I noticed that, for whatever reason, a “worry” theme has emerged today in my posts (see also this).
Which gave me the idea for a musical interlude from one of my very favorite groups:
And as a bonus:
After nearly a quarter century of global warming worry…
…it seems we’re about where we began:
If you look at the chart, you’ll see that, so far, worry about global warming peaked around 2000 and again in the years 2006-2008. I’m not sure what was happening in 2000 (Al Gore’s presidential campaign?) to cause this, but it was 2006 when his movie came out and he won an Oscar, and 2007 when he received the Nobel prize.
From the Gallup report:
Politics remain a powerful predictor of Americans’ worries about global warming, with more than half of Democrats saying they worry about it a great deal, compared with 29% of independents and 16% of Republicans…
Young Americans aged 18 to 29 are more worried about global warming than older adults, particularly those 50 and older…
Worry about global warming is not related to education in any systematic way; those with postgraduate education are no more worried than those with a high school education or less.
If I were a global warming activist (or is it an anti-global warming activist?) I’d be perturbed by the failure of my propaganda to make a long-term change in people’s point of view on this. I also know that nothing will stop global warming activists from trying. The people I know who are dedicated to this truly think we are facing Armageddon.
Don’t tell a worrier to stop worrying
It will only make things worse.
And they’re likely to get mad at you in the process.
I’ll bet all you non-worriers have done it to the worriers in your life: told them the equivalent of “Just stop it. It doesn’t do you any good, and most of the stuff you worry about never happens anyway.”
True, true, true, say the worriers, if they’re being honest. But if they’re being honest they also say, “Easier said than done, non-worrier. Easier said than done.”
It’s not that it’s impossible. In fact, an entire approach called cognitive therapy has evolved to teach the worrier how to do it:
People who are working with a cognitive therapist often practice the use of more flexible ways to think and respond, learning to ask themselves whether their [negative] thoughts are completely true, and whether those thoughts are helping them to meet their goals. Thoughts that do not meet this description may then be shifted to something more accurate or helpful, leading to more positive emotion, more desirable behavior, and movement toward the person’s goals. Cognitive therapy takes a skill-building approach, where the therapist helps the person to learn and practice these skills independently, eventually “becoming his or her own therapist.”
A similar discipline called Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy preceded cognitive therapy by about a decade:
One of the fundamental premises of REBT is that humans, in most cases, do not merely get upset by unfortunate adversities, but also by how they construct their views of reality through their language, evaluative beliefs, meanings and philosophies about the world, themselves and others.
…REBT claims that people to a large degree consciously and unconsciously construct emotional difficulties such as self-blame, self-pity, clinical anger, hurt, guilt, shame, depression and anxiety, and behaviors and behavior tendencies like procrastination, over-compulsiveness, avoidance, addiction and withdrawal by the means of their irrational and self-defeating thinking, emoting and behaving. REBT is then applied as an educational process in which the therapist often active-directively teaches the client how to identify irrational and self-defeating beliefs and philosophies which in nature are rigid, extreme, unrealistic, illogical and absolutist, and then to forcefully and actively question and dispute them and replace them with more rational and self-helping ones.
It’s different than just saying “stop that!” What these therapists do is to help clients identify the individual and specific patterns of self-talk that do them in, and to develop counter-statements that make sense to them and give the world a more positive spin.
So, going back to the research I linked at the beginning of this post:
For the study, 71 female participants were shown graphic images and asked to put a positive spin on them while their brain activity was recorded. …
“The worriers actually showed a paradoxical backfiring effect in their brains when asked to decrease their negative emotions,” Moser said. “This suggests they have a really hard time putting a positive spin on difficult situations and actually make their negative emotions worse even when they are asked to think positively.”
The study focused on women because they are twice as likely as men to suffer from anxiety related problems and previously reported sex differences in brain structure and function could have obscured the results.
Moser said the findings have implications in the way negative thinkers approach difficult situations.
“You can’t just tell your friend to think positively or to not worry ”“ that’s probably not going to help them,” he said.
I’d love to see a study that compares worrier subjects’ brain reactions before treatment with cognitive and/or rational emotive therapy and their brain reactions after.
But I worry that that will never happen.
Could it be…
…that Flight 370’s black box ping has been heard by a Chinese ship?
We’ve had so many previous reports that have turned out to be unrelated to Flight 370 that I’m highly skeptical that this one will turn out to be anything, either.
I think that, if the box is ever located, it will be on something resembling the time scale of Air France Flight 447. The recovery of that airplane’s flight recorder took approximately two years. In addition, it was known from the start where the aircraft had probably gone down, and some debris that was spotted as early as a day later included an airplane seat, highly likely to be from the plane. Then:
Early on 6 June 2009, five days after Flight 447 disappeared, two male bodies, the first to be recovered from the crashed aircraft, were brought on board the Caboclo along with a seat, a nylon backpack containing a computer and vaccination card and a leather briefcase containing a boarding pass for the Air France flight. The following day, 7 June, search crews recovered the Airbus’s vertical stabilizer, the first major piece of wreckage to be discovered.
