Floods, internet taxes and other topics

Taxes: we are seeing some cracks in the Republican caucus. Some businesses are putting pressure on Republicans in Congress to back the internet sales tax laws. I agree with the business types who say that this will level the playing field.

Infrastructure
Michael Reuter wrote an interesting op-ed in the Peoria Journal Star about preparing for flooding. The gist: these big floods ARE more common and by making some changes (e. g. giving the river some wetlands where it can spread out a bit in places and therefore take up some of the water volume) we will be better off in the future and, perhaps, even same money in the long run:

[...]2. It’s time for a different, coordinated, system-wide approach that reduces losses while improving the health of great rivers like the Illinois. In the future we must be proactive and innovative. There is a payoff: A study by the National Institute of Building Sciences estimated that for every dollar we spend on hazard mitigation efforts, we save $4 in future damages.

3. Work with nature, not against it. We need dams and levees but nature is an essential part of the solution, too. Large cities are demonstrating how to use nature to slow stormwater runoff with less money than required for hard infrastructure. On the Lower Mississippi, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has opened floodplains and floodways to create room for the river during catastrophic events – an approach that avoided devastating losses to farmlands and urban areas in 2011.

4. Demonstrate potential solutions. While The Nature Conservancy is focused on developing and maintaining critical fish and wildlife habitat at Emiquon, part of our plan is to provide room for the river to help curtail damages during major floods. Every flood is different, but in general, by allowing floodwaters to spread out onto this vast area, Emiquon can help lower flood levels in nearby communities, including Peoria some 40 miles upstream. Even a few inches can prevent millions in damages, but ultimately additional floodplain areas along the Illinois and other rivers are needed. Farsighted public policies would provide fair economic incentives to those farmers and landowners who want to be part of the solution, potentially saving taxpayers substantial money.

Note: the economic calculations aren’t that easy, given that flooding is a stochastic event and we have to take the time value of money into effect: spending X now to prevent damage in the future (thereby saving repair and recovery costs) might save us money in the long run, but how much (if at all) depends on how long it is before the next major flood.

Speaking of disasters: Matthew Yglesias caught a lot of heat by suggesting that not every foreign country have their businesses and factories held up to the same safety standards of the United States. Yes, extra safety can be thought of as a luxury and one can overdo it. But his piece was related to the collapse of a Bangladesh factory which killed 100′s. Here he explains himself and what he was thinking. And yes, the factory in question didn’t follow local codes.

On the other end
A Texas member of the House of Representatives wonders if windmills will lead to more warming of the earth? His reasoning: windmills take energy out of the wind, which cools the planet. Or something.

My beef: why didn’t he run his idea past an engineer or scientist first? Yes, windmills take energy from the wind (and energy to the wind is being supplied by the sun) and it is nice to see what the potential “upstream” and “downstream” energy effects are. But people will look a lot smarter if they consult an expert prior to opening their mouths. Instead, they don’t feel the need to consult.

President Obama: 2013 Correspondence Dinner:

My favorite parts:

The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on Saturday night gave President Barack Obama a chance to take humor-laced shots at those things in Washington that rub him the wrong way — Republicans in Congress, the media, his critics — and he also directed plenty of friendly fire at himself.
“I look in the mirror and say, ‘I’m not the strapping young Muslim socialist that I used to be,’” Obama quipped at one point, reflecting on how he’s aged into a second term. [...]

“Some folks still don’t think I spend enough time with Congress. ‘Why don’t you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?’ they ask,” Obama said. “Really? Why don’t you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?” The line earned Obama one of his loudest applauses of the evening from the 2,700 in attendance at the Washington Hilton.
Along the same lines, Obama vowed to take his “charm offensive” on the road to “a Texas barbecue with Ted Cruz, a Kentucky bluegrass concert with Rand Paul and a book burning with Michele Bachmann.”

Senator McConnell had a sense of humor and posted this photo:

Some Paul Krugman
There is a difference between cherry picking facts that support your cause and ignoring ones that don’t and picking what you write about:

One criticism I face fairly often is the assertion that I must be dishonest — I must be cherry-picking my evidence, or something — because the way I describe it, I’m always right while the people who disagree with me are always wrong. And not just wrong, they’re often knaves or fools. How likely is that?

