Octopodial Chrome

Here’s an interesting theory from Roger Unger, M.D.: obesity is not the cause of metabolic syndrome but rather a defense against it. Metabolic syndrome is a fancy new name for belly fat and increased risk for heart disease, strokes and diabetes—it’s afflicting more and more Americans these days.

Dr. Unger’s theory is is intriguing, and he may be on to something. I’m not certain, though, what the prognosis is: okay, so fat doesn’t cause the problem but what does? Is it simple lack of exercise? In that case, the answer is simple: raise the gasoline tax to $4/gallon, all proceeds to go toward bicycles for the poor and new bike-only roads. Is it the wrong sort of food? Then start subsidising the right stuff and stop subsidising the wrong stuff (although—what if certain key political states like Iowa can’t meet the nation’s needs for healthy food as they can for maize?). More research is clearly needed.

Chris Dixon has a great post examining the perverse incentives which reward executives for mismanagement. Well worth the read.

Roger Clegg offers up an illuminating parable. It starts:

Suppose you are a lifeguard, and you are presented with studies showing that boys are more likely to drown than girls, probably because they engage in riskier behavior. Now, how does this affect the job you do as a lifeguard?

Well, I hope that one thing you do not do is shrug if you see a girl drowning. You also should not try to rescue boys who are not drowning.

In fact, if this datum doesn’t help you spot drowning people, and it probably doesn’t, then it won’t affect the way you do your job as lifeguard at all. You look for people flailing and screaming, and knowing that most of them will be boys is really irrelevant to you.

Would it prompt you to support “Safety First” swim programs for boys only? Well, so long as there is some percentage of girls who would benefit from such programs, it’s not clear why you would want to exclude girls from them. Maybe the “Safety First” videos you show in the programs would be more likely to depict boys doing typically boy-things, but that’s about it.

And, of course, if further studies showed that it’s not so much sex that matters, but some other factor, then you would care even less about gender, and would be even less supportive of a program for boys and boys alone. For example, if there were some way instead to target risk-seekers for the program—thereby excluding cautious boys (and girls), and including risk-seeking girls (and boys)—then you would be all for it.

Read the whole thing—it’s good.

Colonel James Moschgat, USAF, relates the story of a janitor and the lessons he learnt from his example. There’s some good stuff here.

The Wall Street Journal notes that wool is coming back: it insulates better, it is more attractive and it’s renewable. Frankly, I think it’s a lot more comfortable than synthetics too. A lot of folks disagree, but I think they’ve not taken the time to get used to wool; also, I wonder if they’ve encountered the new non-synthetic blends and varieties which are super-soft.

As for the notion that kids raised on synthetic pseudo-fleece won’t go near wool, I’m sure that kids raised on McDonald’s have trouble with French cuisine. That doesn’t mean I’m burning my Le Central gift card (thanks Dad!).

Last month the New York Times ran a surprisingly good set of features on hunting, composed of an article on the first turkey season on Long Island, a a video on urbanites going hunting and finally an accompanying article the third day. They’re worth a read.

I think a lot of people don’t really understand hunting. I don’t do it for the kill—if anything, actually killing the birds is the least fun part of a hunt—but for the camaraderie, the time spent with friends in the outdoors, the reality of tromping in a farmer’s field looking for birds to eat. There’s something honest and straightforward about it that I enjoy. I can look across a section and know that I walked across every one of those furrows; I can see the bootprints of the men who hunted them yesterday, or earlier this morning; I can see the tracks and sign of birds and rabbits and dogs and cattle; I can see a particular piece of territory and know that there’s a good change there’ll be a bird in there; other times, I’ll be surprised by one where I didn’t expect him. And at the end of the day, I know that for once in my life I’ve earned my food in a way I never used to.

It’s pretty neat to read that even in our coastal elites might be relearning the joys of hunting for themselves.

Slowly but surely the forces of freedom are pushing back the liberty-hating brigades of anti-smoking fascists. This is a Good Thing, not because cigarettes are particularly pleasant (they’re not) or because Big Tobacco is particularly decent or honest (it’s not), but because it’s a fundamental principles of property rights that a property owner has the right to allow what he wants within extremely broad limits, and the public has the right not to attend if they don’t want to.

Carol Yoon pens an ode to the joys of classifying living organisms. You know, I’d not really given the subject much thought before, other than to know that it was mildly interesting, but she has some interesting factlets and whets the appetite for more.

Hat-tip to Drew.

I’ve recently been hearing from multiple sources that running shoes are actually counter-productive: they encourage poor running form and discourage using the natural shock absorbers the Lord provided for us, which leads to more injuries. Given that all three of my brothers have had leg problems in their training, this is an important concern for me, so I decided to take a leap of faith and get a pair of Vibram FiveFingers, a barefooting shoe.

The term sounds counter-intuitive, but it actually makes sense: it’s a shoe designed with no or minimal padding when allows the foot to flex freely, as though one were barefoot, but which protects one from glass and parasites which burrow through the feet (hookworm is nasty).

I like the FiveFingers because of the articulated toes. They look strange, but it’s so cool to actually be able to actually use my foot; it’s like the difference between gloves and mittens. Terra Plana make a line of more-traditional looking barefooting shoes which look traditional but have ultra-thin (about 1/8″), flexible soles. I might get a pair for the office.

The only warning I have is this: approach barefooting as though you were starting to run all over again. Your leg and foot muscles are almost certainly not developed enough due to years of under-use so you need to gradually get into the swing of things. I made the mistake of putting the shoes on and running a mile…very stupid.

