Gambling

The structure of gambling necessarily engenders both winners and losers, the winners benefitting at the expense of the losers. It’s part of the visceral “joy" of gaming. What has America done over the past generation but eagerly, seamlessly, ruthlessly integrate the gambling ethos into our economy, so much so that even curbing the gambling will utterly destroy the economy? It must feel exhilarating, self-actualizing, so self-evidently proper and natural for the few to walk away from the table with their multi-million and billion dollar compensation packages won so effortlessly at the expense of all those hapless 50+ year old losers and all the rest. What have we wrought? What have we wrought?

An Open Letter to President Barack Obama

President Obama,

I urge you to reconsider your administration's extraordinary and, in my opinion, extreme position on invoking the state secrets privilege to prevent review of targeted killing of U.S. citizens.

If we have learned anything as a nation, anything at all over the last troubled decade, it is that our extensive intelligence apparatus and best functioning executive processes are not immune to even the most basic failures.

It seems to me that precisely because of the inevitability of these failures our government was and has been wisely structured with checks and balances and this is nowhere more true than in the competition between the rights of individuals and actions of the government with its overwhelming power and resources. The targeted killing policy simply discards this fundamental principle and in a stunning manner that is the most irreversible, unenlightened, anti-democratic fashion imaginable.

As a veteran or our nation’s armed forces, I clearly understand that we live in a dangerous world and that the most important of your charges as president is the safety of America’s citizens. But, again, such safety is always a competition between the rights of the individual and the actions of an overwhelmingly powerful and self-evidently failure-susceptible government. Any realistic reflection on this policy in consideration of history, politics, and our constitution can lead to no other conclusion but that it demolishes a cornerstone of our values as a nation and will ultimately have tragic consequences. Again, I urge you to reconsider.

Acquired Dunning-Kruger Effect and Anosognosia Syndrome - ADKEAS

I humbly submit a new, brash, and untested hypothesis - that the existence of the tea-party, and particularly of the many tea-party enthusiasts enthusiastically embracing ideas that are patently counter to their own interests, is evidence of a heretofore unidentified chronic, devastating medical affliction: Acquired Dunning-Kruger Effect and Anosognosia Syndrome (ADKEAS).

An Open Letter To My "Moderate" Republican Representative

`God save thee, ancient Mariner !
From the fiends, that plague thee thus !--
Why look'st thou so ?'--With my cross-bow
I shot the albatross.

As you know from my missives to you on a variety of topics, you and I do not see eye to eye on many issues. Therefore you might be surprised to learn that I probably agree with you that the recently passed Health Care Reform bill is a stinker.

Now you might be thinking: “Great! The ‘stinker’ aspect of HCR is a winner, it even has my opposition constituents disgruntled” – and that a lot of folks like me will simply associate the stinkiness with your political opponents who voted for the bill. But, you know what? Some voters have the ability to be a bit more nuanced in our understanding of politics than when we voted for 5th grade class president, and I intend to make sure everyone I know is familiar with the following narrative of your role in HCR.

The background, and again, something on which I suspect we both agree: Americans currently pay more, a great deal more, per capita for health care than any other nation and yet more than 30 other countries have health care outcomes that outperform ours, and this situation is a serious and growing threat to the competitiveness of our economy, to say nothing of what it says about our values.

The leadership of your party, leadership you apparently willingly followed (considering your extensive voting record, public comments, and legislative actions and inactions with respect to HCR), opted to implement a strategy intended to do nothing less than simply ensure the defeat of any HCR legislation. This was in spite of your party leadership’s failure to advance any meaningful legislation to address the health care issues identified above during the many years when it was in control of the legislative and executive branches of government, the wide margin of victory by your political opponents - opponents who had made clear that health care reform was an agenda they would undertake - in the 2008 elections, the obvious attempts to forumlate the HCR bill in a bipartisan fashion, and the now painfully clear political miscalculation that the HCR bill would be defeated by a shameful partisan effort.

That is, when given the chance to improve a stinky HCR bill, to really do something on behalf of your constituents, even if it meant compromises on some issues, you instead squandered the opportunity in loyalty to party leadership whose judgement is now so obviously questionable. I will now and always think of and represent the stinking aspects of this bill as your legacy, a legacy you now so richly deserve.

Ah ! well a-day ! what evil looks
Had I from old and young !
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.

New Word: peud

OK, new word. You know that accursed and annoying ubiquitous blogging technique where a provocative or inflammatory word or phrase is crossed out, but still visible, and then followed by a more benign word or phrase, but of course the edgy insinuation is still stuck in your brain like the nauseating stench unpleasant aroma of dog poo in your nose long after you've scraped it off the bottom of your shoe? I propose we call these pre-emptive up-dates, or "peuds" (to rhyme with feuds) for short. You heard it here first.

Meanwhile, back at the 13.7 blog...

...Professor Kauffman continues his march to the sea (where fish are, no doubt, right now engaged in employing their swim bladders as exaptations to be turned into hummingbird beaks). There are many things about his posts that rub me the wrong way, really rub me the wrong way, but a big one is the incomplete and hence misleading logical construct used to formulate his "no law" assertions.

