When you lose your “dummy card” in my book (or the Wisdom of Donald Rumsfeld)

I am getting ready to work out and then go to a coffee shop to work on my math paper (I have a paid leave to do research this semester).

Part of my study involves studying this object:

The red circle represents a line going to infinity; the yellow circle represents a “pattern” that is obtained by cutting it with a disk bounded by the red circle, and attaching copies of itself “end to end”. This gives you algebraic data to analyse.

So, what about the title of the post?
I had a conversation with a Sarah Palin supporter (I haven’t undfriended them all) who didn’t like the movie Game Change; they thought it was an “exaggeration” and refuse to believe that she was the way that she was portrayed, despite some top McCain campaign officials saying it was like that.

Then the topic of “common sense” came up. Yes, such “common sense” (a way of reasoning based on everyday life experience) might get you through your day to day routine (e. g. prevent you from getting swindled, help you run a small business, help you in relations with people) but it frequently fails when the situation becomes larger (say, nation wide, or world wide) or unfamiliar (say, science). Here is an example of such a failure:

I don’t blame someone for not knowing a technical area that isn’t their speciality; most of us have to struggle for success in our own fields. I do blame someone for not realizing that other fields have smart people working in them; just because what they are doing doesn’t make sense to you doesn’t mean that what they are doing is nonsense, waste of time, etc.

So, to me: you lose your “dummy card” when you realize “hey, this might seem strange to me, but this is in a different arena than I am used to; maybe I am missing something!”. In other words, when you realize that your “common sense” isn’t enough to compensate for a gross lack of knowledge, training or experience in another field, then you’ve lost your “dummy card” in my book.

Or, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld (NOT one of my favorite persons): “when you realize that there are not only “known unknowns” (variables that you don’t know the value of) but also “unknown unknowns” (variables hidden to YOU that you are unaware of to begin with but that the experts are aware of, as well as some that no one is aware of yet), then you lose your dummy card.

And, no this is not a partisan rant (think: Senator Proxmire Of course, projects should be vetted prior to getting funding, but they should be vetted by knowledgeable people and not “common sense populists”)

Off I go…

Game Change: the film

Ok, I read, er, listened to (while driving) the book Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin.

I just got through watching the HBO movie by the same name; the movie focused on Sarah Palin.

Wow. Yes, this stuff was in the book, but seeing it come alive on the screen gave it a whole different feel.

Some stuff struck me, and it wasn’t merely her absolutely appalling ignorance. It was also that she was not only unaware of her ignorance but that “I know what I know what I know” attitude. If she had a way of seeing something that made sense to her, why…then it must be true.

I admit that I am ignorant of many things; heck I am ignorant of most of mathematics and I know that better than I know anything. I am also aware of the trap of “if it makes sense to me then it must be true”; I’ve had to change my mind about stuff that I was “pretty sure” of. This was true professionally (at times): for example I was so certain of a mathematical fact that I spent two years trying to prove it..and couldn’t. Then I realized: “maybe it is false”..and then I came up with the counterexample (and published that).

Please, Please, Please

Some Republicans: think that Sarah Palin should be the GOP nominee in 2016:

Furthermore, looks count in politics, and Palin at age 48, has it all over her possible competition, including Hillary Rodham Clinton, who will be 69 by election day 2016 and who let someone talk her into adopting the flowing blond locks of a college student, making her look like Brunnhilde in a small-town Wagner production. Men love Sarah Palin, and she loves men.

She’s tough as nails too. After Election 2008, she was supposed to have been through. This year eight of the 14 GOP candidates Palin endorsed for Congress won election or reelection, including tea party favorite Ted Cruz for a Senate seat in Texas.

Sure, there is going to be never-ending nastiness from the left, but she’s already lived through that once. Katie Couric? A has-been. Tina Fey? Her shtick was already wearing thin in 2008.

There are also the snooty East Coast Republican intellectual types, such as Peggy Noonan, who look down their noses at a woman who doesn’t shop at Neiman Marcus and didn’t attend an Ivy League university. But Peggy made a fool of herself calling the election for Romney on Nov. 5. Who’s going to care what she and her ilk have to say next time?

Some Republicans will say Palin has too much baggage from 2008, and we need to look for a new Sarah Palin. But I don’t see what’s wrong with the one we’ve got. Ever since the 1990s, Republicans have been looking for the next Ronald Reagan. Reagan is now revered in bipartisan circles, but during his presidency he was, like Palin, ridiculed by liberals. They cited “Bedtime for Bonzo” and sneered at his no-name college degree.

