Doctor Science

by Doctor Science

Rupert Murdoch, that is, not Beelzebub. Well, not literally Beelzebub.

It’s clear from our discussion that Sarah Palin’s charisma is highly polarizing, but this is also true for other very charismatic politicians, such as Bill Clinton.

What would make a Palin campaign truly different is Fox News.

Jonathan Bernstein at The New Republic tries to reassure those of us fearful about a Palin candidacy:

Presidential nominations are … I need a word not quite as strong as “controlled,” but much stronger than “influenced” … by political party leaders. […] If Republican leaders don’t want Palin, you’ll start hearing negative stories about her on Fox News, and from leading conservative talk shows and blogs, and enthusiastic conservatives will turn elsewhere.

I just want to pinch his cheeks, he’s so cutely naive. Bernstein thinks Republican leaders tell Fox News what to do! That’s so last century — or at least last decade.

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I am thankful for the usual: family, friends (both RL and e-), reasonable health, a cat who loves me, and PIE.

This year, I’m thankful for: managing to sell our old house, staying in the school district yet moving to a place we can afford, a walkable community, enough money to give people presents this year, and this blog. And good grief, a LOT of pie.

Today in special surprise thankfulness, U.S. to Drop Color-Coded Terror Alerts.

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This will be your mandatory Sarah Palin post. Every political blog has to have one, it’s the law (like gravity). And, like gravity, it’s pretty hard to get away from hearing about Sarah Palin.

This week, the big question being kicked around the blogosphere is, Will Sarah Run? (for President in 2012, that is.) And if she does, can she win the Republican Nomination? And if she’s nominated, can she beat Barack Obama?

Frank Rich says: You Betcha

Daniel Larison says: are you kidding? it would be a slow-motion car wreck

Frum reports on an important trend: the Republican establishment’s increasingly frantic search for ways to stop the Palin for President campaign.

Nate Silver says: she dominates the news.

I say: what none of these horse-race analyses take into consideration is Sarah Palin’s superpower. She has charisma, the genuine article (not available in stores, much less online). In our household, we call it “charisma buckets” — where the person is so charismatic that it overflows, so they have to carry figurative buckets everywhere to hold the excess. If US electoral politics were a role-playing game (and are you going to argue that it’s not?), her Charisma would be +4: a perfect 18 out of 18.

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Like many people, I played the New York Times’ You Fix the Budget puzzle. My personal solution can be succinctly described as “stop war; tax the rich”.

Of course, the whole game is based on assumptions about what we can or can’t do: there are options for “Obama’s plan” versus “Clinton-era taxes”, for instance, but none for my favored Eisenhower-era taxes. And then we also get to consider:

Tighten eligibility for disability

The costs of the disability insurance program, which is administrated by the Social Security Administration, have been rising rapidly. This option would cut disability spending by 5 percent by focusing on states with the loosest standards. Supporters note that growing numbers of workers are classified as disabled, though the average job is less physically taxing. Opponents worry that injured or ill workers with few good job prospects would be harmed.But hey! It could save up to $17 billion dollars! Out of a trillion! So really, how much could it hurt?

It happens that I’ve spent some time this past week finding resources for a friend who IMHO needs to go on disability, and from my personal observation: it could hurt a *lot*. And the people it would hurt are, pretty much by definition, already hurting — it is a targeted intervention to afflict the afflicted.

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When people started talking about the TSA offering passengers a choice of “nude pix or enhanced pat-down”, I was at first kind of confused about why there was so much fuss. You see, I remember getting the old “enhanced security examination” years ago, and no-one then took real umbrage.

The different circumstances, though, shed light on why the TSA’s policies have really crossed a line (James Fallows, *very* frequent flier and occasional pilot, is a good source for background).

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Andrew Sullivan linked to Morgan Meis’ review of George W. Bush’s official portrait:

That can’t be serious, I thought to myself when I turned a corner at the Gallery and saw the portrait. The mundane kitsch of the thing was shocking. There are standards. By God there are standards. Aren’t there? A vase of flowers sits on the table of a dining room set behind him. The set is more middlebrow than anything you could find even at a mainstream outfit like IKEA. It is a set you’d find, I suppose, at Jennifer Convertibles. The whole scene is resolutely suburban. Aggressively suburban.

