Anti-Science is Alive and Well

People prefer to "believe". They don't like slow and painful study and rational thinking, calculation, experimentation, theory building aka "science". That requires 20 years of education and only really dedicated and really smart people can access the edges of science these days. That sidelines the masses and they don't like that one bit.

So people believe in magic. They believe in "spirit" and "soul" and the "power of positive thinking". They believe in "holistic medicine". They have their religions.

I worked in a high tech company and was appalled to discover that even people with PhDs in science believed in such madness as "homeopathy". These were smart people, well educated people who had worked hard to understand technology and science and yet they gave in to magical thinking.

Here's what magical thinking will "achieve". From Yahoo! News:

Five share $340,000 in holistic healer case that left woman a quadriplegic

The Canadian Press – Fri, 11 Nov, 2011

RICHMOND, B.C. - Five B.C. residents, including a woman nearly killed by arsenic poisoning and left a quadriplegic, are sharing more than $340,000 as a result of a settlement involving a self-proclaimed holistic healer.

Money from the settlement came from property seized from the defendant and sold under the B.C. government's civil forfeiture legislation.

The government says the defendant, Selena Tsui, was not charged in the case after the Crown concluded there was no substantial likelihood of conviction on any criminal charges.

The government says between 2000 and 2004, Tsui told at least a dozen people she was qualified to diagnose and treat diseases, including mental conditions, when in fact she had no formal training.

One of her clients, identified only as E.L., began taking a concoction she believed contained mushrooms and herbs, but had extreme arsenic levels, and she suffered respiratory and renal failure, cardiac arrest and paralysis.

She was taken to hospital, put on life support and given a five per cent chance of survival, but her life was eventually saved.

The real world is complicated. It isn't a simple morality story. It isn't something that "a good heart" and a "strong will" can conquer. It requires hard work, sophisticated technology, advanced math, and a long education in a specialist area of science. But people love quacks with no training yet who have an "aura" about them, or can "channel spirits", or have a commanding presence and claim a direct line to "God".

Right now, Europe and the United States are in the hands of quacks. Serious economists know that austerity budgets only prolong a depression. A Keynesian approach is needed. But Obama and the European leaders would rather call in the witch doctor to shake bones over the economy and prattle some debt reduction "confidence building" mumbo jumbo rather than rely on the math, the models, and the sophisticated economic theories (the ones prior to the Chicago school and "freshwater" economists turned into lunatics and ran economics off the rails).

It is tragic living in a world where some plague is raging and the scientists and the doctors have the technology to manipulate DNA to create a vaccine to cure it, but the "authorities" (political, religious, civic, etc.) all cry out for "prayer" and "abstinence" and "a submission to God's will" or some "alternative medicine" rather than to science to cure the plague.

We live in a dark time. Carl Sagan wrote a book in 1995 before he died in which he worried about this modern anti-science trend. The book was called The Demon-Haunted World. We live in that magical thinking, irrational, and anti-science world. Millions die every year because of this stupidity. That is what people who want "quick solutions" have created by preferring magical thinking to the difficult path of rationalism and science. Tragic.

Krugman Reviews the State of the "Recovery"

From Paul Krugman's NY Times op-ed column in the NY Times:

But it’s worth stepping back to look at the larger picture, namely the abject failure of an economic doctrine — a doctrine that has inflicted huge damage both in Europe and in the United States.

The doctrine in question amounts to the assertion that, in the aftermath of a financial crisis, banks must be bailed out but the general public must pay the price. So a crisis brought on by deregulation becomes a reason to move even further to the right; a time of mass unemployment, instead of spurring public efforts to create jobs, becomes an era of austerity, in which government spending and social programs are slashed.

This doctrine was sold both with claims that there was no alternative — that both bailouts and spending cuts were necessary to satisfy financial markets — and with claims that fiscal austerity would actually create jobs. The idea was that spending cuts would make consumers and businesses more confident. And this confidence would supposedly stimulate private spending, more than offsetting the depressing effects of government cutbacks.

...

But the doctrine has, nonetheless, been extremely influential. Expansionary austerity, in particular, has been championed both by Republicans in Congress and by the European Central Bank, which last year urged all European governments — not just those in fiscal distress — to engage in “fiscal consolidation.”

And when David Cameron became Britain’s prime minster last year, he immediately embarked on a program of spending cuts in the belief that this would actually boost the economy — a decision that was greeted with fawning praise by many American pundits.

Now, however, the results are in, and the picture isn’t pretty. Greece has been pushed by its austerity measures into an ever-deepening slump — and that slump, not lack of effort on the part of the Greek government, was the reason a classified report to European leaders concluded last week that the existing program there was unworkable. Britain’s economy has stalled under the impact of austerity, and confidence from both businesses and consumers has slumped, not soared.

Maybe the most telling thing is what now passes for a success story. A few months ago various pundits began hailing the achievements of Latvia, which in the aftermath of a terrible recession, nonetheless, managed to reduce its budget deficit and convince markets that it was fiscally sound. That was, indeed, impressive, but it came at the cost of 16 percent unemployment and an economy that, while finally growing, is still 18 percent smaller than it was before the crisis.

So bailing out the banks while punishing workers is not, in fact, a recipe for prosperity. But was there any alternative? Well, that’s why I’m in Iceland, attending a conference about the country that did something different.

If you’ve been reading accounts of the financial crisis, or watching film treatments like the excellent “Inside Job,” you know that Iceland was supposed to be the ultimate economic disaster story: its runaway bankers saddled the country with huge debts and seemed to leave the nation in a hopeless position.

But a funny thing happened on the way to economic Armageddon: Iceland’s very desperation made conventional behavior impossible, freeing the nation to break the rules. Where everyone else bailed out the bankers and made the public pay the price, Iceland let the banks go bust and actually expanded its social safety net. Where everyone else was fixated on trying to placate international investors, Iceland imposed temporary controls on the movement of capital to give itself room to maneuver.

It is tragic that all the countries around the world are in the grip of right wing ideology and simply refuse to use the lessons learned in the Great Depression and nicely summarized by John Maynard Keynes: Central government must lean against the wind. During good times have a surplus for a rainy day. During bad times, spend to replace the missing spending by the private sector.