Sarah Palin is the new Ronald Reagan: charming and affable and unwilling to back down if she’s right. I can’t see what’s wrong with that.

Charlotte Allen writes frequently about feminism, politics and religion.

I say: I agree! Pretty please…run her! (I can’t tell whether this Los Angeles Times editorial is satire or not because some journalists really argue this poorly.)

Shaming racists: someone set up a “rouge’s gallery” of racists who post racists rants on the internet. Good idea or no?

I Oppose Bad Ideas….Hopefully I don’t oppose people.

Workout notes Yoga and an easy 4 mile run (43 minutes); once again the blackbirds left me alone. Did I offend them?

Religion can kill

Just read:

A cleric in Pakistan’s Punjab province has warned that a jihad would be launched against polio vaccination teams at a time when the World Health Organisation has expressed concern at the emergence of new cases of the disease across the country.

Maulvi Ibrahim Chisti of Muzaffargarh district declared the anti-polio campaign as “un-Islamic” and announced at the local mosque that jihad (holy war) should be carried out against the polio vaccination team.

Chisti made the remarks after finding out that a vaccination team had entered Khan Pur Bagga Sher area of Muzaffargarh and asked families to cooperate with the campaign.

The cleric went to the largest mosque in the area and declared that polio drops were “poison” and against Islam, The Express Tribune reported.

He warned that if the vaccination team forced anyone to participate in the campaign, then jihad was “the only option”.

As a result, the polio team returned to Muzaffargarh city without carrying out any immunisation and reported the matter to senior officials.

That is serious business. Superstition can be no laughing matter.

We sometimes see perhaps a more benign version here; I wonder how many girls were forced into a shotgun marriage because her parents didn’t believe in single motherhood and they didn’t want her to have an abortion (early term). No, I don’t have data; I haven’t looked it up. But still…I also wonder how many gay kids are rejected by their parents and family for the same reason?

Yes, you have the occasional kook who lets their kid die instead of giving them life saving medical treatment. The Muslim case is worse in that this denial is being enforced on a group by a cleric who is threatening the people who would be providing the care.

Commentary
Hopefully I keep my fire aimed at what I think are bad ideas rather than at people themselves. Here is an example of what I mean:

I am no fan of Sarah Palin, but this….well…this can be aimed at anyone that one doesn’t like. It says nothing about what is bad about the person’s ideas.

I am happy to ridicule her ideas or the idea that she finds intellectual shallowness to be a virtue rather than a liability. For example, I found the Tina Fey parody to be hilarious.

In the upcoming months, I’ll probably be paying attention to much of what Mitt Romney says. I’ll attack, but hopefully I’ll attack his bad ideas and his political weaknesses (and give respect to his good ideas) but hopefully I’ll refrain from stuff like what is in the above photo.

Two Books: Carter’s “Peace is Possible in the Holy Land” and McGinniss’ “The Rogue”

President Carter’s book
Here is an excerpt and here is a good review.

My take: the story was interesting; it gives a good synopsis of the problem and provides some of the details of the Camp David accord which lead to some Nobel Peace Prizes and peace between Egypt and Israel (who had fought several wars).

Also, Carter points out that the sides are not that far apart on the issues and gives a straight forward way forward…though this proposal is nothing new.

Alas, the irony here is that President Carter has “Holy Land” in his title and that is a big part of the problem. You have two populations of roughly the same size in one region…but unfortunately these people are hung up over the claim to the same set of ruins and rock piles…deemed to be “holy” by their texts of superstitions and myths.

I’ve never seen a better display of the toxicity of religion.

Joe McGinniss’s book on Sarah Palin
Ok, I picked this up at the used book store in the Lakeview Museum as I waited for the Venus transit.

Here is a good review.

What it is: basically, McGinniss interviewed a bunch of people about Sarah Palin and complied what they said. Sure, it was “fun” in a gossipy sort of way, but that is what it struck me as: gossip. Sure, there were some solid details on her service on the Alaska energy commission (it was a farce, but we already knew that), that she overreached in her trooper scandal (old news) and that she used her family as a prop (duh) and that she sunk her political career when she made the Gabriel Giffords assassination attempt about her.

But we knew all that. What is new: some say that she was a bad mother and uninterested in her kids, and he gave a long account about Trig’s birth…and wondered why the media didn’t examine that “story” more carefully.

