Enjoy these pictures; a stack of final exams awaits….(May 13 2009)

Republican Follies: 13 May Morning Edition

Science
Here is a discussion of a review of Jerry Coyne’s book Why Evolution is True. The gist of the review is a discussion of how much evidence we have for natural selection being the reason for a given specific evolutionary change.

Science Tiny Frog recalls an incident in which many people were killed by a natural release of carbon dioxide.

Serious Ethical Question Suppose that someone has a terminal case of cancer. They decide to take part in a study which is attempting to find a cure. How much money should be spent on this case; how much of a probability of recovery should some have in order to, say, get insurance to pay for it?
Go here to see a nice discussion of this question.

Social Do you want to see a map of which regions engage the most in the 7 deadly sins? Ok, the explanation of how this was determined is here (e. g., gluttony was determined by the percentage of obese people) and the map is here.

Sports Smackdown: In athletics, no one likes someone to “rub it in” after they have been defeated. There is a baseball pitcher who routinely makes a gesture after making a save. So, when a batter hit a home run, he made the same gesture; the pitcher was outraged. Yes, religion was involved.

Politics
State of Illinois: will Lisa Madigan run for the Senate seat in 2010? (note: she is the Illinois Attorney General and the daughter of Illinois House speaker Michael Madigan)

IL-17: Phil Hare: sticking up for Hartmarx workers: Hartmarx was taken over by the government bailed out Wells-Fargo. He promises to fight them if they attempt to liquidate this clothing making company.

Republicans and Conservatives

The social conservatives in the Republican party are feeling scapegoated.

Other social conservatives are playing the victim.

Other social conservatives (e. g. Mike Huckabee) are attacking Republicans who don’t want to be beholden to the Religious Right.

Dick Cheney: still shooting off his mouth.

Former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura body-slams Cheney.

He has a few good words for President George W. Bush.

Don’t expect conservatives to admit that President Obama inherited a mess though and don’t expect them to give him any credit at all; instead expect things like this.

Remember that the Republicans have been losing the most educated among us (on the average).

Celtics rally from 14 Down in 4′th Quarter; win 92-88

(photos from yahoo)

This is how I blogged it on facebook;

22-16 Magic after one. The Celtics can’t hit the broad side of a barn (they’ve had open looks)

Going into quarter 4 the Magic lead 67-59. Now it is 77-63; (8:49 left in the game) the Celtics have hit no shots and the Magic are just whipping them.

(note: Allen 3 pointer with 1:20 left puts the Celtics up by 1)

Now there are 35 seconds left and the Celtics are up 86-85 and they have the ball. But it is still anyone’s game. There are 23 seconds left on the shot clock and are inbounding the ball.

The Celtics missed the shot but got the rebound; quick foul and now the Celtics are inbounding the ball again. 9.5 seconds are left; Eddie House (ace 3 point shooter) now shooting two with 8.5 seconds to go.

Celtics up 88-85, 8.5 seconds left; Magic with the ball. But the Magic are a good 3 point shooting team.

Magic shooting two with 7.3 seconds left. Lewis is the shooter; he makes both (not a surprise). Now Allen is fouled (one of the best free throw shooters in the NBA), 6.2 seconds to go. He makes both; time out Magic.

Howard fouled with 5.9 seconds to go; he is a poor free throw shooter but a good pressure player. He intentionally missed number two, rebound Celtics, foul and Davis at the line.

Davis hit number 1; 91-88 Celtics. He makes both; Celtics win 92-88; I don’t see how they did it.

The numbers: Davis 22, Pierce 19, Allen 13, Marbury 12 (all in the 4′th quarter); 26 Bench points between Marbury, House, and Scalabrini.

For the Magic: Lewis 19, Turkoglu 18, Alston 16, Howard 12 (17 rebounds).

It was 85-75 Magic with 5:39 to go; they only got 3 more points after that. Basically, they were content to take bad shots from the outside. Howard only had 3 fouls; I am a bit surprised they didn’t pound the ball into him.

