Jim Cramer on Jon Stewart

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Bernie Madoff pleads guilty to fraud, while Jon and Jim Cramer finally face off.

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March 12 2009 Chilly Evening

Some posts to warm cyberspace

Political Humor:
Red State Update on the current Republican Party:

Science
A Senator had put a hold on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association and Office and Science and Technology picks; they have now been approved in committee:

The two nominees — John Holdren and Jane Lubchenco — cleared the committee in a unanimous vote this afternoon as part of an unannounced, closed-door markup, a committee aide said. The panel’s approval sends the nominees to the Senate floor, where they should pass by unanimous consent within the coming week, according to leaders of the committee from both sides of the aisle.

“They’re going to be confirmed,” said Commerce ranking member Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas). Hutchison said there are no Republican holds on the nominees.

Human like behavior: a chimp who had been abused by his owner killed him by hitting him with a coconut; he threw it from a tree.

A book that claims that human evolution was accelerated within the last 10,000 years or so has appeared. This isn’t claiming that the number of mutations went up due to the exponential increase in population but rather that the “per human adaptation rate” has gone up, presumably due to the pressures of civilization.

Many are skeptical of this claim; I haven’t done the meta-research to have an informed opinion.

Education
Here is President Obama’s speech on education; it is 33 minutes long.

Social:

Mano Singham makes the case that the internet sites (such as facebook) has lead to the contraction in the numbers of people who belong to a church. He also points out that many people who claim to be believers are, in effect, “acting atheists”. This is what I think that he means by this: one might believe in some deity but not believe that this said deity will interfere in the affairs of this universe; that is, what happens in our world is merely the result of our interacting with natural laws.

This is a Pat Condell video. Yes, he is British, but what he says here goes for me. Yes, I believe in free speech, but part of free speech is my having the right to say that I don’t like your protest.

Politics

Robert Reich talks about President Obama’s plans. On one hand, the individual changes that he proposes are incremental and hardly revolutionary. On the other hand, the view that the economy grows from the bottom up (rather than from the top down) is a big change from the way things have been done recently.

Democrats acting badly
This isn’t good at all:

Top federal regulators say they were taken aback when they learned that a California congresswoman who had helped set up a meeting with bankers last year had family financial ties to a bank whose chief executive asked them for up to $50 million in special bailout funds.

Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, requested the September meeting on behalf of executives at One- United, one of the nation’s largest black-owned banks. Ms. Waters’s husband, Sidney Williams, had served on the bank’s board until early last year and has owned at least $250,000 of its stock.

Treasury officials said the session with nearly a dozen senior banking regulators was intended to allow minority-owned banks and their trade association to discuss the losses they had incurred from the federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But Kevin Cohee, OneUnited’s chief executive, instead seized the opportunity to plead for special assistance for his bank, federal officials said.
[...]
Ms. Waters declined on Tuesday to comment on the meeting, or to say whether her husband still owned shares of OneUnited. Her staff released two letters that showed the meeting was initially called to discuss industry concerns broadly.

Ms. Waters, a member of the House Financial Services Committee, did not disclose her ties to OneUnited to Treasury officials, who said they learned of them only later.

This is unacceptable.

Republicans behaving well

Ok, I’ll give some Republicans some credit.

Megan McCain appeared on the Rachel Maddow show.

I agree with her. This might sound strange but I don’t like it that the Democrats all but have a lock on my vote; the current Republicans are so far out there I wouldn’t consider voting for any of them, even if we ran a complete idiot. I’d love to have a choice which included an Eisenhower, T. Roosevelt or a Rockefeller or even a Christine Todd Whitman. This group appears to have the right idea.

Senator Sam Brownback. Yes, he is a creationist woo. But he has reached out from time to time; he did some work with then Senator Obama on Darfur and recently he went to bat for Kathleen Sebelius, even though he caught flack from his own party.

Republicans Behaving Badly

Illinois: Chair of the Cook County (Chicago) GOP party gets his wife arrested for battery. Why? She was upset that she caught him with a couple of hookers at their home.

David Vitter: R-La. Yes, this is the diaper and the DC-madam Senator.

Yes, evidently he had a meltdown when he was late for a flight and tried to get through a closed security door.

Yes, he criticized President Obama for having earmarks in the spending bill (to keep the government afloat) while loading it with many of his own.

