Across the Great Divide

Of Pigs and Parts.

Today I biked into town against high winds, but believe me, Minnesota, I'm not complaining. I was on a mission to find a glass piggy bank as video prop, and sure enough, I found this cutie in the first antique shop I visited.

Cost me eight bucks plus tax. No idea how long it had been on the shelf, but the price certainly had not gone up recently due to inflation, commodity prices, transportation costs, devaluation of the dollar or supply and demand. I'm reasonably confident Colorado antiques retailers aren't walking through their shops, marking up prices of other inventory on the shelves, either.

If anything, there's downward pressure on their prices, just as there is on homes right now. I mean, who needs a butter churn — or a bigger house payment with a longer commute?

But bicycle parts?

Bike dealer Jim Thill reports that he watched  the wholesale price of a certain item increase 25% over the weekend, and a 50% over the past few months. Unfortunately, it's probably an indicator of the dollar's weakness, and not a sign that bikes are becoming the new hybrids.

The World According to Data.

The tagline for Worldmapper is "The world as you've never seen it before." Actually, if you're into information design, you probably have.

Michael Kidron married global perspective, political analysis, graphic design and data from the CIA in the State of the World Atlas (first published in 1981 and heading into its 8th edition) and The War Atlas (1983). Worldmapper may be more up-to-date and accessible, but its more fluid reworking of maps to portray relative differences among nations actually conveys less information — especially if you're looking for specific countries.

Still, the maps do succeed as a way of provoking global thoughts in the short-attention-span crowd.

Here's a picture of the countries of destination for both refugees and internally displaced persons. Unfortunately, there's no way on the map to distinguish internally uprooted people (in Iraq or the Sudan) with refugees entering another country (say, France or the U.S.). A poster version does list top 20 countries and shows the breakout by region, however.

Here's a map showing where the world's rabies cases occur — most are in India.

And here's the distribution of the Sunni Muslim population.

I Feel I Should Show Up.

The boys are at it again, and I promised not to miss the next one, but I'm a bit out of range to make it to Intermedia Arts on April 1st.

Instead of repeating themselves with another speed lecture series, Troy Gallas and Colin Kloecker, young designers who brought us Solutions Twin Cities, are curating an exhibit and other events that merge "data visualization, artistic expression, and interactive installations."

It's called W(e are)here: Mapping the Human Experience, and the gallery speak may not get you too excited, but there's a beer prelude at Herkimer Pub & Brewery at 5 pm Tuesday and a mapping mashup /meetup and...

The promo site will give you a better idea of what to expect on Tuesday as well as the rest of the exhibition run.

While there, I ran across We Feel Fine, which I gather is part of the exhibition, but you can also explore it online. It searches blogs for versions of the phrase "I feel" and then incorporates the statement in an interactive "exploration of emotion on a global scale."

I feel certain I'll be showing up there soon.

Why Won't Godless Liberals Help the Poor?

Thursday's Why Do Conservative Christians Kill Their Kids? could've been an early April 1st post, but it was actually a bad reaction to an overdose of "liberals are [bad/unethical/unpatriotic/hypocrites/can't count to numerous] and here is my carefully selected fact to prove it."

This impulse welled up after spending far more time on John McCain's mouth than any non-member of the American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry should, and then reading George Will's "Liberals speak of generosity; conservatives actually have it."

"The surprise is that liberals are markedly less charitable than conservatives," he intones, sounding not very surprised at all, while the headline writer follows right along.

Will picked this week to write about a book published 16 months ago that forwards a premise that liberals give financial lip service to their social values. You've probably heard this already, in a far less affected manner than Will manages:

While conservatives tend to regard giving as a personal rather than governmental responsibility, some liberals consider private charity a retrograde phenomenon — a poor palliative for an inadequate welfare state, and a distraction from achieving adequacy by force, by increasing taxes.

In other words, we substitute other people's taxes for our personal charity.

You'd think in honor of tax time Will would at least congratulate us Blue Staters for taking smaller deductions, thereby paying more to the government. Isn't that living your values?

