A new study says that people start losing their brain powers as early as 45 years of age.

The results of the tests show that cognitive scores declined in all categories except vocabulary – and there was a faster decline in older people.

The study found a 9.6% decline in mental reasoning in men aged 65-70 and a 7.4% decline for women of the same age.

For men and women aged 45-49, there was a 3.6% decline.

Since my work involves mainly words, the lack of decline in vocabulary skills may be masking my decrepitude.

The study can be read here.

… and best wishes for the New Year to all the readers of this blog.

Since my family is visiting over the holiday week, blogging will be lighter than usual. Regular blogging will resume on Tuesday, January 4, 2012.

The new film version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is being released today.

I have not read the books but saw the Swedish trilogy of films and they were pretty good. They are also recent, all being released in 2009 so I don’t understand the reasons for this remake. The new version also takes place in Sweden and seems to have the same plot with the same characters and names, and the trailer seems awfully similar to the original, so I am baffled as to why it was done.

The only benefit seems to be to not have subtitles. I know that some people don’t like them but they don’t bother me in the least. In fact, after the film is over, I often cannot recall whether the film was in English or I was reading subtitles. Subtitles can also be an advantage because you don’t miss mumbled words and the spoken words do not get drowned by ambient sounds, not an insignificant factor when you are watching at home, and your dog can get excited by seeing a squirrel and let loose a fusillade of barks.

Maybe the reason is purely commercial. The books have been huge bestsellers and by making pretty much the same film but in English with a well-known star like Daniel Craig, Hollywood hopes to cash in on the phenomenon and make a bundle.

Yes, it’s that time of year to have fun seeing the people over at Fox News get into a lather over people not using the word ‘Christmas’ everywhere. The best part of this war is that it not only gives The Daily Show plenty of material for mockery, it also allows them to set the record straight, destroying the myth that the US used to always treat Christmas with somber veneration until we heathens destroyed its sanctity.

Face it, Fox News. You have lost the war on Christmas. It has become largely a secular event and there is no going back, however much you insist on saying “Merry Christmas”.

Four years ago, I made the obvious point of why spreading the wealth was much better for everyone than great inequality. (I wrote a whole series of posts on this but this particular one is the most relevant here.)

The oligarchy and its allies, especially those in the Republican party and Fox News, have fought against this, saying that rich people are ‘job creators’ and taxing them more means that they will invest less and hire less people. A billionaire venture capitalist named Nick Hanauer wrote an op-ed in which he debunks this idea and pretty much makes the same point that people like me have made.

I’m a very rich person… Even so, I’ve never been a “job creator.” I can start a business based on a great idea, and initially hire dozens or hundreds of people. But if no one can afford to buy what I have to sell, my business will soon fail and all those jobs will evaporate.

That’s why I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is the feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion a virtuous cycle that allows companies to survive and thrive and business owners to hire. An ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than I ever have been or ever will be.
…
It is unquestionably true that without entrepreneurs and investors, you can’t have a dynamic and growing capitalist economy. But it’s equally true that without consumers, you can’t have entrepreneurs and investors. And the more we have happy customers with lots of disposable income, the better our businesses will do.

That’s why our current policies are so upside down. When the American middle class defends a tax system in which the lion’s share of benefits accrues to the richest, all in the name of job creation, all that happens is that the rich get richer.

And that’s what has been happening in the U.S. for the last 30 years.
…
One reason this policy is so wrong-headed is that there can never be enough superrich Americans to power a great economy. The annual earnings of people like me are hundreds, if not thousands, of times greater than those of the average American, but we don’t buy hundreds or thousands of times more stuff. My family owns three cars, not 3,000. I buy a few pairs of pants and a few shirts a year, just like most American men. Like everyone else, I go out to eat with friends and family only occasionally.
…
I can’t buy enough of anything to make up for the fact that millions of unemployed and underemployed Americans can’t buy any new clothes or enjoy any meals out. Or to make up for the decreasing consumption of the tens of millions of middle-class families that are barely squeaking by, buried by spiraling costs and trapped by stagnant or declining wages.

If the average American family still got the same share of income they earned in 1980, they would have an astounding $13,000 more in their pockets a year. It’s worth pausing to consider what our economy would be like today if middle-class consumers had that additional income to spend. [My italics]
…
We’ve had it backward for the last 30 years. Rich businesspeople like me don’t create jobs. Middle-class consumers do, and when they thrive, U.S. businesses grow and profit. That’s why taxing the rich to pay for investments that benefit all is a great deal for both the middle class and the rich.

So let’s give a break to the true job creators. Let’s tax the rich like we once did and use that money to spur growth by putting purchasing power back in the hands of the middle class. And let’s remember that capitalists without customers are out of business.

What Hanauer is saying is (or should) blindingly obvious to anyone who gives the topic a moment’s thought. Henry Ford said pretty much the same thing a century ago. But our oligarchy has gotten so out of control and so avaricious that they have to counter this renegade from their ranks and so naturally there has been pushback. In this interview Neil Cavuto of Fox News tries to faithfully serve his masters by challenging Hanauer.

Cavuto raises the idiotic argument that I have heard so often, that if Hanauer feels he should pay more taxes why does he not voluntarily send in a check instead of changing the tax rates for everyone?

