I think Dembski's acolytes are screwed...

William Dembski still hasn't retracted what is almost certainly slander against Eric Pianka.


Now, Dembski links to a statement from extremist governor of Texas Perry's press secretary, who apparently is pusing a "Pianka=Hitler" meme.

Dembski left this bit out:

But to the academy, the message behind Pianka’s presentation is inconsequential. President David Marsh said the organization selects the DTS honoree based solely upon the individual’s credentials and contributions to science. He said TAS places no constraints on its speakers, nor will it ever.

“Whether or not we as a body agree with the statements that Dr. Pianka made in his presentation is irrelevant,” he said. “We are an academy of individuals, and as such, each is free to make his or her alignments.”...

Students at St. Edward’s University also got a look into Pianka’s philosophy Friday, when the professor accepted an invitation to share his talk with one of the university’s science classes. Pianka extended that invitation to the Gazette-Enterprise, where the publication made a digital recording of Pianka’s lecture. A full transcript of that lecture will be available on the newspaper’s Web site later this week.

Pianka told the classroom packed with silent listeners that decades of ignoring population control would lead to deadly effects — a fact he says is too late to change. Referencing the Biblical story of the Apocalypse, he revealed a slide depicting the “Four Horsemen” — war, famine, disease and death. If humanity doesn’t take steps to solve the problem of overpopulation, “the Four Horsemen will do it for us.”

Pianka went on to describe his vision of humanity’s crash and its aftermath.

“What I’m waiting for is the day you go to the supermarket and there are no Triscuits on the shelves,” Pianka warned the class, advising they begin packing a survival kit in preparation for the coming disaster. “We’re going to be hunters and gatherers again soon.”

The professor’s university Web site features an extensive list of items survivors will need when “civilization grinds to a halt.”

“When you’re out in the wilderness, you’re going to have to take things out with your hands,” Pianka said, telling students they’d best hone their survival skills.

While some have described Pianka’s words as hyperbole, the governor’s office’s distaste was plainspoken.

I can only hope that Pianka will indeed sue.

Eight Principles of Yong

This Wiki article is useful if you might want to learn 書道.

On-line Japanese Grammar Guide...

This could be useful.

Two State Solution? Democracy?

Can you imagine if a US official was treated this way in Iraq?

Israeli police today detained the Palestinian Authority's minister for Jerusalem affairs.

It was the first time Israel had arrested a member of the Hamas-led government since it first sat last week.

Khaled Abu Arafa and his bodyguard were taken into custody at a checkpoint on their way into Izzariya, a suburb of Jerusalem within the Palestinian-controlled West Bank.

Israel Radio said the 45-year-old politician had been arrested because, as a resident of Israeli-controlled Arab East Jerusalem, he is banned from entering the West Bank carrying an Israeli identity card.

Mr Arafa is a cabinet member of the Hamas-led government, but stood as an independent in January's elections...

Ahmed Jalajel, a photographer for the Al-Quds daily newspaper who was with Mr Arafa at the time, told the Associated Press: "They asked us for ID, they said: 'Get out.' He said: 'I am not getting out.' They opened the car and pushed him out.

"They asked him to sit down on the ground, and then they checked the IDs. They asked him to get into their jeep. He refused, then they pushed him into the jeep."

You may not like their government- heck I don't like theirs, or Bush's or Iran's- but if you treat people like this they get pissed off. It's like the law of gravity. Especially when they're, you know, democratically elected, 'cause it gives them something moral to rally 'round.

Of course, on the other hand, Hamas does want to ban belly-dancing.

Living in times of scarcity...

I hope Richard Bennett is right, that like the Samurai pressuring feudal Japan to renounce the use of guns we can somehow renounce trends that leave to overpopulation. But still, while the right is projecting denial about Eric Pianka - no doubt for their own ends- the rest of us can see the effects in the tiny things around us, and may in fact provide some of Richard's hope unintentionally.

Take shower heads in gyms.

