Easterstupid

I find it pretty frightening that TNR is paying Easterbrook to write the equivalent of a late night (stoned) college dorm conversation. His concluding paragraph:

Yet if at Yale, Princeton, Stanford, or top schools, you proposed that there exists just one unobservable dimension--the plane of the spirit--and that it is real despite our inability to sense it directly, you'd be laughed out of the room. Or conversation would grind to a halt to avoid offending your irrational religious superstitions.

To modern thought, one extra spiritual dimension is a preposterous idea, while the notion that there are incredible numbers of extra physical dimensions gives no pause. Yet which idea sounds more implausible--one unseen dimension or billions of them?

Can he really be this stupid? I don't know, maybe he can. I've known a lot of people like him - overly educated, overly enamored with their own thoughts, utterly unaware of their own banality.

For the record, many physicists are religious. Many physicists have expressed the notion that their work is literally a quest to find and understand God. But these physicists also understand that science, religion, and faith are not the same thing. "A spiritual plane" is a phrase which means something in Easterbrook's mind, but which is otherwise meaningless. Physicists understand, even if Easterbrook does not, what their posited extra dimensions mean.

In a country which is overwhelmingly religious, this weird defensiveness by the faithful is odd. How often are people "laughed out of the room" for proposing the existence of some spiritual reality? As an atheist-leaning agnostic I get a president telling me that he doesn't consider me a citizen. I'm not going into victim mode over it, while Easterbrook is channeling David Limbaugh here.

Physicists look at the available empirical evidence, try and construct models which are consistent with it, use their models to try and determine what additional information they might need to deny the confirm or deny the validity of them, and then try again. That, roughly, is science. At the end of it, who knows - they may find God or something like that.

Easterbrook believes in the divinity of Jesus Christ, the existence of God, and the existence of some fuzzy concept of "spirit." He's welcome to all of these beliefs, but his ridiculous attempts to link science and religion are adolescent blather. And, as a truly oppressed (though only slightly) religious minority, I'm getting really sick of this martyr complex by many Christians in this country.

Jesse from Pandagon Needs a Couple Bucks

Here's his plea. And here's where you can give it.

It's hard to comprehend - someone actually pays Ben Shapiro for his drivel but no one, as of yet, has hired Jesse to put his talents to good use. Let's hope the new job he's hinting at is a good one.

Framing the Issue

This guy gets it.

....you can buy his books here and here.

Playstations of Mass Destruction

This is a few years old, but man it's hilarious, and not from the Onion:

US defence experts believe Saddam Hussein may be building a weapons supercomputer from Sony PlayStation 2s.

Individual units of the powerful games console can be linked up and boosted so their computing powers can be used to design and control long-range missiles or even nuclear devices.

A leaked US Defence Intelligence Agency report confirms that up to 4,000 of the consoles have been shipped to Iraq in the last three months.

Both US Customs and the FBI are investigating.

The news confirms the worst fears of the Japanese government, which first warned of the potential danger of the high-specification PlayStation 2 eight months ago.

Experts say that the PlayStation 2 designers may have unwittingly built a machine ideal for weapons work because its technology is so advanced.

Exports of the console to Iraq are illegal in Japan.

One source tells WorldNet Daily: "Applications for this system are potentially frightening. One expert I spoke with estimated that an integrated bundle of 12 to 15 PlayStations could provide enough power to control an Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicle."

It is believed Saddam Hussein may have exacerbated the Sony PlayStation 2 shortage.

(nice catch by jsg)

Lust in His Heart

I hardly even found this noteworthy, but as many others have already noted, there was no nuclear weapons program. No weapons. No program. No nothing.

Charter Schools Waste Money, Fail to Educate Kids

Not surprised.

LANSING, Mich. (AP) — Six companies responsible for teaching 17,000 Michigan's charter school students fail to produce test scores that match even low-scoring traditional public schools, records show.

The companies manage about $123.7 million in tax money each year.

The low-performing companies include three of the biggest for-profit charter school managers in the state, The Detroit News said Sunday.

They are Mosaica Foundation, The Leona Group and Charter School Administration Services. Together, they manage schools with more than a quarter of the 63,000 students in charter schools in the state.

Let me just add that this Michigan program is essentially more like a voucher program than a normal charter school program. From what I understand there are some very good charter schools, but as with vouchers the devil is in the details. It isn't enough to say "voucher system" or "charter school program" - without further qualifications those are meaningless phrases.

