Pregame May 2, 2009

A couple of quick links:

Paul Krugman His latest post is interesting:

Joe Nocera writes about Thursday’s New York Revie/PEN event on the economy, but fails to mention what I found the most depressing aspect of the whole thing: further confirmation that we’re living in a Dark Age of macroeconomics, in which hard-won knowledge has simply been forgotten.

What’s the evidence? Niall Ferguson “explaining” that fiscal expansion will actually be contractionary, because it will drive up interest rates. At least that’s what I think he said; there were so many flourishes that it’s hard to tell. But in any case, this is really sad: John Hicks knew far more about this in 1937 than people who think they’re sophisticates know now.

In any case, I thought it might be useful to re-explain why our current predicament can be thought of as a global excess of desired savings — which means that fiscal deficits won’t drive up interest rates unless they also expand the economy. [...]

In effect, we have an incipient excess supply of savings even at a zero interest rate. And that’s our problem.

So what does government borrowing do? It gives some of those excess savings a place to go — and in the process expands overall demand, and hence GDP. It does NOT crowd out private spending, at least not until the excess supply of savings has been sopped up, which is the same thing as saying not until the economy has escaped from the liquidity trap.

Now, there are real problems with large-scale government borrowing — mainly, the effect on the government debt burden. I don’t want to minimize those problems; some countries, such as Ireland, are being forced into fiscal contraction even in the face of severe recession. But the fact remains that our current problem is, in effect, a problem of excess worldwide savings, looking for someplace to go.

Surf to the article to see how Dr. Krugman arrived at his conclusion.

2 May 2009 (pm)

Run notes: 8 miles on the East Peoria trail 39:50 out, 39:30 back. Breezy; headwind on the way back, and the locals were burning leaves (cough, cough). I wish that I had remembered that; I love community “no burn” laws. It was sunny.

Mathematics notes There was an interesting talk on centenarian studies (study of people living to 100 years); I’ll have to read a bit on this. Evidently the thing that most affects longevity at that age is having proper assistance for day to day tasks. Note: there is a huge variability among those who live this long; no one trait stands out.

Tattoos: Check out Millard Fillmore’s bathtub to see equations which are tattooed on someone’s back. One equation is the entropy equation, one is the hydrostatic equation, and one is for the Mandelbrot set. Can you tell which is which? (hint: it is easy if you remember calculus and what entropy is)

Science education A teacher got in trouble with the courts:

John Pieret is a pain in the lawyer. He has something to say about a recent court case [Accommodating the Law].

The latest ruling on the religion-science front is by a Federal judge in California holding that a public school teacher who called creationism “religious, superstitious nonsense,” violated a creationist student’s First Amendment rights.

Of course, the teacher is correct: creationism is religious, superstitious nonsense. But as one commenter pointed out, in public schools, the teaching must have a valid secular purpose and can’t have the purpose of attacking a religion.

Hence, saying “well, life evolved over x billion years” is ok. Saying that “the teachings this religion are wrong” isn’t, even if the science (which can be taught) does imply that the religious teaching is wrong: (from the comments)

John Pieret said…

It’s a little tricky but I’ll try to explain. Teaching science is a legitimate secular purpose of government. If, incidental to that — i.e. not as the purpose of the lesson — something is taught that some religion finds contradicts its dogma, the secular purpose controls. But, if the intent of the lesson is to show that some religion or belief is false, that means that the purpose is not secular, but religious / theological / philosophical. For example, if a lesson on geology teaches the age of the Earth is 4.5 billion years and that the geological history of the last 6,000 years does not include a global flood, the purpose is secular. If the lesson is that science disproves the biblical account, that is a religious purpose. As you can imagine, this can be difficult to determine in practice, which is why accommodationist statements by scientific organizations can be legally helpful in the US.

It is not necessary to a science lesson to teach that science and religion are in conflict and the purpose of including such a statement could only be to attack the students’ religious beliefs, which is most definitely not a secular purpose.

Eamon:

The real issue (on the first prong of the Lemon test) is the government intent. The more blatant the nature of the attack on a religious belief, the easier it is to determine the intent. But subtle attacks are also prohibited.

Thank You Senator Durbin

Yes, this is Senator Tom Harkin. Here I agree with him:

Here is a blog post on this

Senator Durbin: thank you. To you spineless Democrats:

No Republican members voted for the amendment. The Democrat no votes include Senators Max Baucus (D-MT), Michael Bennet (D-CO), Robert Byrd (D-WV), Tom Carper (D-DE), Byron Dorgan (D-ND), Tim Johnson (D-SD), Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), Ben Nelson (D-NE), Mark Pryor (D-AR), Arlen Specter (D-PA) & John Tester (D-MT).

Shame on you; I know that you represent the big banks.

This is why I don’t contribute to the DSCC or the DCCC; I don’t want to support such Democrats. Note: the vote on this amendment was subject to the usual “cloture” rules; that is why 45 “nay” votes were enough to kill it.

1 May 2009 PM

It is Friday evening and I am watching Bill Moyers Journal. There is a lively debate as to what President Obama should do about the torturing our country did.

