Phases of the moon

As most people know, the month is lunar and the year is solar. But there is no nice 12:1 equivalent in reality, and the months have varying numbers of days. As a result, solar years will contain different numbers of lunar cycles. This year we had the pleasure of seeing 13 full moons; last night (Fri) was the final one. See a cool video showing the moon's cycles below:

Marx reborn

I think the failures of hands-off capitalism are becoming more apparent by the day. Americans do not trust their government because it has failed them in privatizing to industry and lobbyists, rather than protecting the 99%. I'm not saying that centralized planning works, but I am definitely a strong proponent of regulations and holding back the race-to-the-bottom nature of unbridled capitalism. And the more time we spend watching the US-style conservatism unfold, the more Marx seems a genius.

The costs of this sort of conservatism are mounting: record-low tax rates for the rich, leading to record deficits, which only get paid for out of the pocket of the working man (cut our SS and Medicare!). Perhaps our benefits are too great, but then so is their corporate graft in the form of no-bid contracts, tax incentives to take jobs overseas, as well as skewed tax breaks given at the state and local levels, obvious moral hazards created by the government for industry (e.g., the banking regulations that led to our financial collapse), lax enforcement of securities fraud, and on and on and on and on...

If capitalists are allowed to "run amok" you will continue to see labor getting shafted. That is clearly, unequivocally and factually the case for the past forty years now (for specific wage vs productivity growth changes, see links in this column). And it only looks to get worse once robots take over 90% of all jobs.

I don't know all the answers, but the current form of so-called liberalism is dead. The Democratic Party lost its way long ago and although it continues to at least fight the forces of plutocracy it has sold its soul to them in many ways. If they can't look to grow a spine and shake free of the shackles of their big-money interests, a revolt of the proles is all but certain.

Newtown, Conn

I haven't had much to say about Newtown because there isn't much to add. Gun nuts still blame "liberals" for not wanting to live in the Wild West where everyone has a six-gun on their hip. This though research has shown that in a chaotic situation, anyone who isn't trained as a police officer will probably shoot innocent people or be mistaken for the shooter themselves. Of course it can't be that politicians who pushed for making these kinds of weapons easily available are responsible for the deaths caused by them. Noooooo...that's just a bridge too far!

Sometimes I try to follow their arguments and give them the benefit of the doubt. But to believe in an absolute Second Amendment that allows any type of weapon by mail to pretty much anyone is just fuc*ing nuts. There is no such thing as an absolute Amendment to the Constitution. Take the First Amendment. Just because speech is protected doesn't mean I can call up a school and tell them I planted a bomb there this morning. Just because religion is protected doesn't mean I can commit ritual sacrifice or use outlawed substances as part of my mystic rituals.

I support the idea that people who obey the law should be able to buy a rifle or shotgun for sport or home defense. But I just don't believe that anyone needs a handgun at any time other than police officers. Perhaps my interpretation is too strict. But oversize magazines, semiautomatic assault rifles, mail-order ammunition, hollow-point shells, etc., is just loony tunes.

It's really not that hard to fix the problem: just see the middle ground here between the red-meat red-wingers in the South who scream that Obama is going to take away their guns and the hoplophobic Northeasterners who think all guns should be outlawed. We all know that the risk of a homicidal maniac will never be completely eliminated. But the risk can be managed. Outlaw all weapons of mass murder and their accessories. If it isn't used for sport or home defense, you don't need it. Institute a buyback to purchase all the weapons out there that will be banned, rather than grandfathering them in. Close the gun show loophole already. Improve the technology of firing pins so that every bullet fired is imprinted with a code that can be traced back to the purchaser.

Anybody with half a brain cell was ready to keep the ban on assault weapons and accessories (like the oversize clips) after Columbine. After the VT shooting I lamented that politicians were cowards and the NRA was not much better than an American Taliban in its fundamentalist zeal. At the end of the day, facts are facts: more guns = more gun deaths. And if Obama doesn't grow a spine and lead on this one his legacy will be tarnished.