Since he is, apparently, an accomplished scientist, I am forced to conclude that he is intentionally misleading his nonscientist readers. The crux of his deception is an incompletely formulated syllogism (paraphrasing): - since the natural laws we understand and accept tell us there is, in principle, no way to deterministically predict future events, there is "no law [sic]". Leaving aside for now the inspired creationist jiu-jitsu technique of enlisting scientific principles and findings as their own enemies, it is crucial to recognize the unstated initial proposition in this syllogism: "If we admit as natural law only those principles that make deterministic temporal predictions, and - since the natural laws ..." That is the only proposition that can lead off his logical construct to arrive at a valid "no law" conclusion. But that initial proposition is, not, not even remotely, the general scientific understanding of what we admit as natural law.

C'mon, Stu!!! You know as well as anyone that when Peebles "predicted" the cosmic microwave background it wasn't a temporal prediction that two guys named Penzias and Wilson would be cleaning pigeon droppings out of their radio telescope 40 miles away in a few months! It was a "phenomenal" prediction: under appropriate conditions, a very specific and precisely circumscribed phenomenon would be apparent. THAT's what scientists nearly always mean when they use the term "predict" and phenomenal prediction is nearly always the form of scientific law.

Professor Kauffman's conspicuous finessing of this initial proposition looks to those sufficiently versed in this science "magic" thing, as nothing more than sleight of hand employed to fool the rubes nonscientists. Reading his entries, I just can't shake the sense that instead of using his role in the 13.7 blog in an appropriate dialogue with nonscientists, he's intent on scoring cheap shots against Steven Weinberg, located conveniently off camera blog, and advancing a pet economic model, by deliberately misleading - browbeating, really - some blog readers to a gross and fundamental misunderstanding of the general structure of science.

And finally there's this: be very, very wary of scientists and others who are eager to (mis)apply some natural or physical law to address what are fundamentally social issues. This is, for instance, what gave us the marvels of eugenics, and boy-oh-boy do I viscerally distrust the general thrust of a scientist invoking the principles of quantum mechanics and the special theory of relativity in support of an economic paradigm. There is simply no mechanism, none, that would allow an understanding of the worldlines of events in the special theory of relativity or the superposition of quantum mechanical eigenfunctions to credibly inform an economic paradigm. If you resort to having these principles undergirding your economic model, to quote lolcats, "ur doin it rong". If Kauffman-economics grows legs, trust me, move your investment portfolio to mattress manufacturers. Or if Hank Paulson becomes CEO of Sealy-Posturepedic, maybe straight to mattresses.

Deconstructing the Liberty Belle

I wonder, I wonder … ? Could it be that NPR has a policy of letting willful stupidity speak for, and thereby hang itself? It’s an innovative and radical notion. And probably one that won’t work given the apparent willful stupidity of great swathes of the nation. After all, calling willful stupidity stupid falls on the stupidly deaf ears of the willfully stupid.

Now, remember that kerfuffle at NPR over the Mark Fiore “Learn to Speak Tea-Bag” cartoon a while back? They caught some heat over it, and as a supposedly unbiased national media outlet reporting in a time of intense political passions, it was definitely a very edgy thing to publish. But most of the group the cartoon was poking fun at couldn’t have been more deserving.

Well, quick on the heels of that dustup, NPR did a report on a charming piece of work who calls herself the “Liberty Belle”. Because of its timing, and at first glance, one might easily have taken the piece as a conciliatory gesture to those it had insulted.

But take a look at this Liberty Belle quote from the piece:

"I tried to boil down in essence what makes me so angry about it," Carender says. "And it was this idea that he and other people decide what the needs are in society. They get to decide. But in order to fund those things, they have to take from some people in order to give to the other people."

So here is Liberty Belles’s “boiled down” political manifesto: let us never again submit to evaluating the quality of ideas themselves; let us, instead, simply demand that our elected officials be free of ideas; freedom, after all, means never having to think; come my friends and let us declare freedom, sweet freedom from the tyranny of ideas!

Sweet Jeebus, that explains so much, including, the until now, mysterious (to me) appeal of Sarah Palin, she of the infamously and perfectly sanitized of any semblance of ideas, empty political rhetoric.

So look: we know NPR has limited time to report on Liberty Belle – they have to pick and choose what parts of her story they will publish. Could it be that NPR cleverly slipped this report, this cartoon more laughable and more disparaging, than Fiore’s, under the radar of the Tea Party movement, relying on 6th grade reading comprehension levels to defuse the otherwise inevitable invective from those it so clearly lampooned? So it might appear based on a comparison of the comments garnered on the two pieces.

And that report was quickly followed by an odd little piece on Andrew Breitbart, raising his profile to NPR listeners just as Breitbart’s albatross was so clearly settling in for an unpleasant, and one can only hope, long stay: a minion with an extended resume of right-wing and racist associations, ugly and possibly illegal political tricks, and, ultimately, a federal felony charge.

Unfortunately, my experience with those possessed of willful stupidity, and its apparently inexhaustible current supply, leaves me pessimisstic that such an approach will have any effect. Still, it provides some comic relief as gotterdammerung ensues. Thanks, NPR, for the few smiles you can provide as the flames consume us.