But look at what some of these earmarks were for:

And since we’re on the subject of David Vitter, there’s this…we know that he voted against the Omnibus bill because he didn’t like the earmarks. We know he had scads of personal earmarks in there. (He’s number 5 in total dollar amount.) But you may have fogotten the failed earmark he shot for two years ago – it was for:

[A] Louisiana Christian group that has challenged the teaching of Darwinian evolution in the public school system.

David Vitter. Airline Passenger. Hypocrite. Anti-science moron. Senator from Louisiana…
DocJess :: David Vitter, so many things…

Oh yes, never, never mention that 9-11 happened on President Bush’s watch.

So now we have revisionist history on the Bush administration. But back to the 9-11 claim, one commenter (named mllamoreux) on the blog that I got the video from made the following observation:

9-1-1 could have happened to anyone. It was Bush who decided to use it to trash the constitution rather than to cement our friendships around the world.

Republicans and the economy

Oh yes, now the CEOs are victims!

Yes, the Republicans are trying to blame Obama for the current dip in the stock market.

The pink represents the Bush administration and the yellow the period after Obama had won the election but hadn’t become President yet.

Why Email Starts Fights! | Online videos for busy business professionals | BNET Video

The video won’t embed but you can get it here. The basic idea is that e-mail doesn’t allow for conveying tone and body language/facial expression cues.

Brrrr….12 March 2009

Workout notes Yoga, then 8 mile run outside followed by a 2 mile walk. It was 14 F with a slight headwind (8 mph) when I started and it had warmed to 16 F when I finished. It is a balmy 20 F right now.

Some of my usual course was flooded due to the heavy rains this weekend.

(photos from the Peoria Journal Star)

My run route wasn’t that affected; I merely had to reroute in front of the Riverplex building.

11 March 2009: Last Post of the Day

Science:
Ok, I don’t consider psychology to be a science, but this article from Scientific American perked my interest. It purports to claim that the linking of moral virtue to cleanliness is less about washing away immorality but rather inoculating oneself against it:

Simone Schnall, Jennifer Benton and Sophie Harvey, psychologists at the University of Plymouth, have demonstrated just how this can happen. Having shown in previous studies that inducing disgust or a sense of dirtiness can make people’s moral judgments more severe, they set out to explore the opposite. Might physical cleanliness encourage less severe moral judgments? To test this idea, they had participants read brief vignettes describing morally questionable behaviors, such as falsifying information on a resume. Prior to reading and responding to these vignettes, “cleanliness” was induced either through the activation of purity-related concepts or through the direct experience of hand-washing.

In one study, participants were asked to form sentences from sets of several words. Some sets contained purity-related words, such as clean and pristine, whereas others (in the control condition) contained neutral (non-purity) words. In a second study, participants watched a disgust-inducing segment of the movie “Trainspotting,” after which they went to another room where they read the moral vignettes. Half of these participants were first asked to wash their hands in order to keep the staff room that was being used clean.

In both studies, the experience of “cleanliness”—either through the subtle priming of concepts about cleanliness or by actual cleansing—reduced people’s tendencies to see the behaviors described in the vignettes as morally wrong. Apparently, participants’ sense of physical purity influenced their evaluations of the actions of others (just as the induction of disgust had done in Schnall’s earlier studies). When they themselves were clean and pure, so were others.

This finding, published in the December issue of the journal Psychological Science, contributes to our emerging understanding of the embodied structure of morality. In particular, it demonstrates its bidirectional nature. Previous research has shown that thinking about one’s sins evokes thoughts of, and desires for, physical cleansing. Now we know the opposite is also true—thinking about, or experiencing, cleansing can influence judgments of morality. What’s more, the effect appears to act completely outside of awareness. The metaphorical structure of concepts can guide moral intuition and moral judgment without ever entering conscious thought.

Politics and Science: From the Conservation Report:

Who in the Senate is upholding the approval of White House science adviser John Holdren and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) head Jane Lubchenco? From TPMDC:

To bring folks up to speed, it appeared initially that Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) was the sole lawmaker standing in the nominees’ way, thanks to an unrelated dispute with Democratic leaders over the Cuban trade embargo. But that obstacle is no longer operative, leaving the situation murky as Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) references multiple holds on the nominees.

Yesterday we ruled out two GOP suspects, Sens. David Vitter (LA) and Mel Martinez (FL). Today we can strike two more likely suspects from the list: Sens. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) and John Barrasso (R-WY) both strongly oppose Holdren’s pro-regulation stance on climate change, but both told me they’re not behind the holds.

