What comedian Benny Hill taught us is that footage of almost any chase can be made funny by speeding it up and adding the tune Yakety Sax as the sound track. Here the theory is applied to a chase within a prison as captured by the closed circuit surveillance cameras. (Via Boing Boing.)
I just love the tune Yakety Sax. It never fails to cheer me up and put me in a good mood.
Via Pharyngula, I learn that Campus Crusade for Christ, the evangelical organization, has decided to change its name. The new one? Cru. Yes, really. Apparently college affiliates had been referring to themselves this way for a while.
I don’t know about this. Cru sounds more like the stage name a rapper would adopt, as in ‘DJ Cru’. Furthermore, the university where I work at has the acronym CWRU that is spoken as ‘crew’ which sounds the same as ‘cru’. So the members of the campus affiliate of this organization will become known as the ‘CWRU Cru crew’, which when vocalized will sound like you are doing bird imitations.
The reason for the change is that apparently the words ‘Campus’ and ‘Crusade’ had negative connotations. More interestingly, they found that even ‘Christ’ was off-putting because people “might initially be turned off by a more overtly Christian name”. They seem to think that having a name that gave no hint of being Christian would enable their members to sneak their religious message into conversations with people who were unaware that they were targets of a proselytization effort.
This is of course the kind of sneaky tactics religious people use. But despite that, I took it to be a very encouraging sign that the brand ‘Christ’ is seen by even evangelical Christians as being tarnished.
As the debt-ceiling talks drag on, Democratic party supporters keep getting alarmed at getting regular reports that he seems to be willing to give away the store to the Republican crazies who are clearly losing the public relations battle, and keep wondering why he seems to be such a lousy negotiator.
It is important to bear I mind what I have said repeatedly. Obama and the Democratic party leadership are not trying to get the best deal from the Republicans. They and the Republicans agree on what they want to do (cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits and provide more tax breaks for wealthy individuals and corporations) because that is what their bosses, the oligarchy, want.
What Obama is trying to negotiate is a way to get all these things without completely alienating his party’s base. He will go as far as he can get away with. That is why all these trial balloons keep getting floated and then denied.
Jerry Coyne has a very interesting post discussing a new study by F. Solt, P. Habel, and J. T. Grant, J. T. titled Economic inequality, relative power, and religiosity that appeared in the journal Social Science Quarterly, 92: 447–465 (2011), that finds that economic inequality is positively correlated with religious belief, and looks at theories that might account for this.
The most common theory is called “deprivation theory” which says that in economically unequal societies, poorer folks turn to religion for reassurance and comfort. The authors of the paper introduce something called “relative power theory” that says that “many wealthy individuals, rather than simply allowing redistribution to be decided through the democratic process as such median-voter models assume, respond to higher levels of inequality by adopting religious beliefs and spreading them among their poorer fellow citizens. Religion then works to discourage interest in mere material well-being in favor of eternal spiritual rewards, preserving the privileges of the rich and allowing unequal conditions to continue.”
Coyne summarizes the conclusions of the paper.
Their findings thus suggest that both the deprivation and relative power theories are needed to explain the data. In economically unequal societies, rich people promulgate religion to keep their own place in the hierarchy, and, rather than fighting for more equality, poor people accept religion as an easy form of solace.
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The authors also note that the relative power theory explains why the U.S. is so religious despite the fact that its citizens are generally well off. It is, they say, because the U.S. shows considerably more economic inequality than other developed countries (and that is true).
The authors also did a time-study and found that “Increases in inequality in one year predict substantial gains in religiosity in the next,” while “past values of religiosity do not predict future values of inequality” clearly indicating that it is inequality that influences religiosity and not the other way around.
A heartening sign is the trend of declining religiosity in America over the last half century.
Of course, this predicts that the recent rise in inequality in the US will see an uptick in religiosity. But it seems that the overall tendency is for religion to decline.
Both the original paper and Coyne’s summary make for fascinating reading.
What appealed to me is the inference that the fights for economic justice and the elimination of religion are related, since those are two of my personal goals.
The film looks at the effect of the loss of jobs in the current economy, but from the point of view of the upper middle classes. It centers around the character played by Ben Affleck, a well-paid executive who suddenly loses his job as a result of his division in a conglomerate being shut down. The reasons for the shut down and layoffs are the usual: the top management of a manufacturing company shifts production overseas to take advantage of cheaper labor and tries to goose up its stock price (thus increasing their personal wealth via their stock options) by eliminating jobs to increase profits, especially laying off older workers who are paid more, all the while paying its chief executives high salaries and providing them with fancy offices, corporate jets, and other perks.
Also in the film are the always watchable veteran actors Tommy Lee Jones and Chris Cooper as much older senior executives who also lose their jobs, the former because he tries to protest the lay-offs, especially of long-time employees like Cooper. The film looks at how they try to adjust to suddenly feeling useless, the shame they feel at their friends and neighbors and relatives knowing about their sudden drop in status, and the sting of not having calls returned and being rejected for job after job.
This is not a great film but it is worth seeing. Initially it is hard to feel any sympathy for the Affleck character who plays the role of a shallow yuppie jerk, living in a large suburban house, driving a Porsche, regularly playing golf at his country club, thinking that he is so good that the recession will not touch him and that he will be snapped up for a similar high-paying job immediately, and refusing to accept the fact that his new reduced circumstances may last a long time and require him to adjust to a much more modest lifestyle. He also looks down on his brother-in-law (Kevin Costner) who is self-employed as a home-builder who does much of the work himself and hires one or two people to help him. But Affleck manages to humanize this character so that you do eventually start feeling sorry for him.
