Conversation with a friend

An email exchange with a friend of mine, regarding this article, and this reply. His comments are in Times Roman, mine in Arial.

A midwife for one's thoughts; another for whom one can provide the same service: Basis of a good conversation.

--Nietschze

Here's my major beef with the article (and it's a point that the replier gets to as well, at least obliquely). The article writer says:

"Above all, these changes would require looking with fresh eyes on the landscape of academic disciplines, and noticing something surprising: The great wall dividing the two cultures of the sciences and humanities has no substance. We can walk right through it."

To which I say: funny that your idea about walking through the science/humanities wall involves turning the humanities into a science. I don't mean to sound all boundary-policing for the sake of boundary-policing here, but I do think the article is guilty of arguing for a merger of science and literary criticism where the exchange of methods seems to be entirely one way: from science, to the humanities and never the other way. He makes a good case for WHY we should study literature (one I totally agree with), but he doesn't really say what -- if anything -- the study of literature might offer scientific study.

I'm not sure how much of it is just that that's not the point he's making right now, i.e. is that another article for another day. And he led off with the observation that hmmm, the sciences seem to be obtaining new knowledge, new insights into our nature and condition, and moving forward in a way that literary criticism isn't; what are they doing that we're not?

And going a bit beyond what he said... If literary criticism is barely surviving on its own, if it doesn't have much to offer itself, well...what DOES it have to offer scientific study? (Though you touch on some of this below.)
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His basic point about how most lit. critics view the human brain is true to. This, I think, is the biggest current divide between humanities and the "hard" sciences. (Or at least it's what my nueroscientist friend Stephen and I end up screaming at each other about over drinks every few months . . . ) The sciences now favor an almost entirely biological account of human coginition/development/ability ("It's biological, it's genetic, it's physiological, etc."), while since at least the late 60s forward, English speaking literary academics have generally favored a social constructionist approach. (The middle ground here would be the 70s feminism articulation of the difference between biological sex [do you have a penis or a vagina?] and socially constructed gender [Having a vagina means you must wear dresses and play with dolls . . . ], while the extreme of this position, an extreme which I myself am uncomfortable accepting, is Judith Butler's explosion of the sex/gender binary, where she argues that nothing exists before or outside of language and that EVERYTHING is gender, EVERYTHING is socially constructed and there is no biological "sex" that's not already caught up in culturally constructed meanings.])

If she's going to make that argument, then she has to explain why the vast majority of societies throughout history have associated having a penis with physical strength and aggression. Is a preference for blue rather than pink culturally constructed? Almost certainly. Does it therefore follow that NOTHING is biological? I, for one, am far from convinced.

Part of the reason for the biological emphasis is that with advances in technology, we can answer questions we couldn't even ask a few years ago. So yes, it seems like everywhere you turn around there are new biological insights. Look at what happened after Darwin published. His central idea was that species could develop and change over time, through a natural process of selection; that the environment could make the same kinds of decisions familiar to any livestock breeder; and the implication that all life descended from a common ancestor.

This was a revolution in biology, and there was a rush to apply Darwin's ideas EVERYWHERE, including places they didn't apply--thus Social Darwinism, etc. With time, the excesses were worked out, and scientists recognized that this application is valid, that one is just silly, and the other is a useful metaphor that shouldn't be taken too far.

We're currently in the early explosion stages of a biological revolution. There are things we've thought of as social that may turn out to have very strong biological components. There may be some things that go the other way. But we haven't mapped out the limits of the new knowledge yet.

(At one time, 'everyone knew' that ulcers were caused by stress....until the role of heliobacter pylori, a bacterium that lives in the gut, was discovered. Stress still has an effect, but only because stress tends to weaken the immune system, and in America, stressed-out people are more likely to eat foods that H. Pylori thrives on, and smoke too much, thus producing plenty of extra stomach acid to irritate already-irritated tissue, etc.) Likewise, 'evolutionary psychology' has given us some useful insights into how seemingly anti-survival traits such as self-sacrifice, altruism, generosity, etc., actually lead to better chances of group survival. It's also made some risible claims that can't be taken seriously, and aren't, even within the field.
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And for me? Personally? I've been struggling most of this year with Butler's position, the full adoption of which is still very much in vogue in literature departments. I think Butler's wrong. Mostly because I don't think that my friend Stephen is an idiot. And I don't think that the advances or observations of Stephen's field are entirely bunk. That said, I am ENORMOUSLY suspicious of strict, biological (or genetic) essentialism. This gets us back to that other article that Sullivan linked to that we discussed recently, which you said (and which I agreed) veered a little close to "some people are simply, inherently unfit to learn, so let's not let them go to college and oh isn't it funny how all the people who are fit to learn and go to college all look white and male, just like me."

I agree with you here. Yes, biology influences us, in ways we're not aware of and don't fully understand. That doesn't mean biology is destiny, though. Antidepressants affect the levels of serotonin in the brain. But SO DOES COGNITIVE-BEHAVIORAL THERAPY. Yes, ultimately it's all encoded in the physical matrix somehow (otherwise you're postulating a source of thought external to the body), but that doesn't mean the physical level is the most convenient (or ethical) place to intervene. Perhaps love can ultimately be explained in terms of biochemistry and neurons firing--but as anyone who's been in love can tell you, it's not *just* that.

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I think biological essentialism (the body or someone's physiology or genetics being read as their unalterable, inescapable fate) is a bad, bad, bad, super scary thing. And me thinking that isn't based in namby-pamby, soft humanities psuedo-science. It's based in the empirical evidence of history. I mean, slavery comes to mind ("These dark skinned people have smaller brains and therefore smaller mental capacity, oh and they also have higher pain tolerance, so obviously they were meant for heavy labor . . . ") as does the Holocaust ("These people have the wrong eye color/hair texture/skin color/nose shape/whatever and are therefore deserving of elimination.")

The problem is, simple indicators have been used to stand in for other traits, or generalizations have been applied without regard to the possibility of exceptions. Suppose we do extensive research and find, lo and behold, that the IQ of the average black person really is 2 points lower than the average white IQ. Do we therefore stop giving scholarships to blacks, since "they're not as smart as whites?" Of course not. Group averages say nothing about individual talents or temperaments, and (as in this example) the magnitude of the difference is insignificant. The relationship between brain size and IQ is poorly understood, if it exists at all. Not only has there been an overreliance on science, there's been an overreliance on BAD science. In the long run, science is self-correcting--but in the short run, can be misused as much as anything else.
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And so science's hard turn to serious biological essentialism scares the fuck out of me. (As Eve Sedgwick, one of those evil postmodern namby-pamby literary scholars that the article bemoans says, You ever notice that there are all these scientific studies to find the 'cause' of homosexuality? But none to find the 'cause' of heterosexuality? What else do we try to find the 'causes' of? Hmm . . . the common cold, liver cancer, lukemia, ALL THESE THINGS THAT ARE PROBLEMS, THAT WE WANT TO ERADICATE.)

Then explain, please, why so many psychologists (particularly those coming at it from an analytic viewpoint) working on the origins of homosexuality are themselves gay. Do they want to eradicate themselves? Is it the stereotype we used to joke about in social work, that you become a therapist because you want to figure yourself out? You're right to point out the effect of heteronormativity, that the default normal state of human beings is hetero and anything else is a deviation from that, so we should find out what causes that divergence. I'm not quite as willing to assume the motives are hostile, though the effects can be just as pernicious.
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Or, to put it another way, I guess what bothered me about the article was it's blind, uncomplicated faith in empiricism and the scientific method. And to make my case why that's a problem, I'll actually turn to a scientist, not a humanist. I'm thinking here of Stephen J. Gould's THE MISMEASURE OF MAN, specifically the part where he goes back and re-does all of that 19th century Philadelphia scientist's studies on the cranial capacity of various races, and finds out that the guy was wrong. That he fudged his data to make it fit the racist worldview that he wanted to argue for. And of course, Gould points out that he himself might be making mistakes that are fudging his own data to try and support a non-racist, multicultural worldview that's currently in vogue.

Through the 50's to 60's, ecologists & biologists looking at animal behavior theorized that aggression had a large survival payoff, that the most aggressive animals would tend to have the best survival characteristics. The field was, at the time, dominated by men. As more women came into the field, they started asking questions about cooperation as a survival strategy, about whether it might be equally valid or even superior in some cases. After all, many species show cooperative strategies: wolves hunt in packs, primates are very social, etc. And lo and behold, they found evidence to support that. The men who asked the questions earlier weren't stupid, weren't corrupt, weren't evil. Their worldview led them to ask certain questions, and as we both know, the way you ask the question has a large influence on what answer you find. Someone with different assumptions asked different questions...and found new results.

There are any number of studies from the 50's and before, comparing the various races & so forth, and finding that southern Europeans are flighty and undisciplined, Africans are a bit simple and childlike, etc., always with the amazing coincidence that the northern European or Scots-Irish (depending on who was doing the ranking) was the most advanced group, with all other groups inferior in some ways.