Did Jesus Rise Bodily from the Dead? Arif Ahmed vs. Gary Habermas Debate

There is a really good defense of Humean skepticism towards the Christian belief in the Resurrection by Prof. Arif Ahmed. I saw this a few months back via the Debunking Christianity website. I forgot to link it at the time and found myself trying to remember it recently. Luckily I was able to retrieve it (see below).

The form of Dr. Ahmed's arguments are very simple forms of Humean skepticism, and he was kind enough to email me a copy of the handout from his presentation:

The Case Against Resurrection (Prof. Arif Ahmed)

All the arguments assume that we have evidence far stronger than what is available in the Bible: in particular we assume that we have contemporary testimony from witnesses who are known to be both independent of one another and highly educated; and we assume that the testimony states directly that a corpse came back to life after three days as a solid body able to pass through rock (John 20:19, 20:26).

First argument
(1) If two hypotheses are compatible with the evidence we should prefer the one that we expect to be more frequent given evidence of that type.
(2) We have frequently observed and verified beyond doubt cases of independent and educated witnesses testifying at the time to something that didn’t happen.
(3) We have never observed and verified cases of bodily reanimation after three days or of solid bodies passing through rock.
(4) Therefore, it is more likely that the witnesses got it wrong.

Second argument
(1) If two hypotheses are compatible with the evidence then we should prefer the one that we expect to be more frequent given evidence of that type.
(2) We have frequently verified cases of an apparent miracle turning out to have an initially unknown natural explanation.
(3) We have never verified cases (except possibly that in dispute) of an apparent miracle having no natural explanation (known or unknown).
(4) Therefore, a presently unknown natural explanation is more likely than a supernatural Resurrection.

Third Argument
(1) If the evidence gives us no reason to prefer one hypothesis to another we should give them equal weight
(2) The evidence gives no reason to prefer Resurrection to any other supernatural explanation.
(3) Therefore a supernatural Resurrection is no more likely than a supernatural hallucination (or Satan, or Baal, or…)

See the video below:

Did Jesus Rise Bodily from the Dead? Arif Ahmed vs. Gary Habermas Debate (posted below) | YouTube link

Guns vs deaths

Take what you will from the statistics. But don't pretend the facts aren't facts.

via Mark Reid: http://mark.reid.name/iem/gun-deaths-vs-gun-ownership.html

I like Jim Boeheim's take:

With his wife, Juli, looking on at the postgame news conference and his young children close by, Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim's final remarks were not about his milestone 900th career victory. Instead, he was thinking about two 6-year-old boys who were buried Monday, victims along with 18 other children and six adults in a shooting massacre last week at an elementary school in Connecticut. "If we cannot get the people who represent us to do something about firearms, we are a sad, sad society," Boeheim said Monday night. "If one person in this world, the NRA president, anybody, can tell me why we need assault weapons with 30 shots -- this is our fault if we don't go out there and do something about this. If we can't get this thing done, I don't know what kind of country we have."

PS: (12/30/12) It appears that the NRA has been blocking funding for research into gun violence for some time. I think that demonstrates the likelihood of what they expect to find: a link between guns and gun violence (duh). Also see some interesting charts here.

PSS: One of the few good research reports written recently on gun violence I could find: .pdf, site

Republican credibility on economics

I am trying to maintain composure as I read about the way that Republicans will go to their political graves to defend the rich from having ANY % increase in their income tax rate, while at the same time, raving and ranting about how the government spends more than it takes in. It hearkens back to when Republicans were falling all over themselves to defend Wall St bankers from accountability, and all I can do is shake my head. The hopelessly-confused Tea Partiers elected these clowns-in-Brooks-Brothers-suits to "fight" for them? What a sad, pathetic, sad thing to think.

One of the clearest-cut ways that wealthy people avoid paying taxes is by routing their money in complicated ways through corporate entities, especially via so-called "sub-S" corporations. By taking a small direct salary and then paying yourself through your S corporation, one can avoid paying both income and payroll taxes. The IRS has been cracking down more on this, but they cannot litigate each individual case, and so the wealthy reap enormous benefits from playing the highly favorable odds.
Consider the “Roadmap for America’s future” released by Paul Ryan, the ranking Republican on the House budget committee, and embraced by Mitt Romney. The CBPP finds that it will explode deficits and raise taxes on the middle/lower class. The hilarious thing is that I grew up always being told that Democrats just run up deficits while Republicans really safeguard the treasury of the Republic...yep, the GOP sure does know economics.