But may I suggest, respectfully, that there’s another possibility? Maybe I actually am right, and maybe the other side actually does contain a remarkable number of knaves and fools.

The first point to notice is that I do, in fact, perform a kind of cherry-picking — not of facts, but of issues to write about. There are many issues on which I see legitimate debate, from the long-run trend of housing prices to the effects of immigration on wages. And in happier times I would probably write more about such issues than I do, and the tone of my column and blog would be a lot more genteel. But right now I believe that we’re failing miserably in responding to economic disaster, so I focus my writing on attacking the doctrines and, to some extent, the people responsible for this wrong-headed response.

But can the debate really be as one-sided as I portray it? Well, look at the results: again and again, people on the opposite side prove to have used bad logic, bad data, the wrong historical analogies, or all of the above. I’m Krugtron the Invincible!

Am I (and others on my side of the issue) that much smarter than everyone else? No. The key to understanding this is that the anti-Keynesian position is, in essence, political. It’s driven by hostility to active government policy and, in many cases, hostility to any intellectual approach that might make room for government policy. Too many influential people just don’t want to believe that we’re facing the kind of economic crisis we are actually facing.

And Krugman really doesn’t think highly of President Bush:

I’ve been focused on economic policy lately, so I sort of missed the big push to rehabilitate Bush’s image; also, as a premature anti-Bushist who pointed out how terrible a president he was back when everyone else was praising him as a Great Leader, I’m kind of worn out on the subject.

But it does need to be said: he was a terrible president, arguably the worst ever, and not just for the reasons many others are pointing out.

From what I’ve read, most of the pushback against revisionism focuses on just how bad Bush’s policies were, from the disaster in Iraq to the way he destroyed FEMA, from the way he squandered a budget surplus to the way he drove up Medicare’s costs. And all of that is fair.

But I think there was something even bigger, in some ways, than his policy failures: Bush brought an unprecedented level of systematic dishonesty to American political life, and we may never recover.

Think about his two main “achievements”, if you want to call them that: the tax cuts and the Iraq war, both of which continue to cast long shadows over our nation’s destiny. The key thing to remember is that both were sold with lies.

I suppose one could make an argument for the kind of tax cuts Bush rammed through — tax cuts that strongly favored the wealthy and significantly increased inequality. But we shouldn’t forget that Bush never admitted that his tax cuts did, in fact, favor the wealthy. Instead, his administration canceled the practice of making assessments of the distributional effects of tax changes, and in their selling of the cuts offered what amounted to an expert class in how to lie with statistics. Basically, every time the Bushies came out with a report, you knew that it was going to involve some kind of fraud, and the only question was which kind and where.

I do object to the phrase: “rammed through”: this is what people say when they are on the losing side of a vote. On these issues, President Bush was a good enough politician to sell this deal (the economic one).

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/27/the-ignoramus-strategy/

Some science: good stuff…and bad…

The good:

Baby octopi hatching.

Evolution About that fish to land animal transition:

In the hope of reconstructing a pivotal step in evolution — the colonization of land by fish that learned to walk and breathe air — researchers have decoded the genome of the coelacanth, a prehistoric-looking fish whose form closely resembles those seen in the fossils of 400 million years ago.

Often called a living fossil, the coelacanth (pronounced SEE-luh-canth) was long believed to have fallen extinct 70 million years ago, until a specimen was recognized in a fish market in South Africa in 1938. The coelacanth has fleshy, lobed fins that look somewhat like limbs, as does the lungfish, an air-breathing freshwater fish. The coelacanth and the lungfish have long been battling for the honor of which is closer to the ancestral fish that first used fins to walk on land and give rise to the tetrapods, meaning all the original vertebrates and their descendants, from reptiles and birds to mammals.

The decoding of the coelacanth genome, reported online Wednesday in the journal Nature, is a victory for the lungfish as the closer relative to the first tetrapod. But the coelacanth may have the last laugh because its genome — which, at 2.8 billion units of DNA, is about the same size as a human genome — is decodable, whereas the lungfish genome, a remarkable 100 billion DNA units in length, cannot be cracked with present methods. The coelacanth genome is therefore more likely to shed light on the central evolutionary question of what genetic alterations were needed to change a lobe-finned fish into the first land-dwelling tetrapod.
[...]
Another helpful preadaptation is a snippet of DNA that enhances the activity of the genes that drive the formation of limbs in the embryo. The Amemiya team focused on the enhancer DNA sequence because it occurred in the coelacanth and animals but not in ordinary fish. They then inserted the coelacanth enhancer DNA into mice.

