Via Agto, Laura Bush opens her big mouth about Burma:

“Although they were aware of the threat, Burma’s state-run media failed to issue a timely warning to citizens in the storm’s path.” 

“It’s troubling that many of the Burmese people learned of this impending disaster only when foreign outlets, such as Radio Free Asia and Voice of America, sounded the alarm,” she said.

Asked by a reporter whether she was accusing the junta of having “blood on their hands,” she said it was clear they are “very inept.”

As opposed to her own husband’s administration, which issued an order to evacuate New Orleans after all the mass transportation had been closed, and her own husband, who only learned of the ongoing disaster when aides forced him to watch TV clips.  

And now Time has its own breathtakingly stupid suggestion: invade Burma.  Because nothing improves a natural disaster more than adding a war on top of it.

So, two months ago, playing with Slate’s delegate calculator, I guessed that Obama would end up with 1677 delegates (thus needing 348 superdelegates).

http://zompist.wordpress.com/2008/03/05/play-campaign-manager-in-your-own-home/

And today the default settings give Obama 1701 delegates (so he needs 324 superdelegates).

This isn’t because I’m a great pundit… it’s because the numbers were pretty much in two months ago.  It looked bad for Hillary.  And pretty much every state has gone the way anyone with a learner’s pundit permit guessed.  Yet it’s only now that the media seem to be stating openly that Hillary’s history.

At this point Hillary’s playbook must look like that S. Harris cartoon with the scientist staring at a blackboard with a bunch of equations on two sides, and in between “… and then a miracle occurs…”

I just finished Cognitive Linguistics: Basic Readings (ed. Dirk Geeraerts).  I wanted to get up to speed on this cognitive linguistics, as the kids call it these days.  I actually like it more than generative syntax, though I think its program is better than its progress.  It wants to be cognitive, even if mostly it’s still people noodling around on sketchpads rather than, say, in the genome.  But it’s still an improvement over Chomsky, who despite holding that grammar is innate, is aggressively uninterested in the brain, in the evolution of language, or in any way language might be integrated into general cognition.

I used a few of the essays as fodder for my upcoming Xurnese grammar; but I thought I’d highlight one here: “Usage-based linguistics”, an overview of developmental studies by Michael Tomasello.  What’s most striking about his research, to me, is how incompatible it is with Chomsky’s latest theories.

Briefly, Chomsky thinks syntax is innate– we’re born with a complete universal grammar, and all the child has to do is figure out a few switches to flip once she discovers that she’s learning English rather than Ojibwe.  He supports this idea with the “poverty of stimulus” argument, which claims that there is far too little linguistic input to learn the full complexity of syntax.

Here’s what Tomasello found: children at first learn single-meaning utterances (’holophrases’).  Some are imitations of entire sentences (”Gimme-that”), but it’s pretty clear that they’re used as invariable units.  Next, they try two-unit phrases– usually a noun filling a slot (”More juice”), though sometimes the added element is a verb (”I-wanna walk”).  Later the slots get more complicated.

He had an unusually rich corpus for one 2-year-old, and took the last half-hour, counting 455 distinct utterances.  Then he compared each one to the previous weeks of data.  78% were word-for-word duplicates of previous utterances.  18% were copies of previous utterances with one minor change; just 4% had two changes, though in each case the particular changes were themselves already attested. 

That is: the vast majority of utterances were things the child had said before, or very minor variations on them.  It’s been noticed that children rarely learn a new pattern that’s demonstrated in front of them, which has been taken as meaning that they don’t imitate adult speech.  But now we see that they don’t do it because a single instance isn’t enough data for them.  They don’t venture to use a new construction till they’ve heard it many times and know how to use it.

A nice confirmation of this: children learning inflectional languages don’t learn the six person/number combinations at the same rate.  They first master the ones with the highest frequency in adult speech– e.g. 1st person singular, rather than 3rd person plural.  Again, they’re learning by imitation, and it takes a huge amount of repetition for them to learn something.  They also seem to learn each verb paradigm separately– it takes a long time before they start generalizing.

Another supposed bit of evidence that children don’t imitate adult speech is that they make errors like “Her open it.”  But Tomasello points out children hear plenty of expressions like “Let her open it” or “Help her open it.”  They’re reproducing part of an utterance that they’ve heard without understanding the whole thing.  They don’t make mistakes like “Mary hit I”, because that never occurs in what they hear.

