The hunt for "pufferfish"

Time Magazine found out that Mitt's vetters unconvered some real dirt on Christie. It won't disappear if he is in the 2016 race. Of course this probably comes from either Rand Paul or Ted Cruz or the Teabag national organizations, who desperately hope to win out over the blue-state favorite.

"The vetters were stunned by the garish controversies lurking in the shadows of his record. There was a 2010 Department of Justice inspector general’s investigation of Christie’s spending patterns in his job prior to the governorship, which criticized him for being “the U.S. attorney who most often exceeded the government [travel expense] rate without adequate justification” and for offering “insufficient, inaccurate, or no justification” for stays at swank hotels like the Four Seasons. There was the fact that Christie worked as a lobbyist on behalf of the Securities Industry Association at a time when Bernie Madoff was a senior SIA official—and sought an exemption from New Jersey’s Consumer Fraud Act. There was Christie’s decision to steer hefty government contracts to donors and political allies like former Attorney General John Ashcroft, which sparked a congressional hearing. There was a defamation lawsuit brought against Christie arising out of his successful 1994 run to oust an incumbent in a local Garden State race. Then there was Todd Christie, the Governor’s brother, who in 2008 agreed to a settlement of civil charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission in which he acknowledged making “hundreds of trades in which customers had been systematically overcharged.” (Todd also oversaw a family foundation whose activities and purpose raised eyebrows among the vetters.) And all that was on top of a litany of glaring matters that sparked concern on Myers’ team: Christie’s other lobbying clients, his investments overseas, the YouTube clips that helped make him a star but might call into doubt his presidential temperament, and the status of his health. Ted Newton, managing Project Goldfish under Myers, had come into the vet liking Christie for his brashness and straight talk. Now, surveying the sum and substance of what the team was finding, Newton told his colleagues, If Christie had been in the nomination fight against us, we would have destroyed him—he wouldn’t be able to run for governor again. When you look below the surface, Newton said, it’s not pretty."

Read more: Double Down Excerpt: Mitt Romney Feared Chris Christie's Baggage | TIME.com http://swampland.time.com/2013/11/02/the-hunt-for-pufferfish/#ixzz2l0DrmvIh

Do NOT call the GOP racist!

As Steve Benen summarizes:

North Carolina Republicans started the week offering a spirited defense of a voter-suppression bill that will make it harder for people of color to participate in their own democracy. Then a North Carolina Republican official was forced to resign after referring to “lazy black people that wants the government to give them everything” during an interview for national broadcast. Then North Carolina’s Republican governor, Pat McCrory, decided it’d be a good idea to honor the late Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) – arguably the last proud, unrepentant racist to serve in Congress.

 

And then a Republican state senator in North Carolina thought it’d be hilarious to celebrate Birther humor.

It's all just coincidence. Or something.

Two great articles on partisanship and food stamps

Two great new opinion pieces from the NYT:

1. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/21/american-bile/
2. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/19/red-state-pain/

"Origins of Religious Disbelief"

This is a few months old, but I just came across it.

"The origins of religious disbelief "
Ara Norenzayan and Will M. Gervais
Trends in Cognitive Sciences January 2013, Vol. 17, No. 1
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2012.11.006

Check out a podcast by Gervais, a University of Kentucky prof, on the origins of religious disbelief here, and read the review paper on the subject here.

Disgust with our political system

Sometimes I excoriate conservatives for their misinformation, confusion and poor moral values. But I will turn the same rigor towards tearing apart Obama for his failure to "close the revolving door" between lobbying and Congressional service.

I can't say it better than Frank Rich did:

IQ revisited

I believe I explicitly pointed out once or twice that I don't put much stock in IQ tests in general. Since I've never had my IQ tested, I guess I get to play both sides of the fence on the issue of whether or not cognitive ability can really be measured, and how much it matters. And by matters I mean for 80% of us, not so much for the 10% at the very top and 10% at the very bottom of the scale. Because we all know that if 80% of us want to learn something, and put a lot of effort into it, we probably can. For those other 10%, effort is much less important.

