While we get pounded…

First, this aired in February 22, 2008, but it is just as relevant today:

Note how Letty goes on about entitlement. I found myself flipping her off as she spoke; she does come off better in the longer version. “Waiting his turn”. I write more on this later in this post.

Note: the longer version is actually better; go to this link and scroll down.

Ok, right now we are getting pounded in Pennsylvania (as I predicted); it has gone between 54-46 and 53-47 for most of the evening. (54-46 with 74% reporting) But not all of the news is bad:

Hillary Rodham Clinton survived yet another day.

There will be little time for celebration, though. Time and money are running out.

Her win Tuesday in the large and important swing state of Pennsylvania was hard-fought. Barack Obama’s well-funded effort to shut her down did not reach its ultimate goal of a surprise upset.

But Clinton now faces a dwindling number of contests, and she’s at a steep financial disadvantage.
[...]
Underscoring the race’s excitement, more than one in 10 voters Tuesday had registered with the state’s Democratic party since the beginning of the year. And about six in 10 of them were voting for Obama.

Some voters had a hard time making up their minds. About a quarter of the day’s voters reported having made their minds up within the past week, and about six in 10 of them backed Clinton.

Of the states left, the biggest prize is North Carolina, a state that both sides are predicting Obama will win. Clinton dispatched one of her top state organizers, California and Texas veteran Ace Smith, to North Carolina in an effort to get every vote she can. Smith told reporters last week that getting the percentage spread within single digits would be a victory for Clinton. Obama’s also expected to win Oregon and South Dakota.

So where can she look for victory? West Virginia and Kentucky are likely Clinton wins, but they offer less than 100 delegates combined. She also has a chance in Guam, Puerto Rico, Montana and Indiana. But none of them are likely to give her a big enough margin to put her over Obama.

To win, she needs to convince voters that Obama is not electable in November even though he’s ahead in the delegate race.

She needs a big influx of cash.

She needs a shocking change of fortune.

Or as put out by MSNBC:

So, just who is voting for Hillary Clinton?
Here is a nice analysis. This article shows the kind of arguments a non-politician can make; if a politician said this, they would be dead.

Here is part of what I am talking about:

Who are the people listening to Hillary Clinton now in Pennsylvania? For the most part, they are indeed working class and middle class folk who live worlds apart from the wealthy Californians and New Yorkers trying to figure out how to package money to keep Hillary Clinton’s campaign afloat. Many places Hillary Clinton has been in Pennsylvania, she’s chosen the meaner streets, the humbler, poorer parts of town. She has a long history with some of these neighborhoods. Women in Scranton talk about her returning to a family christening just last spring. Mayfair, a close-knit northeast Philly neighborhood, where families have lived on the same block for three generations, remembers Bill Clinton campaigning in the rain in ‘92 outside the Mayfair Diner. Friday night, when Hillary Clinton returned to the Mayfair Diner for a block party, at least half the crowd, the largest ever at a political rally in northeast Philly, remembered that rainy night sixteen years before. Clintonism is part of neighborhood identity in many Pennsylvania towns and cities. This is why Hillary Clinton will win Pennsylvania. But winning here–it’s too late.

A surprising aspect of the Pennsylvania race has been the obliviousness of many of Hillary Clinton’s supporters to the media. These supporters have not heard the pronouncement that the race is all but over. Every Hillary event has had its share of Republicans (Obama is not the only candidate with “kins”) who have come out to hear her, the better to decide whether or not to vote for her in November. But most of the people who stand in line for several hours to get into a Hillary event are loyalists. Indeed the tenor of a Clinton rally, from Bristol to Bethlehem, is fierce loyalty. On some level, these believers must know that they are backing the losing candidate; that they will not be returning for her in November. But by and large these are people who are accustomed to losing–it’s something they deeply understand because it’s been their own experience–and that recognition makes their support stronger. In a powerful way, Hillary Clinton’s losing validates her working class supporters’ lives. This is the kind of bond that can forge a candidacy. But for Hillary Clinton it’s too late.

Now I’ll have to take issue with what I highlighted. Here: “losing” means “coming out on the short end of the stick for reasons mostly beyond your control”; e. g., the person who works for 29 years and becomes too sick to work 1 year prior to being eligible for their pension, or the person who worked hard, did the job but got laid off. It doesn’t mean “incompetent” or “lazy” or any of that sort of negative stuff.

You see, in one sense, I back Obama in part, because I have accepted my losses in life! If that doesn’t seem to make sense, I’ll put it this way: I am used to being overlooked because some young hotshot graduates from MIT and proves big, important theorems. Heck, I can accept that he/she is simply smarter and more talented than I am. I don’t resent it, though I acknowledge feelings of envy.

