The Long Way Back

I’ve had enough of a chance to recover from last week’s meltdown. I’ve had some time to think as well: basically, I need to do lots of slow training walks to prepare to do faster ones. Hence today’s workout: not as long as my typical long walk (say, 13-15 miles), but I plan to put some speed into it. Not lots of speed, but none of this 15 minutes per mile stuff. We’ll see how it goes.

The idea is to do 13-15 until I get it right, then up it to 15-18, then to 18-20, and so on.

But we know how plans sometimes go; when it comes to sports, saying “I’m gonna do this or that” means nothing.

Update My time for today’s course was 2:52; it was 3:04 a couple of weeks ago. Part of the reason is that it was rainy last time, but mostly it was because I was far more focused this time. Training walks are supposed to require mental concentration.

When I can walk for 6 hours at this type of intensity without being wiped out afterward, I’ll be ready to do some honest ultra training. So, I’ve made progress, but I have a ways to go.

Football Lat night, Rutgers whipped Navy 41-24; Navy had two “red zone” interceptions and also gave up an interception deep in its own territory. Still, Navy moved the ball well and gave a good account of itself against one of the nation’s ranked teams; the Mids can hold their heads high.

This is hotlinked from Yahoo’s football slideshows; many other game photos there.

Other topics (while I let my breakfast yogurt settle): yesterday afternoon I worked a Bradley Cross Country meet. It was hot; I am sure that it was tough day to run. But the runners worked hard. I noticed that Chicago State brought a men’s team; they had buffed muscular guys who finished way back in the pack; and I mean WAY back; their tail end of the pack were running the kinds of time that I would run. Their times ranged from 37:30 to 47:21 for the 8 km (5 mile) course (the median time for the University Division was about 27:20). I wonder what the story is. The interesting thing is that they had the best physiques there; the best distance runners are almost always very, very skinny.

The women had a good race too, though I was surprised that there were three finishers that took over 30 minutes to finish the 5K course, and several that were slower than 25 minutes. It seems as if the tail end gets slower every year. Evidently, at the small college level, the emphasis in sports has gone to “participatory” rather than “competitive” at some schools.

On the other hand, Bradley’s team (a University Division school) is way better now than it was when I first got here (in 1991), so Bradley has certainly gone the “competitive” route.

Religion: Katha Pollitt has an interesting article on the “New Atheists”:

You would think that the left would savor this new, muscular secularism. But that’s not what has happened. In the progressive media, the atheist bestsellers have gotten a lukewarm reception. Writers continue to blame leftists’ and liberals’ lack of respect for God for the rise of evangelical Christianity, the triumph of the Republican Party, the conservative impulses of the working class and the general failure of events to turn out as we would like. Just what this respect is supposed to involve is never spelled out: behaving nicely to the religious people we know? supporting certain religion-inflected policies? becoming religious ourselves? There’s something both grandiose and masochistic in all this breast-beating. We’re far too few in number to have so huge an effect. I’ll bet most right-wing Christians have never even seen a copy of The Nation. We might as well just say what we think. Besides, a huge percentage of us are Jewish! If we found “faith” we’d be brushing up on our Hebrew, not accepting Christ as our personal savior or filling up the pews at Our Lady of Sorrows. From the right-wing Christian point of view, we’d still be suspect, alien and bound for hell. That leftists themselves have a God-shaped hole in their souls strikes me as most unlikely. On the last two Nation cruises, an imperfect barometer I realize, sessions on spirituality and the left were met with resounding atheistic/agnostic reaffirmations.

Politicians don’t get it either. Republican candidates compete over who can deny evolution most firmly. As for Democrats, Oh Democrats! Who said this: “You need to embrace Christ precisely because you have sins to wash away–because you are human and need an ally in this difficult journey.” I need to embrace Christ, Senator Obama? I don’t think so! Or how about this: “We are all sinners. We all fall short, which is why we have to ask for forgiveness from the Lord.” Speak for yourself, John Edwards.

As these remarks suggest, the Dems have decided that respect isn’t enough. “It has to be authentic,” Mara Vanderslice, Democratic consultant and evangelical Christian, told CNN. “This is not about Jesus-ing up the party, so to speak…. It just won’t work if it’s seen as a cynical ploy.” [...]