What the internet does

Not going to try to make a deep post here. I think we all forget sometimes just how radically the internet has upset the world. Its full effects have still not shaken out.

Palin saves Xmas

It's easier to spend time hooking suckers to buy your new book than to work on legislation (i.e., Farm Bill, Immigration).

Why does this "War on Christmas" shit drag on? (here, here, here...)

As Krugman memorably put it, the modern GOP is an alliance between the plutocrats and the preachers. You can't get middle and lower-class Americans to vote for plutocrats openly, so you make BS like this the underlying current that drives them. This is of course the famous "What's the matter with Kansas?" thesis. As the GOP continues its rightward slide, I can't help but think that as older white people die off so will the party they support. The GOP will become a truly regional party, largely rooted in Southern Christianity.

PS: I'm a not-so-angry atheist without an attorney. Thus I won't be "telling" Palin that Christ is no longer a part of Christmas. Lolz

Reason to celebrate

I am pretty late on this, but once I saw it I couldn't resist...

Sometimes science gives you reason to celebrate: "Does semen have antidepressent properties?"

(apparently it does)

Every man's reaction on planet earth?

Kristof on guns

Today's NYT:

The imbalance in our priorities is particularly striking because since 2005, terrorism has taken an average of 23 American lives annually, mostly overseas — and the number has been falling.
More Americans die of falling televisions and other appliances than from terrorism. Twice as many Americans die of bee or wasp stings annually. And 15 times as many die by falling off ladders.
Most striking, more than 30,000 people die annually from firearms injuries, including suicides, murders and accidents, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. American children are 13 times as likely to be killed by guns as in other industrialized countries.
Doesn’t it seem odd that we’re willing to spend trillions of dollars, and intercept metadata from just about every phone call in the country, to deal with a threat that, for now, kills but a few Americans annually — while we’re too paralyzed to introduce a rudimentary step like universal background checks to reduce gun violence that kills tens of thousands?
Wasn’t what happened at Sandy Hook a variant of terrorism? And isn’t what happens in troubled gang-plagued neighborhoods of Chicago just as traumatic for schoolchildren, leaving them suffering a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder?
I don’t see any glib solutions here, just a need for a careful balancing of risks and benefits. I’d say that in auto safety, we get it about right. We give most adults access to cars, but we regulate them with licenses, insurance requirements and mandatory seat belts. In the case of national security and terrorism, I wonder if we haven’t overdeployed resources.
In the case of guns, we don’t do enough. Baby steps, consistent with the Second Amendment, would include requiring universal background checks, boosting research to understand gun violence and investing in smarter guns. A debit card requires a code to work, a car requires a key — and a gun, nothing at all.

"Derp" - a new word for something I've long known

As you may suspect, derp is not limited to wingnuttian politics. It is quite prominent in religion (esp. American Christianity) as well. Typical signs: bumper-sticker-theology and/or cliches, sloganeering, smugness, frequent visits to the Creation Museum's "Dragon vs. Dinosaur" exhibit.

Gun fallacies

Going to start a running post here on the common "counterpoints" (as if they deserve to be considered valid) to the idea of universal background checks, or any change in gun laws generally. This is a work in progress and I will add new points and commentary over time, then erase this sentence later on...

Although it isn't particularly germane to the discussion, for the record I own two shotguns.

Evolution of life

The last time I thought much about abiogenesis, I had a hard time finding good (recent) review articles to summarize things, and relied on the NYT. The past few years have provided many breakthroughs, summarized by Hazen and others. This month's Nature Chemistry has an entire section devoted to the subject. It calls the Grand Challenge of chemistry explaining the emergence of life, similar to a Theory of Everything in physics.

The collapse of the Republican intellectual edifice

Facts haven't been kind to Republican ideology lately. For years, really, the eminent apocalypse upon which they depend has failed to materialize (like Jesus, lol). Chait walks us through the details:

A brave new world

Friedman is not my favorite columnist by a long shot. Many times I glance at his column and think, "He's recycled this garbage again?" He seems to repeat the same thing about our world being "hyperconnected" and "flat" every week, and just looks at a different implication of it: education, industry, entrepreneurship, etc.

