Ripping John McCain a new one

Frank Rich is good today. He basically rips McCain a new one over the spin and lies and rashness known as Sarah Palin.

Jon Stewart was also good:

(or see this version)

Don't let them lie to you that she has more overall experience than Obama. He was in the Illinois legislature for 8 years and has been in the US Senate for almost 4 years. He went to Harvard Law and was the first black president of the prestigious (though under-read) Harvard Law Review.

From an interview on AC360:

“My understanding is that Gov. Palin’s town, Wassilla, has I think 50 employees. We've got 2500 in this campaign. I think their budget is maybe 12 million dollars a year – we have a budget of about three times that just for the month,” Obama responded.

Actually, according to ADN, Wasilla's budget was only $6M / yr. The point of this being that her "executive experience" as mayor doesn't really even compare to the decisions and strategy Obama has had to form as a result of running the campaign.

She's been governor for 20 months of a state with 950,000 caribou and 670,000 people. She was a mayor for six years of a town of 5,000. She went to five different schools before finally graduating with a Journalism BA after six years from the U of Idaho.

[UPDATE: Check out the 63-page vetting report (PDF, 275KB) that was compiled on Palin when she ran for Governor of Alaska in November 2006.]

We report, you decide. (retch)

A little over-the-top

Here in Columbia, SC, the Richland County Sheriff's Dept. has secured a ridiculously over-the-top weapon of warfare: dubbed the "peacemaker"...

Now I'm not a criminal or a person who is very libertarian with respect to government power, but I have to agree that this is ridiculous, not to mention how this was named after (supposedly) Jesus' reference in Matt 5. This worries me as being something that is completely out of proportion to the threats faced by the police, and thus something that will probably just end up killing someone unnecessarily. They'll use it to break up poker games or pot smokers just so they can use it.

Kind of like how cops kill dogs regularly now (and back then) with no justification. I'd sue the sh*t out of them and probably be arrested for trying to assault them if they ever shot my big teddy bears.

Cleaning things up some

After hearing about someone getting fired at Hammond School for what they had on their MySpace page, I decided to take privacy to the next level. I made my Blogger profiles private, am in the process of killing the links and references to them I had on my index pages, and have whittled down my list of "allowed readers" to 18. If you're reading this, I must think you're a genius.

Seriously, though, it's sad that someone can't have a private place to enjoy freedom of speech without worrying about losing their job, but there are consequences to actions, even when they're protected constitutionally. Right, Maurice's BBQ owner Maurice Bessinger? So I'm also googling my name and variants of it and my email addresses and trying to go through and do what I can to make finding material about me online as difficult as possible. One good thing: the revolutionary war hero by the same name makes it harder to search for me.

If in the future you find yourself unable to read the blog entirely, don't think it's personal. It's just me being a little overly cautious. Even people whom I trust cause me to worry because they may forget to log out of their computer somewhere and someone else, whom I don't trust, may see it or use it against me. I've whittled down my Facebook and MySpace friends list and changed the privacy settings there for the same reasons.

If you're bored enough to wonder how many times I've changed my mind about whether to make this blog private, public, or somewhere in between, read this or figure it out yourself from the various postings.

Happiness and life's value

Full disclosure: I'm about to link to an article from Oprah's magazine. OTOH, it is a decent article written by an academic neuroscientist about happiness. Here are the five main points:

1. Find what you enjoy and are good at and immerse yourself in it.
2. Set out to deliberately make yourself happy by prioritizing it over relationships and career.
3. Avoid living in the past.
4. Invest and spend heavily of your self on a few close friends.
5. Don't ever associate enjoyment with guilt.
   