Basically the Magic kicked butt for the first 43 minutes and then acted as if the game was over. Pierce kept the Celtics in it (when the rest of the team was shooting poorly); Davis and Marbury stepped up big in the last 10 minutes.

12 May 2009

Workout notes yoga, then a painfully slow 7 mile hilly run (untimed, but 1:10-1:11 ish) and a 3 mile walk. The walk was fine; during the run my left knee barked once and the scar tissue behind my right knee acted up sporadically; my guess that this is due to the rain system that is about to move in.

But the day was very pretty and the red winged blackbirds aren’t in dive bombing mode yet.

Later: I give a final exam in a couple of hours; hence the next 48 hours will be “grade, grade, grade”. I am half-way done with my linear algebra exam stack.

Politics

I found a couple of cartoons from this Daily Kos diary; they are hilarious:

The first one is a David Horsey cartoon which points out the schism between the intellectual Republicans (who I actually like but disagree with) and the bat-sh*t crazy ones:

The second one by Rob Rogers really pokes fun at the so called social conservatives:

(click here if you don’t get the joke)

Republican cat-fighting: RNC chairman Michael Steele slams Mitt Romney. Now he attempts to make nice with Mittens.

The fact is that Steele was right: Romney’s Mormonism did hurt him with base, as did his past record of being moderate.

And just for fun, lunacy from Bill O’Reilly:

Bill O’Reilly again theorized that the legalization of gay marriage could lead to interspecies marriages, stating to Margaret Hoover, “[Y]ou would let everybody get married who want to get married. You want to marry a turtle, you can.” O’Reilly has previously suggested that gay marriage could ultimately allow for a person to marry a goat, duck, or dolphin.

Why anyone continues to take this clown (or his fellow clowns) seriously, I do not know.

President Obama on Bring Down Health Care Expenses.

11 May, PM: Idiots, Politics and Republicans

I’ll start with Politics. I’ll end with Idiots.

Politics Of course, torture apologists such as Dick Cheney are lying through their teeth; on of Cheney’s lies was that Guantanamo Bay contained “the worst of the worst” terrorists. In fact, one of the early non-moral problems is that our government quickly discovered that many of the people that we were detaining were of no value whatsoever.

But the Republicans are raising the fact that some in the Democratic leadership were privy to what was going on at the time; that may well be partially true. Then again, the Republicans are so lacking in moral authority…well, this is possibly a “cry wolf” situation. But at least one other member of Congress is backing Nancy Pelosi’s story that she (and others) were NOT briefed on waterboarding and other forms of torture.

My gut tells me that Congressional Democrats are more culpable than they are letting on; but I also know what liars the Republicans are (or at least many of them in Congress; I am NOT talking about the rank-and-file here).

SCOTUS: Rightwing nut jobs: openly gay people are unfit for the Supreme Court of the United States. Really:

While many have been careful to avoid explicitly declaring that being gay makes it impossible for someone to be good Supreme Court justice, Bryan Fischer of the Idaho Values Alliance is not among them, as evidenced by his column entitled “Virtually impossible for open lesbian to make a good Supreme Court justice”:

An open lesbian has obviously resolved the ethical questions about sexuality in favor of the legitimacy of aberrant sexual behavior, in favor of what historically has been known in U.S. law as an “infamous crime against nature.”

It’s one thing for a judge to keep his orientation a private matter. There is some evidence that perhaps two Supreme Court justices of the past were homosexuals themselves. But they concealed that from the public, accepted that the laws of the day considered homosexual sexual activity a felony offense, and did not use their platform on the bench to challenge society’s sexual standards.

But a judge who is quite open about his (generic use) alternative sexuality is another matter entirely. It’s hard to imagine any universe in which an open lesbian would uphold any pro-family law should it be challenged in her court.

It will be absolutely incumbent upon the GOP members of the Senate judiciary committee to ask probing questions of a lesbian nominee on a host of issues that are matters of legal and constitutional dispute.

