Plants Have Feelings, Too

Some people, through what appears to be an excess of sensitivity, refuse to eat animal products. They envision the pain and suffering of our animal cousins and refuse, on moral grounds, to participate.

So well developed is their capacity for empathy that they apply it to all members of the animal kingdom.

By their reasoning, animals should have rights too. What makes us believe that we humans comprise a superior class of animals… just because we have the capacity to speak and to reason?

For those who are afraid of hurting any animal, to the point where they refuse to swat flies, lest they think of themselves as serial killers, science has now discovered that plants have feelings too.

Here’s the story from Modern Farmer:

Eating a leaf off a plant may not kill it, but that doesn't mean the plant likes it. The newest study to examine the intelligence (or at least behavior) of plants finds that plants can tell when they're being eaten -- and send out defenses to stop it from happening.

We’ve been hearing for decades about the complex intelligence of plants; last year’s excellent New Yorker piece is a good place to start, if you want to learn more about the subject. But a new study, conducted by researchers at the University of Missouri, managed to figure out one new important element: plants can tell when they’re being eaten, and they don’t like it.

Keep this in mind the next time you chomp on that spinach leaf.

How dare you disrespect the plant’s feelings!

Time to do some serious penance for participating in the Holocaust that we call the salad bar.

New York City: Capital of Inequality and Segregation

New York has become the poster child for wealth inequality and racial segregation.

The Bloomberg years and the financial crisis worked wonders for the 1%, but the rest of the city’s citizens suffered. The middle class has been hollowed out and the city is increasingly the domain of the very rich and the rest.

Now, we have a new mayor, Bill de Blasio, and the prospects are not very much better.

Joel Kotkin uses statistics to paint the picture.

Gotham has become the American capital of a national and even international trend toward greater income inequality and declining social mobility….

Manhattan is now the most unequal county in America (it was 17th in 1980), with a Gini coefficient — which measures the disparity between the richest and poorest residents — higher than that of Apartheid-era South Africa.

Something liberal New Yorkers—that includes just about everyone—should not be proud of.

New Yorkers are great believers in racial integration. And yet, the city remains racially segregated, especially when it comes to the school system.

Kotkin explains:

And as the city becomes more economically unequal, it’s also become more racially segregated. Demographer Daniel Herz’ census analysis shows New York is now America’s second most racially divided city, behind only Milwaukee.African-American incomes in New York are barely half those of whites, as compared to nearly 70% in Phoenix and Houston.

And New York City now has the nation’s single most segregated public school system, according to a devastating report from the Civil Rights Project at UCLA.

Will the de Blasio program, designed to solve these problems, be more effective than twelve years of Michael Bloomberg?

Kotkin does not think so:

But de Blasio’s press to bring in more tax revenue to pay for ambitious new programs, more generous social services and new contracts for city workers have the perverse effect of doubling down on Bloomberg’s bet on the wealthy.

His ambitious ramping up of green-energy policy could be the straw that breaks the back of what remains of the logistics and manufacturing industries in New York, something that has already occurred in California.

And his kowtowing to the teachers union and attempted assaults on charter schools threaten to further undermine the effectiveness of public education, something vital to middle and working class residents.

Surely, New Yorkers hold all the right beliefs. They vote for politicians who hold the same liberal and progressive beliefs.

Unfortunately, when their policies are put into practice their dreams of a multicultural utopia are seen to have produced a racially segregated, grossly unequal dystopia.

You would think that true pragmatists would look at the results and conclude that perhaps the policies are defective.

Tragically, New Yorkers are more likely to double down on failure than to change course.

Happy Thought Meets the Work Ethic

When Aaron Beck invented cognitive therapy he prescribed homework exercises that would help depressed patients restore some balance to their thinking.

It was better than introspection and turned out to be as good as Prozac.

Beck told his patients to write down a depressive thought—like “I never get anything right”—and to add three facts that tend to prove the thought correct and three thoughts that tend to disprove it.

