"We're not anti-anybody."

Dolan Says Church Is ‘Caricatured’ as Antigay - NYTimes.com

You can be whatever you like, but if you want to do something I don't like, you can't do that. Wanting to do naughty things is perfectly normal. Doing naughty things will get ya eternity in Hell.

I suppose a simple solution is too much to ask for?

U.S. businesses alarmed by Senate plan on corporate taxes - The Washington Post

Why on Earth can't they just eliminate corporate taxes altogether, and make all personal income "ordinary" income? Corporations would be expected to pay their investors, or reinvest in their business. Investors would pay taxes on their personal income. And not at the minuscule post-Reagan rate, they would pay taxes on earnings like any other flesh-and-blood person.

And by "all income," I do mean to include inheritance. The current $5 million exclusion could be preserved. The conservative claim that it's all money that has "already been taxed" is an outright lie. In fact, the vast majority of the money inherited by individuals is unrealized capital gains.

No program of their own...

...Or at least none they'll admit to. So their only strategy is to keep anybody else from succeeding.

Rooting for Failure - NYTimes.com

Th reality, of course, is that they do have a program. They want to make sure that all the mistakes other people make have dire consequences, so they can self-righteously proclaim that it's their own fault they're poor. They want to enforce their own brand of religious bigotry, but scream bloody murder when the traditions of others are afforded some respect.

But most of all, they want to make sure that the idle rich pay no taxes on their ill gotten gains.

Best in the world, except for all the others.

The U.S. Health Care System Is Terrible, In 1 Enraging Chart

Or, how to spend more and get less: Hint private enterprise and competition don't work in health care economics the way they do in, say, toaster economics.

Not even close

Americans think John F. Kennedy was one of our greatest presidents. He wasn’t.

"It tells us a great deal about the meaning of John F. Kennedy in our history that liberals and conservatives alike are eager to pronounce him as one of their own," [E. J.] Dionne notes. 

I'd argue it tells us more about the role of presentation over substance in the media and the public mind. In fact, I'd argue that the reason Kennedy is highly regarded is exactly the same reason Reagan is highly regarded.

To sumarize the article:

• the Cuban Missile Crisis was his fault
• the Bay of Pigs invasion (which precipitated the missile crisis) was his fault
• he escalated in Vietnam
• he backed a coup that put Baathists in power in Iraq
• he required tremendous pressure to do anything about civil rights
• and he never really passed domestic legislation of consequence

Besides the things in the article, he also started cutting top marginal tax rates. He didn't make up the "rising tide" line, but it's something only a rich person would say. If you can't afford a boat, a rising tide leaves you stuck in the mud, drowning.

From the "If natural selection is real..."

...then why hasn't Faux and Friends dropped dead of teh stoopid?" archives:
Daily Kos: Gettysburg Address 'outrage' provides handy checklist of stupidest people in America

One note: Sarcasm is wasted on these people. They are unable to detect obvious hoaxes because their own beliefs are so completely full of crap.

Interesting, but flawed

Are We Alone in the Universe? - NYTimes.com

So Paul Davies throws (deserved) cold water on the hope that we should encounter intelligent life estimate of how many "Earthlike" planets astronomers say are out there.

As he points out, just because conditions are like they were on Earth at some time in the past doesn't make it inevitable that life will have arisen in a majority of those cases.

But then he makes almost the same error. He says that since intelligent life on Earth has arisen by natural selection, and that life elsewhere must logically evolve as well*, then once life appears, it's only a matter of time before intelligent life evolves.

Sorry. Nope. The only thing that natural selection increases is fitness. If, through some accidental set of circumstances, increased intelligence results in higher fitness, then intelligence might arise. But if anything, I regard that as much less sure than the likelihood that some kind of life will arise.

* Life must be subject to natural selection, because logically, natural selection is inevitable when imperfectly reproducing entities compete for resources. A number of experiments bear this out.

This is the best health care system in the world....

...except for most of the others.

From Ezra Klein's Wonkbook email:

The airwaves are alive with impassioned protests against the idea that anyone might change a market that relies on discriminating against the old, the sick, the female, and people who don't read the fine print of insurance policies. This is the best health care in the world, you know.