So, I don’t see it as “unfair” that this young upstart Obama runs against and, up to now (tonight excepted), beats the so-called “experienced”, “established”, “it is her turn” Hillary Clinton.

In my opinion, he is smarter, more creative, and in anyone’s opinion, he has run his campaign in a far more physically responsible manner.

True, he faces stiff opposition, and the creators of the Willie Horton ads are not fixing their sights on him.

And, of course, he is still learning, and the “bitter” remark has cost him some. Of course, many of us think that, while he shouldn’t have said this so openly, that he was basically correct:

But the amazing thing about it to me is that in the many, many comments I’ve seen, be they in the oral, written, or blogged press, no one seems willing to accept this reality. [...]

Obama is not an elitist for daring to suggest that underpaid, overworked, high school dropout country bumpkins might be a bit pissed off about their lot in life, and lacking the necessary cognitive skills to reason out why, pray to their gods while they shoot at targets with Mexicans painted on them.

If recognizing that makes one an elitist, so be it. Obama should watch his language, but I don’t have to, so let’s get this out in the open right now. Ever spend much time in the country? I have. You ever see those movie and TV plots where the city guy goes into the country and finds that the people there are a lot more intelligent than he thought they were? They just had a different kind of intelligence, kind of folksy and down to earth? Well, it’s a load of crap.

Oh sure, country folks have their virtues. [...]

But intellect? Sorry, there’s a reason the smart country kids end up migrating to the city when they don’t inherit the family business. There’s little for them in the sticks, where the biggest building in town is the church, and society stops on Friday nights in the fall to watch a little controlled teen violence on the gridiron. They think prayer counts as action and don’t think they came from no monkeys. They know America is the greatest country in the world, except for all those damned foreigners coming here who don’t even speak American good. Of course, they’ve never been anywhere, but rest assured, they know all about the rest of the world, or so they bullshit themselves.

Let’s not bullshit each other. A big reason this country is going down the crapper is because our politics revolve around pleasing this immense population of hayseeds whose bullets are bigger than their brains and who get their morality from 2,000 year old sheepherders. [...]

And you think that I am harsh?

I have to admit, though while I laughed out loud, if someone were to say similar things about, say, black or brown skinned folks who live in the poverty stricken urban areas, well, they would be skewered, at least in liberal intellectual circles.

Much of how intellectual a group of people are depends on the kind of educational opportunities that they have had, and, well, the educational opportunities that their parents have had.

For example, I don’t think that my daughter has a significantly higher IQ than I have (I know, all kids are smart, just ask their (helicopter) parents…though you probably shouldn’t ask their professors).

Nevertheless, in terms of understanding the world, evolution, etc., my daughter is much more advanced at her age than I was. Up until college, I thought that creationism was a real, viable option, and that scientists believed what they did because “they HAD to think that way to be good scientists” (though I thought that my god would forgive them for that)

It was about exposure! My parents could (and often did) take me to the museum, but they couldn’t explain those things to me. Why? Well, when they were my age at the time, they weren’t in school. Instead, they were hustling 24/7 just to scrape up enough to make ends meet and to eat another day. It is hard to be intellectual in such an atmosphere.

And, looking at things in a cold blooded manner, if intelligence is indeed part genetic (and I believe that it is), well, where did I get my genes from? My advantages were educational and having good well child care.

Some intellectual fun

Anthropology.net has some good stuff, as usual:

Evolutionary “cost of complexity”

Amongst people who do not fully understand evolutionary biology, there’s this big misconstrued concept that human evolution has slowed down or even that humans have stopped evolving. [...]

Some think that evolution has stopped because humans, and other higher organisms, are so complex, that the shear number pleiotropic interactions impedes on the rate evolution change. In a new Nature paper, Günter Wagner and crew have studied pleiotropy in mice. They investigated the quantitative trait loci (QTLs) that affect skeletal characters. They conclude that,

“most QTLs affect a relatively small subset of traits and that a substitution at a QTL has an effect on each trait that increases with the total number of traits affected. This suggests that evolution of higher organisms does not suffer a ‘cost of complexity’ because most mutations affect few traits and the size of the effects does not decrease with pleiotropy.”

In short, complicated animals can continue to evolve.

A group of early humans: with clown feet?

Some time ago I linked to an article about early tiny humans that were found on a Pacific island; it was conjectured that they evolved from us! (see the above story)

So it turns out that these tiny relatives had big, flat feet. So the question is: were these humans a different species than us? Anthropology.net thinks not; that is, these humans were of the same species as us.