Today, of course, it's impolite to suggest that there might be ANY difference of ANY kind. I'm not sure which extreme is more annoying. (Is it just a coincidence, for example, that cultures in climates with a short growing season have a much greater sense of time urgency, of 'don't put it off, do it now,' than parts of the world with a more benign climate? That cultures where it's colder, so people are usually dressed in more layers, have a stronger nudity taboo? And what if it turns out that members of certain ethnic groups really are slightly more outgoing, or whatever, than some other groups. Explain how that means I should treat the person across from me any different, please.)

Over the long run, science is self-correcting. Mistakes get flushed out, re-examined, discarded. The same principle applies in the humanities as well. Case in point: The romanticized view of plantation life exemplified by "Gone with the Wind" was based largely on a scholarly historical study on the life of southern blacks before the civil war. (The name of the study escapes me at the moment...it was considered THE standard work in its day.) It wasn't a polemic, it was good, solid, primary-sourced scholarship. And it strongly indicated that most plantation slaves really didn't have it all that bad, and though there was a lot of hard work involved, they were essentially well treated.

Well. Some other historians looked at this later. And noticed that the work was indeed primary-sourced with original documents--almost all of them from slave holders or slave dealers. So they applied the scientific method and asked what other evidence there might be for that proposition, or what counter-evidence might exist. And in the process uncovered lots of other documentation suggesting the earlier view was wrong.

That was an application of the scientific method to the humanities, with good results. (More on this later.)
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I guess what reading Gould taught me was EXTREME skepticism, a wariness of how our cultural programming creeps its way into even what appears to be objective, detached, rational analysis.

And THAT, I think, is what the humanities have to offer the sciences. Experience in looking at the non-technical assumptions, of looking at what's being asked and what's NOT being asked, about what's being taken for granted.

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So do I think we need to abandon science or rationality or empiricism? No. Not at all. That way madness lies. Or at least that way George W. Bush and his administration lie. (Which is pretty much the same thing as madness, but that's another rant.) We've got to strive for empiricism and rationality . . . but we also need to be aware of the dangers of assuming that "empirically" staged experiments are perfect. Or that things conducted under the name of "science" are, unquestioningly, captial T "TRUTH."

The difference between science and fundamentalism is that science regards truth as contingent, provisional, and mediated by evidence, refuted by a single counterexample. As long as you remember that, you maintain enough humility to be careful in your conclusions and your statements about Ultimate Cosmic Truth.
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I think we desperately need empiricism in the world right now, and literary studies could damn sure use more of it. But the article Sullivan linked to worried me because it seemed ready to worship at the altar of empiricism without acknowledging any of the valid pitfalls/complaints that some scholars in the humanities have raised about it.

Does that make any sense?

Your comments make perfect sense, and I think we agree more than we don't. Now, if I can get up my soapbox for a bit:

I stand by my earlier statement that one of the best preparation for graduate study in the humanities would be a standard first-semester calculus course. NOT because you're going to need to apply the definition of a derivative or prove the chain rule, but because it teaches rigorous thinking and analysis, the habits of thought that you'll need later on.

Its not unlike some of my comments when you've sent me your papers and I've looked them over, and I've had to remind myself that standards of proof are different in the humanities. And the article touched on that, or at least pointed toward it. In lit-crit, it's apparently OK to say, this is what I think, and here's an example, and here's an example, and here's an example. So having established that, let's move on to the next point.

In the sciences, of course, that wouldn't fly. Do I expect that anyone will analyze and comment on Foucault with mathematical rigor? Of course not, though I'd like to see them try. But there are questions the scientific method forces you to ask, that don't seem to get asked in lit-crit:

• Are there other explanations for these observations?
• Do these observations really imply what I think they do? Or could they also be interpreted to support a different hypothesis?
• Are there counterexamples out there that imply something else? (This, I think, is the most important question lit-crit leaves unasked. My own thesis, just a lowly master's thesis at a middle-of-the-road university, spent about a third of its effort looking at possible counterexamples or other explanations and trying to rule them out.)

math training drills into you, again and again, that a set of examples is all very nice, but one counterexample makes them all irrelevant, no matter how many you have or how convenient they are the rest of the time. it teaches you the difference between a theorem and a conjecture, well enough that you never ever confuse them again, and you understand how to tear apart an argument and check it for validity.

No, lit-crit will never ever be at the same level of rigor as mathematics, and it shouldn't try. But as long as it views logical rigor as a symptom of dead white european male hegemonism (I'm sure there are much bigger words to express the same idea more snottily), it's going to be stuck in its own little backwater.

The NYT gets it half right

In a somewhat-bemused article, they note that the punditocracy has finally figured out what the blogosphere has been saying for weeks, that Hillary is farther than ever from the nomination, and that it's now effectively over.

But the impact was apparent almost immediately, as evidenced by The Drudge Report... It had as its lead story a link to a YouTube clip of Mr. Russert’s comments, accompanied by a photograph of a beaming Mr. Obama with his wife, Michelle, and the headline, “The Nominee.”

The thought echoed throughout the world of instant political analysis. “I think there’s an increasing presumption tonight that Obama’s going to be the nominee,” Chris Wallace, the Fox News host, said to Karl Rove, President Bush’s longtime political guru, who is now a Fox News analyst....

A posting on the DailyKos Web site included a mock memo to Mrs. Clinton entitled, “To-Do List Before Dropping Out.”

Speaking on CNN, David Gergen, a former adviser to several presidents, including Mrs. Clinton’s husband, said, “I think the Clinton people know the game is almost up.”

Stating it more bluntly, Bob Franken, the political analyst, told the MSNBC host Dan Abrams shortly after 2 a.m. Eastern time, “Let’s put it right on the table: It’s over. It’s over.”

But, unable to completely let go of a narrative, no matter how wrong, it goes on to argue that even though it's over, it's not really over.

The instant analysts on television and on the Web have not exactly showered themselves in glory this year. They have frequently made predictions that have been upended by actual votes from actual people.

But their opinions matter as much as ever in this late phase of the primary race, when Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama are battling to sway the opinions of the uncommitted superdelegates....

The superdelegates are a largely elite group that presumably will track the conventional wisdom of Washington’s class of political insiders as they weigh their decisions. And the big donors and fundraisers whose help Mrs. Clinton will need to continue her campaign are similarly tapped into the news media echo-sphere.

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign indicated early this morning that it would try to prove the commentariat wrong once again. “Pundits have gleefully counted Senator Clinton out before, and each time they have been wrong, because they don’t decide this race -- voters do,” Howard Wolfson, Mrs. Clinton’s communications director, wrote in an e-mail message. “And as the results in Indiana demonstrated, voters are rewarding Senator Clinton with victories, even in states Senator Obama predicted victory in.”

See? The delegate lead doesn't matter, it's about perception. And as long as we're talking about predictions, let's talk about North Carolina being a game-changer, about double-digit wins in Indiana... You know, those things that were going to prove the Clinton campaign had some realistic chance. At this point, Clinton has to get over 80% of remaining unpledged delegates and most of the unpledged superdelegates. Ain't gonna happen. And perceptions, pundit opinions, and media narratives don't decide that.

Wolfson's got a point, actually. Voters decide this. And at this point, even if you count Florida and Michigan the way Hillary wants, she still trails in the popular vote, in delegates, and in states won. She has fewer donors, her campaign's broke, she can't get the Black votes that no Democrat can win without. The votes simply aren't there.

Future pundits will decide whether Obama was inevitable from the start (I don't think he was; his campaign's been skillfully run, but it's not a juggernaut), or whether the Clinton campaign took the strongest brand in Democratic politics and ran it into the ground (and there do seem to have been some key strategic missteps, beginning with the complete lack of contingency planning for anything after Super Tuesday--such hubris never goes unpunished).

From the "Gee, ya THINK?" Dept...

TIME: Is Obama's "electability" code for race?

Well, at least they're saying it out loud, even if they have to pretend it's just a wildly speculative question. I suppose that's progress. Of some sort.

The persistence of stupid habits of thought

I don't usually blog about personal stuff, but as this is what's foremost in my forebrain lately, and the purpose of a blog, any blog, is to memorialize the brainfarts as well as the deep thoughts, well, why not...

I'm dealing with a minor frustration regarding some behavior by a friend of mine that's leaving me feeling a bit neglected & taken for granted. On its face, it's no big deal. And rationally, by any sane measure, it is, truly, minor. Not worth getting worked up over, move on to something that's worth firing a few neurons about because this certainly isn't. (Other people do have lives, and sometimes, shocking though it may be to admit it, some aspects of their lives don't involve me.)

And yet. In the back of my head, there's the little voice (my friend Wayne calls his "Waldo") that would be more than happy to play the poor-poor-me game all day long.

