Saturday, December 19, 2009

The RR isn't dead yet (unfortunately)

The crazy. It burns:

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More from Steve Benen:

First up from the God Machine this week is a look at something called the "prayercast," organized by Family Research Council Action PAC, a leading religious right outfit. The point of the event was to organize right-wing activists to pray for the failure of health care reform in the Senate.

It's hard to truly appreciate the true madness surrounding the event and its neo-theocratic organizers/participants, but I found Rachel Maddow's coverage helped capture some of the more disturbing elements.

Of particular note, remember that high-ranking, elected federal officials were integrally involved in this rather bizarre right-wing gathering. Alongside religious right heavyweights like Tony Perkins and James Dobson, Sens. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) were on hand, and Rep. Michele Bachman (R-Minn.) even helped lead attendees in prayer against health care reform.

Right Wing Watch had some of the best coverage of the "prayercast" anywhere, and posted some striking clips from the event, including this one in which Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.) argues that the Bible should be a "blueprint" for American government, and this one in which James and Shirley Dobson ask God to "frustrate the plans of the Evil One."
yowza

Gimmicks, contd

When the opposition uses gimmicks and lies to oppose you, feel confident you're on the right side of the issue. Coming up with valid arguments against the current reform efforts is quite possible by thoughtful people on the left and the right, but Congressional Republicans aren't those kind of people. In this case, the joke is on the GOP: by using the printed out bill as a prop to try to make a pseudo-argument that any very long bill is a very bad bill, they continue to establish themselves as the Party of Beavis and Butthead. Retarded arguments make a party look retarded.


As I've pointed out before
: Republicans love criticizing the length of the bill, as if that's a valid argument. Legislative bills are printed up with huge margins, large font, numbered lines and double spacing. This causes them to be much lengthier than typical reading material. A recent analysis by the AP finds that the length of the healthcare reform bill is actually about 209 normal pages:
Actually, Leo Tolstoy's tome [War and Peace] is longer than either bill. Full translated versions are nearly twice as long.

The bill passed by the House is 319,145 words. The Senate bill is 318,512 words, shorter than the House version despite consuming more paper. Various versions of Tolstoy's novel are 560,000 to 670,000 words. Bush's education act tallied more than 280,000 words.

By now, the full draft of Reid's bill that had circulated in the corridors and landed so prominently on Republican desks has been published in the Congressional Record in the official and conventional manner.

The type is small and tight. No hernias will be caused by moving this rendering of the bill around. Unfurling it on the Capitol steps would not be much of a spectacle.

It's 209 pages.
That's less than Palin's new 400+ page book. I guess the GOP should be against that, too...?

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

The problem with being responsible

From Yglesias:
Can’t liberals be just as stiff-necked as Lieberman? Sure, they could. But liberals members do have an incentive to compromise—the tens of thousands of people who die every year for lack of health insurance. The leverage that Lieberman and other “centrists” have obtained on this issue (and on climate change) stems from a demonstrated willingness to embrace sociopathic indifference to the human cost of their actions.
Why is it that liberals keep having to concede on health care, watering down valuable reforms and cost-saving measures in the bill? Why is it that "compromise" isn't to some political center but rather a fraction of a hair to the left of business-friendly, anti-consumer conservatism? Because of f*cksticks like Lieberman who will filibuster the bill to death rather than allow it to come to a vote and then voting against it. The grown-up party realizes that failure in reforming the broken health care system literally is not an option, and so has to cater to these few Senators' every whim and fancy, as well as literally bribe them for their vote. As I've said before:
We're already bankrupting the system because of the issue of how the system is right now. The government already pays 46% of all health care expenses in the US. The private insurers pay about 37%. The rest is out-of-pocket.

The entitlements problem will continue to grow with our top-heavy population chart (more old people than young). But if we can reign in health care costs by overhauling the system then we can possibly prevent total fiscal collapse. This is a problem that Republicans kicked down the road every single time they held office and could do something about it. Everyone knows our entitlements are literally headed for failure and something must be done about it. No Republican has had the courage to face the issue since Newt Gingrich's proposal for drastic cuts in Medicare in 1995.

