Shame. Not dead, not sleeping.

I was driving on Friday last, listening to the radio version of The News Hour on PBS. Shields and Brooks were giving us their measured, reasonable and usually wrong headed views on the news of the day. Shields, when asked about the Anthony Wiener unpleasantness, said "Shame is officially dead."

Au contraire, Mr. Shields. It is still with us. It just has to applied in the proper forum in the correct way and shame still possesses a crushing force.

Obviously, Mr. Shields would not have said what he did without some data on his side. In past generations, what happened to Bill Clinton or David Vitter or Alec Baldwin or Kanye West or Kobe Bryant or Anthony Wiener would have driven them from the stage, possibly forever. But we live in the post-Nixon era, and if even Tricky Dick can come back from the grave, so can nearly anyone with enough time and intestinal fortitude.


Submitted for your disapproval: Donald Trump. He made some nonsensical noises about running for president, and since we are still more than six months away from an actual delegate in the nomination process to be assigned to a candidate, the press was unable to ignore him.

Then came his decision to hang his hat on the birther issue, to be followed by the long form birth certificate being released.

This did not shame him. He took credit for a thing he did not do, a completely predictable move from such a pompous swine.

No, he was shamed out of the race on C-SPAN (and more importantly, You Tube) by comments made by Barack Obama and Seth Myers at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. In an odd twist, Trump had been to a modern Friar's Club roast only a few weeks before, where the jokes were much more vicious. But at the Friar's Club, it's supposed to be an honor to be mocked, and the target gets the last word. Instead, the Leader of the Free World used irony to crush him while a room of "important people" laughed out loud, completely unimpressed by the fact that the target of the mockery was in the room. Minutes later, Seth Myers tucked in to what was left of the warm and not yet rotting corpse.

And Myers, not Trump, got the last word and the last laugh.

Arnold Schwarzenegger never really wanted a long term career in politics, but he did plan to return to the movies when his stint as the savior of the Californian Republican Party was over.

Those plans are currently on hiatus.

Kind of like Manimal is on hiatus.

People are coming out of the woodwork to tell stories of his swinishness now, and the press is eating these stories up.

It's funny what just one secret child fathered out of wedlock can do in this day and age.

And in this day and age, the "secret" part is far worse than the "fathered out of wedlock" part.

Tiger Woods will not be at the U.S. Open this week. He has to be seriously injured to make such a move. But if you have followed his career, you'll know the last major championship he won, The 2008 U.S. Open, was won on what was effectively a broken left leg, and he then missed the last two major championships that year. He came back in 2009 after surgery to win many regular tournaments, but no majors.

And then, around Thanksgiving 2009, the world found out Tiger did have a hobby outside of golf.

Shame has turned Tiger Woods into Robert Gamez.

Here is sweet Reese Witherspoon. She has been married, her husband Ryan Phillippe cheated on her, she left him. His career has stalled, hers continues to move forward. On my silly gossip blog, she has had 18 cover stories about her since the beginning of 2010, none negative. I looked online to see if she had ever been involved in a feud, and in 2008 she went out of her way to deny any bad blood between her and co-star in Four Christmases Vince Vaughn.

If you have ever seen Jon Favreau's show Dinner For Five, you know Vince Vaughn is an unstoppable flaming asshole in real life. But Our Reese does not want to be seen as a difficult person to get along with.

And then earlier this month, she went on the MTV Movie Awards and said this.

"I get it, girls, that it’s cool to be a bad girl but it is possible to make it in Hollywood without doing a reality show. When I came up in this business, if you made a sex tape, you were embarrassed and you hid it under your bed.”

I am of the opinion that sweet little Reese Witherspoon has just done to Kim Kardashian what Barack Obama and Seth Myers did to Donald Trump. She will finally feel shame. Maybe I'm wrong and she will weather it, but I really think the right words were said on the right venue at the right time and Kim is going to have to be satisfied with being rich and beautiful instead of rich, famous and beautiful.

It's already happened to Paris Hilton. She tried a new reality show and it bombed, she's through.

All things come to an end, pleasures and plagues alike. If you find yourself wondering in 2012 whatever happened to Kim Kardashian, look back at Reese Witherspoon's comments and know that shame is not dead and it is not sleeping. It just has to be applied properly.