Okay, seriously. My annoyance with Will's piece starts with how he slants the evidence even further to the right than what's in Arthur C. Brooks's Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism. Will says:

Although liberal families' incomes average 6 percent higher than those of conservative families, conservative-headed households give, on average, 30 percent more to charity than the average liberal-headed household ($1,600 per year vs. $1,227).

Will notes the importance of religion as an underpinning of conservative values, but he neglects to mention that religious giving accounts for most of this disparity.

Brooks found religious donors gave about 3.5 times the amount secular donors did — on average $2,210 versus $642 — and most of that giving went to religious causes. That tracks with a recent report from the Minnesota Council on Foundations, which says individual religious giving in the state dwarfs all other categories at about 60% of charitable dollars.

But according to a review in Philanthropy, when Brooks measured only giving to non-religious causes, the difference between religious and secular givers fell to $88. He also found that religious conservatives gave slightly more than religious liberals, while secular liberals were more generous than their conservative counterparts.

I could further question the size and source of any giving gap, but what really got me was the divisive set up. Like asking "why do conservatives kill their kids?" Will's formulation of the research is presented in a way that incites argument rather than invites exploration by the "accused."

Instead, what if we approached Brooks's book in a spirit of discovery? What sorts of questions might we ask? And what might we learn about ourselves that would actually be useful?

For example:

• Am I more generous than other Americans? If not, is that something I want to change?
• Why do I give? To solve social ills or make myself feel good?
• Do my giving patterns show ideological or class biases? Does that matter?
• Is it better to give to the poor than to the arts or environment? How do I make those choices?
• Do my political opinions make it hard for me to see the actual social value in religious giving and faith-based initiatives? Do others discount the value of public investment for similar reasons?
• If we can agree on desired outcomes from fulfilling social needs, will it be easier for the community to agree on a variety of funding methods?

When readers are introduced to issues in a way that accentuates existing political notions — such as government wastes my money or wealth and morality are incompatible — it's very difficult to reach any kind of understanding, either of the other side's beliefs or the deeper complexities of the problem.

This article about fundamentalism expresses in another way the constructive potential of the tension between liberal and conservative thought.

Fundamentalism's conservative impulse wants stability in societies. Liberal impulses serve to give us not stability but civility: humanity. They do this by expanding the definitions of our inherited territorial categories. The essential job of liberals in human societies is to enlarge our understanding of who belongs in our in-group. This is the plot of virtually all liberal advances.

[...]

When liberal visions work, it's because they have kept one foot solidly in our deep territorial impulses with the other foot free to push the margin, to expand the definition of those who belong in “our” territory.

When liberal visions fail, it is often because they fail to achieve just this kind of balance between our conservative impulses and our liberal needs.         

The problem, of course, is that this notion of balance fits better with liberalism. The fundamentalists are less likely to budge.

End of the World as We Know It?

Raul Castro has lifted the Cuban ban on cell phone ownership for regular citizens. So, reportedly, is Korea's Kim Jong-Il. No word on whether they will also follow the U.S. example on monitoring phone traffic.

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How is the End of the World like Bill Clinton?

It never shows up on time.

So why go into a cave in November to await the  predicted May arrival of the end? Seems like July would be soon enough. Or better yet, why go into a cave at all and miss the fireworks?

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And you thought "price war" was a figure of speech. A Detroit gas station owner was killed in his yard by an unknown assailant.

[Hassan] Masbouth was facing open murder charges. He never denied shooting Jawad Bazzi, his 46-year-old business rival and owner of the BP gas station near Fort and Springwells.

Masbouth was accused of shooting Bazzi in November, after Bazzi and other men walked across the street to confront his competitor about lowering prices at his station. A fight broke out between the two men and Masbouth allegedly shot Bazzi to death.

The November killing was precipitated by a confrontation after Masbouth lowered his gas price by three cents to $2.93 per gallon. Masbouth claimed self defense in shooting Bazzi

[I]n the back of the head and abdomen after Masbouth was hit over the head with a pole used to change gas prices on signs at stations, according to the reports.

The two had been involved in an ongoing price war. And even the shooting did not stop the stations from continuing their fight. WXYZ's Bill Proctor reported at the time that that as soon as Bazzi's body was taken away, workers at his station changed the price-per-gallon of unleaded from $2.96 to $3.09.