Inhofe couldn’t confirm that the holds weren’t coming from his environment committee, but he said flat out: “It’s not me, though.”

I don’t have any ideas on this issue.

More Politics
CNBC and Jon Stewart I’ve posted a couple of these videos where Jon Stewart completely embarrasses Jim Cramer: here and here.

The idea was that someone at CNBC had ranted about the “losers” who had trouble paying their mortgages; Stewart pointed out that the alleged pros at CNBC had also made some rather colossal misjudgments.

But the real problem with CNBC isn’t that they made some bad predictions; that is going to happen from time to time. The problem is that CNBC is that they were so concerned with having “access” to the top CEOs that they didn’t do the tough reporting to root out stuff that might not be favorable to these said CEO’s; they didn’t want to lose their access. As Cenk Uygur says at the Daily Kos:

That’s not the problem with CNBC. The real problem is their reporting — or lack thereof. The CNBC reporters and anchors make the Bush press corps look like draconian inquisitors. They are obsessed with access. This is a problem with all of the media, and something Jon Stewart points out all the time. But it is particularly acute at CNBC (and all other business news channels).

I have a close friend who works at a business news station — and here is the worst kept secret in show business — it’s all about the access. If you piss off the CEOs or the companies, you’re going to get a call from your boss. You have jeopardized our relationship with them!

That is very thinly disguised code words for — don’t ever say anything negative about a company we cover otherwise your job is in the trouble. The message is clear — go along to get along. This isn’t journalism. It’s public relations by another name.

CNBC never did any exposés about the enormous risks these financial companies took. They never exposed the insanity of the derivatives market. And they never told their audience that the executives of these companies have been robbing their shareholders blind. Because they didn’t see that as their job. They saw their job as doing whatever it took to keep Wall Street happy and playing ball with them.

Republican nut jobs
Mike Huckabee struck me as reasonable at times. Ok, his tax system was whacked and he is a creationist woo. But he struck me as someone who actually cared about the poor.

Nevertheless, he had some rather creepy people working with him.
We talked about Chuck Norris and his “Running for the President of Texas” after Texas (and other states) left the Union. But Norris is merely a bad actor and a good athlete.

Others who were on Huckabee’s staff have no such excuse:

Since Huckabee’s campaign ended, Jerry Jenkins has been seen discussing whether Barack Obama is the Antichrist or merely a pre-cursor to the Antichrist; Star Parker has been heard declaring that public schools are “cesspools” designed to indoctrinate students with “anti-Christian worldviews”; Mat Staver has been proclaiming that letting gays get married will lead to a whole generation of violent criminals; Jerry Cox has been hard at work ensuring that gays cannot adopt children; Kelly Shackelford has been spending hundreds of thousands of dollars defending Sarah Palin and warning that gays are out to destroy Christian businesses; and Rick Scarborough has been complaining about the relentless persecution of Christians in America.

But nobody has gone more off the rails than Janet Porter, the co-chair of Huckabee’s coalition (though her last name was Folger at the time). Starting with her declaration that anyone who voted for Obama was going straight to hell and her prayers to God to keep him out of office and continuing through to her joining up with the Birthers and allegations that Obama’s presidency was the culmination of a decade-long Communist conspiracy, Porter has been a one-woman source of right-wing lunacy.

Just last week she declared that our nation is currently being cursed by God for electing Obama and now she is warning that a massive catastrophe is on the way.

Religious Woos of Various Stripes

Other countries have their woos; in Iceland there are some who believe in elves:

there is actually something called the Icelandic Elf School where you can learn all about the classification and cultivation of various sorts of fairy-like entities.

Also known as Álfaskólinn in Icelandic, The Icelandic Elf School teaches students and visitors about the five different kinds of elves or hidden people in myth that are believed to inhabit the country of Iceland. The school is located in Reykjavík, the country’s largest city.

The school is headed by Magnús Skarphéðinsson, brother of the leader of one of Iceland’s largest political parties. Magnús has a full curriculum, and certificate programs for visitors that can be earned in as little as half a day. However, the school also publishes texts on hidden people, partly for its own use in the classroom. There is also ongoing research on the elves and hidden people of Iceland.

