Is there a Method to President Obama’s apparent madness?

We’ve seen the temper tantrums on TV:

Some health care reform advocates are getting a bit unnerved at some of the loud protests that they are seeing at town halls; e. g., Nate Silver says:

Occam’s Razor would suggest that a decent number of Congressmen will be scared sh*tless after seeing some number of their constituents yell at them. Yes, there might be a few who feel greater solidarity for the cause in the face of all the misinformation and screaming. Yes, there might be a few who feel repelled by the incivility of the protests. Yes, there might be a few who recognize that, even if the health care bill is fairly unpopular at the time of its passage, a failure to pass a bill would be worse for both political and policy reasons.

But Congressmen are, by and large, not the deepest people on earth. They like being popular. They don’t like getting yelled at. They don’t like taking risks. I still think health care reform is more likely than not.

But where have we seen this before? Sure, stuff like this happened when social conservatives pushed for continued segregation, but that was a long time ago. We’ve seen stuff like this much more recently…

How did that work out for them??

14 August 09 (am)

Workout notes plan is for a swim over lunch; walk afterward if I am up to it (it is pretty outside)

Articles for the day

I spend too much time on the internet and I do very long distance footraces. I also like to think about and solve mathematics problems. Is there a connection? 3-quarks daily points us to this Slate article. Here is the key part:

University of Michigan professor of psychology Kent Berridge has spent more than two decades figuring out how the brain experiences pleasure. Like Panksepp, he, too, has come to the conclusion that what James Olds’ rats were stimulating was not their reward center. In a series of experiments, he and other researchers have been able to tease apart that the mammalian brain has separate systems for what Berridge calls wanting and liking.

Wanting is Berridge’s equivalent for Panksepp’s seeking system. It is the liking system that Berridge believes is the brain’s reward center. When we experience pleasure, it is our own opioid system, rather than our dopamine system, that is being stimulated. This is why the opiate drugs induce a kind of blissful stupor so different from the animating effect of cocaine and amphetamines. Wanting and liking are complementary. The former catalyzes us to action; the latter brings us to a satisfied pause. Seeking needs to be turned off, if even for a little while, so that the system does not run in an endless loop. When we get the object of our desire (be it a Twinkie or a sexual partner), we engage in consummatory acts that Panksepp says reduce arousal in the brain and temporarily, at least, inhibit our urge to seek.

But our brains are designed to more easily be stimulated than satisfied. “The brain seems to be more stingy with mechanisms for pleasure than for desire,” Berridge has said. This makes evolutionary sense. Creatures that lack motivation, that find it easy to slip into oblivious rapture, are likely to lead short (if happy) lives. So nature imbued us with an unquenchable drive to discover, to explore. Stanford University neuroscientist Brian Knutson has been putting people in MRI scanners and looking inside their brains as they play an investing game. He has consistently found that the pictures inside our skulls show that the possibility of a payoff is much more stimulating than actually getting one.

Read the rest; I know that sometimes, as soon as I meet a goal, rather than savor it I start asking “ok, what is next?” That is true for me in athletics, mathematics and in political campaigns.

Social Science and Psychology It is true: single women tend to like a guy more if he is married! Ok, that is what this study suggests; you might argue that the result is still not rigorously proven yet.

More on human relations: one way police (and investigators) can spot liars: liars make up a story and try to stick to a script; truth tellers tell a less organized story, but don’t stumble as much if, say, they try to tell it in reverse chronological order.

Moving to political issues You may have heard that one conservative source said that Stephen Hawking (famous scientist who is wheelchair bound) would be dead if he were in the UK’s health system. Well, Dr. Hawking IS a UK subject and has gotten his treatment by the UK’s NHS (socialized medicine program).

So the source did a retraction…a retraction on their reporting of Dr. Hawking’s citizenship. They didn’t talk about the argument that they made and how the facts blew it right out of the water. But are you surprised?

Just a bit more of Krugman He points out that the more that Republican/conservative economic policy is followed, the more “gilded” our society becomes (separation between the rich and poor).

Back to health care reform:
Nate Silver is a bit pessimistic , though he thinks that we might still get a bill.

It looks as if President Obama is willing to go to the mat for this.

Howard Dean is drawing a line in the sand and saying that Democrats who oppose a good health care bill might face primaries.

