A Curious Explanation as to Why Europe's Population Fell During the Dark Ages

Learned something curious from Berkowitz's Sex and Punishment, a book I picked up from the Harvard Bookstore a week ago.

Medieval priests used penitentials to define rules and punishment. A lot of prohibitions involved sex and some were odd. (To be fair, in an age before cars, guns, and corporations there wasn't much other behavior to regulate.) In a few regions, the penalty for performing fellatio on one's husband was greater than the penalty for killing him.

The penitentials offered a labyrinth of penalties and prohibitions. Among other things, it left only about 4 days a month during which it was "legal" to have sex. Even those limits weren't enough: married couples could be prosecuted if they were known to enjoy sex too much. Pope Gregory (~540 to 604) declared that marital sex was blameless only when there was no pleasure involved.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, during the period of the Dark Ages when these penitentials had the most influence - from about 500 to 1050 - Europe's population actually shrank.

So that's kind of interesting.

The Trick is Finding Someone Whose Unusual Interest in Dwarfs Has Forced Them to Sell Their Art

From the early 1500s to early 1600s, the English destroyed a lot of art. Perhaps as much as 98% of their paintings and statues as part of their rejection of Catholicism and its rather worldly reliance on images. 

King Charles (the king who ruled until the Puritans cut off his head in 1649) revived an interest in art. An avid collector, at one point he was able to get a good deal on some great paintings (among them a Titian) because a certain Gonzaga family had fallen on hard times morally and financially; only interested in sex with dwarfs, they sold him paintings in order to get money to purchase a rather extraordinary Hungarian she-dwarf for a high price. (Yes. The actual woman. Not a painting of her.)

Had Shakespeare only lived a few more decades, he could have included accounts like this in his plays. As it is, we have only stories of passionate teens and mad kings.

[This is a story that was casually dropped into conversation on Andrew Marr's Start the Week podcast today. It struck me as remarkable.]

Some Thoughts on Sex Scandals, Politics, Culture and Consent

As I write this, Twitter is a twitter about sex. At least for the accounts I follow, that's unusual.

The two big stories are Roy Moore and Al Franken. The left is appalled that Moore won't drop out of the senate race and is asking Franken to resign.

There is a line of Shakespeare, "First let's kill all the lawyers," that seems to describe what so often happens in political arguments. The point should be to clearly define terms as lawyers would do but instead, on this discussion, we're killing off all efforts at clarity and lumping a lot of  behavior under the heading of "sexual misconduct."

We now know why Roy Moore dresses like Woody from Toy Story

In Roy Moore's mind, sexual misconduct does include consenting adults engaged in homosexual behavior but does not include a 32 year old man groping and touching a 14 year old girl he met at a child custody hearing.

In Donald Trump's mind, sexual misconduct does not include grabbing women's pussies or kissing them because they are so beautiful or regularly having affairs. Sexual misconduct does include whatever it is that Al Franken is doing.

In Al Franken's mind, because he's a conscientious liberal, sexual misconduct is anything guys like Moore and Trump have done AND anything he - Al Franken - may have done that would upset his constituents.

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Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore's repeatedly made unwanted advances on girls; in his thirties, he dated, groped and molested girls between 14 and 16 years old. And speaking of repeatedly, I've repeatedly heard people excuse the folks still wanting to vote for Moore as being no different from Bill Clinton supporters, people willing to compartmentalize a man's private life from his policy stances, essentially saying "I like his policies and what he does in his personal time is not my business."

When Trump confessed that he grabbed women by the pussy, I heard the same thing.  Defenders of Trump said, "Well, people still voted for Bill Clinton even though they knew about his misconduct."

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What is clear about Bill Clinton was that after marrying Hillary he had sex with other women, at least one of whom he apparently had an affair with. What is less clear is that he actually forced a woman to have sex, something Juanita Broaddrick accused Clinton of doing. Three women accused him of unwanted advances. And most clearly of all, he had a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky that led to his impeachment. Lewinsky doesn't describe unwanted advances, though; she refers to it as falling in love. 

What is clear about Donald Trump is that he assaulted women and had sex outside of marriage multiple times (and twice that sex matured into an affair and then marriage). What is also clear is that he readily confessed to assaulting women on tape (a confession so repulsive that it got Billy Bush, who merely chuckled at the confession, fired). What is less clear is how often he did that; about a dozen women have accused him of assault and unwanted advances, which seems to corroborate his own confession.

What is clear about Roy Moore is that when he was in his 30s he dated and propositioned high school girls. He was actually banned from the YMCA and asked not to hang out at the mall because of this behavior and his coworkers thought it strange that he would attend high school football games to pick up girls. He's been accused by multiple women of having made unwanted advances on them when they were girls - 14 to 16.

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The first question is whether Roy Moore making sexual advances on a 14 year old girl who he literally met at a child custody hearing who later describes it as intimidating and confusing is the same as Bill Clinton making advances on a 22 year old woman who he literally met at work who later describes it as falling in love.

