Month: August 2013

Introducing Difficult Run 2.0

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2012-09-05 18.55.01 smaller

Welcome to the new and improved Difficult Run 2.0! This iteration of the site is much closer to my original vision when I launched the site in November 2012, but it took a lot of help from talented friends to get it here.

The first major change is that I’ve brought on board a group of awesome contributing editors: Adam, Mahonri, Monica, Ro, and Walker. I’ve known these folks for a variety of time from just months to more than 10 years. They are all intelligent, thoughtful writers with their own perspectives and views, but the one attribute they all share is that they are interesting people. They think about the topics of the day–from international relations to economic policy to video games and technology–in terms of the principles and ideals that matter to them. And that’s what DR is really all about.

The second major change is the layout. It’s a lot different cosmetically, of course, but the big change is functional. There are now two “streams” of content. The center column is for shorter, time-sensitive pieces like links to other blog posts or news stories. It’s updated fairly frequently (usually at least a few times every day) and so the stories go by pretty quickly. The far-right column is for longer, original pieces and is updated less frequently (usually just once a day). It’s also a mobile-responsive theme, which is nice.

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Tazelaar…Peter Tazelaar

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My love of James Bond films knows no end. It has been a torrid affair since sixth grade. My excitement for Skyfall‘s release in November actually overshadowed my anxiety over the presidential election. Part of my adoration for Bond films is the mix of the absurd with the awesome.

One of the most pristine examples of this absurd awesomeness is found in Goldfinger. In the pre-titles sequence, Bond accomplishes a mission in a wet suit, only to remove the suit to reveal a crisp white tuxedo underneath (while I suggest watching the whole thing, this specific scene is at 2:13):

Silly? Unrealistic? You’d think. Except that it really happened in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands during World War II:

Peter Tazelaar

Peter Tazelaar was under orders from the exiled Dutch queen, Wilhelmina, to slip into the country to extract two fellow countrymen to join the government-in-exile in Britain.

He and his fellow secret agents – Eric Hazelhoff Roelfzema and Bob Van der Stok – had often spent time at the seaside resort of Scheveningen, near The Hague, and knew that the Palace hotel there had been taken over by the Germans as a headquarters, and that every Friday night they held large and boisterous parties there.

Their plan was simple but audacious – approach Scheveningen in darkness by boat, and take Mr Tazelaar into the surf by dinghy, from where he could scramble ashore. Once there, he would strip off his wetsuit, to reveal his evening clothes underneath, to enable him to pose as a partygoer and slip past the sentries.

…[J]ust after 4.30am on November 23 1941, after several false starts, Mr Tazelaar, Mr Hazelhoff Roelfzema, and another Dutchman, Chris Krediet, and Lieutenant Bob Goodfellow, disembarked from a British Motor Gun Boat into a small dinghy.

Once they neared the surf, Mr Hazelhoff Roelfzema and Mr Tazelaar slipped off the boat and waded onto the beach. Mr Hazelhoff Roelfzema then helped his comrade unzip his specially designed wetsuit to reveal his immaculate evening clothes.

Mr Hazelhoff Roelfzema then poured a generous measure of Hennessy XO – Mr Tazelaar’s favourite – from a hip flask over his friend, and returned to the dinghy. Reeking of brandy, Mr Tazelaar managed to stagger convincingly past the sentries stationed around the hotel.

Think twice the next time you scoff at a Bond movie. It just might be true to life.

 

Jonathan Langford on the God Who Weeps

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Godweeps5083070_detailJonathan Langford over at A Motley Vision gave an insightful review of Terryl and Fiona Givens’ The God Who Weeps, perhaps the best book I read this past year (and which quickly leapt up to my all-time favorites list). Check it out by clicking here.

Also, if you’re interested in my own approach to, and appreciation for, the Givenses and their work in the past, here are my thoughts on Terryl Givens in Terryl Givens: The Mormon C.S. Lewis and my interview with Fiona Givens, Nothing Can Separate Us From the Love of God.

