Outrage: Fox shows Representative Conyers instead of Jefferson

Fox News: I don’t know whether these clowns are merely incompetent or downright immoral. The news story is indeed newsworthy; though I understand that everyone is innocent untill proven guilty, Congressman Jefferson sure looks guilty (90,000 dollars in a freezer?) and if proven guilty, should have the book thrown at him.

I think that Kos gets it right.

But watch the video and see which representative gets followed by the camera? That is right: John Conyers. Yes, this is John Conyers at a hearing involving Alberto Gonzales, and Conyers has been a thorn in the side of this administration.

John Conyers:

William Jefferson:

Fox news is incompetent or blatantly dishonest? It really is hard to tell, isn’t it? But it certainly is NOT news.

Representative Conyers responded. He was way too nice.

Early June

Workout Notes 1500 yard swim, yoga class. I didn’t have much energy today.

FANS notes: Julie Berg’s report is here. Marshall King’s is here.

Julie also has some good photos of the course; I especially recommend these:

• Start/finish of a long lap
• Mount Nokomis (the only hill; it is grass and not very high)
• The one bridge that we cross Early in the morning, you can see huge catfish near the surface.
• Generic part of the course
• The Lake (on your left as you cricle the course)
• Tent City

Overall Results (24 hour) and 12 hour.

My race (continued): later, I hope to upload photos as I get them. As far as what I learned: obviously, I wasn’t prepared and I knew that. Doing the 10 minutes “quick” and 5 minutes “easy” helped somewhat, but I should have backed off the “quick” intensity a bit, but I wasn’t that far off. My larger error was in what I chose to eat at 11 hours.

If I had to do it again, I would have went with the slim fast, fresh fruit and soup (when available). I can’t be too rigid with my food; I have to be more situational. When I am very tired (as I was at this race, or as I was at McNaughton when I DNF’ed), I have to go to eating tiny amounts every hour or two and to only eat easy to digest stuff. At my first couple of 24 hour races, at my Leanhorse 100, and at my successful McNaughton 100, my eating strategy worked fine. But at each of those, my pacing was better.

Non-ultra stuff

Larger version.

Dialogue between Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins on how science should speak to faith.
From RichardDakwins.net:
This conversation is very, very interesting. Here is part of it:

Although the authors are both on the side of science, they have not always agreed about the best ways to oppose religiously motivated threats to scientifi c practice or instruction. Krauss, a leading physicist, frequently steps into the public spotlight to argue in favor of retaining evolutionary theory in school science curricula and keeping pseudoscientifi c variants of creationism out of them. An open letter he sent to Pope Benedict XVI in 2005, urging the pontiff not to build new walls between science and faith, led the Vatican to reaffi rm the Catholic Church’s acceptance of natural selection as a valid scientific theory.

Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, prolifi c author and lecturer, is also an eloquent critic of any attempt to undermine scientifi c reasoning. He has generally shown less interest than Krauss, however, in achieving a peaceful coexistence between science and faith. The title of Dawkins’s best-selling book The God Delusion perhaps best summarizes his opinion of religious belief.

These two allies compared notes from the front lines during breaks at a conference devoted to discussing clashes between science and religion held at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego late last year. In a dialogue they re-create here, the authors explained their respective tactics for engaging the enemy and tackled some of the questions that face all scientists when deciding whether and how to talk to the faithful about science: Is the goal to teach science or to discredit religion? Can the two worldviews ever enrich one another? Is religion inherently bad? In an extended version of their conversation available at www.SciAm.com/ontheweb, the authors also delve into whether science can ever test the “God Hypothesis.” [...]