That is the kind of argument that labels you as being either incredibly stupid or willfully obtuse. It is on a par with those anti-evolutionists who think that the question “If we descended from monkeys, how come there are still monkeys?” is a devastating argument against evolution. Those who are tempted to make such an argument should really think twice, unless they don’t mind people laughing at them.

Apparently that’s what a billboard company in north central Ohio said in refusing to put it up. However the company is quite willing to post religious billboards.

The whole story is quite bizarre. (Via Pharyngula)

This illustrates once again that religious people resort to the strategy of ‘taking offense’ because they have no rational arguments to counter those of the atheists.

[Update: For some reason, this post has attracted an enormous number of spam comments and so I have regretfully closed it for new comments.]

The rioting by Penn State students on hearing the news that football coach Joe Paterno was summarily sacked (along with the university president) by the university’s Board of Trustees is inexcusable.

According to news reports, graduate assistant Mike McCreary (sometimes spelled as McQueary) observed assistant coach Jerry Sandusky raping a 10-year old boy in the showers in the locker room all the way back in 2002. Why he did not immediately try to stop it is bad enough. He apparently reported it to Paterno the next day but Paterno says he was not told the details and simply reported to his superiors that there was some kind of problem and left it at that.

I find that unbelievable. Paterno exercises tight control over his operations. To think that he would not have asked for details of what McCreary had observed is preposterous. The fact that he and McCreary did nothing even when no action was taken against Sandusky for nine years is shameful. We are talking about the rape of a child. Paterno and McCreary and anyone else who knew of Sandusky’s serial predatory behavior and did nothing deserve a far greater punishment than firing.

The code of silence and cover-up in the Penn State football program reminds me of the Catholic church’s child abuse scandal and raises the question: Is there something about an all-male culture that makes people tolerate horrible abuses such as these?

As I feared, the authorities are starting to use force on the Occupy protestors, starting in Oakland. Charles Pierce says that the assault symbolizes the militarization of the police:

Make no mistake about it: The actions of the police department in Oakland last night were a military assault on a legitimate political demonstration. That it was a milder military assault than it could have been, which is to say it wasn’t a massacre, is very much beside the point. There was no possible provocation that warranted this display of force. (Graffiti? Litter? Rodents? Is the Oakland PD now a SWAT team for the city’s health department?) If you are a police department in this country in 2011, this is something you do because you have the power and the technology and the license from society to do it. This is a problem that has been brewing for a long time. It predates the Occupy movement for more than a decade. It even predates the “war on terror,” although that has acted as what the arson squad would call an “accelerant” to the essential dynamic
…

It’s time for the country to realize that something is dangerously out of control here, and that it’s not a bunch of people in sleeping bags in the public parks. There is a tradition of public protest in this country. Hell, this country is itself an act of public protest. Preserve that, or preserve nothing else, because there’s nothing else worth preserving. Police officers are public servants. They are not soldiers, facing down enemies. This is not a war. This is America.

It may not be a war as yet, but the oligarchy sees this as an uprising that must be quelled in its infancy.

Clearly the panel on Bill Maher’s show think that Cain could give Sarah Palin a run for the title of the most ignorant and confused high-profile politician in recent times.

One thing that panelist Joshua Green said shed a lot of light and that is that although Cain is described as the former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, that was from a long time ago. What he has been doing for the last fifteen years is touring as a motivational speaker. People who do that can get used to blathering self-help messages tailored to get a rousing response from the audience right in front of them without bothering about whether it makes sense or contradicts what they said to another audience at another time and place.

Cain’s latest campaign ad also has to make you wonder at his judgment. Look at what happens at the 40-second mark. Can you imagine any other candidate letting that pass?

The always readable Steven Pinker has a new book out titled THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE: Why Violence Has Declined arguing that there has been a steady drop in violence over time. The equally readable Peter Singer has a very positive review of the book, of which the following is an excerpt.

Against the background of Europe’s relatively peaceful period after 1815, the first half of the 20th century seems like a sharp drop into an unprecedented moral abyss. But in the 13th century, the brutal Mongol conquests caused the deaths of an estimated 40 million people — not so far from the 55 million who died in the Second World War — in a world with only one-seventh the population of the mid-20th century. The Mongols rounded up and massacred their victims in cold blood, just as the Nazis did, though they had only battle-axes instead of guns and gas chambers. A longer perspective enables us to see that the crimes of Hitler and Stalin were, sadly, less novel than we thought.

Since 1945, we have seen a new phenomenon known as the “long peace”: for 66 years now, the great powers, and developed nations in general, have not fought wars against one another. More recently, since the end of the cold war, a broader “new peace” appears to have taken hold. It is not, of course, an absolute peace, but there has been a decline in all kinds of organized conflicts, including civil wars, genocides, repression and terrorism. Pinker admits that followers of our news media will have particular difficulty in believing this, but as always, he produces statistics to back up his assertions.

The final trend Pinker discusses is the “rights revolution,” the revulsion against violence inflicted on ethnic minorities, women, children, homosexuals and animals that has developed over the past half-century. Pinker is not, of course, arguing that these movements have achieved their goals, but he reminds us how far we have come in a relatively short time from the days when lynchings were commonplace in the South; domestic violence was tolerated to such a degree that a 1950s ad could show a husband with his wife over his knees, spanking her for failing to buy the right brand of coffee; and Pinker, then a young research assistant working under the direction of a professor in an animal behavior lab, tortured a rat to death. (Pinker now considers this “the worst thing I have ever done.” In 1975 it wasn’t uncommon.)