perfidy

While my wife is away schmoozing with music bidness types for her band, and the boy is in Ohio with Grandma - it's just me and the girls.  And since they can be distracted with Dora the Explorer, I actually have a moment to think.

I thought I'd clear out a backlog of interesting stuff I've seen.

• This article at Wired discusses how the Sense of Touch Shapes Snap Judgments.  The bit about holding a clipboard making one self-important - that kind of struck me, and got me wondering what impact over the centuries things like the rosary, or of kings holding sceptres has had.  Could we design worry stones to improve our thinking?
• This bit from the economist on world debt is mildly troubling.  We're in a not good place, and about to jump into bad.  But we might get trampled in the rush.
• Interesting piece suggesting that Germany bail on the Euro, rather than the Euro kicking Greece to the curb.  Personally, and for no economic reason whatsoever, I'd like to see the Euro fail.  Just because I don't like it.  I have a bad feeling, though, that that just might happen, and the economic and political consequences wouldn't be pretty.  I recall that the last great depression started with a stock/bank crisis, and then worsened into a sovereign debt crisis.
• Ran across this fifteen year old piece from CATO on how excessive government killed the Roman Empire.
• I always thought that granting suffrage to women was at the very least tactically foolish.  It may have been a bad strategic move as well.  From Roissy:

Giving women the right to vote really was a bad move:

Did Women’s Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government?

Giving women the right to vote significantly changed American politics from the very beginning. Despite claims to the contrary, the gender gap is not something that has arisen since the 1970s. Suffrage coincided with immediate increases in state government expenditures and revenue, and these effects continued growing as more women took advantage of the franchise. Similar changes occurred at the federal level as female suffrage led to more liberal voting records for the state’s U.S. House and Senate delegations. In the Senate, suffrage changed voting behavior by an amount equal to almost 20 percent of the difference between Republican and Democratic senators. Suffrage also coincided with changes in the probability that prohibition would be enacted and changes in divorce laws. We were also able to deal with questions of causality by taking advantage of the fact that while some states voluntarily adopted suffrage, others where compelled to do so by the Nineteenth Amendment. The conclusion was that suffrage dramatically changed government in both cases. Accordingly, the effects of suffrage we estimate are not reflecting some other factor present in only states that adopted suffrage. [...]

More work remains to be done on why women vote so differently, but our initial work provides scant evidence that it is due to self-interest arising from their employment by government. The only evidence that we found indicated that the gender gap in part arises from women’s fear that they are being left to raise children on their own (Lott and Kenny 1997). If this result is true, the continued breakdown of the family and higher divorce rates imply growing political conflicts between the sexes.

Yes, women’s suffrage really did herald the end days of America. The result of giving women the vote has been an ever-increasing nanny state funded on the backs of increasingly sex-dispossessed betas (dispossessed from banging women during their prime years). The elevation of diversity as a moral value and the flooding of the country with incompatible third world immigrants has no doubt been a secondary consequence of suffrage for women, who naturally bring their feminine sensibilities, for better or (more usually) for worse, to the polls. This is why I have argued that the next step in this national devolution toward mindless compassion is the creation of armies of cads. Men want sex, and will do whatever it takes to get it, whether that be good or ill for society.

Hmn.

• and then there's ...  I forgot what the last one was.

I'm also thinking about Formalism but more on that later, after I go have a beer.