I’ll let David Corn say what was on my mind:

McGinniss also does a fine job dissecting Palin’s associations with extreme Christian fundamentalism—territory other authors have previously excavated. Palin ran for mayor of Wasilla with one public issue: more bike paths. But McGinniss shows how her real agenda was to transform her town into an enclave of evangelism. When she campaigned for governor, McGinnis writes, “the hardest job her staff had was to keep her quiet about her religious beliefs.” He reports that after being elected governor she fired a group of minority state employees who had worked on her campaign. An aide (named) says, “Sarah just isn’t comfortable in the presence of dark-skinned people.” But what about Glen Rice?

Virtually anything negative one can say about a person who is not a murderer or genocidal war criminal is said about Palin in this book. Of course, that doesn’t make it untrue. Yet as I trekked along on McGinniss’ unrelenting death march to the bowels of Palin’s supposedly dark soul, at times I almost felt sorry for her. How many backstabbing “friends” can one person have? (One “friend” told McGinniss of a snowmobile trip that included both Todd and Sarah and allegedly involved a cocaine binge.) And how much wrath does any biographic subject deserve? At times, I wanted to reach for the hand sanitizer.

McGinniss is a journalist with a long, storied, and controversial career. Dialing back on the Palin-slamming might have yielded a better book—especially considering his run-in (or feud) with the Palin clan. The Rogue is must-cringe reading. It’s a book that puzzles as much as it enlightens. There’s a fine line between “wow!” and “really?”—and McGinniss is working both sides of that divide.

Too many times, McGinniss wrote out the conclusion for the reader instead of letting the reader make his/her own. The book sure read like a hatchet job and I am no more enlightened after reading the book than prior to reading it.

Cranks: economic, mathematical and political

Mathematical cranks If you see an article that claims “an elementary proof of “major result X, Y, or Z”", beware. Here we have yet another “elementary proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem”. Please. Those who have attacked this problem are very smart people; a simple proof would have been discovered a LONG time ago; shame on an editorial board that doesn’t realize this.

Political Cranks Witness the clown-show that is going on in the Republican Presidential primary:

After Sarah Palin was first elevated to from obscure governor of less than 1 percent of the population, her influence over the party became abundantly clear. Other than Obama, nobody pulled larger crowds than her. She became the top small donor fundraiser in the Republican Party. She commanded the biggest speaking fees, sold the most books, and even won herself a top paid spot at Fox News. Her endorsement during the 2010 election cycle was the most coveted in the country. The media proclaimed her ability to “connect” with the most base desires of the GOP as unrivaled. Until Palin’s infamous “blood libel” video permanently damaged her as a national candidate, she represented everything the GOP base wants in an American leader: White, not too smart, against modernity, an ability to ignore inconsistency, a devotion to megachurchdom, hostility to metropolitan areas, and hateful of anyone not like themselves. The fact that she was woefully unprepared to take on the responsibilities of being president was irrelevant. The Republican right doesn’t want a president. They want a televangelist.

While many of us incorrectly predicted a Palin run for the presidency, her imprint on the primary has been obvious. At every turn, Republican primary voters have spoken loud and clear: they want someone who can beat Barack Obama, but they want that person to be as unqualified to be president as possible. While the establishment has decided that Mitt Romney offers their best shot at accomplishing that goal, even they have taken note of just how far right their base has gone. In any other era, the current version of Mitt Romney would have been considered a far right ideologue far outside the American mainstream. The current version of Romney is considered a moderate not simply because of his previous positions, but because the party base has moved far beyond Reagan conservatism and turned into a radical hate group writ large. If it wasn’t for Palin’s imprint on the party base, this election would look far more favorable for any Republican challenger.

Now I’d have to agree with Paul Krumgan that the right wing has always been extreme; it is just that now-a-days we don’t have the moderate Republican to mitigate things.

Economic crankery They don’t even bother with facts anymore:

Many pundits still like to pretend that we’re having something resembling a rational national debate, with members of both parties saying reasonable things given their views about how policy works. And when you find a politician saying something not at all reasonable, there’s a lot of false equivalence — surely both sides do it, even if you don’t have any, you know, actual examples from one side.

Then you encounter something like this: the CBO puts out its latest update (pdf) on the cost of the subsidies in the Affordable Care Act, and the chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee puts out this statement:

House Republican Policy Committee Chairman Tom Price, M.D. (R-GA) issued the following statement regarding the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) updated cost estimate of the president’s health care law. The new CBO projection estimates that the law will cost $1.76 trillion over 10 years – well above the $940 billion Democrats originally claimed.

