There is perhaps no more graceful sight in cricket than to see a great fast bowler in action. The long flowing run up, the planting of the feet and the swiveling of the body before the arms wheel and delivers the ball at high speed, is really something to see.
[Read more…]
David Bromwich, a professor of literature at Yale, argues that there is a remarkable continuity between the Bush and Obama presidencies. He repeats the warning that I have made earlier, that Obama and the Democrats are in fact more dangerous to the fortunes of the not-wealthy than the Republicans were.
In these August days, Americans are rubbing their eyes, still wondering what has befallen us with the president’s “debt deal” — a shifting of tectonic plates beneath the economy of a sort Dick Cheney might have dreamed of, but which Barack Obama and the House Republicans together brought to fruition. A redistribution of wealth and power more than three decades in the making has now been carved into the system and given the stamp of permanence.
Only a Democratic president, and only one associated in the public mind (however wrongly) with the fortunes of the poor, could have accomplished such a reversal with such sickening completeness.
…
A certain mystery surrounds Obama’s perpetuation of Bush’s economic policies, in the absence of the reactionary class loyalty that accompanied them, and his expansion of Bush’s war policies in the absence of the crude idea of the enemy and the spirited love of war that drove Bush. But the puzzle has grown tiresome, and the effects of the continuity matter more than its sources.Bush we knew the meaning of, and the need for resistance was clear. Obama makes resistance harder. During a deep crisis, such a nominal leader, by his contradictory words and conduct and the force of his example (or rather the lack of force in his example), becomes a subtle disaster for all whose hopes once rested with him.
Bromwich looks in detail at which advisors the president likes to keep and which ones he is quick to jettison and sees a pattern that points to Obama’s willing complicity in the looting by the oligarchy.
Meanwhile Glenn Greenwald argues that the increasing surveillance powers that the US and UK governments have developed to spy on and monitor their own citizens is because they are afraid of the growing anger among their populations at the fact that most people are being marginalized while a very few are doing well. The governments will need this information to crack down on possible mass protests in the future.
This year, the Obama administration began demanding greater power to obtain Internet records without a court order. Meanwhile, the Chairwoman of the DNC, Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, is sponsoring a truly pernicious bill that would force Internet providers “to keep logs of their customers’ activities for one year.” And a whole slew of sleazy, revolving-door functionaries from the public/private consortium that is the National Security State — epitomized by former Bush DNI and current Booz Allen executive Adm. Michael McConnell — are exploiting fear-mongering hysteria over cyber-attacks to justify incredibly dangerous (and profitable) Internet controls. As The Washington Post‘s Dana Priest and William Arkin reported in their “Top Secret America” series last year: “Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications.” That is a sprawling, out-of-control Surveillance State.
One must add to all of these developments the growing attempts to stifle meaningful dissent of any kind — especially civil disobedience — through intimidation and excessive punishment. The cruel and degrading treatment of Bradley Manning, the attempted criminalization of WikiLeaks, the unprecedentedly harsh war on whistleblowers: these are all grounded in the recognition that the technology itself cannot be stopped, but making horrific examples out of those who effectively oppose powerful factions can chill others from doing so.
There is already a lot of anger in the US. This is often taking inchoate forms and directed at the wrong targets out of ignorance (the Tea Party is a good example of this) but the ruling class cannot depend on that happy state of affairs continuing forever.
Harvey Golub, former CEO of American Express, takes to the opinion pages of the August 22, 2011 issue of the Wall Street Journal to whine about how unfair the current tax system is to rich people like him and that it would be an outrage if his taxes are raised. But he has solutions to the budget deficit! He feels that eliminating the departments of education and energy is better than him paying more taxes.
There is one statement that is flat-out incredible, where he says: “Of my current income this year, I expect to pay 80%-90% in federal income taxes, state income taxes, Social Security and Medicare taxes, and federal and state estate taxes.”
80-90% of his current income goes in taxes? To the calculators, Batman!
I have no idea what Golub’s income is this year is but let’s say it is one million dollars. Let’s be most generous in our calculations in his favor and assume that it is all from salary and that he is a single person and claims no deductions at all.
First off, federal and state estate taxes are not based on income at all, so it is deceitful for him to include that in the list of taxes that are set off against income. Furthermore, aren’t those taxes a one-time thing imposed at death? Does he die at the end of every year, pay the tax, and come back to life the following year? If so, he should really write about that, rather than this bilge.
As for the rest, he would pay federal income tax $327,643, social security tax $11,106 (assuming that he generously pays the employer’s contribution as well), Medicare $29,000 (again picking up the employer’s tab), and state income tax (if he lived in Ohio) $56,464, for a grand total of $424,213, or 42% of his income.
In reality, people like him claim a lot of deductions, have tax shelters, and get a lot of their income from investments that are taxed at a lower rate. I would be surprised if he pays even half that amount.
The son of a friend of is very good at solving the Rubik’s cube and takes part in the annual national contest to see who is the best in the US. In successive years he has come in 3rd, 2nd, 4th and 5th, but frustratingly has never won.
Here is a video of someone solving it in competition in 6.77 seconds.
What I learned recently is that the contest also has a category where people are required to solve the puzzle with their feet! Here is someone solving it in 31.56 seconds.
Being somewhat of a klutz myself with quite poor small motor skills, I find this amazing.
You have to be a bit cautious about YouTube videos of people claiming to be able to solve the puzzle quickly with their feet or hands. Some of them are hoaxes where they start out with an ordered cube, make it disordered while filming it, and then run the video in reverse. Make sure there is a lot of background stuff going on which unambiguously indicate forward time, and that there are no cuts.
(For other posts in this series, see here.)