How to deal with Republican Trolls

13 August 09 (pm)

Posts for the day:

A fraud scheme: read about the following scheme: companies sometimes post what services that they’d like done for them on a board (e. g., we need 2 tons of X taken from Austin, TX to Peoria, IL) and companies can sometimes bid on the job. Sometimes, a company will take a trucking company’s ad and change the contact information. The customer contacts the fake company, agree, but the fake company will “subcontract” the job to a real trucking company which does the trucking. The fake company bills the customer who pays; then the subcontracted company will attempt to bill the real company and find that the genuine company had never heard of them.

Freedom of speech Yale University is publishing a book on the reaction to the Mohammad cartoons. But they won’t allow the cartoons themselves to be reproduced in the book? I don’t get it.

Politics
Pot: Meet Kettle. Mr. Karl Rove talks about “the perpetual campaign” that the Obama administration is in. Maybe Mr Rove should read Scott McClellan’s book?

Read the line above Mr. Rove’s article:

Turning critics into enemies isn’t presidential.

Have you ever read anything more blatantly hypocritical than that???

Political Humor: I have started to read the following posts on facebook: MSNBC, NPR, Media Matters, Alan Colmes, Michael Moore, and Bill Maher. Colmes has the most trolls on it, followed by MSNBC. But most of the posters are ok.

One poster on the Maher thread was commenting on Maher’s contention that the “town halls” should become “study halls”:

“Those disrupting Town Hall meetings should start their own group, like moveon.org, theirs could be moron.org. Or is that taken already?”

I laughed pretty hard.

Of course, there were those who predicted this level of nastiness no matter who won the Democratic presidential nomination.

More on Health Care:

Yes, I’ve love to see us all embrace single payer. No, that will NOT happen. Yes, I want a strong public option. That might not happen. But I can at least hope for and push for progress:

And yet I think my fellow progressives ought to give Max Baucus and other members of the Senate Finance Committee a little breathing room as they labor to produce a health-care bill that can garner enough votes to pass the Senate.

Progressive politics is, in my view, a movement, not a monument. We cannot achieve perfection in this life, and if that is our goal we will always be frustrated. The right has far more modest goals: At every turn, its members seek to advance their power and protect privilege. I’ve never seen the Republican right oppose a tax cut for the rich because it wasn’t generous enough; I’ve never seen them oppose a set of loopholes for corporate lobbyists because one industry or another wasn’t included. The left, on the other hand, too often prefers a glorious defeat to an incremental victory.

Our history teaches us otherwise. No self-respecting liberal today would support Franklin Roosevelt’s original Social Security Act. It excluded agricultural workers — a huge part of the economy in 1935, and one in which Latinos have traditionally worked. It excluded domestic workers, which included countless African Americans and immigrants. It did not cover the self-employed, or state and local government employees, or railroad employees, or federal employees or employees of nonprofits. It didn’t even cover the clergy. FDR’s Social Security Act did not have benefits for dependents or survivors. It did not have a cost-of-living increase. If you became disabled and couldn’t work, you got nothing from Social Security.

I agree; getting a bill passed this year is merely the first step; the real test will happen when my daughter is my age. But I think that it is better to get what we can now than to come away completely empty handed.

Republicans: a conservative organization is passing out talking points for the town halls (and that is a perfectly good thing to do); here are the so-called five questions:

1. Can you promise me that I will not lose my current plan and doctor?

Answer: as written, the current plans say that you can keep the plan that you currently have. Might things change over time? Of course, but they will almost certainly change over time if we do nothing! In other words, if you have coverage that you like now and we do nothing, that coverage might well be gone, or priced so high you can’t afford it anyway.

2. Can you promise that you and your family will enroll in the public plan? Strictly speaking, “no”, since the bill that gets passed might not have a public plan. And, if it does, no one will be required to enroll in it; people will get the option to enroll in the plans similar to those that are currently available to all Federal employees (that menu of options that was talked about). This is a nonsensical question.

3. Can you promise that Obamacare will not lead to higher deficits in the long term? No, but we may well end up with higher deficits if we do nothing. Remember what has happened the last 8 years when a conservative was in the Executive Branch. Conservatives have no business bringing up deficits as they have zero credibility here.

4. Can you promise that government bureaucrats will not ration health care for patients on the public plan? Come on. Any decision on what to cover is a type of “rationing”. I am very confident that government “rationing” will be far more humane than the “murder by spreadsheet” that the current health insurance companies are doing; google “rescission” for tons of examples, or watch this:

I’d trust someone from the government way before I’d trust the greedy reptiles of a health insurance company any day. After all, the government won’t be under pressure to turn out the maximum profit possible.

