Republicans…..

Some time ago, I watched the following video (of the Peoria, IL “Tea-party” “rally’:

And I made a one sentence comment:
“I hope that someone had a defibrillator.”

11 months later, the owner of the video “demolished” me:

@ultraollie At least they all probably have long form birth certificates and their college, medical & legislative records are not sealed. It kills you to think that plenty of young people are disgusted with Communist totalitarianism in US government. How old is your buddy Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, George Soros? LOL

Hmm, I didn’t know that most people’s college and medical records were public access. As far as legislative records…hmmm, those are open public access, no? Of course, what is the birth certificate nonsense anyway? In what passes for a mind, this person must think that the State of Hawaii and all of the local newspapers were involved in some conspiracy to cover up a non-existent birth….almost 50 years ago?

Then we get to the phrase “communist totalitarianism”. Hmm, if the current administration was really that, would this video be allowed to stay up? Didn’t the communist totalitarians throw dissenters in jail and sometimes execute them?

Now as to my friends: “Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank”: if memory serves me, they were all reelected in 2010 and Sen. Reid’s election was an upset win over a….oh yes….TEA PARTY candidate! George Soros? Well, he is still a multimillionaire so I suppose that he is doing well…

Anyway, as far as the tea-party types: yes, I know that they are more educated than average (most people don’t have college degrees…so even a C+ business student with a 22 on their ACT would technically be “above average” when compared with the general public.

But take a good look at this crowd. How would THEY feel if the Ryan “medicare plan” was imposed on them? Really, why shouldn’t it be? If the plan is so great, impose it now.

Of course the Republicans don’t have the guts to do that; they were elected in large part due to the “government hands off of my Medicare” crowd.

But if you think that I am hard on Republicans, check out this Rolling Stone article. The article itself doesn’t say anything I haven’t said over the past couple of days; the Ryan plan is to give even more tax cuts for the rich and to destroy all of the more socialist governmental programs. But just read what Matt Taibbi has to say:

Paul Ryan, the Republican Party’s latest entrant in the seemingly endless series of young, prickish, over-coiffed, anal-retentive deficit Robespierres they’ve sent to the political center stage in the last decade or so, has come out with his new budget plan. All of these smug little jerks look alike to me – from Ralph Reed to Eric Cantor to Jeb Hensarling to Rand Paul and now to Ryan, they all look like overgrown kids who got nipple-twisted in the halls in high school, worked as Applebee’s shift managers in college, and are now taking revenge on the world as grownups by defunding hospice care and student loans and Sesame Street. They all look like they sleep with their ties on, and keep their feet in dress socks when doing their bi-monthly duty with their wives.

Every few years or so, the Republicans trot out one of these little whippersnappers, who offer proposals to hack away at the federal budget. Each successive whippersnapper inevitably tries, rhetorically, to out-mean the previous one, and their proposals are inevitably couched as the boldest and most ambitious deficit-reduction plans ever seen. Each time, we are told that these plans mark the end of the budgetary reign of terror long ago imposed by the entitlement system begun by FDR and furthered by LBJ.

Never mind that each time the Republicans actually come into power, federal deficit spending explodes and these whippersnappers somehow never get around to touching Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. The key is that for the many years before that moment of truth, before these buffoons actually get a chance to put their money where their lipless little mouths are, they will stomp their feet and scream about how entitlements are bringing us to the edge of apocalypse.

The reason for this is always the same: the Republicans, quite smartly, recognize that there is great political hay to be made in the appearance of deficit reduction, and that white middle class voters will respond with overwhelming enthusiasm to any call for reductions in the “welfare state,” a term which said voters will instantly associate with black welfare moms and Mexicans sneaking over the border to visit American emergency rooms.

The author goes on to point out is that the real cost driver are things like Medicare in which we spend hundreds of thousands of tax payer dollars to keep some old fart alive for a couple of weeks in an intensive care ward of a hospital.

Mr. Taibbi isn’t through with the Republicans though:

Here is how old friend David Brooks, taking a break from his authorship of breathless master-race treatises, put it in a recent column called “Moment of Truth”:

[...]
Brooks then goes on to slobber over all of Ryan’s ostensibly daring proposals, from the Medicare block grants to the more obnoxious Medicare voucher program (replacing Medicare benefits with vouchers to buy overpriced private insurance, which Brooks calls the government “giving you a sum of money” to choose from “a regulated menu of insurance options”).

What he doesn’t mention is that Ryan’s proposal also includes dropping the top tax rate for rich people from 35 percent to 25 percent. All by itself, that one change means that the government would be collecting over $4 trillion less over the next ten years.