Now this is hardly a new phenomenon. (Waldo causing trouble, I mean, not the feeling-neglected issue.) And in fact, that's what's most annoying about it. That this is far from new, in fact it's the same old crap I've fallen into off & on for years. I guess there's some progress, though. I'm not wallowing in it, I'm recognizing what I'm doing, and going out of my way to tell Waldo to STFU for a change. To paraphrase Snoopy, "It's not much, but it's something."

This is ridiculous.

Life has a way of interfering with the blogging, or something... At any rate, I'm still alive, as I'm sure my regular readers (both of you) will be pleased to hear.

We're heading into finals, so there should be a little more time in the schedule Real Soon Now.

Plans for the summer: Development work on orientation for new grad students, working with another instructor to brush up on Python (the language, not Monty) and some gaming applications.
We'll see how it actually goes.

Hillary's latest: I lied.

John at Americablog has the story. Her wording is that she "said some things that weren't in keeping with what she knew to be the case."

Most of us call that "lying."

At least she admits it.

If things were different, they'd be different

The latest spin from Hillaryland: Her (actually Mark Penn's) strategy didn't work, therefore the system is flawed. A GOP-like winner-take-all system would be better because under that system she'd be winning right now.

Unlike the Republicans, the Democrats in primary states choose their nominee on the basis of a convoluted system of proportional distribution of delegates that varies from state to state and that obtains in neither congressional nor presidential elections.

And both candidates were well aware of that system, or could have been, well before the election campaign started. But at this stage, it appears to be just another attempt to provide the GOP with Obama's-not-legitimate talking points.

Is the Democratic nominating process convoluted, perhaps too much so? There's evidence supporting that contention. Perhaps it should be changed. But for the next election cycle, not this one. You don't change the rules halfway through because the current ones aren't producing the outcome you want.

Yes, I'm still alive.

Mass craziness preparing for a week-long trip, then a really good conference, now back just in time to host a conference this week and run the student programming contest. Fun, but busy. More later as time permits.

Thumbs up for the Apocalypse!

The Atheist Apocalypse (if there could be such a thing) would actually be pretty cool....

[H/T: PZ]

Why I Am Not A Theist

An occasional series, with installments whenever I feel like it.

Theism requires the following assumptions:

• That God exists;
• That God is benevolent;
• That God is able to communicate with us in a way we can perceive;
• That God is willing to do so;
• That God has done so;
• That this communication has included God's preferences regarding our behavior;
  
• That we have noticed this communication;
• That we have understood or interpreted it correctly.

If any one of these assumptions falls, maintaining religious belief becomes much more difficult. (Not impossible; a deist, for example, may posit only the first two items and deny everything else. Accepting all but the last one allows the sort of questioning that moves you from one religion to another. Accepting all including the last one is the setup for various religious wars, since if we've understood it correctly, anyone with a different understanding is incorrect--and probably needs to be shown the error of their ways.)

That's an awful lot to swallow on faith. More than any rational being should be willing to accept.

Of course, that's part of the theist/religionist dodge, isn't it? It's all got to be taken on faith and questioning isn't allowed, or is allowed only as long as your answer leads you back to obedience.

Bands Playing Badly

The saga of the Really Terrible Orchestra.... An inspiring story about amateurs. (The word amateur is based on the word "love"... An amateur does something for the love of doing it.)

Go read it, it's worth it.

Quote of the day

"Freedom of religion does not mean no one ever gets to tell you you're wrong."

--Ed Brayton

Midweek weekend update

Finishing touches on the conference paper for the end of the month, heard from my college roommate thanks to the wonders of the interwebs, heard from a former long-distance BF just because, and they're voting in 4 states today, 2 of them big. Hillary's position has kept shifting (big surprise); the latest is that unless Obama takes them all by big margins, he really lost, and she's in the campaign regardless. Looks like she's going to push it to the end, getting more negative along the way, until she's destroyed either herself or the party. Typical.

At any rate, it's been a while since I posted, but I'm not dead.

god help us all...

Nader is considering another run.

The man most responsible for the Shrub's election, right up there with Rove, is thinking about jumping in again, because his ego hasn't been stroked enough lately and the idea of these other people getting attention and him not is just soooooo annoying.

It takes a healthy ego to run for President in the first place. It takes a pathological ego to launch a vanity bid well after deadlines have passed, with the idea of generating free media with ballot-access lawsuits while piously posturing about his virtue.

Who's paying his bills? Where's he getting his funding? The timing is just too convenient.

She's not singing yet, but she *is* warming up...

Mark Kleiman announces that it's over and that he will no longer be criticizing HRC, because that would be "unnecessary roughness." To his mind, Obama's got the nomination, no further critique of Hillary is needed and would just be piling on.

Except, of course, there's still Super Tuesday, and a potentially deadly floor fight about what to do with the Florida and Michigan delegates, and who's going to control the Credentials Committee and thus make the delegate decision.

Please. You don't think the Clinton machine would launch a party-wounding internecine war rather than go quietly? I doubt Hillary would give up the nomination until it was pried out of her fingers. I could be wrong--I'd love to be wrong--but I don't think I am.

Media watch edition

So let's have a look at what's in the news today...

• Fidel Castro is stepping down after 50 years in power. Implications for U.S. policy isn't entirely clear.
• The ruling party in Pakistan has gone down to defeat in a (relatively) clean election. This is a serious blow to the U.S-leaning ruling clique, and is seen as a rebuke to the U.S. Implications for U.S. policy aren't clear.
• A group of military officers has completed a study showing our military is "stretched dangerously thin" and could not undertake another major operation. Almost half agree with the word "broken" to describe the current state of the military.
• Florida has approved educational standards requiring teaching "the scientific theory of evolution."

And what's the lead story at CNN? On a busy day like today, what did they select as what you most need to know to be a well-informed citizen?

None of the above... They're doing an uplifting puff piece on blind veterans who are learning to ski.

Feh.

Darn ear-worms

A few days ago, in this post, I linked to a couple of old campaign ads on YouTube.

Warning: It's been quite some time, and I still find the "I like Ike, You like Ike, Everybody likes Ike (for President)" ditty wafting up through my brain.

I'm hoping it's just a bizarre side effect of the cold meds or something.

Creationist "science"

Bonnie Goldstein has a must-read over at Slate showing the peer "review" process at a creationist journal that passes itself off as science. Among the helpful things in the style manual is how to cite biblical references correctly in your science papers, instructions regarding use of pseudonyms (if you'd rather your home institution didn't know about your publishing), and a reminder that the submission must support a Creation/Flood model or it won't be accepted.

Pssst. Guys? Here's a hint. If you decide on what the answer is going to be before you ask the question... it's not science.

If you want to have a journal called "Distorted Facts Forced To Fit Bronze-Age Legends," that's one thing. Not as catchy, I'll grant you.

Anyway, go have a look. It's really pretty funny.

So I'm not the only one...

It looks like someone else is noticing the increasing air of unreality coming from Camp Hillary.

Perhaps good spin is an oxymoron, moral if not linguistic. But good spin is clever and forward-leaning pitches of actual realities, facts. The word in the sense we use it today actually came into being in the early 90s and to a great degree around the '92 Clinton campaign, which had such mastery in its practice. But this Clinton campaign has been doing it in a weird parody mode. Not sharp 'spins' on favorable realities, but aggressive pitches of complete nonsense. So now you have Penn successively saying caucus wins don't really count, small state wins don't really count, medium state wins don't really count, states with large African-American populations don't really count, all building up to yesterday's gem: "Could we possibly have a nominee who hasn't won any of the significant states -- outside of Illinois? That raises some serious questions about Sen. Obama."

Clinton is ultimately responsible for putting her political fate in this fool's hands.

I think it's significant that we're hearing a great deal about how Hillary values loyalty in her staff, sometimes above all else. That's understandable, given what she's been through, but in this case, competence would be a higher virtue. Pretending everything's fine and she's well on her way to the nomination isn't going to work. Not when the momentum, the fundraising, and the number of wins keeps favoring her opponent. As for the strategy of getting enough superdelegates to go over the top,

The super delegates who are gettable for Clinton by loyalty, conviction or coercion are already got. And enough's been seen of both candidates for everyone to be more than acquainted with them. The ones who remain -- who make up roughly half the total -- are waiting to see who the winner is.

If they haven't signed on with Hillary by now, what's the likelihood that they're going to if Obama enters the convention with more elected delegates, more cash on hand, and better polling numbers against McCain? Not very much. If Hillary's going to salvage her chance at the nomination, she needs to do something quickly. There's still time. But the clock is ticking.

[h/t: Andrew Sullivan]

No side effects here...

So I'm on medication for whatever-this-is, my temperature is going up & down & all over the place, at the moment I feel relatively normal... And have an attention span of about 3 minutes.

Seriously, firing up The Sims feels like it would take too much effort and thought commitment. Checking the same dozen-or-so news sites and blogs every few seconds is getting old... hmmm... Oh well, I'll think of something.