But this week I liked the way he summarized things: we live in "A brave new 401(k) world, where we all take the bar exam, and are measured by the most-emailed list." His explanation follows (my emphasis added in bold):

Philosopher's Stone in NYT

I really like a lot of the stuff I read there, and today's reading was no exception:

Kant’s insight was that, in order for the knowledge we get from our senses at any given moment in time to mean anything, our minds must already be distinguishing it and combining it with the information we get in prior and subsequent moments in time. Thus there is no such thing as a pure impression in time — no absolute, frozen moment in which we know the sun is rising now without being able to infer anything from it — because such a pure moment without a before or after would be nothing at all...

Apt summary

I no longer have a facebook page, but my significant other does. Using their facebook page afforded me the opportunity to check up on some old friends from my hometown. When I did this, I found one person's wall that I felt compelled to save and share. You see, it captures the hilarious mixture of religion and ignorance that I grew up in:

Two books

I never get around to reading books anymore. Maybe soon. Young children just aren't helping me with productivity...although they may be providing me with two things that seem pretty important to most people: the meaning of life and an afterlife.

Organization psych in NYT Mag

Adam Grant's money quote:

Organizational psychology has long concerned itself with how to design work so that people will enjoy it and want to keep doing it. Traditionally the thinking has been that employers should appeal to workers’ more obvious forms of self-interest: financial incentives, yes, but also work that is inherently interesting or offers the possibility for career advancement. Grant’s research, which has generated broad interest in the study of relationships at work and will be published for the first time for a popular audience in his new book, “Give and Take,” starts with a premise that turns the thinking behind those theories on its head. The greatest untapped source of motivation, he argues, is a sense of service to others; focusing on the contribution of our work to other people’s lives has the potential to make us more productive than thinking about helping ourselves.

Great read. I will check out the book.

Lessig's "Lesterland"

You must watch this video on the corruption of our democracy:

Genius

I found a few interesting resources from this page that I wanted to highlight / bookmark. I am reading through Basic Neurochemistry (Siegel, 8th) right now and am interested as a scientist in the effort to model intelligence based on the brain. There are a lot of variables that people try to plug into equations to predict IQ: brain volume overall, correlations between the amount and/or ratio white matter (myelin sheathing), gray matter, folding, interhemispheric interaction, density, wave patterns...etc.

Now that all this money is supposed to be poured into the Brain Activity Map Project or whatever they'll call it, I just figured I'd put out my prediction:

We tend to think of the brain in computer-related terms. The speed at which it processes information. How its "circuits" are designed and how signals propagate through them. But there is something as a biochemist that leads me to reject the binary on/off nature. Rather than thinking of neurons as in an "on / off" state, and trying to model the brain like a CPU, it is important to realize that the strength of the signal is a function of chemistry. The actual electrochemical potential (voltage) that we are discussing here goes back to the concentration of ions and transmitters. And since this concentration can vary, so can signal strength.

So now imagine trying to model a very simple brain, like C. elegans, studied by Bargmann and others,  with only 300 or so neurons. In the simplest computing model, you would have the firing patterns of the neurons mapped so that, for instance, odor recognition lights up a certain portion of the brain in a certain sequence. But this assumes each of these neurons to be in a true "on/off" state. They are more along a spectrum of signal strength. Let's say for simplicities' sake you round off the observed concentrations into 10 brackets (zero, near-zero...near-maximum, maximum). The complexity inherent in mapping 300 different possibilities is exponentially magnified because it isn't 2^300, but instead it is now 10^300. So now you've gone from 2 * 10^90 to 1 * 10^300 possible "states". And if you aren't mathematically inclined, 10^90 is more than the estimated number of atoms in the universe. You would have to assemble 10^200 universes to approach the number atoms equal to the possible states in C. elegans brain.

Where would we put that kind of map, assuming a computer could draw it for us? ;) And do you think that reading it would be any different than an ant reading Melville?