The reason I'm linking to this is I've been thinking over the meaning of happiness the past few days after receiving an email from a friend of mine who brought up the subject. He brought it up because he's a Christian and he has a non-Christian friend who seemed to make intimations of suicidal thoughts. He wrote me for advice as to what to say to her, presumably because he felt that his lack of ability to invoke God made advising her difficult or impossible. I wrote him back with a strategy much like that outlined in the article below: practical, real-life advice about finding something you enjoy and basking in it. On a deeper note, I've said before that I think the fact-value distinction is very important in considering things like, "what's the meaning of life?" I really don't think that adding God to the equation helps clarify that question, as it only pushes it back to "why would God make anything at all?" and "why would God allow such evil and suffering in the world?" and makes it more confusing. But furthering that idea is for another day.

Five Things Happy People Do
By Gabrielle LeBlanc
http://www.oprah.com/article/spirit/emotionalhealth/omag_200803_happy

Sages going back to Socrates have offered advice on how to be happy, but only now are scientists beginning to address this question with systematic, controlled research. Although many of the new studies reaffirm time-honored wisdom ("Do what you love," "To thine own self be true"), they also add a number of fresh twists and insights. We canvassed the leading experts on what happy people have in common—and why it's worth trying to become one of them:

They find their most golden self. Picture happiness. What do you see? A peaceful soul sitting in a field of daisies appreciating the moment? That kind of passive, pleasure-oriented—hedonic—contentment is definitely a component of overall happiness. But researchers now believe that eudaimonic well-being may be more important. Cobbled from the Greek eu ("good") and daimon ("spirit" or "deity"), eudaimonia means striving toward excellence based on one's unique talents and potential—Aristotle considered it to be the noblest goal in life. In his time, the Greeks believed that each child was blessed at birth with a personal daimon embodying the highest possible expression of his or her nature. One way they envisioned the daimon was as a golden figurine that would be revealed by cracking away an outer layer of cheap pottery (the person's baser exterior). The effort to know and realize one's most golden self—"personal growth," in today's lingo—is now the central concept of eudaimonia, which has also come to include continually taking on new challenges and fulfilling one's sense of purpose in life.

"Eudaimonic well-being is much more robust and satisfying than hedonic happiness, and it engages different parts of the brain," says Richard J. Davidson, PhD, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "The positive emotion accompanying thoughts that are directed toward meaningful goals is one of the most enduring components of well-being." Eudaimonia is also good for the body. Women who scored high on psychological tests for it (they were purposefully engaged in life, pursued self-development) weighed less, slept better, and had fewer stress hormones and markers for heart disease than others—including those reporting hedonic happiness—according to a study led by Carol Ryff, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

They design their lives to bring in joy. It may seem obvious, but "people don't devote enough time to thinking seriously about how they spend their life and how much of it they actually enjoy," says David Schkade, PhD, a psychologist and professor of management at the University of California San Diego. In a recent study, Schkade and colleagues asked more than 900 working women to write down everything they'd done the day before. Afterward, they reviewed their diaries and evaluated how they felt at each point. When the women saw how much time they spent on activities they didn't like, "some people had tears in their eyes," Schkade says. "They didn't realize their happiness was something they could design and have control over."

Analyzing one's life isn't necessarily easy and may require questioning long-held assumptions. A high-powered career might, in fact, turn out to be unfulfilling; a committed relationship once longed for could end up being irritating with all the compromising that comes with having a partner. Dreams can be hard to abandon, even when they've turned sour.

Fortunately, changes don't have to be big ones to tip the joy in your favor. Schkade says that if you transfer even an hour of your day from an activity you hate (commuting, scrubbing the bathroom) to one you like (reading, spending time with friends), you should see a significant improvement in your overall happiness. Taking action is key. Another recent study, at the University of Missouri, compared college students who made intentional changes (joining a club, upgrading their study habits) with others who passively experienced positive turns in their circumstances (receiving a scholarship, being relieved of a bad roommate). All the students were happier in the short term, but only the group who made deliberate changes stayed that way.

They avoid "if only" fantasies. If only I get a better job…find a man…lose the weight…life will be perfect. Happy people don't buy into this kind of thinking.