A child may use what seems like a complex construction, but it can be an illusion.  For instance, he found that kids pretty quickly say “I think…”  But at that age they didn’t have other forms (”she thinks”, “I don’t think”, “I thought”, or even “I think that”).  So this is very likely not real subordination; rather, they’re using “I-think” to mean “maybe”.

Now, why is all this striking?  Because it doesn’t fit at all with an innate, complete understanding of syntax. If all the kid had to do was flip switches, she wouldn’t struggle like this.  They aren’t born knowing the patterns of language; they have to laboriously acquire them, adding new features only after they’ve been exposed to a load of data.

Thomas Friedman has a good column today.  But first, I have to get this out of the way.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/30/opinion/30friedman.html

Anyway.  Friedman addresses the mind-boggling idea currently being pushed by McCain and (good Lord) Hillary about getting rid of the 18.4¢ gas tax.  Not only is this fiscally irresponsible, nearly worthless in the face of $4 gas, and shameless pandering, but it’s precisely the wrong way to go on oil.

Markets are great ways of pricing and allocating goods… except when there are significant externalities involved.  If manufacturers get something for free, or cause harm without paying for it, then their prices just don’t reflect these things, and the market operates on false information.

The price of gas doesn’t reflect the fact that it’s running out, or the pollution and carbon emissions it causes, or the cost of the foreign policy we pursue to secure it.  The single simplest way to address this is with a gas tax.  It’s one of the few taxes that actually affects economic incentives in the right way. 

No one likes a nag; but living in denial for another eight years is not an acceptable alternative.  It’s not just that we should kinda maybe face these issues.  We will face them.  We will soon live in a world where cheap gas is a thing of the past, and people will rethink those SUVs and sprawling suburbs.  The choice isn’t between cheap energy and annoying liberal contraints.  It’s between starting to deal with the problem now, while we have time to adjust and research alternatives, or dealing with catastrophic failure in a few decades.

One of Friedman’s most telling bits:

In 1997, said Resch, America was the leader in solar energy technology, with 40 percent of global solar production. “Last year, we were less than 8 percent, and even most of that was manufacturing for overseas markets.”

What’s kept the US on top for a century and given us bigger incomes (and energy footprints) isn’t our moral values; it’s our technology.  We did things earlier and better than other nations.  If we lose that edge, we can’t ultimately keep our lead in wealth either.  We need to be applying ingenuity to energy production, rather than to creating ever more tenuous types of mortgages.

Probably the Order of the Stick will always be considered a D&D comic.  But it hasn’t been, for quite a while.  By by rough count, the last ten strips contain about five D&D references, total.  It’s basically a fantasy comic that occasionally uses D&D jokes.  (He’s actually using anachronisms and pop culture references more than D&D.)

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  On the other hand I’m looking forward to Chainmail Bikini starting up again.

Wow. Occasionally I find a book that unwinds my mind and rethreads my head. This is one: The Shia Revival, by Vali Nasr.

By now people often know about the Sunni/Shi`i distinction and even know where each is concentrated.  And you can hardly get your pundit license without knowing that the conflict derives from a 1300-year-old succession dispute: the Shi`ites believe that only descendents of Muhammad’s son-in-law Ali can rightfully rule.

But Nasr makes this come alive.  He starts with the celebration of Ashura in Karbala in 2003, which Americans took as Iraqis celebrating some kind of religious festival Saddam had prohibited, thus a victory for “freedom”.  In fact Ashura is an emotional ritual commemorating the martyrdom of Ali’s son Husayn, and this gathering of two million Shi`i marked the transformation of the Middle East not according to Bush’s neocons, but in the direction of Shi`a revival.

Bush– like many of the leaders Nasr describes, ancient and modern– didn’t know what he was stirring up.  More confusion has reigned in Bush’s support for the Iraqi premier’s attacks on Moqtada al-Sadr in Basra, which has been depicted as a struggle against Iran… although in that fight Iran supported the government.  Similarly McCain’s confusion of al-Qaeda with Iran isn’t just a minor point; it’s a failure to understand what’s going on in the region.