 

*****
A new short film by a right-wing Dutch critic of Islam  Geert Wilders is provoking demonstrations in the Muslim world and raising questions about multiculturalism, free speech and conflicts between fundamentalism and Dutch liberalism.

A Pakistani diplomat said the film deeply offended the sentiments of Muslims all over the world and could result in expression of strong abhorrence and outrage. Given the assassinations of Pim Fortuyn and film director Theo Van Gogh, the Dutch have reason to be concerned about how strong those expressions might be.

Dutch immigration expert Paul Scheffer thinks the conflict is "indicative of integration."  

The atmosphere of tolerance that was created in Holland during the 1960s and 1970s was not genuine, Scheffer explains, and should therefore not be mourned. In fact, he says, it encouraged "mutual cultural avoidance" on the part of immigrant and native communities alike. Integration, he argues, involves conflict and change. "When change does not occur, then it's a sign we have cultural avoidance."
 
The Netherlands, with its population of one million immigrants, can be seen as "a laboratory where many of the questions visible everywhere in Europe are debated," according to Scheffer. By contrast, Wilders says he sees the conflict as threatening the country's ability to survive as a free society.
 
"Wilders urges the Muslims to respect our constitution and the separation of state and church, but in the very same sentence he says he's against building more mosques, and advocates banning the Koran," Scheffer complains. "I think he should be publicly confronted about this internal confliction more often and more effectively."
 
One the explanations that the scholar offers for the Netherlands' immigrant problems sounds uncomfortably similar to Israel's relationship with its population of approximately 200,000 foreign workers and asylum-seekers.
 
"People who came in as 'guest workers' in the 1960s thought they would stay a while, earn some money and go back home," Scheffer said on his visit, which was arranged as a joint initiative by The Royal Dutch Embassy in Israel together with Tel Aviv University.
 
"They didn't think of about the possibility that their children could become Dutch. They lived in a state of suspension and they didn't even learn the language." Dutch society, Scheffer said, shared in this "mutual illusion" to find itself "enormously changed without ever preparing."

Colorado Weekend: Big Gun Coming to Town.

I'm not trying to set up Joel for our next gun discussion, really I'm not.

After all, Minneapolis has a ripe current case that provides a provocative example of the ambiguities surrounding self-defense claims.

I'm just showing that out here in Colorado, where the buffalo roam, the varieties of gun news have a different tenor right now.

(The 32 buffalo were shot near my great grandmother's former homestead, a place the columnist called "the middle of a lot of central Colorado nothingness," which must make Denver the center of everythingness.)

*****

Some exciting news from where I sit. Dick Cheney's coming next week to the far left part of the state — a better description might be "to the right of Utah" — for Senate fund raiser for Bob Schaffer — a good description would be to the right of Mark Kennedy... or maybe near the center of nothingness.

I'm wondering if would be worth 150 bucks to get close to Cheney and really confuse the hell out of anyone checking out my political donations.

*****
My brother-in-law had Tombstone on when I went over for dinner. Damn, they ran a tight ship back then. Oh, sure there were murders and all. But they kept all traces of horse manure off the main street day and night, and the dirt stayed as smooth as my living room floor. Clothes were always clean, women were hot and well kept, except for the one doing the laudanum, and the good guys were are all pretty sensitive for the 21st century, let alone the 19th.

Even when there was bloodshed and Kurt Russell had blood up to his elbows, he could caress his dying brother's forehead and never leave a print! The bar and rooms, including the jail? Immaculate. The consumptive Doc Holliday? Pale, yes, but otherwise, Paul Verlaine with six guns. Three bad cowboys went to Boot Hill in curved glass-topped coffins that looked better than any piece of furniture I've ever owned.

Doc Holliday died in Glenwood Springs, the town where I grew up, and making the little hike up the mountain to see his tombstone was like going to Mall of America. (It's what you did when you had visitors and didn't know what to do with them.)

My grandfather's ranch (not the Colorado side of the family) was near Tombstone in Cochise county. I don't recall any woods like they rode through, but maybe life was better around there in the frontier days, and we don't realize how bad we have it.

My Parade of Homes.

