No Respect….

Workout notes Great weather; walked my Cornstalk classic course in about 58 minutes (by time of day; I had to wait to cross streets, etc.) This was about 13:30 mpm or so on a hilly course; it was just hard enough to get slightly damp with sweat.

I am feeling better, but this mini-workout took something (just a little) out of me. There is no way in Hades I could have done this 7 times in a row (enough to make 30 miles) today. And yes, I’ve walked 50 miles in a row at a faster pace…a LONG time ago.

Later, my wife tells me that one of her former students (in his early 30′s) ran his first half marathon in 1:54. “That’s good, right?” she asks. I reminded her that when I was 39 and 40, I had run a 1:42 (windy; a month after a marathon) and a 1:35 (peaked) and she had yelled “get going Lard-Butt!” at me as I finished (25-30 minutes behind the winner). So, is he (her former student) a lard-butt? “No…that’s different.”

No respect.

Social
I got this e-mail message from Rick Santorum:

Grab the popcorn folks; this will be fun.

Awesomeness

See the earth through Saturn’s rings…and Saturn, with rings, from the earth via the moon:

The view from the other direction:

Grab the Popcorn; Republicans turn on each other…

I am loving this. Some Republicans think that it is ok, and possibly even a good idea, for Republican politicians to denounce Rush Limbaugh:

In February 19 columns for New York Daily News and Politico, MSNBC’s S.E. Cupp and Joe Scarborough had harsh words for major pieces of the right-wing noise machine.

Cupp was responding to a virulent conservative reaction to her past criticism of Limbaugh. On February 14, The New York Times Magazine reported Cupp’s statements on what the Republican Party needs to do to win:

“And we can’t be afraid to call out Rush Limbaugh,” said Goodwin’s fiancée, S. E. Cupp, a New York Daily News columnist and a co-host of “The Cycle” on MSNBC. “If we can get three Republicans on three different networks saying, ‘What Rush Limbaugh said is crazy and stupid and dangerous,’ maybe that’ll give other Republicans cover” to denounce the talk-show host as well.

Cupp wrote in her Daily News column: “Rush’s fans, who call themselves ‘Ditto-heads,’ did not appreciate this. … Some demanded I apologize. Others implied I just committed career suicide. Others still politely suggested I commit actual suicide.”

The MSNBC host refused to apologize and went on to slam Limbaugh for his infamous comments labeling Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke a “slut” for speaking in favor of federal funding for contraception ….

Then you have the tea party zealots vs. the establishment Republicans. The tea party types are furious with Karl Rove because he is setting up a fund to get establishment types past the tea party types in Republican primaries:

A fundraising email from the Tea Party Patriots is causing a stir after it “accidentally” went out featuring a photo of Karl Rove in a Nazi SS uniform. The email, a portion of which can be seen below, issues an attack on Rove for wanting to “crush the Tea Party movement and protect the big-government status quo” directly beside the Photoshopped image.

This is hilarious! Of course, Karl Rove had a less than impressive record in 2012.

I think that, thanks to gerrymandering at the state level and thanks to the spread out nature of rural districts, in terms of population the Republicans will always be overrepresented in the House; our chances of winning that back in 2014 are tough. But unless the quit becoming the party of old men who yell at empty chairs, they are sunk at the national level.

There is a place for smart conservatives but the current Republican party isn’t it. Bring back the Whigs.

If only this were true about President Obama…

Via Right Wing Watch:

Adding to his ever-growing list of fears, conservative commentator Erik Rush suspects that President Obama will work with the American Psychiatric Association to classify Christianity as a mental illness in order to take away their rights and detain them indefinitely. Rush, who ironically encouraged a possible Romney administration to begin prosecuting and disenfranchising liberals, writes that the health care reform law will be the mechanism that will enable Obama to begin targeting Christians for persecution.

Oh good grief. Seriously, President Obama IS a Christian (as much as I wish he were an atheist, he really isn’t). And, as much as I disrespect certain religious beliefs (e. g. that humans were an intentional creation of a deity or that there is some deity keeping score over us), if it came down to a vote to make religion illegal I’d vote “no, keep it legal”. Of course, given that we live in a liberal democracy and that freedom of religion is one of our rights that can’t be voted away (and should remain a protected right), well, it is a moot point anyway.