“It lit up right away and made an almost normal limb,” said Neil Shubin, meaning that the coelacanth gene enhancer successfully encouraged the mouse genes to make a limb. Dr. Shubin, a member of the team, is a paleontologist at the University of Chicago.

Surf to the New York Times article to read more. Note: Neil Shubin wrote a couple of good books on evolution: Your Inner Fish and The Universe Within. I highly recommend both.

The not so good
See a GIF that shows, in graphic form, how each individual state’s obesity rates went up with the passing years. Read the accompanying article at Slate.

Pesticides: it is no secret that bees are dying. Part of the reason is the weather. It sure appears that part of the reason is new pesticides:

In the last half century, the domesticated honeybee population has declined by about 50 percent. In the United States, this year marks the highest losses of honeybee populations, with some of the biggest beekeepers losing more than 60 percent of their insects. But identifying the culprit has proved daunting. Pathogens, parasites, pesticides, and habitat loss are likely involved. Recently, the potential role of neonicotinoid pesticides has taken center stage, as a flurry of studies has yielded conflicting findings—and the controversy is getting political.[...]

Neonicotinoids—“neonics”—are systemic pesticides broadly used in Europe and the United States. Absorbed by plants from the soil, they eventually reach the pollen and nectar, which is ingested by bees and other insects. Last year, research demonstrated that even low levels of neonics can strongly affect bee behavior. In one study, bumblebees that were exposed to the neonic imidacloprid in the lab, then allowed to forage in the field, had sharply reduced colony growth rates and produced 85 percent fewer queens to found new colonies in the spring. In another study, more than 30 percent of free-ranging honeybees exposed to the neonic thiamethoxam got lost, failing to return to the hive.

The papers were “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” said David Goulson of the University of Stirling in the U.K., a coauthor of the bumblebee study. Previous research implicating neonics in bee decline had been done entirely in the lab. “We wanted to see what happens when the bees have to navigate over realistic distances, find patches of flowers, and bring the food back to the hive,” he said. “We found really striking results.”

So striking that the U.K.’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) decided to reevaluate existing publications. But the agency concluded last month that “the risk to bee populations from neonics, as they are currently used, is low.” Moreover, DEFRA’s own research, also released last month, stated that “laboratory-based studies demonstrating sub-lethal effects on bees from neonics did not replicate realistic conditions, but extreme scenarios.”

But many researchers disagree. “We used exactly the levels found in a treated crop in the field,” said Goulson. Suggesting that the experiments linking neonics to bee decline use doses that are unrealistically high is “part of the smoke screen of lies and confusion that have been thrown up by the agrochemical industry” to defend the use of neonics, he added.
[...]
Independently, the European Commission asked the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) to also review the existing literature on neonics, specifically Syngenta’s thiamethoxam and Bayer’s clothianidin and imidacloprid. EFSA’s report, released this January, concluded that neonics pose an unacceptable risk to bees and that they should not be used on flowering crops. This prompted the E.U.’s ban proposal and fevered campaigning from both sides of the debate.

Now I know some GMO “activists” are concerned about this. The problem here is that the GMO crop isn’t the culprit but rather the pesticides used on those crops. There really is a distinction.

Of course, this area of science is beyond my professional expertise (way beyond it) so I’ll be following this dust up closely.

Budgets, Weather, One’s choices…

Weather
Yes, people’s moods ARE affected by the seasons: (via the New York Times)

A new study using the patterns of Google search queries suggests that mental illnesses flourish in winter and decline in summer.

In both the United States and Australia, researchers found distinct seasonal patterns, high in winter and low in summer, in searches pertaining to anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, eating disorders, depression, suicide, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and schizophrenia. The study appears in the May issue of The American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Searches related to eating disorders varied the most — 37 percent higher in winter than summer in the United States and 42 percent higher in Australia. The smallest variations were in searches related to anxiety: 7 percent and 15 percent more common in winter than summer in the United States and Australia, respectively. The variations persisted after he researchers controlled for seasonal differences in Internet use, mentions of the diseases in news articles and other factors.