Creepy

This is new to me, anyway. Someone in comments alerted me to the existence of this fake Riverbend weblog which is trying to pose as the real one.

Today in Iraq

As always, yankee doodle provides the full rundown. One-stop shop for all things Iraq.

Who Let the Negroes Vote?

Josh Marshall has the latest on GOP attempts at voter suppression. No word yet if they're being advised by Bill Rehnquist.

Cher on Cspan

[edited 14 years later: back in the day the string and tin can internet didn't let us embed video, so here it is!]









This morning.

Transcript provided by norn:



CHER c-span transcript
C-Span Moderator: Good Morning Miami Beach

caller: Good morning! Thank you for C-span, I watch it every day! Uh, I would like to say I had the occasion the other day to spend the entire day with troops that had come back from Iraq and had been wounded and..um...I also visited troops during the Vietnam era...but the thing that I was most shocked by...um...as I walked into the hospital the first person I ran into was a boy about 19 or 20 years old who'd lost both of his arms...and when I walked into the hospital & visited all these boys all day long...uh...everyone had lost either one arm...one limb or two limbs or had lost one limb and there were...there were a lot of legs that seemed to be missing and a couple of the boys told me it was because that their vehicles ...that the rockets pierce the vehicles so much it's like being kind of in a tin can...it doesn't have...there isn't...the walls of the Humvees are very soft and there's no protection...but three guys in the same vehicle have lost a leg. ...and another thing that I saw was that...um...if they'd lost one leg that... that shrapnel that had hit the other leg had been so devastating that they were having to pull like the thigh...you know...the muscle and the thigh around the bottom of the calf to try to make the leg workable but in some cases these boys had lost one legand the other leg was so damaged that they weren't sure what they were gonna be able to do.

C-Span Moderator: Where did you spend the day?

caller: Walter-Reed.

C-Span Moderator: And youre down in Miami beach, back in Miami beach?

caller: I'm down here today.

C-Span Moderator: what were you doing at walter -reed? are you a volunteer?

caller: no, I was just asked to come and spend the day. I was working that day in Washington, DC and...

C-Span Moderator: what kind of work do you do?

caller: um, I'm an entertainer.

C-Span Moderator: oh, what kind of entertaining? are you USO?


caller: no, I actually was called by the USO but I'm...I'm...I'm just...I'm an entertainer. And I really dont want to go much past that but...um...

C-Span Moderator: Is this CHER?

caller: yeah.

C-Span Moderator: (worshipful silence) ok. And you spent the day at walter-reed.

caller: Yeah. And I spent the day with, I mean they were great guys...and the the men that took me around were in the...you know...the services,you know, they were fabulous men...uh...Mike and John ...and they these boys had unbelievable courage and they still said for the most part hat they were glad that they they did it, they felt that it was their duty...and there were a few of the national guards that felt it was their duty that once they were over there but they wondered why they were taken out of America to spend that much time as actual service men when they really felt that their job was to be, you know, protecting this country. ...but I I have to say that they had the most unbelievable courage and it took everything that I have as a person to...to not...you know... break down while I was talking to these guys...but I just think that if there was no reason for this war this was the most heinous thing I'd ever seen... and also I wonder why...why are none of Cheney, Wolfowitz, Bremer, the president, why aren't they taking pictures with all these guys? Because I dont understand why these guys are so hidden and why... and why there arent pictures of them because you know, talking about the dead and the wounded...that's two different things but these wounded are so devastatedly wounded...you know...that I think that... the wounded...its just... it''s unbelievable...its just unbelieivable to me and i'm an independent but I....

C-Span Moderator: Are you supporting anyone yet for 2004? You supported Ross Perot, correct? in 92?

caller: Yeah, I mean when I heard him talk right in the beginning I thought that he would bring some sort of common-sense business approach and also less partisanship but then of course...you know... I was completely disappointed like everyone else when he just kind of cut and run and no one knew exactly why ...you know...being that maybe he couldn't have withstood all the investigation that goes on now...but...um...you know...I'm not a bush supporter, that for sure...and I'm definitely not Ashcroft or Cheney or any of them...but I would just like to see them have...you know, if youre going to send these people to war then don't hide them, you know...and have some... have some news coverage where people are sitting and talking to these guys and seeing how they are and seeing their spirit and its just... I just... I think its a crime.