And, yes, Difficult Run’s Nathaniel Givens is the son of these two stellar people, which makes me wonder how a single family can deal with so much awesomeness!

Medical Marijuana & Legalization

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weed1
This is not a peer-reviewed picture.

This subject probably deserves a longer post (as in I could probably spend 5000 words discussing the “things the government doesn’t want you to know” hooey), but I’m going to stick to pointing out my biggest takeaways from CNN’s Marijuana stops child’s severe seizures.

In countdown mode:

3. Charlotte had 300 (300!) seizures a week, and was able to control them down to 2-3 a month with a treatment of marijuana.  This is amazing and remarkable.  This, however, does not prove that the government is hiding a marijuana cure-all from us.  It also does not prove that using marijuana has absolutely no side-effects.  (Gynecomastia, anyone?)  I’m hoping with some state legalization we’ll finally get peer-reviewed research into what marijuana can actually do.

2. Great medical uses of marijuana do not indicate a need to legalize recreational use of marijuana.  Lots of heavy-duty pain medications are controlled substances, and there’s no reason at this point to assume which category marijuana should fall.

1. A special low-THC marijuana was grown for Charlotte, as she is only 6.  THC is the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana.  So, sorry stoners, it might turn out that getting high is unnecessary to whatever good medical uses marijuana may provide beyond merely treating symptoms.  I think this topic would be most interesting first dive into academic research of the drug.

 

You're not helping your cause.
You’re not helping your cause.  “Although it is undisputed that smoking of marijuana plant material causes a fall in intraocular pressure (IOP) in 60% to 65% of users, continued use at a rate needed to control glaucomatous IOP would lead to substantial systemic toxic effects revealed as pathological changes.”

NSA: We can’t because we can’t

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documents

The NSA hires a lot of smart people, and smart people tend to think they’re smarter than other people because they’re smarter than other people. So it’s not surprising that when Kevin Collier of the Daily Dot asked the NSA under the Freedom of Information Act for his “file,” he was answered that because the “adversaries” of the security of the nation would inevitably monitor any “public request” for data, and the compilation of any and all such requests could result in “grave damage” to national security, they were unable to honor his request.

Catch that?

The NSA has concocted a defensible rationale for why they can’t honor FIA requests for personal data, based upon the fact of their own existence and the existence of their surveillance programs. They are saying, in essence, “we cannot exchange information because the exchange of information alerts enemies which will use the exchange of information to do harm.” The implicit premise is that their information gathering is necessary and justified in the first place, which of course begs the question. We are forced to wonder, if the information didn’t exist, would we be in more or less danger from the enemies of national security? It amounts to a rhetorical tautology, and it’s nonsense.

These are the people we’ve put in charge of our military, our money and our future, folks. Take a good look.

Miyazaki’s Newest Film Angers Japanese Nationalists

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I’ve been a fan of Miyazaki’s work ever since I saw a butchered version of Nausicaa in school as a kid. I rediscovered the movie as an adult, and then the rest of his work. I’m excited to see his most recent film The Wind Rises, but apparently a lot of Miyazaki’s fellow Japanese aren’t as enthusiastic.

2013-08-16 The Wind Rises

Miyazaki said this about the film:

My wife and staff would ask me, ‘Why make a story about a man who made weapons of war? And I thought they were right. But one day, I heard that Horikoshi [designer of the WWII fighter named the Zero] had once murmured, ‘All I wanted to do was to make something beautiful.’ And then I knew I’d found my subject… Horikoshi was the most gifted man of his time in Japan. He wasn’t thinking about weapons… Really all he desired was to make exquisite planes.

That’s why the film is unpopular with some: it casts Japanese history in a negative light as the beautiful dreams of Horikoshi are warped by militarism. Which, you know, is exactly why I’m so excited to see it. It’s good to have the right enemies, I suppose.