As I've said before, I don't put too much stock in IQ tests that fall within one standard deviation or so from the mean, but I put a lot more in them when the measurement indicates significant outliers. I put zero stock in the effort to link brain activity meaningfully to behavior or intelligence.

Efficiency of capitalism?

Richard Wolff writes:

Less inequality among and within societies and increased efficiency that benefits everyone with less work and more or different output: these goals require confronting the capitalist system. The particular capitalist way of organizing how goods and services get produced and distributed and who makes the key decisions is the problem. What, how and where to produce and how to use the profits are those key decisions. To serve most people, those decisions must be made by most people. To do that requires converting capitalist into co-operative enterprises where workers become their own collective board of directors. Workers self-directed enterprises would be far less likely to relocate production, far less likely to distribute profits among workers in extremely unequal ways, and far less likely to install technologies with negative impacts on the environment in which they, their families, and their communities live. Democratizing the economy in this way can yield the kinds of economic and social results that capitalism has long promised – but increasingly fails to deliver. 

Indeed. Some more thoughts on this topic.

The reason they marry little girls

Must be that the child rapists' penises are too small to fill up a grown woman. Definitely too small to satisfy her. And their brains are too small to question how this is a divine commandment.

On a related note...(child rape, for those of you too dense) see this hilarious parody of the fantastic new Netflix HOC.

The future of coal

I am sidelined by illness today so I thought I'd spend some of my newfound free time exploring a topic I've considered before.

Although many of my friends and family would be sad to hear it -- and disbelieve me strongly -- the long-term trend for domestic coal looks bleak. Of course as gas begins to replace coal its price will go up, but coal is dirty. Yes, gas emits carbon dioxide too, and has some of its own challenges. However, burning coal emits more carbon dioxide, as well as harmful particulates, than any other choice to power our electric grid. Given the power of states and the federal government to limit harmful emissions from coal, I don't think that coal will ever recover from its current slump, and in fact the warming climate will push it into further obscurity.

Here's some EIA data showing the change in coal demand from 2011-2012:

What I did is took the numbers of millions of tons of coal demand by electric utilities for 2011 and subtracted 2012 to generate a "demand loss" bar for each month. I then divided this absolute change in tons by the 2011 amount of tons to generate a % loss in 2012. Coal prices have basically flatlined/held stable/declined slightly even as natural gas consumption spiked, which means that the price point for gas is still much more attractive than coal.

Coal prices are now back at 2005 levels:

Production is trending down, too, probably in an effort to increase prices. In January, production fell from 95 to 83.9 Mtons = 11.7% drop. In February 85.8 to 76.7 Mtons = 10.6% drop.

And yet no effect on prices yet. Probably without the drop in production the prices would have plummeted more.

So let's put the pieces of the puzzle together:

1. Power plants are demanding less coal due to two factors: weather and switching to gas
2. Overall demand/consumption of coal in 2011 was equal to 1996! (Table 6.1, page 93/211)
3. Coal prices are back at 2005 levels, a drop of 50% from 2008 prices.
4. Coal production is down, but the price of coal continues to flatline/fall
5. EPA regulations on power plant emissions will begin in 2015, which should further impact coal

Now that doesn't mean that international coal use will wane. Estimates I've seen predict an enormous increase in coal plants in India and China. So there will be a huge market for exporting coal, although this may be usurped by gas too (since Australia, Russia and the US will be exporting that too). And there has been a small uptick in exports lately, but not nearly enough to close the gap in falling domestic consumption (Fig. 6.1)

Testimony a few weeks ago in Congress about the good news from the drop in coal's fortunes:

U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from energy consumption are down 13 percent since 2007. The economic downturn is part of the story. But the most significant part is the result of natural gas supplanting coal in electric generation at a rapid rate.

That's good news. But not to coal miners and their families...

If you can't beat 'em, rig 'em!

A few months ago I just shook my head as I read about the scheme to apportion electoral votes by heavily-gerrymandered districts. Obviously, Republicans can't win the popular vote in states where the majority of voters don't vote Republican. So instead they want to cut out the majority of voters (living in large cities) entirely. Lol.