Someone gets it...

I'm currently dealing with a sinus infection of some type... Just when I think I'm almost over it, it knocks me on my butt again. So either I'm going to be even more erratic than usual in posting, or I'm going to be stuck home from work with just enough energy to think that I can put two sentences together coherently.

At any rate... Misty Irons has a post worth reading on her blog.

To say that homosexual people are all about the baser impulses of sexual attraction, minus any of the nobler feelings, is essentially saying they are less human than the rest of us. In other words, it is saying they are incapable of human love.

I think the reason the idea of homosexual love makes some Christians uncomfortable is that it doesn't provide much basis for their negative reaction to homosexuality. It would seem more justified if homosexuality were about people who are of a fundamentally lower moral quality. But to say that there are people who are capable of the exact same kind of sexual attraction as everyone else, except that they find themselves attracted to people of the same sex for reasons even they can't explain, is a more disturbing idea. It turns a part of your universe upside down. How can something as sacred and sublime as love take on this orientation? How could God allow this to happen? What is he doing? What does it mean? Why am I feeling so freaked out by it?

As much as Christians like to talk about "the homosexual agenda" and their righteous anger over "perversion," at its root this is really about the deep issues regarding our own personal faith, isn't it?

Exactly. It's always about their own personal faith, and how to justify it, which is why it makes them so uncomfortable. If you're doing something that doesn't affect me much at all, I probably won't feel the need to institutionalize hatred of it. But if it's something that makes me uncomfortable regarding my own issues, I'm going to persecute it for all it's worth.

And she is exactly right, of course. To define it strictly as a matter of lust is to make gays less than, not equal to, not fully human, and thus fully deserving of whatever mistreatment they receive. Being gay isn't solely about lust any more than heterosexual marriage is just about sex.

Nice to see that at least a few people get that.

Is this supposed to help?

Andrew Sullivan calls this cringe-inducing, and I tend to agree; John Aravosis over at Americablog is pointedly not commenting, and I can respect that decision.

Let's see... Lyrics that sound like they were slammed out by an enthusiastic 15 year old in about an hour... a jazz background that's competently done but carefully chosen not to be too out there (but you just know, somewhere, a consultant insisted it was hep, and yes, I suspect that word came up in discussion)... argh.

Granted, the standards for political jingles aren't particularly high. But some, while clearly products of their time, have stood up pretty well. This one won't be remembered by November, let alone in 50 years.

Reality Disconnect

Watching Hillary's speech from last night has an oddly surreal feeling to it. It's not just that she didn't congratulate Obama--tacky, tasteless, not unexpected--but that she's inside her own reality bubble. She's in some odd parallel-universe Hillaryland, where everything is fine. There wasn't anything original there, and not much that felt reality based. Certainly based on that speech, you'd never guess she'd just lost 8 states in a row.

Listening to Bush often produces a "what world is he living in?" sensation... I'm getting that with Hillary as well, and I haven't before. I've had a variety of reactions to her speeches--some have been very good, some left me cold, whatever--but I've never before had the feeling I'm watching someone who doesn't realize they're losing.

It's not inevitable, of course. A lot can happen, Obama can blow up or melt down, a negative attack can score home, shenanigans with superdelegates is always a possibility. Standing between a Clinton and power is always a dangerous place to be.

But ignoring problems won't make them go away. And things that go away by themselves often come back by themselves.

Disregard previous post

It appears that Obama did indeed deliver a thumpin'. As of 9:10 Central, CNN's reporting at least 60/40 splits in all 3 states voting today--76/24 in DC.

And the media is starting to notably not buy into Hillary's explanation of why none of this matters (8 consecutive states since Super Tuesday is a little hard to brush off) and point out the remaining challenges from here.

But never fear--these are Democrats. They can be counted on to shoot themselves in the foot at least once during a campaign.

Drinking the Kool-Aid?

The voters are doing their thing in the "Potomac Primary," and the media is full of Hillary lowering expectations and how this is Obama's chance to pull into the lead.

Meaning, of course, if he delivers anything less than a thumpin', it's going to be a "moral victory" for Hillary.

I'm afraid the media are being played by the Clinton spin machine... Again. But I'm willing to be proven wrong.

Update: smell the irony

Pam Spaulding has posted on the Washington mess, and points out something quite relevant.

Gee, Huck...

If you have the 2000 general election Tivo-ed, you can refresh your memory as to how that can happen. Can I assume you were supporting Al Gore then?

I didn't think so.

How can he be so shocked, shocked, that the Republican Party can be engaged in election shenanigans?

More blatant than ever

So the vote counting has stopped in Washington State, because with a lead of 242 votes (and 1500 ballots left to count), John McCain has it so locked up there's no point in counting the remaining ballots.

I'm no Huckabee fan, but he's right to be outraged. Anyone who cares about the state of American democracy should be outraged. (They should have been outraged most of the last several years, but that's another rant.)

It's a basic principle that all the ballots are counted. Particularly when the leader's lead is narrowing as the remaining ballots are counted. Simply saying we have enough to know how it's going to end--not good enough. If the difference is greater than the number of outstanding ballots (a 10,000 vote lead and 1,500 ballots left to count), that's one thing--even if all the ballots are for one candidate, it won't change the outcome. But this isn't that situation.

It's no surprise that the power brokers of a party are willing to steal an election. (The Democrats aren't immune in this regard, of course.) But usually they at least try to cover it up. Not unlike the brave man who finally confronted Joseph McCarthy:

"Have you no shame, sir? At the end of the day, have you no shame?"

The answer: Evidently not.

It's all in the terminology

Andrew Sullivan had a link to this Beliefnet article, which poses the question that maybe Romney lost because he was too Christian.

On reading the headline, I thought it was an interesting thesis. Was he too forgiving? Too humble? Too willing to turn the other cheek? Too focused on the Kingdom of Heaven rather than on temporal power?

But that's not what it's about.

Romney believed that to win the nomination he had to win over evangelical Christians. He figured the way to do that was to get all Jesusy. So he declared, "I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind." In so doing, he showed a fatal misunderstanding of the attitude of evangelicals toward Mormonism.
. . .
"When he goes around and says Jesus Christ is my Lord and savior, he ticks off at least half the evangelicals,'' Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention said. "He's picking a fight he's going to lose."

You see, the problem was, he used the wrong words in talking about his magic invisible daddy in the sky, using the same words other people use, implying that his magic invisible daddy in the sky is the same one as theirs, which they totally disagree with because there's, like, a different book of stories!

He had the temerity to suggest that everyone who follows Jesus is a brother in the spirit. And he used a label that didn't respect GOP identity politics. That's what "too Christian" means--nothing to do with your beliefs or behavior, everything to do with what label you use for your magic invisible sky-daddy.

Election night thoughts, such as they are

Got an email from a friend asking what I thought, here's what I told him. This is current as of post time, subject to change as late results come in.

===
The delegate count is looking good. Everyone's made a big deal about MO being a bellwether, and it looks like he's going to fight her to a draw here (12-point gap earlier, currently at 3%). Exit polls show the Latino vote is breaking heavily for Hillary, which is going to be a problem in CA. But all in all it's about what people expected... Neither is going to land a knockout blow, he's actually beating expectations (and the margins for Obama are huge in the south) and doing well in delegates. (In fact, the delegate counts so far look like it's going to be almost a draw.)

She's going to keep arguing she's inevitable, but the numbers don't really support that. She's trumpeting her wins in OK & AR, that she really can win something midwestern/southernish... meanwhile, in the *real* south, Obama's kicking her butt.

Romney's gotta be hurting. Speculation at one blog [can't find the darn link now, drat] that Huckabee's going to get the call from McCain about a slot on the ticket... Usually that sort of thing carries a "...provided you drop out of the race now" contingency. In this case, it may be "...provided you stay in until the end and keep sucking votes away from Romney."

And the BBC seems vaguely amused by it all.

So all in all, not the blowout I'd hoped for, not the trashing I'd feared. Not a bad night. And MA's not a surprise, in spite of Her Inevitableness's bloviating. She's been ahead there for weeks--by 14 points a week ago. So there wasn't anything unexpected about it. Yes, a bigger bounce from the Ted-loving would have been nice. Oh well.

Leaping to (probably wrong) conclusions

CNN has already decided that there's going to be a jobless recovery, "again." You remember, just like that last jobless recovery? The one that turned out to add lots and lots of new jobs?

Yes, it did. It wasn't really jobless at all. The employment statistics are mostly estimated based on what's happening at large companies. Smaller companies and new companies tend not to get sampled sufficiently; that's why the early numbers are always subject to revision, sometimes as much as a year later. And the later revisions showed that the "jobless" recovery wasn't jobless at all; it's just that most of the new jobs were added by smaller businesses, those with 50 or fewer employees, so didn't show up in the early statisitcs; it wasn't until the numbers were revised with more complete information, much after the fact, that the truth became known. By which time, of course, it was (literally) last year's news, so was ignored by the media.