To the extent that these exercises, performed repeatedly, worked, they did so because they replaced pessimism with balance. They offered a place for more optimistic thinking but they did not replace unalloyed pessimism with unalloyed optimism.

I have made the point before, and have made it often. It is worth making again because some cognitive therapists believe that positive thinking, aka happy thought, is enough.

Gabriele Oettingen explains in The New York Times:

MANY people think that the key to success is to cultivate and doggedly maintain an optimistic outlook. This belief in the power of positive thinking, expressed with varying degrees of sophistication, informs everything from affirmative pop anthems like Katy Perry’s “Roar” to the Mayo Clinic’s suggestion that you may be able to improve your health by eliminating “negative self-talk.”

But the truth is that positive thinking often hinders us. More than two decades ago, I conducted a study in which I presented women enrolled in a weight-reduction program with several short, open-ended scenarios about future events — and asked them to imagine how they would fare in each one. Some of these scenarios asked the women to imagine that they had successfully completed the program; others asked them to imagine situations in which they were tempted to cheat on their diets. I then asked the women to rate how positive or negative their resulting thoughts and images were.

A year later, I checked in on these women. The results were striking: The more positively women had imagined themselves in these scenarios, the fewer pounds they had lost.

If positive thinking means filling your mind with fantasies of success, it does not work very well. Apparently, the good feeling that accompanies the fantasy demotivates people. Or else, they might believe that with the right mental attitude the rest will follow naturally.

Proponents of happy thought do not seem to recognize that people need to work to achieve their goals. Happy thought without a plan does not work.

To balance happy thought with work, Oettigen and her colleagues ask their subjects to imagine the obstacles that will stand in the way of achievement. 

Beyond their ability to see themselves succeeding, they would set about making a plan for how they were going to overcome the obstacles to success.

Almost by definition, work means expending effort to overcome obstacles.

Moreover, she adds, your wishes must be realistically attainable. You cannot use happy thought, even accompanied by hard work, to make yourself into Charles Barkley.

In Oettingen’s words:

Some critics of positive thinking have advised people to discard all happy talk and “get real” by dwelling on the challenges or obstacles. But this is too extreme a correction. Studies have shown that this strategy doesn’t work any better than entertaining positive fantasies.

What does work better is a hybrid approach that combines positive thinking with “realism.” Here’s how it works. Think of a wish. For a few minutes, imagine the wish coming true, letting your mind wander and drift where it will. Then shift gears. Spend a few more minutes imagining the obstacles that stand in the way of realizing your wish.

This simple process, which my colleagues and I call “mental contrasting,” has produced powerful results in laboratory experiments. When participants have performed mental contrasting with reasonable, potentially attainable wishes, they have come away more energized and achieved better results compared with participants who either positively fantasized or dwelt on the obstacles.

When participants have performed mental contrasting with wishes that are not reasonable or attainable, they have disengaged more from these wishes. Mental contrasting spurs us on when it makes sense to pursue a wish, and lets us abandon wishes more readily when it doesn’t, so that we can go after other, more reasonable ambitions.

Again, Aaron Beck’s homework exercises introduced more than balanced judgment; they required work. When you are depressed and are persuaded that you are worthless, you will need to expend some energy and to overcome some obstacles to find any reason to think otherwise.

By definition, homework is work. A patient who overcomes depression by performing these exercises has worked to defeat the mental obstacles that have been preventing him from succeeding.

Charles Barkley Exposes "a Dirty, Dark Secret"

Famed basketball legend Charles Barkley had his say about the current state of African-American culture.

The Daily Caller reports his remarks without commentary. I will do the same.

From The Daily Caller:

While appearing on “Afternoons with Anthony Gargano and Rob Ellis,” Barkley was asked about a rumor that Seattle Seahawks QB Russell Wilson was getting criticism from his black teammates for not being, quote, “black enough.”