They recently replaced those in my gym to those things that emit a fine spray that uses less water; of course, when one is sweaty one wants to get clean, and one won't leave a shower until one is clean, and so all things being equal, one will inevitably spend more time in a shower with less flow than one with more flow. But one will probably use less water overall, and will undoubtedly spend more of one's life in the shower, thereby having less time overall to consume something else.

All in all, a win-win, if you plan for it.

So rage on, Dembski about Pianka and the trends he's illuminating; but my gym's shower head says otherwise.

Kerry's gauntlet

Via Atrios, I see Kerry's got the major idea going with Iraq:

So far, Iraqi leaders have responded only to deadlines — a deadline to transfer authority to a provisional government, and a deadline to hold three elections.

Now we must set another deadline to extricate our troops and get Iraq up on its own two feet.

Iraqi politicians should be told that they have until May 15 to put together an effective unity government or we will immediately withdraw our military. If Iraqis aren't willing to build a unity government in the five months since the election, they're probably not willing to build one at all. The civil war will only get worse, and we will have no choice anyway but to leave.

If Iraq's leaders succeed in putting together a government, then we must agree on another deadline: a schedule for withdrawing American combat forces by year's end. Doing so will empower the new Iraqi leadership, put Iraqis in the position of running their own country and undermine support for the insurgency, which is fueled in large measure by the majority of Iraqis who want us to leave their country. Only troops essential to finishing the job of training Iraqi forces should remain...

For three years now, the administration has told us that terrible things will happen if we get tough with the Iraqis. In fact, terrible things are happening now because we haven't gotten tough enough. With two deadlines, we can change all that. We can put the American leadership on the side of our soldiers and push the Iraqi leadership to do what only it can do: build a democracy.

Let me be among the first to say that we aren't going to ultimately "push" Iraqis to build a democracy. If we stay there 10 months or 10 years it'd be about the same. Not that they wouldn't get democracy on their own, or find some way to stop killing each other, but that isn't the objective here. The objective here is for us to stop getting dead, which isn't a bad one.

The Last Tom DeLay post you'll ever need...

Sure, I'll probably post something when he's convicted, but I think- for better or worse- this captures the mood of the lefty blogosphere:

With apologies to Dr. Seuss

You're a mean one, Tom DeLay.
You really are a heel.
You're as cuddly as a cactus,
You're as charming as an eel.
Tom DeLay.


You're a bad banana
With a greasy black peel.


You're a monster, Tom DeLay.
Your heart's an empty hole.
Your brain is full of spiders,
You've got garlic in your soul.
Tom DeLay.


I wouldn't touch you, with a
thirty-nine-and-a-half foot pole.


You're a vile one, Tom DeLay.
You have termites in your smile.
You have all the tender sweetness
Of a seasick crocodile.
Tom DeLay.


Given the choice between the two of you
I'd take the seasick crockodile.


You're a foul one, Tom DeLay.
You're a nasty, wasty skunk.
Your heart is full of unwashed socks
Your soul is full of gunk.
Tom DeLay.


The three words that best describe you,
are, and I quote: "Stink. Stank. Stunk."


You're a rotter, Tom DeLay.
You're the king of sinful sots.
Your heart's a dead tomato splot
With moldy purple spots,
Tom DeLay.


Your soul is an apalling dump heap overflowing
with the most disgraceful assortment of deplorable
rubbish imaginable,
Mangled up in tangled up knots.


You nauseate me, Tom DeLay.
With a nauseaus super-naus.
You're a crooked jerky jockey
And you drive a crooked horse.
Tom DeLay.


You're a three decker saurkraut and toadstool
sandwich
With arsenic sauce.

Ever get the sense that you can't make sense of text before you?