Mad Skillz

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Over at the American Enterprise Institute, James Pethokoukis has an excellent write-up on a new study by Steven Kaplan (University of Chicago Booth School of Business) and Joshua Rauh (Stanford Graduate School of Business) on income inequality and the “1% vs. 99%” war cry. The findings:

  • The increase in pay at the highest income levels has been broad-based, ranging from public and private company executives to pro athletes.[ref]”[C]omputers and advances in information technology may complement skilled labor and substitute for unskilled labor. This seems likely to provide part, or even much, of the explanation for the increase in pay of professional athletes (technology increases their marginal product by allowing them to reach more consumers), Wall Street investors (technology allows them to acquire information and trade large amounts more easily) and executives, as well as the surge in technology entrepreneurs in the Forbes 400″ (Steven N. Kaplan, Joshua Rauh, “It’s the Market: The Broad-Based Rise in the Return to Top Talent,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 27:3. Summer 2013: 53).[/ref]
  • Instead of drastically rising, the afer-tax, after-transfer income share of the top 1% is about the same as it was in 1987-1988, 1996, and 2001 (most inequality alarmists cite pre-tax, pre-transfer income).
  • Top earners come less from inherited wealth (which dropped from 60 to 32% between 1982 and 2011) and more from modest households, access to education (the share of those with no college dropped from 17 to 5 percent, with college grads rising from 77 to 87% between ’82 and ’11), and placing their efforts in tech-based industries.

“We believe,” write Kaplan and Rauh,

that the US evidence on income and wealth shares for the top 1 percent is most consistent with a “superstar”-style explanation rooted in the importance of scale and skill-biased technological change. In particular, we interpret the fact that the top 1 percent is spread broadly across a variety of occupations as most consistent with an important role for skill-biased technological change and increased scale. These facts are less consistent with an argument that the gains to the top 1 percent are rooted in greater managerial power or changes in social norms about what managers should earn.[ref]Ibid.: 36.[/ref]

Though globalization “may have contributed to greater scale,” it “cannot drive the increase in inequality at the top levels given the breadth of the phenomenon across the occupations we study.”[ref]Ibid.: 53.[/ref] Funny enough, increasing globalization has actually decreased global inequality over the last few decades.[ref]See Xavier Sala-i-Martin, Maxim Pinkovskiy, “Parametric Estimations of the World Distribution of Income,” VoxEU.org (Jan. 22, 2010); Sala-i-Martin, Pinkovskiy, “Parametric Estimations of the World Distribution of Income,” NBER Working Paper 15433 (Oct. 2009).[/ref]

Xavier Sala-i-Martin, Maxim Pinkovskiy, 2010

So, maybe the superrich aren’t all Gordon Gekkos. Maybe they’ve just got mad skillz in the globalized economy.

This Is Why You Can’t Have Nice Things, NSA

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The Washington Post has a pretty simple graphic explaining one of the really fundamental problems with NSA spying:

2013-08-16 NSA Breaches

The excuses of politicians (both parties) about all the safeguards ring sort of hollow when it’s obvious that the NSA can’t follow it’s own rules. (To say nothing of sharing national defense intelligence with law enforcement agencies…)

PC Skepticism vs. Genuine Harassment

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John Scalzi, Gamma Rabbit.
John Scalzi, Gamma Rabbit.

I think one of the biggest sources of misunderstanding between conservatives and liberals is the perception of how each approaches issues dealing with minorities. My take is that everyone agrees things like sexism, racism, and homophobia exist, are bad, and should be confronted. But conservatives have a sense that liberals sometimes exaggerate the problems for political gain or just to feel good about having something to crusade against. This skepticism from conservatives–which I admit I share–causes liberals to accuse conservatives of apathy or denialism.

What’s the truth? I don’t know, but the more time I spend following issues of how geeks in particular treat women the more I’m starting to think the problem is deeper than I had realized. John Scalzi (famous sci fi author) covers this issue quite frequently, and here is his latest alarm.

Basically: a creep is cyber-stalking women using Storify, the Storify CEO not only refuses to intervene but also notifies the cyberstalker that he’s being scrutinized, apparently leading to hordes more men piling on the women who were being harassed to begin with. What’s up with this kind of nonsense?