When Facts Matter

Mitt Romney and his running mate are famous for their allergies to facts and specifics. Between the two of them they have perfected the art of lying and using vagaries instead of policies in the hopes of getting elected in the recent New Yorker profile (sub req) of Romney he is quoted as insisting that in the private sector fluff is denigrated while substance is the drug of choice. He also insists, all facts to the contrary, in the private sector when you screw up you get fired.

He is so marvelously unself-aware that he doesn't realize that he is the person he has warned us about: an empty suit spewing lies and fluff who cares not at all about our collective future.

When Facts Don't Matter

Romney and his supporters are being done in by facts or more precisely their disdain for facts, truth, justice, and -- dare I say it? -- the American way.  There are however intellectual enterprises of real value in which facts get in the way. For example Charles Babbage to Tenyson on truth and beauty:

Sir:

In your otherwise beautiful poem "The Vision of Sin" there is a verse which reads – "Every moment dies a man, Every moment one is born." It must be manifest that if this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill. In truth, the rate of birth is slightly in excess of that of death.

I would suggest that in the next edition of your poem you have it read – "Every moment dies a man, Every moment 1 1/16 is born."

The actual figure is so long I cannot get it onto a line, but I believe the figure 1 1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry.

I am, Sir, yours, etc.,

Charles Babbage

Romney out to give poetry a whirl when is being president of these United States doesn't pan out.

The Reason Romeny is Losing

Men and women on the Right aren't very bright. Here, for example is Ross Douthat burbling on about Romeny's most recent assault on his fellow citizens:

The way Obama and Romney employed these stereotypes are not actually equivalent. Both behind-closed-door comments were profoundly condescending, but only Romney explicitly wrote off the people he’s describing. As Slate’s William Saletan notes, Obama embedded his bitter- clingers characterization in a longer riff about why it’s important for Democrats to keep fighting for blue-collar votes. Romney’s remarks were more dismissive and therefore should prove more politically damaging: “I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives,” he said, of millions of his fellow countrymen, and left it at that.

He then asks that we

set aside the short-term politics for a moment. What does it say about our culture that the people funding presidential campaigns on both sides of the aisle seem to regard their downscale fellow countrymen as a kind of alien race, to be feared and condescended to in equal measure? 

The obvious idiocy of this "argument" is that Romney first blames the mythical  47% and they writes them off while Obama see's the creation of narrow minded bigots as a failure of public policy and outreach and demands that we do better. The "short-term" politics are likely to be less important than now might seem to be the case.

 However, the longer-term political implications are that the left-half of the neoliberal political world is going to continue to try and ameliorate the ravages of market capitalism, albeit insufficiently and sporadically, while trying to convince their fellow citizens to be less bigoted and fear-filled.

This dynamic, indeed, helps to explain the decline of the Republicans as a national party and their increased reliance on voter suppression and lies.

Romney Dead Man Walking?

According to Think Progress he is:

Former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty announced Thursday morning that he would step down as co-chair of Mitt Romney’s campaign to become the head of the Financial Services Roundtable, a trade organization that represents the 100 largest financial services companies in the country.

Pawlenty might be a wretched little man, but he has so far shown the wisdom of a quitter who knows when he is beat.

There at The New Yorker

I was going to write something about the bipolar nature of the current New Yorker. There is dishonest and disingenuous article by Malcolm Gladwell on the Penn State child raping debacle and great essay by Jill Lepore on the roots of modern corporate conservatism's inability to tell the truth. The problems with Gladwell's article, however, have been laid out here  and his essential dishonesty and mendacity here, here, and here.  

Lepore delves into a now obscure PR firm and lays bare the roots and consequences of several decades of the Right and corporate America to use lies, astroturfing, and smears ton smother popular desires for universal medical insurance and, by extension, nearly ever desirable reform of market capitalism and the society on which it feeds.

One of the understated aspects of the article is the way in which a left-leaning reporter wrote a profile of the firm's founders that was fair and balanced, not being sarcastic, and because of that led to the conclusion that corporate funding of political action was necessarily bad for Americans as citizens. Despite which the reporter actually liked the dynamic duo. Odd the world is.

The Nanny Plutocracy

So Bloomberg's ban on 16 oz or greater sugary drinks in certain location and in specific kinds of containers passed. It is, we are assured, an attempt to deal with the obesity crisis in these United States. It seems like an attempt to stop people smoking by limiting the pack size to 10 cigarettes, which is to say silly, a waste of time, and generally a misuse of the state legitimate regulatory function.

Matt Yglesias Still Dumb

Re the Chicago strike he writes that

[i]f you think that Chicago's teachers deserve the right to form an association to advocate, lobby, and bargain on behalf of the interests of its members (and why shouldn't they?) then you have to think that they deserve the right to advocate for ideas that may not be in the public interest

Without a rough definition of "public interest" the claim that if I support public unions then I must support advocating anti-public interest ideas is devoid of content.

