Thank God For Satan

This guy has the best youtube rants!

Calling it like I see it…

On policy matters, I tend to see eye to eye with Robert Reich and Paul Krugman. But the best policy in the world means nothing if it can’t get into law so political considerations are always a factor.

I love a Bernie Sanders rant as much as the next liberal. But he is the Senator of a very small state; he wouldn’t stand a chance in a national election.

The President is the President of the whole nation. He doesn’t have the luxury of noisily popping off and thumping his chest.

So with that in mind read this Rick Ungar piece:

It wasn’t just that the President of the United States drew that proverbial line in the sand by stating his firm refusal to continue the Bush tax cuts one moment longer than legally required.

And it wasn’t just Obama’s taking a solid stand when he said “Not while I’m President” to the GOP budget plan that would break the nation’s most basic cultural commitments by destroying Medicare and dramatically curtailing Medicaid, all to provide still more tax breaks to the richest Americans.

What did it for me in Obama’s plan to get the nation’s finances in order was that the President took his stand against the GOP effort to take away the soul of this nation while staring directly into the eyes of Rep. Paul Ryan- the architect of the document that would remake this country in the mold of third world nations where there are rich people and poor people with nobody in the middle.

Unlike the taunts, personal insults and barbs that Ryan and his companions lob at the president on a daily basis from the safety of a television studio, Obama took the route that requires character.

He did it to Ryan’s face. [...]
While you may not always – or ever – like Barack Obama’s policies, he has shown, time and again, that his decisions reflect a willingness to do what he believes is right while taking the political hits that come with courageous decisions.

President John F. Kennedy once pointed out that being president is all about choosing between the many bad options that are available.

This reality was never brought into sharper focus than last December when Obama elected to suffer the slings and arrows fired at him by his own supporters by swallowing hard and agreeing to the extension of the Bush tax credits.

Anyone who truly understood what was at issue in that fight- and the incredibly difficult choices available to the President – understands that Obama chose to pay the political price in order to ensure that millions of Americans who are out of work would continue to get their unemployment benefits. He was willing to take the hit from those who are supposed to be his friends so that he could protect the already suffering middle class from having to pay for the President’s political safety in the guise of the tax increases that were threatened for those who could least afford them.

That took character. [...]

As I wrote at the time, it’s awfully easy to demand that the President stay true to his progressive roots and go to the mats with the Republicans as you sip a fine glass of wine with your friends inside a cozy bistro. Meanwhile, as you enjoy the conversation and drinks, you don’t even notice that poor fellow outside the bar who is offering to shovel driveways to make a few bucks so he can put a cheap dinner on the table for his children. He’s the one who lost his job and, if progressives had their way, would have been cut off from the only financial lifeline he had -all so that the liberals could feel more righteous in their willingness to battle the GOP using the snow shoveler’s money-not their own.

That is not progressive behavior- that is elitist behavior.

The wine drinkers were not the ones on the President’s mind last December. It was the cold guy on the outside who was the focus of Obama’s attention-and that is precisely as it should have been.

Character.

Read the whole thing.

This is exactly my reaction when I hear Bill Moyers saying that it is better to fight for the whole loaf and fail than to settle for half a loaf (this was about health care). Sorry, but many of the big reforms started off as limited measures that were improved over time.

Illinois Spring Weather….

Yes, it was chilly (40′s, or about 8 C), windy (13 mph with stronger gusts) and rainy, and yes, the wind shifted into my face as I ran my return leg. Total run: 8 miles in 1:23:28 or about 1 minute slower than last week’s “perfect weather” run. But strangely enough, this run was far easier; I spent more energy cursing the weather than I did running.
But this was one of those days were I (sort of) wished I had opted for the treadmill; ok, it wasn’t THAT bad except for the wind.
The good news: running is starting to get slightly easier.

Posts
Statistics: for those who enjoy this sort of thing, here is a nice synopsis of how those who do classical statistics differ from the more modern Bayesian statisticians. The differences, while obvious to them, are very subtle to non-experts like me:

Confidence intervals and hypothesis tests. I agree with Kass that confidence and statistical significance are “valuable inferential tools.” They are treated differently in classical and Bayesian statistics, however. In the Neyman-Pearson theory of inference, confidence and statistical significance are two sides of the same coin, with a confidence interval being the set of parameter values not rejected by a significance test. Unfortunately, this approach falls apart (or, at the very least, is extremely difficult) in problems with high-dimensional parameter spaces that are characteristic of my own applied work in social science and environmental health.

