Propositions have been given numbers

The Secretary of State has numbered the propositions for the November ballot. Here's my first run on them:

• Prop 18: Water bond.
  Haven't decided
• Prop 19: Tax and regulate cannabis.
  You bet. I'll  write about this between now and November. 
• Prop 20: Gives Prop 11 redistricting commission authority to draw Congressional districts.
  Bad for Democrats. No.
• Prop 21: Raising the vehicle license fee by $18 to pay for state parks.
  Sure.
• Prop 22: Prohibits state government from taking local government funds.
  I'm inclined to be against anything that restricts the ability of the legislature to make decisions when they need to, but I'm not yet sure about this. 
• Prop 23: Repeals AB 32, the state global warming law.
  No. 
• Prop 24: Closes corporate tax loopholes.
  Yes. I'm a tax and spend liberal, after all. 
• Prop 25: Lets the legislature pass a budget with a majority vote.
  If anything can save California from the Republicans, it is this. Yes.
• Prop 26: Requires a 2/3 majority vote to impose fees.
  No. It would make budgeting even harder than it is now.
• Prop 27: Disbands the Prop 11 redistricting commission entirely.
  Probably yes. I think redistricting should be political. I don't mind gerrymandering.

Budget Salvation

An initiative has qualified for the November ballot that would, if passed, allow the legislature to adopt a budget by majority vote. It could save California. Therefore it hasn't a chance.

Personality and politics

I've talked about this several times. A new study finds a strong relationship between a person's politics and personality. Liberals are nicer than conservatives. Conservatives are more tight-assed than liberals.

"Conservatives tend to be higher in a personality trait called orderliness and lower in openness. This means that they're more concerned about a sense of order and tradition, expressing a deep psychological motive to preserve the current social structure ... (and)  liberalism is more often associated with the underlying motives for compassion, empathy and equality."

This makes me think so much of Jane Jacobs. If you didn't go out and read Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics when I talked about it before, do so now. It will change your life. Or not. It permanently changed the way I think about people.

"the natural consequences of an immoral act"

Via Digby, you don't often hear right-wingers so explicit in their religious nastiness. In talking about a Utah Democrat, Digby mentions

"a failed Utah initiative to deal with STDs among teenagers and the fact that many of them will end up sterile, among other things, because they aren't educated about it and don't get treated. (The Democrat) relays the response from some social conservative harpy which was,'I don't think we should do anything to interfere with the natural consequences of an immoral act.'"

In other words:

• God's laws should be the basis of public policy (and she knows what God's laws are).
• Teenage sluts deserve what they get for violating God's law (unless they are related to part-term governors of Alaska, in which case they are paid $30,000 a crack* for speaking out against sluttiness).

*The pun didn't occur to me until after I wrote it, but if the slut** fits, wear her.

**You know I'm being sarcastic about a girl being a slut just because she got pregnant, don't you?

UPDATE: I just wrote the post above about thinking of mental disorders in terms of their biological processes, and I  think a little better of this lady. She's not evil; she can't help having her repulsive ideas, because that's how her brain works.

Post-May revise depression

Going to planning meetings this week has been like being in a car hurtling toward a cliff, and we're inside talking about what to do if we survive. How injured do we expect to be? What direction should we try to crawl? Should we put the least valuable of us on the bottom as a cushion for the more valuable? What if we end up so injured that we face a life of constant pain?

And what if we all die? Nobody talks about what if the budget is really passed as proposed. What if we do lose all those programs, 140,000 slots, and I forget how many billions of dollars in revenue? I guess a lot of us find new jobs.

It's depressing as hell, and the personal questions are worse. Is there a non-child-care position open at your agency, or what would you like your next career to be at your age?

Buck up, kiddo. The Dems won't let that happen, although the Reps seem pretty united. In the past the Dems have been able to peel off a Rep or two by offering them something (such as Prop 14, or something for their district), but this time the Republican leadership is telling them that they will be dead to the leadership if they vote for a budget with a single tax increase.

I'll say it again. Voting Republican is a character fault. Voting Republican enthusiastically is a personality disorder.

Not up to speed

This morning I was in the No. 2 lane behind a driver going 60 miles an hour. As I passed, I saw a Bush/Cheney 2004 bumper sticker in the back window. I thought, this lady is not up to speed on anything.