Meis is shocked at how much the portrait looks like “a Sears portrait” in quality, but what shocks *me* is how resolutely unpresidential it is.

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Last week, the voters of Oklahoma overwhelmingly approved a state Constitutional amendment to prohibit judges from considering international or Shariah law. As Marcia Hamilton said on Findlaw (I believe sarcastically), this
seems to be Oklahomans’ reaction to the demonic Taliban and al-Qaeda forces that are pledged to end our way of life and America itself [ominous music].

As has become customary, much of the rhetoric about “Shariah Law”[1] focuses on the legal status and treatment of women. In this case, one of the standard talking points is that “Shariah Law” mandates unjust wills, because it prescribes that, in dividing an estate each son should inherit twice as much as each daughter. The Muslim who has filed the initial lawsuit against the amendment is doing so on the basis that his will states “that his possessions be divided ‘in accordance with the guidance contained in the prophetic teachings’ of Islam” — which pretty much makes the point for his opponents.

Echidne of the snakes said

I’m not certain if there is anything “especially nefarious” about the shariah laws when compared to other religious laws created during the middle ages, and that’s when most of them seem to have been created. They all tend to give women fewer rights than men, though.

I’m more knowledgeable about Islam than Echidne, and I’ll go further: before the Enlightenment, Islamic inheritance law, in particular, was in many ways *more* just and equitable than that current in Europe, and some Islamic legal creations have become part of the structure of Western law.

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The following was published in a different venue by an e-friend who’d like to be known here as “Lizzie”. I’m posting a slightly-edited (by her) version here with her permission, because I think she says some important and frequently-overlooked things particularly well.

I used to work in politics.

I started local, running GOTV for my county, and I ended local, running a successful county-wide campaign. In between I worked two presidential cycles and a congressional campaign, which meant for four years I ate, breathed, slept, and thought about very little but votes, votes, votes.

When I worked in politics there was nothing worse than the day after the election. Everything you'd worked for, sometimes for two whole years, came down to the votes people cast, and sometimes, despite everything you did, how they voted was mind-boggling. You were exhausted; you'd eaten nothing but junk food for weeks and you drove and canvassed and planned and organized events; you'd worked 18 hours on election day and stayed up to watch every last return from every corner of the country come in.

There was nothing left for you to do. Everything was over. It was depressing as hell.

But now . . .

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Greetings, fellow Citizens of the Republic of Science!

Galaxy Zoo began more than 3 years ago. It’s a crowdsource project to have regular people — citizen scientists, as they say — do image-processing for large-scale projects. I worked with them for a while — especially on what are now called pea galaxies — then dropped back as I did more political work and blogging.

Now I’m going through one of my periodic realizations that I’m wasting a lot of time doing mindless games (sudoku, fer chrise sake), and thinking maybe I could use those brain cycles — FOR SCIENCE!

At this point, Galaxy Zoo has expanded to a zooniverse of projects, some by the original team and some using the Galaxy Zoo API. This is what I think of the current projects:

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Well, tell *some* of the truth. But the slant part they can do.

I walked to the convenience store to get milk. I saw the sign for the “Naanwich” of the day — tandoori chicken and pepper strips with chutney, wrapped in a naan. The convenience store in this teeny semi-rural NJ town is now run by Gujaritis, and the results are *delicious*.

While I was waiting for my naanwich, I read the headlines in the stacks of newspapers. The NY Times was there, next to the Wall Street Journal. The lead story in the Times: Top Corporations Aid U.S. Chamber of Commerce Campaign. The lead story in the WSJ: Campaign’s Big Spender: Public-Employees Union Now Leads All Groups in Independent Election Outlays.

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Some interesting points and question have come up in the comments to Of Stink Bugs and Men. First, I’m going to round up the ones that are principally about Africa.