Krauss: Let me make clearer what I mean by reaching out. I do not mean capitulating to misconceptions but rather finding a seductive way to demonstrate to people that these are indeed misconceptions. Let me give you one example. I have, on occasion, debated both creationists and alien abduction zealots. Both groups have similar misconceptions about the nature of explanation: they feel that unless you understand everything, you understand nothing. In debates, they pick some obscure claim, say, that in 1962 some set of people in Outer Mongolia all saw a flying saucer hovering above a church. Then they ask if I am familiar with this particular episode, and if I say no, they invariably say, “If you have not studied every such episode, then you cannot argue that alien abduction is unlikely to be happening.” I have found that I can get each group to think about what they are saying by using the other group as a foil. Namely, of the creationists I ask, “Do you believe in flying saucers?” They inevitably say “no.” Then I ask, “Why? Have you studied all of the claims?” Similarly, to the alien abduction people I ask, “Do you believe in Young Earth Creationism?” and they say “no,” wanting to appear scientific. Then I ask, “Why? Have you studied every single counterclaim?” The point I try to make for each group is that it is quite sensible to base theoretical expectations on a huge quantity of existing evidence, without having studied absolutely every single obscure counterclaim. This “teaching” technique has worked in most cases, except those rare times when it has turned out that I was debating an alien abduction believer who was also a creationist!

RDDawkins: I like your clarification of what you mean by reaching out. But let me warn you of how easy it is to be misunderstood. I once wrote in a New York Times book review, “It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).” That sentence has been quoted again and again in support of the view that I am a bigoted, intolerant, closedminded, intemperate ranter. But just look at my sentence. It may not be crafted to seduce, but you, Lawrence, know in your heart that it is a simple and sober statement of fact. Ignorance is no crime. To call somebody ignorant is no insult. All of us are ignorant of most of what there is to know. I am completely ignorant of baseball, and I dare say that you are as completely ignorant of cricket. If I tell somebody who believes the world is 6,000 years old that he is ignorant, I am paying him the compliment of assuming that he is not stupid, insane or wicked.

Krauss: I have to say that I agree completely with you about this. To me, ignorance is often the problem, and, happily, ignorance is most easily addressed. It is not pejorative to suggest that someone is ignorant if they misunderstand scientific issues.

[...]
Dawkins: As an aside, such pessimism about humanity is popular among rationalists to the point of outright masochism. It is almost as though you and others at the conference where this dialogue began positively relish the idea that humanity is perpetually doomed to unreason. But I think irrationality has nothing to do with romantic love or poetry or the emotions that lie so close to what makes life worth living. Those are not orthogonal to rationality. Perhaps they are tangential to it. In any case, I am all for them, as are you. Positively irrational beliefs and superstitions are a different matter entirely. To accept that we can never be rid of them—that they are an irrevocable part of human nature—is manifestly untrue of you and, I would guess, most of your colleagues and friends. Isn’t it therefore rather condescending to assume that humans at large are constitutionally incapable of breaking free of them?

Krauss: I am not so confident that I am rid of irrational beliefs, at least irrational beliefs about myself. But if religious faith is a central part of the life experience of many people, the question, it seems to me, is not how we can rid the world of God but to what extent can science at least moderate this belief and cut out the most irrational and harmful aspects of religious fundamentalism. That is certainly one way science might enrich faith.

In my lecture to the Catholic group, for instance, I took guidance from your latest book and described how scientific principles, including the requirement not to be selective in choosing data, dictate that one cannot pick and choose in one’s fundamentalism. If one believes that homosexuality is an abomination because it says so in the Bible, one has to accept the other things that are said in the Bible, including the allowance to kill your children if they are disobedient or validation of the right to sleep with your father if you need to have a child and there are no other men around, and so forth.

Moreover, science can directly debunk many such destructive literal interpretations of scripture, including, for example, the notion that women are simple chattels, which stands counter to what biology tells us about the generic biological roles of females and the intellectual capabilities of women and men in particular. In the same sense that Galileo argued, when he suggested that God would not have given humans brains if “he” did not intend people to use them to study nature, science definitely can thus enrich faith.

Still another benefit science has to offer was presented most cogently by Carl Sagan, who, like you and me, was not a person of faith. Nevertheless, in a posthumous compilation of his 1985 Gifford Lectures in Scotland on science and religion, he makes the point that standard religious wonder is in fact too myopic, too limited. A single world is too puny for a real God. The vast scope of our universe, revealed to us by science, is far grander. Moreover, one might now add, in light of the current vogue in theoretical physics, that a single universe may be too puny and that one might want to start thinking in terms of a host of universes. I hasten to add, however, that enriching faith is far different than providing supporting evidence for faith, which is something that I believe science certainly
does not do. [...]

If such topics interest you, please read the whole article. It is worth your time.

