weren't caught up in the joy of discovery like this person. Then again, there does seem to be a disconnect between the "sucessfully charming and manipulative" part of the description and the "gives me the cold robbies" part.