I see no reason to expect any current "jobless" recovery to be any different. I'm willing to be proven wrong, but in this case using the latest statistics is actually one of the weakest arguments.

Oh, by the way, welcome to post #200.

OK, even we Yanks aren't this out of touch...

Apparently many Brits have trouble telling where reality ends and fiction begins...

Britons are losing their grip on reality, according to a poll which shows nearly a quarter think Winston Churchill was a myth, while the majority reckon Sherlock Holmes was real.

The survey found that 47 per cent thought the 12th Century English King Richard the Lionheart was a myth.

And 23 per cent thought World War II prime minister Winston Churchill was made up.

Hmmmm..... I can't help wondering if there isn't a whiff of a setup in this, much like the poll about 10 years back showing more Gen-Xers believed in UFO's than believed that Social Security would be there when they were 65. (Moral of the story being, ask 2 widely-separated questions, make sure the wording on one is heavily slanted, and you can get whatever results you want.)

Still... Even assuming there's a modicum of truth in this. But what were the actual questions? That Richard the Lionheart existed? Or that he actually did all of the various things attributed to him? (After all, there was a Saxon warlord named Arthurius...but that hardly makes the grail-quest legends historically accurate.)

[h/t: Paddy, at Cliff Schecter's]

The scourge (and stupidity) that is postmodernism

Sometimes it's not just academic follies, sometimes it spills out into the real world. Seems there's a recent law review article posted that makes the argument:

• The government is required by the constitution to be neutral on matters of religion, and therefore to treat all "ways of knowing" as equal;
• Science (specifically evolution) focuses on natural causes, rejecting supernatural causes out of hand, without even considering them, and is therefore itself a belief system, a type of religion;
• Therefore for govt to endorse science, particularly evolution, is to forcibly indoctrinating students into the "religion" of secular humanism, and compelling them to undergo religious instruction;
• while instead the constitution clearly requires government to remain "neutral" and teach "alternative" theories, explicitly including supernatural ones.

Yes, the fundamentalists are adopting the language of postmodernism to "prove" that creationism should be taught in schools.

See, this is why us geeks make such a big deal about rigorous logic, clear definitions, etc. It can be shown (relatively easily) that if a logical system has a contradiction anywhere, it is possible to prove anything in that system, no matter how absurd. Of course, there are several problems with this argument, including weasel words, non sequiturs, and so on; it's not a solid argument. But why didn't the law journal catch that? Don't they review articles? Doesn't anyone notice such leaps of logic? I was under the impression lawyers were trained in such things... Perhaps I was misinformed.

Fortunately, in this particular case at least, there's a blistering point-by-point rebuttal... But the fact the original article ever got published in the first place is scary.

[h/t: Ed Brayton]

Out of control?

I suppose, in good blogosphere fashion, I should congratulate Greg Mankiw for saying what I did already. On the other hand, he has actual data to back him up, and so has some claim to actually know what he's talking about. So instead I'll just make the standard "Yeah, what he said!" post:

A rise in expected inflation is not consistent with the conventional wisdom that the economy is on the verge of a serious slump driven by inadequate aggregate demand. It is, however, consistent with the hypothesis that policymakers are overreacting to some bad economic news with excessive monetary and fiscal stimulus.

If the problem with the economy is that we're coming off an asset bubble caused by too much easy money (i.e., too low interest rates) for too long, lowering interest rates isn't going to fix it. We can have a mild recession now, or a much worse recession later, possibly combined with inflation. Yes, recessions are uncomfortable. Runaway inflation is worse. (Recessions make it difficult to accumulate more capital, due to sluggish economic activity; inflation takes away capital you've already accumulated, via erosion of purchasing power.) Of course, the inflation won't hit until after the election. Could that be it? Naw, I'm just being cynical.... not.

Memo to new president: do what you have to, to get the economy under control early in your term. If you have the recession early, the voters will forgive you by the time you're up for re-election.

[h/t: Andrew Sullivan]

Am I reading too much into this...?

The Times has an article about Kennedy's endorsement of Obama. This line jumped out at me:

Both the Clintons and their allies had pressed Mr. Kennedy for weeks to remain neutral...

And all I could think of was the passage from The Prince where Machiavelli explains that if two nearby states are in conflict, the one asking for your armed support is your friend, and the one asking for your neutrality is not.

For some reason, watching the Clintons lately has brought Machiavelli to mind quite often the last few weeks.

Tall and Nasty...

No, that's not the title of a bad porn movie... Just one person's summary of a Starbucks, which matches up with my views fairly well.

My drink was disgusting. A bland half-pint of milk with as much coffee flavour as if someone sipping an espresso had sneezed over my cup. A coffee for someone who hates coffee, but uses the bitter adult nectar as a cloak of sophistication for their babyish suckling on warm, creamy sweetness.

I was tricked into drinking one of those vile concoctions once. Never again. And don't call them coffee, please, when they're no more than coffee-flavored glop.

I'm in the wrong line of work

Notwithstanding my last post...

Okay, here's the setup. Suppose I run a company that works with the federal government... say, helping to administer a government program. Further suppose that I overbill shamelessly, to the point that the government's inspector-general finds that I got $34 million more than I should have.

What do you think should happen? Should I have to pay back the $34M?

No, silly, of course not!

I get to decide how much I should pay back. And if I can justify it on paper...

Keith New, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania agency, said it was “very pleased” with the department’s letter, and that it would continue to negotiate with the department over any repayment obligation.

“We could wind up with zero liability,” Mr. New said.

I'm not surprised he was "very pleased." I would be, too, if I could keep $34 million I wasn't supposed to have. Really, the depth of corruption and cronyism in this (mal)Administration continues to boggle.

Why Teach?

There's a meme going around, and though I wasn't specifically tagged, this being the blogosphere, I'll feel free to jump in anyway.

Why do you teach? Why is academic freedom crucial to that effort?

Several reasons why I do this.

1) It's important work. I'm preparing students to take their place not only in their careers, but as citizens. That means it's important to hold them to high standards, and to model the sort of behavior I want them to exhibit in society--reliability, honesty, integrity, etc.

2) Let's face it, it's fun. Yes, sometimes the 'performance' aspect gets a little scary--how do I get their attention? How do I keep it? How do I make this interesting? And the feedback--for better or worse--is pretty immediate.

3) It keeps me on my toes. Every semester there's something new to learn. I get a question no one ever asked before. A student asks something that forces me to go out and learn a little more. I find myself reading farther and farther afield, and saying "I can use that in class..." New technologies, new fads, new controversies. It's all good.

4) Because it's an interesting, exciting subject. Seriously. This stuff is just cool. And I get to explain how it works and help other people learn how to do cool stuff with it. How great is that?

And as for academic freedom.... One of the courses I teach is on the societal and ethical impact of computing. We discuss how tech is used and misused, and why it matters. Along the way I usually manage to get at least a few students, on both sides of the aisle, seriously offended. I try to point out inconvenient truths that annoy both sides, and make students who happen to agree with me defend their positions just as rigorously as those who don't. This means I sometimes say some politically extremely-incorrect things at the front of the classroom. Part of education is having one's preconceptions challenged. If I have to start watching what I say and not saying something that someone somewhere might find offensive, I have a much more difficult time being effective. [Do I go out of my way to be offensive for its own sake? No. Do I let it stop me from doing my job? Also no.]

Calling out the quackery

Background: The full story is over here, but suffice to say a quack by the name of Joseph Chickelue Obi got called out on his quackery on a blog... So he did what any called-out quack does. He demanded the ISP pull down the offending blog posts. Under UK law (much more plaintiff-friendly in libel suits), the ISP had little choice.

Because I happen to believe in the importance of calling out the quacks on their quackery, and discouraging the use of lawsuits to silence legitimate criticism, I'm reposting the offending articles in their entirety. And a fine job of calling out the quackery it is!

Articles from Le Canard Noir follow:

Right Royal College of Pompous Quackery - Dublin, Thursday, September 28, 2006

I had to share this with you. Following on from my recent Quack Word 'Doctor' blog, I came across the Royal College of Alternative Medicine (RCAM) , a Dublin based - well, I'm not sure quite what it is...

What caught my eye was just the shameless aggrandisement of the site. It is quite hilarious, if not a little repetitive at times. Calling yourself 'Doctor' is somewhat pompous when all you have done is paid for some international postage. However, the man behind RCAM has absolutely no shame and titles himself as the:

Distinguished Provost of RCAM (Royal College of Alternative Medicine) Professor Joseph Chikelue Obi FRCAM(Dublin) FRIPH(UK) FACAM(USA) MICR(UK)

Wow! Probably, just Joe to his mates. Naturally, when you Google the qualification FRCAM(Dublin), there is only person who appears to revel in this achievement. I'll leave the rest as an excercise for the reader.