Austerity appeals to the bond holders because it ensures the "soundness" of the money (and even promotes deflation) which gives the holders of cash an even greater share of the wealth. Meanwhile, the debters burden gets more crushing. Normally you would inflate you way out of a depression because you want to encourage those holding cash to either spend it or invest it.

The "policies" of 2008 to now have been to reward the Wall Street miscreants while punishing the innocent. It is an insane policy. It was the George Bush policy and now it is the Barack Obama policy. Shame!

A Right Wing Tea Party Partisan Tries to "Characterize" the Occupy Wall Street Demonstration

Here is Saturday Night Live's Victoria Jackson "interviewing" various people in the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. She thinks she has all the answers but she simply proves that she is a narrow-minded bigot spoon-fed on right wing Tea Party ideas. When she talks to protesters she isn't interested in "dialog". She is trying to do "gotcha" questions and ignores their answers to "lay on" another of her "I've got the truth and you are misguided so how do you respond to this" questions. I find this video very instructive. It explains how the ultra-rich have used credulous "little people" as their ideological foot soldiers to hold power for all these years:

More Proof that Education in America is Failing

From Dean Baker's Beat the Press blog:

Speaker Boehner Commits Huge Gaffe, Can't Do Simple Arithmetic

Republican House Speaker John Boehner committed an enormous gaffe yesterday according to a Washington Post article. Mr. Boehner claimed that:

"Our unemployment rate has been higher than 8 percent for more than 21 / 2 years, far above what the Obama administration promised with the ‘stimulus.'”

Actually, the stimulus did not promise to keep the unemployment rate below 8 percent as Mr. Boehner would know if he ever looked at the administration's discussion of its stimulus proposal at the time. The report claimed that the stimulus as proposed would create between 3-4 million jobs by the end of 2010. However, the bill passed by Congress was substantially smaller than the stimulus requested by the president. The expected effect would therefore be in the range of 2-3 million jobs.

However, the economy was in much worse shape than the administration recognized at the time. It expected the unemployment rate to peak at 9.0 percent even without any stimulus. At the time, the economy was losing close to 700,000 jobs a month. The unemployment rate had already risen to 9.4 percent by May when the first stimulus related checks were just going out the door.

The best evidence available shows that the stimulus worked almost exactly as planned, creating 2-3 million jobs. However, the economy needed 10-12 million. The Obama administration's error was in underestimating the severity of the downturn, not overpromising for the benefits of the stimulus.

This is apparent to people who can read and know arithmetic. The Washington Post should have highlighted the fact that Mr. Boehner apparently either has difficulty with arithmetic or was deliberately trying to mislead the public.

Call me cynical, but I believe that somebody who gets a B.A. degree in Business Administration from the private Xavier University probably has math skills greater than a 5th grader. So my best guess is that Boehner is lying through his teeth for partisan advantage. He is part of the problem and not the solution. It is liars and cheats like Boehner who are destroying America.

I don't think education in America is failing. I think politics and politicians in America are failing. They are sold out to Wall Street and the ultra-rich. They politicians are bought and sold among the elite to do the bidding of the elite but hide behind stories that twist the truth and confuse the electorate.

Peak Oil

For the doomsday crowd that follows regular predictions of gloom-and-doom, the "peak oil" story has been a good one.

The typical "picture of doom" is something like this from Wikipedia:

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That picture is pretty convincing. We are on the slide to perdition. Only a bleak and hopeless future awaits us...

But wait a second. Here is a more recent graph from an article in the Houston Chronicle:

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The article goes on to report a "new peak" in production:

North America appears headed for an oil renaissance, with crude production expected to hit an all-time high by 2016, given the current pace of drilling in the U.S. and Canada, according to a study released by an energy research firm this week.

U.S. oil production in areas including West Texas' Permian Basin, South Texas' Eagle Ford shale, and North Dakota's Bakken shale will record a rise of a little over 2 million barrels per day from 2010 to 2016, according to data compiled by Bentek Energy, a Colorado firm that tracks energy infrastructure and production projects.

Canadian crude production is expected to grow by 971,000 barrels per day during the same period, with much of the oil headed for the U.S.

Combined, the U.S. and Canadian oil output will top 11.5 million barrels per day, which is even more than their combined peak in 1972.

Goldman Sachs has estimated the U.S. could move from being the No. 3 oil producer behind Saudi Arabia and Russia to the No. 1 spot by 2017.

It's a reversal of the steady downward production trend that started after 1971, when U.S. oil production peaked around 9.5 million barrels per day.

I know this is a shock and disappointment to the end-of-days crowd. But this is an old story. If you followed the Club of Rome with its best seller in the early 1970s, the book "Limits to Growth" you've seen this tale before. It is so convincing. The end is nigh! Repent!

But human ingenuity keeps foiling that tale of gloom and despair. It is so seductive to believe that there is no hope and we must give up our sinful "modern ways" and go back to our pastoral past when we were disease ravaged and lived an average of 34 years. But those pesky scientists and technologists keep ruining out return to a "golden age" by creating new techniques or helping us conserve or producing a new substitute. This story is older than civilization. But the siren call of "repent! the end is nigh!" keeps winning because it appeals to our dark side that expects us to be punished for "having it too good".

The Club of Rome pessimists are still in business and no doubt still selling their siren song of "the end is nigh!". But you are better off reading "The Ultimate Resource" by Julian Simon. Unlike the Club of Rome, Simon has been right more than wrong. But unlike the Club of Rome, Simon is ignored by the press. It is so much easier to sell papers with the story of doom-and-gloom. Nobody wants to hear that we will "muddle through" or that we can count on "human ingenuity". We want morality plays. We want punishment for sinful ways, the excesses of the past. Nobody wants dull fact, reasoned judgement, and a scientific attitude. It doesn't sell.

Press Coverage of the "Occupy Wall Street" Demonstration

Here are some bits from a good post by Allison Kilkenny in The Nation where she questions the "official media" coverage of this demonstration:

Over the weekend, my inbox exploded with angry messages from people who had just read this New York Times article (though it reads more like an op-ed) about the Occupy Wall Street protest. Ginia Bellafante gives a devastating account of the event’s attendees, depicting them as scatterbrained, sometimes borderline-psychotic transients.