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.. and Africa.

by Doctor Science

Like many people in the mid-Atlantic US, I’ve been noticing a lot of stink bugs this summer. I figured there was some kind of weather-related stink bug boom until a story about them popped up on the NY Times. It turns out that these are actually new and different stink bugs, a recent accidental arrival from China. Most species that are introduced to a new continent don’t make it, but when they do they can run wild, run free! and be extremely destructive away from their home-grown predators and parasites. Researchers are looking into introducing stink-bug-specialist parasitic wasps to control them, but that will take several years — and it looks as though the wasps are killed by agricultural insecticides to which stink bugs are naturally resistant. Oops.

But what does this have to do with Africa?

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One of the things that doesn’t really get examined enough in discussions of US economic inequality is inherited wealth. It’s obvious to me, at least, that inherited wealth can be expected to be an *enormous* problem with any “level playing field” expectation — after all, historically the rich have been aristocrats, who by definition inherit their positions.

But how much of an effect does it really have in the US? Don’t most rich people get that way from money they collect during their careers?

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At Crooked Timber, John Holbo asked Should We Fight For ‘Social Justice’?

If someone tells me they need ‘social justice’ to mark some crucial distinction, I’m happy to entertain the possibility. Analytically, my complaint is that the term is vaguely redundant; redundancy never killed anyone dead. But why burden yourself with redundancy that seems mostly to provide Glenn Beck and co. with fodder for dismissals that are lazy even by their standards?

Much of the ensuing discussion got into details about Hayek, Rawls, etc. that are above (or something) my head.

But I was reminded of something I wrote in the comments of a discussion at ObiWi in June 2006:

My gut reaction to discussion of the “patterned view” of justice versus the “process view” is to go all Jewish-prophet-y and say, “Justice will come when you pay less attention to your damned stuff, and more to other people!”

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It turns out that Marty Peretz is pretty much a bigot

But, frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims. And among those Muslims led by the Imam Rauf there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood. So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.

A lot of people are upset about it, but as far as I’m concerned it’s news like “Water, Continued Wet.”

Meanwhile, science fiction writer Elizabeth Moon thinks

Muslims fail to recognize how much forbearance they’ve had …I feel that I personally (and many others) lean over backwards to put up with these things, to let Muslims believe stuff that unfits them for citizenship, on the grounds of their personal freedom. It would be helpful to have them understand what they’re demanding of me and others–how much more they’re asking than giving.

This is, frankly, considerably more surprising and upsetting than Marty Peretz being a jerk (water, wet), for me and for a bunch of other people.

I hope that David Moles is right, and that Moon — who I would have described as a writer of great insight and sensitivity — is

only repeating what the media’s been telling her — what our climate of bigotry and willful ignorance has been telling her.

I had been planning to make a pre-Yom Kippur post about the Book of Jonah, which is read during the afternoon services, but I’ve changed my mind. A major part of the several services throughout the more-than-24-hours of Yom Kippur is spent listing and regretting sins, especially those that are collective (everything is in the plural, what *we* have done) and that are sins of speech: lies, gossip, deadly silence. To atone, we have to speak rightly; I will do some small part now.

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'Cause we love peace and motherhood.

As you may recall, in early August The Atlantic published an article by Jeffrey Goldberg about how Israel and Iran are getting "to the point of no return" because of Iran's nuclear program. The article got a lot of online and other media attention, so much that The Atlantic put together an online debate that ran August 16-25.

I made an effort to be one of the people reading and commenting on the debate there. You can read my daily extracts here:

• Days 1-2: who's driving this bus, Israel or the US?.
  
  
• Day 3: would a strike work? realism at the White House?.
• Day 4: the Long Game and containment.
  
  
• Day 5: how threatening is the threat?.
• Days 6-7 (or so): If force is the answer, what is the question?.
  
  
• Day 8: Should we give peace a chance?.

Those links doubtless qualify as "tl;dr" for non-masochists. The highlights of the discussion, for me:

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