Indeed, given that teachers have a set of concrete demands, both in this case and in general, it would be helpful in Yglesias offered some examples of anti-public interest advocacy or policies. Given that his example drawn from private sector unions is the increased cost associated with increased wages, he seems, although given his dunderheadedness it is hard to know, to mean that increased wages mean increased taxes.

The problem here, of course, is that only neoliberals and libertarians fully support the notion that providing adequate funding for public services is anti-public good.  Paying teachers a decent wage, protecting them from the  arbitrary authority of administrators in thrall to the latest educ-scam, and the like are, actually, policies that promote the public good. Smaller classrooms and more teachers make for better schools. Limiting the power of the administration or rabid maniacs riding various political, religions, or other hobbyhorses to dictate curriculum or tenure and promotion decision is another public good. And so on.

People babble on about rubber rooms and lazy teachers but the fact of the matter is that teaching is a highly competitive profession and thee most teachers care about students and want their schools to continue to improve. Assuming that they and their unions want to advocate for policies that decrease the public good is one way to assure that the best and the brightest of this and any future generation will seek to join a profession, like banking, investing, or punditry, where failure is not an option and even the dimmest  of bulbs is free to fail upwards.

Pay Attention to the Details

 Over to The New Yorker there is long and well done evisceration of evolutionary psychology. It has in it, however a howler of an interpretive error. Gottlieb offers a little anecdote from Darwin's reception:

The idea of natural selection itself began as a just-so story, more than two millennia before Darwin. Darwin belatedly learned this when, a few years after the publication of “On the Origin of Species,” in 1859, a town clerk in Surrey sent him some lines of Aristotle, reporting an apparently crazy tale from Empedocles. According to Empedocles, most of the parts of animals had originally been thrown together at random: “Here sprang up many faces without necks, arms wandered without shoulders . . . and eyes strayed alone, in need of foreheads.” Yet whenever a set of parts turned out to be useful the creatures that were lucky enough to have them “survived, being organised spontaneously in a fitting way, whereas those which grew otherwise perished.” In later editions of “Origin,” Darwin added a footnote about the tale, remarking, “We here see the principle of natural selection shadowed forth.”

The problem here is obvious. Natural selection and Empedocles' just so story have nothing whatsoever to do with one another. Darwin hadn't heard or read and was not working in that intellectual tradition. He was, rather, engaged in a  modern scientific endeavor in which the facts mattered. Take, as an example, the peacocks tail or sexual selection. As Gotlieb points out Darwin, like all of us, was a prisoner of his culture. Nonetheless, he recognized that females had enormous influence on evolution even though it violated his cultural assumptions about women's inferiority.

In addition, Lamarcks' theory of acquired characteristics, which is a nearly perfect example of just soing, was one of Darwin's targets as were all the then current just so stories about speciation.  Darwin, for all his faults and warts, was most emphatically not just soing and, indeed, one reason why the Darwinian solution to evolution, natural selection plus descent with modification, was and is so important is that it provides both a wealth of evidence against just so but also a nearly-perfect example of how the application of scientific method to a knotty problem can resolve the problem and limit the distortion of cultural assumptions.

Who is the Real Crook?

In a review of Hamilton's book on why he doped the NYTimes reviewer makes a key point:

Rightly, Mr. Hamilton notes in “The Secret Race” that punishment has focused far too much on cyclists while minimizing the role of team owners, sponsors, race organizers and cycling’s bureaucracy. Yet for someone who repeatedly preaches the value of speaking the truth, Mr. Hamilton lets himself off lightly.

Unfortunately this comes in the third to last paragraph. And the conclusion, Hamilton didn't either have to dope, undermines the argument that systemic doping in a profitable business owes more to the structures created by the sports owners then to the workers yet some how or another the workers are the guiltier party.

Unequal Forces

From The New Yorker comes this image of one or another of the recent conventions:

Seems about right.

Status Update

My computer, it seems, is dying. Posting will be light.

Green Acres

Eddie Albert bike commuter:

“Eddie Albert pauses to catch his breath on Cahuenga Pass, between Hollywood and Universal City, on his way to work at Universal-International studio in “Smash-Up -The Story of a Woman.” Back at the Hollywood grind after wartime service as a naval officer, Eddie couldn’t get a new car, so his wife bought him a bicycle and told him the exercise was good for him.”

If he can do so can you.

Return to Normal

David Brooks today:

On the one hand, you see the Republicans taking the initiative, offering rejuvenating reform. On the other hand, you see an exhausted Democratic Party, which says: We don’t have an agenda, but we really don’t like theirs. Given these options, the choice is pretty clear.