Bellafante, who is not a reporter but a columnist for the Times, offered a representation of the protesters that is as muddled as the amalgam of activists’ motives she presents in the span of the article. She first claims a Joni Mitchell lookalike named Zuni Tikka is a “default ambassador” of the movement. In one of the following paragraphs, she then describes the protest as “leaderless.” Either the people at Zuccotti Park have official leadership or they don’t (they don’t, by the way). So either Tikka is an official spokesperson who warrants first-paragraph favorability, or Bellafante’s own biases persuaded her to put the kooky girl dancing around in her underwear in the spotlight.

The more serious aspect of the protest—the “scores of arrests” that occurred over the weekend including the arrests of more than eighty people, several of whom the police first penned and then maced—is offered as an aside in Bellafante’s article (she doesn’t mention the macing at all). By the way, none of the young women in the following video are in their underwear.

Bellafante goes on to (rightfully) wonder why the response to the widening class divide hasn’t come in the form of a more serious movement. A proposed hypothesis never emerges, even though Bellafante almost stumbles across one when she describes a young man who is stopping by only in “fits and spurts” because his mother fears he’ll be tear-gassed by the police. It sounds as though Bellafante is on the cusp of critiquing the US police state that has completely terrified the activist community into submission, but then she retreats.

The main bone the article wishes to pick is the scattered ideologies of the attendees—a fair point. However, Bellafante never attempts to do the job of real journalism here, which is to use this slice of life to help her readers understand the world around them. Instead, she comes across as a rubbernecker leering at a particularly bloody wreck.

Go read the whole post. There is a lot more detail and points to consider (plus embedded links).

I remember my experience of demonstrations in the 1960s and 70s. Sure enough, there are a good number of kooks in a crowd. Even the idea of "demonstrating" is felt to be somehow wrong in a democracy where supposedly the people's voice is captured in the election. But elections presuppose and informed public which in turn presupposed an open and effective press. But these are rarely in place, so the role of a demonstration is to kick the system in the rump to force the press to pay attention. This in turn gets the wider public thinking about a topic that heretofore was ignored.

Demonstrations are important and effective. But a journalist who holds them up as a laughingstock is working hard to realize the right wing fantasy of shrinking government down to a size where it can be strangled in a bathtub. If you can turn the public into sleepwalkers by making demonstrations a joke, you will get the "government" you deserve, a robbers' haven where self-interested crooks run the show.

Here's the bottom line for Kilkenny:

... Bellafante reaches a far, far larger readership, and the ones who dismiss protesters always do because their corporate overlords love depicting protesters as flower-waving, stoned-out-of-their-gourds hippies. If you think those are the only people on your side, why get off the couch at all?

This rubbernecking style of journalism is particularly dangerous right now because it amounts to criticizing a burning house for the color of its curtains. The curtains might be brash, ostentatious and completely unhelpful in maintaining the overall flow of the home’s ambiance, but it’s perhaps not the most pertinent detail of the moment. Here’s a more pressing question: Why are the people Bellafante described in her article the ones left behind?

The teargas aside starts to tap into something important: how the police state and its domestic weaponry and bureaucratic assist with the needs for permits to do anything in protests have successfully crippled the activism community. Activists are afraid. You can smell it in their midst. They talk about the constant presence of agent provocateurs and undercovers at every protest. They share battle stories of being abused by the police, like being tazed or held so long in makeshift police pens that they had to defecate in their clothing. And these are the brave ones that still show up to the protests.

It’s not mere paranoia. We know for a fact that the FBI monitors activism groups, and this practice reached a frenzied level during the Bush administration years. These intimidation practices continue under President Obama in the form of raids.

So much for democracy in America. So much for America having a future.

There's a reason why the founders of the America Republic made such blunt statements as the need to "water the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots". Those who run a society are not interested in protests or demonstrations. They will always paint them as loonies and malcontents. Real democracy unfortunately requires a real struggle. The trick is to work for change without being corrupted by the dark forces that those in power use against you. The real task is to remain hopeful and sane while the powerful paint you as a nihilist and crazy.

The Insanity of Anti-Technology

Most people are abysmally ignorant of the role of science and technology in today's world. They have wildly romantic images of "organic gardening" and "back to nature" view of life. They are terrified of pesticides and absolutely ignorant of the fact that your veggies are packed with lethal concoctions natural to the plant as its defense against insects and other animals tempted to nibble on it.

These people think they can give up on nuclear power because it is dangerous while not aware of the deaths from traditional energy sources. They don't understand the trade-offs that must be taken in all aspects of our life. Mostly these are the coddled children of middle and upper class families, young adults never responsible for feeding and clothing themselves. But they get sucked up in a "great cause" of anti-science.

One of the most laughable was the "frankenfood" movement based in Europe. These people are convinced that if you transfer genes from one species to another you are upsetting "God's plan" and have created a great sin. They see genetically modified food as both dangerous and sinful. But they are completely ignorant of science and the fact that all life is chock-a-block full of "foreign genes" transported by viruses. This has been happening for a couple of billion years. The genetically modified food is perfectly safe unless the experiment was to move toxin-generating coding into the new species. But no food researcher is interested in poisoning people. They are trying to create stronger, better crops, e.g. move vitamin A into rice crops to fight disease. From Wikipedia:

Approximately 250,000–500,000 children in developing countries become blind each year owing to vitamin A deficiency, with the highest prevalence in Southeast Asia and Africa.

Again from Wikipedia:

Golden rice is a variety of Oryza sativa rice produced through genetic engineering to biosynthesize beta-carotene, a precursor of pro-vitamin A in the edible parts of rice.

This is the horror of "frankenfood"? This is engineered food to save half a million children per year from blindness.

The madness of anti-science was seen in the Unabomber. He was judge, jury, and executioner for his perceived "wrongs" of scientific researchers. Nobody appointed him. He had to pass no tests or get a license to go on his murderous spree. Rather than work within the system and try to set up regulations for ensuring safe research, he went on a killing spree. This is the "saviour" of mankind. Just as Osama Bin Laden was the "saviour" of a purist Islam. Self-appointed fanatics gone murderous and feeling saintly about their vicious trade.