More Republican lunacy: Dick Morris thinks that the country (as a whole) will “come around” to taking the Republicans back:

By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN

Published in the New York Post on May 9, 2009

Gen. Colin Powell is wrong to say that the Republican Party must move to the center: Now is not the time to try for triangulation.

This is a time for the party to stand firm on its principles until this nation again comes around to the GOP’s way of thinking. This process will be driven by the consequences of President Obama’s program.

The challenge brought by Obama is no longer just theoretical: He means to pass the ultimate leftist agenda and has the votes to do so.

As a result, our nation will be unrecognizable well before the 2010 elections. Business will march to a beat drummed in Washington. The top producers will be hounded by confiscatory taxation. A majority will pay nothing or receive government welfare. Our health-care system will be destroyed. Illegal immigrants will be well on their way to citizenship.

Obama’s brave new world will be the subject of the 2010 elections. We believe that his Congress will be swept from power as a result.

More Republican lunacy from Congressman Pete Sessions:

Apparently realizing that the “socialist” label wasn’t going to get any traction, Pete Sessions (R-TX) has a new line of attack on President Obama’s economic policies:

In an interview published this morning in The New York Times, Sessions pointed to rising unemployment and said that the Obama administration was deliberately trying to “diminish employment and diminish stock prices.”

Sessions told the paper that this was part of an agenda on Obama’s part that is “intended to inflict damage and hardship on the free enterprise system, if not to kill it.”

And an NRCC spokesman backs him up:

The Chairman was simply reiterating what many members of the Democratic Party have echoed over the past several weeks, which is that one-party dominance in Washington has further damaged our economy and undercut our country’s free enterprise system.

Naturally, the response didn’t offer any examples of what Sessions’ was “reiterating.”

Keep it up Republicans…don’t change a thing! Reading this reminded me of a Bill Maher essay where he compares current Republicans to a guy who has been dumped by his woman:

Look, I get it, “real America.” After an eight-year run of controlling the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court, this latest election has you feeling like a rejected husband. You’ve come home to find your things out on the front lawn — or at least more things than you usually keep out on the front lawn. You’re not ready to let go, but the country you love is moving on. And now you want to call it a whore and key its car.

That’s what you are, the bitter divorced guy whose country has left him — obsessing over it, haranguing it, blubbering one minute about how much you love it and vowing the next that if you cannot have it, nobody will.

But it’s been almost 100 days, and your country is not coming back to you. She’s found somebody new. And it’s a black guy.

The healthy thing to do is to just get past it and learn to cherish the memories. You’ll always have New Orleans and Abu Ghraib.

And if today’s conservatives are insulted by this, because they feel they’re better than the people who have the microphone in their party, then I say to them what I would say to moderate Muslims: Denounce your radicals. To paraphrase George W. Bush, either you’re with them or you’re embarrassed by them.

The thing that you people out of power have to remember is that the people in power are not secretly plotting against you. They don’t need to. They already beat you in public.

Surf to the article to get a refresher course in Republican lunacy.

Rush Limbaugh Limbaugh got it with both barrels at the White House correspondents dinner. Here is a quick survey of the times that Limbaugh attempted to tie Democrats with terrorists:

* June 24, 2008: Limbaugh stated: “I will guaran-damn-tee you there will not be a terrorist attack before the election. And you know why there won’t be one? Because they want Obama elected.” He later falsely claimed, “Hamas has endorsed Obama. Hamas has endorsed Obama.” Limbaugh also asserted that “every time I hear [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad speak, every time I hear a tape from [Al Qaeda leader] Ayman al-Zawahiri or a so-called dispatch from bin Laden, whenever I hear from any of these Middle East Al Qaeda terrorists, I think I’m hearing Democrat [sic] Party talking points.”
* April 15, 2008: Limbaugh asserted: “[T]he Islamofascists are actually campaigning for the election of Democrats. Islamofascists from Ahmadinejad to al-Zawahiri … Osama bin Laden, whoever, are constantly issuing Democrat talking points.”
* February 29, 2008: On Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor, guest host Laura Ingraham interviewed Limbaugh, who said, referring to a photograph of then-Sen. Obama dressed in traditional Somali clothing that was posted on the Drudge Report, that Obama “look[ed] like Ayman [al-]Zawahiri.”

