Social Security assault: It's ideology, not demography and not economics

Shrillblog: WaPo Goes WaCkoFrom the WaPo:

... In short, Social Security is not facing a financial crisis at all. It is facing a need for some distinctly sub-cataclysmic adjustments over the next few decades that would increase its revenue and diminish its benefits.

Politically, however, Social Security is facing the gravest crisis it has ever known. For the first time in its history, it is confronted by a president, and just possibly by a working congressional majority, who are opposed to the program on ideological grounds, who view the New Deal as a repealable aberration in U.S. history, who would have voted against establishing the program had they been in Congress in 1935.

It's the same story with the funding of education in Minnesota. Pawlenty's attack is not about economics, or even about outcomes, it's about ideology. It's all about the foundations of the Republican/Libertarian agenda:

1. Eliminate progressivity in taxation and services.
2. Let the wolves take the weak.

We can have good and important discussions about both of these principals. We can't, however, start those discussion until American journalists find their way out of the deep, dark, black hole they're wandering in. Without journalists cutting through the fog of clever nonsense, Pawlenty and Bush, each in their sphere, will win their covert war.

I don't mind losing a war of ideology that's openly fought. If those two principals are the new core of our society, I can handle that (mostly by looking for refuge and moving!). It really annoys me to never have a chance to fight at all.

Be the Best You can Be: Pawlenty vs the american dream

Be the Best You can Be: Pawlenty's educational plan -- killing the american dream

He shows his colors.

Friedman's seven rules of mideast politics

The New York Times > Opinion > Friedman: Ballots and Boycotts

Rule 1 Never lead your story out of Lebanon, Gaza or Iraq with a cease-fire; it will always be over by the time the next morning's paper is out.

Rule 2 Never take a concession, except out of the mouth of the person who is supposed to be doing the conceding. If I had a dime for every time someone agreed to recognize Israel on behalf of Yasir Arafat, I would be a wealthy man today.

Rule 3 The Israelis will always win, and the Palestinians will always make sure that they never enjoy it. Everything else is just commentary.

Rule 4 In the Middle East, if you can't explain something with a conspiracy theory, then don't try to explain it at all - people there won't believe it.

Rule 5 In the Middle East, the extremists go all the way, and the moderates tend to just go away - unless the coast is completely clear.

Rule 6 The most oft-used phrase of Mideast moderates is: 'We were just about to stand up to the bad guys when you stupid Americans did that stupid thing. Had you stupid Americans not done that stupid thing, we would have stood up, but now it's too late. It's all your fault for being so stupid.'

Rule 7 In Middle East politics there is rarely a happy medium. When one side is weak, it will tell you, 'How can I compromise?' And the minute it becomes strong, it will tell you, 'Why should I compromise?'

Rule 8 What people tell you in private in the Middle East is irrelevant. All that matters is what they will defend in public in Arabic, in Hebrew or in any other local language. Anything said in English doesn't count.

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I think these are quite interesting. Best he's done in a while. For what it's worth, I agree that it's not worth postponing the Iraq elections unless the Shia's ask for a delay.

Titanic Friday

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: Under the Moon

Our lander flies into Titan tomorrow.

Keep your toes and fingers crossed.

Never have we reached so far.

Least competent defense attorney

Boing Boing: Quote of the day: pyramid scheme

'Don't cheerleaders all over America make pyramids every day? It's not torture.' -- Defense lawyer Guy Womack speaking about alleged abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, during the trial of accused military personnel.

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Womack may not be a dumb as he sounds. Maybe this is a brilliant strategy to enable a future appeal on the grounds that the defense counsel was incompetent.

Global warming -- Now you can panic

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Why the Sun seems to be 'dimming'

Here's the thesis:

1. Particulate matter (soot, etc) is changing cloud behavior much more than we'd thought. This results in increasing the earth's albedo (reflectivity -- so can satellites we see the moon brightening over the past few years? probably no baseline ...) and cooling the earth.
2. Changes in clouds are altering rainfall, may have been responsible for recent African droughts, and may cause drought in China.
3. The earth is not getting cooler, however. It's getting warmer. But, from #1, there's less sunlight reaching the earth. SOOO ... the greenhouse effect is much stronger than we though. That means the extreme global warming models are more plausible.
4. We're reducing particulate pollution even as we increase greenhouse gas pollution. That means less of #1 and #2, but it means much more of #3.

Phew.

We'll see. Sounds like this thesis is only now gathering steam. It may yet be shot down. If it isn't ...