The second question is whether grabbing a woman's pussy hoping for sex is the same as making an unwanted advance in the hopes of sex.

To say yes to these questions is to say that consent is of no consequence. By law, a child younger than the age of consent cannot give consent. By common sense, anytime you grab a woman by the pussy without invitation it is done without consent. By experience, responding to the flirtations of a woman who describes the experience as falling in love is done with consent.

Consent - something the law states can only occur between adults - seems like a fairly useful way to distinguish between sexual conduct and sexual misconduct.

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Example of comedian making a bad joke or threatening advance?

And finally, there is a question as to whether making a sexual joke is the same as sexual misconduct. Going down this path alarms me. If we are going to ask every man who has done something stupid with a woman to resign, we're going to have a lot of job openings. (Going down that route could also take us back to the days when Lenny Bruce was arrested on obscenity charges; comedy is about mocking the sacred and making fun of these odd physical forms we're found in, cracking jokes about farts and the sexual impulses that make fools out of us all.)

What is clear about Al Franken is that he thought it was funny to pose for a picture groping the breasts of a woman who was wearing a bulletproof vest. I was a young man. It makes sense to me that a young man's imagination would find it hilarious to mock the guys who clumsily grope women by simulating that with a woman who would be impervious to bullets, much less hands. Such an act is just absurd enough to seem funny to a young man. There is no suggestion that this was done for anything more than a laugh. Franken himself dismisses it as unfunny now, as likely any man over 40 would.

Al Franken has welcomed a hearing on his behavior. It seems like such a hearing should be promised to start the day after the hearing on Trump's misconduct has ended.

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Culture plays a role here, obviously.

There is a sensibility about affairs often attributed to the French that winks at flirtation and sex outside of marriage as something understandable. Obviously anyone voting for Bill Clinton or Donald Trump was at least reluctantly in this camp.

There is also a culture of child brides found in communities that see girls as people who would aspire to become mothers rather than people who might aspire to careers, to become equal to men outside the home. In these cultures, physical development that has largely played out by 14 is all that matters and intellectual development that might not play out until 18 to 22 is of less consequence as prelude to a relationship. States like Alabama have an age of consent at 16 and states with higher education levels like California have an age of consent of 18 given their different definitions of what it means to mature. A 14 year old preferred in some cultures because a child is easier to control. 

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The goal of going after guys for sexual misconduct should have two dimensions. One, it should further the notion that women are simply people to everyone they interact with and the object of lust for only a chosen partner(s). Two, any expression of interest in a woman should leave a woman feeling safe.

Given how much larger men are than women the culture should be this simple: a man could express interest in a woman through words and then simply say, "You're now in control. If you are interested I will leave it for you to initiate." We don't (yet?) live in this world, though, and in the world we do live in men have made and do make advances. I assure you that any man has expressed interest in a way that they'd be embarrassed to have broadcast. So what makes a difference between embarrassing and offensive? In my mind it is whether the unwanted advance leaves the woman feeling humiliated and unsafe or flattered and desirable, feeling like an object some guy would use to satisfy his lust or as a person some guy delights in. [Note: I'm not a woman. Women may have very different opinions about this.]

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Consent seems the anchor point in these discussions. To excuse assault on any woman or advances on a child is to dismiss consent as incidental to moral judgment rather than central to it.

Progress, Sex, and the 24 Hour Workweek

About 90% of men had a job in 1900. (The Labor Force Participation Rate, or LFPR is the measure of this.)
The workweek was 60 hours.

Nearly the same percentage of men - 86% - had jobs in 1950.
The workweek was 40 hours.

Between 1900 and 1950, the workweek shortened and roughly the same percentage of men had jobs. Productivity gains translated into a shorter workweek rather than fewer jobs.

In 2017, about 63% of men have jobs.
The work week is about 34 hours.

Since 1950, productivity gains have translated into a slightly shorter workweek and a significantly smaller percentage of men with jobs.

To keep the same percentage of men employed would have meant a workweek of 24 hours instead of 34 (or 40).

Let me briefly digress onto the topic of sex.

Reading history made me deeply sympathetic to people who we would today call prudes. Pregnancy and childbirth could easily kill a woman a century ago. What people today may consider, "regular, healthy sex" could mean supporting a dozen children, a woman's life metaphorically lost to the logistics of child rearing if her life isn't first quite literally lost in the act of childbirth. To find sex alarming a century or two ago seems to me a wildly rational impulse. There was nothing casual about sex in this time, fraught as it was with sobering consequences.

The Pill - and more broadly, a variety of safe contraceptives - has changed sex. Technically speaking, given the rate at which women died in childbirth, a healthy sex life 100 years ago probably meant celibacy. Today, with contraceptives, a healthy sex life can mean sex throughout the week. Sex has been largely separated from childbirth and even when childbirth follows, it is much safer for mother and child. Casual sex is no longer an oxymoron.