It’s fine with me if a candidate believes in God. Unlike some militant atheists, I don’t think it matters for public policy that Obama believes Christ absolves his sins, or that Hillary Clinton hopes God has time to help her pass up dessert. We all believe weird things. My parents, for instance, believed for decades that the Moscow show trials were legit. But all this wearing of religious faith on the political sleeve is a huge pander, and lacking in dignity besides. Next they’ll be talking about how their marital troubles have made their marriages stronger than ever. Oh wait, they already do that. Message to the progressive community: There are more of us secularists, skeptics, atheists and agnostics out here than you think. How about sending a little love our way, for a change?

Well, as far as it being “fine with me”: I am more resigned to it. You don’t win elections without winning lots of “dumbass” votes, and the dumbasses aren’t going to vote for someone that they think is an atheist.

Speaking of dumbasses, here is some more about my favorite dumbass candidate: Fred Thompson

Thompson: don’t bother me with details:

One of the principal knocks on actor/lobbyist/senator Fred Thompson’s presidential aspirations is that he’s kind of lazy and unwilling to go beyond the pleasantries and soundbites. He’s an all-hat, no-cattle candidate who doesn’t even take his own policy priorities seriously.

After one day as a candidate, Thompson is already reinforcing the conventional wisdom.

Fred Thompson says a top challenge for the next president is fixing Social Security. Asked how his ideas for overhauling the system differ from those of George W. Bush, the actor and former Tennessee senator says: “I don’t even remember the details of his plan.”

Got that? Social Security policy is one of the reasons he’s running for president, Thompson says, so it’s presumably an issue he knows quite a bit about. Asked about Bush’s policy proposal — from just two years ago — Thompson is surprisingly clueless.

Uh, “surprisingly clueless”? There is nothing surprising about it.

Fred Thompson: clueless about taxes too. Evidently, Fred Thompson (among other loons) supports the so called “Fair Tax” which seeks to abolish income tax with a National sales tax. They say it will be a 23% tax, but, well, if it were calculated the way that other taxes were, it would be more like a 30% tax. And yes, the poor would pay it too with the chance of getting rebates.

This tax is actually the brainchild of Ron Hubbard, who founded the so-called Scientology Church; it was his goal to abolish the IRS.

Some stuff about this tax and its supporters:

In a strange confluence, the Scientologist proposal happens to be nearly identical to one of the trendiest conservative tax proposals of the year, the so-called FairTax, which has been endorsed by John McCain and Fred Thompson, as well as second-tier presidential candidates Mike Huckabee, Tom Tancredo, Duncan Hunter, and Democrat Mike Gravel. Georgians John Lindner and Saxby Chambliss have introduced FairTax legislation in the House and Senate that would establish a 23 percent national sales tax.

But, when you mention any hint of the nexus between Scientology and the nrst–as I did briefly in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed–you’ll be denounced by FairTax supporters as a smear artist. This retort, however, is simply evidence that these FairTax supporters don’t know the history of their own proposal. That’s too bad. Perhaps if they understood its origins in Scientology, they might have a greater appreciation for its inherent flaws.

The reason I brought up the Scientology connection in the first place was not to create guilt by association. Rather, it was to explain that cats had one very specific goal: the abolition of the Internal Revenue Service. Anything else that the nrst might accomplish was entirely secondary. And, in the rush to rid the world of the IRS, the plan’s authors neglected some important details, not to mention some key facts.

For starters, the FairTax is deceptively calculated. When you think of a 23 percent sales tax, you think of paying an extra 23 cents on the dollar. That’s how every sales tax in the world works. The FairTax, on the other hand, doesn’t represent 23 percent of the pre-tax value of the item you bought, but the post-tax value of the item. So, under FairTax, you wouldn’t pay $1.23 for a $1 widget–but $1.30, since the 30-cent tax is 23 percent of $1.30. How straightforward!

The legerdemain doesn’t end there. Unlike every other sales tax in the world, the FairTax actually applies to everything–every pencil, every tank–the government buys. Unfortunately, the FairTax proposal doesn’t take into account this increase in government spending. Thus, it will either provoke a massive cut in federal spending or a massive increase in taxes.

And what about the poor who bear the brunt of this highly regressive tax? The FairTax would track every household’s monthly income and then cut checks to minimize the pain, a logistical challenge that will ultimately resemble some welfare state nightmare. What’s more, this would cost gobs of money, forcing further cuts in spending.

For these and other reasons, every reputable tax expert who has ever looked at the FairTax has concluded that the true tax rate would have to be much, much higher than 23 percent (or even 30 percent) to work–and, even at that unrealistically low rate, the plan would inspire massive tax evasion. In short, the FairTax is a crackpot scheme from beginning to end. That would be true even if the Scientologists hadn’t authored it.