Voting Republican is a character fault

I was just reading some comments by some sitting legislators about how they plan to obstruct everything, and I've come to a conclusion. Voting Republican now is a character fault. Voting Republican enthusiastically is a personality disorder.

Who gets traumatized by witnessing family violence?

I sense a confluence of ideas. Or maybe it's just carrying things too far.

 It has long been one of my rules of life that people vary. Two kids grow up in an abusive household. One grows up to be a social worker and a fine parent, and the other is in and out of jail for spouse and child-abuse.

This study showed that the difference in whether kids who had seen family fights had symptoms of trauma ("(b)ad dreams or nightmares about their mom's and dad's arguments or fights; if thoughts of the arguments or fights ever just pop into their mind; if they ever try to forget all about the arguments and fights; and if they ever wish they could turn off feelings that remind them of the arguments and fights") was how concerned they were that "a family member might be harmed, the stability of the family is threatened, or a parent won't be able to care for them."

I've said recently that I'm beginning to think that a genetic difference between conservatives and liberals causes them to sense threats differently and to react to them differently. If this is the case, one's natural speculation after the study about who gets traumatized is that maybe it's the kids who grow up to be conservative who are more traumatized by seeing family violence. Maybe liberal, touchie-feelie, I-have-control-of-my-life-and-it's-all-going-to-turn-out-okay optimism protects against trauma after witnessing family violence.

The solution to immigration reform

I know this has nothing to do with child development, but when I know how to solve such a knotty problem, it would be selfish of me not to share it.

What we should do about immigration is let people who are now here illegally become permanent legal residents, with no chance of ever becoming a citizen, unless they go back to the old country and start over.

It should satisfy the conservatives, because there is no path to citizenship, in fact an effective prohibition of citizenship. (Kids born here, of course, are citizens by birth.)

It should satistfy the liberals, because everybody's status is regularized, and nobody is deported, no families split up.

You're welcome.

Marriage ban make gays crazy -- literally

Some researchers looked at the prevalence of mood disorders, generalized anxiety disorder and alcohol use disorders among gays, lesbians, and bisexuals and found that they increased in states that instituted constitutional bans against gay marriage. See what you did?

Smarter men are more monogamous, liberal, atheist, and nocturnal

I hope this is true, because it sure matches my prejudices. The findings of the study are that

More intelligent people are statistically significantly more likely to exhibit social values and religious and political preferences that are novel to the human species in evolutionary history. Specifically, liberalism and atheism, and for men (but not women), preference for sexual exclusivity correlate with higher intelligence.

The claim is that dumber people are more likely to think we should do things the way we always have, and smarter people can think of and embrace new ways of doing things. This does not go so deeply that intelligence is correlated with any preferences we have had since we were, say, Australopithecines.

In the current study, Kanazawa argues that humans are evolutionarily designed to be conservative, caring mostly about their family and friends, and being liberal, caring about an indefinite number of genetically unrelated strangers they never meet or interact with, is evolutionarily novel. So more intelligent children may be more likely to grow up to be liberals.

More intelligent		Less intelligent
More nocturnal		Less nocturnal
Atheists		Believers
Adolescent IQ 106		Adolescent IQ 95
Very liberal		Very conservative
Adolescent IQ 103		Adolescent IQ 97
Not at all religious		Very religious
Value given to sticking to one member of the opposite sex
Smarter Men	Smarter Women	Dumber men	Dumber women
More monogamous	Same as dumber	Less monogamous	Same as smarter

One reason I like this is it fits into a general idea I have about people, following Jane Jacobs' analysis in Systems of Surval. That is, you can usefully divide people and human activities in to two broad groups. She calls these commercial and guardian. There's lots of caveats and slopping back and forth within and among people, but basically you have liberals and conservatives. It is natural that, because I am a serous liberal, I should think liberal ideas are right, and people who agree with me are smarter than those who don't.  So it is natural that this study should appeal to me.

I'll wallow around in it a bit and then step back and see what sticks, because it's too much in agreement with my prejudices to take at face value.

UPDATE: After mulling this a bit, if this is true, conservatism is the historic state of humankind, and liberalism and atheism are a new invention. I wonder how new. Presumably at some point when the occasional people born with liberal mutation didn't die off.   With language, grading back to apes' grunts? With H. sap. sap, call it 50,000 years ago or so, when art and technology also bloomed? When villages became cities big enough that nobody knew everybody, maybe 4000-3000 BC?