Now I come to the purpose of this post. You should read about the latest gang of murderous anti-science fanatics and their handiwork. Here is a bit from an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about attacks on nanotechnology researchers in Mexico by self-appointed "saviours" of humanity:

A package bomb that injured two professors at a university here this month is the latest in a string of attacks by a new terror group inspired by the Unabomber. Its violent actions have put campuses across Mexico on alert and caused nanotechnology researchers worldwide to take precautions with their mail.

Nanotechnology was singled out as a target for the attacks in manifestos posted on the Web by the group behind the bombs, which calls itself "Individualities Tending Toward Savagery." It has been linked to attacks in France, Spain, and Chile, and to a bomb sent earlier this year to a scientist at another Mexican university who specializes in nanotech. An analyst who helped identify the Unabomber—who turned out to be a former professor—says the posts show signs of someone well-educated who could be affiliated with a college.

The online rants credit the Unabomber as an inspiration. ...

...

In the group's online post (written in Spanish) claiming credit for the latest bombing, the terrorists complained about the growing number of nanotechnology experts in Mexico, which it estimated at 650. "The ever more rapid acceleration of this technology will lead to the creation of nanocyborgs that can self-replicate automatically without the help of a human," it said.

...

Many people in the region are skeptical of science, he adds. "In our country, and in the whole Latin American region, we put more faith in the supernatural than in reason. This poses fatal consequences, making people view researchers in science and technology with suspicion and hate, as inhuman individuals, who work against society and as the exploiters and destroyers of natural resources."

These anti-science fanatics can't be bothered with facts. No researcher that I know of is trying to develop this kind of dystopian technology. Everybody I know is working to make a better world, like the first fellow who rubbed two sticks together to create fire. Sure, I'll bet there were those sitting around the resulting campfire speculating that some mad caveman would use this "new technology" to set afire all the forests of the world and destroy earth. Maybe they even plotted to kill the fire-starter and ensure the knowledge was lost because they saw it as a clear danger to the lovely lifestyle of sitting in the dark and cold eating raw meat and uncooked veggies.

People need to realize that science is what gives us the comfortable life we have. Those who are anti-science should put their energies into going "back to the land" and living with a "technology-free" lifestyle and quit trying to use murderous plottings to kill of the rest of us that are quite happy to benefit from fire, metal working, the wheel, the agricultural revolution, modern medicine, etc.

Two things astound me about these fanatics:

1. Their temerity to act on own behalf to bring their twisted vision of the future to reality. Who appointed them? What right have they?


2. The abysmal ignorance of these fanatics of the role of science in technology in modern life. Their blind ideology puts ignorance on a pedestal and they worship it. They use religion or just crass stupidity as justification for their evil actions without understanding what they claim to oppose or what the consequences of their actions truly are.

In my youth I was naive and thought the aberration of the Nazis with their ignorant anti-science views (the condemnation of "Jewish science" and their idiotic race theories) was a one-time thing. But as I get older I see more and more outbreaks of this kind of insanity. What truly astounds me is that these deluded people convince themselves they are the "benefactors" of humanity by going on a killing spree (just as Osama Bin Laden saw himself as the saviour of Islam by going on a jihad against the West). Insane!

What's Ahead for the Lesser Depression in the US?

Here are some graphs from a paper by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, the leading experts on financial panics and their ensuing depressions. These graphs are from an update of a paper from the Oregon Office of Economic Analysis entitled "This Time is Different, An Update".

The first graph show how the 2008 financial panic has not created a traditional recession, something caused by the Federal Reserve raising interest rates to cool off an overheated economy.

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The second shows how this 2008 "Lesser Depression" in the US compares to other depressions caused by bank panics:

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The above should put fear into Obama and the Republicans. But they don't read economics, at least no the stuff written by honest & intelligent economists.

Misdirection and Ignorance from the Political Right

Here is a bit from a post by Mark Thoma in his Economist's View blow using some material sent to him by Gary Burtless:

A couple of hours after talking to an ABC correspondent about the woeful job numbers and what might be done to improve them, I was in the Bloomberg TV studios debating a guy from Heritage. He went on for several minutes about the damage being done by high taxes, excess regulation, business "uncertainty" about future tax hikes and regulatory burdens. I asked Bloomberg's host whether he was aware that corporate profits relative to national income had just hit a 60-year peak? He had heard rumors to that effect. Was he aware that taxes on corporate earnings were at a 60-year low? The Heritage guy had heard that might be the case.

Then why was uncertainty about taxes and the future burden of the Affordable Care Act holding back business investment and hiring right now? If managers thought taxes or regulatory costs might go up in the future, wouldn't it make sense to take advantage of today's low taxes and lower burdens to invest and hire today? According to the "uncertainty" argument, businesses are fearful they might face high taxes and extra health costs in 2016 or 2018. Shouldn't they expand hiring right now and scale back employment when they actually face higher costs (if they ever do)?

The "tax uncertainty" and "regulatory uncertainty" arguments would make more sense if, say, taxes were already high and might be going higher or regulatory burdens were heavy and might be getting heavier. But when taxes are at a 60-year low and the regulations are pretty much the same as they were in the 1990s boom, the argument makes no sense at all. As we used to say down on the farm, you should "make hay while the sun shines." In other words, if you think it's going to rain later in the week, it strengthens the case for cutting and baling right now.

The odd thing is, when businesses are asked why they're not expanding, "high taxes" and "heavy regulatory burdens" and "tax uncertainty" don't feature as prominent answers. They mostly say they don't see good prospects for extra sales. But right-wing economists have their talking points, even if they make little sense, and they're sticking with 'em. Another of their favorites is "... executives tell me they can't find good candidates for the job openings they have." Don't get me started on that one.

Sadly, the American people haven't caught on that the political right is simply lying about the economy and government. The right is blinded by its ideology and simply refuses to open their eyes and see reality. As long as they do that, America will continue to be caught in a decades long depression.

This is what eating your own seed corn and cutting your own throat looks like:

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The Quality of "Leadership" in US Presidential Candidates

Obama has shown himself to be a poor leader who pleads with the electorate to force him to lead. He has no program. When it comes to big issues he "compromises" himself into advocating and accepting Republican positions.