Of course Republicans cannot and will not admit that they just don't want their bankrollers to have to pay a little more in income taxes. So instead they hide behind "small business" and the supply side voodoo that used to be all the rage...in the 80s.

As Steve Benen summarizes:

"Thirty years ago, this raving stupidity had a name: "voodoo economics." More recently, it's come to be known as belief in the "Tax Fairy."

Regardless of the name, the notion that tax cuts necessarily pay for themselves is one of the more pernicious lies in the far-right arsenal. It's both gibberish and right-wing propaganda, but it's nevertheless repeated from time to time.

It shouldn't be -- the concept has been debunked repeatedly by those who care about reality. How wrong is the argument? The Bush/Cheney Office of Management and Budget and the Bush/Cheney Council of Economic Advisers rejected the notion that tax cuts can pay for themselves out of hand. Fiorina, in other words, is promising to be even more fiscally irresponsible than the bunch that added $5 trillion to our national debt in eight years.

Even a fired CEO should be able to understand the reality here. The single biggest cause of the current deficit is Bush's tax cuts. They didn't "pay for themselves"; they put us in a devastating hole."

Bingo.

And remember this as the "fiscal cliff" approaches: the Bush tax cuts were fiscally irresponsible giveaways to the wealthy. Republicans do not want them to expire on the rich. Republicans do not want to admit that they explode our deficit and debt. Republicans will consider it a major concession if the Democrats allow them to expire for the rich and will try to use that as leverage to get money out of the hands of poor and old people via Medicaid/Medicare/Social Security cuts. Somehow, some way, people actually vote for these clowns?

But Republicans don't just suffer from a lack of reality with respect to economics. They also suffer seriously when dealing with the factual reality of climate change and evolution.

Fall of a Giant

If a giant of the faith like Chuck Templeton can become an agnostic, who should feel sure in their faith? One thing stood out for me in Chuck Templeton's interview with Lee Strobel in The Case for Faith, the picture:

“Was there one thing in particular that caused you to lose your faith in God?” I asked at the outset.

He thought for a moment. “It was a photograph in Life magazine,” he said finally.

“Really?” I said. “A photograph? How so?”

He narrowed his eyes a bit and looked off to the side, as if he were viewing the photo afresh and reliving the moment. “It was a picture of a black woman in Northern Africa,” he explained. “They were experiencing a devastating drought. And she was holding her dead baby in her arms and looking up to heaven with the most forlorn expression. I looked at it and I thought, ‘Is it possible to believe that there is a loving or caring Creator when all this woman needed was rain?’” As he emphasized the word rain, his bushy gray eyebrows shot up and his arms gestured toward heaven as if beckoning for a response.

“How could a loving God do this to that woman?” he implored as he got more animated, moving to the edge of his chair. “Who runs the rain? I don’t; you don’t. He does – or that’s what I thought. But when I saw that photograph, I immediately knew it is not possible for this to happen and for there to be a loving God. There was no way. Who else but a fiend could destroy a baby and virtually kill its mother with agony – when all that was needed was rain?”

He paused, letting the question hang heavily in the air. Then he settled back into his chair. “That was the climactic moment,” he said. “And then I began to think further about the world being the creation of God. I started considering the plagues that sweep across parts of the planet and indiscriminately kill – more often than not, painfully – all kinds of people, the ordinary, the decent, and the rotten. And it just became crystal clear to me that it is not possible for an intelligent person to believe that there is a deity who loves.”

Templeton was tapping into an issue that had vexed me for years. In my career as a newspaper reporter, I hadn’t merely seen photos of intense suffering; I was a frequent first-hand observer of the underbelly of life where tragedy and suffering festered – the rotting inner cities of the United States, the filthy slums of India, Cook County Jail and the major penitentiaries, the hospice wards for the hopeless, disaster sites. More than once, my mind reeled at trying to reconcile the idea of a loving God with the depravity and heartache and anguish before my eyes.