Barkley went on a long monologue on the subject: “Unfortunately, as I tell my white friends, we as black people, we’re never going to be successful, not because of you white people, but because of other black people. When you’re black, you have to deal with so much crap in your life from other black people. It’s a dirty, dark secret; I’m glad it’s coming out.”

Barkley said that young black men who do well in school are accused of “acting white” by their peers. “One of the reasons we’re never going to be successful as a whole, because of other black people. And for some reason we are brainwashed to think, if you’re not a thug or an idiot, you’re not black enough. If you go to school, make good grades, speak intelligent, and don’t break the law, you’re not a good black person. And it’s a dirty, dark secret.”

“There are a lot of black people who are unintelligent, who don’t have success,” he continued. “It’s best to knock a successful black person down because they’re intelligent, they speak well, they do well in school, and they’re successful…”

“We’re the only ethnic group who say, ‘Hey, if you go to jail, it gives you street cred.’ It’s just typical BS that goes on when you’re black, man.”

Hillarynomics

Call it the battle of the titans.

Billionaire Warren Buffett insists that Hillary Clinton will be the next president of these United States.

Billionaire Jim Rogers guarantees that it will not happen.

As of yesterday, Rogers seemed to be more prescient.

Speaking at a Massachusetts rally in support of gubernatorial candidate Martha Coakley, Hillary declared:

Don’t let anybody tell you that raising the minimum wage will kill jobs,” Clinton said. They always say that.

As Bryan Preston notes, the “they” in question is the Congressional Budget Office. It has predicted that raising the minimum wage will destroy half a million jobs.

Hillary continued by showing off her understanding of economics.

Preston quotes:

“My husband gave working families a raise in the 1990s,” Clinton said, saying she herself voted for raising the minimum wage when she served as a senator from New York. “Don’t let anybody tell you that it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs.”

Now we know, Hillary Clinton does not believe that businesses create jobs. Doubtless she will quickly walk back this piece of nonsense. And the press will probably not hold her to account.

For all I know, Warren Buffet might be right. Hillary might well be the next POTUS. But before that happens, she will have to find a way to keep her foot out of her mouth.

Renee Zellweger's New Face

Renee Zellweger is the talk of the nation. If her fondest wish was to be able to walk down the street again and not be recognized, she has succeeded. If she wanted to play roles that were written for women two decades her junior, she has probably not.

You see, it’s all about face. It’s about saving face and losing face. In the most literal sense.

Whatever the concept of face means in Chinese culture, by using the word face, the Chinese are referring, among other things, to the way we look to other people—above the neck.

Those who are obsessed with how they look below the neck should probably pay more attention to their face. People identify you by your face, not by your abs or your thigh gap.

I suspect that I have written more about the topic of “face” than nearly anyone who writes in English. See my book, Saving Face and my new book, The Last Psychoanalyst. Thus, I consider myself something of an authority on the topic.

If Western culture values the state of your soul, if today’s therapy culture cares primarily about how you feel and if psychologists believe that you have an identity because you are conscious of always being the same person, Chinese culture differs markedly by defining individual identity by the way you look to other people.

In Chinese culture the requirement to express yourself pales next to the requirement to look respectable to other people and to behave decorously. Chinese culture cares about social harmony. If that offers you individual fulfillment, well and good. If it does not, social harmony is more important.

No one will grasp the distinction between Western and Chinese cultures without understanding the difference between “face” in China and “soul” in the West.

Some Western scientists are studying face. They are drawing some interesting and important conclusions.

Alex Kuczynski writes in the New York Times:

Nancy Etcoff, an evolutionary psychologist at Harvard and author of “Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty,” said: “We have gotten used to seeing bad plastic surgery. Two big basketballs on the chest, fish lips, blown-up cheeks. But this is a little different. This is about a lot of subtle changes that add up to a person who no longer looks like our memory of them. She looks like a different person.” Instead of aging along with us, she jumped off the path directly into another identity.