* September 20, 2007: Limbaugh claimed that Obama and bin Laden were “on the same page” with regard to the deteriorating situation in Pakistan. While discussing a newly released audiotape reported to be from bin Laden in which he calls for Pakistanis to overthrow then-President Pervez Musharraf, Limbaugh asserted: “Well, we’ve got another tape from — I get these guys confused — Osama bin Laden. Another tape says he’s going to invade Pakistan and declare war on Pakistan and Musharraf, which, ladies and gentlemen, puts him on the same page with a Democrat presidential candidate — that would be Barack ‘Uss-Obama.’ “

* July 2007: For several days in July 2007, a graphic on the front page of Limbaugh’s website depicted a screen shot of C-SPAN’s Washington Journal doctored to show bin Laden appearing as a guest identified as “Mr. Osama bin Laden, D-Afghanistan.”

Media: It is no secret that the mainstream print media is in trouble. Here is why this is bad:

Yes, journalists have made tons of mistakes and always will. But without their enterprise, to take a few representative recent examples, we would not have known about the wretched conditions for our veterans at Walter Reed, the government’s warrantless wiretapping, the scams at Enron or steroids in baseball.

Such news gathering is not to be confused with opinion writing or bloviating — including that practiced here. Opinions can be stimulating and, for the audiences at Fox News and MSNBC, cathartic. We can spend hours surfing the posts of bloggers we like or despise, some of them gems, even as we might be moved to write our own blogs about local restaurants or the government documents we obsessively study online.

But opinions, however insightful or provocative and whether expressed online or in print or in prime time, are cheap. Reporting the news can be expensive. Some of it — monitoring the local school board, say — can and is being done by voluntary “citizen journalists” with time on their hands, integrity and a Web site. But we can’t have serious opinions about America’s role in combating the Taliban in Pakistan unless brave and knowledgeable correspondents (with security to protect them) tell us in real time what is actually going on there. We can’t know what is happening behind closed doors at corrupt, hard-to-penetrate institutions in Washington or Wall Street unless teams of reporters armed with the appropriate technical expertise and assiduously developed contacts are digging night and day. Those reporters have to eat and pay rent, whether they work for print, a TV network, a Web operation or some new bottom-up news organism we can’t yet imagine.

And here is how the media brought it on themselves (in part)

Same thing has happened in print, with niche media proliferating on the web, and people unhappy with their local coverage splintering off to read about the stuff they are most interest in. So that “sense of community” thing? It never existed. Newspapers have always served the wealthiest members of their communities — the people that will buy the stuff that advertisers were peddling. So ethnic communities have always been underserved. In San Francisco, Asians make up over a third of the population — the largest single ethnic group in the city — yet the San Francisco Chronicle doesn’t have a single Asian columnist in its stable. Do you think the Asian community sees the Chronicle as a member of its community? Of course not. And given they were traditionally a relatively poor immigrant community, the Chron had little interest in engaging that part of the city.

All around the country, you see the major metro dailies completely ignore entire chunks of their cities. Why do you think the New York Times writes story after story after story talking about those poor unemployed Wall Street types no longer able to buy caviar or $800 doll houses for their daughters?

The reason alternate media has taken off was because the traditional media didn’t deliver a product people wanted. If people felt a “sense of community” from their newspaper, perhaps they may have stuck with the product. But they don’t, hence it’s easy to toss it aside for the countless alternatives at the public’s disposal.

Idiots

Yes, idiocy is a nation wide problem and there is yet another book coming out about it:

Charles Pierce has expanded an essay into a full blown book on Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), soon available in fine bookstores everywhere, and I recommend it highly. You might be wondering what Idiot America is, and he explains it well.

