Kitten and String

Peaches and cream, bread and butter, kittens and string — all things that just really need to be together.

Maka Lea, the latest feline to join us (we have eight others!), is still in that cute kitten stage. He’s got some problems with his locomotion (more about that here and here, along with more pictures!), but he doesn’t let that bother him in the slightest.

Way on the right, little Maka Lea spots me carrying the camera into the livingroom. He can be hard to find — he’s so small that he fits into the tiniest hidey-holes, and under just about anything. But his curiousity got the better of him this morning — he saw that strange thing in my hands and just had to come see what it was.

Then I took him into the bedroom for one of his favorite games: playing with a short piece of twine. You can see how much he’s enjoying himself; he completely forgot about the camera. Eventually he did the universal kitten-and-string thing, getting himself all wrapped up in it.

It’s interesting to watch Maka Lea deal with his disabilities. Basically his strategy is to ignore them, along with their consequences. He’s bouncy and energetic, even compared with other kittens, and this results in all sorts of incidents that just look awful to us. For example, he might run headlong, at full throttle, into a piece of hard wooden furniture — making a resounding “thunk!” that we can hear on the other side of the house. Maka Lea acts like this is just a normal part of life; shakes his head a couple times, and resumes his headlong, full-throttle galivanting. We’ve seen him up on high places, not knowing how to safely descend. You can see him reach a point where he figures he’s got nothing to lose — can’t stay stuck here all day! — and he just launches himself into space. He might be over a hard rock or ceramic floor, or over a dog, or over some pointy object — it doesn’t matter, he just goes for it and ignores the consequences.

With this positive attitude, little Maka Lea does just about everything the “big kitties” do — even a little earlier, I think, than a normal kitten would do. His utter fearlessness lets him march right up to our dogs (who scatter whenever he comes too close, as they’re leery of getting nailed with Maka Lea’s awesomely sharp little claws). He just seems to have no idea that any action might have consequences; the very opposite of the stereotypical scaredy-cat. It’s good compensation for his disabilities, so long as we keep him strictly indoors (which we do)…

As usual, click on the small pictures for a larger view…

Troubling

Troubling. It seems I keep reading about politicians calling this or that “troubling”. I first wondered if I was imagining things, so I did a little research:

Google the web for “troubling” and you’ll get 27 million hits; google “trouble” and you get 340 million. So troubling isn’t exactly an unusual word, but it’s far from the most common.

Google News, on the other hand, has 8,820 hits for “troubling” at the moment I tried it. I perused the first 100 hits, and the majority of them are in stories related to politics. Not all of them, to be sure, but the clear majority. Ah, ha!

My final experiment was to do four searches on Google News: “troubling hillary-clinton", “troubling harry-reid", “troubling president-bush", and “troubling bill-frist”. The hits, respectively, were 38, 22, 976, and 16. But there’s another pattern, slightly subtler, that’s more interesting: the hits on the two Republicans were almost all about the Republicans, and the hits on the two Democrats were almost all said by the Democrats.

This is very one-sided. Apparently Republicans are very troubling to Democrats.

Then I wondered if I really understood what the word “troubling” meant, so I looked it up:

troubling

adj : causing distress or worry or anxiety

Well, that’s about what I thought it meant.

So why are the Democrats so one-sidedly “troubled” by the Republicans? Not that I’m really troubled by this, I’m just kind of curious about why that word seems to keep popping up.

I googled all sorts of things, trying to find someone who knew the reason; didn’t find a darned thing. So I took the more difficult approach: I sat down and pondered. And here’s what I came up with:

I think this is a conscious effort on the part of the Democrats — a word wouldn’t be so lop-sidedly used, otherwise. The Republicans are, I’m sure, just as troubled by the Democrats as vice versa. Yet they aren’t saying so. That difference can really only be accounted for by a deliberate effort.

If the Democrats are doing it on purpose, why are they? I’ll bet they got some advice from someone they trust, a political strategist most likely. I’ll further bet that they got advice that the word “troubling” is a splendid way to make your political enemy look bad — it’s completely non-specific and can’t really be countered. Think about it: Harry Reid calls the NSA wiretaps “troubling”. What’s President Bush going to say? “No, Harry, they’re not troubling"? Doesn’t work. But anybody listening to Harry Reid hears a respected [did I really say that?] Senator calling President Bush’s actions “troubling”. Sounds bad, doesn’t it?

I think that’s the explanation. When faced with a situation where they have no reasoned, defensible counter-position (something that seems to happen to them with great regularity), the Democrats have deliberately decided to invoke the generic, all-purpose adjective “troubling” to register their non-specific objection, and to convey their concern with the proper gravitas.

I’d like to see the Republicans counter this troubling trend. Everytime a Democrat uses “troubling” to characterize a Republican policy or action, I’d like to see the Republicans challenge the Democrats to articulate and defend their alternative. I don’t hear that enough; instead, the Democrat’s non-specific whining is usually allowed to stand unchallenged, like the mom who ignores her screaming child.

Sometimes the child really does need a good spanking.

Education Matters

My readers (all 11 of them) know how concerned I am by the anti-results, anti-science, touchy-feely culture that pervades our educational system. A report delivered to the National Academies on Thursday provides some concrete evidence that competition in the intellectual arena is heating up. Financed by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which “…strive[s] to foster an environment nationwide in which entrepreneurs have the information and tools they need to succeed” (from their web site), it reports on a survey of over 200 multinational companies. The survey aimed at uncovering the factors that drove outsourcing. Key graf from the press reports:

The study contended that lower labor costs in emerging markets are not the major reason for hiring researchers overseas, though they are a consideration. Tax incentives do not matter much, either, it said.

Instead, the report found that multinational corporations were global shoppers for talent. The companies want to nurture close links with leading universities in emerging markets to work with professors and to hire promising graduates.

In other words, America is no longer the premier source of talent — many other countries now have talent pools that look very attractive to these companies, and the trend is for that to be even more true down the road. When our children get a shoddy, short-changing education, we are as a nation crippled in our ability to compete in this arena. This is the core of what worries me on this issue.

The report’s author also had this to say:

"The United States would seem to have a comparative advantage in maintaining its innovative leadership through the high caliber of its scientists and its strong protection of IP,” said Lesa Mitchell, vice president of Advancing Innovation at the Kauffman Foundation. “Industry and universities must be alert to removing obstacles to joint research, or emerging countries will overtake us in innovation breakthroughs, and the burst of discovery that has been driving our economy for the past half-century will be over."

Another public policy implication of the findings, say the researches, is that the United States must focus on highly skilled worker immigration.

"We are educating the best and the brightest, but make it impossible for them to stay in America and immigrate. We need major immigration reform that welcomes, instead of pushes out, highly skilled workers,” said Dr. Marie Thursby.

That first point, about the collaboration between universities and companies, is new to me … but it certainly makes sense, and it jibes with my own experiences in Estonia. The point about our immigration policies stupidly preventing us from importing talent is one I whole-heartedly agree with. If we can’t educate our own children (through our own mismanagement of the education process), well, the next best thing would be to allow (and encourage!) the world’s best and brightest to become American citizens. Why any current American citizen would object to that is beyond me…

A presentation about this report is available here. The report itself is currently undergoing peer review; when it is actually published I’ll let you know.