11 February 2009

Workout notes 4000 yard swim; then some yoga on my own. I need to watch the back and piriformis area as I am getting some leg tinges when I swim.

Swim: 500 (slow; 9:18), 10 x 50 (drill/swim) with fins, 1000 in 16:41 (4:04 first 250 then lost concentration; I was 12:29 at 750), 10 x (25 fly, 75 free), (1:47-49; one 1:53), then 5 x (alternate free/back) on the 2:10. then 100 paddle/free cool down.

At the end I got stuck with this person who smelled of mint; he more splashed in place than anything else; he has an almost vertical position in the water.

Politics Commentary: A Gary Younge editorial in the 16 February issue of The Nation cautioned against staying an Obamabot; the gist of the article is that “ok, Obama won, and now he is President. Our duty is to hold him accountable.” Younge brought up the image of someone in North Korea going to work with their “Dear Leader” photo in the workplace.

Here is the article (which was “subscription only” last night)

But it’s time to let that new reality sink in. The transition is over. We have moved from aspiration to destination. Obama has arrived. Tempting though it may be to savor the lingering aftertaste of a sweet, sweet victory, progressives need to take the posters down and the buttons off. These are no longer the emblems of resistance but of power.

A movement that does not champion the cause of the powerless has no right to call itself progressive. And a movement that attaches itself unequivocally to power does not have the credibility or wherewithal to call itself progressive. That distinction is of course much easier in times when those in power attack us and our values with impunity. But it is no less necessary when they don’t.

Our support for Obama has always been (or should always have been) contingent, as opposed to unconditional. That does not necessarily mean an antagonistic relationship but at the very least an independent one. So to remove his likeness from our walls, hats, chests and homes signals not a souring of the relationship between progressives and Obama but a maturing of it. For many this will be difficult. Obamaphilia has always been a wild beast in desperate need of taming. He already has a school named after him in New York as well as a couple of streets in Florida and Missouri. Most presidents have to be dead–or at least no longer serving–before they get that kind of treatment. All of this happened before Obama had even taken the oath.

Don’t get me wrong; I still approve of the job that Obama is doing. But I can’t let myself become blind to what he isn’t doing well.

One place where President Obama is getting criticism

President Obama has gotten some sharp criticism over the Department of Justice sticking with the Bush DOJ “state secrets” ruling in a case where former terrorism suspects were trying to file suit against a company that provided air transportation to take them to CIA “black sites” and to other countries.

If you think that the left is being easy on Obama, read this.

Here is a synopsis of the situation from Slate via 3-quarks daily.

et in a San Francisco courtroom Monday, that is precisely what the new Justice Department did. Administration lawyers held to the Bush line of using the state-secrets privilege to urge the 9th Circuit to block a civil suit filed by five foreign detainees against Jeppesen Dataplan, a Boeing subsidiary. This suit was filed by the ACLU in 2007 on behalf of the five detainees and dismissed by a district court last February. The ACLU was hoping to reinstate the suit, which alleges that Jeppesen contracted with the CIA to fly detainees to countries where they were tortured under the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program. The abuse these men describe in their court papers is appalling. Allegations have recently surfaced in the British papers that one of the detainees, Binyam Mohamed, had his “genitals . . . sliced with a scalpel.”

Note: the ACLU attorney on the case appeared on Rachel Maddow last night. He admitted that Obama’s administration was superior to Bush’s in terms of civil liberties, even though he was disappointed in this ruling.

Here is the video MSNBC videos don’t embed well. Don’t worry; the ACLU guy comes on at about 3:05 into the video.

For why the Obama administration might have gone this route:

The State Secret Privilege is perhaps the most powerful executive tool available for any president to use, and thus the Obama administration’s decision to preserve its invocation, in Mohamed v. Jeppesen, was immediately interpreted by the vocal civil libertarian community as a betrayal of its basic principles. During the campaign, Obama had criticized its use to preemptively dismiss civil lawsuits against the government. Adding to the current agitation, Obama aides have been silent about its reasoning and the process.

But based on interviews with current administration officials involved in the case, with Bush administration officials, as well as with national security law experts, a clearer explanation emerges.

Officials decided that it would be imprudent to reverse course so abruptly because they realized they didn’t yet have a full picture of the intelligence methods and secrets that underlay the privilege’s assertions, because the privilege might correctly protect a state secret, and because the domino effect of retracting it could harm legitimate cases, both civil and criminal, that are already in progress.