And yet it took two more years to find the plane’s black boxes. So, considering how little we still know about Flight 370, it would be nearly a miracle to have heard a ping at this point.
George W. Bush exhibits his paintings
I would love to see this exhibit.
And what a great interview. Note the reference to Churchill, the humor, and the relaxed and affectionate interplay between the family members, as well as Bush’s articulate and fluid manner of speaking. Gone is his studied carefulness, the fear of making an error that his enemies could pounce on that (IMHO) caused some disfluency during Bush’s presidency. Of course, it probably helps that he’s speaking to family members, and about his love of painting.
Laura looks great, too. What’s her secret?
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
My favorite quote from the interview:
“As you know, our dear dog Barney, who had a special place in my heart ”” Putin dissed him and said, ”˜You call it a dog?’” Bush recalled. “A year later, your mom and I go to visit and Vladimir says, ”˜Would you like to meet my dog?’ Out bounds this huge hound, obviously much bigger than a Scottish terrier, and Putin looks at me and says, ”˜Bigger, stronger and faster than Barney.’
“I just took it in. I didn’t react,” Bush continued. “I just said, ‘Wow. Anybody who thinks ‘my dog is bigger than your dog’ is an interesting character.’ And that painting kind of reflects that.”
Here’s a close-up of Bush’s portrait of Putin (the NBC logo is not part of the painting), which I think is quite fine, as well as revealing of Putin’s character:
[NOTE: There’s a gallery of Bush’s portraits here.]
More on Eich’s “resignation”
If you want to read two wonderful pieces on the subject of Eich’s resignation and the movement that led to it, start with this one, from whence comes this excerpt:
This is NOT about Prop 8, gay marriage and religion. That is just the context in which this latest abuse has come to be. It is about the freedom — in your personal life — to believe as you do, support the candidates and issues you want, and to be left in peace to do so without fear of recrimination at the place where you make your livelihood.
If competent individuals can be fired at work for their personal stances on issues that they do not bring into the workplace, then we are no longer in a free and open society, but a very tightly closed one where fear reigns and keeps us all under control–where our beliefs must yield to pre-set political and religious dogma we are force fed.
Not only is it hard to swallow that something like this could happen in our country, it is hard to fathom how anyone can be so self-righteous, so emboldened, to think it a perfectly good idea to socially engineer society with the same iron fists as history’s liberty-crushing despots. All of that talk about equality, justice, liberty, tolerance and diversity, is just talk. It’s a one way street leading to oppression. And so frenzied are they with their viewpoints — so intent on crushing any opposing ideas– that they are blinded to their own bigotry.
And then read The Anchoress on the subject. She’s really really angry, as you can tell from the uncharacteristic headline (for her, that is: “A Gay CEO with Balls Needs to Hire Eich and Halt this Crap”). Here’s an excerpt:
If the headline strikes some as offensive, it will nevertheless remain, because that’s the case I’m making, and I’m sticking with it: a gay CEO with a pair of brass ones needs to step up and speak truth to a growing, and most illiberal new power. He or she needs to hire Brendan Eich in some sort of corporate leadership capacity for the sake of the most fundamental of freedoms ”” the freedom to think what you want to think, even if your thinking is unpopular or deemed “mistaken” ”” and in so doing boldly declare that our society has no truck with inquisitions…
Let me be clear: I hold out absolutely no hope that this chill wind will be checked or reversed ”” too many people with money and influence and no individual courage at all find totalitarianism an alluring idea. Nevertheless, though everything is part illusion, I’ll still resist and say, as Tom McDonald so succinctly puts it, “this shit has to stop.”
Indeed; it is an execrable, detestable trend that, if unchecked, will affect every facet of our lives as “correct” thoughts and “correct” ways become ever-narrower and trap more and more people in its stinking and miserable gullies…
I would ask my gay friends to openly reject this movement to oppress so-called “wrong” thinking ”” suffocate it right now, as it is being born ”” because eventually it will grow into a monster that will consume anyone, indiscriminately.]
I have one disagreement with the Anchoress, though: this movement is hardly “being born.” Our social engineers of the left have been crusading against various thought-crimes for a long, long time, and establishing the idea of the need to stamp out thought-crime against the righteous PC wisdom du jour. The only thing that’s different now is that it’s reached critical mass, on this issues and many others.
I don’t know…
…whether to consider this skydiver lucky or unlucky. But I do know that what happened to him was so unusual as to seem virtually impossible.