I wish the interesting questions were easier. No, I don't. I just wish I understood them better.

Voting Republican as a moral fault

I try not to emphasize child development issues and avoid too much politics, but this stands out to me. This is a table of data from a poll conducted by for the Daily Kos website. It has been copied several places on the web, but it was pulled out and formatted by Bruce Bartlett. It is a survey of what self-identified Republicans think nationwide, and the results by state are pretty uniform. This is really what they think.

Question	Yes	No	Not Sure
Should Barack Obama be impeached?	39	32	29
Do you believe Barack Obama was born in the United States?	42	36	22
Do you think Barack Obama is a socialist?	63	21	16
Do you believe Barack Obama wants the terrorists to win?	24	43	33
Do you believe ACORN stole the 2008 election?	21	24	55
Do you believe Sarah Palin is more qualified to be president than Barack Obama?	53	14	33
Do you believe Barack Obama is a racist who hates white people?	31	36	33
Do you believe your state should secede from the United States?	23	58	19
Should openly gay men and women be allowed to teach in public schools?	8	73	19
Should contraceptive use be outlawed?	31	56	13
Do you believe the birth control pill is abortion?	34	48	18

This shows that 1/2 to 3/4 of Republicans are, as Bartlett said at the link, either insane or mind-numbingly stupid. How can you have an intelligent political conversation with a person who thinks Sarah Palin is more qualified than Obama to be president? How can you have an intelligent moral conversation with someone who thinks contraception should be illegal or that gays should be barred from teaching?

These are the people below the Keyes Horizon. If I were one of the sane few Republicans, I would be embarrassed by having the same voting registration as they do. I would be especially concerned that the wackos determine who wins primaries, and they nominate people who are morally and intellectually repugnant. Can you imagine being a sane Republican in Michele Bachmann's district? It would feel so creepy.

While I can understand (if not approve) voting for Reagan or George H.W. Bush, voting for someone who wants to teach creationism in public schools, to cut taxes as a solution for every problem, and to outlaw contraception is a grave error for a sane citizen. It's just nuts. We are approaching a point where voting Republican is a moral fault.

Naming your kid after their disability

From Andrew Sullivan, who obsesses about Sarah Palin but does it in an interesting and readable fashion, about her infant son Trig, who has an extra chromosome 21:

The medical term for Down Syndrome is Trisomy-21 or Trisomy-g. It is often shortened in medical slang to Tri-g.

So Sarah Palin seems to have named her Down Syndrome kid after a slang term for "Down Syndrome."

I just wrote that I could imagine what people who have kids with a variety of handicaps might name them, but after a flash of adolescent giggling, I saw they were all in really bad taste, so I deleted them. I'm not the most PC person in the world, but even I could see I was going too far.

The preschoolization of K-3

I have pissed and moaned about the elementary-schoolization of preschool, by which I mean the tendency of elementary school teachers and administrators to want to make preschool more like kindergarten, which is more and more like first grade, or even second grade.

Well there's some pushback. This report from Linda Jacobson at the New America Foundation says K-3 could benefit by learning something about preschoolers and applying it to K-3 kids. Hear, hear!

It has some interesting numbers I would not have guessed and some that don't make sense together.

•  53% of California 3- and 4-year-olds are eligible for Title 5 programs.
• Of those eligible kids, 53% of 4s and 25% of 3s were enrolled in subsidized programs.
• Calfornia serves12% of its 4 year olds in state Pre-K.
  (This is one of the numbers that doesn't make sense; 53% of 53% is about a quarter, not about an eighth. Unless they mean only State Preschool and do not include CCTR programs, which makes it misleading.)

Of kids 8 and under in California:

• 53% Hispanic
• 28% non-Hispanic white
• 10% Asian
• 5% Black

I'm not really sure about this last one. I just checked some data I recently gathered from my local area association of governments and found that 43% of kids 0-9 in my town are Hispanic.

If 53% of all kids in California are income-eligible for Title 5, tautologically that means 53% are in families with less than 75% of the state median income, which means that on the order of 2/3 of preschool kids are in families in the lower half of incomes. Families with little kids average poorer than families without little kids.