“If you decide today precipitously to waive this privilege, you can’t get it back,
an administration official said. “If you decide to assert it, you can always retract it in the future.”

It isn’t easy, is it?

Economy David Horsey:

Aaron Shock: here is his press release on the Stimulus Package debate.

“Given the billions of taxpayer dollars at stake in the stimulus, negotiations between the House and Senate must be completely open and transparent. American taxpayers deserve to know how and where the government plans to spend their money. I believe it is an open invitation to trouble to keep these negotiations closed.”

“Allowing this historically enormous spending package to be negotiated between a small handful of people behind closed doors would eliminate accountability to the American taxpayers and wholly undermine all efforts at bipartisanship.”

“I support fast action but not at the expense of getting this wrong. We need to work in an expeditious and bipartisan manner to proceed under full sunlight so taxpayers can have full faith in this process and the resulting economic stimulus bill.”

The conference negotiations have already occurred, but I approve of this sentiment.

Religion: those who “believe” tend to be born with this tendency?

The origin of religious belief is something of a mystery, but in recent years scientists have started to make suggestions. One leading idea is that religion is an evolutionary adaptation that makes people more likely to survive and pass their genes onto the next generation. In this view, shared religious belief helped our ancestors form tightly knit groups that cooperated in hunting, foraging and childcare, enabling these groups to outcompete others. In this way, the theory goes, religion was selected for by evolution, and eventually permeated every human society (New Scientist, 28 January 2006, p 30)

The religion-as-an-adaptation theory doesn’t wash with everybody, however. As anthropologist Scott Atran of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor points out, the benefits of holding such unfounded beliefs are questionable, in terms of evolutionary fitness. “I don’t think the idea makes much sense, given the kinds of things you find in religion,” he says. A belief in life after death, for example, is hardly compatible with surviving in the here-and-now and propagating your genes. Moreover, if there are adaptive advantages of religion, they do not explain its origin, but simply how it spread.

An alternative being put forward by Atran and others is that religion emerges as a natural by-product of the way the human mind works. [...]

The ability to conceive of gods, however, is not sufficient to give rise to religion. The mind has another essential attribute: an overdeveloped sense of cause and effect which primes us to see purpose and design everywhere, even where there is none. “You see bushes rustle, you assume there’s somebody or something there,” Bloom says.

This over-attribution of cause and effect probably evolved for survival. If there are predators around, it is no good spotting them 9 times out of 10. Running away when you don’t have to is a small price to pay for avoiding danger when the threat is real.

Again, experiments on young children reveal this default state of the mind. Children as young as three readily attribute design and purpose to inanimate objects. When Deborah Kelemen of the University of Arizona in Tucson asked 7 and 8-year-old children questions about inanimate objects and animals, she found that most believed they were created for a specific purpose. Pointy rocks are there for animals to scratch themselves on. Birds exist “to make nice music”, while rivers exist so boats have something to float on. “It was extraordinary to hear children saying that things like mountains and clouds were ‘for’ a purpose and appearing highly resistant to any counter-suggestion,” says Kelemen.

I recommend reading the whole thing; it goes on to say that “atheism will always be a hard sell.” That doesn’t bother me as I am not selling anything.

10 February 2009 Parting shots

I am working a bit late as we are doing some of my favorite topics in my classes:

1. Uniqueness and existence theorems for first order differential equations.
2. Sylow Theorems for abstract algebra and
3. The rudiments of kernel and image for linear transformations in linear algebra.

The class preparations are time consuming, but fun.

Politics
President Obama’s press conference in its entirety

Republican Fail

Bizarre Republican Objections

Bizarre Republican Primary

Evidently, this is serious.

Oh, I love the tight white pants.

Republican Mouth Pieces: Fox News Repeats GOP talking points, complete with typos!

During the February 10 edition of Fox News’ Happening Now, co-host Jon Scott claimed that “the Senate is expected to pass the $838 billion stimulus plan — its version of it, anyway. We thought we’d take a look back at the bill, how it was born, and how it grew, and grew, and grew.” In tracking how and when the bill purportedly “grew,” Scott referenced seven dates, as on-screen graphics cited various news sources from those time periods. However, all of the sources and cost figures Scott cited, as well as the accompanying on-screen text, were also contained in a February 10 press release issued by the Senate Republican Communications Center. One on-screen graphic during the segment even repeated a typo from the GOP document, further confirming that Scott was simply reading from a Republican press release. The Fox News graphic and the GOP press release both claimed that a Wall Street Journal report that the stimulus package could reach “$775 billion over two years” was published on December 19, 2009 [emphasis added].