The distinguished provost looks like he is just another pseudoscientific nutritionist, his spin being "Nutritional Immunomodulation". This is obviously a lot more clever than Patrick Holfords mere 'Optimum Nutrition', but having only one 'omnipill' is probably a poorer commercial decision that Patrick's vast range of supplements.

Obviously, Professor Obi has had a few problems with what probably amount to bewildering comments about his site as the legal threats and press releases concerning his 'ethical' responses to criticisms cover more space than anything else. 'Ethical' is a favourite word on the site.

The most recent press release states,

7th September 2006 : The Distinguished RCAM Provost, Professor Joseph Chikelue Obi FRCAM(Dublin) FRIPH(UK) FACAM(USA) MICR(UK) has formally accepted appointment as Chief Professorial Examiner for the Doctor of Science (DSc) programme in Evidence Based, Alternative Medicine (EBAM) of a highly respected International University in one of the British Commonwealth Protectorates.

This new qualification is primarily aimed at Medical Graduates, Physicians, Surgeons, Pharmacists, Dentists, Osteopaths, Chiropractors, Opticians, Wellness Consultants, Herbalists, Acupuncturists, Naturopaths , Healers, Podiatrists , Chiropodists , Scientists , Healers ,Therapists, Homeopaths, Chinese Medicine Practitioners and Nurses wishing to ethically upgrade their current Qualifications in Alternative Medicine over an exceedingly intensive 12 - 36 month period of study.

British Commonwealth Protectorates? Could that be Dublin?

I really have no idea what this organisation is all about. But it looks like it could be getting quite big soon...

RCAM currently has International Vacancies for One Million (1,000,000) 'Foundation Fellows' ('Movers and Shakers') ; who will independently play a highly pivotal role in diligently mentoring (and regulating) it's future Global Membership.

So if you really think that you seriously have what it takes to become a 'Leader' in Alternative Medicine , then (perhaps) RCAM may definitely be exactly what the Doctor ordered for you.

One million. That's a lot of quacks! And they are just to mentor (and regulate) the wider quack membership! This man has ambition.

The Big J really hates real doctors. This is his most recent press release...

RCAM would like to warmly commend the various Chieftans of the National Health Service of the United Kingdom for ethically and appropriately ignoring utterly misguided calls (from a rather amusing Group of thirteen Clinical Yestermen) to compel Hard-Working (and Tax-Paying) British Citizens to additionally pay for Life Enhancing Alternative Medicine Interventions out of their very own pockets - rather than get such treatments free via the NHS. RCAM would like to also categorically state that such exceedingly flawed 'G-13′ demands that the National Health Service of the United Kingdom expediently abandon Alternative Medicine altogether (in total favour of Conventional Medicine) be diplomatically treated with the very utmost contempt which such unguarded verbal flippance duly deserves ; as none of these 13 'Eminent UK Scientists' behind such calls has professionally attained Globally Acceptable Fellowship Qualifications in Alternative Medicine and as such cannot be deemed competent enough to make such sweeping 'Shilly-Shally' statements about the noble independent specialty of Alternative Medicine.

RCAM therefore publicly advises the General Public to lawfully go about their normal Wellness-Seeking Behaviour as usual - without any unwarranted prejudice or fear resulting from such highly self-serving, morally unethical , abjectly crude , totally unprofessional, utterly unstatesmanly, morbidly barbaric, wantonly uncivilized, profanely undemocratic and unspeakably sacrilegious perpetual affronts on the therapeutically formidable institution of Alternative Medicine.

Now, I do not have 'Globally Acceptable Fellowship Qualifications' in Santa Clause Studies to know he does not exist. But hey. I must be a morbidly barbaric and profanely undemocratic, unethical duck.

So, struggling around the acres of pomposity I find one place where Prof Joe might be making some money. You can call him to seek his wisdom, after pre-booking an hour's slot (and handing over your credit card) for a mere 300 Euros. Alternatively, you can pay by the minute on the contact line for a trifling $10 per minute.

Its going to cost you $20 just for Joe to say Hello and to read out his numerous titles, qualifications and names. Not bad 'ethical' work.

Ethical Quackery, the Monarchy and Kate Moss - Thursday, October 12, 2006

No, this is not about our Defender of Quackery, our Quack-in-Chief His Royal Quackiness, Prince Charles, but about the Distinguished Provost of the Royal College of Alternative Medicine, Professor Joseph Chikelue Obi. And yes, it is just a rather lame story written solely to get a picture of Kate on my blog.

I've written a rather lazy blog on the distinguished professor before that was just a bit of a gawp at his quacktastic website and what looks like a health phone-line scam.

Well, I've done a little more digging with Google and it has revealed a few quack gems. It has been pretty hard work, since Google returns some 6,000 pages, the vast majority just appears to be Prof Obi's self-promotion. However, if you persist in digging a few interesting facts turn up.

So, what has the little black duck found out about the "most Controversial Retired Physician and 'A-List' Medical Celebrity, Dr Joseph Chikelue Obi"?

Here we go...

1. The Irish Independent reports that his college does not exist at the Dublin address given on the web site. There's a surprise! It's just a front.

2. The Independent goes on. "In January 2003, he was suspended by for serious professional misconduct at South Tyneside District Hospital. Among the allegations made were that he failed to attend to patients, wrote strange notes about colleagues and at one point gave a dating agency phone number to a psychiatric patient."

3. He was being investigated by the police for taking thousands of pounds of a 58 year old woman to in order to cure a long standing illness.

4. The GMC strike Dr Obi off their register for "serious professional misconduct". So much for him being retired.

5. On another tack, Dr Obi has been involved in a little cyber-squatting. This looks as if it took place while he was a doctor - always after a few quid!

6. Since then, now self-titled Prof Obi, a few new avenues have been opened, including trying to entice Kate Moss away to one of his 'safe-houses' in Ireland. Hat's off!

He is quoted as saying:

Under the European Convention on Human Rights, Miss Moss still has fundamental rights, just like anyone else out there, and as far as I am concerned, she is not guilty of anything until an Ethical Jury says so.

(I mentioned before that 'ethical' was one of his favourite words.)

7. Prof Obi has been developing a Penis Enlarger (watch out Kate) that his own Royal College has now endorsed.

8. At least one person (out of the targeted million) has paid Prof Obi the fees for his college to accredit them. Dr Michael Keet (8 Canards) of the Central London College of Reflexology handed over 'hundreds'. Do we feel sorry for out-quacked quacks? I guess we ought to.

9. For those of you wanting to see behind the grand titles and see the real human being, Joseph lists his interests as Comedy in London, Whole Food Nutrition and Christian Music. On this 'Meetup' site, he describes himself as "Just a very ordinary guy . . .". That's nice.

10. His name appears very often on the blog Abolish The General Medical Council (GMC), often reporting something he has got up to. The blog describes itself as:

An ethical blog for those who publicly feel that the General Medical Council (GMC) should be Statutorily Abolished in favour of a Medical Licensing Commission (MLC) to solely register and revalidate Doctors who practise Conventional Medicine in the UK. The Blog also recommends that the GMC/MLC hands all disciplinary functions over to an Independent Clinical Tribunal (ICT) in keeping with the EU Convention on Human Rights ; to avoid (both) Institutional Bias and Multiple Jeopardy.

Oooh. There is that word 'ethical' again. And 'European Human Rights'. No name is given for the blog author but the avatar is a portrait of the queen. Another apparent obsession of Prof Obi - royalty. Could the author be none other than the Professor himself, a little agrieved for his ticking off? I hope you all click through to the blog. Maybe we will show up in his stats and whoever the writer is can get in contact and confirm one way or another.

I rather hope it is, as the final thing I turned up would just be fantastic...

11. Is the Distinguished Provost of the Royal College of Alternative Medicine, Professor Obi now selling ethical ring-tones? I do hope so.

Watch out Crazy Frog! Here comes the Crazy Provost...

Ouch!

Gotta watch that oversight, there...

PARIS (AP) -- French bank Societe Generale said Thursday it has uncovered a $7.14 billion fraud - one of history's biggest - by a single futures trader who fooled investors and overstepped his authority.

As usual with this sort of thing, it was done (as it only could have been) by someone on the inside.

It said a trader at the futures desk had misled investors in 2007 and 2008 through a "scheme of elaborate fictitious transactions."

The trader, who was not named, used his knowledge of the group's security systems to conceal his fraudulent positions, a statement from the bank said.

Any system can be subverted. And subversion usually does not happen because of weak algorithms (although that's only because most professional systems use peer-reviewed algorithms and protocols).

The problem, of course, and it's not a trivial problem at all, is making a set of procedures and checks that can't be gamed or subverted, but are still usable. (Who watches the watchers, etc.)

Wrong Action, Wrong Time

So the government is ready to step in, after already cutting interest rates in the biggest drop in 20 years.