C-Span Moderator: When you were up here for your farewell concert earlier this month, is that when you went to walter reed?

caller: Yeah.

C-Span Moderator: Ok well thanks for your time this morning, thanks for watching.

caller: Oh I have to tell you I watch you every day and I really appreciate it because I go all over the world and I must say that the news we get in America has nothing to do with the news that you get outside of this country And I think that's why people don't..people don't understand why so many of the allies did not...you know, our usual allies did not join us because if you get outside the United States you hear a different kind of news you know and so...

C-Span Moderator: What's your favorite news source outside the US?

Caller: Well there's a source that I really like inside the US that gives you special documentaries called WORLDLINK but I think my favorite source outside the US is BBC because they are our allies but you still get...on the nightly news you get...you know, much more coverage and I think much more honest coverage...I dont know, I guess they're not...well...they're independent so they're not owned by any of the major corporations that are... you know, have vested interest in this war.

C-Span Moderator: thanks for your call this morning.

caller: ok, thank you!

A history of the Blue Slip

A handy dandy reference from Calpundit.

Feel the love

Gene Robinson is under 24 hour FBI protection:

The first openly gay man to become an Episcopal bishop is under round the clock FBI protection following threats on his life, according to media reports.

Gene Robinson is to be formally installed as Bishop of New Hampshire on Sunday.

"The only thing that will stop this happening is if I am not around any more," Canon Gene Robinson, who is to become the Episcopalian Bishop of New Hampshire, told the British newspaper The Independent in an interview published today. "We have to take that seriously."

A spokesperson for the bishop-elect declined comment on the FBI protection. But several British papers Monday reported that the threats had come from conservative extremists.

Feel the love from the Chalcedon foundation:

In academia we like to talk about "culture wars." This is a proper undertaking, but there is a great deal more at stake here than a mere disagreement about how to interpret the Bible. There are spiritual realities at play that must be addressed openly and forthrightly. The liberal church in Holland — and other places as well — has suffered greatly by starting down the path of "religious tolerance."

Let there be no mistake: We are engaged in a serious warfare over right and wrong, good and evil, God's people and a modern Sodom and Gomorrah.

Returning Soldiers

Reader j writes in:

I'm a counselor at a psychiatric triage unit in *****. I just had a long talk with one of our clients, a soldier just back from Iraq with classic PTSD symptoms. He's a wreck, reliving an incident where he was forced to fire on Iraqi children and now he can't live with himself. His family has abandoned him because he drinks nightly to drown the demons, he can't sleep because of the fear of "seeing the faces of those kids", and naturally, he feels that he can't go on with life anymore.

I've probably counseled 20 soldiers back from Iraq here and EVERY SINGLE ONE has issues, feels betrayed by Bush and the government, almost all say they realized that once they were over there, the freedom of the Iraqi people is only incidental to our government, that it's clear it's only been about oil and Haliburton stock price. They've also said that for every one of them stating this anger at betrayal, there's at least 50 more still back in Iraq.

I noticed the influx of admissions from ***** back in August and had an opportunity to ask a social worker at **** what the deal is. "Get used to it," she replied, "It's only going to get worse. These guys and gals are coming back after having served with no clear mission, getting attacked out of the blue, and realizing they were lied to by Bush. Plus, the military wants to avoid what went on at Fort Bragg after the Afghanistan War (domestic violence episodes that ended up with dead military wives).

I can't say that these soldiers are representative of the military as a whole; it's definitely a skewed sample. However, my gut tells me that BushCo is going to have to answer to more than just the families of those killed and wounded over in Iraq. The soldiers who have been permanently psychologically scarred by this immoral war (and the families who have been affected by this) are going to be demanding some answers as well.

Bring'em On

Chaos.

Insurance Part Deux

When last we left insurance, in what seems like a lifetime ago, I had explained the concepts of moral hazard and adverse selection. The Angry Bear provides perhaps a shorter version of these things here. AB also brings up a related concept, "The Market for Lemons," which I probably won't address directly but it does remind me to make sure to include the issue of "market failure"explicitly.

Anyway, to continue...