Faces are tightly packed with important biological information, Dr. Etcoff said. “They tell people who we are, who our relatives are, how we feel,” she said. “We are face virtuosos. We can discern one face from thousands, even millions, of other faces. When someone does something to their face that renders them unrecognizable, when that impacts our ability to read their face, it really is a jolt.”

As for Ms. Zellweger… she is about to discover anonymity and will perhaps not find it to her liking.

Dare we say, it is slightly ironic to see that someone who has made a living pretending to be someone she’s not now appearing to be someone she is not. It’s as though her face has been replaced by a new mask. It’s decidedly disconcerting to witness it.

In the public debate over the Zellweger transformation, a couple of points stand out. Naturally, those who do not believe in free will and personal responsibility have absolved her of any agency for her decision to undergo so many cosmetic procedures. They have blamed it on the American cult of youth and on the American demand that women to look eternally young.

Of course, this is a moral cop out. I will not name all of the forty-something actresses who do fine work without having modified their faces, but the truth is that no woman is forced to alter her appearance. 

It might be that we no longer respect the wisdom that comes from age, but the truth is, botox—to take the least of these procedures—makes faces look eerily masklike, to the point where the face’s role in communicating emotion is compromised.

Perhaps a botoxed face can pass in a still photo, but anyhone who spends some time conversing face-to-face with someone who has been botoxed will quickly feel the loss of face.

It is ironic to see so many women blame the Zellweger transformation on Hollywood. After all, cameras and makeup can be very forgiving. They can make you look younger or older, more or less beautiful. If it were just for career, one suspects that fewer Hollywood stars would be going under the knife.

The greater irony lies in the fact that four decades ago second-wave feminism burst on the scenes by insisting, among other things, that women had to be recognized for their minds not their bodies. How did it happen that this emphasis produced generations of women who are obsessed about the shape of their bodies and the look of their faces.

As Kuczynski wrote in her book, Beauty Junkies:

…looks are the new feminism, an activism of aesthetics. As vulgar and shallow as it sounds, looks matter more than they ever have — especially for women.

How did such a well-planned assault on the feminine mystique and the beauty myth come to grief?

If you accept that biology trumps ideology it is not very difficult to understand.

If women are naturally more attractive to men in their twenties—studies from the dating websites all arrive at this conclusion—and if feminism told women not to marry until they were firmly established in their careers, this policy has produced a wave of thirtysomething women competing for men with twentysomething women.

And, competing at a disadvantage. In truth the disadvantage lay in pheromones--in sexual attraction hormones--but modern liberated women denied reality and decided that the problem lay with their bodies and their faces. They even refused to accept that fertility had something to do with sexual attraction. 

As if that were not sufficient, feminism produced even more single women by giving rise to a wave of divorces. Declaring marriage oppressive to women, feminists wanted to destigmatize divorce. Naturally, women suffered the most.

The newly single divorcees entered the marriage market, to compete with younger women. Thus, the market for aesthetic enhancements increased.

In consequence, women in their forties and fifties were competing for men against women who were considerably younger. Moreover, everyone woman knows—she may or may not want to tell you—that she dreads the day when she will become invisible to the male gaze. The male gaze is mostly drawn to young women, whether youth appears in the look on a face or in the shape of a figure.

But, when a woman who is in her mid-forties, like Zellweger, tries to make herself look ten or twenty years younger she will be engaged in what can politely be called deception.

And this is the problem with thinking that it’s all about aesthetics.

However young a woman appears, a moment of truth will inevitably arrive when her paramour realizes that he has been deceived. At times, he will not react well.

A woman who has spent considerable amounts of money enhancing her bodily and facial aesthetics will not understand why a man sees her at her true age, not her surgically enhanced age.

She might respond by becoming more desperate and by doing more surgery. She will ignore the fact that she will be more attractive if she uses fashion and cosmetics to enhance who she is rather than use surgery to look like someone she is not.