And here are the statistics.

 Their data compares the U.S. to Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom on a host of health-system measures, both objective (like diabetes amputations) and subjective (like satisfaction). The results are a reminder of why reform is so badly needed. 

Start with cost. Americans spend 17.7 percent of GDP on health care. No one else spends even 12 percent. Let's make that more concrete: If Americans only spent 12 percent of GDP on health care we would have saved $893 billion in 2012. 

The reason isn't that Americans get more health care than anyone else. We have more uninsured than anyone else. We have fewer physicians per capita than anyone but the Japanese. We go to the doctor less often than anyone but the Swiss. We don't have more hospital beds than other developed countries, and when we do go to the hospital, we don't stay longer.

But we do pay more for the privilege. The average hospital stay costs more than $21,000 in the U.S. It costs only $8,363 in France.  

My WTF moment for the day

Can we get rid of inflation and recessions forever?

Sounds to me like this guy is going through all sorts of monetary gyrations just to avoid admitting that there is a time for fiscal policy to be used to stimulate the economy.

Self control, or perception of time and reliability?

You’re So Self-Controlling - NYTimes.com

This is an extremely interesting article. Apparently, whether you are willing to forgo an immediate reward for greater future gain depends on how you perceive the real expectation of that future gain.

So if I'm thinking about trying to lose weight, and I'm offered a tempting high-fat meal, I'm not just thinking "that high-fat meal will cause me to gain weight, and I won't get the reward of losing weight." I'm also taking into account the probability that I really will lose the weight anyway.

The other thing I find interesting, though (and this is completely speculation on my part) is that I suspect that some people will read the article and say "That's an interesting insight into how the brain works," and others will engage in some kind of moralizing on the virtue of austerity or some such thing. The second group of people are more interested in scolding reality into fitting their expectations (And how's that working for you?) and the first group is more interested in seeing how the world works.

It's never been about the deficits

Or we have always been at war with Eastasia, or something...

The Plot Against France - NYTimes.com

Seems those self-appointed police of the morality play that passes for conservative economic thought don't like France. Gee! There's a surprise!

S&P downgraded France's bond ratings, and the markets don't seem to care. They still pay near record low interest on their bonds.

So what’s going on here? The answer is that S.& P.’s action needs to be seen in the context of the broader politics of fiscal austerity. And I do mean politics, not economics. For the plot against France — I’m being a bit tongue in cheek here, but there really are a lot of people trying to bad-mouth the place — is one clear demonstration that in Europe, as in America, fiscal scolds don’t really care about deficits. Instead, they’re using debt fears to advance an ideological agenda. And France, which refuses to play along, has become the target of incessant negative propaganda.

And contrary to the expectation of those champions of everybody else's fiscal responsibility:

According to standard estimates, French workers were actually a bit more productive than their German counterparts a dozen years ago — and guess what, they still are.

But if France is doing OK, why the uproar?

Here’s a clue: Two months ago Olli Rehn, Europe’s commissioner for economic and monetary affairs — and one of the prime movers behind harsh austerity policies — dismissed France’s seemingly exemplary fiscal policy. Why? Because it was based on tax increases rather than spending cuts — and tax hikes, he declared, would “destroy growth and handicap the creation of jobs.”

In other words, never mind what I said about fiscal discipline, you’re supposed to be dismantling the safety net. 

France's real sin is in having a healthy economy without taking money from poor people and giving it to a handful of rich people.

 If all this sounds familiar to American readers, it should. U.S. fiscal scolds turn out, almost invariably, to be much more interested in slashing Medicare and Social Security than they are in actually cutting deficits. Europe’s austerians are now revealing themselves to be pretty much the same. France has committed the unforgivable sin of being fiscally responsible without inflicting pain on the poor and unlucky. And it must be punished.

 

Doonesbury tackles intelligent design. - Born Again Pagan Cartoons

Doonesbury tackles intelligent design. - Born Again Pagan Cartoons

"But that's 'microevolution' so it doesn't count! It's only real evolution if a goldfish turns into an canary!"