But the Republicans present an even bigger problem for American voters. The candidates on the right have only a tenuous grasp of reality and live in an ideological fantasy land. Here is a bit from an article in the USA Today newspaper:

GOP presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann said today that Americans "fear the rise of the Soviet Union" during an appearance on a conservative radio talk show.

Earth to Bachmann... the Soviet Union dissolved over 20 years ago into a number of different republics. Russia is the biggest piece with the nuclear weapons, but they aren't aggressively threatening anybody. Their internal economy was shattered in the 1990s and they are still trying to get back to where they were. According to the CIA Factbook, their per capita GDP is only $15,900 with a population of 138 million. The US is $47,200 with 313 million. They are one-seventh the power of the US. Why is she batting at ghosts of the past?

Bachmann's statement is reminiscent of Sarah Palin in 2008 trying to establish her foreign policy credentials by claiming to be able to "see" Russia from Alaska. That's like saying that because you once walked by a bakery you know how to run the business. Nutty.

The problem with the Republican candidates is that they don't understand economics and they are unaware of the current world situation. They live in a bubble isolated from ordinary American lives, so their policies are detrimental to the vast majority of the people. But they are effective because they play on fears: fears of the Soviet past, racial fears, economic uncertainty, and a general fear of a complex modern world that many people don't understand. But to build your social institutions on fear rather than knowledge and hope is to ask for failure and misery.

Americans made a mistake just a decade ago by having their Supreme Court "elect" the dim-witted George Bush as their president. Here they go again being infatuated with a dim bulb as their "bright hope":

The GOP presidential candidate has flubbed some facts in history before, such as when she mistakenly said that the Revolutionary War battles of Lexington and Concord occurred in New Hampshire. This week, she mistakenly wished Elvis Presley a "happy birthday" on the anniversary of his death.

If you fail to have factual knowledge of the world, you don't have the basis for making policy and deciding on action. You might as well put a poodle in the presidency and let her choose by how loud the dog goes "woof!" when presented with "options".

Words of Wisdom from Barry Ritholtz

From and opinion piece by Barry Ritholtz in the Washington Post:

Government as the problem? “Government” is not the problem, “bad government” is the problem. There is an enormous distinction between the two.

Being surrounded by two oceans — and being so powerful since WWII — has allowed you to become too insular. Your “not-invented-here” attitude has led you to miss many other good ideas. Have a look around the world and see what other countries are doing right:

Canada managed to come through the financial crisis unscathed — what was it about its banking regulations that protected it? Why is Finland the best country for education? Why does Australia have the world’s lowest jobless rate? How are Germany’s highways so darned good? What is it about Japan’s health-care system that has made it the best in the world? Norway has the highest adult literacy level and is often ranked as having the best quality of life; what is it doing right? And Singapore has the highest per-capita GDP and one of the recession’s fastest-growing economies. Why?

It sure wouldn’t hurt you to put your pride aside and take a few lessons from the best ideas in the world.

What are the chances that this good advice is heeded? I would say it is close to zero. People say they want advice, but secretly they hate it. They don't want to hear bad news. All they want is for people to flatter them. Americans want to hear that they are "the world's best" even when it isn't true. They remind me of Wiley E. Coyote who is several steps past the edge of the cliff but not yet willing to look down and see the real situation he is in.

Belief in Math

This is a wonderful spoof of empty-headed beauty pageant "interviews". But instead of asking what they most wanted ("world peace"), this video speculates on what you would get if you asked "Should math be taught in schools?"



When a beauty queen tells me that she doesn't "believe in math" I sit up and pay attention. And when another tells me that math is "only a theory" and isn't what the Bible tells us therefore it shouldn't be taught in American school, then I know they are onto something big, really big.

I'm guessing America should now be preparing to "reform" its school system and remove all that "belief-based math" and replace it with real, hard facts, Bible-based facts. Oh, and teach more of the sounds, smells, and vibrations stuff. That's just so much more fun than that stodgy old "mathy" stuff.

Glory hallelujah! Religion is going to help free Americans from the cruel domination of "math". God speed the day of our salvation!


By the way... If you want to see the real 2011 Miss USA contestants, try this web page.

If you do want to hear the idiocies of genuine Miss America 2011 contestants ruminating over the tough question of "Should evolution be taught in schools?" watch this...



You can see how the spoof in the first video took some liberties with the idea of "empty-headed beauty queen", but the second video should reassure you, that idea isn't a myth. These women really are only loosely connected to reality. And it is so lovely to see that they clasp religion so closely to their breasts... oh, I mean "bosom".

The Sad State of Science Education in the US

If you think US schools are going a fair to good job of educating the next generation, watch this slow motion train wreck...



It is pitiful that 92% show a fundamental confusion in thinking that "evolution is only a theory that should be taught alongside other great theories like the Biblical creation myth". I'm surprised these budding geniuses didn't opt for Mayan cosmology and the Greek pantheon as suitable "science" subjects as well.

The US is rapidly becoming a banana republic.

Compare the simplistic stupidity of the "beauty queens" with real science. Here is a bit from a post about evolutionary aspects of sex by Carl Zimmer in his blog The Loom at the Discover Magazine web site:

In many species of animals, males and females have a conflict of evolutionary interests. Males compete with each other for the opportunity to fertilize the eggs of females. Males use all sorts of strategies in these competitions. They fight with each other for territory, they scare off intruding males, they put scrapers into females to dump out the sperm from previous males, and they inject “anti-aphrodiasiacs” to make females unreceptive to other males.

A number of experiments suggest that females have to pay a steep price for these male shenanigans. Anti-aphrodisiacs are toxic to the females, shortening their lifetime. Why would males harm the females that carry their offspring? In many species, males can mate with many females. The long-term health of any one female doesn’t matter–in an evolutionary sense–to the male.

As natural selection favors increasingly deadly male mating strategies, this onslaught opens up the opportunity, in turn, for the evolution of counterstrategies in females. In some species, females may evolve antidotes to male poisons. The males, in turn, may evolve counterattacks to overcome these new defenses. Theoretically, this coevolution can become a never-ending cycle of sexual conflict, capable of producing some of nature’s greatest extravagances (like absurdly kinky ducks).