But Templeton wasn’t done. “My mind then went to the whole concept of hell. My goodness,” he said, his voice rising in astonishment, “I couldn’t hold someone’s hand to a fire for a moment. Not an instant! How could a loving God, just because you don’t obey him and do what he wants, torture you forever – not allowing you to die, but to continue in that pain for eternity? There is no criminal who would do this!”

“So these were the first doubts you had?” I asked.

“Prior to that, I had been having more and more questions about things like, for instance, unanswered prayer. I had preached to hundreds of thousands of people the antithetical message, and then I found to my dismay that I could no longer believe it. To believe it would be to deny the brain I had been given. It became quite clear that I had been wrong. So I made up my mind that I would leave the ministry. That’s essentially how I came to be agnostic.”

I've always been interested in finding this photo.

I thought that perhaps the Biafra photos in LIFE were the ones referenced, but according to his Wikipedia page, he announced himself an agnostic in 1957. I have found some other really good pictures for inducing atheism: the World Press Photo of the Year collection. Or see the W. Willoughby Hooper photos of skeletal human beings from a famine in Madras.

The House GOP "mandate"

Just remember, according to Boehner & Co., Americans wanted divided government and they have a mandate too!

House Democratic candidates won about 50.5 percent of the national vote in November, but took just 46 percent of the seats. In the last 40 years, only one other time — 1996 — did the party that won the majority of the votes end up with a minority of the House, said Nicholas Goedert, a political science researcher at Washington University in St. Louis in Missouri. Democrats actually gained two seats in the Senate. 

Political scientists point to two factors influencing this divergence: a redistricting process dominated by Republican legislatures, and even more so, the concentration of Democratic voters in urban enclaves. 

Gerrymandering did matter. In nine states redistricted by Republicans, the Democratic vote share was well above the percentage of seats won, Mr. Goedert said. For instance, in North Carolina, Democratic House candidates won 51 percent of the vote but only 27 percent of the House seats. Where Democrats drew the lines, in Illinois, Maryland and Massachusetts, Democratic House delegations fared better than their vote totals, but not as drastically. This points to an inherent advantage for Republicans. In closely contested years, like 2012, the concentration of Democratic voters in cities has put them at a loss — and given House Republicans little reason to fear national opinion.

Yeah I mean why would they care what a large majority of voters want (raising taxes on the rich)?

"Lab Lit"

I'd never heard of the genre before. Now I want to write the next Frankenstein.

The State of our Union: Debt Ceiling Edition

The existence of a debt ceiling is probably going to be our undoing. Not only can Congress not find reasonable ways to budget out the nation's finances...it then has to f-up its own ability to borrow money to finance its deficits.

Here is how Paul Krugman put it on PBS Newshour last night:

Where do spending and tax revenue come from? They come from bills voted by Congress. So, the way that the debt ceiling works is that Congress can actually vote to not tax enough to pay for the spending it proposes, and then it can refuse to allow the government to borrow the money to make up the difference between its own spending bills and its own tax bills. This is crazy. This is a license for continual irresponsibility.
And, of course, we're heading for -- the Republicans are attempting to do government by blackmail. Don't -- give us what we want, or we will tank the economy. Nice little economy you have got here. Shame if something were to happen to it. And we can't run on that system. So we have to -- this needs to be taken off the table.

He's said this before about "government by blackmail" in his column and on his blog.

But it isn't the first time that this point has been raised before. In fact, the debt ceiling came about during WW1 over war funding. At that time the total debt issued was about $11.5B. This represented less than 20% of the GDP at that time. Interestingly, the limit was set to DOUBLE that number. And that is a good thing, as financial markets don't get spooked.

Today, the debt limit is closing in on 100% of GDP fast. And so is the debt. Which means, of course, that financial markets could finally start to doubt the ability of the US government to pay its own debts, not due to insolvency, but due to a broken political system. Oh, wait, that's happened already...and the standoff last summer cost us billions of dollars in additional interest on the debt due to Republican blackmail and intransigence.

As today's NYT editorial reminds us, they put out an editorial in the 60s imploring Kennedy to do away with this stupid political football, which serves no constructive purpose whatsoever. Football is a fun game because afterwards everybody gets to go home and resume their lives. Political footballs are not a fun game, because the consequences can impact us all for years to come.