Is McCain trying to throw this election?

Here is one of his latest attack ads:

Remember that people often focus on the images.
Oil? Uh, what might come from offshore drilling will take a decade or more to impact current prices. Besides, on whose watch did these prices go up? Who is saying that “effects beyond our control” are driving prices up? (hint: current President).

My guess is that McCain wants to try to lose while appearing to try to win.

You know that a political ad is bad when your opponents gleefully spread them around!

Obama’s response:

Essay on Being Open Minded

A recent post by a local blogger got me to thinking about the term “open minded”. Often the term is used with a positive connotation as in this example (where the local UU minister is describing his church in the context of the shooting at the Knoxville UU Church):

“We’ve never had anything remotely like this happen at our church,” Brown said. “We are dedicated to the resolution of problems by peaceful means.”

Brown said he grew up Baptist but found the religion less meaningful as an adult. Services at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Peoria, which has more than 300 members, include discussion of the Bible, Brown said, but it is not the focus of his sermons.

Though Peoria is largely conservative, that doesn’t necessarily equal greater risk for the Unitarian Universalist Church, he said.

“Progressive churches in conservative areas become a haven for people,” he said. “We have a real ministry of folks who want an open-minded approach to things.”

So, what does this term mean?

I think that this term can be taken in many different ways.

1. This term can mean that one is willing to question one’s basic assumptions if the need arises.
Example: I had a grad school friend who grew up in rural Louisiana. He told us (back in 1985) that he still felt an internal twinge when he saw a black man with a white woman even though his intellect told him that there was nothing wrong with that.

Another example: I grew up being homophobic…sort of. Yes, I cheered on Anita Bryant in her crusade to get an anti-discrimination bill defeated in Florida; I just “knew” that homosexuality was wrong and that I didn’t like homosexuals.

Then I met some, and even saw some men kiss each other. My internal reaction was “oh, that’s it?”; I honestly just didn’t care one way or the other; “it is their business” I said to myself.

There was a time when I associated gayness with pedophilia; I came to understand that I was merely ignorant.

So, it can be good to question one’s basic assumptions, especially when there is a good chance that there is evidence against one’s assumptions, or if there isn’t good evidence for one’s assumptions.

2. On the other hand, some think that it is a sign of open-mindedness to accept fantastic phenomena with scant or non-existent evidence, or at least to suspend judgment.

For example, I had a friend from grad school who wasn’t a Mormon, but told me that the only thing to do with the “gold plates” story was to suspend judgment. I told him that was absurd.

In fact, the proper response to fantastic claims is to dismiss them, unless strong evidence is presented.

Now “wait” some might say; isn’t it true that at one time, nuclear theory, quantum mechanics, evolution and germ theory were all considered “fantastic”?

Sure! But, the difference was this:

1. The claims were made by world class scientists.
2. The claims were published, along with evidence, in peer reviewed publications.
3. The claims were checked, cross checked, and cross checked again by other smart people.

As far as point 3: remember what happened to the claim of “cold fusion”? Yep, that paper appeared in Nature, but subsequent cross checking brought this claim down.

The one thing to remember is that the overwhelming majority of fantastic claims are indeed false; hence it is best to dismiss these claims as “nonsense” unless evidence requires further examination.
And no, the fact that a fantastic claim appears in religious writings does not constitute “evidence” for that claim. I find it very interesting is that all of the so-called miracles “happened” thousands of years ago.

Side note the shooting at that UU Church in Knoxville might well be the one thing that drives me back to going to church. I know; that is a bit ironic; after all I have no intention to be “open minded” about the type of nonsense that is accepted in those circles (for the unfamiliar: in UU churches, standard religious nonsense is usually rejected. But all too often, “alternative” nonsense is accepted. That is, no “Jesus dying for our sins”, but “magic”, “dousing” and other wacko stuff is ok.

If you are curious as to what holds UU churches together, it is NOT common theological beliefs; in fact there is no demand that one adhere to any theological creed at all. Atheists, agnostics, skeptics, humanists, neo-pagans, liberal Christians and liberal Jews are openly accepted. What holds UU’s together is “religious freedom” principle and 7 principles. These are the principles:

“We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote

* The inherent worth and dignity of every person;
* Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;
* Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;
* A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;
* The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large;
* The goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all;
* Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.”[16]

Of course, a responsible search for truth means calling “BS” when one encounters BS. THAT sort of attitude is inconsistent with being a full fledged member.