First, one political tidbit; more later

Check out these approval ratings:

Research 2000 for Daily Kos. 4/27-4/30/2009. All adults. MoE 2% (4/20-4/23/2009 results):
FAVORABLE UNFAVORABLE NET CHANGE
PRESIDENT OBAMA 70 (68) 25 (26) +3

PELOSI: 38 (37) 45 (44) +0
REID: 35 (34) 49 (48) +0
McCONNELL: 21 (22) 60 (58) -3
BOEHNER: 16 (17) 62 (61) -2

CONGRESSIONAL DEMS: 44 (43) 49 (50) +2
CONGRESSIONAL GOPS: 14 (15) 71 (70) -2

DEMOCRATIC PARTY: 54 (53) 40 (41) +2
REPUBLICAN PARTY: 22 (23) 68 (67) -2

The Republicans as a whole at 22 percent, and Republicans in Congress at 14 percent? I hope that they keep shooting off their mouths. I can’t remember a time when Republicans were so despised. Yes, it warms my heart!

Science and Society

The Secretary of Health and Human Services(Kathleen Sebelius) is dealing with the potential flu crisis.

Meanwhile at Columbia University, bioinformatician Raul Rabadan and his colleagues compared the sequence data from the flu virus that has infected hundreds of people in Mexico and elsewhere to more than 10,000 virus sequences in the National Center for Biotechnology Information database. Contrary to some media reports that have characterized the current strain as a mixture of swine, avian, and human viruses, Rabadan said that the virus appears to be decidedly more swine-like.

“The closest relatives to this virus are found in swine,” Rabadan said, adding that most of the virus seems to be related to previously isolated swine virus in North America, but that another part of the virus seems to have Asian or European origins. Rabadan added that a part of the current virus may have evolved into a swine virus after a “triple reassortment” event–in which avian, human, and swine viruses combined in pigs– that likely occurred in 1998, but that all segments of the current virus seem to be of swine origin.

Though his results are preliminary, Rabadan’s work is helping to form a more complete genetic picture of the new virus as vaccine development ramps up. A good genetic characterization of the novel virus, which is being transmitted from human-to-human and against which there appears to be no background immunity, will be crucial in the coming weeks. “We have not seen this before with this particular virus,” Fauci said at the HHS press conference.

Of course, we should take care not to overreact.

Fake Journals: Merck paid a journal publisher to publish articles (favorable to its product) in a manner that made the articles look as if they came from a peer reviewed journal

Merck paid an undisclosed sum to Elsevier to produce several volumes of a publication that had the look of a peer-reviewed medical journal, but contained only reprinted or summarized articles–most of which presented data favorable to Merck products–that appeared to act solely as marketing tools with no disclosure of company sponsorship.

Evolution
How did something as complex as an immune system evolve? Check out this article; there is a cool photo of bacteria being eaten by a cell.

This article talks about animals that respond to music (at one time we thought that humans were the only animal that did this). This has promise in Parkinson’s disease research.

Religion

Sometimes, secularists refer to the idea of a divine intervention in the creation or evolution of life as a “skyhook”. Mano Singham discusses this.

Such a skyhook is taken on here by Jerry Coyne:

Earlier I posted about dancing birds and centenarian Nobelists, but accommodationism still dogs my heels. It comes at me today in two forms: Francis’s Collins’s execrable Biologos website, funded by our old friends the Templeton Foundation, and an article in the Guardian by Kenneth Miller about transitional fossils. Both of these items offer a faith/science accommodationist viewpoint, either explicitly (Collins) or implicitly (Miller). And both suffer from the big problem inherent in that viewpoint: when one makes pronouncements about faith that involve assertions about science, the science always suffers. (As a working scientist and a naturalist, I’m not all that concerned with what it does to faith.)

The more I peruse Collins’s site, the more embarrassed I am for him and his cronies. On the first page, with the “Mission Statement,” appears the following proclamation (see comments below):

Follow the link to read a point by point breakdown. Here is a brief snippet:

And, predictably, the “fine-tuning of physical constants” argument appears, with the more-than-strong suggestion that this is a “pointer to God”:

Fine-tuning refers to the surprising precision of nature’s physical constants and the beginning state of the universe. Both of these features come together as potential pointers to God. To explain the present state of the universe, even the best scientific theories require that the physical constants of nature — like the strength of gravity — and the beginning state of the Universe — like its density — have extremely precise values. The slightest variation from their actual values results in a lifeless universe. For this reason, the universe seems finely-tuned for life. This observation is referred to as the anthropic principle, a term whose definition has taken many variations over the years.3 Dr. Francis Collins has addressed both aspects of fine-tuning in the third chapter of his book, The Language of God.

This is creationism, pure and simple: it is a “God of the gaps” argument. Because physicists haven’t yet told us why these laws are as they are, they must reflect God’s miraculous handiwork. Here Collins, as did Kenneth Miller in his book Only a Theory, approaches creationism, or what A. C. Grayling prefers to call “supernaturalism.”

