Why Is Miss Teen South Carolina Obsessed With South Africa?

It's funny how her answer is simply a shining example of the problem raised by the question.

Thomas Jefferson is Rolling in his Grave

My friend Rob and I have been in a kind of long distance argument with some people over our disdain for popular entertainment. Rob and I have ridiculed such popular entertainments as Transformers, 300 and Dancing With the Stars. I don't have anything against any of these in particular (though 300 might be the stupidest movie I have ever seen), but I do hold a grudge against what passes for art in our society.

I have been accused of being elitist, and I don't necessarily disagree with that appellation. I believe that some art is better than others, the same way that I believe that some baseball players are better than others and that some food is better than others. It's funny, if I said steak is better than Kraft Mac N Chee, I'm not an elitist. If I say A-Rod is a better player than Yuniesky Betancourt, I'm not an elitist. But if I say Children of Men is better than 300, suddenly I'm an elitist. That's not to say that Mac, Yuni and 300 are not worthy of anybody liking them. That IS to say, though, that just because somebody likes something doesn't mean it's good.

I like America's Funniest Home Videos. I would watch it three hours a day if I could, no kidding. But it's not "good". It's entertaining, but it's not "good".

To say that something is good requires the frontal lobe, the thinking part. To say that I like something requires the brain stem, the reptilian brain, the feeling part. So I can't argue, and I won't argue, if people say they like something. However, I can argue, and will argue, if someone argues that something is good just because they like it.

And what America likes is getting, on the whole, stupider and stupider. We are not exercising the frontal lobe, the thinking part of our brain. To wit:

One in four adults read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday. Of those who did read, women and older people were most avid, and religious works and popular fiction were the top choices.

The survey reveals a nation whose book readers, on the whole, can hardly be called ravenous. The typical person claimed to have read four books in the last year — half read more and half read fewer. Excluding those who hadn't read any, the usual number read was seven.

"I just get sleepy when I read," said Richard Bustos of Dallas, a habit with which millions of Americans can doubtless identify. Bustos, a 34-year-old project manager for a telecommunications company, said he had not read any books in the last year and would rather spend time in his backyard pool.

Read the entire article here.

Hard wired

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of "The Black Swan," writes:

What are our minds made for? It looks as if we have the wrong user’s manual. Our minds do not seem made to think and introspect; if they were, things would be easier for us today, but then we would not be here today and I would not have been here to talk about it---my counterfactual, introspective, and hard-thinking ancestor would have been eaten by a tiger while his nonthinking, but faster-reacting cousin would have run for cover. Consider that thinking is time-consuming and generally a great waste of energy, that our predecessors spent more than a hundred million years as nonthinking mammals and that in the blip in our history during which we have used our brain we have used it on subjects too peripheral to matter. Evidence shows that we do much less thinking than we believe we do.

I guess this explains the popularity of "Dancing With the Stars" and "300."

Life's hard when you're stupid, part II

Older people who lack “health literacy” — that is, they cannot read and understand basic medical information — may be paying a high price. A new study finds that they appear to have a higher mortality rate than more-literate patients.

As the authors note, education levels have long appeared to play a role in longevity: one study found that people who did not graduate from high school lived an average of nine years less than graduates.

The explanation, researchers have suggested, may be that better education tends to result in better jobs, housing, food and health care.

Read the article here.