Since Brooks himself is talking about Ryan’s plan cutting $4 trillion over the next ten years (some say that number is higher), what we’re really talking about here is an ambitious program to cut taxes for people like… well, people like me and David Brooks, and paying for it by “consolidating job-training programs” and forcing old people to accept reduced Medicare benefits. [...]

But the icing on the cake comes when a guy like David Brooks – like me a coddled, overcompensated media yuppie whose idea of sacrifice is raking one’s own leaves – comes out and calls Paul Ryan courageous for having the guts to ask seniors to cut back on their health care in order to pay for our tax breaks.

I have to admit that I laughed long and hard over that one.

And to the tea party owner of the Peoria Tax Day video: THAT is how you insult someone. Take notes.

9 April 2011 (post run)

I got in my run; I leave for McNaughton in about 4 hours. I’ll bring my fanny pack and my boots; it should be muddy but I can fit in a slow post-duty loop.

Run: East Peoria Bike Path

Ok, my time wasn’t good at all: 1:22:02; 42:27 out (360 foot climb against the wind) and 39:35 back; in May 2009 (almost 2 years ago!) my times were 1:18:44 and 1:19:23 with similar effort. Still, today didn’t feel too bad. There were a few small clumps of runners and some Cub/Boy scouts trying to hike (and not that successfully ….but one has to start somewhere).

Upside: my shoulder felt ok (and yes, I PT’ed the rotator cuff afterward) and I had slight twinges in both knees (at different times).

What I have to remember is that I stopped running (due to my knee) in October 2009 BEFORE my July 2010 surgery) and only restarted in December of 2010. I have to build up not only from the post surgery lay-off but the pre-surgery lay off as well.

9 April 2011 National Economic Matters, Mud, and Math (ematical Biology)

Mud: I’ll be at McNaughton Park later today to help out with the 5 pm to 6 am shift. I’ll be helping the slower 50 mile finishers and the 100 mile runners.
As far as my own workout: I’ll attempt to run 8 miles after this. I’ll get wet as it is raining off and on. I might drive to East Peoria so as to avoid traffic by using the paved bike path (and get some good hill work going up) or I might do a multiple hill loop at home; we shall see.

Ok, no government shutdown. But what about the larger Paul Ryan plan?

Yes, this plan sets the debate: do we want lower taxes with a government that does far less (e. g., no more medicare?):

The best thing about the long-term budget proposal from Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, is that it forces Americans to confront the implications of their choices. If voters want taxes that amount to roughly 18 percent of G.D.P., then they are going to have to accept a government that looks roughly like what Ryan is describing.

The Democrats are on defense because they are unwilling to ask voters to confront the implications of their choices. Democrats seem to believe that most Americans want to preserve the 20th-century welfare state programs. But they are unwilling to ask voters to pay for them, and they are unwilling to describe the tax increases that would be required to cover their exploding future costs.

I don’t think that this is a “courageous” plan (even if Fahreed Zakaria thinks that it is) as the Ryan plan taxes the wealthy at very low rates and it doesn’t end medicare RIGHT NOW; it does so for those who haven’t reached 55 years of age yet. His plan does nothing to anger his own base; angering YOUR OWN BASE takes courage.

It isn’t really that “serious” of a plan either, if by “serious” you mean “uses realistic assumptions” and “has numbers that actually add up“:

So, we have a plan that proposes to cut spending to Calving Coolidge levels, without explaining how it will do that; that includes $2.9 trillion in tax cuts, but asserts that it will make that up by broadening the base — yet says literally nothing about what that means; and has as its centerpiece a Medicare plan that will collapse as soon as seniors start getting their grossly inadequate vouchers.

Oh, and it directs us to a totally ludicrous Heritage Foundation analysis for support.

There’s nothing serious about this plan. And the way our pundit class swooned over this fantasy document suggests that all those people lecturing the American people about our unwillingness to face up to reality and make hard choices should spend some time looking in the mirror.

My guess: the bar has been lowered so far for the Republicans that any plan that verbiage too complicated for Sarah Palin to speak about is considered serious even if it is Sokal caliber bunk. Remember that when it comes to anything related to intellectual standards, Republicans are graded on a massive curve.

Science: Mathematical models and evolution

The following New York Times article is interesting:

“SuperCooperators” (written with Roger Highfield, editor of New Scientist magazine) is an absorbing, accessible book about the power of mathematics. Unlike Darwin with his brine bottles and pigeon coops, Nowak aims to tackle the mysteries of nature with paper, pencil and computer. By looking at phenomena as diverse as H.I.V. infection and English irregular verbs, he has formally defined five distinct mechanisms that have helped give rise to cooperative behavior, from the first molecules that joined to self-replicate, to the first cells that formed multicellular organisms, all the way to human societies, which exhibit a degree of cooperation unmatched in all creation. In Nowak’s view, figuring out how cooperation comes about and breaks down, as well as actively pursuing the “snuggle for existence,” is the key to our survival as a species.