5. Can you promise me that my tax dollars will not fund abortions? Abortion again? Please. This is NOT a monetary issue.

More on health care
I am an atheist, but I can support this:

13 August 09 (am)

Workout notes 1:02 worth of running; I ran to Bradley Park (via the 1 mile route) and then went downhill and turned right to take the first hill; I then went up Cornstalk hill, down, back up…and then back up to the ball field hill at which point I reversed myself again; 8 uphills total. Though I didn’t run hard, the pace took a toll on me; I am not in running shape!

Topics:
Mathematics Education: the level of mathematical ignorance in our elementary school teachers is astonishing. In the pdf article I linked to, there was a story of a suburban 5′th grade teacher teaching “fraction addition” by adding numerators and denominators. Then there is the story of a 5′th grade teacher not knowing where the fraction 1/3 would be on a marked number line “near 3?”. That is in the first paragraph!

Later, one student who was in a program to become an elementary school teacher didn’t know that if, say, pickup trucks had an average fuel efficiency of 20 mpg and sedans had an average fuel efficiency of 28 mpg, that the aggregate average had to be between these numbers; she thought that it had to be 48 mpg!!!

Her reasoning was derived from little “thumb rules” that are taught to help students pass standardized exams.

And we wonder why people can’t understand some of the basic issues in the news. Pathetic.

Speaking of ignorance: I heard something about this on the Rachel Maddow show and read about it on Peoria Pundit this morning. Someone was doing a study on “birthers” and decided to test whether conservatives in North Carolina knew if Hawaii was a state or not. Ok, 88 percent did, but the remaining 12 percent either didn’t know or said “no, it wasn’t.”

According to Public Policy Polling (PPP), a North Carolina polling firm, only 24% of self-identified Republican voters in the state believe Barack Obama was born in the United States. 47% do not believe that Obama is American born, and 29% of Republicans aren’t sure.

One part of PPP’s data might reassure sentient readers somewhat: 7% of those who voted for John McCain do not believe Hawaii to be a part of the United States. Now perhaps this is just another irrational expression of Obama hatred. But, it may also be older voters who never quite absorbed the news that our 50th state is indeed our 50th state.

Ok, now for some ignorance of the left. I was irritated to find this diary on Daily Kos:

Never mind that Frum “qualified” his directive. More on the flip.

* arubyan’s diary :: ::
*

Here’s what Frum said today:

If Barack Obama really were a fascist, really were a Nazi, really did plan death panels to kill the old and infirm, really did contemplate overthrowing the American constitutional republic—if he were those things, somebody should shoot him. But he is not.

So let’s summarize. David Frum writes a paragraph in which the following words collide:

* Barack Obama
* fascist
* Nazi
* death panels
* kill the old and infirm
* overthrowing the American constitutional republic
* somebody should shoot him
* not

Thank the Lord for that last, er, bullet.

“If…if…if…” I’ll bet you a nickel that many, many , many people will read Frum’s words and decide that they do indeed believe that Obama is in fact all of the things Frum says (tepidly) that he is not.

Here is the Frum article:

I don’t think the former speaker could tweet such a thing today in good conscience. The person who drafted that homeland security memo has gained very good reason to be worried. The guns are coming out. The risks are real.

It’s not enough for conservatives to repudiate violence, as some are belatedly beginning to do. We have to tone down the militant and accusatory rhetoric. If Barack Obama really were a fascist, really were a Nazi, really did plan death panels to kill the old and infirm, really did contemplate overthrowing the American constitutional republic—if he were those things, somebody should shoot him.

But he is not. He is an ambitious, liberal president who is spending too much money and emitting too much debt. His health-care ideas are too ambitious and his climate plans are too interventionist. The president can be met and bested on the field of reason—but only by people who are themselves reasonable.

This is what I called reasoned opposition. I happen to think that President Obama is doing the right thing; if anything he doesn’t go far enough. But my point is that this whole article is condemning this unreasonable, threatening way to opposing President Obama and the Democrats, and I salute Mr. Frum for writing this article.

Now about health care
Liberals who support things like a strong public option are stymied and really prevented from being as intellectually aggressive as the opponents because President Obama hasn’t really presented something concrete and said “I support this.” Fair enough; but President Obama doesn’t want to repeat the Clinton mistake of just presenting something; he wants to be able to say “we worked on this together.” It is important to remember that Democratic support will be enough (sort of; if we need reconciliation to pass this in the Senate, we will get a watered down bill, so it is better to present something that won’t be filibustered, and all the Rs have to do is to stay united and to pick off 1 blue dog)

And yes, too many are beginning to wonder if the President’s commitment to be “bipartisan” is wearing thin:

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been hearing rumblings. They’re not from the staged or misinformed protestors at town hall meetings who have decided that shouting down a member of Congress is their right as American citizens. They’re not from “the left” — that wild, unruly group of bloggers and Birkenstockers the White House has called on repeatedly, both in pubic and in private, to be quiet.