Since I do not move around in such corporate or social circles, it was hard for me to get a sense of how realistic the situations and portrayals were. The firings of even the very senior executives seemed too abrupt and secretive to me. It also seemed odd that people who had earned so much money over such a long period did not seem to have sufficient savings or other reserves to ride out not having an income for a few months, so much so that they cannot even pay their children’s college tuition. Do such people actually blow almost their entire incomes living high on the hog, thinking that they will never face any setbacks in life?
The US is notorious for having a very low savings rate. I wrote in an earlier post about how 50% of the population are economically fragile, in that they would find it hard to lay their hands on $2,000 in 30 days if a sudden emergency should require it. I thought that this would apply to mostly the middle class and poorer who had less disposable income but this film suggests that this may extend to the more wealthy upper-middle class too. Maybe these people try too hard to emulate to the lifestyles of the people profiled in David Sirota’s “Such it up and cope” article and feel that a fancy house, a Porsche, country club membership, and fancy vacations are essentials, not luxuries, and thus spend as much as they make, if not more.
One interesting side note in the film was seeing how the executive outplacement system, which is a benefit offered to executives to ease the sting of being fired, works. It seems to be much like working in an office in that you are given a desk, a computer, a phone in a shared cubicle (and maybe a private office if you are a fired senior executive), plus some coaching on how to find a job, except that it is for a limited time and your job is to find a job.
Here’s the trailer.
In October 2006, more than one hundred horses got trapped in a small patch of dry land as a result of a sudden flood in the Netherlands in which 18 horses drowned. All rescue attempts failed and the horses seemed to be getting desperate until four women decided to try a different approach.
The episode has been set to music. Watch.
Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), issued a statement on the latest budget plan that Obama seems to be enthused about, although there is still some confusion about what the plan calls for since it is still in outline form. Baker’s statement is worth reading in full but here is his conclusion:
The budget plan produced by the Senate’s “Gang of Six” offers the promise of huge tax breaks for some of the wealthiest people in the country, while lowering Social Security benefits for retirees and the disabled.
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It is striking that the Gang of Six chose to respond to the crisis created by the collapse of the housing bubble by developing a plan that will give even more money to top Wall Street executives and traders.
Obama seems to be actually proud that he is going along with the long-sought-after dream of the oligarchy to cut the safety net of older and poor people, saying that the plan is ‘broadly consistent’ with what he has been advocating, adding that “We have a Democratic President and administration that is prepared to sign a tough package that includes both spending cuts, modifications to Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare that would strengthen those systems and allow them to move forward, and would include a revenue component.”
The wingnuts seem to be mobilizing against the plan too so it may not go anywhere.
(For other posts in this series, see here.)
The logic used in arriving at scientific conclusions closely tracks the legal maxim that ‘the burden of proof rests on who asserts’. It should be noted that the word proof used here does not correspond the way it is used in mathematics, but more along the lines used in law. As commenter Eric pointed out in response to the previous post in this series, in the legal arena there are two standards for proof. In criminal cases, there is the higher bar of proving beyond a reasonable doubt, but in civil cases the standard is one based on the preponderance of evidence. So if the preponderance of evidence is in favor of one position, it is assumed to be true even if it has not been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Scientific propositions are judged to be true not because they have been proven to be logically and incontrovertibly true (which is impossible to do) or because they have been established by knowledgeable judges to be beyond a reasonable doubt (which is not impossible but is too high a bar to result in productive science), but because the preponderance of evidence favors them. Evidence plays a crucial role here as it does in legal cases.
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During any budget debate, politicians who want to cut spending on salaries and benefits for the middle classes and on public services never fail to invoke the family budget as a model for how the government should deal with its own finances. We are repeatedly told that just as families have to make hard choices about what to spend their money on in order to stay within their income, so should the government. This comparison invokes the cozy image of thrifty families getting together around the kitchen table and making decisions about what they can afford based on their income, and making painful cuts when necessary.
This is a fantasy, especially in America, a country in which the general public has a notoriously low savings rate and exists on credit card debt and has nowhere near enough money saved to meet their retirement needs. In fact, living beyond their income seems to be the norm in families, not the exception.
Actually there are good reasons for not trying to balance the budget right now. High unemployment is a huge problem right now. The devastating effects it could be ameliorated by government spending a lot of money on projects that put people back to work. While increasing the debt is not good as a permanent policy, there are times when it makes the most sense in the short term and this is one of them. Even families realize that going into debt to purchase a home or paying for college can be a good thing.
So in reality, the federal government’s budgeting process is already like that of the average family. Just not in the way the moralizing speakers intend.
Tbogg does the math to contrast the pathetic ticket sales of the Palin fan biopic The Undefeated with the spin by Fox News that the “Palin Film Opens Strong, Theaters Packed.” (One wag noted about the film’s title, it is easy to be undefeated if you keep quitting halfway through everything.)
Meanwhile Stephen Colbert gives his take on the film.
Daniel Radcliffe appeared on The Daily Show. I realized that I had never seen him except in the Harry Potter films. Given his massive success at a young age, he could easily have turned into a brat, but he comes across as quite an unassuming, self-deprecating young man.