As funny as this sounds, this has some real consequences:

Michael Lewis has a piece (h/t) about Iceland and its economic collapse in Vanity Fair. Besides being fascinating, it’s also wonderfully written. Felix Salmon excerpted this bit, and I will too:

“Alcoa, the biggest aluminum company in the country, encountered two problems peculiar to Iceland when, in 2004, it set about erecting its giant smelting plant. The first was the so-called “hidden people” — or, to put it more plainly, elves — in whom some large number of Icelanders, steeped long and thoroughly in their rich folkloric culture, sincerely believe. Before Alcoa could build its smelter it had to defer to a government expert to scour the enclosed plant site and certify that no elves were on or under it. It was a delicate corporate situation, an Alcoa spokesman told me, because they had to pay hard cash to declare the site elf-free but, as he put it, “we couldn’t as a company be in a position of acknowledging the existence of hidden people.” The other, more serious problem was the Icelandic male: he took more safety risks than aluminum workers in other nations did. “In manufacturing,” says the spokesman, “you want people who follow the rules and fall in line. You don’t want them to be heroes. You don’t want them to try to fix something it’s not their job to fix, because they might blow up the place.” The Icelandic male had a propensity to try to fix something it wasn’t his job to fix.

So I have to give our fundies some credit: I haven’t seen a factory held up by worry if there were devils or angels lurking nearby.

I am not going to give them too much credit though; some are claiming that Christians are “soft victims” and should be packing heat to their churches:

Nobody seems to know what drove Terry Sedlacek to shoot and kill Rev. Fred Winters as he delivered his sermon in church last Sunday, though he reportedly suffers from some form of mental illness which his mother attributes to Lyme disease.

Nobody that is, except for Gary Cass of the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission, who knows exactly what caused it – anti-Christian hostility and a lack of guns in church:

The tragic church shooting and death of Reverend Fred Winters, pastor of First Baptist Church , Maryville Illinois, has once again raised the under-reported issue of violence directed at Christians and churches … Anti-Christian hostility is reaching a new, more violent level. Churches used to be sanctuaries that were regarded as sacred, unfortunately now all church leaders must be prepared to defend their congregations and themselves from violent acts even with the use of deadly force.

Self-defense is not just a right, but a Christian duty. Jesus told his followers, “If you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one.” Jesus did not send his disciples out unprotected into a hostile world. In a world filled with gun violence, Christians must be prepared to respond with appropriate force to defend their family, neighbors and themselves.

It is not virtuous for Christians to be a soft target for the hateful and deranged. Church leaders have a moral duty not to tempt a crazed gunman to come and shoot up their congregation by being unprepared.

And of course, Christian Fundamentalist Wooism harms science, especially in Oklahoma:

OU students and faculty are busy celebrating the anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the publishing of his book “On the Origin of Species,” but one Oklahoma lawmaker is not too happy about the party.

House Resolutions 1014 and 1015, introduced by Rep. Todd Thomsen, R-Ada, assert that OU’s recent evolution-related discussions, part of the “Darwin 2009” project, have been unfair and biased because proponents of creationism and intelligent design have not been represented equally alongside evolutionary biologists.

“I am trying to promote free thinking,” Thomsen said. “I strongly oppose the Department of Zoology for their unwillingness to lead our state in this discussion and not have opposing views in this matter.”

Although Thomsen’s resolutions would not enforce any government action if passed, his efforts still have been met with opposition.

“It’s breathtakingly stupid,” said Rob Boston, a spokesman for Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. “Rep. Thomsen might as well be complaining students are being indoctrinated with the theory of gravity.”

Boston said he thinks Thomsen’s resolutions promote creationism and are a step toward implementing creationism instruction in schools.

AUSCS is working with the Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education to make sure creationism is kept out of the classroom, he said.

HR 1014 claims that the OU Department of Zoology has “been framing the Darwinian theory of evolution as doctrinal dogmatism rather than a hypothetical construction within the disciplines of sciences.”

But the word “theory” means something different in science than it does in colloquial language, according to Rosemary Knapp, director of graduate studies in the Department of Zoology.

“It’s as close to law as can be,” she said of the theory of evolution. “It’s the equivalent to gravity.”

Still, Thomsen said OU should encourage students to think independently about the issue by inviting speakers well-versed in creationism and intelligent design.

But creationism and intelligent design theories do not hold ground when compared to evolutionary biology, Knapp said.

“What’s really unfortunate is that people that are opposed to the fact that we don’t discuss things like intelligent design have a hard time recognizing intelligent design is not a scientific theory,” Knapp said. “It’s not on equal standing.”