Why this happens, and whether it is connected to increased incidence, is unclear, but it is known that varying hours of daylight, variations in physical activity and seasonal changes in blood levels of vitamin D and omega-3 fatty acids can affect mood. [...]

The drought in the southwest: probably not CAUSED by global warming:

Extreme natural events, not man-made climate change, led to last summer’s historic drought in the Great Plains, a new federal study said Friday.
Drought occurred in six Plains states between last May and August because moist Gulf of Mexico air “failed to stream northward in late spring,” and summer storms were few and stingy with rainfall, said a report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“Neither ocean states nor human-induced climate change, factors that can provide long-lead predictability, appeared to play significant roles in causing severe rainfall deficits over the major corn producing regions of central Great Plains,” the report summary said.
The drought in Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota and North Dakota was the worst since record keeping began in 1895, even eclipsing the notorious Dust Bowl droughts of 1934 and 1936, said study leader Martin Hoerling, a NOAA meteorologist.

“The event was rare, and we estimated maybe a once in a couple of hundred years event,” Hoerling said. “But for as extreme as it was, it didn’t have any strong indications for early warning.

[...]

“I’m an advocate of global warming because science tells me that greenhouse gases have warmed the planet by about 1 degree Celsius in the last 100 years. So there’s no question about that,” he said. “But the science also tells that every drought that’s occurring isn’t a result of climate change.”

Politics
Some people’s minds might not be THAT hard to change, if you are willing to stoop to trickery:

Researchers in Sweden have discovered a clever way to trick partisan voters into switching parties, through the application of a simple survey and some slight of hand.

Exploiting a known defect in human psychology called “choice blindness,” researchers writing for the journal PLoS One got 162 voters to fill out surveys pinpointing their views on key issues like taxes and energy, then covertly switched the survey with one created to show the exact opposite answers. Participants were then confronted on why they gave the faux responses.

What the researchers found is astonishing: A whopping 92 percent of respondents did not catch that their answers were manipulated, and only 22 percent of the switched answers were noticed by participants. During questioning after the survey, 10 percent of the subjects actually switched their preference in political party, while another 19 percent of previously partisan voters said they’d become undecided. [...]

Economics/Economy
Bitcoins: ever hear of them? This is a decent article about them and the general nature of money (recommended by Paul Krugman). Upshot: money is about putting your faith in something.

President Obama’s budget: too centrist for many on the left.

I’m not sure what to think. It appears to me that second term Presidents drift somewhat to center during their second terms. I wonder if this is what is happening here.

Transparency and Congress

Workout notes Weights plus 3 miles (5K) on the treadmill.

Weights:
pull ups (5 sets of 10); rested with hip hikes and toe raises
bench: 10 x 135, 4 x 180, 7 x 170 (rested with rotator cuff)
incline: 9 x 140, 8 x 140 (ab sets: 10 x twist, weight crunch, sit backs, 20 x v. crunch, 3 sets each)
dumbbell military, rows; 3 sets each (10 row, 12 military) 50′s military (seated), 65′s rows, left arm missed one rep.
pull downs: 3 sets of 10 x 60
curls: 2 sets of 10 x 30 dumbbells, 10 x 70 machine.

Run: started at 5.7 mph (10:30 at 0), then moved to 1, every 2 minutes increased the incline or speed up to 27 minutes, when I increased the speed every minute. 10:20, 20:07, 29:10; 30:04 for 3.11. Mile 1: 1, mile 2: 2, mile 3: 3 (incline)
I have to play with it to keep from getting too bored.