Karl Popper’s model of falsification makes the scientific enterprise process seem extremely rational and logical. It also implies that science is progressing along the path to truth by successively eliminating false theories. Hence it should not be surprising that practicing scientists like it and still hold on to it as their model of how science works. In the previous post in this series, I discussed how Thomas Kuhn’s work cast serious doubt on the validity of Karl Popper’s falsification model of scientific progress, replacing it with a seemingly more subjective process in which scientists switched allegiance from an old theory to a new one based on many factors, some of them subjective, and that this transition had some of the elements of a gestalt switch. This conclusion was disturbing to many.
[Read more…]
The ruling class and their media lackeys do not even make an attempt anymore to hide their contempt for the poor and their desire to crush them completely. If they keep this up, who knows what will happen.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Back in May, I wrote about the hopeful sign that the New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman was investigating the role of the big banks in the housing bubble, but cautioned that “The oligarchy is going to close ranks and pull out all the stops to defend itself and preserve its privileges and get away with a plea deal that involves just a slap on the wrist and fine.”
Well, the oligarchy seems to be doing just that. And who are their friends who are going to bat on their behalf to get the New York AG to accept a plea deal that is highly favorable to them? Why, the Obama administration. What a surprise!
Yves Smith explains what is going on in great detail and says:
It is high time to describe the Obama Administration by its proper name: corrupt… Team Obama bears all the hallmarks of being so close to banks and big corporations that it has lost all contact with and understanding of mainstream America… As far as the Administration is concerned, its goal is to give banks a talking point and prove to them that Team Obama is protecting their backs in a way that the chump public hopefully won’t notice.
Recently Democratic congresswoman Maxine Waters, speaking about the Tea Party, said: “They called our bluff and we blinked. We should have made them walk the plank.”
Similarly President Obama said to Eric Cantor during the debt ceiling discussions: “Eric, don’t call my bluff. I’m going to the American people on this.”
In both these cases, the speakers implied that they possessed the stronger hand so it does not make sense to say “Don’t call my bluff”. In such situations, you either call your opponents’ bluff or you want your opponent to think you are bluffing and call you on it. To say that you are bluffing and then warn them not to call you on it does not make any sense.
It seems like in both cases the speakers meant to say “Don’t think I am bluffing because I am not.” In other words, the people who are saying “Don’t call my bluff” should really be saying “I am calling your bluff.”
One of the curious features of modern religious apologists is how they try to use the latest scientific research to argue for the existence of god. Of course, science makes the traditional idea of a personal god who intervenes in the world utterly preposterous and few religious intellectuals outside the evangelical community argue in favor of it. So sophisticated religious apologists have resorted to arguing for the existence of a highly abstract form of god that has no practical consequence whatsoever but for some reason seems to meet some sort of emotional or psychological need. But in order to make their case, they have to cherry-pick scientific research and hope that their audience is not aware of the full science.
The latest attempt is in the area of cosmology. The following very nice video (via Skepchick) exposes how some Christian and Muslim apologists try to use the latest cosmology research in selective ways to make their case.
If the latest developments in cosmology comprise the best arguments for god, then you might expect that cosmologists might be the most religious of all scientists. And yet, as the above video shows, even the scientists quoted by the religious apologists are nonbelievers, suggesting that the cosmological arguments for god are a distortion of the actual science. This paper by cosmologist Sean Carroll titled Why (Almost All) Cosmologists are Atheists explains why.
He first addresses what it would take to require a god hypothesis to be taken seriously.
There are several possible ways in which this could happen. Most direct would be straightforward observation of miraculous events that would be most easily explained by invoking God. Since such events seem hard to come by, we need to be more subtle. Yet there are still at least two ways in which a theist worldview could be judged more compelling than a materialist one. First, we could find that our best materialist conception was somehow incomplete — there was some aspect of the universe which could not possibly be explained within a completely formal framework. This would be like a ”God of the gaps,” if there were good reason to believe that a certain kind of ”gap” were truly inexplicable by formal rules alone. Second, we could find that invoking the workings of God actually worked to simplify the description, by providing explanations for some of the observed patterns. An example would be an argument from design, if we could establish convincingly that certain aspects of the universe were designed rather than assembled by chance. Let’s examine each of these possibilities in turn.
He examines both these possibilities and weighs their merits using the normal ways that scientists use to compare theories and finds the god hypothesis wanting, arriving at the following conclusion:
Given what we know about the universe, there seems to be no reason to invoke God as part of this description. In the various ways in which God might have been judged to be a helpful hypothesis — such as explaining the initial conditions for the universe, or the particular set of fields and couplings discovered by particle physics — there are alternative explanations which do not require anything outside a completely formal, materialist description. I am therefore led to conclude that adding God would just make things more complicated, and this hypothesis should be rejected by scientific standards. It’s a venerable conclusion, brought up to date by modern cosmology; but the dialogue between people who feel differently will undoubtedly last a good while longer.
I for one am glad that people religious apologists are advancing these sophisticated cosmological arguments for god. While they may think they are rescuing religion from science, they are the ones, not atheist scientists, who are going to ultimately destroy religion because in order to salvage the idea of god, they have made it so abstract and remote that it will not appeal in the least to most religious people who want a father figure who listens to them when they talk and who will answer their requests at least some of the time. The idea of god persists because children are indoctrinated at an early age with the idea of a Santa Claus-like figure who will both look after them and punish them if they are bad. That basic childlike idea is what gives god its appeal. The cosmological god is unlikely to have much appeal to a child.
If the cosmological view of god gains ground, it will become the sole preserve of a few intellectuals who will comfort themselves with the idea that a disengaged god exists somewhere out of reach of science. But such a god is a far cry from the warm and fuzzy invisible friend that can command mass appeal.