Snarky responses to things…and something useful

Not all mathematics professors are as useless as I am. Note that Andrew Hicks (Drexel University) created a side mirror (for an auto) which gives a wider view without the usual distortion that the “round mirrors” have:

Now for the snark (and fun):

Proof that God exists!

The Great Frog God (whose existence has been proven) now looks forward to your worship, adoration and money. Mostly money.

(hat tip: Jerry Coyne)

Benghazi Attack Hearing
Colbert is annoyed that the Republicans looked so bad.

Inauguration

Tyrants
No, neither President Obama nor President Bush are/were tyrants.

Snark with Spandex

When I took my psychology course, I learned that some ads could be “too sexy” to be effective: that is, subjects remembered the sexy stuff but not the product. Could this be a case of that?

Well, if the product (what product? ) was aimed at both men and women, this ad is probably wasted on the heterosexual males. But the heterosexual females might relate without being distracted, though I wonder what “183 percent less” means.

Someone thought that I’d like this. Hey, I am always willing to lend a hand.

No, this won’t get me into adventure racing; I’d probably end up torching my knees.

OMG: conservative attack ad blasts Aaron Schock (ad is nonsense but…)

First of all, I am now in IL-17 instead of IL-18 so Mr. Schock no longer represents me in the House. But he is a Bradley U. grad and I’ve seen him in person a few times and have written to him; I’ve always gotten a polite, detailed response.

Now:

Note: whereas the ad is technically correct, uh…you could probably say the same thing about ANY member of Congress; the ad gives you no useful information about Mr. Schock. And yes, it is an “attack” from the right.

What is going on???

My guess: Republican groups are probably trying to make him unelectable in a statewide Republican primary (say for Senate or Governor); call this a “shot across the bow”. Perhaps there is something else that they don’t like about him?

Anyway, if you want to be a Republican politician these days and stay anywhere near sanity…good luck in the primary.

Come on National Review! Blames carnage on “not enough men” at school?

Can you believe this BS?

There was not a single adult male on the school premises when the shooting occurred. In this school of 450 students, a sizeable number of whom were undoubtedly 11- and 12-year-old boys (it was a K–6 school), all the personnel — the teachers, the principal, the assistant principal, the school psychologist, the “reading specialist” — were female. There didn’t even seem to be a male janitor to heave his bucket at Adam Lanza’s knees. Women and small children are sitting ducks for mass-murderers. The principal, Dawn Hochsprung, seemed to have performed bravely. According to reports, she activated the school’s public-address system and also lunged at Lanza, before he shot her to death. Some of the teachers managed to save all or some of their charges by rushing them into closets or bathrooms. But in general, a feminized setting is a setting in which helpless passivity is the norm. Male aggression can be a good thing, as in protecting the weak — but it has been forced out of the culture of elementary schools and the education schools that train their personnel. Think of what Sandy Hook might have been like if a couple of male teachers who had played high-school football, or even some of the huskier 12-year-old boys, had converged on Lanza.

People, even unarmed people, need to fight back against criminals — because usually, no one else will. It took the police 20 minutes to arrive at Sandy Hook. By the time they got there, it was over. Cops and everybody else encourage civilians not to try to defend themselves when they are criminally assaulted. This is stupid advice. There are things you can do. Run is one of them, because most shooters can’t hit a moving target. The other, if you are in a confined space, is throw things at the killer, or try a tackle. Remember United Flight 93 on 9/11. It was a “flight of heroes” because a bunch of guys on that plane did what they could with what they had. They probably prevented the destruction of the White House or the Capitol.

Yes, and I am sure that Fort Hood was full of feminized sissies.

Remember this is National Review and not NewsMax or Fox Nation.

Closed Minds and Approval Ratings Bounces…

Closed Minds
Paul Krugman one the conservative bubble:

Maybe this attitude explains, in part, the amazing debacle of Romney polling. We now know that Romney’s internal polls were wildly wrong, and that, incredibly, he went into Election Day confident of victory. My immediate question is not so much why those polls were wrong, but rather why the campaign didn’t have severe doubts about what its pollsters were telling them.