Up till now, the best evidence for this kind of sexual conflict came from experiments. Scientists manipulated Drosophila flies so that the males were free to evolve while the females couldn’t. The result: the lifespan of the females got shorter and shorter over the course of generations. In a flipped version of the experiment, scientists prevented males from mating with lots of females, as they normally do. Instead, the male flies were forced into monogamy. Now there was no evolutionary reward for competing with other males. Over time, the male fly toxins got less toxic, and the females lost their defenses.

Now Nicolas Rode of the the Center for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology in Montpellier, France, and his colleagues have found a new way testing this hypothesis: by having males travel through time to mate with females.

The time-traveling males in this case are brine shrimp (a k a sea monkeys). Brine shrimp produce tough eggs that can survive through droughts for years and then hatch into healthy young when water returns. In the Great Salt Lake in Utah, the brine shrimp egg cysts form layers on the lake bed going back decades. Rode and his colleagues gathered cysts from layers that formed in 1985, 1996, and 2007. They brought the cysts back to their lab and reared the sea monkeys. And then they orchestrated some sea monkey sex. They had females mate with males from their own time, as well as from the other years. For example, females from 1996 could mate with males from 2007 and 1985.

There is more. Go read the whole article.

The world of real science is so much richer, so much more exciting and beautiful than the simplistic crap that religious fundamentalists spew. It is tragic that the fundamentalists have such a hold on the minds of America's youth. The funny thing is that Americans understand that the madrassah's of fundamentalist Islam are dangerous and mind stultifying, but they don't see the same truth about their own Christian fundamentalism. Tragic.

The Next President of the US

Sarah Palin corrects 200 years of inaccuracy and lies that were passed off by the liberal elite as “history”...



This is the choice of the idiot right, an idiot who can make them feel good about themselves. She thinks she is ready for "prime time" because of her "deep" understanding of the US Constitution and the hagiographic history of the US. It is that insouciance for fact and truth which makes her so beloved. Oh, and I guess the fact that she figured 2 years as Alaskan governor were more than enough. To heck with the electors who thought they were getting the full 4 years, but she didn't think they needed to know that 2 were enough for her. If the idiot right in the US gets its wish and elects her, I wonder what other "surprises" she has in store for them!

Update 2011jun05: Palin continues to show all the wrong qualities for President. In this Yahoo! News report she refuses to accept that she made a mistake:

Potential presidential candidate Sarah Palin stood by her skewed version of US history Sunday, insisting patriot Paul Revere warned British soldiers along with Americans ahead of key revolutionary battles.

Palin had put her foot in it this past week when, during a tour of Boston where Revere lived in the 18th century American colonies, she offered a history lesson that didn't quite match with the history books.

Revere, she had said, "warned the British that they weren't going to be taking away our arms by ringing those bells and making sure as he's riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free."

Revere, a silversmith who helped set up an elaborate signaling system, was celebrated for his "midnight ride" in which he alerted Americans to an impending British attack -- "The British are coming!" is the cultural catchphrase attributed to him.

It is not commonly believed, as Palin asserts, that he was warning the British that they couldn't seize US weapons.

Do American's seriously want to have somebody with their finger on the nuclear trigger who can't admit an error and recall the missiles once launched? Do Americans really want a president who confuses Canada with Libya and sends the troops into Canada to "kill the dictator"? Am I the only person who sees a problem with putting an idiot in charge?

Marching Backwards, Back to 1937

The world's politicians seem ever more determined to achieve the infamous double dip, the "depression within a depression" of 1937 when FDR listened to the fraidy cats and "tightened" up on the budget and immediately plunged the US economy off a cliff.

From Wikipedia:

By the spring of 1937, production, profits, and wages had regained their 1929 levels. Unemployment remained high, but it was considerably lower than the 25% rate seen in 1933. In June 1937, some of Roosevelt's advisors urged spending cuts to balance the budget. WPA rolls were drastically cut and PWA projects were slowed to a standstill. The American economy took a sharp downturn in mid-1937, lasting for 13 months through most of 1938. Industrial production declined almost 30 per cent and production of durable goods fell even faster.

Unemployment jumped from 14.3% in 1937 to 19.0% in 1938, rising from 5 million to more than 12 million in early 1938. Manufacturing output fell by 37% from the 1937 peak and was back to 1934 levels. Producers reduced their expenditures on durable goods, and inventories declined, but personal income was only 15% lower than it had been at the peak in 1937. In most sectors, hourly earnings continued to rise throughout the recession, which partly compensated for the reduction in the number of hours worked. As unemployment rose, consumers' expenditures declined, leading to further cutbacks in production.

Here's is Robert Reich piling on and pointing out that Obama under the endless brow-beating of the idiot right, the Republicans, in the US is now force marching the US down the same path, a repeat of the 1937 infamous "double dip":

The May jobs report is a disaster — the weakest reading since September. Non-farm payrolls grew only 54,000 last month, according to the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. Private employment rose only 83,000 — the smallest growth since last June. Government payrolls dropped 29,000.

The overall jobless rate rose to 9.1 percent.

Together with plummeting housing prices, falling wages for non-supervisory workers, a paltry 1.8 percent growth in the first quarter, and a precipitous drop in consumer confidence, the picture should be clear to anyone able to see clearly.

The recovery has stalled.

We’re not in a double dip yet, but the odds are increasing.

The question is whether all this will wake up Washington, and stop the monumental distraction of the games being played over the debt ceiling and long-term budget deficit. The Republican lie that the nation’s long-term budget deficit is responsible for high unemployment would be laughable if it weren’t so tragically irrelevant to the current situation.

The President cannot be reelected if the economy tanks. He may not even be reelected on an anemic recovery in which unemployment remains nearly this high. But all incumbents are endangered. Republican House members from swing districts are toast if they don’t show voters they’re actively working on the twin problems of jobs and wages.

Several steps need to be taken right away. Exempt the first $20,000 of income from payroll taxes for two years. Lend money to cash-starved state and local governments. Initiate a new WPA for the long-term unemployed. Amend bankruptcy laws to allow homeowners to include their prime residencies in personal bankruptcy (giving them more bargaining leverage with their lenders to renegotiate mortgage loans).

Above all: Washington needs to show Americans it’s taking seriously the ferocious problem of jobs and wages, and the trend back toward a double dip.