This is what I feel like I'm reading when I read this:

"Cross Country," John Edward's new show on WE, the Women's Entertainment network. Mr. Edward, a stage medium who used to channel spirits in the safety of a TV studio on his syndicated show "Crossing Over," is now adding the pathos of shows like "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" by traveling to remote areas to commune with the survivors. ("Closure has no map," he says.)..."Queer Eye for the Dead Guy."...cable's Sci Fi Channel showed the debut of an even more down-market new series, "Psychic at Large," in which Char Margolis, a self-described "spiritual-intuitive," roams around in her car, using her special powers for fun and high jinks. Ms. Margolis may have an inside advantage: she looks a bit like Agnes Moorehead in her "Bewitched" days...She haggles for a used car by demanding $1,000 off the list price for every relative of the car lot manager she can intuit correctly. "Apple?" Ms. Margolis ventures. "Akbah. Very close!" the woman replies...Gail Porter, a Scottish-born celebrity/skeptic, and Chris Fleming, an even less famous "sensitive"... travel the country trying to make contact with dead celebrities like Bing Crosby and Rita Hayworth, but mostly turn breathless in dark basements while being filmed by an infrared camera...The spookiest element, however, is Ms. Porter, a former television presenter and nude model for men's magazines, who serves as a harbinger of celebrity derailed: drug abuse and eating disorders ravaged her health, and she now wears a head scarf because alopecia left her bald...

And Terri Schiavo...and John Edward...and Tom DeLay...is it because the rest of what is shown to people is such a steaming pile that they sort of kind of trust hucksters like Larry King?

Umm...historical sidenote on Gingrich

This political obit of DeLay glosses over an important part of history:

eLay is quitting for the same reason that Democratic House Speaker Jim Wright quit after Republican Newt Gingrich helped expose his sleazy book deal.

And he's quitting for the same reason Gingrich quit after coming under attack from DeLay and others in the wake of Gingrich's own sleazy book deal and other controversies.

Those "other controversies" were that Larry Flynt had the goods on Newt Gingrich's sexual escpades (as well as Bob Livingston, who came after Gingrich).

So now how many Republican speakers of the House had ethical problems?

Give me Tip O'Neill.

Republican Party Brand Meltdown

MyDD has it. Nice.

A smear

The religious right's new cause celebre- perhaps to be aborted by the DeLay collapse- is or would have been Eric Pianka.

I heard Limbaugh- serial liar- conflating airborne evolution of ebola virus with germ warfare.

These people are absolutely shameless...it needs to be addressed though with sincerity, but also with how one becomes sincere, and how one does that in an age of rank dishonesty.

I know a "conservative" who actually believes that Limbaugh does not "lie intentionally." Which is kind of naive to me- a paid Republican party propagandist and demogogue is not an intentional liar?


Meanwhile, I hope Eric Pianka and others sue Limbaugh and others like Dembski for slander. It'd be about time. I'd wish Michael Schiavo had done that too; and maybe he still will.

More on Pianka at Pharyngula here, and especially here.

That includesPianka's own words on the topic:

If humans do not control their own population (and we seem unwilling and unable to do so), then other forces will certainly act to control our population. The four horseman of the apocalypse (conquest, war, famine, and death) are all candidates. Most likely, lethal virulent microbes like HIV and Ebola zaire will set limits on the growth of human populations. HIV, by allowing infected hosts to survive years while they spread the virus and infect new hosts, has already become a pandemic, but it will be years before it decimates the human population. Although Ebola kills 9 out of 10 people, outbreaks have so far been unable to become epidemics because they are currently spread only by direct physical contact with infected blood. However, a closely related virus that kills monkeys, Ebola reston, is airborne, and it is only a matter of time until Ebola zaire evolves the capacity to be airborne.

And here:

Dr. Pianka was named the 2006 Distinguished Scientist by the Texas Academy of Science. He's an ecologist, a "doomsday ecologist" as he puts it, with a CV several pages long and results that have changed the way ecologists think, forever. And damn is he ever entertaining to listen to.

Dr. Pianka's talk at the TAS meeting was mostly of the problems humans are causing as we rapidly proliferate around the globe. While what he had to say is way too vast to remember it all, moreover to relay it here in this blog, the bulk of his talk was that he's waiting for the virus that will eventually arise and kill off 90% of human population. In fact, his hope, if you can call it that, is that the ebola virus which attacks humans currently (but only through blood transmission) will mutate with the ebola virus that attacks monkeys airborne to create an airborne ebola virus that attacks humans. He's a radical thinker, that one! I mean, he's basically advocating for the death of all but 10% of the current population! And at the risk of sounding just as radical, I think he's right.

