Faces

Military Masks Could ‘Give Injured Soldiers Their Faces Back’

As shown in this video, nearly a century ago the French did their best to create sculptured masks for faces of young men mutilated in WWI. It's very sad, but it's also extremely touching to see the encouraging smiles these men receive from the female artisans doing this work:

Byron

Junk Science by Politicized CDC

The problem is not advocacy research that is merely "careless."  It's that behavioral research at the CDC long ago became an agenda-driven joke. This article concerns only one example of that. For another, CDC's "research" on gun violence has long been a travesty, a virtual tutorial on how to do research deliberately designed to mislead in the service of a political/social agenda.

The CDC has no business floundering around in these areas where it has no claim to competence in the first place. That's nothing but self-aggrandizing mission creep of the worst kind.  CDC needs to stop doing junk behavioral research aimed at putting itself in the vanguard of our National Nanny Brigade, and instead keep its focus on STDs, epidemic diseases, food safety, and the other biological aspects of its proper mission.  If that's not enough to keep everybody busy, then downsize the whole operation and send the money back to the taxpayers.

Byron

Economics is Fun

He's going to do 20 of these 3-minute quickies:

Part 1: Value

Excellent piece

Varieties of liberalism:  How and why they developed, thrived, and eventually failed -- including both the "red" market-oriented laissez faire type and the "blue" social democratic type.  One a dead man walking, another that we are never going back to.

So where do we go from here? 

Very long, and worth it.

THE ONCE AND FUTURE LIBERALISM

Egypt

Barack Obama's Middle East Miscalculation

A modest prediction:

The Egyptian economy, using the latter term loosely, is a wasted disaster that stays about a week ahead of food riots only by providing cheap bread heavily subsidized with borrowed money.  As the new government discovers that Sharia law is not a substitute for foreign aid when it comes to the food supply, it will launch a campaign to blame its failures on "enemies of Islam." Israel and the U.S. will be at the very top of that list. Egypt and soon-to-be-nuclear Iran, recognizing their common interests, will become fast friends and cooperative partners on multiple fronts.

Among the internationalist intellectuals in the Obama Administration, this happy sequence of events is called "Smart Power foreign policy."

Byron

Head Start fiasco

There's nothing in Head Start A 50 Year Flop? Say It Ain’t So, Joe to surprise anyone who's followed the evaluations of compensatory education programs over the years, especially programs of the "general enrichment" type like Head Start. Head Start does get the kids seen by a doctor and a dentist, and it provides a few jobs for people in the neighborhood, but that's about it. Cognitive gains? At most a small and very temporary "hot house" effect, nothing more than that.

The only programs that showed significant gains were the ones built around an intensive focus on directly and systematically teaching specific academic skills -- but those never could get the support of liberal child advocates, who consider approaches like that to be insufficiently touchy-feely and somewhat fascistic. The fact that drill-based programs actually produced measurable results was carefully ignored. In other words the compensatory education effort, and its funding, was hijacked very early in favor of diffuse approaches that never worked, do not work, and will never work.

(Aside: In my professor days I was always surprised to find college students who didn't know their basic arithmetic facts and had to stop and figure out 7-times-9. I recall my 4th-grade teacher, Olde Miss Macalester, standing imperiously in front of the whole class loudly rapping her ruler on the desk as we drilled the multiplication tables out loud, in lockstep unison. There were some pretty stupid kids in that class, but every one of them came out knowing their multiplication tables like they knew their own name. Later a coalition of child development and mathematics experts got together and introduced math teaching based on set theory. That kind of conceptual approach was fine for kids with higher IQs and some native math ability, but the rest ended up years later puzzling over 7-times-9. The only reason for kids not learning the basic stuff is the failure to directly teach it, and that's why Head Start is a failure and why, under its misguided philosophy it always will be.)   

Byron

The New Authoritarianism

http://www.city-journal.org/2012/eon0106fsjk.html

The totalitarian impulse has from the beginning been part and parcel of Left thinking, embodied from the start in those 19th-century utopian experiments that tried to create viable socialist communities and in the Marxist dream of establishing a "Dictatorship of the Proletariat."  The former all failed, and the latter failed catastrophically.  The Left thinks all of that must have been due to bad luck.

The U.S. Constitution, in contrast, was based on a far deeper understanding of human nature, and with the dangers of demands about "getting things done," clearly and specifically in mind.  Thus the system of separated and countervailing powers.  The currently popular idea that the problem with Government is that it can't "get things done" and therefore doesn't DO enough is laughable on its face and extremely dangerous.

I'll take all the gridlock I can get and be thankful for it.  Despite the best efforts of the Left, we are still a competent and energetic citizenry; what truly needs to get done will get done.  

Byron