The rise of Idiot America, though, is essentially a war on expertise. It’s not so much antimodernism or the distrust of the intellectual elites that Richard Hofstader teased out of the national DNA, although both of these things are part of it. The rise of Idiot America today reflects — for profit, mainly, but also and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power — the breakdown of the consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people we should trust the least are the people who know the best what they’re talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a scientist, or a preacher, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.

Here is an excellent example of this:

This may be the stupidest example of risk assessment I’ve ever seen. It’s a video clip from a recent Daily Show, about he dangers of the Large Hadron Collider. The segment starts off slow, but then there’s an exchange with high school science teacher Walter L. Wagner, who insists the device has a 50-50 chance of destroying the world:

“If you have something that can happen, and something that won’t necessarily happen, it’s going to either happen or it’s going to not happen, and so the best guess is 1 in 2.”

“I’m not sure that’s how probability works, Walter.”

This is followed by clips of news shows taking the guy seriously.

Thus yet another case of the media not getting it right; reporting on technical issues is always under fire these days.

Public Stupidity: one instance.

I enjoyed last night’s basketball game between the Celtics and the Magic. Here is how it ended:

Exciting, right? Well, if you replay it, you’ll see that the Celtic who made the shot (Davis) bumped a fan as he ran past.
The helicopter parent of that kid is now demanding an apology from the NBA?

I can’t believe I’m going to type this, but Orlando Magic fan Ernest Provetti is demanding an apology from Glen “Big Baby” Davis for inadvertently bumping into his son after nailing the Celtics’ game-winning jumper on Sunday. (Check out the video here.)

According to Shannon Owens of the Orlando Sentinel, Provetti says Davis shoved his 12-year-old son Nicholas with such force, that Nicholas’ baseball cap catapulted into the air and his son went tumbling into his courtside seat.

Shoved. Force. Catapulted. Good words, strong words.

Apparently, Provetti sent an email to the NBA League office this morning.

(Side question: Does anyone know how I can get my hands on this league email address? I’d like to send a formal complaint, on Lisa Salters’ behalf, of course, demanding an apology from Rockets forward Shane Battier(notes) for sweating all over her lovely cardigan during yesterday’s halftime interview. It’s called antiperspirant, Shane. Look it up!)

Back to the nonsense: Provetti said Davis crossed the line, literally, and embarrassed his son:

“The NBA makes it clear to not cross the sideline,” he said in a telephone interview. “If I cross that line, the NBA will take away my tickets. It’s a double standard.”

In the email, Provetti said Davis conducted himself like a “raging animal with no regard for your fans’ personal safety.”

“A raging animal?” Are you kidding me? You’re screaming bloody murder about an excited professional athlete accidentally bumping into your son at a sporting event? Oh heavens to Betsy! How embarrassing! Look, his hat fell off! Quick! Quick! Look at his hat hair! Take a picture!

Daily Kos: State of the Nation: Republicans

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Mano Singham’s Web Journal: Colbert Report on Obama and National Prayer Day

more about "Mano Singham’s Web Journal: Skyhooks …", posted with vodpod

11 May 2009

No lifeguard this morning; I’ll try again at 11 am. I’ll try to get a head start on grading (linear algebra exams).

Topics

Creationism Humor: Read this post at Cosmic Variance. Sometimes reality laps satire.

Politics
This video gives a quick and dirty on what happened with the economy:

Republicans Two liberals muse at what the Republicans should do to come back.
One (Devilstower at Daily Kos) gives a detailed analysis of recent history and concludes:

What the shift of 1992 represents isn’t just a dissatisfaction with Democrats, but the full integration of the southern base and the Christian right into the Republican Party. 1992 was the first year in which the Christian Coalition distributed voters guides through churches. With their traditional base across the country, the Christian Right, and the Solid South, Republicans had a position that made them nationally competitive with Democrats for the first time in half a century. Not only that, it gave them a party with enthusiasm at a time when most people were disgusted by politics as usual.