Of course there are some smart people in Oklahoma; I know that there are excellent mathematicians on the University of Oklahoma and the Oklahoma State University faculty. I’d be greatly honored to be offered a position at either place (though I really don’t measure up to their research standards).

But, on the whole…well….Oklahoma places 10′th from last (42 out of 51) in percent of college graduates (22.4 percent of the adult population; 27.2 for the United States and 29.2 for Illinois). Oklahoma places 44 out of 51 in percentage of those with graduate degrees (7.2 percent, as opposed to 10 percent in the United States and 10.9 in Illinois).

These stats are from here.

Just a note
Among the top 15 states (plus DC) in terms of percentage of college graduates: all 15 voted Obama, and 18 of the top 20 voted for Obama.
Among the bottom states: All bottom 4, 8 of the bottom 10, 11 of the bottom 11 and 14 of the bottom 20 voted McCain.

GOP hypocrisy on several issues including President Obama on Earmarks

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Of course, this isn’t the only instance

We have, of course, the judicial nominations.

The Republicans sang one tune when they were in the majority, and now they are singing another:

A March 11 New York Times article reported that President Obama faces a “threat from Senate Republicans, who earlier this month threatened, though in vague terms, to block his judicial nominees by filibuster if they were not consulted on vacancies from their home states.” But the Times failed to point out that several of the same Senate Republicans who signed onto the letter “threaten[ing] … to block [Obama's] judicial nominees by filibuster” have previously challenged the constitutionality of filibustering judicial nominees.

The letter to Obama, sent by all 41 Senate Republicans, stated: “Regretfully, if we are not consulted on, and approve of, a nominee from our states, the Republican Conference will be unable to support moving forward on that nominee.” But as Media Matters for America documented, among the signatories were several senators, including Sens. Sam Brownback (KS), Chuck Grassley (IA), John Cornyn (TX), and James Inhofe (OK), who had previously said or suggested that filibustering judicial nominees is unconstitutional.

As Media Matters noted, Politico and Roll Call both reported on the GOP senators’ letter to Obama without noting that several of the signatories previously challenged the constitutionality of filibustering judicial nominees.

Of course President Obama has 67 vacancies to fill; the Republicans are blaming the obstructionist Democrats for having such a large number. But the fact is that at the same point in his first term, President George W. Bush had 94 of them.

Take the Progressive Test!

I found this “progressive test” via Nate Silver’s blog.

First, I’ll post a snippet about the analysis of the test:

The Center For American Progress has a terrific new survey out on political ideology. The material in the survey is right up our alley, and is probably deserving of several posts, but I want to start with a relatively quick, 30,000-foot question: ideologically speaking, is there more that unites us as Americans or divides us?
[...]

If you’re having trouble picking up on a pattern in that data, that’s because there isn’t one. The correlation between the fraction of conservatives and the fraction of liberals agreeing to a given question is essentially zero.

Is this surprising? Perhaps. If conservatives and liberals had fundamental disagreements on most major political questions, you’d expect to see a statistically significant inverse correlation in their responses. But you don’t see that. Conversely, if they agreed on most of these fundamental questions, with the differences being only around the periphery, you’d expect to see a statistically significant positive correlation in their responses. But you don’t really see that either.

Rather, it seems there’s about as much that unites us as divides us.

Surf to the blog to see the chart.

Ok, go take the test!

My score: 307 out of 400.

Note: Barbara (my wife) scored 258.

How does this compare to other groups? I’ve highlighted the groups that I belong to:

Conservative Republicans: 160.6
Republicans: 168.4
2008 McCain voters 169.0
Conservatives: 177.9
Baptists 196.4
Over 64: 200.7
White: 203.7
Men 204.3
HS or less: 206.4
Average American: 209.5
Women 214.3
Moderates 217.4
Under 29 219.7
News from Blogs and the internet: 221.1
Blacks 224.3
Post grad: 227.0
Latinos: 228.4
Progressives 237.6
Democrats: 237.7
Liberals 242.3
2008 Obama: 244.0
Liberal Democrats: 247.1

Update: 299 people at the Daily Kos took the test.

The median was roughly 330-ish. In other words, I am more liberal that most Democrats, but slightly more conservative than most Daily Kos readers.