Protection rackets hit gambling sites

BBC NEWS | Technology | Rings of steel combat net attacks

Gangs demand protection money from gambling sites. If they don't pay up, they are hit with a denial of service attack.

The interesting part is that they don't seem to target legitimate businesses (Amazon), or at least the journalist didn't mention that. I suspect this is simple logic. Amazon is unlikely to pay up, and they're a much tougher target. It's the same reason physical world protection rackets don't target Walmart.

HubMed: Syndicating PubMed Search results

HubMed

This was featured in a recent Blogline's newsletter. It turns a PubMed query into an RSS/Atom source. Similar to what I used to do with embedding PubMed queries into URL, but now conveniently integrated with one's RSS reader. It's of particular interest to researchers who want to monitor developments in an active area.

It looks like an experiment from the NIH/NCBI.

PS. I go way back in this area. I was an early usability tester for Grateful Med, a precursor to PubMed. (In some regards I prefer Grateful Med to PubMed, but I have a historic bias. Rosemary Woodsmall was the Product Manager for that effort.)

Dave Barry defines a sense of humor

Dave Barry - Elegy for the humorist. By Bryan Curtis

Dave Barry once defined "a sense of humor":

A sense of humor is a measurement of the extent to which we realize that we are trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason. Laughter is how we express the anxiety we feel at this knowledge.

How dangerous are cell phones?

Times Online - Britain

Professor Sir William Stewart, chairman of the National Radiological Protection Board (NRPB), said that evidence of potentially harmful effects had become more persuasive over the past five years.

The news prompted calls for phones to carry health warnings and panic in parts of the industry. One British manufacturer immediately suspended a model aimed at four to eight-year-olds.

The number of mobiles in Britain has doubled to 50 million since the first government-sponsored report in 2000. The number of children aged between five and nine using mobiles has increased fivefold in the same period.

In his report, Mobile Phones and Health, Sir William said that four studies have caused concern. One ten-year study in Sweden suggests that heavy mobile users are more prone to non-malignant tumours in the ear and brain while a Dutch study had suggested changes in cognitive function. A German study has hinted at an increase in cancer around base stations, while a project supported by the EU had shown evidence of cell damage from fields typical of those of mobile phones.

“All of these studies have yet to be replicated and are of varying quality but we can’t dismiss them out of hand,” Sir William said. If there was a health risk — which remained unproven — it would have a greater effect on the young than on older people, he added.

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I'm betting there won't turn out to be much if any effect, but I'm definitely interested. I expect there'll be a genuine review article in JAMA or NEJM soon.

Predictions from 1961: looking to 2000

Will Life Be Worth Living In 2,000AD?

A quite funny list of predictions. The ads on the left, however, suggest it was probably not the most serious of exercises. More like the National Enquirer predicting life in 2040. Intriguingly, many of the IT predictions weren't that far off. Extrapolation around cars and robots however went very wrong.

...Doors will open automatically, and clothing will be put away by remote control. The heating and cooling systems will be built into the furniture and rugs.

You'll have a home control room - an electronics centre, where messages will be recorded when you're away from home. This will play back when you return, and also give you up-to-the minute world news, and transcribe your latest mail.

You'll have wall-to-wall global TV, an indoor swimming pool, TV-telephones and room-to-room TV. Press a button and you can change the décor of a room.

The status symbol of the year 2000 will be the home computer help, which will help mother tend the children, cook the meals and issue reminders of appointments.

Cooking will be in solar ovens with microwave controls. Garbage will be refrigerated, and pressed into fertiliser pellets.

Food won't be very different from 1961, but there will be a few new dishes - instant bread, sugar made from sawdust, foodless foods (minus nutritional properties), juice powders and synthetic tea and cocoa. Energy will come in tablet form.

At work, Dad will operate on a 24 hour week. The office will be air-conditioned with stimulating scents and extra oxygen - to give a physical and psychological lift.

Mail and newspapers will be reproduced instantly anywhere in the world by facsimile.

There will be machines doing the work of clerks, shorthand writers and translators. Machines will "talk" to each other.

It will be the age of press-button transportation. Rocket belts will increase a man's stride to 30 feet, and bus-type helicopters will travel along crowded air skyways. There will be moving plastic-covered pavements, individual hoppicopters, and 200 m.p.h. monorail trains operating in all large cities.

The family car will be soundless, vibrationless and self-propelled thermostatically. The engine will be smaller than a typewriter. Cars will travel overland on an 18 inch air cushion.