They’re from the parent who came to pick up her daughter after a play date with my five-year-old, as we stood in the door chatting. They’re from my cousin, a family doctor, who called me when he heard about Big Pharma’s sweetheart deal with the White House to prevent negotiations on the cost of prescription drugs. They’re from a guy I sat next to on a plane this week who doesn’t follow politics all that closely but follows closely enough to know that bankers seems to be getting bonuses as homeowners are getting foreclosure notices.

These people aren’t “raving liberals.” Most of them haven’t even gotten word yet that they’re supposed to call themselves progressives (and none of them knew the secret progressive handshake). They’re ordinary voters who either sometimes or reliably vote Democratic, who were members of the Obama majority in 2008 and were convinced that this time their vote really mattered. Now they’re disillusioned. [...]

Then the reports started to come in from ordinary Americans who were seeing their interest rates hit the roof — applied retroactively to money they had borrowed before the recession hit or they lost their jobs.

I got my own letter today:

Important Account Price Change Notification

We are raising your Annual Percentage Rate (APR) on purchases and cash advances.

We are raising the Annual Percentage Rate (APR) on any balances that have a penalty rate because of a late payment.

We are increasing the late fee.

It was very thoughtful of them to tell me. But I was surprised the letter didn’t say how much the new rates would be. I looked for a second page, but there wasn’t one. Then I flipped it over, and there it was — in fine print.

So the President and Congress passed a new law protecting consumers from predatory lending practices and credit-card fine print, but they gave the credit card companies a grace period during which they could raise the rates and put them in the fine print. Funny, I don’t remember a similar grace period for homeowners who can’t pay their mortgages. [...]

The American people did not vote for “bipartisan” solutions that split the difference between the failed ideology of the last eight years, which continues to cost thousands of people their jobs and homes every day, and the change the President and the super-majorities they elected in both houses of Congress promised.

This author has a valid point.

Here is more on the town halls; one is a summary of opposition hatred and the second is about Stephen Hawking:

So, how are the right wing temper tantrums playing? Nate Silver has an analysis. In short, it is hard to say if these tantrums are changing anyone’s mind.

On another note: the Mayor’s race in Tulsa has drawn a religious woo.

President Obama refutes rumors (humor)

Both Obama supporters and detractors will like this; he has President Obama nailed!

more about "President Obama refutes rumors (humor) ", posted with vodpod

12 August 09 (pm)

Workout notes 2000 yard swim; 5 x 100 on the 2, 10 x 50 (drill/swim, no fins), 10 x (25 fist, 25 free) on 1, 5 x (25 fly, 25 free) on 1, 2 x 100 IM, 50 side.

Then 4 mile walk (plus) at about 12:20-12:30 via 2-1 right afterward. With showers and transition, this took about 2 hours (11 to 1).

Academia A voice of sanity from someone who does academic research for a living (building on a topic that I discussed here):

Secondly, Ivy notes that Mike has changed the game. He didn’t succeed like his buddy at MIT (which is an okay school, actually, though not really along the lines of where I went), so he’s set new rules that apply for Soda Pop college [...]

Thirdly, Ivy points out that Mike’s actions remind him of many older faculty he runs across. I can absolutely attest that this is common in academe. For whatever reason, older faculty put their retirement and their personal lives ahead of the work of the university. I’m not saying this is bad. I certainly plan on having children and a partner one day, but those things are NOT THE SAME as a growing career. If I say, “Look at my new publication,” and the respondent says, “Oh, I had some nice tomatoes come up in the back yard,” that means that the respondent has decided that personal life trumps academic life, and I know where NOT to stop along the hallway next time I want some intellectual banter. (The tomato lady isn’t BAD; she’s different from me.)

[...]

Fifth, Ivy notes that calling Mike a loser might be too harsh, and I agree. Mike isn’t working in the same profession as Ivy, just like the CEO of a bank isn’t doing the same thing as someone who wraps the nickels. There should be no animus against Ivy or others like him. We were trained for a special niche.

Well, here is where the animus: fewer people have the ability to earn their living as researchers than have the ability to teach. Think of it this way: how many marathon runners can coach cross country? Now how many have the innate ability to, say, run a 2:10 marathon?

Science

Via Conservation Report: Many New Species found in the Himalayas; these include miniature deer and the flying frog:

Isn’t that adorable? (Its large webs allow for it to “glide” when it falls).