And yet it happened:
Brendan Eich and the gay marriage zealots
[NOTE: In my earlier post today on the Charles Koch piece at the WSJ, I mentioned that I couldn’t get through the firewall to the article. Since then, the WSJ has kindly removed it from behind the wall, and this link will take you there successfully. Many thanks to all the readers who emailed me with either the text of the piece, or the news that the link was working.]
Charles Koch, who knows a bit about being criticized and even lied about for his beliefs, wrote this today in the WSJ:
Instead of encouraging free and open debate, collectivists strive to discredit and intimidate opponents. They engage in character assassination. (I should know, as the almost daily target of their attacks.) This is the approach that Arthur Schopenhauer described in the 19th century, that Saul Alinsky famously advocated in the 20th, and that so many despots have infamously practiced. Such tactics are the antithesis of what is required for a free society””and a telltale sign that the collectivists do not have good answers.
People have the right to engage in such tactics against someone like Koch, unless guilty of libel—and the bar to proving libel of a public figure is very very high. But should they? Especially when, as in the recent case of Brendan Eich, who resigned today as CEO of Mozilla, the thoughtcrime committed by the targeted person was in taking a position that until very recently was considered completely mainstream.
You may have missed the case of Eich, but it is extraordinarily chilling. Eich was found to have made a donation in 2008 to a group supporting California’s anti-gay-marriage Proposition 8. For this horrific offense he has been pressured to resign, and that pressure succeeded despite his attempts at recantation and reassurance. Apparently, his mea culpa wasn’t maxima enough.
Ace of Spades has been covering the Eich story quite thoroughly, so I direct you to his posts here and here. Note, also, that even gay marriage proponent Andrew Sullivan has been made pretty queasy by the Eich persecution. In a column titled “The hounding of a heretic,” Sullivan writes:
Will Eich now be forced to walk through the streets in shame? Why not the stocks? The whole episode disgusts me ”“ as it should disgust anyone interested in a tolerant and diverse society. If this is the gay rights movement today ”“ hounding our opponents with a fanaticism more like the religious right than anyone else ”“ then count me out. If we are about intimidating the free speech of others, we are no better than the anti-gay bullies who came before us.
Note, also, that the mechanism by which Eich’s contribution was outed was a leak by none other than our old friends at the IRS, who gave “a copy of the National Organization for Marriage’s 2008 tax return to a gay-advocacy group.” So although Eich was probably not the special target (there probably was no one individual target; rather, the potential targets were all the names on the list), the whole thing has unfolded exactly as planned. This was no accident, and it required the cooperation of someone or several someones at the IRS.
Unfortunately, we have become used to this level of outrageous, illegal, and yes, un-American behavior. And that’s probably most dangerous of all.
[ADDENDUM: Allahpundit at Hot Air says the leak was not by the IRS and that the mechanism was actually a disclosure through the LA Times, acting in accord with a California law allowing it. He also explains why such a law doesn’t seem to make sense except as a mechanism to hound people for their beliefs.
Here’s the history of the law. Interesting:
California’s Political Reform Act of 1974, and laws like it across the country, sought to cast disinfecting sunlight on the political process by requiring contributions of more than $100 to be made public.
[Some activist websites take] that data, formerly of interest mainly to social scientists, pollsters and journalists, and publishes it in a way not foreseen when the open-government laws were passed. As a result, donors are exposed to a wide audience and, in some cases, to harassment or worse…
Joseph Clare, a San Francisco accountant who donated $500 to supporters of Proposition 8, said he had received several e-mail messages accusing him of “donating to hate.” Mr. Clare said the site perverts the meaning of disclosure laws that were originally intended to expose large corporate donors who might be seeking to influence big state projects.
“I don’t think the law was designed to identify people for direct feedback to them from others on the other side,” Mr. Clare said. “I think it’s been misused.”
Many civil liberties advocates, including those who disagree with his views on marriage, say he has a point. They wonder if open-government rules intended to protect political influence of the individual voter, combined with the power of the Internet, might be having the opposite effect on citizens.
“These are very small donations given by individuals, and now they are subject to harassment that ultimately makes them less able to engage in democratic decision making,” said Chris Jay Hoofnagle, senior fellow at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at the University of California.
It sounds as though even some liberals are perturbed by this. I bet not many, though. And I don’t see anything being done about changing the law, at least not so far.]
This is not photoshopped: Marilyn Monroe the bodybuilder
Taken for a 1952 photo essay in Life, this picture was one of a series that never got published in the original article:
Koch in the WSJ
I’m told that todays’s Charles Koch opinion piece in the WSJ is good, but I can’t seem to get behind the WSJ firewall. The usual tricks to do so aren’t working, so I’ll link to this excerpt, and leave it to you to find the article itself.
