Fish for Friday

Last Friday a man jumped off the Bronx Zoo Wild Asia Monorail, cleared two fences, and landed in a tiger enclosure. Where, not surprisingly, he was attacked by a tiger. Zoo employees used fire extinguishers to chase the tiger away from the man, but a zoo official was quoted as saying they would have used deadly force if necessary.

    I don't suppose that he meant they would have shot the man, not the tiger. But if a person is that determined to do something senseless, why should an innocent member of an endangered species pay the price?
    That would be like shooting the driver of a car to keep them from running over someone who ran out in an interstate to commit suicide. Wouldn't it? [personal communication]

Something to think about, from "On the diminishing marginal utility of Stuff," by Charlie Stross:

Once you hit a certain threshold at which you are not hungry, cold, in debt, and short of pocket money, a weird gap opens up between that which is available, and that which we desire. Even the hyper-rich can't have what they want unless they pour vast amounts of money—and, more importantly, time—into making it.
    So why do the rich keep trying to acquire more money, long past the point at which it can make any noticeable difference to their lifestyle?
    I have three answers. One: it becomes a habit. You don't generally get to be hyper-rich without many years of continual effort; after a decade, just about anything becomes an ingrained habit.
    Two: it becomes a game, a way of keeping track of how well you're doing at whatever it is you want to do.
    And three: you're trying to build up a war chest that will buy you a very expensive toy—one that isn't currently available at any price, so that if you want one you'll have to sink billions of dollars and years of your own time into building it.
    The latter is unusual but not unheard-of. Elon Musk has repeatedly explained that he wants to retire on Mars. That's a not-available-at-any-price option right now, but he's definitely serious about it; which is why he sank most of a gigantic fortune into building his own space program....
    But what, I wonder, motivates Mitt Romney? Does he want to buy something that isn't for sale at any price because it doesn't exist yet? Is it habit? Or is it all a game? [personal communication]

Of course, "friends don't let friends read The Daily Beast," but maybe this won't harm you: "The Sinister Message Behind Romney's 'Gaffe'," by David Frum [personal communication; excerpt:]

Mitt Romney has just committed the worst presidential-candidate gaffe since Gerald Ford announced in 1976 that "there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe."
    Irreparable? To Romney's image, yes; to his election chances...we'll see. But you know who's determined that Romney never recover? His deluded supporters in the conservative media world....Romney was expressing views that are widely held among a certain group of conservatives, and they are determined to make it as awkward as possible for him to retreat from those views.
    ...Romney has been reshaped by this campaign. The dread to which he gives voice in his Boca Raton speech—that "makers" are about to be electorally overwhelmed by "takers"—is a dread expressed again and again by conservative media and conservative thought-leaders. "Democracy is two lions and a lamb voting on what's for dinner": how often have we heard that old country-club quip repeated these past four years? Only this time, the quip is repeated not as a joke, but with real fear.
    ...And what makes it all both so heart-rending and so outrageous is that all this is occurring at a time when economically disadvantaged Americans have never been so demoralized and passive, never exerted less political clout. No Coxey's army is marching on Washington, no sit-down strikes are paralyzing factories, no squatters are moving onto farmer's fields...There is no protest party of the political left.
    ...Yet even so, the rich and the old are scared witless! Watch the trailer of Dinesh D'Souza's new movie to glimpse into their mental universe: chanting swarthy mobs, churches and banks under attack, angry black people grabbing at other people's houses.
    It's all a scam, but it's a spectacularly effective scam. Mitt Romney tried to make use of the scam, and now instead has fallen victim to it himself....

And one more: "We Are All Welfare Queens Now," by Ta-Nehisi Coates, published in The Atlantic [personal communication; excerpt:]

Thinking some more on Mitt Romney's high-handed claim that one in two Americans will vote for Obama simply to better ensure their own sloth, I was reminded of Lee Atwater's famous explanation of the Southern Strategy:

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff....

The process Atwater is describing really stretches back to 1790 (sorry if I am on repeat here) when Congress restricted citizenship to white people. Progress has meant a series of fights first over direct and indirect components of citizenship (voting, serving in public office, serving in the Army, serving on juries etc.) and less explicit tactics to curtail access to them.
    ...More to the point, as tactics aimed at suppressing black citizenship become more abstract, they also have the side-effect of enveloping non-blacks. Atwater's point that the policies of the Southern Strategy hurt blacks more than whites is well taken. But some whites were hurt too....What [we're seeing now] is more non-black people being swept into the pool of victims and the pool expanding.
    You can paint a similar history of the welfare state, which was first secured by assuring racist white Democrats that the pariah of black America would be cut out of it. When such machinations became untenable, the strategy became to claim the welfare state mainly benefited blacks. And as that has become untenable, the strategy has become to target the welfare state itself, with no obvious mention of color. At each interval the ostensible pariah grows, until one in two Americans are members of the pariah class....

Well, here is one for you...
    Just unscrewed the lid on a jar of sunflower butter, and found ants inside! The lid was on tight, how can that be? On closer examination I discovered the new jar has one less groove of threads than an old one, no doubt a cost-saving move to squeeze an extra 50 cents of profit per 1,000 units. Only problem is, ants can follow the threads and get inside to the food. Which I assume means other tiny creatures, and air, can do the same.
    That is what actuarial thinking—or "Bainthink" as we call it these days—gets you. More profit on the container, no protection for what is inside.
    Hey, that gives me an idea, what if we take seat belts and airbags out of cars to make them more affordable? [personal communication]

Limerick of the week:

When morning comes and day's post's not ready,
Comb the papers with eye poised, steady:
    Some news from somewhere
    Will come out of nowhere;
Hold on, th'experience can be heady!