Which is true so long as you ignore the Democrats economic agenda, growing green energy agenda, commitment  to mass transit, and so forth. Even more interestingly, the Democrats have actual policies to achieve reasonable goals as opposed to the Republicans notion of no taxes on the rich leading to the creation of 57 bazillion new private sector jobs.

He thus continues and expands the Republican festival of lies.

Dog Whistlled

The Germans have been watching the current Romney/Ryan festival of lies and have decided, at least the non-Neonazis among them, that their message is "too closely tailored to white men," which pretty much sums it up.

When the foreign press is doing a better job of honest analysis of our Presidential election, it might wake up the various outlets that have so far refused to point out Romney/Ryan's lies and dog whistles.

WTF

Is up with David Brooks? Is there such a thing as truth serum?

Lance Armstrong Redux

There is something odd about this from. Tygart of the USADA:

"[If Armstrong had of] come in and been truthful, then the evidence might have been that the statute [of limitations] should apply."

I am baffled as to how a suspect/defendants behavior changes the existence of a statute of limitations. Laws apply regardless of the horridness or perceived horridness of any specific perpetrator.

Clearly, Armstrong's refusal to continue to litigate the matter means that he is guilty of doping violations but there is something creepy about a regulatory agency flinging rules out the window because they don't like someone's attitude.

Lance Armstrong

His decision to not contest the USADA's case means that he has been or will shortly be found guilty of doping his way to victory, which is just sad. It was not a "witch hunt" because witches didn't exist and doping cyclists do. It may be an unfair process, as Judge Sparks put it "the deficiency of USADA's charging document is of serious constitutional concern." He, however, did not quash the process. Does the USADA have the power to strip Armstrong of his titles and ban him from racing? Not really. They need to prove to the UCI that they have the goods on Armstrong.

So what does it all mean? That some of the finest moments in international sport are now official tainted and that quite possibly the erstwhile greatest tour champion, Eddy is the greatest cyclist of all time, will lose all of his titles.

It is, all in all -- given that George Hincapie is rumored to be implicated in the doping, a very sad day for sport.

Civility

So, I got a Romney fundraiser phone call. I figured I would play along and suggested that while I would vote for the him I had insufficient funds to offer any financial support. In the course of wheedling, or attempting to wheedle, the spandolax out of my wallet, the nice young woman on the phone informed that should we fail to defeat Obama he would "burn this country to the ground."

Obviously, this kind of language isn't an affront to either decency or comity nor yet an example of Romney trying to divide America into those who would vote for him and those who are going to burn the country to the ground, which recent polling suggests divides the country about 50/50. Nope, because if it were it would make mock of all the other bullshit, in the Frankfurtian sense, the Republicans and the Right more generally are flinging about in their increasing desperate attempt to impose the 19th century on an unwilling 21st.

You Tart

Tomato and cheese tart fresh from the garden:

The crust needs some work yet as it is not quite crispy enough but on the whole a nice hot weather dish.

A Debate

The internet and the rest of the world is all in a whirl about Akin's insane notions of human biology; meanwhile the Republicans prove that they don't care if a woman secretes a secretion  during rape that makes fertilization impossible. Or maybe not. After insisting on a Party platform that demands a "personhood" amendment to the US Constitution. In the past these amendments effectively ban abortion for whatever reason by declaring eggs people.

Today, however, the Republicans are trying to deny that they are in fact deranged ideologues on moral matters best left the conscience of our fellow citizens and their medical providers.

The Republicans, in other words, like Mitt Romney on everything and Paul Ryan on most things want to have it both ways. Each opposes something rhetorically but understands that the thing they oppose, mandates, stimulus spending, auto bailouts, etc, is actually good policy and, consequently they rail with the one side of the mouth while the other asks for seconds.

So lets have a debate in this election. The Republicans ought properly stand or fall on their deranged social, economic, and political ideas. Man up boys said loud and proud: I am batshit crazy with only a tangential connection to reality.

Akin did and it looks like he might win.

Surprise

Yesterday morning at about 7 30 am I was rolling down a small  hillock when I saw a brown thingy on the road sitting over a black dealibob. As I got closer what I took to be a cat with its victim became a hawk with a crow grasped in its talons. The hawk rose and flew side by side with the bike for a few feet before dropping the crow and crossing over to perch in a tree. It was an unexpected, or surprising, moment of beauty.

Later that same day I was sitting outside drinking a beer when I looked up to the north and found that I was right on the edge of a thunderstorm. I could hear the thunder and see the lightening but the rain was just over to the other side of the railway tracks. It was an unexpected, or surprising, moment of if not beauty then sublimity.