Inevitable, I'd say; perhaps not an advocacy, but inevitable.

Hmmm... I think I have money on this from a conservative...

I thought De Lay would cop a plea, and this looks like the first step...

Holy cow I think he wants to be a lobbyist in the Ralph Reed mold...

Mr. Delay told the Galveston County paper that he decided last week after speaking to the Christian group Vision America that he could be more effective pushing the conservative cause if he left Congress.

"I can continue to be a leader of the conservative cause," he said. "I can do more to grow the Republican majority, rather than spend the next eight months locked down in running a campaign."

Wow.

And these people will still suck up to folks like him no matter what.

But the NY Times at least mentions the Abrahmoff connection:

One DeLay ally said that the lawmaker had been considering leaving Congress since he gave up his leadership post in January and that he had been persuaded to make the break last week, when his former deputy chief of staff, Tony Rudy, pleaded guilty to corruption charges....

With Mr. Rudy's guilty plea last Friday, he became the second former DeLay aide to admit wrongdoing in the corruption investigation centered on Mr. Abramoff, who has also pleaded guilty to conspiring to corrupt public officials, including members of Congress.

Mr. Abramoff, Mr. Rudy and the other aide, Michael Scanlon, who had been Mr. DeLay's press secretary in the House, are all cooperating with the Justice Department, which is investigating whether Mr. DeLay and other members of Congress accepted travel, gifts or money from Mr. Abramoff and his associates in return for legislative favors.

Mr. Rudy's plea agreement, which covers actions he took on Mr. Abramoff's behalf both while on Mr. DeLay's staff and after leaving the House to work as a lobbyist, did not allege any wrongdoing by Mr. DeLay or say that Mr. DeLay knew of any criminal activities by Mr. Rudy.

The Fed is eliminating M3

and Jerome a Paris says it's a good leading economic indicator.

Tell me again why I should overweight the US...

No Margaritas for Michelle Malkin

on Cinquo de Mayo. No burritos or enchiladas either.

Dialogue from another blog's comments...

... the mere fact that we quarrel -- i.e. censure others and try to excuse ourselves for failing to meet assumed common standards of moral conduct -- is telling. In fact, this is Paul's EVIDENCE that there is an underlying law written on our hearts!

--> In this context, the issue is not that practice makes perfect, but rather that inconsistency makes us hypocrites who condemn ourselvces by that hypocrisy.

The mere fact that we can cease to quarrel is telling - and in fact more important than that we quarrel. Chimpanzees and dogs quarrel.

Is a child learning a skill a "hypocrite" because he hasn't mastered it yet?

One might experience frustration at the lack of mastery of a skill, but, in every single endeavor known to man, lack of confidence in the efficacy of one's ability to improve one's skill never, ever, improves it.

This has been observed in so many times, places, and contexts - and in my own life- as to be as metaphysically certain as the observance of Newtonian physics.

William Barrett- ironically enough arguing in favor of a spiritual/deistic outlook- mentioned that if you worry about whether or not you are being sincere or not in your life you will only wind up being insincere; and went on to quote Pascal's injunction in the Pensees (not exactly Calvinist friendly): Stupefy yourselves, take holy water. Or, in a Buddhist context, "You are at the top of the 100 foot high pole. How will you make a step further?"


Just jump. Take the action in a committed way; keep your eye on the ball and just hit it.


There is a way to help others in their behavior without condemning them. It is another skill.

All of these words are useless though; what is needed is for them to be realized within the atoms of one's marrow. But that's no reason to give up, and one need not be close to perfection to see improvement.

A bit of investment nonsense from the NY Times...

This guy from the Guardian got it right:

1 Play with the wind at your back. I mentioned once "Old Partridge", a character in Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Edwin Lefèvre's account of the career of Jesse Livermore, who at the height of his success in the 1920s was among the richest men in America. Old Partridge deflects every entreaty to discuss a particular price or share with the same reply: either "it's a bull market, you know" or "it's a bear market".

In other words, the real money lies in calling the direction of the general market. In my case, I was obliged to abandon plans to go short on many stocks (or bet that the price would fall). I was losing money that way. It was a bull market.