Republican Ron Paul
I admit that I was wrong about him. At first, I saw his anti-war views and cheered him. But I certainly don’t approve of many of his other views; in fact, on most issues, I’d even prefer President Bush, especially on racial issues.

Update: evidently I didn’t think before I wrote this last sentence. Of course, I agree with Representative Paul about personal and civil liberties (especially his opposition to the Patriot Act) and about property rights. But his views on race bother me. I thank the commenter for making me think.

Paul, writing in his independent political newsletter in 1992, reported about unspecified surveys of blacks.

“Opinion polls consistently show that only about 5 percent of blacks have sensible political opinions, i.e. support the free market, individual liberty and the end of welfare and affirmative action,”Paul wrote.

Paul continued that politically sensible blacks are outnumbered “as decent people.” Citing reports that 85 percent of all black men in the District of Columbia are arrested, Paul wrote:

“Given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the `criminal justice system,’ I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal,” Paul said.

Paul also wrote that although “we are constantly told that it is evil to be afraid of black men, it is hardly irrational. Black men commit murders, rapes, robberies, muggings and burglaries all out of proportion to their numbers.” [...]

Writing in the same 1992 edition, Paul expressed the popular idea that government should lower the age at which accused juvenile criminals can be prosecuted as adults.

He added, “We don’t think a child of 13 should be held responsible as a man of 23. That’s true for most people, but black males age 13 who have been raised on the streets and who have joined criminal gangs are as big, strong, tough, scary and culpable as any adult and should be treated as such.”

Paul also asserted that “complex embezzling” is conducted exclusively by non-blacks.

“What else do we need to know about the political establishment than that it refuses to discuss the crimes that terrify Americans on grounds that doing so is racist? Why isn’t that true of complex embezzling, which is 100 percent white and Asian?” he wrote.

Oh well, I was thinking of giving his campaign a small amount of money; I think that I will pass.

Democrats

How honest were the candidates?
Factcheck weighs in. The candidates did well, but weren’t perfect.

No whoppers, but hype springs eternal.
Summary
Amid barbs on Iraq, there were exaggerations on energy, insurance and other issues in the second debate of candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination. Among those we found:

*
Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware wrongly cast Iran as a nation running out of oil.
*
Former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina talked about gas price manipulation by Big Oil where investigators have found none.
*
Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich and Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd used old figures that are almost 2 million too high when stating the number of uninsured.
*
New York Sen. Hillary Clinton lumped all the Republican Presidential candidates together when it came to their support for the war. That’s not quite right.

Go to the link for the details.

Barack Obama: in statistical dead heat with Hillary Clinton (nation wide) according to a USA Today poll.

Hat tip to Mikesco at the Daily Kos.

But other polls show Clinton with a stasticall signficant lead; this poll may well be one of those outliers.

To provide a realistic balance of the news I offer this article:

Barack Obama (news, bio, voting record) may not be as well known as Senator
Hillary Clinton, but he has been consistently running second to her in the race for the Democratic nomination(1). When it comes to the final race, just one-third of adults (34%) would vote for Senator Obama if he was the Democratic nominee for President, while two in five (41%) would not vote for him. Perhaps underscoring the fact that he is still unknown to so many, one-quarter of U.S. adults (23%) say they are not sure. As one might expect, race does play a role. While three-quarters (76%) of African Americans say they would vote for him, that number drops to 41 percent among Hispanics and just 26 percent of Whites.

One group that should be giving him solid support, i.e., Democrats, does not seem to be completely sold on Senator Obama. While three in five Democrats (60%) say they would vote for him if he was the Democratic nominee, 19 percent say they would not and 20 percent are unsure. As they are most likely to actually go out and vote on Election Day, Matures (those aged 62 and older) are another group whose support Senator Obama will need. Right now he does not have it, as half of this age group (53%) say they will not vote for him.

These are just some of the results of a Harris Poll of 2,383 U.S. adults conducted online between May 8 and 14, 2007 by Harris Interactive(R).