In a modern Bayesian approach, confidence intervals and hypothesis testing are both important but are not isomorphic; they represent two different steps of inference. Confidence statements, or posterior intervals, are summaries of inference about parameters conditional on an assumed model. Hypothesis testing–or, more generally, model checking–is the process of comparing observed data to replications under the model if it were true. Statistically significance in a hypothesis test corresponds to some aspect of the data which would be unexpected under the model. For Bayesians as for other statistical researchers, both these steps of inferences are important: we want to make use of the mathematics of probability to make conditionally valid statements about unobserved quantities, and we also want to make use of this same probability theory to reveal areas in which our models do not fit the data.

Here the word “conditional” is used in the sense of conditional probability, e. g., what is the probability that we’d get an observation in this range given our model parameters really were x, y and z verses the classical “given this outcome, we fail to reject that the model parameters were in these ranges.”

Science I had mentioned an article in the New York Times about the origin of languages (the claim that they came from Africa). Jerry Coyne also discusses this paper and discusses some of the details in a very readable fashion.

Politics
Paul Krugman seems to be enjoying Republican whining about President Obama pointing out that their plan was really nothing more than a “reverse Robin Hood” approach:

At the beginning of last week, the commentariat was in raptures over the Serious, Courageous, Game-Changing Ryan plan. But now that the plan has been exposed as the cruel nonsense it is, what we’re hearing a lot about is the need for more civility in the discourse. President Obama did a bad thing by calling cruel nonsense cruel nonsense; he hurt Republican feelings, and how can we have a deal when the GOP is feeling insulted? What we need is personal outreach; let’s do lunch!

The easy, and perfectly fair, shot is to talk about the hypocrisy here; where were all the demands for civility when Republicans were denouncing Obama as a socialist, accusing him of creating death panels, etc..? Why is it OK for Republicans to accuse Obama of stealing from Medicare, but not OK for Obama to declare, with complete truthfulness, that those same Republicans are trying to dismantle the whole program?

Beyond that, are we dealing with children here?

He goes on to point out that the Republicans have a very different agenda: they want to dismantle the New Deal programs and return to a pre-New Deal era.

16 April 2011 early AM

I haven’t gone out running as yet; I’ll probably make myself run outside though it certainly means getting wet.

Yes, more “middle way” stuff though I hope that he forces their hands on the “taxes on the millionaires” issue. We’ll see.
Some are very cynical:

As I have said over and over again, the Democrats negotiating strategy is to betray the middle and working classes that support them and give the oligarchy as much as they can while acting as if they were forced into it or were outmaneuvered. Since even people like Krugman and other liberal commentators seem to have bought it, it means that they have succeeded.

The Democrats behavior is perfectly understandable if you bear this simple rule in mind: When it comes to any policy that the Democrats say they espouse but which hurts the interests of the oligarchy, the Democrats do not want a strategy that will win, they seek one that will lose.

I hope that Mano is wrong and still think that he is, in SOME cases.

But I could be wrong too.

Speaking of wrong:

This guy is right about one thing: this IS what the church teaches. Of course, the solution is to leave the church rather than to pretend to believe such nonsense or to pretend “oh, they don’t really mean it.”

But yes, the guy in the video could have been ME 30 years ago or so.

15 April 2011 (am)

Workout notes very easy 2 mile run on the treadmill followed by shoulder PT. I’ve added shoulder exercises; there is still some ache.

Posts

Fun

This is fun (hat tip: Jerry Coyne)

Silly quizzes:
How much do you know about US politics (facts, not opinions). I got 11 out of 11, but that isn’t unusual for a liberal. Needless say the typical Fox News watcher didn’t do so well.

This leads me to a point: some well intentioned but clueless “conservative independent” tried to equate the people that I listen to to people like Rush Limbaugh. Fact: Paul Krumgan won the Nobel Prize in economics. Robert Reich was Secretary of Labor under President Clinton, a Rhodes Scholar and has a J. D. from Yale. Rachel Maddow has a Ph. D. from Oxford and Fareed Zakaria has his Ph. D. from Harvard.
Sorry, but the people I listen to know what they are talking about, even if they make mistakes from time to time. There is no way you can compare them to people like Limbaugh.

In this post, I’ll put my science stuff towards the end; the political stuff is next.

Some Republicans got their feelings hurt over the Obama budget speech.