A certain test for lying

I've commented several times about the question of what you would do if you could tell from a simple test at birth, maybe a blood test or EEG, that a kid had either a certainty or a  high probability of developing some bad thing, like alcoholism, or autism, or schizophrenia, or uncontrollable aggression.

This article in Science Daily asks a related question. Suppose it turns out, as some people claim, that truth-telling takes place in a different part of the brain than lying, and a cap studded with electrodes to read the brain is mass produced, and every courtroom and cop car can have a fool-proof way of telling if a person is lying. Would that be a good thing?

I predict that:

• We will find such a brain difference between lying and truth-telling.
• It will be accepted by the courts, though not without strong opposition from liberal fruitcakes like me, and probably before the science is really settled, as happened with "lie detectors." 
• The science will not be as cut and dried as we wish.
• Cops and prosecutors will fail to understand the nuances of reading the results, so there will be false positives for lying when the person is just confused.
• Pathological liars will be found to have brain scans similar to truth-tellers.
• States, counties, and cities will fund buying these new devices and pay for it by cutting social services. 

What will the society look like then? I don't usually have much truck with people who invoke 1984 and Big Brother, but this sure seems to me like a big step toward it.

But what is depressing to me is that I think it is inevitable. I truly believe we will find a way to tell truth-tellers from liars with a success rate good enough for cops and prosecutors, and once that happens, not voting to fund it will make a politician seem soft on crime. "Nobody would object except someone who wanted to be able to lie to cops and courts."

It's like a national ID. Yes, a national ID would be intrusive, and it would be an official end to privacy, but that war has already been lost. Privacy is gone. Some combination of market research companies and the NSA know everything about you except what you buy with cash, and they can probably make a good guess at that. So we might as well cowgirl up and accept a national ID, so at least the intrusion can be efficient and not confuse two people with the same name.

And while the truth cap is not even part of the debate yet, that battle is already lost. What I really fear is the possibility of claiming to be able to read more of a mind than just whether it is lying. The implications of this are enormous. I assume the ACLU has lawyers already thinking about it.

I'm not sure whether I think we liberals should fight tooth and nail or accept that some form of a truth cap is inevitable and work to make it a better system, as I think we should do with the idea of tying teacher pay to student performance. I might be feistier tomorrow, but right now, I think the big battle is lost.

Oh, crap. It just occurred to me that it would be possible to make the mind-reading caps wireless, so a person we think might be up to something might have to wear a cap, and when he thinks illegal thoughts, the computer listening to the cap back at the police station sounds an alarm to go pick him up. I shouldn't think about this stuff on Monday morning.

The Keyes Horizon

The Keyes Horizon is the percentage of crazy people who vote in an election. It's the percent who voted for Alan Keyes when he ran against Barack Obama for US Senate in Illinois in 2002.

Keyes was from out of state, so you can eliminate any established political base; both candidates were black, so you can factor out racism; and Keyes was plainly, obviously, completely crazy. Batshit crazy. Head-trauma crazy. But 27% of the population of Illinois voted for him. They put party identification, personal prejudice, whatever ahead of rational judgment. Hell, even like 5% of Democrats voted for him. That’s crazy behaviour. I think you have to assume a 27% Crazification Factor in any population.

A commenter named Jon H said, "May I suggest it be called the “Keyes Horizon”?"

It's a perfect name for the condition. Just thought it should be part of your vocabulary. Now back to our regularly scheduled program.

Characterizing conservatives and liberals

I've talked several times about my belief that many personality traits, including religiosity and conservatism/liberalism are biologically based. Some combination of genetics, epigenetics, and peer influence molds our physical brains to where our minds either do or do not believe in god and do or do not believe in government welfare to poor people.

This morning I may have had an epiphany (unless it's just mental heartburn). I was reading one of the several political blogs I read regularly, and it was quoting some conservative woman saying she was under attack by the media, and some conservative man saying he was under attack by the liberals. It's not by any means original that modern conservatives, certainly the ones who become politicians or TV personalities, are characterized by believing (or at least by saying) they are under attack. They are easily offended. 

And it occurred to me that this could be the fundamental difference between conservatives and liberals (understanding that, as I said before, conservatives vary among themselves, so let's say the difference between genetic conservatives and genetic liberals) is the fear of attack (and reacting to an attack) versus expansiveness. 