Instead, use a staged program where you start off walking three times a week for a month, then start run/walk periods, increasing the ratio of running to walking, then eventually start running straight through. I’m doing that now.

It feels great to run like a little kid again!

The standard response to an unhappy marriage nowadays is to end it instead of mending it. Laura Munson chose not to do that, and saved her family and her marriage. Her husband was going through an emotional low and thought that leaving his family would solve the problem (not bloody likely); instead of giving in—which is the socially-expected course of action—she waited him out. And eventually he realised that the fault lay not in his family but in himself.

Theodore Dalrymple—a British subject and physician, and thus with intimate knowledge of their health care system—warns us that there is no fundamental right to health care and that State-funded health care is often insufficient. Takeaway line: There is no right to health care—any more than there is a right to chicken Kiev every second Thursday of the month.

I recently happened upon Life Cycle of a Silver Bullet. It examines how it is that an approach that succeeds for one company doesn’t necessarily work at others. This isn’t rocket science, but one sees it happen over and over. Basically, cargo-cult imitation of what worked in one situation doesn’t necessarily work in another situation any more than the original cargo cults succeeded in bringing back the angels-with-gifts by setting up bamboo airfields and coconut headphones.

The real method behind every successful methodology is this: take an honest look at your problems, and find a specific solution for them. The solutions to someone else’s problems may address some of yours if they are sufficiently similar—or may lead you in entirely the wrong direction.

This should be well-known, but apparently it isn’t.

Nat Friedman has some interesting thoughts about nerds and jocks. He refers to Germany as a country where engineering is respected. I wonder how true that is…isn’t football pretty popular over there?

Do you think that you know about Christianity? Why not get to know the original? It’s a pretty cool site with some nice high-level articles answering various questions and providing information folks might not know—like that the Bible came from us (yup: we’re not a Bible-based church, but rather the Bible is a Church-based book).

Iain Murray argues that systematic risk in financial governments exist because of the State. I think he may very well be right: absent the expectation of a bailout, would markets more accurately price risk? It’s a reasonable proposition.

Jeremy Beer has an intriguing piece on how our meritocratic world has led to the downfall of small towns. I’m not certain yet what my thoughts are; it requires some mulling-over.

Sally Pipes makes some excellent points about health care. The most important one IMHO is that health care is a necessity but not a natural right. Here’s another good one: A little known fact is that of all of life’s necessities, save clothing, health care is by far the least costly. It’s not until Americans become senior citizens that the average household spends more out of pocket on heath care than entertainment and dining out. Yet we don’t decry the crisis in restaurant bills, football games, and rock concerts.

It turns out that speed bumps are deadly: while they save lives by slowing traffic, they also end lives by slowing ambulances. Apparently for every life saved up to 85 are lost. Whoops.

Oregon plans to raise the beer tax nineteen-fold, from $2.60 per barrel to $52.21. Crazy stuff.

Roland Martin is a commenter on CNN; he lauds the recent tobacco tax increase. This is the single largest federal tobacco tax increase of all time: the excise tax on cigarettes has gone up from 39 cents per pack to $1.01; the tax on large cigars goes up 35.36 cents; on little cigars 97 cents; pipe tobacco goes from $1.75/lb to $2.83; rolling papers are going up $1.97. The worst of the increases is on loose cigarette tobacco: it has gone from $1.10/lb to $24.78. Indeed, the majority of the cost of rolling tobacco is not the tobacco itself but the tax.

Martin approves of this because he doesn’t like smoking and he thinks that increased taxes will decrease smoking. What if I don’t like fat people like Roland Martin? Is it okay to tax people by weight? I propose $1/pound/month.

Roland Martin can take a long walk off a short pier. The rest of us should support a fair, just and uniform tax code. Taxes are necessary; excess taxes are not.

One thing social conservatives often have trouble with is describing exactly why sexual conservatism matters. Jim Kalb has a pretty good list of frequently asked questions about exactly that. I don’t know that I’d phrase all of my own answers identically, but all-in-all he makes some excellent points.

Charles Fountain has a great article on how subsidised spring training is basically welfare for wealthy teams. Yes, there is a positive impact to communities where spring training takes place (after all, the rich players come into town and spend money, and so do ball fans who want to see them), but is it worth the cost? Moreover, what’s the opportunity cost of that tax-based investment in spring training subsidies? Could that money be better spent by the communities themselves? Could it be better spent by the individual taxpayers? I can’t help but think that would be the case. For one thing, not all taxpayers care about sports; perhaps they would rather spend their money on ballet or opera. Or maybe just food.

Charles Murray argues that it’s a good thing that America has not followed Europe’s example. I tend to agree: my perception of Europe is that is a once-great but now-hollow civilisation, unable even to maintain itself, much less spread its ideals. It’s sad, really.

Writing on ethnonationalism, Jerry Z. Muller raises a really interesting point: we tend nowadays to regard nationalism as outdated and discredited, but in Europe it won. From the multi-ethnic British, French, German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires have emerged relatively homogeneous nation-states, and in fact there are now only two European states without a dominant nationality: Switzerland and Belgium.

A really, really good and thought-provoking read. The US, of course, is predominantly American, which is to say English-speaking, more-or-less theoretically Christian, paying at least lip service to liberty, but each of those attributes is rapidly changing: we’ve a growing non-English subclass; our churches are emptying but atheism is by no means dominant enough to be the state religion—and liberty has few friends these days. I wonder what that bodes for our future.