Understanding the significance of McCutcheon: campaign finance and the history of free speech protection
I must confess that the McCutcheon case that was decided by SCOTUS yesterday rested on an area of law with which I wasn’t all that familiar. One of the big questions yesterday’s ruling raised for me was: if campaign contributions are Bill of Rights-protected speech, then under what rationale can they be regulated and limited? Is the mere temptation to government corruption or possibility of corruption enough? Shouldn’t the standard be higher than that, since freedom of speech is such an important liberty? And what would the legal argument be behind an answer of “no”?
The articles I read yesterday did not answer my question. But today I struck pay dirt in this offering at Volokh by David Bernstein. It goes into the background of the Progressive (i.e. leftist) attitude towards freedom of speech and the entire doctrine of natural rights embedded in the Constitution.
Here’s an excerpt, but it’s well worth reading the whole thing [emphasis mine]:
Progressives identified freedom of speech as a civil liberty to differentiate it from what Progressive understood to be the obsolete, individualist, natural-rights based liberties of the American past. While activist government was inimical to such rights as liberty of contract and property rights, it arguably buttressed a Progressive case for freedom of speech. According to Progressive advocates of constitutional protection for freedom of expression, the more active a role played by government, the more important it is to ensure that public policy is subject to vigorous and uninhibited debate. Such debate not only could bring important considerations to light, but also could serve as a check on those who would use public power for private gain, which in turn would lead to better public policy, which in turn would create a welcome demand for even more government.
In 1927, Justice Brandeis penned an extraordinarily influential concurrence supporting constitutional protection for freedom of speech in Whitney v. California. Consistent with his Progressivism, Brandeis defended freedom of speech primarily on the instrumental ground that it promoted free and rational public discussion, essential for the American people to govern themselves. By focusing on the social interest in democratic self-government, Brandeis attempted to differentiate freedom of speech from individualist rights such as liberty of contract and other traditional assertions of natural rights against the government.
Later on, freedom of speech was of special interest to the left because in the 60s it protected radical speech from infringements and helped the left to promulgate its message. But when it is in the left’s interest to restrict freedom of speech, that idea of general social interest can be used to limit speech.
And that’s what Justice Breyer—joined by the other liberal justices—tried to do in his McCutcheon dissent. Here’s Bernstein again:
…[In recent years] opposition to First Amendment protection of campaign donations has become a significant “cause” on the liberal left. It’s not hard to see why: the legacy mainstream media, Hollywood, academia, publishing, the legal profession, the mainline churches, and the arts, i.e., almost all of the leading opinion-making areas of American life, are dominated by liberals (though conservatives dominate talk radio, evangelical churches, and have Fox News). The one place where the playing field is more or less level is in campaign spending. Limit campaign spending, and left-leaning opinion-makers utterly dominate American political discourse.
But how can liberals, who so expansively interpret other constitutional provisions, narrow the First Amendment so that campaign finance no longer gets protection?
Justice Breyer’s dissent today shows the way, as he revives the old Progressive conception of freedom of speech as serving instrumental purposes (which he calls “First Amendment interests”), rather than protecting individual rights or reining in potential government abuses. And once we identify those “First Amendment interests,” we must limit freedom of speech to ensure that they are advanced…
Just to make sure he’s not being too subtle, Breyer goes back to the source, Justice Brandeis, citing his opinion in Whitney for the proposition that freedom of speech is protected because it’s ”essential to effective democracy.”
Further showing off his affinity for the Progressive statism of a century ago…, Breyer turns constitutional history on its head, by declaring that the purpose of the First Amendment was not to prevent government abuses, but to ensure ”public opinion could be channeled into effective governmental action.”
A more stark demonstration of the difference between left and right could hardly be devised. And we are just one justice away from having Breyer’s vision realized.
Reid: hey, it worked the first time, so why not?
Senate majority leader Harry Reid has a whole page on his official Senate.gov website devoted to revealing “THE FACTS ABOUT THE KOCH BROTHERS.” One of the alleged facts promoted on Reid’s website is that the Kochs do not pay any corporate taxes…
The claim that the Koch brothers don’t pay corporate income taxes was first made by former White House official Austan Goolsbee, but Koch Industries lawyer Mark Holden disputed the accusation and raised the question of whether someone in the Obama administration illegally accessed the Kochs’ tax returns. Goolsbee’s comments led to a federal investigation–the results of which have never been released.
In October 2010, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that Goolsbee’s claim “was wrong.” But that hasn’t stopped the Senate majority leader from promoting the claim four years later.
Of course it hasn’t. Because nothing stopped him when he asserted a similar lie about Romney during the 2012 campaign (adding, for good measure, “His poor father must be so embarrassed about his son”). One thing of which I’m pretty sure: Reid himself is beyond such petty emotions as embarrassment.
That’s what happens when the MSM does nothing to challenge a lie.