The latest research shows that we're surprisingly bad at predicting what will make us happy. People also tend to misjudge their contentment when zeroing in on a single aspect of their life—it's called the focusing illusion. In one study, single subjects were asked, "How happy are you with your life in general?" and "How many dates did you have last month?" When the dating question was asked first, their romantic life weighed more heavily into how they rated their overall happiness than when the questions were reversed.

The other argument against "if only" fantasies has to do with "hedonic adaptation"—the brain's natural dimming effect, which guarantees that a new house won't generate the same pleasure a year after its purchase and the thrill of having a boyfriend will ebb as you get used to being part of a couple. Happy people are wise to this, which is why they keep their lives full of novelty, even if it's just trying a new activity (diving, yoga) or putting a new spin on an old favorite (kundalini instead of vinyasa).

They put best friends first. It's no surprise that social engagement is one of the most important contributors to happiness. What's news is that the nature of the relationship counts. Compared with dashing around chatting with acquaintances, you get more joy from spending longer periods of time with a close friend, according to research by Meliksah Demir, PhD, assistant professor of psychology at Northern Arizona University. And the best-friend benefit doesn't necessarily come from delving into heavy discussions. One of the most essential pleasures of close friendship, Demir found, is simple companionship, "just hanging out," as he says, hitting the mall or going to the movies together and eating popcorn in the dark.

They allow themselves to be happy. As much as we all think we want it, many of us are convinced, deep down, that it's wrong to be happy (or too happy). Whether the belief comes from religion, culture, or the family you were raised in, it usually leaves you feeling guilty if you're having fun.

"Some people would say you shouldn't strive for personal happiness until you've taken care of everyone in the world who is starving or doesn't have adequate medical care," says Howard Cutler, MD, coauthor with the Dalai Lama of The Art of Happiness in a Troubled World. "The Dalai Lama believes you should pursue both simultaneously. For one thing, there is clear research showing that happy people tend to be more open to helping others. They also make better spouses and parents." And in one famous study, nuns whose autobiographies expressed positive emotions (such as gratitude and optimism) lived seven to 10-and-a-half years longer than other nuns. So, for any die-hard pessimist who still needs persuading, just think of how much more you can help the world if you allow a little happiness into your life.

Gabrielle Leblanc is a writer and neuroscientist in Washington, D.C.

Good stuff.

This is "reform"?

The whole narrative that McCain's gimmick revolves around is that he chose Palin because she is a "reformer" and "maverick" and so is he. I thought mavericks bucked their party's orthodoxy, rather than representing an extreme version of them, but hey, what do I know?

The problem with that is these damned stubborn facts.

They're shutting down the investigation into how she used her office to punish subordinates in a way very reminiscent of King George's use of power in the Justice Dept. That's hardly the sort of transparency in government and ethics reform we'd expect from this supposed duo of do-goodism.

In addition, with the facts piling up about Palin's use of pork and advocacy of the "Bridge to Nowhere", opposing it only late in the game and keeping the money after the project itself was shut down, it is becoming a literal laughingstock to call this woman an agent of reform against earmarking. She lies.

Besides this, there's the fascist way she used her position as mayor and governor to try to censor the town's library and fire political opponents.

Like it or not, despite the cable news lovefest for her, the disaster that is Sarah Palin will continue to linger like a stench over this election.

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.

John Adams, 'Argument in Defense of the Soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trials,' December 1770 (source)

In the same way that the Right insisted on looking at Obama's record and proposals rather than his character, let's look at the facts surrounding Palin's "reformer" label rather than her biography.

Call me a bleeding heart liberal

Go ahead. Call me a bleeding heart liberal if you want to. But supporting this grotesque mockery of "sport" -- shooting wolves from airplanes -- is just abominable. And Palin supports it.

There's hunting for food then there's bloodsport. I'm all for the 2nd Am protecting gun rights and all, as well as reasonable hunting laws. However, these beautiful animals are viciously tortured, not cleanly and painlessly killed for any good purpose.

That's ignoring all the other reasons to vote against the McCain-Palin ticket.

