24 July 2011 Posts; rare events, bikinis, etc.

Politics

Political Humor

Click on the image to see the non-cropped image at the site; there are four panels. (hat tip: Millard Fillmore’s bathtub)

Click on the figure to see the full 4-panel cartoon at the site.

Hat tip: Millard Fillmore’s bathtub.

President Obama: Pushover?

Paul Krugman is a frequent critic of President Obama; he pressures him from the left on economic issues. Recently he wrote a piece called “President-Pushover”:

The redoubtable Elizabeth Drew has a forthcoming article in the New York Review of Books — not yet online — that confirms all our worst fears. She tells us that past concessions have

established in both Democrats’ and Republicans’ minds the thought that Obama was a weak negotiator—a “pushover.” He was more widely seen among Democrats and other close observers as having a strategy of starting near where he thinks the Republicans are—at the fifty-yard line—and then moving closer to their position.

Even more alarming, however, is her window on what the White House is thinking:

It all goes back to the “shellacking” Obama took in the 2010 elections. The President’s political advisers studied the numbers and concluded that the voters wanted the government to spend less. This was an arguable interpretation. Nevertheless, the political advisers believed that elections are decided by middle-of-the-road independent voters, and this group became the target for determining the policies of the next two years.

Ok, the above is fair; it appears to me that the President, at times, is too concerned with compromise and not concerned enough with effective policy.

Ms. Drew’s article is worth reading and includes this important observation:

In the end, the President had made the Republicans look bad, but what did he get for it? He ended up agreeing to new restrictions that will hamstring his policies for as long as he serves in office. His own actions will have led to new laws that forbid him to borrow money for any government policy—unless, at some time, he goes out and campaigns hard for raising taxes in any form. His actions so far shed light on how likely that is.

This country’s economy is beset with a number of new difficulties, among them that recovery from the last recession remains more elusive than was generally expected, while the US is confronting a variety of international economic instabilities, especially the large debts and possible default of several countries in the eurozone, bringing on unpopular austerity measures. Recent experience with what should have been a simple matter of raising the debt ceiling, normally done with no difficulty, is reason for deep unease about our political system’s ability to deal with such challenges.

Agreed: the President, in an effort to look “more centrist”, basically adopted the discredited right wing model.

But back to Paul Krugman’s article: even the great ones slip up from time to time, and Dr. Krugman slips here:

OK, I’ve never won a tough election. But neither has Obama! The 2008 race was looking close until Sarah Palin and Lehman came along. And as far as I can tell, this assessment both of what 2010 was about and what matters for 2012 is just ludicrous.

Emphasis mine. The first sentence is true, and the last one makes sense. But Dr. Krugman is just plain wrong about the middle two sentences.

1. I forgive Krugman for not remembering that then State Senator Obama came from nowhere (in 4′th place) to win the Democratic nomination for the U. S. Senate race in 2004. I do NOT forgive Krugman for forgetting that Obama won a bruising primary election in 2008 against Hillary Clinton, who was heavily favored (and yes, backed by Krugman).

2. The second sentence was half right: yes, the economic collapse helped Obama. But as far as Sarah Palin goes, remember that Palin being put on the ticked BOOSTED John McCain’s campaign!

The Republican National Convention has given John McCain and his party a significant boost, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken over the weekend shows, as running mate Sarah Palin helps close an “enthusiasm gap” that has dogged the GOP all year.

McCain leads Democrat Barack Obama by 50%-46% among registered voters, the Republican’s biggest advantage since January and a turnaround from the USA TODAY poll taken just before the convention opened in St. Paul. Then, he lagged by 7 percentage points.

The convention bounce has helped not only McCain but also attitudes toward Republican congressional candidates and the GOP in general.

“The Republicans had a very successful convention and, at least initially, the selection of Sarah Palin has made a big difference,” says political scientist Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia. “He’s in a far better position than his people imagined he would be in at this point.”

I admit that this surprised me at the time.