Let's assume the House bill passes the Senate just like it is (it won't). Paying $1.2 trillion over 10 years works out to approximately two-thirds the cost of the Bush tax cuts, half of the long-term cost of the Iraq War (including long-term health care for vets, not just the annual supplementals to the budget), and about 15% of our defense budget. That's right, we pay about $1 trillion dollars or more *every year* in defense spending, a *huge* part of that right now for two wars, the rest of which largely ends up as pork and wasteful spending and research for technologies that are completely useless (think missile defense, "Star Wars"...). Meanwhile, over 45,000 people die annually in the US from lack of access to basic medical care, ten times the casualties on 9/11. A new Harvard study estimates even higher numbers, that every 12 minutes someone dies from lack of adequate care, meaning every three weeks more people die from lack of health care than from 9/11.
Now, the GOP just can't be persuaded by these facts and reasoning, not by the specter of massive insolvency, nor by the moral burden of being the only industrialized country in the world that allows its citizens to die and go bankrupt because they get sick. What bothers me the worst is that they're quite willing to see reform completely die, that Liebeman and a few other Democrats are willing to help kill it via the filibuster, and Paul Krugman was right in characterizing them as "the party of Beavis and Butthead." It's no coincidence that these few people willing to kill the bill all receive large payouts (campaign contributions) from insrance executives. Meanwhile the "responsible" Senators have to basically give up every important change in the bill and turn it into a gift to the insurance industry to satisfy the tyranny of these four (or five) because failure is not an option.

Saturday, December 5, 2009

Outward Bound and the Call of the Wild

I've gone on two Outward Bound 3-4 day group excursions. The trips really recharged me and reminded me of studying the transcendentalists. SciAm has a good article talking about what time out in nature does to us:
But a recent article by researchers at the University of Rochester shows that experiences with nature can affect more than our mood. In a series of studies, Netta Weinstein, Andrew Przybylski, and Richard Ryan, University of Rochester, show that exposure to nature can affect our priorities and alter what we think is important in life. In short, we become less self-focused and more other-focused. Our value priorities shift from personal gain, to a broader focus on community and connection with others.

To demonstrate this effect, they ran a series of studies. In their first study, the researchers randomly assigned individuals to view a slide show that either depicted scenes of human-made or natural environments. The slides were matched across a variety of characteristics, to eliminate the possibility that the results were due to things like color, complexity, or brightness of the images. The participants were instructed to try to immerse themselves in the images—to notice the colors and textures and imagine the sounds and smells. After watching the slide show (which took about 8 minutes), the participants completed a series of questions about their life aspirations.

Of particular interest were responses to extrinsic life aspirations , like being financially successful or admired by many people; as contrasted with intrinsic life aspirations , like deep and enduring relationships, or working toward the betterment of society. The results showed that people who watched the nature images scored significantly lower on extrinsic life aspirations, and significantly higher on intrinsic life aspirations. The effect was particularly strong for participants who reported being “immersed” in the images. This basic effect was further explored in three subsequent studies. The later studies showed the same effect for true nature experiences: being in a small room with plants, for example.
As people spend less and less time outdoors, I fear we'll see these encouraging results affect smaller portions of the population. I think if we all spent more time in nature that issues like global warming and pollution would be far less polarized. We'd all feel connected to the issues more personally.

On another (completely unrelated) note, SciAm has an article by Shermer talking about skepticism that was really good:
So many claims of this nature are based on negative evidence. That is, if science cannot explain X, then your explanation for X is necessarily true. Not so. In science, lots of mysteries are left unexplained until further evidence arises, and problems are often left unsolved until another day. I recall a mystery in cosmology in the early 1990s whereby it appeared that there were stars older than the universe itself—the daughter was older than the mother! Thinking that I might have a hot story to write about that would reveal something deeply wrong with current cosmological models, I first queried California Institute of Technology cosmologist Kip S. Thorne, who assured me that the discrepancy was merely a problem in the current estimates of the age of the universe and that it would resolve itself in time with more data and better dating techniques. It did, as so many problems in science eventually do. In the meantime, it is okay to say, “I don’t know,” “I’m not sure” and “Let’s wait and see.”