Praying for Jamey didn't work out so well

When I first moved to Columbia, I saw lots of bumper stickers that said, "I'm praying for Jamey."

I finally found out what they're about: a guy who got pancreatic cancer. Well, he died this January (9 months ago). I have a feeling a lot of people will take those stickers off without even reflecting on their effect...that is, their lack thereof.

In one of my posts at Debunking Christianity, I looked at the question of whether or not there really is any scientific evidence that "prayer works" or a correlation between faith and health. Unsurprisingly, I found none.

The core methodology of such studies is flawed for three reasons:

1) Some studies examine how frequent churchgoing relates to health. The problem with this methodology is that the same correlation would appear between frequent football game attendance as well; anyone healthy enough to frequently attend anything that they enjoy will do so, and the more unhealthy you get, the less you will be able to attend...and so church attendance is not special.

2) Another big problem with studies designed to measure the "prayer effect" is that the people are often receiving medical care while being studied, and it is impossible to say that the prayer had an effect compared to their treatment. If you could study only patients who have exactly the same disease at exactly the same stage and receive exactly the same treatments, then you could truly control these other variables. However, it is basically impossible to control the other variables that will affect the prognosis.

3) The final problem is that it is impossible to separate people into "prayed for" and "not prayed for" groups by virtue of the fact that you'd have to ask each person and their extended families and their entire churches not to pray...and do you think that is going to work? If someone has a serious condition and is religious, they're going to stop praying for a few weeks or months? No. And so many of the people in the "not prayed for" group whose situation turns bad are lumped in as "evidence" that those who don't receive prayer are worse off...even though the people themselves as well as their families and church members were praying for them, especially if the health condition is serious, like cancer or heart disease.

And those are just the core methodology problems. In other studies, the ones cited as "evidence prayer works", the sample sizes are very small (n<20), and therefore the probability values are unimpressive: p>0.05. Whether or not you agree that the standard for statistical significance should be p<0.05, when p values approach 0.2, you have very little statistical evidence to back up a claim of a significant impact from whatever variable you're studying. But people conveniently ignore this when touting these meager studies.

In the only double blind, multi-year, multi-thousand-patient study ever conducted on the effect of prayer on health, God failed the test. Big time. Every empirical study has shown the same thing -- that nothing fails like prayer. Don't believe me? Find one documented amputee whose limb grew back from prayer. One. Ever.

Some studies purporting to support the idea that prayer works have been literally written by criminals and frauds.

Dr. Richard Sloan (M.D., not Ph.D.) has done a lot of work in examining these sorts of issues and wrote a book recently summarizing the facts -- there is no valid study supporting the idea that prayer changes anything (valid in the sense that they used a competent methodology and a large sample size and got a good p value).

On the logical side of things:

Does prayer move God to act? If yes, then God is callous/cruel, and God is not totally sovereign. If no, then God will act regardless of whether you pray or not.

If the desired goal does not happen after you pray, would you admit that God wanted things to turn out the way that they did, or do you believe that God wanted things to turn out differently? If God wanted things to turn out the way that they did, then your prayers don't matter, because God is sovereign. If God wanted things to turn out differently, then your God is weak or stupid or both.

See, God gets the credit when the desired goal occurs, but none of the blame when it doesn't.

So both from the logical and evidential sides, you really have an uphill climb in trying to show that praying for someone even makes sense.

Obama on unilateral action in Pakistan

Am I the only one who remembers when Obama said that if high value targets in Pakistan could not be acted on by the Pakistani forces, that he'd act with or without Pakistan's permission:

"If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will," Mr Obama said.

Okay, and after that he got hammered by others, including McCain, for being wrong about this? Yet, everyone in the crowd cheered when McCain famously claimed he'd chase Osama bin Laden to the "gates of hell". I guess as long as the gates of hell aren't inside Pakistan...