Because, you see, the problem was caused by too much easy credit and free spending, so we're going to fix it by easing credit and giving people money to spend. We'll borrow the money from foreign governments--it's okay, they've got lots.

We can go through a relatively mild recession now, or a much worse one later. The housing bubble cushioned us from the effects of the dotcom crash. Now they're looking for something to cushion us from the housing crash.

I'd rather get it over with, take our medicine now, and get back on track. Trying to put it off only makes it worse.

More liars for Jesus

Autumn Sandeen has a story up at Pam's about the latest stunt from the Anything-For-Jeeezus brigade.

The problem with cheap publicity stunts is that it's too easy to reveal them as cheap publicity stunts. Not that the TV station that got duped will admit it, of course.

Buried in cables

I currently have yet another workstation set up, this one putting together the disk image for the programming contest in April. My office is beginning to resemble an electronics workshop. Which wouldn't be a bad thing, I guess, if I'd had (or taken) the time to get the end-of-semester piles cleared out from last time.

I can still find my chair, and have a clear space big enough to write on. I guess that's something.

What a week.

We've seen the Clinton slime machine kick into full gear.

Huckabee has come right out and said we should bring the Constitution into line with his view of the Bible.

Wall Street continues to implode. The CEO's who brought it about are enjoying their $100M bonuses. Republicans think the solution is to cut corporate taxes.

So not much new happening in politics.

Here at Chez Geek, we've had some network emergencies and a new router. We also had a brain-cramp moment and deleted some data that we really shouldn't have. We recovered most of it and had backups of some of the rest. We also started referring to ourself in the plural, and we think we like it.

More Shenanigans at Bank of America

Just when you thought the lies couldn't get any more brazen....

Bank of America is buying out Countrywide Financial at a hefty discount, as Countrywide is reeling from all the bad loans it made. So get this:

"I think it's positive for the borrowers," Bruce Marks, chief executive of Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America said. "There are millions of home owners with unaffordable mortgages. The deal will allow Bank of America to restructure loans to what homeowners can afford."

Marks suggested that Bank of America will be able to help current Countrywide customers where Countrywide can't, because it doesn't give risky subprime mortgages, so it plans to convert them into prime loans.

News flash... whether or not it's subprime is NOT a question of whether it's fixed-rate or adjustable-rate. It's a function of the borrower's prospective ability to repay. So apparently BoA is going to have its High Priests of Accountancy wave their magic fingers over the balance sheet, and >poof!<>Either this is incredibly sloppy reporting, even by CNN's standards, or someone's blowing a particularly cheap grade of smoke. Fortunately, they did talk to someone who injected a note of reality:

"[This deal] doesn't make any difference to the home owner," said Hanzimanolis. "The only difference will be where you pay your bill to. Just because Bank of America is buying your Countrywide subprime loan, it doesn't change [into a prime loan] when they buy it."

But the story then goes back to cheerleading for good ol' BoA, friend of the working family & all that.

Taylor noted that restructuring loans also makes financial sense for the bank. "Bank of America may very well intend on having loans restructured to ones that are closer to prime loans and performing assets, because they would rather have the homeowners stay in their homes and pay their mortgages than face the alternatives."

In doing so, Bank of America may be able to recoup some of the losses it incurred from purchase of Countrywide, said Marks. Since the bank has already written off the value of many of those loans, it plans on getting strong returns by restructuring customers' loans.

Okay, let's take this one at a time. They've written off the loans... so they're not going to foreclose, but instead if they can get anything, even below market, they can get strong returns, stronger than expected at least. Ah, the joys of tax law. Speaking of which, how about having the taxpayers subsidize the entire deal? Which they're going to do... But that's another story.

"restructuring to avoid foreclosure," short version: Rewarding someone who took out more mortgage than they could afford, in order to avoid the painful consequences of dealing with a loan that should never have been written in the first place. Thus avoiding market discipline for irresponsible lender and irresponsible borrower.

Meanwhile, if you've been struggling to keep up on your payments? Sucker.... see how many current mortgages (versus, say, those delinquent 3+ months) get restructured. Holding off until you had a down payment saved up? Stooopid. Enjoy the higher rates and tighter credit check. Meanwhile, the guy next door, with the lower credit rating, no down payment, and more house than he can afford? He's going to get below-market interest for years, possibly the rest of his mortgage, so he doesn't get foreclosed. You, on the other hand, by showing some responsibility, demonstrated you're more than capable of making higher payments.

Responsibility is punished, and recklessness is rewarded.

Feh.

Fanboys and their obsessions

From xkcd, the coolest & geekiest webcomic out there:




That's what strikes me about the Paul crowd...there's an obsessive element to it. I understand enthusiasm for a candidate, but there's such a strong element of with-us-or-against-us and hero-worship to so much of it. Yes, I have a favorite candidate, who I'm enthusiastic about... But I don't maintain that candidate is without weakness or will be the single-handed savior of American democracy. And whatever is driving his fanbase, it's not well-reasoned agreement with his positions, which are an incoherent mess. (Get the government out of almost everything except national defense and regulating orgasms; economic ideas regarded by most economists as crackpot--and yes, they're based on ideas from a Nobel-winning economist, but it was Nobel-winning economists who brought us the LTCM debacle--a Nobel is no sign of infallibility; and why can't Paul quite bring himself to distance himself from the white-separatist fringe?)

Oh, well. Every election has its sideshow.

Clinton Desperation Syndrome

Andrew Sullivan has a quick post quoting a Clinton campaign email. He notes the subtext, but I think he misses the deeper irony.

From a Clinton campaign email list:

The Iowa caucus process is a broken and flawed process. It was designed to allow for the active party Dems generally known to one another to assign delegates and was not designed to handle a flood of students and independents. It was a system designed to give more power to Dem party loyalists. In the tension over whether the candidates should be chosen by the party or by the general public, the Iowa caucus was designed to give the party the advantage. For this reason, the Iowa system failed on Thursday.

Translation: we couldn't control it. So it sucks.

The irony is that Her Inevitableness ran on a not-so-subtle argument that she had the ground organization (i.e. control of the party activists) to lock up the nomination.

Obama won in spite of the control of the machinery, not because of it.

Obama as Rorschach

So pundits on the right see Obama as being, underneath the airy rhetoric, actually deeply progressive.

Meanwhile, some on the left are concerned that underneath it all, he's actually deeply conservative.

Meanwhile, others recognize his liberalism but compare him to Regan all the same.


I don't know whether it's seeing different subsets of the facts; seeing the same things but valuing them differently; or some sort of political Rorschach. But it certainly is interesting.

Well, crud.

Just got word back that a conference paper I'd submitted was turned down. The reviews were generally positive, but one reviewer essentially ripped me a new orifice, rating the paper very low, which brought the average rating down beneath the acceptance threshold.

Now that experience--several generally positive reviews and one blistering denunciation--is not in itself all that unusual. It's not universal, but it happens. And reading the blistering reviews, while not always pleasant, is often educational. I've read through blistering reviews that did in fact home in on design flaws, overstated claims, or places where I had, in fact, overlooked something. Not pleasant, but useful. And someone clearly went to some trouble to review the paper, to read it closely. I haven't always agreed with the criticisms, but they are, for the most part, at least mostly fair.

In this case, I can't help wondering. The comments included that I should have included some examples of X (there were 3 in the paper already, wasn't that enough?), should have included some examples of Y (Y being something completely irrelevant to the point I was making), it should have been presented as a case study (I thought it was, though the words "case study" didn't appear in the title, so maybe that point wasn't clear), and that I didn't address any of several other questions (which admittedly were interesting, but were not what the paper was about).

The rest of the blistering criticism seem to boil down to "this wasn't the paper I wanted to read; you should have written a different paper."

And the icing on the cake: My paper was the only one reviewed for this conference by this particular reviewer.

Oh well. The system is what it is, and I knew what it was like when I chose this career. Most of the time it works fairly well, but it's not perfect, and sometimes the imperfections spatter. And if I'd submitted something I thought was marginal and it got accepted because a review got sloppy the other direction, I wouldn't be complaining.

A good question

J. Zasloff asks a very good question:

Now that Edwards seems fatally wounded, I'm still wondering whom I should vote for. So I'll ask it again: what is at the center of the Obama Administration's first 100 days?

He draws a contrast with Edwards, who has made poverty the centerpiece of his campaign. I'm not sure I could answer that question about Hillary. But he makes a valid point, that "change we can believe in" is perhaps inspiring, but also pretty vague. (I'm not sure I'd agree that Edwards is "fatally wounded," at least not yet. Wounded, yes. Fatally? Perhaps not. Too early to tell. But that's another question.)

If Obama's presidency were a mixed bag at best...what would he point to at the end of the year with pride and say "at least we got that done, and if that was done, the other things aren't as important?"

Who needs parody?