“Fair and Balanced”? Yeah, right.

Robert Reich on today’s Geithner’s press conference:

Geithner has to raise confidence among two groups: (1) the public, enough to allow the administration to use the second $350 billion Congress has already authorized without too much hollering on Capitol Hill; and (2) investors, sufficiently to get them to buy the banks’ toxic assets (with guarantees from the Treasury and loans from the Fed limiting the investors’ downside risks), and to buy new securities that will finance future loans to consumers, small businesses, and homeowners (also with some federal guarantees and loans limiting downside risks).

At this stage, (1) will be far easier to accomplish than (2). [...]

The public doesn’t trust Wall Street and has big doubts about the Treasury, even under Obama. But the administration isn’t asking for new legislation now. Geithner’s entire program is based on existing authority[...]

There are problems, to say the least. The Federal Reserve would be willing to grant loans in order to encourage investors to take the risks. But Reich argues that capital is hard to come by these days and this plan may rely on using hedge funds for capital….these are risky! Do you remember what happened recently?

So Geithner was intentionally vague about the plan; he needs to build in some wiggle room, but vagueness undermines transparency and confidence.

In short, this is a tough situation and we are in uncharted territory.

Republican Hate Thinking about it, I found it amusing that someone expressed, well, disapproval at my saying “GOP stands for Greed Over Patriotism”.

After all, that is all sweetness and light compared to what the Republicans routinely throw at us.

To see what happens at the extreme: recall what happened at the Unitarian Church in Knoxville. The person who did the shootings will be spending life in jail. But he is unrepentant:

In one sense, justice has been done this day in Tennessee. Jim Adkisson, the shooter who violated the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church,will be spending the rest of his life behind bars.

But there are still troubling loose ends. Still wondering whether it was a hate crime?

“This was a hate crime,” Adkisson wrote in a four-page “manifesto” he had left inside his truck and intended to serve as a suicide letter.
[snip]
This was a symbolic killing,” Adkisson wrote. “Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate and House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg’s book. I’d like to kill everyone in the mainstream media. But I knew these people were inaccessible to me.

I invite you, if you are strong of stomach, to read the whole thing.

If I weren’t one of the people whom he shot at, I could more easily be moved by the despair and self-loathing written here. “I know my life is going downhill fast from here,” he said. “If you would take my sorry carcass to the body farm, or donate it to science, or just throw me in the Tennessee River.” Here’s a man who felt like he had no options.

But how did he feel like he could best use this time he had remaining?

Liberals are a pest like termites. Millions of them. Each little bite contributes to the downfall of this great nation. The only way we can rid ourselves of this evil is kill them in the streets. Kill them where they gather.

This is where my sympathy for him ends. He apparently remains unrepentant:

Matthew David Chamberlain, a 47-year-old nonviolent sex offender who shared a pod with Adkisson, said Adkisson insisted that the motive behind the attack was purely ideological.

“He said if he got out (of prison), he’d do it again,” Chamberlain said.

Now THAT is a display of violence and nastiness; that is a bit more than calling someone a name.

Besides, given the crap that the Republicans routinely threw at us for the past umpteen years…

So, when someone calls us “liberal haters”, ask them when you’ve seen a bunch of liberals shooting up a place?

Of course, we have been known to protest….

BRING OUT THE PITCHFORKS!

No, this group of protesters are not necessarily a group of liberals; in fact I don’t know if there is a dominant political persuasion among them.

I am a bit surprised that this hasn’t happened earlier:

Monday, Feb. 9, a group of 350 to 400 at-risk homeowners, organized by the Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of America , staged a series of protests outside the mansions of wealthy bankers in a moneyed Connecticut neighborhood.

More details of the people powered movement below the fold.

* AfroPonix’s diary :: ::
*

The Stamford Times reports:

Stamford and Greenwich became the stomping grounds of a grassroots campaign against corporate greed Sunday as part of a three day homeowners’ workshop sponsored by the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America. Between 350 and 400 people, most of them members, staff or volunteers for the Boston-based nonprofit organization, converged outside the Greenwich home of William Frey, manager of Greenwich Financial Services, at around 1 p.m.
[....]Called the ‘Predators Tour’ these actions were the start of NACA’s ‘accountability campaign,’ an aggressive, confrontational protest aimed at several top executives of companies that refuse to allow NACA to renegotiate the terms of loans on behalf of members, according to NACA CEO Bruce Marks