The separation of sex from the natural consequence of childbirth caused a sexual revolution. For one thing, premarital sex has become fairly common in the West for the simple reason that sex no longer has to mean pregnancy. Everyone has to find and define their own morality in this time of easy contraception but the consequences of casual sex are far less dire than they were a century ago. This has forced people to rethink what they consider moral. You may have traditional or modern views on sex but whatever drives them it no longer has to be wrestling with the inevitability of childbirth.

Now let me return to the topic of work.

There was a time when 90-some percent of the population had to work simply to feed everyone. To have someone in your group slacking off could translate into starvation or malnutrition after harvest. In this period it made sense to be harsh with folks who weren't working. Today, though, productivity advances mean that we can feed everyone with just 2% of the workforce. No one is going to starve because a few guys in the corner are playing solitaire.

Technology has made it easier to be productive. We have a traditional definition of work ethic that includes - among other things - a 40 hour workweek. Technology and management enhancements have challenged that model in the same way that contraceptives have challenged notions of morality. 4 six-hour days could be to us what 5 eight-hour days were to our grandparents. Proof that we don't need everyone working 40 hours a week is that only 73% as many men are working as did in 1950. It's a fact that we don't need as many hours worked to enjoy our current level of prosperity; the question is whether we adjust to that by having fewer men work 40 hour weeks or having the same percentage of men work 24 hour weeks.

Gains in productivity, like the Pill, have challenged traditional notions of morality and ethics. You may have traditional or modern views on work but whatever drives them, it no longer has to be worry that if someone slacks off we won't have enough to eat.

If we were to lower the workweek to 24 hours, it could result in labor force participation rates of over 80% (assuming the same total number of hours worked as we do now with 63% of men working nearly 40 hour weeks).

How could this help? For one thing, it would result in a broader distribution of wages, a correction to growing income inequality. For another, people working 24 hours a week could have time to engage in creative endeavors that are high-risk and high-return. Pursuit of art, music, business startups or any of a number of efforts that are likely to fail but - should they succeed - have the potential to make the individual rich or gratified and positively change society.  More time outside of work could result in more binge watching of Netflix shows but also more socializing, exercise, startups, sex, and creativity. More people with jobs could even translate into lower incarceration rates.

Having sex need not mean facing the risk of childbirth. Cutting back on hours worked need not mean facing the risk of starvation. Progress has broken old linkages and given us choices that previous generations did not have.

What a 24 hour workweek would mean, of course, is a change in the definition of work ethic. That's not a tough thing, though. There was a time just a century ago when we thought it normal to work 6 ten-hour days. Why not change that again to 4 six-hour days? It could be fascinating to see what might happen.


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Quick acknowledgement.
One reason LFPR for men has dropped is because the LFPR for women has gone up. It might not make sense for men's LFPR to remain closer to 90% when women's LFPR has nearly doubled (rising from 32.4% in 1948 to 57.3% in 2017, roughly 70 years later). Still, the general principle of shorter workweek as a means to sustain higher LFPR holds.

Don John's Continuing Struggle Against Liberals, the Media, the Establishment, Facts, Sense & Sensuality

This election seems like a big deal. It is. We're exactly one month away from election day and the Republican National Committee is seriously considering dumping Trump from the ticket. Nothing like this has happened before.

It isn't obvious how Trump could have more effectively destroyed Republicans' chances in 2016 - not just for the presidency but the House, Senate, and every down ballot election -  if that were his goal the whole time.

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After the last week in which we learned that Donald remained rich in spite of losing investors 99.5% of their money, and we saw evidence of his atrocious treatment of women, I expect him to adopt Dire Strait's "Money for Nothing and Your Chicks for Free" as his new campaign tune.(Remember that when he introduced Mike Pence as his VP, the Trump campaign repeatedly played the Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want." Now we know that was meant for Pence, not Donald.)

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Donald J. Trump's name is actually Donald John Trump. Don John. That's got to be the WASP spelling of Don Juan, no?

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Neil thought the date was going well. She seemed lovely and in spite of her venting a bit about Trump - Neil prided himself on not following politics so he mostly just nodded blankly as she spoke - he really liked her personality. And she seemed to enjoy his silly humor. Then he casually reached for a Tic Tac and when he offered her one she blurted out, "Are you serious?!!"

"What," he called out as she turned around and stormed off. "What did I do?"

Women, he thought. Who can understand them?

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It's becoming more apparent that Trump is going to be crushed in the election but can't they just give him a "President Trump" show in which we can follow him as he says absolutely nonsensical, stupid and offensive things with no country at stake? Do we really have to turn off this "are you kidding me?" story?

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"Grab them by the p--y."
I'm so old I can remember when Mitt Romney got into trouble for saying, "binder full of women."