Poll

How did you do?
375.1-400
11% 35 votes
350.1-375
20% 60 votes
325.1-350
24% 73 votes
300.1-325
29% 89 votes
275.1-300
6% 18 votes
250.1-275
4% 13 votes
225.1-250
1% 3 votes
210.1-225
0% 0 votes
200.1-210
1% 4 votes
190.1-200
0% 0 votes
190 or below (troll)
1% 4 votes

18 F: Winter can go away any time now! (11 March 2009)

Workout notes Slept in; yoga plus 3000 yards of swimming at Bradley. 20 x 100 on the 1:45; mostly 1:37-39, got one 1:36 and the last one was 1:40. This set was work!

Religion and Society

It does seem that way to us; we see “god” just about everywhere but when we put up one stinking little sign, the rubes get enraged.

Politics
Of course I live in Illinois and Obama won Illinois handily 62-37 (McCain won Arizona 54-45). But I live in IL-18 and Aaron Schock is our representative (a freshman Republican). Here are the local numbers: Obama won Peoria County 57-42 (in 2004 Kerry “won” Peoria county by 67 votes out of over 80,000 cast; a virtual statistical tie) and Obama won the City of Peoria by 60-39.

But McCain barely won Shock’s IL-18 by 48-50; Bush carried it 58-42 in 2004. Remember that IL-18 is heavily gerrymandered to lean Republican (includes lots of countryside):

Schock won his district 59-38, though his opponent started late (didn’t announce until after the primaries were over) and was woefully underfunded. So Schock outperformed McCain by 9 points.

Note: Obama won Sangamon county 51-47.

Education: this happens more than you might realize: A professor related to having a deaf student in his college class that couldn’t write at all:

I bled all over her assignment and wrote in my comments that there would be no way for her to pass the essay exams and I did not know what to do (make a whole different objective test just for her? that seemed unfair to the other students) but that she should probably drop the course. The next thing I know I get hauled into my chair’s office who tells me that her father has complained and threatened to file an ADA complaint against me.

My chair said she had been an excellent student in high school and had done well in her other intro classes at our institution (someone at the university gave her an A for English 101!) I then produced the assignment in question and my Chair practically fell backwards in his chair when he saw it. I said, “Clearly this kid has more going on than deafness.” Then he says, “Well, according to her father she does have some slight learning disabilities.”

SLIGHT? “Well, I was not informed, and, as you can see — she’s illiterate. This kid’s been patted on the head and socially promoted for 13 years — but not by me. How can I pass her? How can she possibly take and pass an essay test?” My chair sympathized, intervened with the father and all went by the board. The kid dropped and I never heard anymore about it.

I’ve seen this in mathematics too (among students who weren’t disabled in any way). I had one student who was in a “calculus with review” class who was making an “F”; she was in tears and told me that she “had made an A in high school calculus”. This snowflake literally didn’t know that you needed to use the quotient and product rules when one took the derivative of functions that were products or quotients!!!! Really.

I had another student who was upset that her “work” on homework was marked “wrong”. I explained that was because her “work” was incorrect (in fact, it was irrelevant gibberish, but I was being polite). She was astounded that the “correctness” mattered when one assigned credit!

Sigh…

10 March 2009: evening

Science: evidently I jumped the gun at calling some of the inherited, acquired changes to be Lamarckian.

We have heard quite a lot in recent times about a resurgence of “Lamarckian” mechanisms, based largely on findings involving epigenetics. In this case, environmental differences cause changes in the patterns of expression of genes, and these alterations can sometimes be passed on through at least a few generations.

There are two reasons why it is inaccurate to consider this kind of change in heritable characteristics induced by the environment as “Lamarckian inheritance”.

One, Lamarck did not think that the environment imposed direct effects on organisms that were then passed on. He argued that the environment created needs to which organisms responded by using some features more and others less, that this resulted in those features being accentuated or attenuated, and that this difference was then inherited by offspring. [...]

Two, the idea of inheritance of acquired characteristics predates Lamarck, was the dominant view in his time, and remained common long afterward.

The blog author goes on to point out that Darwin had thought that such things happened. Still, Lamarck was not crazy.

Politics

The Omnibus budget bill has passed; the last procedural hurdle was passed 62-35 and so it passed the Senate by a voice vote.

How is President Obama doing? I’d say that this review is typical from what I’ve seen from my fellow liberals:

Obama’s standing with the public — 62 percent approve of his performance and 22 percent disapprove, according to Gallup, is objectively quite good. But presidential approval scores are usually quite good at this early point in their terms. Since World War II, the average of all presidential approval ratings through about 50 days in their terms is 61 percent approve and 23 percent disapprove. Moreover, if we limit the analysis to those presidents in their first elected terms — we include Truman in ’49 and Johnson in ’65 in this category — the average has in fact been slightly stronger than that.