—————————————————
Update: Jed Rothwell has made some interesting comments on the state of cold fusion; basically he states that experiments in cold fusion research has appeared in peer reviewed scientific journals and claims that the results of these experiments shows that there is some nuclear process going on. I lack the expertise to comment on these results though others who have the expertise have.

But this exchange is a nice example of how science works; on one can make an “Ex Cathedra” statement that “this is so”; people do experiments, attempt to replicate them, and then argue about what the results mean.

I’d be interested to see who among the great research departments is working on cold fusion; here is another reference from a reputable source, and another which clears one of the founders of this area of scientific misconduct.

Bubble fusion, back with a pop

* 19 February 2007
* NewScientist.com news service

Reports that the bubble had burst for a form of cheap, table-top nuclear fusion may have been premature. Rusi Taleyarkhan, the physicist at the centre of a furore surrounding so-called bubble fusion, was last week cleared of scientific misconduct.

In 2002, Taleyarkhan, then at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and now at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, published a paper in Science claiming that bombarding a solvent with neutrons and sound waves produced tiny bubbles that triggered nuclear fusion reactions. Then in March 2006, Purdue began investigating allegations of misconduct against Taleyarkhan, amid accusations that the evidence of fusion he reported was actually caused by a radioactive isotope of californium.

However, on 7 February, Purdue absolved Taleyarkhan’s group of any misconduct. The verdict follows independent verification of Taleyarkhan’s results by Edward Forringer of LeTourneau University in Texas and his colleagues last November

Keep in mind that LeTourneau is a fundamentalist Christian institution.

As a biology student, you’ll look at things up close that the rest of the world will only glance at, or will never see at all.

At LETU, you’ll learn biology from the main-stream, evangelical, interdenominational Christian perspective. We firmly believe in a Trinitarian God as the Creator and do not believe in theistic evolution or neo-Darwinian evolution. We believe and teach a sanctity-of-life morality of bioethics.

Of course, if the science is correct, it is correct, no matter the beliefs of the person doing it (e. g., the universe is only 6000 years old!). But this does not help me with my skepticism.
——————————————-

Too Good to Pass Up: stick figure cartoon of the mortgage mess

This was posted in Edge of the American West.

I laughed my head off all the while knowing that this isn’t funny. Click this link to get to the googledoc slideshow. It doesn’t take long.

They Just Make Stuff Up

Workout notes Good news: I had a good swim: 5 x 100 warm up, 500 drill/swim: 10 x 100 on the 1:45 (finished in 17:20), 10 x 50 on the 1 (all 47 except for one 48); no flip turns in any of these. 50 back, Then 10 x 50 (paddle/free), then 500 worth of strokes.

Bad News: nada left for running afterwards; I just gave up after a couple of steps. But leg weights went fine.

They Just Make Stuff Up

Some of McCain’s attack ads: nonsense.

For four days, Sen. John McCain and his allies have accused Sen. Barack Obama of snubbing wounded soldiers by canceling a visit to a military hospital because he could not take reporters with him, despite no evidence that the charge is true.

The attacks are part of a newly aggressive McCain operation whose aim is to portray the Democratic presidential candidate as a craven politician more interested in his image than in ailing soldiers, a senior McCain adviser said. They come despite repeated pledges by the Republican that he will never question his rival’s patriotism.

The essence of McCain’s allegation is that Obama planned to take a media entourage, including television cameras, to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany during his week-long foreign trip, and that he canceled the visit when he learned he could not do so. “I know that, according to reports, that he wanted to bring media people and cameras and his campaign staffers,” McCain said Monday night on CNN’s “Larry King Live.”

The Obama campaign has denied that was the reason he called off the visit. In fact, there is no evidence that he planned to take anyone to the American hospital other than a military adviser, whose status as a campaign staff member sparked last-minute concern among Pentagon officials that the visit would be an improper political event.

“Absolutely, unequivocally wrong,” Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor said in an e-mail after McCain’s comments to Larry King.

Despite serious and repeated queries about the charge over several days, McCain and his allies continued yesterday to question Obama’s patriotism by focusing attention on the canceled hospital visit.

[...]

The McCain campaign has produced a television commercial that says that while in Germany, Obama “made time to go to the gym but canceled a visit with wounded troops. Seems the Pentagon wouldn’t allow him to bring cameras.” The commercial shows Obama shooting a basketball — an event that happened earlier in the trip on a stopover in Kuwait, where the Democrat spoke to troops in a gym before grabbing a ball and taking a single shot. The military released the video footage. [...]
A reconstruction of the circumstances surrounding Obama’s decision not to visit Landstuhl, based on firsthand reporting from the trip, shows that his campaign never contemplated taking the media with him. [...]