Fun More on the transparent yoga pants “scandal”:

It’s no surprise that much of the press is having a bit of fun with the story about Lululemon recalling a bunch of wildly overpriced yoga pants because you can see everything the good Lord gave yuppie housewives when they bend over in them. But for all the punning headlines and snark, I feel the lede has really been buried here. What, exactly, has the onslaught of transparent yoga pants taught us about the personal habits of ladies who simply cannot sweat in anything that costs less than my monthly phone bill? While I enjoyed this cheeky debate about whether or not there’s a way to spin “see-through pants” as a good thing, I can’t believe Charlotte Cowles just blew past this tidbit like it was no big deal:

That said, there is the thong issue, which I can understand. The problem with sheer yoga pants isn’t so much that your butt cheeks are visible, but that your thong is. Still, I don’t see why this is a terrible concern, since lots of ladies’ thongs stick out during yoga anyway.
Cowles talks about “your thong” as if nothing is more suitable for exercising than wearing underwear specifically designed to slide between your butt cheeks and attack you at the slightest provocation. What kind of sexualized hell are these poor women living in that they can’t even give up porn-compliant underwear in order to keep their bodies lean and toned for future thong-wearing situations? I was under the impression that yoga was supposed to be a healthful activity, and yet here women are, contorting their bodies in a strap of fabric made to respond by straining painfully at your most sensitive bits. Yoga is supposed to be relaxing, and not reminiscent of a visit to the proctologist.

Here’s an idea for women who really are this worried about having visible panty lines under your yoga pants: Don’t wear underwear. It’s not like flies or ants are going to get in there if you don’t seal it off tightly. If your concern is maintaining maximum sexiness at all times, never fear.

My suggestion: be creative with your undies; wear stripes, smiley faces, hearts, or “team underwear“.

Politics
Don Young (R-Alaska, US House) thinks it is ok to use the term “wetbacks” when talking about migrant workers of Mexican decent.

But this guy is a real idiot:

Richard Dawkins, Admirals, Climate Change, and Krugman’s LOLZ…

Fun
Hot Yoga At Home has posted another video (after a hiatus)

Click on either screenshot to see the 2:45 video. It lifted my spirits.

Science When Admiral Locklear was asked about the “top threat” in the Pacific, he said(Will Rogers in National Security Blog):

Bryan Bender of the Boston Globe reported the statements on Saturday. Here is an excerpt from his article:

Navy Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III, in an interview at a Cambridge hotel Friday after he met with scholars at Harvard and Tufts universities, said significant upheaval related to the warming planet “is probably the most likely thing that is going to happen . . . that will cripple the security environment, probably more likely than the other scenarios we all often talk about.’’

“People are surprised sometimes,” he added, describing the reaction to his assessment. “You have the real potential here in the not-too-distant future of nations displaced by rising sea level. Certainly weather patterns are more severe than they have been in the past. We are on super typhoon 27 or 28 this year in the Western Pacific. The average is about 17.”

Locklear said his Hawaii-based headquarters — which is assigned more than 400,00 military and civilian personnel and is responsible for operations from California to India, is working with Asian nations to stockpile supplies in strategic locations and planning a major exercise for May with nearly two dozen countries to practice the “what-ifs.”

…

[W]hen it comes to pragmatic military planning, Locklear said he is increasingly focused on another highly destabilizing force.

“The ice is melting and sea is getting higher,” Locklear said, noting that 80 percent of the world’s population lives within 200 miles of the coast. “I’m into the consequence management side of it. I’m not a scientist, but the island of Tarawa in Kiribati, they’re contemplating moving their entire population to another country because [it] is not going to exist anymore.”

Then there is this from NASA (via Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub)

WASHINGTON — Vegetation growth at Earth’s northern latitudes increasingly resembles lusher latitudes to the south, according to a NASA-funded study based on a 30-year record of land surface and newly improved satellite data sets.

An international team of university and NASA scientists examined the relationship between changes in surface temperature and vegetation growth from 45 degrees north latitude to the Arctic Ocean. Results show temperature and vegetation growth at northern latitudes now resemble those found 4 degrees to 6 degrees of latitude farther south as recently as 1982.

“Higher northern latitudes are getting warmer, Arctic sea ice and the duration of snow cover are diminishing, the growing season is getting longer and plants are growing more,” said Ranga Myneni of Boston University’s Department of Earth and Environment. “In the north’s Arctic and boreal areas, the characteristics of the seasons are changing, leading to great disruptions for plants and related ecosystems.”

The study was published Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change.

The weather here: wetter than normal, and warmer than normal. We had snow toward the end of February but not much during January. We have fewer snowstorms, but heavier ones along with more total moisture (due to rain).