You know, it's really hard to write a good, spot-on parody of the classic whiny liberal NuYawker looking down her nose at the silly rubes in the Midwest, giving a dozen totally bogus made-up reasons why it's so unfair that people outside NuYawk City and California have to be considered at all.

On the other hand, why bother writing a parody when the Times has Gail Collins?

Now it gets interesting

The GOP's Wall Street wing and East Coast Establishment (to whatever degree either bloc is non-mythical) both loathe Huckabee. Winning in Iowa will definitely help his fundraising, but he's still short of cash coming into Super Tuesday. If he can keep riding the evangelical vote, the difference in fundraising may not be as decisive as it would be for some other candidates. Still, it looks as if a GOP bloodbath is in the works. The knives will be out, and as I said a bit ago, paraphrasing someone else I can't remember, no one does a political knife fight better than Republicans.

Of course, a lot can happen between now and the time the primaries are over. The only Republican to win Iowa and go on to win the election was Bush 2000. Still plenty of time to coalesce around another candidate, and try to put down the upstart preacher who doesn't understand the role of the evangelical vote in Rove's GOP--to reliably turn up at elections, then go back to church and wait another 4 years, until they're needed to vote Republican again. No, the evangelicals are refusing to go to the back of the bus, and the rest of the party is looking on in horror. They embraced the fusion of politics and religion; they are now reaping the whirlwind. Whether they can get past this point without going through a complete purge and meltdown is very much up in the air; having perfected the politics of division and destruction, they appear ready to be consumed by it.

Which makes the Ron Paul situation all the more interesting. Ten percent of the vote, fifth place finish, behind Fred "Campaigning is such a bother" Thompson and McCain. But it seems high enough that Fox News' decision not to include him in the Republican debates is even more transparent than it was before. After all, it's still very very early in the process; too early, it seems, to be able to say with justification that it's only about including 'viable' candidates. Paul has a number of ideas that are distinctly crackpottish, but he's the only republican candidate talking seriously about limits on executive power, which is the defining issue of the next administration. As for his crackpottish ideas, sunlight is the best disinfectant. Let him explain himself; that'll do the job of sinking his candidacy.

On the Dem side, well, this makes thing interesting indeed. Hillary is trying to sell herself as the agent of change, while also running on nostalgia for Bill. Um, hel-lo.... The 'inevitability' narrative just took a hit close to the waterline. She came in third. Not far behind Edwards, but third all the same. This raises the pressure for New Hampshire; she has to win there, convincingly, or the 'inevitability' meme is dead and the campaign is over. (If she loses Iowa and New Hampshire, then her last chance is South Carolina; but if she loses the first two, what are the chances of taking the third? It seems the more the voters get to know Hillary, the more they prefer someone else...)

Edwards has got to be sweating it. His campaign is still viable, but no more than that. He was hoping for a win, he came in a rather distant 2nd. He's got to do well in NH and in the south. Whether his trial-lawyer skills will be enough.... we'll see.

For Obama, he's celebrating, and rightfully so. His speech hit all the right notes, he won by a respectable margin with a large turnout...he can legitimately claim a very real victory. Yes, if he takes the nomination, the choice of a running mate becomes very important; it has to be someone with serious foreign-policy chops. But that's a very good problem to have. Yes, the slime machine (both the Clintons' and the Republicans') will kick into high gear. But the campaign has a way of testing a candidate; so far he's risen to the challenge every time.

Also, John Aravosis has a hilarious statistic.

Hey, that'll boost traffic...

Documentation of the Ron Paul Effect...

[but is the humiliation worth it?]

[this post & the previous: h/t Andrew Sullivan]

Even a conservative evangelical sees through it

There's an interesting post discussing one's experience on the campaign trail for the Huckabee campaign, and the many interesting things learned....

The Mainstream Media Ain't So Bad -- Many bloggers (including me) have a knee-jerk reaction to the mainstream media. We "just know" they have a liberal bias and that they can't be trusted to report accurately on Republicans and conservatives. If my experience is any indication, then most of what we know is "just wrong."

[...]I expected that I'd have the toughest time with the professional journalists but most of the reporters that I dealt with (especially Michael Luo of the New York Times and Jonathan Martin of Politico) were quite fair and always professional. Even when their coverage was cringe-inducing I rarely could fault them for being inaccurate or putting their own biases ahead of the facts.

Unfortunately, the same can not be said of the conservative media.

[...] Almost always the mainstream media from the "liberal" outlets were more fair and balanced than were the ones from the "conservative" side of the media.

Some conservative outlets, of course, were notably fair and accurate. [...]

But while there were a few other exceptions that I could praise ... far too many of the conservative outlets refused to present any evidence that conflicted with their typical anti-Huckabee narrative.

[...]

As a campaign staffer, I found such behavior frustrating. But as a consumer of conservative media I found it infuriating. There are a number of pundits, bloggers, reporters, and radio hosts that I will never trust again to be "fair and balanced."

Sometimes learning the truth can be painful, can't it? Sadder but wiser now, and all that....

Mitt Romney will never be President -- I won't be surprised if Mitt Romney wins the Iowa Caucus. I will be surprised, however, if he's still in the race when the South Carolina primary comes around. Even if the impending scandal that has been rumored for weeks doesn’t derail his campaign (I can't say what it is but you should hear about it before Jan. 8), his inherent dishonesty will eventually do him in.

It's not just his flip-flops on the issues, though that should be enough....No, what will destroy Romney's chances is that he will lie about an issue, know that he is lying, know that you know he is lying, and say it anyway. It's not just that he's dishonest. It's that he thinks we're stupid.

Now it's true that in the short term, we do tend to be stupid.... [M]ost people have yet to realize--as have the other campaigns and the mainstream media--he is a liar. But eventually the public catches on.

[...] Because most of it is done behind the scenes (i.e., scurrilous emails sent to reporters and influential bloggers) it is difficult to point out the most egregious examples. Don't take my word on it, though. Ask around to the other campaigns and media outlets.

[...] His "lie and buy" strategy may get him a narrow victory in Iowa but he'll flame out soon enough.

Tell it, brother.

There's nothing here that we didn't already know. But it's nice to see it admitted.

The "fair and balanced" thing, I think, goes back to a point Garry Trudeau made (and yikes, I'm actually quoting him, what's wrong with me?) The so-called "liberal" takes it as a given that the other person's viewpoint may be valid, that listening to "the other" is inherently worthwhile. (What's done after that, and how it's often misused, is another story. And I should note that "listen to" and "agree with" are not synonyms.) The conservative, on the other hand, knows he's right... Why should he listen to someone who's wrong? If he knows what the story is, why should he listen to some staffer try to convince him otherwise?

The whole sorry spectacle is, to a degree, the legacy of Karl Rove, the politics of personal destruction writ large.

On the other hand, maybe it's simpler than that. Nobody does a political knife-fight better than Republicans. The money elite of the GOP is terrified of Huckabee, and want him stopped, almost as much as they want Ron Paul to shut up.

Oh well. Nice to see someone start to gather just a bit more awareness than they had before...

No comment necessary

From today's Washington Post homepage.

I suppose there's nothing wrong with relaxing a bit and mugging for the camera, but... is this really the image they want to present? Of course, as things get down to the wire, I'm becoming more and more horrified by what's coming out of this campaign, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised. On the other hand, personally, I've felt the GOP was ready for a good crash/burn for quite a while... This may be the party's Nemesis.

Decisions, decisions...

I'm working on the schedule for next semester, and have hit the perennial dilemma. Based on the number of weeks in the course, etc., our second exam should be at about week 12 or so. But there's this little thing called spring break right then. So the question is, do I hit the students with an exam right before break, or right after?

On the one hand, an exam right before break always feels a bit cruel. On the other, given that it takes a few days after break for students to get back into the groove, you can make a case that an exam after break is cruel, that it pushes them to perform right after they've been away from the material for a while.

Last year we had the exam right after break... I think this year we'll try it before, and see if it makes a difference.

Isn't this thrilling?

Sinking into Oligarchy

Glenn Greenwald has a must-read post about what the BushCo criminal enterprise has done to the rule of law and the idea that no one is above it.

Most revealing of all, anyone who insists that this should be different -- anyone who believes that our highest political officials and largest corporations should be held accountable when they break the law -- is a shrill "partisan," bent on vengeance and Guilty of obstructionism: trying to prevent the political establishment from operating in a harmonious, bipartisan manner to do their Important Work. At least under the Bush presidency, investigations into wrongdoing are bad and disruptive and mean-spirited, and calls for consequences for illegal behavior are shrill and nasty.

Count me as a proudly shrill partisan, then. Eight years of BushCo has done fundamental damage to American democracy, far more than Al Qaeda could ever dream of doing.

Also in that article, check out the link to Privacy International's new annual report. Based on their objective criteria, the US is now an "endemic surveillance society," right up there with China, Russia and a few of the military juntas of southeast Asia.