I never cease to be amazed at how stupidity gets you elected, how obtuseness allows you to pontificate, and a cruel indifference to suffering makes you a media analyst. How much longer must the long suffering public put up with incompetence at the top? with inaction in the face of a national disaster? with cynical political maneuvering when moral courage and leadership is so desperately needed?

The Second Leg Down in the Great Recession

It looks like the "experts" and political "leaders" are leading the world's economy over a cliff for the second time since 2008. Here is a post by Paul Krugman looking at the lastest research by one of the bright lights of the Federal Reserve's in-house economists:

1937 in 2011?

Gauti Eggertsson has a nice piece on the New York Fed blog about the great monetary/fiscal mistake of 1937, which sent the Great Depression into a second downward leg. As he notes, the underlying situation bore a significant resemblance to current events: unemployment still high (actually under 10 percent if measured by modern standards, so quite similar to now), but with rising prices thanks to commodity shocks.

Where I part with Gauti here is his assertion that modern economists won’t make the same mistake. The research staff at the NY Fed won’t; but the ECB very probably will, and the Board of Governors is under a lot of political pressure to raise rates.

We’ve learned a lot less these past 74 years than you might have imagined — or rather, we learned some stuff, but have spent the last few decades unlearning it.

I side with Krugman. I think that even though smart guys like Eggertsson can see the problem, their bosses won't let them do what's necessary. So we will go into a mini-recession inside the Great Recession, just like in 1937. It is sad, but the "leaders" of today are worse than FDR's brain trust while the Federal Reserve is marginally smarter than the 1937 Federal Reserve, Bernanke is too timid to do the right thing.

Providing Context

I once taught a journalism class. Sadly I had a rather poor text to use. I wish I had access to Dean Baker 35 years ago to help me with gems of advice like the following.

Here Dean Baker in a post on his blog Beat the Press is scolding the Washington Post for failing to provide adequate context to understand some numbers it published:

Shocking News: Not Everyone Who Got Stimulus Money Paid Their Taxes!

The Washington Post called readers attention to this shocking item today in an article on a new report from the Government Accountability Office that found stimulus recipients owe $750 million in taxes on $24 billion in stimulus payments. Of course people cheat on their taxes on non-stimulus income also.

It would have been helpful to compare the rate of cheating on stimulus with non-stimulus income to determine if compliance was especially bad with stimulus income. The Internal Revenue Service reported that $345 billion in taxes went uncollected in 2006, more than 4 percent of total income in that year. This suggest that the rate of tax evasion with stimulus funds (@ 3.1 percent) might be somewhat lower than with income more generally. The Post should have included this comparison.

Funny. This is a lesson that every journalist should learn early in his schooling. But apparently the Washington Post hires "journalists" who haven't learned the basics.

Calling David Brooks on the Carpet

Here is an excellent post by Dean Baker in his Beat the Press blog that points out that David Brooks doesn't know what he is talking about. This is good. It brings Brooks down a peg. Brooks is a lovely writer, but he is in love with his words and not necessarily the truth. Brooks lives isolated from the lives of the bottom 90% so he uses his imagination to "fill in the gaps". But when you are upper middle income guy, your imagination about "how the other half lives" is fully of a lot of blarney:

David Brooks Shows How Far We Have Gone from the Founding Fathers: It Used to be That Columnists Had to Know What They Were Talking About

David Brooks told readers that:

"Over the past months, there has been some progress in getting Americans to accept the need for self-restraint."

This should have hundreds of millions asking who needs "self-restraint?" Does Brooks thinks that the 14 million unemployed need more self-restraint? Do the 8 million people who want full time work but who can only find part-time employment need self-restraint? Do the millions of people who are facing the loss of their home need more self-restraint?

Brooks isn't very clear on who he thinks needs to restrain themselves but he praises Senator Alan Simpson, Representative Paul Ryan and President Obama for helping to lecture us on this need. Those familiar with the basic economic data know that the richest 1 percent have used their control of the political process to hugely increase their share of national income over the last three decades. The bottom 90 percent has seen little gain from economic growth over this period. Of course Representative Ryan wants to give more tax breaks to the richest 1 percent, so he doesn't seem to be preaching self-restraint to those who have been showing the least in recent years.

If Brooks' concern is making the welfare state sustainable, then he should be talking about fixing the health care system. It is easy to show that if per person health care costs in the United States were comparable to any other wealthy country then we would be projecting huge budget surpluses, not deficits.

If Brooks bothered to take a few minutes to study the issues he writes about then he would know this. Fortunately for him, he has job for which this skill is not required.

Brooks also claims that there is an inherent tension between economic dynamism and economic security, telling readers:

"Republicans still mostly talk about incentives for growth, and Democrats still mostly talk about economic security."

Actually many Democrats have been actively talking about more stimulatory fiscal policy, monetary policy and currency policy (i.e. a lower valued dollar). All of these policies would boost growth. It is remarkable that Brooks is apparently unaware of the large number of Democrats, including several of his colleagues at the New York Times, who have been vigorously pushing these positions.

I enjoy Dean Baker. He has taken on the Sisyphean task of correcting the errors and lies in the media. I admire his sense of duty. It is a hopeless task. Not only does the media mostly ignore his corrections, they seem to glory in their ignorance and politically motivated perversions of the truth. A guy like David Brooks makes enough to hire fact checkers and take the time to talk to people outside his bubble of affluent types. But he would rather just make the stuff up.

Brooks is the kind of guy who during the Great Depression would be saying that the real problem was that people didn't know any peppy songs. They needed to sing some lively tunes and the economy would recover. It was all those people lining up to get their money out of the banks that was scaring the rich people from investing in the economy that had caused the Great Depression. If only the unemployed would go out for a good restaurant meal once a week, the Great Depression could have been stopped in six months instead of lingering for more than a decade.