“We got notice that [Gration] would be treated as a campaign person, and it would therefore be perceived as political because he had endorsed my candidacy but he wasn’t on the Senate staff,” Obama said. “That triggered then a concern that maybe our visit was going to be perceived as political, and the last thing that I want to do is have injured soldiers and the staff at these wonderful institutions having to sort through whether this is political or not, or get caught in the crossfire between campaigns.”

Obama’s explanation, which came after more than a day of controversy, was the clearest in noting that it was Pentagon concerns about Gration accompanying him to the hospital that forced Obama to reconsider and, ultimately, cancel the visit.

Gibbs was asked yesterday about the continuing allegations from McCain that the real reason was a desire to bring a media entourage to the hospital.

“That’s completely untrue, and I think, honestly, they know it’s untrue,” Gibbs said.

So, McCain really is “more of the same”, up to including Rovian campaign tactics.

But McCain isn’t the only person just making up stuff against Obama:

Right now, the Washington Post report about Barack Obama is now being slammed by House Democrats as being taken wholly out of context. The Washington Post story reads like this:

Obama’s Symbolic Importance

By Jonathan Weisman

Perhaps he’s beginning to believe the hype.

In his closed door meeting with House Democrats this evening, presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama delivered a real zinger. According to a witness, he was waxing lyrical about last week’s trip to Europe, when he concluded, “this is the moment, as Nancy [Pelosi] noted, that the world is waiting for.”

The 200,000 souls who thronged to his speech in Berlin came not just for him, he told the enthralled audience of congressional representatives.

“I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions,” he said.

So, you see, this is what Obama was accused of saying. What did he actually say?

And now the pushback from House Democrats who were actually at the conference has begun according to Mark Halperin at Time’s The Page:

But, a Democrat who was in the room tells The Page: “His entire point of that riff was that the campaign IS NOT about him. The Post left out the important first half of the sentence, which was something along the lines of: ‘It has become increasingly clear in my travel, the campaign, that the crowds, the enthusiasm, 200,000 people in Berlin, is not about me at all. It’s about America. I have just become a symbol..‘”

Again, they just make stuff up.

Republican Family Values: This is too funny to pass up:

Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) says the Las Vegas venue where he held a fundraiser was absolutely not a strip club:

It is what I would call a burlesque show where there’s a woman who comes out and has a dress on… Uh, she never get’s naked. There’s no nudity, there’s no nudity in there.

…

But the Forty Deuce Web site does not suggest the dancers are nude. And Sessions’ chief of staff, Guy Harrison, tells the Sleuth there was no nudity at the fundraiser at all, just good old fashioned burlesque.

“It was as racy as a 1940’s movie,” Harrison assured us.

Is he right? You be the judge: here’s the club’s photo gallery.

Sessions condemned Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake’s infamous half-time show as “liberal values.” But he’s already known as a bit of a flip-flopper on public nudity: at 18, he streaked across the Southwest Texas State University campus.

It all kind of reminds me of this old cartoon:

July 29 Evening

Workout update: 10 miles on the bike with Olivia. It was hot and muggy out there; later a thunderstorm came by.

Blog comments:
Postsimian is one of our visitors. He has a nice post about the perils of being too openminded.

Richard Dawkins site: has a feature which they call the “flea circus”. This consists of all of those books that were written to “counter” the New Atheist books such as The God Delusion(Richard Dawkins), The End of Faith (Sam Harris) and God is Not Great (Christopher Hitchens). I have to reread End of Faith .

You have to give the Dawkins site credit: they often post articles which attack the ideas of Dawkins. They are not afraid to read what intellectual opponents think!

Politics (Illinois, Local) You’ve heard this garbage that “governments ought to be run like businesses”. Well, you put the conservatives in charge of the military and what do they do? One thing that they do is they try to recover bonus pay from those who were released from the military with injuries (mental and or physical) that were sustained in combat! Yes, these are the assholes people that claim to “support the troops”. Well, one Illinois representative is doing something about it!

By KAREN McDONALD
for the Journal Star
Posted Jul 29, 2008 @ 12:27 AM
CHILLICOTHE —

The government is shirking its duty and responsibility to veterans by misdiagnosing them with personality disorders, ending their service and cutting benefits, U.S. Rep. Phil Hare said Monday.