And how to determine bull and bear markets? I offer the view of a chartist chum who was honest about the supposed art of reading graphs. "If you can't see it from six feet away, it's not a trend," he would say.

2 Let winners run. The first stock the portfolio bought last September was the mining group Anglo American. The price was about £14.50. I would not have believed at the time that it would hit £22 by February. I caught most of the rise simply by resisting the temptation to play safe and get out. A couple of Anglos can pay for a lot of mistakes elsewhere.

3 Cut losers. It's very old, and very good, advice. If you set your maximum loss on any one position at 2% of your capital, you've got at least 50 bets. You'll be in the game for a while.

4 Don't cut losers too early. The rider to the above. My "ones that got away" file bulged: I was shaken out of P&O and the Pru by falls of 5% or so and both stormed away afterwards. Stopping losses at 10% would have been better.

And the other stuff he said, too; but these 4 are relevant in light of the pronouncement in today's NY Times:

Consider that the average European stock fund has soared more than 14 percent a year, annualized, over the last five years. During this same stretch, funds that invest in domestic blue-chip growth stocks have returned less than 2 percent a year.

Some strategists say that if more than half of the world's total stock market capitalization resides in companies based outside the United States, about half of your equity portfolio should be held in foreign shares. That argument has certainly gained traction in light of the recent successes overseas...

New research by S.& P. would seem to indicate that keeping around 25 percent of your equity exposure in foreign securities would be optimal.

Having some foreign exposure clearly helps diversify a portfolio. From 1970 to 2005, a portfolio invested entirely in domestic stocks had a standard deviation — a popular measure of volatility — of 16.8 percent, according to S.& P. By comparison, a portfolio that was 75 percent invested in domestic stocks and 25 percent in foreign shares had a standard deviation of 16.4 percent, implying a slightly less bumpy ride.

But beyond a 25 percent international allocation, the more foreign stock you own, the more volatile your portfolio becomes — without generating much in additional returns...

Of course, investors may sometimes choose to slightly overweight or underweight foreign stocks, as opportunities arise. John Thompson Jr., portfolio manager at Ibbotson Associates in Chicago, says he thinks that an aggressive investor should feel comfortable putting as much as 30 percent of total equity exposure overseas.

But it's also important, Mr. Thompson said, not to deviate too much from your long-term asset allocation strategy.

That is especially true if you plan to hold emerging-market shares. Investors should probably keep their emerging-market exposure from growing beyond 5 percent of their total portfolio, he said. After all, the whole point of having a long-term asset allocation strategy is to reduce your portfolio's risk.

The conflation of foreign mature economies with emerging economies, and the blissful ignorance of what the speculator said above all is cause for consternation. The Republicans have trashed the US economy; and going against a "trend" dating back to 1971 - which included the 1980-2000 bull market in the US- is kind of fallacious.

Emerging markets emerge. Economies mature. Other economies decline. The idea that somebody could have crunched the numbers in say, Argentina, in the late 90s and come to different conclusions other than "get that money the hell out of the country" is ridiculous, as ridiculous as thinking that somehow the US equity situation is unique to the world. Why should that be? It only is if there is the assumption that the rest of the world has faith in US equities that it might be unique.

But it might be becoming unique in a bad way. And that's why one would be crazy to follow the "conventional wisdom" here.

Let's see some reform of the fundamentals of the US economy first.

Are right wing trolls organizing?

It seems to be the case, but this is so open to countermeasures....

Kevin Phillips is right

From tomorow's WaPo:

Because the United States is beginning to run out of its own oil sources, a military solution to an energy crisis is hardly lunacy. Neither Caesar nor Napoleon would have flinched. What Caesar and Napoleon did not face, but less able American presidents do, is that bungled overseas military embroilments could also boomerang economically. The United States, some $4 trillion in hock internationally, has become the world's leading debtor, increasingly nagged by worry that some nations will sell dollars in their reserves and switch their holdings to rival currencies. Washington prints bonds and dollar-green IOUs, which European and Asian bankers accumulate until for some reason they lose patience. This is the debt Achilles' heel, which stands alongside the oil Achilles' heel.