...except it's true. Luckily the plan failed in Virginia.

So hey, guys, if you really want an amazing idea, here's one: do away with the Electoral College completely. Scrap it. It is a ridiculous waste of time and money to vote in our modern democracy the way we do and focus ONLY on "swing states". I know I have little incentive to vote, living in a deep red state like I do.

But of course Republicans would never support a measure to elect Executive officials based on popular vote. Since they'd lose even more than they already do now.

Procrustean Bed

I like Taleb. He was a lot like Roubini back in the day (07-08). And his collected sayings are definitely worth consideration:

1. “Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the non-sucker, not exactly the same thing.” 
2. “Social media are severely antisocial, health foods are empirically unhealthy, knowledge workers are very ignorant, and social sciences aren’t scientific at all.” 
3. “In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.” 
4. “Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.” 
5. “In nature we never repeat the same motion; in captivity (office, gym, commute, sports), life is just repetitive-stress injury. No randomness.” 
6. “Economics cannot digest the idea that the collective (and the aggregate) are disproportionately less predictable than individuals.” 
7. “Catholic countries had more serial monogamy than today, but without the need for divorce—life expectancy was short; marriage duration was much, much shorter. “ 
8. “You never win an argument until they attack your person.” 
9. “The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind’s flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality—without exploiting them for fun and profit.” 
10. “To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.” 
11. “People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels—people you don’t want to resemble when you grow up.” 
12. “The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary. My only measure of success is how much time you have to kill.” 
13. “Some books cannot be summarized (real literature, poetry); some can be compressed to about ten pages; the majority to zero pages.” 
14. “They think that intelligence is about noticing things that are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns).” 
15. “The best way to spot a charlatan: someone (like a consultant or a stockbroker) who tells you what to do instead of what not to do.” 
16. “The main difference between government bailouts and smoking is that in some rare cases the statement ‘this is my last cigarette’ holds true.”

Sceptic's Guide to Atheism

I've expressed dismay towards the New Atheists a few times on this blog before (here, here). The major criticism I have is the employment of straw men and acerbic wit in place of careful reasoned arguments and scholarship. This is found in misrepresentations of classic theistic arguments and also in trying to make a case against religion generally as harmful/evil.

I wandered upon what looks to be a very good book -- Sceptic's Guide to Atheism -- that provides a summary and review of the arguments of the New Atheists, with counterarguments. I found it by finding another video involving Arif Ahmed, an atheist philosopher at  Cambridge whose debate style I find quite strong and appealing. The first speaker in the new video I happened upon is the author of this new book, Peter Williams. I've embedded the video below:

Really cool Science videos

Title says it all. I wanted to embed them but they seem to have that function disabled. Check out these fantastic videos from Science:

• Fertilization (human)

I'd seen videos of human fertilization depictions before, but this one is breathtaking. AMAZING

• Inventory of the cell

They use a pancreatic cell from a mouse to show you the relative 3D scale of the organelles, then switch to a graphical depiction. Really informative and neat.

Flush out the atheists

Thought this was funny:

 

Maybe as the red hats vote in Rome they ought to pretend to be interested in supporting gay marriage. Or just marriage for priests. Or just equal rights for women (nuns). Good way to flush the crap out of the system...

"Way of the agnostic" in NYT

Gutting writes on love, understanding and knowledge in the context of religion. He basically argues that religious people should appreciate those who want to partake in the community and aesthetics of religion although they find its knowledge/belief claims "a bridge too far"...

But love and understanding, even without knowledge, are tremendous gifts; and religious knowledge claims are hard to support. We should, then, make room for those who embrace a religion as a source of love and understanding but remain agnostic about the religion’s knowledge claims.  We should, for example, countenance those who are Christians while doubting the literal truth of, say, the Trinity and the Resurrection.  I wager, in fact, that many professed Christians are not at all sure about the truth of these doctrines —and other believers have similar doubts.  They are, quite properly, religious agnostics.