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One month out from the election, Fivethirtyeight estimates that Clinton has a better chance of winning in a landslide than Trump has of winning at all. And those numbers don't reflect yesterday's appalling new revelations about how boorish he is.

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At some point, the sacred Republican scroll had been mistakenly transcribed from the importance of "pro-life" to "pro-lie." From this typo the Trump - Pence ticket was born.

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Pence won the VP debate by many accounts. Why? He was more calm lying than Kaine was recounting a variety of Trump's outrageous statements. It's worse to become upset about really upsetting statements than it is to deny facts.

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Less than a week passed between the time that we learned that Trump had lost a billion dollars and the time that we learned that because he's a star he can just grab women anywhere he wants. It's a curious strategy that was so baffling that for a while it actually worked: distract us thinking through one really outrageous and offensive thing by blurting out another. But maybe he's tried this one too many times.

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"The media is the message." TV changes the story from what the newspapers told us. Twitter has now changed the story from what TV and newspapers told. If your story can't be reduced to 140 characters, it doesn't make it into the national debate. This is the first Twitter election in the same way that the 1960 election, the first to feature a televised presidential debate, might have been the first TV election.

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The biggest casualty of this election might be the fact that Trump's personality has completely drowned out the conversation on policy. One advantage of focusing on politics every four years is that we almost inevitably have to talk about real issues. This year, with Trump following up one outrageous thing with yet another outrageous thing, generating more controversy in a week than any prior candidate has in an entire election, there has been almost no room in the conversation to talk about issues. This is a huge tragedy because we're living in a time of such change that we really do need to address fundamental issues. Sadly, there is no time left for policy in spite of all the time we're spending on politics this year.

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It might be time for Don John to try a different tactic for distraction. Maybe it's time to bring out Clint Eastwood to talk to a chair.

Sex and Christianity - Same Sex Acceptance is Just Another in a Series of Revolutions

For centuries, the Catholic Church taught that every kind of sex was sinful. Well, all but one kind of sex: sex between married people who were - in that very instance - trying to make a baby. Sex between two women who didn't know each other's middle names or sex between a couple who were madly in love after 20 years of marriage was all sin if it wasn't part of creating the next generation.

Pleasure. Strengthening a relationship. Sex for such suspect reasons was sin.

Few Christians today would agree with that. What was so obvious in one century eventually became anything but obvious in another.

Social conservatives like to think that they are holding to something timeless. In fact, they are holding onto some notion of normal they learned when they were first forming their opinions about the world. It's true that what they believe falls into the category of  "how it has always been" but that "always" simply describes all they have ever personally known. Time doesn't even leave continents in one place, much less notions of normal.

History changes everything and you can see why this unsettling fact would lead so many social conservatives to reject the notion of evolution. Once you admit that things have continually changed, you have to admit that there's no reason your generation will be spared from - or ruined by - change.

How Catholic Confession Has Created Sex Scandals and Driven Members Out of the Church

Before looking at the following graph, keep in mind that the Catholic Church has been around about 1,700 years. Had the church lost just 6 percentage points of its believers each of the last 17 centuries, it would now be effectively obsolete, making Catholics about as common as pagans. Again, losing 6 percentage points per century would have obsoleted it by now.

Which brings us to the precipitous decline of Hispanics who refer to themselves as Catholic in the US.

In just four years, the church has lost 12 percentage points. At this rate, within 25 years no Hispanics will be Catholic. In terms of the time the Church has been around, a quarter of a century is a rounding error.

It's a safe bet that the church won't dissipate that quickly, but it's worth asking how Pope Francis could slow this decline.

I have two complementary theories, one having to do with confession and the other with the modern emphasis on autonomy - the self-defined life that is at the root of democracy and capitalism.

Sex scandals have hurt the church. That seems obvious. Less obvious is the persistent role of confession in sex scandals.

Centuries ago,a young woman confessing to immoral urges was positioned on her knees before the priest, her arms on his legs in a penitent position. Even the most sincere young priest, looking into the face of a beautiful confessor gazing up at him, her face essentially on his lap, would find it hard not to be moved as she confessed to sinful thoughts or acts. So a long time ago, the church decided that a confession booth would both take some of the sexual tension out of this situation and possibly protect the identity of easy marks from rogue priests. Things got better.

Then, in 1910, Pope Pius X decided that children should confess. He thought it was a good idea for 7 year old kids to begin admitting they were sinners. (The list of serious sins includes being late for Mass. It's never too early for someone to start feeling guilty, apparently, even for things for which parents are responsible.) And while the previous practice was to confess once or twice a year, Pius thought confession should become a weekly practice. So about the time everyone else began to listen to weekly radio programs, priests were listening to weekly confessions from prepubescent children.

After this policy, reports of sexual abuse of children rose. It's a terrible policy.