If it's genetic, then having both conservatives and liberals was probably advantageous during during the period the two types evolved. I speculate that, during the period when we were more often prey than predator, liberals were the ones who found new food supplies and invented the tools, and conservatives were the ones who made sure the food didn't rot and that we weren't killed by lions. Later, the liberals were the ones who traded with other groups and brought in foreign technology, and conservatives were the ones who made sure the walls were solid and the foreign technology was sharp. Within a family, when the issue of whether to share food with other families came up, maybe liberals thought they had plenty to share, and conservatives were more concerned about running out.

What one would need to do is relate this allegedly fundamental characteristic to modern political issues, cases where the differences between conservatives and liberals amount to fear of attack (and fighting back) or not.

Fiscal conservatism is easy. Liberals think we have enough money do do everything we need to do, and conservatives think if we spend too much now, it will damage our economy and be hard to pay back later. The extreme version, common now, is a refusal to consider any new taxes for anything, period, and if we propose to expand Healthy Families, that is said to be a step toward destroying their America.

The recent health care debate would seem to fit into this, too, but it's hard to say how much of the rhetoric was serious and how much just made up to hurt Obama based on corporate interests and the madness of crowds. What does fit is that conservatives, at least the ones on TV, assert they are being attacked by proposals to offer health insurance to more people. One hears people paid to opine on TV say that their country is being taken away from them. 

I see the same difference in when and how to use military force, when and how often to use the filibuster, how to fight terrorists, and how to react to global warming. This last one is odd. You'd expect conservatives to be up in arms about this threat, but they claim they are being lied to (attacked?), instead, by liberal scientists who want to destroy our way of life. 

I need to think more about this and to relate it to Jane Jacobs. That's going to be a long post, so I've been putting it off, but she posits a way to divide people into two groups that makes sense to me and seems to have application to modern politics.

Gay marriage has ruined another heterosexual marriage

Barely a week after Washington DC legalized gay marriage, Karl Rove filed for divorce. He warned us gay marriage would destroy the sanctity of marriage, and I guess he was right. What's more it apparently ruined his first marriage, too, retroactively.

One book claims Rove's father was openly gay.

Genetic basis of political party orientation

I've said before that I believe that whether one is conservative or liberal has a genetic component. Some researchers recently looked at whether political party identification has a genetic component and found that it does not, but genes do influence the strength of party identification. (Abstract; Science Daily article)

This makes sense to me. There are conservatives in the Democratic party, and their used to be liberals in the Republican party, and may be again in whatever becomes of the current Republican party. People tend to keep their parents' political party unless something big intervenes, such as all the southern Democrats who became Republicans when the Democratic party embraced civil rights.

It makes sense, at least after the fact, that strength of political identification is stronger than the choice of  party to identify with. In that way it would be like religiosity: which religion is determined mostly by where you're born, but strength of religiosity is mostly genetic.

I should distinguish between kinds of conservatives when I say I think it is genetic:

Should we try to "cure" conservatives?

A commenter to my post on the biological basis of political orientation said:

Thank you scientists for using science to conclusively associate unfavorable attributes with conservatives! Now our contempt for them has an even stronger foundation.

And mad props to CDRealist for suggesting that we can may someday hope to create a politically pure strain of mankind.

My first thought was this misrepresented what I said. But on reflection, it only misrepresents part of it. I do associate unfavorable attributes with conservatives (as does any liberal following the health care debate in the Senate), but only some types of conservatism. There are conservatives I respect, and I read them to keep myself honest. If someone as brilliantly wrong as Bill Buckley comes along again, I'll get a TiVo season pass for his or her show.

I suppose the difference between the sanes and the loonies consists of having different constellations of alleles and peer experiences, as is the difference in any personality point. But I don't think we should try to "cure" even the loonies. As I said in the previous post, we need some down-to-earth conservatives around to keep us airy-fairy liberals from getting killed by lions. It is not clear to me that modern society has the same needs as 200,000 years ago, but it might well be that we can substitute commies for lions and have the same dynamic.

So I don't want to cure conservatives. I just don't want them in charge of public policy. I want them on the outside calling bullshit on the liberals in charge and edging public policy back from the liberal brink.

But, just as it is fun for an atheist to play with pagan nature worship once in a while, it's fun for a liberal to imagine medication that would bring Michelle Bachman into our world.