It’s not just that all of this comes from moving the window — because the Act doesn’t take effect until 2014, the 10-year cost as measured from 2012 is higher than measured from 2010 (and no, this doesn’t mean that the original claims of deficit reduction were cooked; see Ezra.) It’s the fact that the CBO report says this:

CBO and JCT now estimate that the insurance coverage provisions of the ACA will have a net cost of just under $1.1 trillion over the 2012–2021 period—about $50 billion less than the agencies’ March 2011 estimate for that 10-year period

And where does this statement that the estimated costs have fallen, not risen, appear? On the very first page of the report.

Tell me that this is a rational, honest debate. Or if you claim that everyone does it, find me a senior Democrat — not some random pundit or backbencher — making an equivalent howler.

Reading a story: if a story is outrageous, you might want to look again. We see this:

From the Sun-Sentinel:

This Friday, 14 workers wearing orange shirts were called into a conference room, where an executive said he understood there was a protest involving orange, the employees were wearing orange, and they all were fired.

The executive said anyone wearing orange for an innocent reason should speak up. One employee immediately denied involvement with a protest and explained the happy-hour color.

The executives conferred outside the room, returned and upheld the decision: all fired, said Lou Erik Ambert, 31, of Coconut Creek, a litigation para-legal who said he was terminated.

“There is no office policy against wearing orange shirts. We had no warning. We got no severance, no package, no nothing,” said Ambert. “I feel so violated.”

So there we have it. A law firm hears a rumor about a ‘protest’ and takes action.

Outrageous, right? Well…there is more to this story; they were wearing orange to mock the wife of their boss (who tans….imagine trying to mock John Boehner).

Mocking your boss: probably not a good idea.

Inaccurate quoting?

Of course, Sarah Palin complained that here words were twisted. Here is the whole interview.

Sarah Palin’s “outrage” over Bill Maher’s use of the c-word….

Yes, I was at a Bill Maher concert in December, 2010 and there (among other places), he called Sarah Palin a “cunt”. I didn’t like it and said so. I still say that he was wrong to do so.

And yes, he gave 1 million dollars to a pro-Obama SuperPAC.

So Sarah Palin saw an opportunity:

Pres. Obama says he called Sandra Fluke because of his daughters. For the sake of everyone’s daughter, why doesn’t his super PAC return the $1 million he got from a rabid misogynist?

REALLY????

So, is she going to police Rush Limbaugh’s contributions? Oh wait…Super PAC contributions can be private…ooops?

Then again there is this:

But a new book on the presumptive Republican nominee will air perhaps the most shocking angry exchange to date.

The Real McCain by Cliff Schecter, which will arrive in bookstores next month, reports an angry exchange between McCain and his wife that happened in full view of aides and reporters during a 1992 campaign stop. An advance copy of the book was obtained by RAW STORY.

Three reporters from Arizona, on the condition of anonymity, also let me in on another incident involving McCain’s intemperateness. In his 1992 Senate bid, McCain was joined on the campaign trail by his wife, Cindy, as well as campaign aide Doug Cole and consultant Wes Gullett. At one point, Cindy playfully twirled McCain’s hair and said, “You’re getting a little thin up there.” McCain’s face reddened, and he responded, “At least I don’t plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt.” McCain’s excuse was that it had been a long day. If elected president of the United States, McCain would have many long days.

Emphasis mine.

So I am sure that Ms. Palin would have nothing to do with Senator McCain, right?

Obama Superpac: keep the money.
Mr. Maher shouldn’t have done what he did, but he is no Rush Limbaugh.

How Wingnuts see us and other topics…

Workout notes I stayed up too late to make yoga, but I did make my weight workout and I did run some on the track.
Weights: rotator cuff, rows, pull downs, curls; I took one warm up set and did two sets of: 10 x 230 rows, 10 x 50 curls (pulley), 10 x 160 pull downs. Bench and pull ups (mixed with 8 sets of 20 sit ups): 10 x 135, 4 x 175, 3 x 175, 10 x 155; pull ups: 10, 10, 7, 6 (last two: shoulder friendly grip).
Incline: 8 x 135, 7 x 135 (dumbbell rotator cuff; 3 sets)
Military (seated): 2 sets of 15 x 45 pounds (a step up; I can finally swing the 45′s into position)
Stretches….then 5 miles on the track (.2 mile cool down walk on the mill)
9:41, 8:56, 8:54, 8:44, 8:43 (45:01….grrr); one young woman ran about 2-3 miles and blew me away but I held my own with the rest of them. This was one of my better workouts. I did have some tingles though; I’ll have to do hip hikes throughout the day.