III. Re-insurance

As I said in the previous post, the role of insurance companies is, for a fee, to remove (or reduce) risk from their customers. In the simple examples I provided, the companies themselves essentially bear no risk themselves. However, in practice for certain types of insurance this isn't actually the case. Obvious examples of when things go wrong for insurance companies are for things like hurricane insurance in Florida or earthquake (or fire) insurance in California. The problem in these instances is that "bad events" are correlated across customers. So, if a hurricane shows up it'll wipe out all of a company's policyholders simultaneously (ditto earthquake, etc...) . Smaller insurance companies likely don't have the geographic scope to diversify their risk portfolios. So, in practice, insurance companies also buy insurance on the reinsurance market. Roughly speaking, this is a way of limiting their own liability by purchasing policies from larger reinsurers. The local hurricane insurance company buys a policy which gives them a rather large deductible, and every claim made on them by their customers over and above that deductible is covered by the reinsurer. A well-known reinsurer is Lloyd's of London. The idea is that these companies have huge portfolios so that if they lose a bundle on a hurricane in Florida, it's no big deal because they have lots of California earthquake premium money coming in. As long as what should be uncorrelated bad events don't happen simultaneously, the reinsurers should be able to cover their liabilities.

This system in general should work, as long as companies have sufficient reinsurance and as long as the reinsurers aren't simultaneously hit with a bunch of hugely unlikely events at once (hurricane in Florida, floods in the Midwest, earthquake and fire in California, a plague of locusts in New England, etc...). However, it's quite possible that such catastrophic events are more likely than we tend to think they are. The problem is due to something called "fat-tailed distributions." The "normal distribution," which is simply one function describing the likelihood of any particular range of outcomes, assigns very tiny probabilities to extreme events happening. However, if those probabilities are in fact "not quite tiny," but somewhat bigger than tiny, then it becomes difficult to set an appropriate price for insurance. It's the difference between "the odds of that happening are so low we don't have to worry about it" and "the odds of having a 500 billion dollar claim are non-negligible, but we're not quite sure what those odds are."

Lloyd's of London itself ran into some problems in recent years due to the high cost of paying out asbestos claims. Lloyd's, along with many other reinsurers, are "unlimited liability" companies. They have shareholders - but unlike the shareholders of most companies, they are responsible for any and all of the company's liabilities. If you own stock in IBM, and it goes bankrupt, you'll lose your investment. If you own a piece of Lloyd's, they can take your bank account and your house too. The scandal with Lloyd's was that many newer owners claimed that the company had conned them into buying into the company, without revealing the extent of their liabilities. The spectacle of a bunch of upper class Brits finding themselves screwed by the Man was interesting.



...this rambled on longer than I intended.... health insurance tomorrow...


...Lloyd's is also known for its famous "inside out" headquarters in London - the plumbing and heating ducts are all on the outside.

Stopping Iraq Searches

Interesting. For some reason the White House has spent a reasonable amount of time trying to prevent external search engines from finding web pages with the term "Iraq" on the official web site.

California Hell

Stay safe, anyone who is out there.

Sweets Again

Dana Milbank reports on breakfastgate, reported here earlier:

President Bush is a man of steely discipline, but it appears the commander in chief has not gained complete mastery over his sweet tooth.

In a new book by author Stephen Mansfield, "The Faith of George W. Bush," the following passage appears on page 173: "Aides found him face down on the floor in prayer in the Oval Office. It became known that he refused to eat sweets while American troops were in Iraq, a partial fast seldom reported of an American president."

Seldom reported -- and apparently little observed. When the White House sent out the shared "pool report" of Bush's roundtable interview with reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Australia, it became apparent that the president had fallen off the candy wagon.

"And he was relaxed. Very relaxed," was the description. "As a reporter began to ask about the Middle East . . . Mr. Bush popped a butterscotch Lifesaver in his mouth. He smacked the candy as he said: 'Middle East, that's right.' "

Duh

One of the silliest ideas propagated after 9/11 was that the White House would have been the fourth target. Of course not - the Capitol Building was.

Patriot Plus

This is downright scary:

Bush wants three additional powers from Congress. First, he wants to give the Justice Department the authority to confiscate records and compel testimony without review by a court or grand jury. ...Second, Bush wants to chip away at the right to bail. Current law allows a judge to deny bond for anyone shown to be dangerous or a flight risk. And, for anyone accused of international terrorism, there is a presumption against granting bond.

And third, Bush wants to expand the reach of the federal death penalty by making it applicable to "domestic terrorism."...Bush also wants the death penalty for those convicted of providing "material support for terrorism," a law that can be violated even when people think they are giving money to a charity and don't know the group is a designated terrorist organization.