Plants: I find this astonishing:

Experiments show that a sagebrush plant can recognise a genetically identical cutting growing nearby.

What’s more, the two clones communicate and cooperate with one another, to avoid being eaten by herbivores.

The findings, published in Ecology Letters, raise the tantalising possibility that plants, just like animals, often prefer to help their relatives over unrelated individuals. The ability to distinguish self from non-self is a vital one in nature.

It allows many animals to act preferentially towards others that are genetically related to themselves; for example, a female lion raising her young, or protecting other more distantly related cubs in her pride.

But the evidence that plants can do the same is limited and controversial.

Teabagger Dregs

1. At Claire McCaskill’s health care town hall: Woman has a posted that is rolled up; a photographers wonders what it is. The lady unrolls it (in a way that does NOT block the view of anyone else). Someone else sees it, takes it away from her and rips it up. The poster is of Rosa Parks.

2. Here are more antics. Remember the “tough talking” imbecile who butted his way in front of everyone pushing his wheelchair bound son? The Congressman in question offered him a one-on-one meeting; he refused!

3. Major Fail:

But most notable was one of the protesters who benefits greatly by government assistance.

Diane Campbell (pictured) of Kingston, N.H., held a sign with Mr. Obama’s face superimposed on a Nazi storm trooper, a sign, she said, that was made by her chronically ill mother.

Her mother’s hereditary autoimmune disease is treated with expensive transfusions of gamma globulin, paid for by Medicare. Her sister, Louise, was born with no arms and one leg, and is also covered by Medicare, the government-run, health-insurance program for the elderly and disabled.

“Adolf Hitler was for exterminating the weak, not just the Jews and stuff, and socialism — that’s what’s going to happen.”

What is with these people anyway? Paul Krugman has some thoughts on the matter:

Yes, there’s a lavishly funded industry pushing these stories. But Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and all the others wouldn’t succeed without a receptive audience. So what makes that audience so receptive?

Here’s a thought: maybe we can learn something from Bernie Madoff.

How did Madoff pull off his scam? A lot of it probably involved affinity fraud: Madoff’s victims, largely affluent Jews, trusted him in large part because he seemed like one of them.

What I think is going on here, at least partly, is that the peddlers of anti-progressive lies are managing to convince a certain kind of American — white, socially conservative, etc. — that the hate-mongers are people like them; and, even more important, that progressives are Those People, people not like them.

He goes on to say that President Obama’s race is an issue, but this group of people hated President Clinton as well (and yeah, they would have hated Hillary Clinton too).

But the larger point is that this group of people will not be convinced by the evidence; we are probably wise to just make sure that they don’t injure anyone and just blow them off.

Survival Kit for Tea Baggers at Town Halls

A Dictionary for a New Language: Republicanspeak

“tyranny”: “we lost the last election”
“arrogance”: “you are trying to keep your campaign promises”
“socialism”: “profits are the be-all and end-all”
“Acorn!”: “only corporate astro-turf groups should organize” or “I don’t like blacks”.
“Affirmative Action Pick”: “if you were choosing only on merit, only white males would get chosen”
“Obama is not an American”: “I am bat-shit crazy”
“I want my country back”: “People who aren’t just like me aren’t real Americans” or “I am completely ignorant of the country I call my own”.

Any additions?

12 August 09 (am)

Workout notes I’ll probably swim over lunchtime.

Humor Friendly atheist has a “fun” post which includes photos of an outing. He includes a photo of someone wearing an integral t-shirt. Yes, that integral is pretty easy, though one has to be a bit of a “perv” to get the joke.

Politics: This pundit is a bit confused. There is a difference between street protesting and disrupting a town hall. Besides, why is it arrogant to win an election and attempt to do what you said that you were going to do if you won? Evidently the Republicans are all for democracy until they lose an election.

Elections: Harry Reid (Senate majority leader) is in trouble. Good. If he enables the failure of health care reform, he deserves to lose.

Health care reform
Of course, health insurance companies are fighting it.

Fact: insurance companies make the most profit by charging as much as they can get away with and by putting out as little as possible; hence it is in their interests to take your money and not pay it out. That is why I am in favor of single payer.

True: some might argue that the companies attempting to pay out as little as possible drives medical costs down but is the effect of the companies working to deny claims in any way possible worth it? Talk about putting someone between you and your doctor.

Here, Maddow shows that these “tea baggers” are being organized by professional groups that have a financial agenda.
Yes, they have a “right” to do this, and she has a right to point out that they are doing this:

And of course, there are the good old “scare tactics” directed at the elderly.