Sick of political nonsense? Me, too. I took a ride around my hometown and put together a personal Parade of Homes. I didn't cover everything, but a Parade is all about exclusion.

I this case, I exclude granite counter tops, great rooms and a bunch of other stuff you can find anywhere.

Remember, this'll autoplay unless you seize the controls and use the arrows.

Why Do Religious Conservatives Kill Their Kids?

On June 20, 2001, Andrea Yates drowned her five children, who ranged in age from six months to seven years, in a bathtub in her home. Prior to this, she had manifested symptoms of depression with psychosis, which were exacerbated in her postpartum periods. She had been hospitalized four times and was catatonic and mute during one admission. In statements made following the crime, she indicated that she believed that she was a bad mother and that she had concerns that her children would not grow up properly secondary to her shortcomings. She noted that she killed them to save them from eternal damnation.
— Psychiatry MMC

Here's a topic for study by some enterprising PhD student: Do more religious conservatives than liberals murder their children?

(You can spare me the comments about abortion. I'm talking about filicide here — and even more, our stupid tendency to explain differences in complex behaviors based on a generalized political affiliation.)

I was thinking about this even before George Will's latest column about how conservatives are more generous than liberals, which I'll take up in a separate post.

In Wisconsin this week, the home schooled daughter of a fundamentalist family died because her diabetes was left untreated. The mother says they are not crazy, religious people who belong to any organized faith. She just writes for an end-of-days ministry website on the side and actively proselytizes other women. Her sister-in-law, who called the sheriff, seemed to think there was a problem.

The aunt: "My sister-in-law, she’s very religious, she believes in faith instead of doctors ... and she called my mother-in-law today ... and she explained to us that she believes her daughter’s in a coma now and she’s relying on faith. ..."

The dispatcher got more information from the caller and asked if an ambulance should be sent.

The aunt: "Please. I mean, she’s refusing. She’s gonna fight it so ... We’ve been trying to get her to take her to the hospital for a week, a few days now so."

In Iowa, an embezzling banker bludgeoned his wife and four kids to death before killing himself. In communications left behind, he indicated he believed his family was in heaven.

And, not to leave anyone out, a Muslim cab driver in Canada strangled his 16-year-old daughter because she refused to submit to his control and demands she wear traditional Muslim garb.

I've looked for a study that examines the role of political and religious beliefs of parents who murder their children. Haven't found one. But golly, the circumstantial evidence doesn't look good, does it? And it stands to reason, when you decide to kill your kids with a baseball bat, the idea you're sending them to heaven might lets you swing just a little more freely.

Anyone offended yet? No, I'm not calling all religious fundamentalists child murderers. But if there's a pattern of behavior that could lead to prevention, wouldn't it be good to understand it?

Psychiatric researchers may not see much merit in testing my only half-serious hypothesis. The research already indicates that filicide is a multidimensional crime, and like most human behavior, is not likely to reduce down to red state/blue state simplification.

But it's hard to shake that whenever I see news of a suicide bomber or a murderous parent, God shows up pretty frequently in the story. John Kerry bumper stickers, not so much.

4,000 in Perspective.

As long as my empathy for the military is being questioned this week, I might as well pass along this time and motion information graphic [via The Deets]. I'm sure someone with an underdeveloped insula can turn this into trivializing the deaths of 4,000 service members.

Non-Compassionate Conservatives, Here's Your Chance!

Using brain scans, University of Wisconsin researchers have isolated a region of the brain — the insula — that plays a significant role in positive emotions such as loving-kindness and compassion.

"The insula is extremely important in detecting emotions in general and specifically in mapping bodily responses to emotion - such as heart rate and blood pressure - and making that information available to other parts of the brain," says Davidson, also co-director of the HealthEmotions Research Institute.

Activity also increased in the temporal parietal juncture, particularly the right hemisphere. Studies have implicated this area as important in processing empathy, especially in perceiving the mental and emotional state of others.

The study findings suggest that an individual's level of of empathy or compassion can be increased, and that practice — in this case meditation —  people can

develop skills that promote happiness and compassion. "People are not just stuck at their respective set points," he says. "We can take advantage of our brain's plasticity and train it to enhance these qualities."

How soon before certain legislators call for the project's funding to be cut off?