Of course many of us wish that the President would say more of this in public:

President Obama’s harshest words were for the Republican whom the president has praised in public for offering serious attempts to address the deficit: House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisc.

“Eliminating the health care bill would cost us $1 trillion dollars,” the president said. “It would add $1 trillion to the deficit. So when Paul Ryan says his priority is to make sure, he’s just being America’s accountant and trying to you know be responsible, this is the same guy that voted for two wars that were unpaid for, voted for the Bush tax cuts that were unpaid for, voted for the prescription drug bill that cost as much as my health care bill — but wasn’t paid for. So it’s not on the level. And we’ve got to keep on you know, keep on shining a light on that.”

[...]

“The interesting thing actually is how little traction these social issues are getting these days,” the president said. “I just think the country is moved into a different place. I think there are some folks who feel very strongly about it. But a lot of these hot button cultural issues, I think there’s a generational change taking place in part where people say, ‘You know what, we may have disagreement about his, but this is not what we’re worried about. We’re not worried about the gay family next door. We’re not worried about what women are doing in terms of maintaining their health. We’re trying to figure out how to move America forward.’”

The president said that’s “what the budget debate was all about: it was can we transport issues that have very little to do with the budget and have everything to do with a particular agenda? And can we use the budget to chip away?

“And so you know they had a provision on repealing health care, they had a provision on basically repealing the EPA. They had a provision on making sure that we didn’t do anything on climate change,” the president said. “And I remember at one point in the negotiations one of Boehner’s staff people pipes up and says, ‘You don’t understand Mr. President, we’ve lost on you know, on health care, we’ve lost on the EPA, we’ve given that up, we’ve got to have something to sell to our caucus.’

“And I said to them, let me tell you something: ‘I spent a year and a half getting health care passed. I had to take that issue across the country and I paid significant political costs to get it done. The notion that I’m going to let you guys undo that in a 6 month spending bill?’ I said, ‘You want to repeal health care? Go at it. We’ll have that debate. You’re not going to be able to do that by nickel-and-diming me in the budget. You think we’re stupid?’”

Yes, the President “gets it” more than we know. We know that taxes on the wealthy (as a share of what they earn) have gone down and that the Republicans really don’t care that much about the debt and deficit; they care about low taxes for the wealthy.

Of course, the Republicans know how to lie to their base. I got the following message from the Townhall system:

Dear Friend,

Surprise! President Obama wants to raise your taxes. That is his solution to America’s dangerously high debt.

Tell President Obama: Don’t Raise My Taxes.

For years, President Obama ignored calls to end Washington’s reckless spending binge. Two months ago, President Obama released a budget that continued the status quo and enormous deficits. Now, he realized his reckless spending must be paid for; and he wants YOU to do it.

Sign our petition: tell President Obama enough is enough.

America has a spending problem, not a tax problem. Tell President Obama that punishing the taxpayers will not create jobs or solve our debt crisis.

Join us by signing the petition,

Of course, the lie works because many Republicans want to assume that they are in the upper 1 percent even though the vast majority are nowhere close to that.

An economic aside

There are frequent mentions of “reforming the tax code”. Guess what? The wealthy have lawyers and they can find loopholes in just about anything, so no “reform” that simplifies things ever lasts long. Here is a nice summary of recent “reform” attempts.

Science
Human Evolution
Tracing the roots of language is a difficult task. There is a credible scientist who claims to have traced language back to our African roots. Some claim that tracing language that far back is not possible (with anything resembling reasonable certainty anyway) but that some advances in this science have been made in this study:

A researcher analyzing the sounds in languages spoken around the world has detected an ancient signal that points to southern Africa as the place where modern human language originated.

The finding fits well with the evidence from fossil skulls and DNA that modern humans originated in Africa. It also implies, though does not prove, that modern language originated only once, an issue of considerable controversy among linguists.

The detection of such an ancient signal in language is surprising. Because words change so rapidly, many linguists think that languages cannot be traced very far back in time. The oldest language tree so far reconstructed, that of the Indo-European family, which includes English, goes back 9,000 years at most.

Quentin D. Atkinson, a biologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, has shattered this time barrier, if his claim is correct, by looking not at words but at phonemes — the consonants, vowels and tones that are the simplest elements of language. Dr. Atkinson, an expert at applying mathematical methods to linguistics, has found a simple but striking pattern in some 500 languages spoken throughout the world: A language area uses fewer phonemes the farther that early humans had to travel from Africa to reach it. [...]