Oh... and here is a bit from another Dean Baker post that is well worth reading. This goes after The Washington Post and not David Brooks:

Those who thought that the Washington Post (a.k.a. Fox on 15th Street) couldn't get any worse, have just been proven wrong yet again. The Post ran a little primer telling readers about Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

The Post tells readers:

"a GAO report found that total government health-care spending in the United States is somewhere in the middle. In the United States, spending on public health was 6.9 percent of gross domestic product in 2005, while it was 8.9 percent in France, 8.2 percent in Germany and 7.2 percent in the United Kingdom. On the lower end of the spectrum, Australia spent 6.4 percent of GDP on health care and Canada spent 6.9 percent. Some of the countries that spend more have had a demographic shift to an older population sooner than the United States."

Okay, boys and girls, can anyone see the problem with this discussion?

That's right! All the other countries included in this discussion have public health care systems. The figures cited for public health care spending comprise the bulk of their national spending on health care. Only in the United States do we have a large private health care sector that spends roughly the same amount as the public sector.

This means that rather being in the middle of the pack, as this discussion implies, we are way over the top. To pay for most of the health care needs of our seniors and our poor, our government pays almost as much Germany, Canada, and the U.K. do to provide for the health care needs of their entire population.

Of course this point should have been central to this whole primer. The reason that Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are projected to "usurp much of the revenue from federal taxes," is that health care costs in the United States are out of control. If the U.S. paid the same amount per person for health care as any of these other countries it would be looking at huge budget surpluses in the long-term, not deficits.

Krugman Skewers the Washington Elite

In a very biting and very trenchant observation, Paul Krugman asks about Washington's priorities. He points out the skewed "concerns" that see mayham in moderation while ignoring very real deep pain and suffering. From his NY Times blog:

Visualizing Priorities

A few charts to illustrate what you are and are not supposed to be worried about. I start these charts in 1985, that is, after Morning in America, so that our view isn’t distorted by the high inflation and interest rates of the 70s and early 80s.

So, here’s what we’re supposed to be deeply worried about. First, bond market confidence:


Second, inflation:


Meanwhile, we’re not supposed to worry about unemployment:


A naive observer might note that interest rates are low by historical standards, making you wonder why we’re obsessing about the bond market; that inflation is also low by historical standards, making you wonder why it’s an issue at all; and that unemployment is immensely high. But Washington has its priorities.

If you read history you find this pig-headedness persists. The rich are adamant about protecting their interests and see dangers everywhere. Meanwhile, the poor fall off the edge of the world and the rich keep partying on completely unconcerned. The world is a very unfair, very ugly place for the bottom 90%. For the top 10% it is a pleasant place, for the top 1% it is a delight, and for the top 0.1% it is a paradise, and for the top 0.01% it is the land of aristocrats who can rape and pillage at will knowing that the law does not apply to them.

Struggling to "Get By" on $174,000 a Year

Can you believe the sheer stupidity of claiming that it is "hard to get by" on a public employee salary that is three times what the median for Wisconsin...



This guy wants you to sympathize with him, but he is from the very political party that is rolling back income for public union employees in Wisconsin in order to give more tax cuts to corporations and fat cats who... how can I put this gently... are earning something north of $170,000/year.

Here's a bit from the blog Talking Points Memo:

The tape caused a stir for Duffy, a first-term conservative best known for his past as a reality TV show star on MTV's The Real World. Democrats flagged the comments about his taxpayer-funded salary (which is nearly three times the median income in Wisconsin) and criticisms began to flow Duffy's way.

In the clip, Duffy is asked whether he'd support cutting his own salary. Duffy says he would, but only as part of a plan where all public employees' salaries would be cut. He then said that the $174,000 in salary (not including benefits) he receives is a squeeze for his family of seven to live on:

I can guarantee you, or most of you, I guarantee that I have more debt than all of you. With 6 kids, I still pay off my student loans. I still pay my mortgage. I drive a used minivan. If you think I'm living high on the hog, I've got one paycheck. So I struggle to meet my bills right now. Would it be easier for me if I get more paychecks? Maybe, but at this point I'm not living high on the hog.
Duffy's office said any Democratic criticism of his response was "a misleading attack." For more on Duffy's finances, see this post.

The county GOP took down the video from its blog after the Washington Post posted a short clip of it yesterday morning.

This isn't quite as bad as the kid who killed his parents and then asked for mercy from the court because he was an orphan, but it is close.

Why do people vote in this bloodsuckers to be their "representatives" when they are so unrepresentative of the people they are supposed to "represent". This guy is so out to lunch he thinks he has an especially hard time because he has to get by on only $174,000 per year. I wonder how that sits with the Walmart employees of his district.

Update 2011apr02: Here is a bit more background from the Talking Points Memo blog:

Duffy is one of the poorest members of Congress. OpenSecrets.org, which tracks the money in Congress, ranks Duffy as near the bottom among House members when it comes to his personal net worth.

Here's a rundown of Duffy's finances, from the 2009 disclosure form he had to file with the government: his family of 7 (wife plus six kids) is carrying between $250,000 and $500,000 in mortgage debt; between $50,000-$100,000 in student loans; between $15,000-$50,000 in credit card debt; and between $100,000-$250,000 in debt related to the family vacation home, a cabin not too far from his primary residence in Wisconsin.

The Duffy family lives in a 5-bedroom house sitting on 5 acres in Ashland, Wisconsin. The home has a market value of $247,000. They also own a 2-bedroom cabin in Iron River. That house is valued at $229,000.

Duffy's household reported a total of $154,500 in income in 2009. That included $94,000 in salary from his job back then as county district attorney and $4,500 in income from his side gig as a competitive lumberjack. Duffy's wife, Rachel Campos-Duffy -- who like her husband starred in MTV's The Real World -- brought in $56,000 in salary.

View the entire 2009 financial disclosure form here.

The $154,000 in income in they reported in 2009 made Duffy's family objectively well-off when it comes to a family from Wisconsin. Median household income there in 2008 was $52,103, according to the Census.

But in Congress, that kind of coin makes Duffy one of the poorest. Check out this chart from OpenSecrets comparing Duffy's finances to the congressional average.

...

Earlier this month, the site did a big report on the freshman House class, which is among the wealthiest ever to be elected. Duffy was among the "several freshmen who, however, have little reportable wealth at all," OpenSecrets wrote.

Duffy's also tried to paint himself as one of the more austere members of the freshman class. He's one of around 20 members who sleep in their Hill offices rather than pay for a residence in Washington.

Go to the TPM blog to get the embedded links.