He presents such agnosticism as a sort of "middle way" between "no arguments" atheism, which is the presumption that the burden of proof lies on the religious, and the presumption by religion that faith justifies knowledge.

One of the more interesting passages takes me back to quite a few dialogs that I've had with believers over the years:

It may well be that physical science will ultimately give us a complete account of reality. It may, that is, give us causal laws that allow us to predict (up to the limits of any quantum or similar uncertainty) everything that happens in the universe.   This would allow us to entirely explain the universe as a causal system.  But there are aspects of our experience (consciousness, personality, moral obligation, beauty) that may not be merely parts of the causal system.  They may, for example, have meanings that are not reducible to causal interactions.

I would wager all my earthly goods that many people believe in religious knowledge claims because of these aspects of our experience. Religion has done a great job of packaging together some really hard-to-swallow claims about history and science with a much easier-to-swallow sense of appreciation for these aspects of our experience, and insisting they be taken together or not at all. Many believers I know have pointed this exact thing out to me before after a long dialog in which they may see that I have some good points/arguments in favor of rejecting some of their knowledge claims about history and science.

Here are some recent posts dealing with those same issues:

1. Accepting these knowledge claims is not evidence that theists have lower IQs - http://nonserviamergofiatlux.blogspot.com/2007/07/new-iq-study-on-theists-vs-atheists.html
2. The roots of anti-intellectualism in Evangelical churches - http://nonserviamergofiatlux.blogspot.com/2008/06/correlations-between-reading-and.html
3. Some people have assumed for years that with the advance of science, religion would disappear. They were wrong, largely because of these "aspects of our experience" listed above: http://nonserviamergofiatlux.blogspot.com/2006/11/more-things-change.html
4. Some religious people mistakenly see science and liberalism as threats, although they really aren't. http://nonserviamergofiatlux.blogspot.com/2008/05/kennedy-parishoners-on-threats-to-faith.html
5. The existential "cost" of atheism as regarding beauty, morality, meaning, etc. http://nonserviamergofiatlux.blogspot.com/2008/04/on-morality-and-hope-vs-godlessness.html

Kon Leong on career/goals

A wise guy. In the good way:

If you experiment in different jobs and functions in those two or three years out of school, you will have a much better shot at finding your sweet spot. And the sweet spot is the intersection between what you’re really good at and what you love to do. If you can find that intersection, you are set. A lot of people would kill for that because, at 65, they’re retiring and never found it. So don’t put so much emphasis on initial compensation. Don’t listen to all the harping from the family. Try to find your sweet spot and, once you find it, invest in that. You don’t want to get degrees just to do work you don’t really like. If you’re miserable, even if you make a lot of money, that’s still 40 years of your life.

He says a lot of other smart things in the interview, so it's worth reading (e.g., his innate strength is that he can "zoom in, zoom out")...

"Losing Our Religion" on NPR

Interesting series on the changes in religious affiliation. I've been harping on this topic for a while...

1. http://nonserviamergofiatlux.blogspot.com/2006/06/some-thoughts-on-religiosity.html
2. http://nonserviamergofiatlux.blogspot.com/2008/10/religiosity-redux.html
3. http://nonserviamergofiatlux.blogspot.com/2009/03/atheism-and-watchmen.html
4. http://nonserviamergofiatlux.blogspot.com/2009/09/religious-nones-and-crazy-people.html
5. http://nonserviamergofiatlux.blogspot.com/2009/07/gotta-love-south.html
6. http://nonserviamergofiatlux.blogspot.com/2009/05/pew-forum-on-changing-religious.html
7. http://nonserviamergofiatlux.blogspot.com/2009/03/god-is-backnot.html

Scientology

I have apparently never written on the topic, aside from a random link in a post about Scientology's effort to do away with CSICOP.

But after reading the book review on Wright's new hard-hitting journalistic manifesto, I had to link.

The thing that bothers me so much: everyone knows that L. Ron Hubbard was a science fiction writer before he "invented" Scientology. And when you read about what Hubbard claims is the "true" history of the universe, it makes you want to bang your head on your keyboard.