One difference between a church and business is the respect for tradition. It takes a lot to change the policy of a previous pope because that pope was the mouthpiece of God. Even so, popes do change policies. It happens and if Pope Francis cares at all about halting the decline of Catholics, he'll reverse this decision to have children confess. Let children be children and wait until they are teenagers, at least, before beginning to make them feel guilty for living in a body instead of existing as a purely spiritual being, unencumbered by carnal thoughts. That's one policy change that could help to reverse the decline of Catholics.

The second policy change will be harder because it gets at the heart of the difference between Catholics and Protestants.

Authority seems to evolve through at least two stages. In the first stage of nation-states, for instance, the monarch was the ultimate authority. Louis XIV, who ruled France until 1715, famously said, "I am the state." That same century, Thomas Jefferson penned the words, "All men are created equal," and then helped to create a constitution that would replace the monarch as the ultimate authority in a country. At the first stage, authority resides in a person and in a later stage it resides in the written word.

Catholics and Protestants alike believe the Bible is the inspired word of God. The difference is, Protestants think the Bible is the ultimate authority whereas Catholics think the ultimate authority is the clergy (and their ultimate authority is the pope). Catholics warned original Protestants that if they were going to make the Bible the ultimate authority then anyone was free to offer a new interpretation and the result would be thousands of denominations; it turns out they were right. But even in the midst of the chaos of multiple theologies, there is a certain freedom and democracy in the Protestant option. It is not just, as Martin Luther said, "We are all priests." Any Protestant, from Mary Baker Eddy to Billy Graham, is free to be pope, to head his or her own religion. And the Protestant emphasis more closely accords with the impulse of the modern world, with each person defining his or her own life rather than turning to an authority figure for instructions.

Here, too, Pope Francis has a chance to articulate relevant policy. A pope who says, "Who am I to judge," is one that people defining their own life are more likely to love than resent. It would be huge - but honest - for the Catholic Church to acknowledge their role of merely informing rather than defining the individual's conscience. There is a very real difference between a church that helps the individual to define his or her own life and one that wants to define that life.

Hispanics make up nearly half of American Catholics. Their loss is not trivial. It would be absurd for Pope Francis to ignore this problem. The good news for him, though, is that this decline could probably be slowed with just a couple of key changes. It's too late to avoid radical change; the Church is going to either radically change in terms of its numbers or in terms of its policy. We will see whether Francis has more commitment to tradition or reality and which kind of radical change he'll accept. It's too late for the status quo.

Sex (X) and Violence (R)

"What kind of First Amendment would permit the government to protect children by restricting sales of that extremely violent video game only when the woman - bound, gagged, tortured, and killed - is also topless?"
- Justice Stephen Breyer in the dissenting opinion to the recent Supreme Court ruling on video games.

Still I am baffled by how this country rates entertainment. If you were to walk in on your neighbor's teenager having sex, you might freak out or blush but you won't be permanently scarred or call the cops. By contrast, if you walked in on this minor torturing or killing someone, you would be psychologically jolted - perhaps permanently scarred - and call the cops. Most people go their whole life without acts of violence yet few go their whole life without sex.

And yet when it comes to entertainment, we rate sex X and rate violence R. Bizarre.

Wouldn't it be a better planet if politicians were forced to resign over war scandals rather than - or at least along with - sex scandals? Obviously I'm warped. Oh well, at least Breyer shares my bafflement.

Oh, and then Jon Stewart does a much better job of illustrating the absurdity of this ruling in this:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Moral Kombat
www.thedailyshow.com
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The Difference Between the Private and Pubic Sectors

When teaching macroeconomics, I wrote a test asking students about the difference between the public and private sectors. It was not until I was grading the tests that I realized that I'd made a typo. The question as I'd actually written it was, Describe the difference between the private and pubic sectors.

Former presidential candidate John Edwards apparently suffered from similar confusion.

in which your humble blogger feels compelled to opine on the day's sex scandal

Apparently, Bush and Clinton are every kind of thrilled to see David Letterman is in trouble, but the two have very different responses. George wants to do some stand up at Dave's expense but aids are trying to convince him that he'll need something more than the one line he's come up with so far. ("Ha! He's so stupid!")

Clinton, by contrast, is trying to use this as an opportunity for healing. He called Dave and told him, "I feel your compulsion."

As it turns out, Jerry Springer was the future of television, but without shame. And that is an important lesson for would-be blackmailers everywhere: only threaten those with a sense of guilt. If you can find them.

Dave makes a good living mocking the sex lives of others. All HR and publicity issues aside, it'll be interesting to see whether becoming the butt of sex jokes will throw him off his game. [Note that the phrase "becoming the butt of sex jokes" sounds dirtier than it actually is. I think.] It has to seem like a trip through the looking glass to have gone from delivering punch lines to being one. "Confucius say, People living in glass houses should turn out the lights before having sex with interns."