Education Michelle Rhee goes on and on about the need for “great teachers”. I’ll have to read her book to see if she provides any actual evidence. The review that I linked to doesn’t say whether it does or whether it doesn’t; it does say that she neglects the argument about poverty and early childhood intervention in programs such as Head Start.

I can say this: there is such a thing as talent. For example: the best track coach in the world would have never been able to make a runner out of me; I just don’t have the ability. And I wonder: if kids show up to school after being neglected (in terms of nutrition, parental attention, being read to, etc.), are they all but doomed? I don’t know; I haven’t read the evidence. I have read studies that show things like Head Start make a difference in poor areas. There is more here.

Richard Dawkins: gets a shout out on The Simpsons as a “Devil” character in Ned Flanders’ nightmare (via Friendly Atheist):

Paul Krugman: LOLZ
This is too good to be true. The Dailycurrant published a satire story about Paul Krugman filing for personal bankruptcy: the idea was that he tried to “spend his way out of personal debt”. Most of us know that Dailycurrant is satire (e. g., it had Sarah Palin being appointed to the faculty at Harvard University). But evidently, some right wing outlets DON’T know that it is satire and ran with the story. Paul Krugman stayed silent until one of these “media” outlets bit…and then had LOLZ.

Illinois Climate and logic

I keep up with the Illinois Climatology blog. The long term prediction: a warmer and wetter March and spring for our region.

But that got me to thinking: what if Jesus gets upset because gays are getting married?

Seriously, what sort of world does a consistent “believer” (one who thinks that deities intervene) live in?

That lead me to reflect on something cosmologist Lisa Randall said (quoted in Jerry Coyne’s website):

Randall is an avowed atheist, but has gone back and forth on accommodationism. In a 2009 comment comment on the Edge website, when several public intellectuals were asked to react to my New Republic piece on the incompatibility of science and faith, Randall was an explicit accommodationist. After describing how she met a science-friendly actor on a plane who nevertheless rejected evolution, Randall said this:

This reinforced for me why we won’t ever answer the question that’s been posed. Empirically-based logic-derived science and faith are entirely different methods for trying to approach truth. You can derive a contradiction only if your rules are logic. If you believe in revelatory truth you’ve abandoned the rules. There is no contradiction to be had.

That is true, to a point. Remember the religious types are quite happy to use logic…to dismiss the claims of OTHER religions. Logic simply fails to apply to their own.

Texas Drought, cute frogs and stereotypes…

Texas Drought: check out this series of photos of Caddo Lake: from all the way full to bone dry now. Things have changed since I moved from Austin in 1991.

Frogs yes, this is a frog:

more at Jerry Coyne’s website.

Minimum wage: a better policy idea that you might think; there is data backing this up.

I’m doing this kind of backwards, writing about the politics first. But I wanted to have my intellectual ducks — or rather, my lucky duckies — in a row before taking on the economics. And while I was grubbing around, Mike Konczal produced the perfect post summing it all up.

So what should you know? First, as John Schmitt (pdf) documents at length, there just isn’t any evidence that raising the minimum wage near current levels would reduce employment. And this is a really solid result, because there have been a *lot* of studies. We can argue about exactly why the simple Econ 101 story doesn’t seem to work, but it clearly doesn’t — which means that the supposed cost in terms of employment from seeking to raise low-wage workers’ earnings is a myth.

Discrimination yes, we’ve made a great deal of progress in race relations; no doubt about it, at all. But, unfortunately, some unfair stereotypes remain:

Not even the inside of a store can provide a Black man–in this case, Forest Whitaker— in New York City refuge from “Stop and Frisk.”
This time, however, the NYPD is not behind the act; it was allegedly an employee of the Upper East Side’s Milano Market who carried out the embarrassing pat down. TMZ reports that Whitaker said he was falsely accused of lifting an item off the store’s shelf and subsequently frisked by an employee. An eyewitness told the entertainment site that the Academy Award winner was frisked in plain view of everyone.
Of course, the shake down produced nothing belonging to the store and Whitaker left the establishment angry and embarrassed.
The actor’s rep told TMZ, “This was an upsetting incident given the fact that Forest did nothing more than walk into the deli. What is most unfortunate about this situation is the inappropriate way store employees are treating patrons of their establishment.
“Frisking individuals without proof/evidence is a violation of rights.”
The rep added, “Forest did not call the authorities at the request of the worker who was in fear of losing his employment. Forest asked that, in the future, the store change their behavior and treat the public in a fair and just manner.”