...Most people (scientists included) treat the God question separate from all these other claims. They are right to do so as long as the particular claim in question cannot—even in principle—be examined by science. But what might that include? Most religious claims are testable, such as prayer positively influencing healing. In this case, controlled experiments to date show no difference between prayed-for and not-prayed-for patients. And beyond such controlled research, why does God only seem to heal illnesses that often go away on their own? What would compel me to believe would be something unequivocal, such as if an amputee grew a new limb. Amphibians can do it. Surely an omnipotent deity could do it. Many Iraqi War vets eagerly await divine action

...There is no positive evidence for [the origin of the universe], but neither is there positive evidence for the traditional answer to the question—God. And in both cases, we are left with the reductio ad absurdum question of what came before the multiverse or God. If God is defined as that which does not need to be created, then why can’t the universe (or multiverse) be defined as that which does not need to be created?

In both cases, we have only negative evidence along the lines of “I can’t think of any other explanation,” which is no evidence at all. If there is one thing that the history of science has taught us, it is that it is arrogant to think we now know enough to know that we cannot know. So for the time being, it comes down to cognitive or emotional preference: an answer with only negative evidence or no answer at all. God, multiverse or Unknown. Which one you choose depends on your tolerance for ambiguity and how much you want to believe. For me, I remain in sublime awe of the great Unknown.
I want to believe in the cyclic universe, but I'm quite willing to admit that no one knows, and that we may never know with any degree of certainty, how our universe came to be as it is today (although it may have never "come to be" at all).

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

False comparison

I've said before that I think the mainstream conservative movement is a little nuts. And in that sense, it doesn't comport to say, "both sides have fringes," since on the right these people make up a giant chunk of the electorate/base:
I continue to think this is a mistaken approach to the ideological landscape. It plays into the conventional wisdom -- "both sides" have their share of nutjobs -- but it doesn't account for the qualitative differences or the reach/influence of both contingents.

It's easy, I suppose, to just assume that the left has some nutjobs, and the right has some nutjobs, but that all of this is unrelated to political mainstream of both major political parties. Wacky liberals said ridiculous things under Bush; wacky conservatives are saying ridiculous things now. Move along; nothing to see here.

But this surface-level look is, at best, incomplete. Code Pink and Truthers don't have, and never have had, any meaningful role in progressive politics or the Democratic Party. Love these groups or hate them, we're talking about a fairly small group, with limited-to-non-existent influence. Indeed, Democratic Party leaders and officials take pains to keep the groups at arm's length. It's not as if leading Dem candidates, seeking high-profile offices, go out of their way to seek Cindy Sheehan's endorsement.

On the other hand, leading Republicans at every level can't do enough to express their support for the Tea Party crowd, and love nothing more than talking to Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. We have GOP members of Congress, even some of the party's leadership, endorsing all manner of unhinged nonsense, ranging from Birther questions to state nullification.

The point is, there's a clear and impermeable line between the progressive mainstream and the left fringe. The line between the Republican Party/conservative movement and the far-right fringe barely exists.

Whereas Dems kept the fringe at arm's length, Republicans embrace the fringe with both arms. Both sides have nutjobs; only one side thinks their nutjobs are sane.
Indeed. Cindy Sheehan never had a major media program. Or a minor one. I guess Olbermann is about as liberal as it gets on MSNBC, but compare him side-by-side with Bill "fuckin' thing sucks" Orally, who is considered a "moderate" on Faux News. On the right, the most popular figures are the ones who are ball-slapping, foamy-mouthed wingnuts. Hannity, Beck, Limbaugh. It's time for all the GOP reps to learn to speak teabag.