But it would seem optimistic to extort $2 million from an unmarried guy who has had sex. You might be able to extort $2 million from an unmarried guy who has not had sex, but only if he thought he had no other alternatives for it.

I just know that if I ever have an awkward confession to make, I'd like to do it before an audience all giggly with laughing gas and the novelty of being on TV.

Watch Dave here.

Advertising : Matchmaker of Ancient and Modern

In advertising we find the marriage of the most advanced and most ancient technologies: desire for status or sex is married to the latest products to emerge from corporate labs and factories. We buy the newest stuff for the oldest of reasons.

The ad, properly done, creates a false association. Gorgeous, svelte women are somehow associated with beer. The rational mind knows that imbibing 200 calories per glass is probably not going to make one more desirable to a woman who so obviously values fitness. But something has already happened in the process of watching TV. Fictional shows put the snap into the trap of ads.

Science fiction and fantasy in particular - but really any fiction - depends on a suspension of disbelief. Once we've sat before the TV we've already laid aside our capacity for critical thinking. We are ready to believe. So, when the ad comes on, although no one explicitly says that beer will make gorgeous women want you, the implication is enough. We buy the pitch and then buy the product. (And of course, those of us who are superior know that it is not beer that works like this. We know it is actually the whitening toothpaste or luxury car that will make her want us.)

The Internet, as much as biotechnology, represents a current apotheosis of technology. So many amazing advances come together to enable us to watch a dog on a skateboard. And it is a running joke with real substance that the Internet is funded by porn. My work email address spam does not work when I log on remotely and it amazes me how many writers of emails are offering to make my penis longer (an offer that seems odd coming from a total stranger). Advanced technology is funded by stimulating ancient impulses.

Modern technology is really just a sophisticated repression of base impulses. People who cut advertising costs during a recession naively believe that the ads get financed by the companies who produce new technology and products. In actuality, the companies able to sell this new technology are financed by the magic of ads: ads that give repressed desires a acceptable outlet.

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Of course, one of the problem with reading blogs is one never knows whether the author is merely speculating out loud or really means what he or she has written. Of course, until the comments come in, even the blogger is uncertain.

Am I the One Confused or ...?

Just to be clear ...

The conservatives' spokesperson for abstinence-only sex education is teen mother Bristol Palin and their spokesperson for the sanctity of heterosexual marriage is a topless model and Miss California Carrie Prejean?

The Era of Freudian Economics

"I don't know why the economists haven't already figured out the cause of this economic downturn," Bernard said assuredly.

"What is it you know that they don't?" I asked.

"Well it's obvious," Bernard said. "We've given a whole generation no reason for libidinal repression. It is as if we gutted their desire for achievement."

"What?"

"We had a golden age of about a century when we still made people feel repressed about their sexuality but they no longer felt self conscious about consumption. We allowed indulgence, but only of a particular kind. It was a sweet spot for economic activity."

"Freudian economics?"

"Yeah. I guess," Bernard scratched his head. "See, everyone knows that people who are sexually repressed sublimate their sexuality into socially acceptable activities. Repression forces them to turn libidinous activity into productivity - or at least a skill like sports or music."

"So, repression is good for developing marketable skills?"

"Exactly! Without repression, they go right to sex - no intervening, forced development of skills that might make them more alluring as mates. Mating suddenly has nothing to do with economics and just has to do with mating. It's why guys increasingly fail to pursue good careers."

"So wages gradually erode as sex becomes less shameful?"

"Yes! But the shopping is still part of the culture of instant gratification. The consumption doesn't go away with the repression. If anything, it increases, all part of the general culture of indulgence."

"So, when people were repressed enough to develop skills but not so repressed as to stifle their shopping urges, the economy was a roaring success?" I paused. "Have I got that right?"

"Yes!" Bernard had a triumphant little smile. "Nothing could be more obvious."

"And now we're not making enough because our wages have fallen? And our wages have fallen because we're not repressed enough?"

"That's pretty much it, I figure."

"From repression to recession."

Bernard paused. "No. This is not just a recession. We've had those before. This is a drop in incomes, a delayed adjustment to a new lifestyle."

"A new lifestyle?"

"Sure. Incomes have not grown but spending has. Adjusting to that fact will require an adjustment in lifestyle."

"But at least the lifestyle will include sex," I noted.

"For whatever that's worth," Bernard said, speaking like a true octogenarian.

Just some random thoughts at end of week

We now live in a world where the fastest man is named Bolt. It’s as if the folks at Marvel or DC Comics have taken over from Newton and Einstein, tired of simply defining blockbuster movies they are now defining our reality.

In Cancun, one of the guides asked us what the difference was between Miami and Cancun. The answer? In Cancun they speak English.