Last Thursday, Obama mentioned that McCain "wouldn't even follow OBL to the cave where he lives" in reference to this logical disparity. The US has conducted aerial assaults inside Pakistan for months, and as of reports yesterday, the US has now invaded there with ground forces to carry out a raid. So, it's now time for McCain to make clear his position: would he agree with Obama on this raid, or would he oppose his own President's call?

This has been the case on many things: Obama was right about getting out of Iraq and reinforcing our troops in Afghanistan, about talking with Iran without requiring that they stop what they're doing first (precondition), about talking with North Korea, and about basically every other foreign policy decision that McCain has gotten wrong. And that's why I'm voting for Obama-Biden this November.

Palin lied about Obama's record last night: he has passed many bills as a state and federal legislator, including many while working with Republicans. All personal and family issues aside, the arguments in favor of Palin have all turned out to be based on false premises. She is not a reformer. She is in the pocket of Big Oil. She is a creationist who is ultra-right (well to the right of McCain) on many environmental issues, including ANWR and protecting polar bears. She opposes abortion rights for women who have been raped or are the victims of incest. She has zero national security or foreign policy experience, and would be one sick old man's heartbeat away from the Presidency...on this line of reasoning, even Expelled star Ben Stein thinks very little of Palin...not that any of us think enough of him to care what he thinks...

The GOP philosophy of failing government

Krugman had a gem of philosophy inside his column:

Let’s start with that red folder. Assuming that the folder contained something other than scrap paper, is the planned response to a hurricane a state secret? Are we worried that tropical storm systems will discover our weak points? Are we fighting a Global War on Weather?

Actually, that’s not quite as funny as it sounds. Some observers have pointed out that daily briefings on preparations for Gustav, which should be coming from the Federal Emergency Management Agency — which is, you know, supposed to manage emergencies — have been coming, instead, from the U.S. military’s Northern Command.

It’s not hard to see why. Top positions at FEMA are no longer held by obviously unqualified political hacks and cronies. But a recent report by the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security said that the agency has made only “limited progress” in the area of “mission assignments” — that is, in its ability to coordinate the response to a crisis. So FEMA still isn’t up to carrying out its principal task.

That’s no accident. FEMA’s degradation, from one of the government’s most admired agencies to a laughingstock, wasn’t an isolated event; it was the result of the G.O.P.’s underlying philosophy. Simply put, when the government is run by a political party committed to the belief that government is always the problem, never the solution, that belief tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Key priorities are neglected; key functions are privatized; and key people, the competent public servants who make government work, either leave or are driven out.

This is something I was discussing with a friend on Friday. Why do we vote in a party who has the following talking points about running the very offices they campaign for:

Why are libertarian ideas important? Because of their influence on the Republican Party. They form the ideological basis for the Reagan/Gingrich/Bush revolution. The Republicans have taken the libertarian "Government is Bad" horse and ridden far with it:

* Reagan's "Government is the problem"
* Phil Gramm's contention that the country's "economic crisis" and "moral crisis" were due to "the explosion of government"
* Talk radio hosts' advocacy of armed resistance to "jack-booted government thugs"
* Dole's 1996 campaign, advancing the notion that taxes were "Your Money" being taken from you
* Gingrich's Contract with America (welfare cuts, tax cuts, limitations on corporations' responsibility and on the government's ability to regulate them)
* Dick Armey's comment that Medicare (medical aid for the elderly) is "a program I would have no part of in a free world"
* Bush's tax cuts, intended not only to reward the rich but to "starve the beast", in Grover Norquist's words: to create a permanent deficit as a dangerous ploy to reduce social spending
* Jeb Bush's hope that the Florida state government buildings would one day be empty
* Intellectual support for attacks on the quality of working life in this county and for undoing the New Deal

I guess they'd say that they are running to dismantle the government in order to save the country. Somehow, that just hasn't worked very well. The modern world demands that government provide quality services to citizens, and you can't defy the economic certainties involved here: cut a program's funding, and there are real losses of quality and scope.