Mr. Romney: is the President building entitlements…or cutting them? Via Paul Krugman:

“This week, President Obama will release a budget that won’t take any meaningful steps toward solving our entitlement crisis,” Romney said in a statement e-mailed to reporters. “The president has failed to offer a single serious idea to save Social Security and is the only president in modern history to cut Medicare benefits for seniors”

.

Yep, Obama has failed to resolve the problem of excessive entitlement spending; furthermore, he’s cutting entitlement spending!

Conservative thinking
If only people behaved optimally all of the time… that is the usual conservative reaction to “well, people should still stay in high school even if jobs are scarce”. Yes, they probably should, but one can measure how humans behave in a statistical manner.

Example: yes, in theory, “abstinence only” sex education should work…but in the large, humans simply don’t behave that way (ask Sarah Palin about her kids). People shouldn’t drive under the influence either (ask the first President Bush about his son…the second President Bush). But a percentage of humans will behave non-optimally and any analysis of “these conditions correlate with that behavior” has to take that into account.

How the Wingnuts see us:

My response:

1. I don’t like any religion (I am an atheist). I believe in religious freedom but that does NOT include a “right” to hold someone else a captive audience to your beliefs, prayers, nor does it give you a pass from following the same rules for your industry.

2. Yes, I believe in freedom of speech even if it offends me. Of course, that applies to governments and not private entities.

3. No, I don’t believe that corporations are evil. I just want them to “play fair” and …

4. No, the 1 percent aren’t evil; I just think that they should pay Clinton tax rates (and some of them agree with me!)

5. LOL! Diversity means “different from the norm”, no?

6. That is stupid; colleges (most anyway) are non-profit. Besides, see 3: corporations hire our graduates and make stuff that I use. Wanting them to “play fair” isn’t hating capitalism.

What they didn’t do and what they didn’t say….

Workout notes
Slept in but made the 7 am swim. 1000 in 19:38 (way slow), 5 x 100 on 2 (1:50-1:53), 3 x 100 IM.
The swim felt pleasant but wasn’t much exercise (just over 1 mile)

Mormon Practice: Baptizing the Dead
I was a bit surprised to see atheists being upset over this:

Gawker’s substantial Mormon readership has come through for us: Two readers have sent us confirmation that Edward Davies, Mitt Romney’s militantly atheist father-in-law, was indeed posthumously converted to Mormonism by his family, despite the fact that when he was alive he regarded all religions as “hogwash.”

Just to set the record straight: this is NOT lying about a “death bed conversion”; no one is claiming that this man DID anything. And no, this isn’t desecrating a burial place as nothing physical was done. (I said these two things right off of the bat because I got remarks such as these).

My question: why does any atheist care who does what ceremony in whose name? Sure, right now, I’d be a bit concerned if some religious leader condemned me to death in some spiritual sense but ONLY because some whack job might attack me. But aside from direct physical acts, who cares? Really…those nut jobs who baptized the dead are DOING NOTHING AT ALL. It is the same as some kid pretending to cast a spell or something. Really….

They didn’t say that
Though I sometimes talk politics, I don’t like it when people repeat stuff that isn’t true. One of the favorite memes of the polyester pants set is that Al Gore said that he “invented the internet”. He never said that. He was clearly talking about policy and legislation and while you might argue that he took too much credit, he clearly was not talking about “inventing it”.

But this is not a left-right issue.
Dan Quayle never intimated that people in Latin America speak Latin; this meme came from a comedian’s joke.

And no, Spandex Sarah (Sarah Palin) never said that “she could see Russia from her house” though she did (correctly) say that you can see a part of Russia from a part of Alaska. The “seeing Russia from her house” was a Tina Fey joke.
This is what she really did say (which was bad enough):

Living in a Bubble
Joe Paterno died recently. My view: he was a good coach who did a lot right (gave back to community, got his players to graduate, etc.) but what he did wrong (NOT calling the police) was inexcusable; he should have been fired IMHO. It appeared to me that he was more concerned with his job and legacy than stopping a horrendous wrong.

Nevertheless, at the funeral, you are seeing much sentiment at how Paterno was giving a raw deal (example, example)

The pro-Paterno people are living in some bubble, I think. My guess is that this will hurt them in the long run; note that this year the got the Big Ten 7′th pick (8′th if you count the Michigan Sugar Bowl team) despite their fine on the field record. Some of that was the scandal, but this type of blind loyalty to Paterno isn’t helping.