I’m delighted that Obama chose Biden as his running mate, but I have to take a shot. The good news is that Obama actually has someone old enough to offer adult supervision to his campaign and administration, to enforce things like a curfew, for instance. The bad news is that Biden is too old to stay up late enough to find out whether Obama actually observes the curfew. I shouldn't joke, though. This could not have been easy for Obama who, in order to balance the ticket, had to find an older white guy active in politics.

My notion that women in their forties and fifties are in the prime of life has gotten two more confirmations. 50 year old Madonna has launched her new tour dancing like someone half her age and 41 year-old Dara Torres is swimming away from Beijing with three silver medals. Minds as interesting as any 60 year old’s and bodies as able as any 20 year old’s. If that isn’t the prime of life I’m unclear on the concept.

My favorite quote regarding McCain’s need this week to check with his staff on the number of homes he owns.
"The number of Americans who do not know how many houses they own is so small they could probably fit in a golf cart."
- John Dickerson, at Slate

What is worse, McCain’s resident blogger has twice ridiculed the “pro-Obama Dungeons & Dragons crowd.” One commentator writes, “the McCain campaign has inadvertently woken an angry nerd army.” I hardly know whether to chuckle or wince at the thought of a swarm of dice-throwing pale and angry men shaking their fists at the former POW who would be president.

And yet, McCain has recently gained on Obama in the polls.



Finally, for those of you wondering about all the effect of mingling all those amazingly fit bodies together in one place at the Olympics, you may want to read Matthew Seyd’s article, Sex and the Olympic City, in The Times. The Greeks loved the physical and their Olympics were a celebration of the body. Apparently, modern athletes continue this tradition and sex between athletes is rampant within the Olympic Village.

News Commentary

Marathon hopeful, 101-year-old , training hard
Already Britain's oldest employee, 101-year-old Buster Martin now aims to become the world's oldest marathon runner by completing the London Marathon and celebrating with a pint of beer and a cigarette.

Training for a marathon is hard for a 101 year old? This is news? What is news is that this father of 17 returned to work at 99, bored with retirement after two years.

For those of you wondering how he has stayed so fit and managed to father 17 children, it could be that Buster has done housework as a means of to both ends: studies indicate that men who do housework get more sex. It is not that men are unaware of this; they just keep hoping for shortcuts, like chocolates and empty promises.

Barak Obama raised $55 million in February.

To put this in perspective, it represents less than 2/1,000th of 1% of the federal budget and less than 3/10,000th of 1% of annual GDP. We still spend less on elections than we do on Halloween candy each year.

Home prices are dropping. The media reports this as bad news. Oddly, this same media had earlier reported rising home prices as bad news, a sign that homes were becoming unaffordable. I guess this is how the media keeps their reporting balanced; any direction the pendulum swings can be construed as bad news.

Forbes latest list of billionaires has some interesting data, among other things seeming to support the notion of globalization. "Two years ago, half of the world's 20 richest were from the U.S. Now only four are. India wins bragging rights for having four among the top 10, more than any other country." In second place, bumping Bill Gates and nudging up against Warren Buffet, is Mexican investor Carlos Slim, whose net worth has doubled in the last two years to $60 billion. The 1,125 billionaires on Forbes' list are worth a combined $4.4 trillion. Assuming a 10% interest rate, their combined net worth would generate Obama's $55 million in donations in about an hour. Facebook's 23 year-old founder Mark Zuckerberg is perhaps the world's youngest self-made billionaire. (At 23, I'm pretty sure my net worth (a shaky balance sheet that included a number of albums and a Bang & Olufsen turntable on one side and student loans and a '65 mustang prone to monthly break downs on the other) was probably closer to a negative $5,500.) With all that money, it is probably no wonder that Zuckerberg would need to create a social network site like Facebook. Many friends can be had for considerably less than a billion and someone with this much money would need some way to keep track of them all.

Personally, I'm hoping to get on Forbes' list within the next year as I begin hostile take overs of other blogs, leveraging my small number of comments to take over first Scott Adams blog and then begin picking off the blogs of people like Andrew Sullivan and Arianna Huffington. How will I finance the purchase of these blogs? By highly leveraging my comments and obscure rating into stock I expect hedge fund managers to snap up. Why would they snap this up? Because next month, some other hedge fund manager will bid the price even higher. Now is the time for savvy investors to get in on the ground floor. I'm pretty excited about this, but I digress.

Mike Huckabee bowed out of the Republican primary contest. This has nonetheless been a boon to his career. He'll be starring in a new Broadway Musical: Gomer Pyle, New Mayor of Mayberry. The drama revolves around the mayor's move to outlaw evolution in the town; that Gomer Pyle is mayor seems evidence that he has succeeded.

Cure for a Recession - Sarkozy in America

Try this thought experiment involving French President Sarkozy. Imagine him here in the U.S. and how our 24 hour news stations, talk shows, and newspapers would cover his story.

Sarkozy had scarcely been sworn into office when he and his wife announced their divorce. Now, just months later, the press is reporting that he is soon to marry Carla Bruni.