So now a Tea Eucharist? (or whatever)

Conservative U.S. Catholics Feel Left Out of the Pope’s Embrace - NYTimes.com

First, the press always gets religious ideas wrong, so I wouldn't take their theological observations seriously. (In fact, I don't take anyone's theological observations seriously)

Second, as I understand it, almost all of these "controversial" things the Pope has said actually do not represent any change at all in doctrine, they merely emphasize a different part than has been emphasized before. People don't do nuance, and the press is especially guilty.

That said, I am rubbing my hands with glee at the prospect that extreme American conservatives will protest that the Pope isn't wingnutty enough for them. They have already formed an elite suicide squad in the Republican Party.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUHk2RSMCS8

Each side has their problems...

... but if they ever agree, watch out!

Missing the Bad Old Days - NYTimes.com

Back to business as usual? Maybe, but only when it's bad for the people and good for the Congresscritters.

See, this is what I like about the farm bill. The agriculture parts harken back to the golden era when Republicans and Democrats could work together to promote stupid ideas that benefited the special interests in their districts. 

One term better defined at least

Far-Off Planets Like the Earth Dot the Galaxy - NYTimes.com

So there may be 40 billion habitable planets in the galaxy. Depending, of course on what you call "habitable."

But that comes closer at least to nailing down one of the variables in the Drake Equation, which I still view as a WAG (wild-ass-guess) multiplied by Who Knows? multiplied by Not Bloody Likely and allowing for the accelerated rotation of the status quo....

How I learned to quit worrying and love the Miocene

How the world is failing at its climate goals, in one giant chart

I can't get too excited about this, for the simple reason that no matter what 8 billion people do, they will foul the nest so badly that continued survival becomes impossible.

We can only hope that those of us who are now living (and sadly, also responsible for the mess) aren't around to see the worst of it.

Blame the recession? No.

The Great Recession may have crushed America’s economic potential

Blame the tepid response, and Republican foot-dragging.

The paper offers a depressing portrait of where the economy stands nearly six years after the onset of recession, and amounts to a damning indictment of U.S. policymakers. Their upshot: The United States's long-term economic potential has been diminished by the fact that policymakers have not done more to put people back to work quickly. Our national economic potential is now a whopping 7 percent below where it was heading at the pre-2007 trajectory, the authors find.

Or maybe blame idiotic economic theory  ideology: (interjections in brackets are mine)

There is a tendency  [among supply-siders, e.g ideologues] to think of a nation’s “aggregate supply,” or potential output, as something that exists outside the realm of influence by short-term economic policy. The economic potential, after all, comes from the education of its people, the richness of its land, the quality of its machines — all things that a central banker can’t do much of anything to influence.

In other words, supply is “exogenous” to a policymaker’s economic model. But that may turn on its head in circumstances like the present. They write:

The implications for monetary policy may differ sharply from what is commonly presumed because much of the supply-side damage could be an endogenous response to weak aggregate demand. [Ya THINK!!????] If so, then an activist monetary policy may be able to limit the amount of supply-side damage that occurs initially, and potentially may also help to reverse at a later stage such damage as does occur. By themselves, such considerations militate toward a more aggressive stance of policy and help to buttress the case for a highly aggressive policy response to a financial crisis and associated recession.

In other words, when there is weak demand and people remain out of work, the cyclical downturn can become a structural downturn. That means that policymakers should move particularly aggressively to keep that from happening.

As I have been saying, 1937 all over again.Inadequate response, followed by chickening out over TEH DEFIZITTZZZ!

Here be monsters

Oarfish Offer Chance to Study an Elusive Animal Long Thought a Monster - NYTimes.com

Very cool!

Snowden did not betray the American people

Snowden Asks U.S. to Stop Treating Him Like a Traitor - NYTimes.com

I still like what Mr. Snowden's father said.

The elder Snowden said

"If folks want to classify him as a traitor, in fact, he has betrayed his government. 
"But I don't believe that he's betrayed the people of the United States."

And I think that's exactly right. When the government systematically breaks the law, whistle-blowers are not betraying the people.