At the heart of Nowak’s ideas is the haunting game of Prisoner’s Dilemma. The game involves two accomplices who are caught for a crime, interrogated separately and offered a deal. If one player incriminates the other, or “defects,” while the second remains silent, or “cooperates,” he will be given a sentence of one year, while the other player gets four. If both remain silent, they will be sentenced to only two years, but if both defect, they will receive three years. The rational choice for either prisoner is to defect, getting three years — though had both cooperated, they’d have been out in two. In the absence of trust, reason can be self-destructive.

In the 1990s, Nowak and Karl Sigmund, building on work by Robert Axelrod, showed that the Prisoner’s Dilemma, played over and over, could describe cycles of behavior in which strategies of selfishness (“Always Defect”) are beaten out by cooperation (“Tit for Tat”), then overtaken by even more cooperative behavior (“Generous Tit for Tat,” summarized as “Never forget a good turn, but occasionally forgive a bad one”), only to be invaded once more by egoists until the cycle begins anew. These “evolutionary dynamic” models, made more realistic by introducing an element of randomness, demonstrate that under the right conditions, competition can lead to teamwork. They also show how fragile that balance can be.

In “SuperCooperators,” Nowak argues that two of his mechanisms, indirect reciprocity and group selection, played an important role in human evolution. Think of a proto-simian trying to figure out whether to trust another in an exchange: Should I provide sex now for food and protection later? The proto-simian may have observed the behavior of its prospective partner, or it may not have; chances are good that others have, though. Reputation becomes important. The proto-­simian evolves into a hominid, with a bigger brain allowing for more precise communication about reputation. Moral instincts evolve to produce shame, guilt, trust, empathy; social intelligence and conscience are born. Before you know it, Yogi Berra is summing it all up: “Always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t come to yours.” Language, cognition and morality, Nowak argues, are evolutionary spinoffs of the fundamental need of social creatures to cooperate.

Of course the debate here is: “ok, maybe the mathematics is correct. But does the model really work, or does it violate long established laws of biology?”

Nowak has also ignited controversy with a paper in the journal Nature, written with E. O. Wilson and Corina Tarnita, arguing that “inclusive fitness” — the idea that organisms cooperate with relatives because it helps pass on shared genes — is not necessary to explain the birth of complex societies like bees and ants, or altruism towards kin in humans. Nature recently published five critical letters, including one with 137 signatories, one of whom denounced the paper’s mathematics as not worth “wasting time” over.

Nowak gives little hint of these fierce debates in this cheerful book, instead offering this striking claim: “The way that we human beings collaborate is as clearly described by mathematics as the descent of the apple that once fell in Newton’s garden.” It seems significant to Nowak that, according to his models, the interest of groups can override the interests of individuals if “the ratio of the benefits to cost is greater than one plus the ratio of group size to number of groups,” and that cooperation can prevail if altruists cluster together in particular topographies. If only we could take such facts into account, as special cancer-preventing “crypt” formations in our colons have unthinkingly done, perhaps we might work together to combat global warming.

Now this book is not about the paper which attacks the established doctrine of “kin selection”; to read about that go here.

8 April 2011 pm

Who is this fat old man?????

Science I love the title of this piece: “Science is Hard”. The article itself basically asks the following question: does this data present strong evidence that a new subatomic particle has been discovered?

The 3-sigma bump reported by Fermilab on Wednesday has garnered a lot of attention. Understandable, since it might be a precious sign of particle physics beyond the Standard Model — but it’s also just a 3-sigma bump, and usually those go away.

For the uninitiated: “3 sigma” means that there is a 1 percent chance (or less) that this bump occurred due to random background. But think of it this way: if you have 100 such time periods, there is a good chance that you’ll see at least one of these “bumps” in the data due to random chance.

Still, read the article. This shows how scientists use data and reveals the kinds of debates that take place.

Politics and Economics
Ryan’s plan includes…yes, more tax breaks for the rich. And no, they haven’t worked before and they won’t work now…unless by working you mean:

(a) the Ryan plan would actually increase the deficit and (b) the whole goal is not to reduce the deficit, but to transfer income upward. In fact, it so happens that the estimated cost of those tax cuts is almost exactly equal to the proposed cuts to Medicaid, food stamps, and other programs helping lower-income Americans.

And as for those who consider Mr. Ryan a serious economic player, please read this awesome smackdown of a Ryan backer. You see, any plan with footnotes must be serious. Or so say Republican pundits.