Early today I read an article in The New Yorker about how liberal millionaires and billionaires aren't giving Obama money because some find super pacs anti democratic, which is true but rather like unilateral disarmament, others, however, pine for the days when Bill Clinton would invite them to private dinners at which, seated in descending order of the size of their contributions, the Clinton would elicit their views on matters of substance and, get this, take notes. Finding this out was an unexpected, or surprising, moment of realizing just how venal Clinton was and just how delusional the riches of these United States are.

Obama, it seems, prefers to get his policy advice from people who know what they are talking about instead of a bunch of riches whose sole virtue is an ability to game a corrupt system. As a result, the article suggests, their feelings are all atwitter and they withhold their ill-gotten gains until such time as Obama, or whomever, decides to grant them once again their unearned ascendency in the halls of power.

What a bunch of assholes.

In Russia the State Punks You

So here is the Pussy Riot video that led to the kerfuffle:




It is insane that the band got 2 years in jail for insulting Putin; the Dixie Chicks only had to go on tv and apologize. U S A U S A  

Two Ways of Thinking About Streets

Last night a motorist try to run me down. A couple of preliminary points. I use quite a few lights, to front lights, which is all that matters here as the motorist could only "see" the front of the bike. I was in a real neighborhood; one in which people jog,  walk dogs, wander to the grocery, and related etc. It was dusk and not pitch black and, because of the multiuser nature of the streets in this quiet area, motorist ought, but don't, drive the speed limit and pay attention.

I was coming up a hill riding toward the center of the lane, when I saw a car backing out of a street without paying attention, by which I mean the motorist clearly hadn't seen me. I rang the bell and slammed on the breaks. Well after the point at which the motorist would have knocked me down had I not been riding responsibly. The dolt saw me.

Like most motorists, the dolt seemed to think that saying "I didn't see you" was exculpatory instead of a condemnation of the dolt's inattentiveness. I said "I could tell."  The dolt responded "I was trying to be nice." To which I asked "How? By trying to hit me."


From my perspective some streets and roads are multiuser from the motorist's perspective all streets are belong to them, as they kids would say. This attitude, as Peter Norton points out, this attitude is the result of going on 100 years of lobbying, opinion buying, and other corrupt practices by the automobile industry. The dolt's implicit claim of motorists' ownership of the roads and idea that I need to get out of motorists' way isn't a natural condition but rather a sing and seal of how money shapes cultural assumptions.

A More Just World

When the issue of economic inequality comes up, this Anatole France quote usually turns up:

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

And a good laugh is had all around. Did you know that in other parts of the world the law actually punishes some crimes on the basis of the perpetrator's wealth? In Switzerland and Finland at least if you are rich and speed your fine is determined by "the severity of the offense and the offender's income level."

One rich driving like a mad man was fine 290k in Switzerland, while the chairman of Nokia faced a 100 odd thousand dollar fine, and one particularly insane rich faces a fine that falls 40,000 dollars short of a million.

So lets do that with, say, property crimes. Poor and shoplift a pair of pants? 60 dollar fine; rich and shop lift a the same kind of pants, 10% of pre-tax income. Rich and embezzle?  50% of total wealth and 10 years in jail.  Poor and steal a neighbors digital camera? Give the camera back or replace and a week in jail.  And so on.

The idea is basically to make the punishment fit the advantages gained by any individual from being  a member of society.

Whose Streets?

I just finished Peter Norton's Fighting Traffic. It is a really fine book that works through in great detail how the Automobile industry and its supporters managed to transform streets for essential public spaces in to expensive and always more crowded preserves of the motorized vehicle.

What struck me about his analysis and narrative was the extent to which the Automobile industry's strategy is the prevalent model for groups dedicated to destroying the vestiges of the welfare state in these United States and abroad. In general the idea is to buy off expert opinion and use leverage with the state to trample popular desires and, as result, create a new culture that is immeasurably less humane than what went before.

It is, however, possible to move back toward a more humanistic vision of your cities, towns, and burgs. As result of the Automobile industry's purchase of the opinions of key traffic engineers in the 1920s in the US streets are designed to maximize "floor space" for automobiles. This take over by private enterprise of the creation and maintenance of a public good without having to pay for meant and means that each year the American tax payer subsidizes the Automobile industry, trucking, and etc. Getting back to a livable city means returning to the older understanding of streets as multiuse public spheres in which cars, as they are least efficient and most dangerous modes of transportation, are relegated to the lower rungs in the ladder of importance.

One way to accomplish this it to insist, as the Dutch do, that streets are "area[s] where people want or need to be."  This formulation reminds us the purpose of cities, towns, streets, and, more generally, humanity in a social situation isn't profit and industrial expansion.

In other words, the neoliberals are wrong about everything because they have both  bought into and promote the economization of all modes of discourse. Bastards.