I mean, anyone who clicked on Nate Silver got a very different view of the race, with the vast majority of public polls portraying an Obama edge. Why wasn’t Romney, or someone else at the top level, asking hard questions about why the internal polls were so different, and why the pollsters believed they knew so much better, not just than the public polls, but than the obviously confident Obama team? Maybe the answer is that nobody on that side even considered clicking on a Times blog! Bear in mind that Romney got in big trouble in one of the debates because he apparently got his Benghazi story from Fox News, with no awareness that Fox’s version wasn’t, you know, true.

All this in turn ties in, I think, with a phenomenon I notice a lot on the right (you can see it often in the comments on this blog): the persistent portrayal of people who disagree with them as marginal figures with trivial support. I think of Bill O’Reilly dismissing anyone who presents data he doesn’t like as “far left”, even when they’re thoroughly mainstream. Or, to be self-centered, the constant insistence by some people that nobody pays attention to what yours truly says; there are, it appears, an awful lot of nobodies out there. I’m not sure I fully understand this phenomenon, but it comes in part from a refusal to pay any attention at all to what other people think.

The point isn’t just that right-wingers believe in their own reality, but that they don’t think it matters that other people have different versions of reality. And no, this isn’t symmetric: liberals don’t consider it unnecessary to know what conservatives are thinking, or dismiss actually influential figures as marginal. Liberal may despise Rush Limbaugh, but they won’t dismiss him as a marginal figure nobody listens to.

Yep: they “know what they know” and no amount of data can change their mind. True: they are careful to guard against “type I error” but this means that they are very prone to “type II errors“.

Example: note how Fox News talks about the stock market:

President Obama’s approval rating
President Obama’s approval ratings impacts his ability to use the bully pulpit. So how is it? He got a post election bounce, but one that is small by previous bounces.

Now Isn’t this Ironic: the Romney team doesn’t like getting “the pink slip” either.

Poor Mitt and Poor Romney team: their own party has “turned on them”. And they don’t like it. Hey, isn’t that the Republican way: pink slip the underperformers?

What goes around, comes around:

The next time you have the misfortune of hearing a Wall Street titan or other one-percenter whine about how their trickle-down contributions are not appreciated by the masses remember this tidbit, courtesy of Garrett Haake at NBC:

From the moment Mitt Romney stepped off stage Tuesday night, having just delivered a brief concession speech he wrote only that evening, the massive infrastructure surrounding his campaign quickly began to disassemble itself.

Aides taking cabs home late that night got rude awakenings when they found the credit cards linked to the campaign no longer worked.

In case you are wondering, this did not have to happen. The Mitt Romney for President entity does not end with Romney’s Tuesday night loss. [...]

These are the Republican Intellectuals…

From the Washington Post (Jennifer Rubin’s Right Turn blog):

There has been much talk about the “lost” voters who backed Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) but who did not turn out for Mitt Romney in 2012. Well, there aren’t that many of them, as it turns out.

As of last Friday, Romney’s popular vote total was 59,142,004, about 800,000 short of McCain’s total. By contrast, President Obama’s has reached 62,615,406. That is about 7 million fewer than he got in 2008. With that perspective, you can understand how a malfunctioning get-out-the-vote operation, misallocation of ad money (due to internal polling assumptions) and failure to define Romney early in the battleground states could be decisive.

Uh, the reason for this? Well, she is comparing the numbers as of a week ago to the FINAL 2008 totals (69.5 to 59.9); the current numbers are: 64.0 to 59.9 with much of the outstanding vote to count coming from heavily Democratic districts in California and New York.

Either she didn’t know what vote remained to be counted (which speaks ill of her competence) or she did (which speaks ill of her intellectual honesty); the point is that her opening words doesn’t inspire confidence in the rest of what she has to say.

I am supposed to respect these people……how???

Note: yes, I know, one can always cherry pick people to make the “other side” sound as dumb as possible. BUT I am referring to the type of people you see in this video (and there are a LOT of them) and not to all Romney voters. And remember Mitt Romney said that those who support President Obama were those who didn’t take responsibility for themselves:

He did say “47 percent, those who were with him…”

(text from here)

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them.

And they will vote for this president no matter what…. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn’t connect. So he’ll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean, that’s what they sell every four years. And so my job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. What I have to is convince the five to ten percent in the center that are independents, that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon in some cases emotion, whether they like the guy or not.

Remember, that is from the “top of the ticket”.