I wrote yesterday about Collins’s unscientific assertion that humans were an inevitable outcome of evolution. I’ve taken this argument apart in an article in The New Republic, and won’t repeat it here. The reason why people like Collins (and Miller) see the appearance of humans as inevitable is, of course, that their theology requires it. Any honest scientist, faced with the question, “Was the appearance of humans or humanlike creatures inevitable?”, would have to answer “I don’t know.” (And I would add: “Considering how evolution works, it does seem somewhat unlikely”.)

Religion and Morality: statistical evidence is presented that suggests that church goers are more likely to support torture than those who don’t go to church.
I haven’t crunched the numbers but I wonder if this is really just a political breakdown along “Republicans are more likely to go to church than Democrats” type of result.

Social Policy
Do women earn less than men do for doing the same job? The Legal Satyricon points us to a well reasoned article that suggests that, once one corrects for things like experience, type of job and men and women making different choices based on family commitments, there is no convincing evidence to suggest this.

Law, speech, policy

The Legal Satyricon also points us to an article about Supreme Court Justice Scalia. Justice Scalia seems indifferent to privacy concerns. Hence a class went on public sites and collected HIS personal information from free, legal, open sources. You’ll be astonished at what this class found out. Of course, our “favorite justice” was not pleased.

Economics
Robert Reich points out that is it counterproductive to bail out the auto companies just to have them lay off workers!

Academia

Here is a case study of a narcissistic professor living vicariously through one of her students. I wonder how many students she teaches?

It gets worse:

With hubbyhead and the kids doing their thing, I decided to have another literary confab at the house with my amazing student. She came over and of course we got right into the wine. I mean, how are we going to solve all of these critical academic questions without it? Anyway, it was such a great night. [My student] amazed me – as always – with her keen insight. It makes me feel sad that so much of the semester was spent with our relationship spent only in class and in my office.

She’s really a peer to me, more a colleague than some of my own colleagues.

That last sentence says a good deal about this professor; it tells me that she doesn’t measure up to her colleagues those in her department who are stuck with her. It gets worse:

Anyway, we kept opening wine bottles and we moved from a discussion of how she uses outside sources to who was dating who among our classmates! It was all very silly. We ended up heating up some Chinese food and giggling on the floor. “Tell me,” I said, “Tell me who’s cooler than us?”

Who is cooler? Oh, the remaining 6 billion people on this planet, save a relative handful of criminals?

My guess: she is not in a technical field. I’d bet 500 dollars to win 50 on that.

Politics
Justice David Souter’s retirement; who will replace him?
Someone at the Good Kentuckian has an idea.

Ok, not really.

But the rabid right wing is already belly-aching. They are trying to get the remaining Republicans to attempt to filibuster. Never mind that these same people argued that the Democrats shouldn’t filibuster Bush’s pick.

Summary: Media Matters for America has compiled examples of conservative commentators denouncing the use of filibusters to block President Bush’s nominees to the Supreme Court or lower courts, including commentators who claimed or suggested that such filibusters violated the Constitution. [...]

* Rich Lowry wrote in a May 13, 2005, National Review column:

The judicial filibuster isn’t a tradition, but an innovation; not a function of checks and balances, but a perversion of them; not an outgrowth of the Constitution, but at best irrelevant to it.

[...]

During the contentious fight over Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the Supreme Court in 1991, Democrats who were harshly opposed to him still refused to filibuster his nomination, even though they would have had the votes to do so. Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy called a filibuster against Thomas “nonsense” and a “crazy idea,” declaring himself “totally opposed to a filibuster.”

Democrats point to a filibuster of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s 1968 attempt to elevate Abe Fortas from an associate justice to chief justice of the Supreme Court as a precedent. But it was different in kind from today’s filibusters. It was bipartisan. Twenty-four Republicans and 19 Democrats voted against ending the filibuster. Fortas almost certainly didn’t have the support to pass on an up-or-down vote in the Senate. Hurt by ethics charges, he soon withdrew his nomination, and ended up resigning from the court. The case was truly exceptional.

[...]

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist should take away their ability to mount unprecedented judicial filibusters through the so-called nuclear option, then sleep the sleep of an utterly justified defender of Senate tradition.

At least these people admitted that President Obama won the election; of course the made a false dichotomy between judicial activism and conservatism.

Republicans

100 days of wingnuttery:

Another strange NRSC commercial

I am really curious as to what point that they are attempting to make here.

Do you want a scholarship to Liberty University?

Liberty University has a long list of scholarships available to prospective students – some require good grades, some require military or ministry experience, and some require memorizing 750 Bible verses.

But if that is too much work, you can always just try speaking out against marriage equality in a nationally televised event and Liberty will start throwing scholarships at you and begging you to transfer:

Liberty University has offered a scholarship to the beauty queen who expressed her opposition to same-sex marriage during the Miss USA pageant.

School Chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr. made the offer yesterday to Carrie Prejean, who was visiting the conservative Christian school.

Prejean, who’s a junior at San Diego Christian College, was first runner-up in the pageant. She hasn’t said whether she’ll transfer to Liberty for her senior year.