No darker skin male would be surprised by this. However, some of this goes down when one ages; the younger guys have it a bit worse. There seem to be tensions any time people of different races live together, and humans are a bit hard wired to reason inductively.

Corn, Fox and Types of Cluelessness

Workout notes yoga. It was good to see Lynn. Then weights then 4 miles on the treadmill (41:50); I varied the incline a bit (.5 to 4.0) over the last 3 miles.
Weights: upper body only:
rotator cuff (both)
sit ups (5 sets of 20)
pull ups (4 sets of 10)
bench press (disaster!) 10 x 135, 5 x 165, 4 x 165, 1 x 155
rows: 10 x 230, 10 x 210, 10 x 210
pull downs: 3 sets of 10 x 160
curls: (pulley) 3 sets of 10 x 50
military: 7 x 90, 5 x 70 (machine), 15 x 45 seated dumbbell
incline: 9 x 135, 6 x 135 (latter killed me)

sights: two young women in spray pained spandex shorts (especially red ones) but…they were doing PULL UPS! What a welcome change this is; I remember that when I was at the Naval Academy the women were excused from pull ups. I am happy to see the younger women not settling for being weak.

Politics
Yes, Fox News is an organ for the Republican party.

Yes, there is no “there” there to the Ryan budget. Hey, even I can come up with a budget that eliminates the debt and drops taxes to zero…so long as I don’t have to provide details.

Science
So far, there is no evidence that suggests the new corn hybrid plants survive droughts better than the previous plants.

Degrees of cluelessness:

Unfortunately, there are many who think that our country ought to run according to the dictates of their religious book. Please. Saying “the Bible says” or “the Koran says” doesn’t mean anything. It is not evidence of virtue thought it might be evidence that someone else thought that this was virtuous. And…

The future of America may be in jeopardy because of this sin.

We are currently going through numerous difficulties in America such as major storms, fires, flood, earthquakes, potential food shortages because of a major drought. In addition, our economy has been ravaged by scandal and debt.

God said in the Bible, “If I shut up heaven that there be no rain, or if I command the locusts to devour the land, or if I send pestilence among my people; if my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.” (2 Chronicles 7-13 and 14). If Sodom and Gomorrah would have repented and turned from their evil ways, they could have been spared from the destruction that befell them.

I’m sorry, but an adult ought to be embarrassed to spout superstitious nonsense like this in public. We are supposed to be an industrial power, not some third rate theocracy like Iran!

Hence: I am not all that put out by the fact that the fundies might be flocking to Chick-Fil-A. Why? Because it means that they will be where I am not.

More cluelessness

I can’t tell whether this guy is clueless about what President Obama actually said or is being deliberately obtuse (example)

But at least this t-shirt isn’t nearly as moronic as this one:

Of course, of this list of “ills”, President Obama is only responsible for the first one, and you might argue partially responsible for the second one (remember much of the debt/deficit comes from Bush obligations and a lowering of revenues).

It is fine to dislike President Obama for what he actually did.

Then you have this type of cluelessness:

The gentry doesn’t like it when the peasants don’t mind. If this is getting under her skin, I wonder what will happen to her if she is subjected to even half of what Michelle Obama is subjected to.

National Academy of Science video on Climate Change

It is 26 minutes long but pretty good. It takes on many of the “arguments” offered by the deniers:

If I were a climate change denier….

Consider this graph of my time to finish the Wildlife Prairie Park 4 mile XC race (note: two years, the distance was 5K so I used the conversion on those years):

Ok, so what do you see here?

Clearly, this is an upward trend right? My first three years I ran 30, 29 and 28 minutes, and now 10 years (plus) hence I ran a 39 and a 37 minute race. Clearly, most people slow down when they age from 40 to 50+ years right?

But…I didn’t get slower EVERY year….in fact, if you nit pick, you can say:

well, there are 10 data points and 5 times, we see a speeding up (thrice) or no change (twice) from one year to another!
So have the time you are speeding up, half the time, slowing down, so it is all a wash! The science is unsettled!!!

This is EXACTLY the kind of BS that climate change deniers pull.