The government has saved an estimated $12.5 billion by denying benefits to veterans, so Hare introduced a bill that would require fair mental health evaluations for returning veterans. If approved, the legislation would place a temporary moratorium on personality disorder discharges until an independent review board determines the diagnoses are legitimate.

“It’s one thing to put people in harm’s way. But when you do, you take care of them when they come home. You take care of them with their education, you take care of them with their health care and you take care of their families, too,” Hare said Monday from the American Legion Hall.

Chillicothe resident Donald “Louie” Schmidt has been battling the issue since he was discharged Oct. 31, 2006, after completing two tours in Iraq. He initially was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, but that assessment was changed to a pre-existing personality disorder just weeks before his discharge, said his mother, Patrice Myers.

The Army wanted Schmidt’s $15,000 re-enlistment bonus back plus interest and penalties. They took $4,000 — his last paycheck — to begin the compensation, and Hare is working to expedite Schmidt’s repayment.

“Four thousand dollars to Louie is a lot of money and it’s his money. He re-enlisted voluntarily and it never, ever, ever should have been taken away from him,” said Hare, D-Rock Island.

“This is one case and there are several thousand others. To treat service people like this and to come up with this scheme is absolutely, to me, just mind-boggling.”

Estimates show the government has saved roughly $12.5 billion by discharging more than 22,000 veterans from 2001 to 2006 with personality disorders and denying benefits.

Kudos to Representative Hare!

Presidential Politics Barack Obama is considering Virginia Governor Tim Kaine for the Vice President spot. Here is Kaine responding to Bush’s state of the Union speech (2006)

Yoga: of use to football players at the University of Illinois.

By JOHN SUPINIE
of GateHouse News Service
Posted Jul 28, 2008 @ 09:43 PM
CHAMPAIGN —

The latest training tool began earlier this summer with a bunch of Illinois offensive linemen taking yoga instruction from a slender woman who had little in common with the biggest Illini on the block.

The players thought this was going to be more of a waste of time than a learning experience for a team trying to follow up a big season.

Eight weeks later, they’re asking for more. Behind the leadership of Kia Locksley, a yoga instructor and the wife of offensive coordinator Mike Locksley, the Illini linemen improved core strength, endurance and flexibility. The yoga already has paid off in the weight room this summer, and increased flexibility should help the Illini avoid injury this fall.

The non-impact exercise relies upon stretching and posing, moves that build strength by improving balance.

“They thought it was more meditation and sitting quietly,” Kia Locksley said. “We quickly dispelled those thoughts. They wanted to hold the poses as long as I could hold them. At the end of the sessions, they were asking if we could continue – ‘Do we have to stop?’

“They were using muscles they weren’t used to using. They saw the benefits.”

For an example of the multi-tasking workout, Locksley said the Illini would strike a balancing pose on one leg, building leg strength and concentration. Meanwhile, they were stretching the hip in the other leg while strengthening the back as well as increasing core strength while maintaining balance.

The football program first became interested in yoga when former Illini Tony Pashos and Dave Diehl, both NFL offensive linemen, got together with Illinois offensive line coach Eric Wolford.

“I knew they were great players,” Wolford said. “I extended a hand and tried to develop a relationship. I always ask them what they do, about new and different stuff. As soon as you think you know it all, you’re done. When you talk to them, you keep asking, ‘What does it take to keep playing that long?’ ”

Pashos and Diehl mentioned yoga. The Illini turned to Locksley, a local yoga instructor. The sessions were mainly attended by offensive linemen, though some defensive linemen also participated.

The workouts were designed specifically for linemen, who needed work on hip flexibility, hamstring strength and improving the core. Other positions could also have specific yoga instruction. Yoga is widely used in the NFL but rarely seen in college programs.

“They were sore,” Locksley said. “They just didn’t understand why. They couldn’t believe how difficult it was.”

Players asked Locksley if she could hold more stretching workouts on Sundays following each gameday, perhaps relieving some muscle soreness through yoga.

“It’s stretching and a lot of isometrics and holding yourself in positions,” said senior center Ryan McDonald. “Offensive linemen have to bend and play loose. We need to loosen our hips to bend. More flexibility will help us avoid injuries. I got stronger, too, so I can’t complain.”

Linemen Randall Hunt and Jack Cornell made major gains in the weight room because of their work with yoga.

Political Humor

seattleforbarackobama: “Obama Counters McCain’s Gas Attack Ad” (video)

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