Carla Bruni, a beautiful Italian model and pop singer, seems very comfortable posing nude before the camera. (Just do a Yahoo or Google image search to confirm this fact.) Imagine an American first lady who the nation has seen pose nude. (It's probably best not to imagine Barbara Bush.)

I'm not sure how the French talk radio shows and tabloids are dealing with this, but it makes me chuckle just to think about how much coverage there would be for Obama or Giuliani (Sarkozy was, after all, the conservative candidate) if they were to do something like this within the first months in office. It would likely get more coverage than the invasion of Iraq.

We're still a country more offended at men eager to use a penis than those eager to use a missile. (And Freud may have explained how the former gets us the latter.) We rate explicit sex X and explicit violence R. (Does this mean that parents would be more offended to walk in on their teenager in the middle of sex than in the middle of a stabbing? Wait. I promised myself I wouldn't wax serious about what, for me, is an amusing scenario - Sarkozy in America.) If Sarkozy were our president, fears of a recession would be easily abated - interest in his libido would help to fuel a resurgence in communications and media revenues that would make the Clinton - Lewinsky coverage look like a cat in the tree story.

And here she is - France's soon to be first lady. (Now we know that the guy in a window is to represent Sarkozy, and of course one more reason that she would never be an American first lady is simply this: she speaks Italian, French, and English. What's the quip? There is trilingual, bilingual, and American.)

Mapping the Female Brain to Find the World's Most Effective Pick Up Line

This morning, my darling wife announces to me that she was in the midst of the most delicious dream when the phone rang. She reports this while still lying in bed, stretching her arms over her head rather sensuously as she yawns. The visual she provides me neatly ties into my own definition of delicious dream, and I’m convinced that we must be talking about exactly the same thing. When I get too bored by sleep, I dream. When I’m lucky, the dreams are delicious.

“What were you dreaming,” I curiously ask, trying not to look too eager to hear salacious details.

“I was in the most incredible shoe store,” she said. “It was like a shoe aquarium.” My little Canadian added, her eyes aglow, “and they even served tea!” As my expectations of erotica dissolved, she launched into details about the assortment of shoes on display, one pair in particular she was inquiring about when her friend Kate called.

I don’t understand women and shoes, but I’ve been given a theory that has to do with brain mapping. (If I could, I would avoid all shoes. My toes get claustrophobic and I will put on a jacket before I put on socks and shoes.)

My daughter, the cog sci major, shared a theory about why women so love shoes. As it turns out, the brain has regions that map to the body. The genitals map to a large region near the top, on the side of the brain, with the toes and feet immediately adjacent. (The brain map does not exactly accord with the layout of the body. Lips – vital for eating and loving – get disproportionately more of the brain’s real estate than, say, the leg.) One (fairly casual) theory is that the wiring for the genitals and feet sometimes overlap in ways that can, in the extreme, lead to foot fetishes or, more often, closets littered with shoes. Our very different "delicious" dreams might actually be exciting very similar regions of the brain.

Only now, happily married at 47, does it occur to me that some guy out there is on track to break Wilt Chamberlain's’s record for sexual conquests with the simplest of pick up lines: “I just love your shoes.”

Sex!

This, from Yahoo News, has to be my favorite headline of the day:

Why people have sex: It feels good

For this, Bernard kvetches, for this they do studies?

Sex & Violence

I saw that Saw III was the top grossing film over the weekend. From what I've read, it falls into the category of the “can't be too graphic" horror movies that sound about as appealing to me as a trip to a dentist who doesn't budget for anesthetic. Putting aside personal preferences, it again brings up the question of movie ratings.

We expect our children will eventually engage in graphic sex and hope that they're never involved in graphic violence - either as thug or victim. Even in very violent cultures, on average there are more acts of sex than acts of violence. A sane community will do what it can to eradicate violence and regulate sex. But only a crazed community would work to eradicate sex and merely regulate violence. Such a community would soon disappear. So how is one to make sense of our movie ratings?

Graphic sex is rated X while graphic violence is rated R, suggesting that we're actually less squeamish about killing than procreation. This odd priority impacts policy.

California has a proposition on the ballot (Prop 83?) that will regulate sex offenders, limiting them from living within a certain distance of parks and strapping them with an electronic bracelet. Oddly, such measures are not first taken against those with a violent streak, but sex offenders - a loosely defined group that includes 18 year-old men who've had sex with a 17 year-old girlfriend. Yet someone who is out after serving time for second or third-degree murder, or someone who has a history of repeatedly violent acts, escapes these odd provisions.

Molestation is not a trivial thing, but it is certainly easier to recover from than murder. So why the special provision against the prospect of molestation but no corresponding provision against the prospect of other violent crimes, crimes that leave physical as well as emotional scars? Could it be that years of accepting the values implied in our movie rating system has distorted our perception of threats?