Unwittingly, the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan empowered the Shi`ites, who were oppressed by Saddamn and the Taliban, and has greatly strengthened Iran, which saw two neighboring enemies disappear.  It had no need to meddle to secure influence in Iraq; shared Shi`ite values and relationships gave it that on a platter.  At the same time Iraq created a new Shi`ite hero in Ali al-Sistani, who is more moderate and conservative than the Iranian leadership. 

As Nasr shows, it’s useless to talk about Islamic fundamentalism… we have to ask instead which Islamic fundamentalism: Sunni or Shi`i.  In recent years the most dangerous variety is the Sunni, which is responsible for 9/11, the insurgency in Iraq (directed as much or more against the Shi`i taking power as against the US), and violence against Shi`i in Pakistan.  Some Sunni clerics have declared that Shi`i are not Muslims and can be attacked with impunity; it’s common to consider them a fifth column supporting either US or Iranian influence, depending on which enemy is more despised at the time.

 At times Nasr seems to hold out the tantalizing possibility of a US-Shi`a alliance.  The interests of the Shi`i are close to ours, in that they benefit from democracy and oppose Sunni terrorism.  This would have to mean some kind of rapprochement with Iran.  Isolating and demonizing its leaders is a losing proposition, and Iraq is likely to fall into chaos without Iran’s help.  On the other hand, being too pro-Shi`a would only intensify the Sunni extremist backlash against both us and the Shi`ites.

On the whole Nasr isn’t very hopeful; he considers that the alliance of convenience with Sunni leaders, for instance, was a mistake, convincing many Iraqi Shi`ites that the US would not protect their interests.  What’s certain, however, is that a whole lot of events in the next few years, from Lebanon to the Gulf states to Saudi Arabia to Iraq to Pakistan, will be determined by the Sunni/Shi`a divide.

How the debate went in a much cooler alternative universe.  Link stolen from Suspect Device.

http://moonshinepatriot.blogspot.com/2008/04/democratic-debate-abc-april-16-2008.html

There are various tests for winning US presidential elections: the economy; likeability; double letters.  But a key factor seems to be having an unnaturally full head of hair.  Americans just don’t like bald presidents, if they have a choice.

Kennedy, Carter, Reagan, and Clinton all had spectacular manes.  Nixon looked better than Humphrey.  Johnson/Goldwater and Eisenhower/Stevenson were tossups.

In recent years the Democrats obviously overestimated the hair factor.  Dukakis’ and Kerry’s big hair did them little good.  Just to be safe, though, Obama had better ease off on the razor, just enough to overshadow McCain’s combover.

A very sensible article by Jeff Greenfield on how the skills required to campaign don’t correlate with those needed to govern:

http://www.slate.com/id/2189272/

Prime examples: Bill Clinton, whose 1992 campaign was exemplary and whose first two years as President were a mess, and George Bush, whose 2004 campaign was focussed, defy-the-odds victory leading to a disastrous presidency.

This is a good reminder because judging the quality of a campaign sounds much more reasonable than most of the drivel that gets posted. 

(Say, I just noticed that the Categories list in WordPress is sorted by how often you’ve used each one.  So the one you want is likely to be at the top.  Clever!)

My friend muckefuck urged me to rant about the film I saw last night–Carlos Saura’s Fados… so I will, though it will mostly show that I have no idea how to talk about music, or dance.

Fado is a distinctively Portuguese musical form, prototypically featuring a mandolin-like instrument properly called the Portuguese guitar; an acoustic guitar; and a soulful soloist.  About all I knew about it before was the key word saudade, roughly meaning ‘longing’ or ‘nostalgia’.

You get plenty of that in Saura’s film, but it’s also exploded by a wide range of variations: different instruments, a wider range of emotions, old and new schools, and above all a welcome splash of energy from Africa.  Most of the songs are accompanied by dance; my wife thought this added little, but I thought it worked.

The best thing about Saura’s direction is what he doesn’t do.  He doesn’t have a fit in the editing room in an attempt to jazz up the music.  He doesn’t force the eye with extreme close-ups, or show just snippets of songs.  There’s no talk.  It’s all music (and dance), allowing you to focus on the performances.  I dislike overviews that cut the work in question into little pieces, a practice which insults the very work the editor is trying to showcase.  And though talk can be good for getting some context, it’s not the best use of a movie’s time… I can always look up the verbiage later.