“The planet Earth, formerly called Teegeeack, was part of a confederation of planets under the leadership of a despot ruler named Xenu,” said Hubbard, who was a best-selling science fiction writer before he became the prophet of a new religion. To suppress a rebellion, Xenu tricked the confederations into coming in for fake income tax investigations. Billions of thetans were taken to Teegeeack (you remember: Earth), “where they were dropped into volcanoes and then blown up with hydrogen bombs.” Suffice it to say I’m not hanging around Earth next time I’m between lives. Hubbard apparently could go on for hours — or pages — with this stuff. Wright informs us, as if it were just an oversight, that “Hubbard never really explained how he came by these revelations,” but elsewhere he says they came to him at the dentist’s office. Of the Borgia-like goings-on after Hubbard’s death in 1986, Wright says cheerfully, “Every new religion faces an existential crisis following the death of its charismatic founder.” He always refers to Scientology respectfully as “the church.”

How can any sane person not understand that he was just creating more science fiction? What amazing revelation brought him this "knowledge"? It's really sad.

A more sane realization is that Hubbard likely invented the church just to get away with not paying some taxes. Then, after he realized how many suckers there are out there, it became a revenue stream for him, rather than a tax shelter...

To be honest, people in Christianity or Islam are not much better. They claim ancient people had "revelations" from angels or directly from God. They believe all the fantastic claims of the Bible and Quran about how the earth/people came to be. The amount of evidence for their claims is exactly equal to those of Hubbard.

Regulation of assault weapons

I like this take by Kristof, which hits the nail home in terms of stats and studies on gun violence:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calculates that each year there are more than 11,000 gun homicides and nearly 19,000 gun suicides. That’s 30,000 firearms deaths a year in the United States. At that rate, there have already been some 2,500 violent gun deaths since Sandy Hook. David Hemenway, a public health specialist at Harvard, says that having a gun at home increases the risk of suicide in that household by two to four times.
To reduce auto deaths, we’ve taken a public health approach that you might call “car control” — driver’s licenses, air bags, seat belts, auto registration. The result is a steady decline in vehicle fatalities so that some time soon gun deaths are likely to exceed traffic fatalities, for the first time in modern American history.

See, the point is that no one said we'd ban cars when we had auto deaths. Instead we applied more rules for how you get a car and track ownership. The government didn't "take away your cars" and they aren't going to do that now. But it's about time for registration and careful database tracking on every firearm, along with other commonsense measures to improve public safety (e.g., firing pin markers, bans on all "highly-lethal" ammo types...).

Mint the coin already

A debt ceiling bypass idea that I wrote about on January 2 that may have sounded "fringe" is now clearly mainstream: bypass the debt ceiling fight altogether using legal means. Don't let the Republicans' brand of economic terrorism (give me what I want or I will harm innocent third parties) survive as an option any longer. In our current political calculus, Republicans control only the House -- and that largely by gerrymandering -- yet feel that having 1/3 the political power entitles them to use the debt ceiling as 100% leverage to get further serious entitlement/spending cuts. Sadly, this is not the time to try to highlight their extremism by letting the US Govt Default date approach. Reforming that bunch is not going to happen.

So now is the time to mint the $1T platinum coin. (Or 1,000 $1B platinum coins, but why waste the metal?) And then instruct the Treasury Secretary to hold on to it and be prepared to deposit it at the Fed once the Republicans make it clear they're willing to blow up the economy if they don't get what they want. Take the debt ceiling off the table today, before all the hype and news attention centers on the fight.

Of course Republicans will scream tyranny and executive overreach. But it seems pretty clearly constitutional. And furthermore, it's Congress who racked up the bills. Tax cuts and unfunded wars and unfunded entitlement increases all happened on the Republicans watch. Now they're bitching because the Treasury has to borrow to pay the bills they incurred.