Unfortunately, more danger lurks in the responsiveness of the new GOP coalition to Christian evangelicals, fundamentalists and Pentecostals, who muster some 40 percent of the party electorate. Many millions believe that the Armageddon described in the Bible is coming soon. Chaos in the explosive Middle East, far from being a threat, actually heralds the second coming of Jesus Christ. Oil price spikes, murderous hurricanes, deadly tsunamis and melting polar ice caps lend further credence.

The potential interaction between the end-times electorate, inept pursuit of Persian Gulf oil, Washington's multiple deceptions and the financial crisis that could follow a substantial liquidation by foreign holders of U.S. bonds is the stuff of nightmares. To watch U.S. voters enable such policies -- the GOP coalition is unlikely to turn back -- is depressing to someone who spent many years researching, watching and cheering those grass roots...

When religion was trod upon in the 1960s and thereafter by secular advocates determined to push Christianity out of the public square, the move unleashed an evangelical, fundamentalist and Pentecostal counterreformation, with strong theocratic pressures becoming visible in the Republican national coalition and its leadership.

Besides providing critical support for invading Iraq -- widely anathematized by preachers as a second Babylon -- the Republican coalition has also seeded half a dozen controversies in the realm of science. These include Bible-based disbelief in Darwinian theories of evolution, dismissal of global warming, disagreement with geological explanations of fossil-fuel depletion, religious rejection of global population planning, derogation of women's rights and opposition to stem cell research. This suggests that U.S. society and politics may again be heading for a defining controversy such as the Scopes trial of 1925. That embarrassment chastened fundamentalism for a generation, but the outcome of the eventual 21st century test is hardly assured.

These developments have warped the Republican Party and its electoral coalition, muted Democratic voices and become a gathering threat to America's future. No leading world power in modern memory has become a captive of the sort of biblical inerrancy that dismisses modern knowledge and science. The last parallel was in the early 17th century, when the papacy, with the agreement of inquisitional Spain, disciplined the astronomer Galileo for saying that the sun, not the Earth, was the center of our solar system.

Conservative true believers will scoff at such concerns. The United States is a unique and chosen nation, they say; what did or did not happen to Rome, imperial Spain, the Dutch Republic and Britain is irrelevant. The catch here, alas, is that these nations also thought they were unique and that God was on their side. The revelation that He apparently was not added a further debilitating note to the late stages of each national decline.

The idea that nations might think "God is on our side" is one of the most reliable indicators of national hubris doomed to failre; there has not been in history a single instance of where such a nation cultivated this idea that it did not decline in power; whether it's the empire of Japan, imperial China, Rome, the Papal States, the Caliphate, or the Holy Roman Empire.

You'd think people would learn from history but they don't, and so the smart money is to short the United States while Republicans are in power.

Wow! The NY Times says the internet is changing politics.

Who knew?

Democrats and Republicans are sharply increasing their use of e-mail, interactive Web sites, candidate and party blogs, and text-messaging to raise money, organize get-out-the-vote efforts and assemble crowds for a rallies. The Internet, they said, appears to be far more efficient, and less costly, than the traditional tools of politics, notably door knocking and telephone banks.

Analysts say the campaign television advertisement, already diminishing in influence with the proliferation of cable stations, faces new challenges as campaigns experiment with technology that allows direct messaging to more specific audiences, and through unconventional means.

Those include Podcasts featuring a daily downloaded message from a candidate and so-called viral attack videos, designed to trigger peer-to-peer distribution by e-mail chains, without being associated with any candidate or campaign. Campaigns are now studying popular Internet social networks, like Friendster and Facebook, as ways to reaching groups of potential supporters with similar political views or cultural interests.

And I should add: yeah, if left is getting rid of Liberman, yeah. left.

Update: Of course Avarosis is right; the idea of writing a piece like this and leaving Domenech out, and Malkin, and the like is simply bias, pure and simple.

But I differ with Avarosis here: if "left" is decentering the party away from the Liberman-DLC faction, and it's a plausible definition, I've no problem with left.

People with too much time on their hands...

Jeff Goldstein and the parody. Which is which?