Then again, Obama has a couple of pretty good excuses if his approval ratings aren’t quite in Kennedy territory.

For one, the public has tended to become more partisan over the course of the past half-century, and so it has been harder to sustain stratospheric approval ratings. Since Reagan, the average president (not counting Obama) has had a score of 57 percent approve, 30 percent disapprove through this point in his term — slightly weaker than Obama’s. If we exclude the second terms of Reagan, Clinton and Bush, the scores are 58 percent approve, 24 percent disapprove. [...]

But for me — and yes, I know, I drunk the kool-aid a long time ago — there’s still nobody that I’d rather have in office right now. A large fraction of the country evidently feels the same way.

– Nate Silver at 9:23 AM

Now for a dissenting view (from someone who has a functioning brain but a different political point of view)

Perhaps the true test of the “overness” of the honeymoon will be found in the reporting of the Congressional testimony today of Dennis Blair, the Director of National Intelligence, who will be asked (by Republicans) about his appointment of Chas Freeman to chair the National Intelligence Council. So far only conservative media outlets — including the Wall Street Journal editorial page and the Washington Times — seem to have made note of the impending testimony,

Note: since this article was written, Freeman has withdrawn. Yes, Obama has had trouble with some of his appointees; I need to review to see if his people are having more trouble than those who were appointed by previous first term presidents.

Ray LaHood: guess what? He has gone to bat for this administration in a big way.

On Obama being a socialist:

I don’t agree with it * * * If you go out and interview these people working on this road in Maryland… these people are thrilled. They are thrilled that they are working in March on a good paying job building roads, which is what they were trained to do. That’s going to be happening all over America. So the idea that this is socialism — it is not socialism, it is economic development. It is going to provide an economic engine around communities all over American for jobs; good paying jobs; and help people pay their bills. I don’t call that socialism…. We are the model for the world when it comes to infrastructure. We are the model for the interstate system. I don’t call that socialism. Our $40 billion [for the Department of Transportation]: not socialism. It is good paying jobs that is going to drive the economies in a lot of states and a lot of communities.”

(emphasis mine)

I suppose that President Obama knew what he was doing when he appointed Mr. LaHood; that isn’t a shock, isn’t it?

But at times there is a price to pay for being bipartisan. Senator Sam Brownback has worked with then Senator Obama on some issues (e. g. Darfur) but now he is catching flack for backing Governor Kathleen Sebelius for the Health and Human Services Department.

It has been a rough couple of weeks for Sen. Sam Brownback.

Since he announced that he was supporting Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius’ nomination to be Secretary of Health and Human Services, he has watched the Family Research Council pull out of the Values Action Team meetings he oversees and his reputation as a pro-life champion has taken a beating.

I have to give him credit. Sure, I am embarrassed that Senator Brownback embraces creationism and is anti-choice. But he is doing the right thing here and I salute him for it.

International A Jewish historian argues that Israel (and Jews in general) spend too much time seeing themselves as perpetual victims.

I suppose a 1000 year old habit can be hard to break, but it is true: Israel is now a major power and is viewed that way by much of the world.

Religion and Society

Scroll down to the comments on this article; there are some breakdowns on the latest survey on religion in the United States:

I should point out that the 2.3% of no belief in God is in answer to the question

“Regarding the existence of God, do you think…”

The choice of answers was
There is no such thing – 2.3%
There is no way to know – 4.3%
I’m not sure – 5.7%
There is a higher power but no personal God – 12.1%
There is definitely a personal God – 69.5%
Refused to answer – 6.1%

Agnostic atheists would quite likely give the second answer or even the third answer (I’m not sure …but I’m going to assume not) so atheistic people might range up to about 12% of the population. Deistic people seem to be another 12.1%.

Also the among those without any religion there are 60 men to every 40 women. Note that some atheists might have a religion (e.g., Unitarians) and some of the ‘no religion’ might be theists.

CS Monitor: here is an article that says that conventional evangelical Christianity might be on the wane; the beneficiaries of this might be churches such as the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church; independent churches might benefit as well.

Jon Stewart Rips Into Jim Cramer Again (VIDEO)

more about "Jon Stewart Rips Into Jim Cramer Agai…", posted with vodpod

Jim Cramer just got PWND.