When a debate turns into an exhibit

Piers Morgan invited nutjob Alex Jones to "debate" gun control. Jones does not provide testimony or evidence to support an argument. He instead functions as a piece of evidence -- a talking exhibit against his own position:

Problems with atheism, cont'd

A NYT article by Susan Jacoby takes me back to familiar ground. In Jacoby's article, she discusses the lack of a secular community, in both the institutional and grass-roots sense, to form a supportive network and gain recognition and legitimacy. Until then discrimination against atheists will continue. She makes the case that atheism can present an existentialist argument that death is a final, perfect rest and therefore attaches no fear. Otherwise, atheists fall far short of offering hope -- or much of anything -- to the religious and non-religious alike in times of suffering.

Food for thought...

Execution is everything

I think my football coach friends can related to this concept very well:

Ideas, in a sense, are overrated. Of course, you need good ones, but at this point in our supersaturated culture, precious few are so novel that nobody else has ever thought of them before. It’s really about where you take the idea, and how committed you are to solving the endless problems that come up in the execution. The more I experienced this frustration firsthand, the more I came to appreciate how naturally suited I am to the job I used to think I never wanted to have when I grew up.

It may seem counterintuitive, but I would claim this really applies to scientific research as well, despite that Holy Grail/Eureka mentality of science (e.g., string theory, cancer cures...). It's not that people haven't come up with a number of novel approaches to solving a problem much like your own. It's that they either gave up on them or started working on them to run into a problem that technology has since changed or solved.

Future hopes of bipartisanship

The hope that a Grand Bargain may result in a New Fair Deal for Americans is probably futile. This opening after the election was a very good opening for the two parties to reach a big deal on rewriting the tax code and changing entitlements. It failed. I think everyone knows why. The Republicans continued to threaten tax cuts for 98% of Americans in order to win them for 2%, which they more than did. This while Obama kept re-drawing his lines in the sand, giving many liberals heartburn when they consider what is likely to happen over the debt ceiling fight. I should point out here that "Obama's 'new' revenues" or "Obama's higher taxes" (mock quotes added since the expiration of the Bush tax cuts is not Obama's "fault" or "plan" for new revenues) will add less to the Treasury over four years than the world's richest added to their own pockets in one year -- $241B.

So what incentive will Republicans have to negotiate any further revenues with Obama? Zero. What incentive will they have to take him right to the debt ceiling limit again, as they did in the summer of 2011? Every incentive imaginable. I mean, it's not like they're held back by some ethos on keeping their country's creditworthiness intact. My hope is that he grows a pair and ignores the debt ceiling all together. It's not a Constitutional limit on Presidential power. It's a stupid quirk, wherein the idiotic Congress passes a budget then limits their ability to honor it.

I can seriously see Obama giving up big on entitlements soon, this despite a very mediocre "win" on taxes. He started his negotiations with John Boehner with an ask of $1.6T in revenues. He ended up with $600B...37.5%! At this rate, if he hopes to "only" cut $400B in Medicare, it will end up being a trillion. And then the Republicans will turn around and run against the Democrats in 2014 as the "Party of Medicare Cuts" who started death panels for grandma.

Does the future hold any hope for more Democratic leverage through elections? No.

According to ace analyst Nate Silver, writing one week after the election, the Democrats have little to no chance of winning back the House in 2014 -- in large part thanks to increased gerrymandering by Republicans in 2010 -- and the WaPo's Chris Cilliza documents that only 15 of the 234 Republicans elected to the House in 2012 won in a district where Obama was also the winner. As The Economist pointed out, Democrats got 49% of the House vote to the GOP's 48.2%, but the Democrats got 32 less seats = 46.2% of seats. Only in America!

So in fact, the Democrats could only stand to lose more of their leverage. The only hope you could have is that they would parlay their electoral losses into the same sort of government-by-blackmailing and filibuster-every-single-bill madness that the past few years of GOP clusterfuc*ery have shown.

How to ignore the debt ceiling

Apparently, the President has some legal room to maneuver around the ridiculous debt ceiling; the Republicans' last great flaming political football.

UPDATE: WSJ says the $1T platinum coin idea is gaining traction...