More Krugman: but I respect Krugman enough to let him change my mind; here he talks about what is wrong with means testing Medicare:

The usual argument against means-testing — which is entirely valid — is that it (a) doesn’t save much money and (b) messes up a relatively simple program. The reason it can’t save much money is that there are relatively few people rich enough to be able to afford major cost-sharing. Meanwhile, the good thing about Medicare, as with Social Security, is precisely that it doesn’t depend on your personal financial status — you just get it. Means-testing would turn it into something much more intrusive, like Medicaid.

But there’s a further point I haven’t seen emphasized: if you want the well-off to pay more, it’s just better to raise their taxes.[...]

So what’s the difference between means-testing and just collecting a bit more taxes? The answer is, class warfare — not between the rich and poor, but between the filthy rich and the merely affluent. For a tax rise would get a significant amount of revenue from the very, very rich (because they have so much money), while means-testing would end up imposing the same burden on $400,000 a year working Wall Street stiffs that it imposes on billion-a-year hedge fund managers.

What we need is actual control of health costs. Means-testing of Medicare is just a badly designed, unfair form of taxation.

My friend Lynn tried to explain to me why means testing wasn’t a good idea, but I didn’t understand her arguments at that time.

Science
Dolphins use sponges
Believe it or not, dolphins use sponges on their noses for certain types of hunting:

(click on the image to see an image at the site that can be enlarged)

In 1984, researchers spotted dolphins doing something unusual in Shark Bay, Western Australia. When the animals got hungry, they ripped a marine basket sponge from the sea floor and fitted it over their beaks like a person would fit a glove over a hand. The scientists suspected that as the dolphins foraged for fish, the sponges protected their beaks, or rostra, from the rocks and broken chunks of coral that litter the sea floor, making this behavior the first example of tool use in this species.

But why do dolphins go to all of this trouble when they could simply snag a fish from the open sea?

The answer, researchers hypothesize and report online today in PLoS ONE, is that the bottom-dwelling fish are a lot more nutritious. Some species also don’t have swim bladders, gas chambers that help other fish control their buoyancy as they travel up and down the water column. In the Bahamas, where dolphins are also known to forage for bottom-dwelling fish, dolphins hunt partly by echolocating these bladders, which give off a strong acoustic signal. That helps the cetaceans find prey even when it’s buried in sea sand.

But bottom-dwelling fish, such as barred sandperch, which are favored by some Shark Bay dolphins, don’t have swim bladders and so are harder to find with echolocation. The sea floor is not nearly as soft here as it is in the Bahamas, so if dolphins want to probe for these fish, they risk injuring their rostra. [...]

Read more at the site; note that some experiments were done on this.

Asymmetric quarks: evidence that the standard model needs refinement

From Nature.com

Newly released observations of the top quark — the heaviest of all known fundamental particles — could topple the standard model of particle physics. Data from collisions at the Tevatron particle accelerator at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, hint that some of the top quark’s interactions are governed by an as-yet unknown force, communicated by a hypothetical particle called the top gluon. The standard model does not allow for such a force or particle.

The results, presented1 today at the Europhysics Conference on High-Energy Physics in Grenoble, France, could help researchers to understand the origins of mass. According to one theoretical interpretation, a top quark bound by to its anti-matter partner, the antitop, would act as a version of the elusive Higgs boson, conferring mass on other particles.

Regina Demina, a physicist at the University of Rochester in New York, and her colleagues sifted through eight years’ worth of particle-collision data recorded by one of the Tevatron’s two detectors, known as DZero. Top quarks produced during collisions can fly off in the direction of the accelerator’s proton beam or its antiproton beam; Demina and her team discovered that more travel towards the proton beam than is predicted in the standard model of physics. A different model would seem to be needed to explain the discrepancy.

There is much more at the site.

Bikinis

Billy Dennis detected unfairness. Click on the thumbnail to see the full version at his site, as well as a front shot.

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