Railways will have one central dispatcher, who will control a whole nation's traffic. Jet trains will be guided by electronic brains...

What the heck is Bush saying here?

President outlines role of his faith - The Washington Times: Nation/Politics - January 12, 2005

I think people attack me because they are fearful that I will then say that you're not equally as patriotic if you're not a religious person,' Mr. Bush said. 'I've never said that. I've never acted like that. I think that's just the way it is.

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What the heck is he saying? God, how anyone could vote for that guy ...

spare the death squad, spoil the liberation. Giblet speaks

Fafblog! the whole worlds only source for Fafblog.

We must destroy them to save them.

The incurable disorder: Obesity

Faughnan's Notes: the JAMA Atkins vs. Ornish vs Zone vs. Weight Watcher Diet Study Post

I posted on this JAMA study a few when the media covered it earlier this month. I updated my post after reading the article. Follow the link to see the original and the updated comments.

The anti-science (anti-Darwin) forces will win

Salon.com News | The new Monkey Trial (Michelle Goldberg)

...It's not hard for creationists to convince the public that the evidence for evolution is weak. Scientists accept evolution as something very close to fact, but Americans never have. In a November 2004 CBS News/New York Times poll, about evolution, 55 percent of the respondents said that God created humans in their present form. Twenty-seven percent believed in the evolution of man guided by God, and 13 percent believed in evolution without God.

So it should come as no surprise that the majority of Americans -- 65 percent, according to the poll cited above -- favor teaching creationism alongside evolution in public schools. Creationism is the perfect culture-war issue because it inevitably pits majorities in local communities against interloping lawyers and scientists. In a country gripped by right-wing populism, it's not hard to stoke resentment against scientists who have the gall to think that they know more than everybody else.

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This is a long article, but overall not a bad overview. The author unfortunately omits mention of the most important anti-science figure in America. George Bush has made it clear, even back when he was first running against Gore, that he supports the anti-evolutionary forces.

I don't think Goldberg was clear enough on the misuse of the concept of "intelligent design". Intelligent design, in the broad sense, does not conflict with the idea of evolution. After all, God could have designed the universe and much else besides, and yet all of our biology might be a result of natural selection. Of course the "intelligent design" persons are not interested in this idea. They believe that God created them explicitly, in this case the "design" refers not to the design of creation, but to the "design" of humanity. I suspect, some of the ID folk would be willing to ascribe everything but humanity to be operations of natural selection. It's all about the primacy of humanity's role in the universe, and the belief that we were built in God's image.

Goldberg also fails to mention the most interesting and persistent fallacy in the thinking of the ID cult -- the fallacy of purpose. Their mathematical arguments against evolution are generally designed to show that if we were to rerun earth's history, the probability of developing anything like us is very low.

Think about it. That's only a quandry if one assumes, as they do, that we're the purpose or point of universal history. It's like someone who flips a coin a trillion times, then declares there must be a God because there's no way someone could flip another coin a trillion times and get exactly the same sequence of heads and tails.

Goldberg does mention that this is fundamentally not merely a crusade against Darwin, the positions taken by the creationist forces are fundamentally assaults on the foundations of science, attacks against reason, deduction and empiricism.

Alas, all of these arguments matter not at all.

The key paragraph, which I've excerpted above, is towards the end. 65% is a strong majority. Emphasis on strong -- among those group there are many for whom this is a "hell or heaven" issue. Weighting for this influence, it seems an overwhelming majority.

At various times in our nation's history we've shifted between a "rationalist" and a "romantic" perspective. Now the latter group is ascendant. The romantics feel that science is, like politics or the arts, a matter of opinion. This romantic group, oddly enough, includes both social conservatives and left wing intellectual deconstructionist heathens. Irrationality makes strange bedfellows.

There's not that much to be done. China may have to carry the torch of Rationalism for the 21st century. I can only hope they take good care of it. The rest of us will have to hunt around for scattered refuges of Reason in the US and resign ourselves to private schools (vouchers anyone?).

There is one final irony. The more layperson's cosmology I read, the more inclined I am to consider that some entity may have designed our universe [1]. So I think there's an interesting discussion about Intelligent Design in the cosmology/physics department. The Creationists are just barking up the wrong tree. They should be hounding physicists, not biologists.

[1] There are interesting distinctions between a created physical universe and the "our reality is a simulation" (created virtual universe), but the two have more in common than not.