Linguists tend to dismiss any claims to have found traces of language older than 10,000 years, “but this paper comes closest to convincing me that this type of research is possible,” said Martin Haspelmath, a linguist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Dr. Atkinson is one of several biologists who have started applying to historical linguistics the sophisticated statistical methods developed for constructing genetic trees based on DNA sequences. These efforts have been regarded with suspicion by some linguists.

There is much more in this New York Times article which is written by Nicholas Wade.

Speaking of human evolution, Jerry Coyne has a tasty tidbit concerning a recent find of hominin footprints:

You all remember the Laetoli footprints from Tanzania: footprints from what were probably three individuals of Australopithecus afarensis, made 3.6 million years ago as they walked across soft volcanic ash. Those proved indubitably that our early ancestors were fully bipedal, and were a poignant snapshot of hominins long gone.

Scientific American now reports on another such finding: a group of footprints (also in Tanzania) from 18 individuals of Homo sapiens walking together on the shores of Lake Natron. They’re dated at 120,000 years ago. This discovery hasn’t yet been published, but was announced two days ago by Brian Richmond of George Washington University at the latest meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society. As Sci Am reports, there were other human footprints as well, but one set seems to have been left by a social band of hominins [...]

Science, statistics and causality
Proving that “X causes cancer” is impossible; of course what is meant is that “X raises one’s risk for cancer”. But even that is difficult to do. There are many things that get in the way: correlation is not causation, some cancers are rare, and showing an effect that is sometimes a precursor to cancer is very different from showing that it raises the risk of cancer.

This New York Times article by medical school professor Siddhartha Mukherjee talks about these issues in detail; here the question is the link between cell phone usage and cancer. What has been shown (via brain studies):

A recent study by Nora Volkow, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and reported in this newspaper on March 30, has raised this unusual possibility. Volkow is an innovative brain researcher who is director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Bethesda, Md. She recruited 47 people and placed an “active” phone next to one ear (the phone was on — generating radiation, but silent, so that Volkow could eliminate the effects of sound and conversation). She then used a specialized brain scanner capable of detecting alterations in glucose. Glucose — a sugar — is the metabolic fuel for the brain. When parts of the brain are activated, brain cells begin to metabolize glucose at an increased rate. Volkow’s scanner was equipped to detect even marginal changes in glucose metabolism.

When Volkow compared subjects with phones turned on with subjects who had their phones turned off, she found a striking pattern: there was a telltale sign of increased brain-glucose activity in the area of the brain immediately adjacent to the antenna of the phone.

But as Volkow points out, there is still a long conceptual leap from “increased brain-­glucose activity” to “brain cancer.”

There is much more there. Some other factors: it is statistically difficult to ferret out factors for things that appear rarely. Also, there is great difficulty in getting accurate data on behaviors:

But the women in Giovannucci’s study had also completed a dietary survey before their diagnosis of breast cancer. How did a woman’s memory of her diet compare with the actual diet that she recorded before her cancer diagnosis?

Giovannucci’s study illustrates the insidious nature of “recall bias.” In women with no cancer, there was no change between the actual and remembered diet. But women with breast cancer typically recalled a much-higher-fat diet than they actually consumed. The diagnosis of breast cancer had not just changed a woman’s present and the future; it had altered her sense of her past. Women with breast cancer had (unconsciously) decided that a higher-fat diet was a likely predisposition for their disease and (unconsciously) recalled a high-fat diet. It was a pattern poignantly familiar to anyone who knows the history of this stigmatized illness: these women, like thousands of women before them, had searched their own memories for a cause and then summoned that cause into memory.

It is very likely that similar effects undid the Interphone trial: some men and women with brain cancer recalled a disproportionately high use of cellphones, while others recalled disproportionately low exposure. Indeed, 10 men and women with brain tumors (but none of the “controls”) recalled 12 hours or more of use every day — a number that stretches credibility. In a substudy of Interphone, researchers embedded phones with special software to track phone usage. When this log was compared with the “recalled” usage, there were wide and random variations: some users underreported, while others overreported use.

The trouble is that even the largest, longest, best-designed retrospective studies that rely on memory are likely to be riddled by recall bias. Typically, it is not the failure of memory that produces this bias, but its hyperactivity — its desire to explain the uncertainty of the present with the certainty of the past.

Moral: science is hard, good data is difficult to obtain and people often want to assign causes to events that may well be random.