Romney’s (possible) Mistake, Herman Cain’s style, Flat Taxes and Flat Earthers

President Obama: we are leaving Iraq!!!

Flat Taxes why the “flat tax idea” is nonsense. Note: when it comes to income tax, everyone does pay the same:

Here’s a modified version of the current Federal Income Tax Brackets (I’ve rounded off the numbers to make it easier to follow):

Taxable Income / Tax Rate
$0 – $10,000 / 10%
$10,000 – $30,000 / 15%
$30,000 – $80,000 / 25%
$80,000 – $200,000 / 28%
$200,000 – $400,000 / 33%
More than $400,000 / 35%

That is, everyone’s first 10,000 is taxed at the same rate, then everyone’s 10 to 30K is taxed at the same rate, etc. The tax rate changes income level and not by total. That is, if you make 100K, your first 10K is taxed at 10 percent, your next 20K is taxed at 15 percent, your next 50K is taxed at 25 percent and your next 20K is taxed at 28 percent.

Science and mathematics
Get a load of this wooden adding machine. It isn’t profound, but it is fun:

Nothing new in resistance to science
The public has often been slow to accept new science results. The situation with climate change is even harder since there are rich industries who are fighting the findings. This article from Physics Today has an interesting summary. Here is a bit of it:

Even Albert Einstein was not immune to political backlash. His theory of general relativity, excerpted on the notebook page in figure 2, undermined our most fundamental notions of absolute space and time, a revolution that Max Planck avowed “can only be compared with that brought about by the introduction of the Copernican world system.”5 Though the theory predicted the anomalous perihelion shift of Mercury’s orbit, it was still regarded as provisional in the years following its publication in 1916.

When observation, by Arthur Eddington and others, of a rare solar eclipse in 1919 confirmed the bending of light, it was widely hailed and turned Einstein into a celebrity. Elated, he was finally satisfied that his theory was verified. But the following year he wrote to his mathematician collaborator Marcel Grossmann:

This world is a strange madhouse. Currently, every coachman and every waiter is debating whether relativity theory is correct. Belief in this matter depends on political party affiliation.6

Instead of quelling the debate, the confirmation of the theory and acclaim for its author had sparked an organized opposition dedicated to discrediting both theory and author. Part of the backlash came from a minority of scientists who apparently either felt sidelined or could not understand the theory. The driving force was probably professional jealousy,6but scientific opposition was greatly amplified by the anti-Semitism of the interwar period and was exploited by political and culture warriors. The same forces, together with status quo economic interests, have amplified the views of climate contrarians.7

The historical backlashes shed some light on a paradox of the current climate debate: As evidence continues to accumulate confirming longstanding warming predictions and showing how sensitive climate has been throughout Earth’s history, why does climate skepticism seem to be growing rather than shrinking? All three provocative ideas—heliocentricity, relativity, and greenhouse warming—have been, in Kuhn’s words, “destructive of an entire fabric of thought,” and have shattered notions that make us feel safe.2 That kind of change can turn people away from reason and toward emotion, especially when the ideas are pressed on them with great force.8

The agitations of modern greenhouse proponents appear to have provoked an antiscience backlash similar to the one against Galileo. In the space of only two years, almost as fast as Bellarmine changed his position on Copernicanism, leading moderates have been squeezed out of the main conservative political parties in both the US and Australia and replaced by hard-line rejecters of climate science.

Leave it to our Republicans to lead the charge for stupidity and ignorance.

Nothing New: Herman Cain’s strange behavior explained

I admit that the first bit of this clip is “same old, same old”: “Cain is an idiot and the Republican debate audiences are even bigger idiots”. Yep, I think there is truth in that (sort of) but that isn’t the reason I linked to it.

The winning point comes toward the end of it (5 minutes or so) when someone who is (sort of) defending Mr. Cain speaks: he points out that while Mr. Cain is mostly associated with is time as CEO for Godfather’s Pizza, he has spent much of his time in the past few years as a motivational speaker. These are the types who say “YOU CAN DO IT!!!! TAKE RESPONSIBILITY and follow my “X-point” PLAN FOR SUCCESS.” When have you ever seen someone actually study such a plan to see if it indeed leads to success?

Anyway, remember the “motivational speaker” background the next time you hear Mr. Cain speak.

Politics 2012
Is Mitt Romney making a mistake by attacking Rick Perry so hard? Why might this be a mistake? According to Nate Silver, Mr. Romney might be setting Mr. Perry as the “legitimate” anti-Romney candidate; perhaps he ought to let the anti-Romney crowd remain fractured.