Time mag. asks, and I answer: Palin = disaster

Barack says that Bristol Palin's teenage pregnancy is off-limits:

MONROE, Michigan (CNN) – Barack Obama told reporters firmly that families are off-limits in this campaign, reacting to news that Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old daughter is five months pregnant.

“Let me be as clear as possible,” said Obama, “I think people’s families are off-limits and people's children are especially off-limits. This shouldn't be part of our politics. It has no relevance to Gov. Palin’s performance as governor, or her potential performance as a vice president.”

Obama said reporters should “back off these kinds of stories” and noted that he was born to an 18 year-old mother.

“How a family deals with issues and teenage children, that shouldn't be the topic of our politics and I hope that anybody who is supporting me understands that’s off-limits.”

The Illinois senator became aggravated when asked about rumors on liberal blogs speculating that Palin’s fifth child - Trig - is actually her daughter Bristol’s. A Reuters report Monday quotes a senior McCain aide saying that Obama’s name is in some of posts, “in a way that certainly juxtaposes themselves against their 'campaign of change,’”

“I am offended by that statement,” Obama shot back, not letting the reporter finish his question. “There is no evidence at all that any of this involved us.”

“We don’t go after people’s families,” Obama said. “We don’t get them involved in the politics. It’s not appropriate and it’s not relevant. Our people were not involved in any way in this and they will not be. And if I ever thought that there was somebody in my campaign that was involved in something like that, they’d be fired.”

Although McCain's campaign insists that they knew about this, I remain skeptical, not the least reason being that they're now sending an army of lawyers to Alaska to try to contain this...which is something they should've done beforehand. Time magazine asks whether McCain's pick was "bold or disastrous?" I think that answer is becoming more clear. Let's have a run-down of the woman's baggage:

1. Late addition: She was a member of a fringe Alaskan political group that seeks its independence from the US, and was involved in their 2008 conference
   
2. Late addition: It looks like independent voters are seeing through the nonsense
   
3. She had a shotgun wedding as she got pregnant with her first kid out of wedlock
4. Her husband was arrested on a DWI
5. She's a staunch "abstinence-only" advocate whose teenage daughter got pregnant, the political fallout from which is still to be determined
   
6. Troopergate: She used her authority as governor to try to have her sister's ex-husband fired, then fired his boss when the boss refused, then lied about it [apparently the ex-husband was a dickhead, but the last two points are more important here]
7. She claimed in her first public appearance as VP candidate that she opposed the "Bridge to Nowhere" but this turns out to be a lie, and a bad one, at that
8. She claims to have opposed corruption in Alaska, but said that calling for Ted Stevens resignation would be "premature" after his arrest and received his endorsement, which she paid to run as an ad
9. She directed Ted Stevens' 527 group on his behalf and appeared with him in July after his indictment to appeal for him politically
10. A few months ago, she claims to have no idea what the VP does everyday
    
11. In a 2006 gubenatorial questionaire, she said that she opposed abortions for incest and rape, only giving an exception if it could be proven that the mother might die from childbirth. The Religious Right loves her. Re-read that.
12. From the same source, and many others, she claims that teaching creationism in science classes is the way to go, "teach both."
    
13. On the same anti-science note, she is a global warming denialist
14. She is to the right of McCain on drilling in ANWR, protecting polar bears and protecting the environment in general (yet another anti-science Republican)
15. On the same line of reasoning, she semi-opposed the surge in Iraq, hailed as one of the only things that McCain has not failed at in the past decade or so
16. There is zero national security experience involved in being governor, so quit repeating the "commander-in-chief of the national guard" line. Campbell Brown stumped Tucker Bounds today (H/T: Kos) who tried to equivocate on this -- she didn't command troops to go to Iraq. Not even close. I'm the "commander-in-chief" of my classroom, but that doesn't make me an education policy wonk.
    
17. She is clearly and unequivocally unqualified to be president should something happen to McCain, the oldest presidential candidate ever nominated for a first term whose four bouts with cancer should make everyone think twice

Go Obama-Biden '08! (pic source)