And that’s the real problem for the GOP.

Davis and Snowe are absolutely right to think that the move to twist the Republican Party around a social conservative base is costing them votes among moderates. It’s also the likely cause of the continued decline of Republican ID, which is now at levels that actually pass the worst of the Watergate era. The trouble is, it takes both the social conservaties and the fiscal conservatives for the Republicans to form a winning coalition. That’s why the first business of that Congress in 1994 was to pass laws rewarding the Christian Right that had returned them to power after so long in the wilderness.

Casting out the social conservatives now won’t lead to a winning position, because there are not enough fiscal conservatives to keep the GOP from being more than an afterthought. Sticking with the social conservatives, whose demands for action on their issues are both insatiable and whose positions are unpopular with the general public, is another route to failure. In forcing a merger between these two factions, Republicans gained temporary victory, at the cost of endless confusion and long term disaster.

If they now push out the social conservatives, they can hold the next Republican convention in Olympia Snowe’s living room.

Nate Silver has a somewhat different point of view:

Take a look at this comment from Mike Huckabee’s interview yesterday with the Visalia (CA) Times-Delta:

Here’s what I find: People that are social conservatives are also economic conservatives. But a lot of the economic conservatives are not social conservatives. Throw the social conservatives the pro-life, pro-family people overboard and the Republican party will be as irrelevant as the Whigs.

If you accept Huckabee’s assertion — that social conservatives are always economic conservatives, but economic conservatives are not always social conservatives — it follows that social conservatives are necessarily a subset of economic conservatives:[...]

So the equilibrium strategy under Huckabee’s model is probably to adopt an economically conservative, but socially moderate message. Sure, the social conservatives might not be particularly happy about this state of affairs — but unless they wanted to form a third party, they wouldn’t have anywhere else to go. (For reasons that we will leave as an exercise to the reader, it wouldn’t make sense for the Democrats to adopt a socially conservative, economically liberal platform under this scenario.)

The GOP’s real problem, of course, is that there is far from perfect overlap between social conservatives and economic conservatives. [...]

Security issues, indeed, may have been the glue that was helping to hold the fiscal and social conservatives together into a winning electoral coalition. There were a lot of security conservatives after 9/11 — and my guess is that the Republicans were winning the vast majority of them provided they were either social conservatives or economic conservatives. With homeland security issues having faded into the background, however, and foreign policy issues starting to work against the Republicans, the strange-bedfellowness of the relationship between social and fiscal conservatives is now becoming more apparent.

So what should the Republicans do? I haven’t a clue. Personally I’d love it if they were to rebound with a part that was at least not openly hostile to science and reality; it would be nice for me to actually have a choice at elections (e. g., be able to vote for an Dwight Eisenhower or a Teddy Roosevelt).

Race, Intelligence, and Society

Olivia Scheck wrote an unflinchingly honest article here. The upshot: yes, the potential for intelligence is certainly genetic, but one can be prevented from reaching one’s full potential by socio-economic factors.

That isn’t a surprise but I love the way that Scheck studies and analyzes the various arguments and factors.

95-94 Celtics over Magic: now 2-2.

The first half was even with the Celtics leading 48-46 at the half. The Celtics then extended their lead to 79-71 in the third quarter. But Pierce (who had 18 of his 27 points in the first half) was in foul trouble (ended up with 5) and the Magic clamped down on defense; they pulled closer and then finally took a 92-91 lead with about 1 minute to go.

They traded, with Lewis making 2 free shots with 11.3 seconds to go to lead 94-93. Then at the last possession Pierce got the ball, wound it down, drew two defenders, and then dished to Davis who nailed the jump shot. The ball left his hand with about 0.6 on the clock and went in after the buzzer sounded.

Davis had 21, as did Rondo who added 3 assists and 14 rebounds. Perkins had 12 points and 13 rebounds.

Of course, the Boston bench had only 2 points.

Howard had 17 rebounds and 23 points; Lewis had 22.