Obama’s Track Record, Political Opinion and Personality

People do not dislike Senator Obama personally; 52 percent of U.S. adults say they like him as a person. However, they also do not like him either. Ultimately, it seems that people just do not know him. Three in ten are not sure if they like or dislike the Senator as a person, one-third are not sure if they like or dislike his political opinions and 44 percent are not sure how they feel about his track record as a U.S. Senator. Minorities are, however, more likely to know him and like him. Just over six in ten (63%) African Americans like his track record as Senator, almost three-quarters (73%) like his political opinions and 84 percent of African Americans like Senator Obama as a person.

Looking more deeply, two-thirds of adults agree that the Senator is a very intelligent person and just under half (47%) agree that he inspires confidence personally. Almost the same number (48%) agrees that his diverse background would be as asset. While half (52%) disagree that the Senator is too young to be president, 44 percent agree that he lacks experience and is unqualified to be president. The public is split, however, on one issue — 39 percent agree there is no substance to his candidacy and it is mostly the media propelling him while 35 percent disagree. Again, though, with regard to each of these statements, one-quarter of adults are just not sure, showing that the Senator needs to get his message to these people before they can make up their mind about him and his candidacy.

Here is my take: he has been treated as something as a rock star. But, there are a couple of things about him: first, he is uncomfortable with attacking; we saw this at the most recent debate. Several pundits said that he acted as if he were the front runner; he didn’t go after Hillary Clinton at all. But that is just his style.

Another thing: notice that his answer seems to always include a blurb or two about the background of the question and the general priciples involved. He is somewhat professorial in that aspect; that is one reason I like him.

One of the criticisms of him is unfair: one pundit (forget which one) said that Obama had never been in a tight, significant race. This isn’t the quote, but this columnist expresses a similar idea:

Thus the third difference: Clinton, more than any other Democrat, has been both scarred and toughened by the partisan warfare of the past 15 years, while Obama is unscathed and untested.

This contrast was reflected in their announcement speeches. Obama attacked a politics that “has become so bitter and partisan” and pledged himself to “our common interests and concerns as Americans.” Clinton spoke proudly of her ability to take on partisan foes. “I have never been afraid to stand up for what I believe in or to face down the Republican machine,” she said. “I know how Washington Republicans think, how they operate and how to beat them.”

In fact, Obama lost a congressional election in 2000, and he started out in 4′th place in the Democratic Senate race primary in 2004! Of course, the general election turned out to be a big joke, but that was another matter.

A good Obama moment at the debate:

Obama’s energy plan:

Hillary Clinton
In all honesty, she came across very well; it was very confidence inspiring.

Here are a couple of items:

Clinton picked up support from liberal bloggers (one of her weak areas)

And one of her shining moments:

And another moment:

And a non-debate moment:

Of course, this drives wingnuts like Cal Thomas nuts.

I guess that Herbert Hoover’s America suited this clown. Ahhha, to bring back the sweat shops and dollar an hour jobs.

And hey, if you just happen to get sick and aren’t a millionare: screw you. And if you are a big corporation and you don’t like the way the world is set up: “hey that’s ok, god intended you to be rich. So, we’ll go ahead and start a war to protect your interests. Don’t worry; your kids won’t be endangered.”

More debate stuff Crooks and Liars has a photo with a nice chart showing how much airtime the respective candidates got.

Bill Richardson: some liked him, others didn’t. Here is one Daily Kos member who has roughly the same opinion of him as I did:

I watched a re-run of the Democratic Debates on C-SPAN, the best network nobody ever heard of. As an aside, we should go back to having the “League of Women Voters” host the Democratic Debates and have C-SPAN and whomever else makes video of the debates make them public domain. Even C-SPAN is trying to take ownership of OUR debates.

That said, I keep noticing Bill Richardson and liking him more and more. I was really struck by how many times Hillary said she appreciated what he had done during the Bill Clinton administration.

And that made me think… why not just go for the best diplomat in the Clinton administration who has become a successful governor? Why mess around with hiring a ‘middle-man’ or ‘middle-woman’ when we can have the guy with the best resume just run the show instead of hiring some bit-player to serve as a frontman like the Rethugs do?

Bill Richardson and John Edwards would make up a team that could set things right after Mr. Bungle’s maladministration and continue to manage our country well for 16 years.

What do you think?

I think he would be a good VP for the Obama ticket.
(or perhaps the Clinton one)