Here endeth the lesson.

The math of Penrose tiles, part 3: Two proofs of impossible similarity.

I'm about to prove a couple of negatives about Penrose tilings. Recall Donald Rumsfeld proudly and stupidly saying you couldn't prove a negative when it became obvious to everyone the weapons of mass destruction ruse was a complete phony. I had to wonder exactly how many classes he slept through when he got his degree at Princeton.

Of course you can prove a negative. The only place where real proof exists is in math and we prove that things are impossible all the time.

Let me give a couple examples.


It is impossible to build a larger shape similar to a dart using kites and darts.

The dart is the Penrose tile with the dent, and angle of 216°. It is also the only Penrose tile that has the sharp 36° angle. Those angles are adjacent to each other, which means if you need a 36° angle when you are building something, you have to use a dart and you have to plan for the fact the 216° will be right next to it at the distance of short.

If we want to build a bigger dart, it will have to have two 36° angles and a 216° angle, but the distance between these will have to be at least the length of long.

We can't do this with these pieces, or if we achieve this, we will not have a long enough straight line to make the outside of the dart.

This proof takes no math skills really. If you had some Penrose tiles to play with, you would see pretty quickly the problems involved trying to make a shape similar to the dart.



It is impossible to build a shape similar to a kite bigger than Papa Kite.

Yesterday, I showed this picture of a regular kite, a slightly larger kite made of a dart and two kites (a shape I call Mama Kite) and a third larger shape made out of five kites and three darts I call Papa Kite.

Notice this. Each of the straight lines that make up a side of all three of these kites has at most one side of the short length. Because of the angles available, one short is all you can have if you are building a straight line that is empty on one side and completely filled in on the other. The problem is that to make a straight 180° angle from a 72° angle, we need 108°, which in Penrose tiles can only be done by combining a 72° and a 36° angle. Just as we saw in the earlier problem, the 36° angle is a little clumsy when trying to continue a straight line because it is so closely tied to the dent, the 216° angle, known formally in geometry as a reflex angle.

Here is my best attempt at making Granddaddy Kite, the next size up of similarity. The Fibonacci sequence tells me how many pieces I need, 13 kites and 8 darts. I used 12 kites and 7 darts and the shape of the empty space that caused the problem has a 36° angle that we can't negotiate with the shapes available.

Notice that the unfillable space is exactly a Big Dart, the shape we can't make with the two standard Penrose tiles. If a third Penrose tile existed that was the shape of the Big Dart, with side lengths long and long+short, the number of things we could do with the new system would increase dramatically, though it wouldn't help with making a dart bigger than Big Dart. That would still be impossible.

Instead of Big Dart, another "third" Penrose tile that could help in this situation would be a triangle with sides short, short and long, which would have angles 36°, 36° and 108°. With this addition, Big Dart would be these two triangles put side by side along one of the short sides, and suddenly bigger darts and bigger kites would be much, much easier.

In math, we call this "prove or disprove or salvage". When you prove something can't be done, you try to find the simplest changes you could make to the problem where you could do what was asked. The most famous early example of this was Archimedes proving that trisecting any given angle was impossible with a compass and straightedge, but it could be done if you were allowed to put one mark on the straightedge.

This is one of the reasons mathematicians put Archimedes head and shoulders over other ancients like Euclid or Pythagoras. Nobody else was "thinking outside the box" like our Sicilian pal.

Not that I'm telling Sir Roger what to do with his tiles. He is a Big Damn Deal in physics and I'm a blogger.

Not that I'm comparing my salvage to Archimedes' method for trisecting angles. That is a work of stunning beauty.

I'm just sayin'.

And, oh yeah, Donald Rumsfeld is still a pinhead who planned two wars he didn't know how to finish and he can bite me.

I'm just a blogger, but I'm a shitload smarter than he ever was.

If you ever read this, Don, quod erat demonstrandum, you ugly, murderous little pencil pusher.

SkeptiCal 2011

My sister Karlacita! used to be an author of New Age books. In the past few years, she has come to question the things she used to believe and in some ways has become a pariah in her old field. She found some like minds in the skeptical community, so she decided to attend SkepiCal 11 this past weekend in Berkeley. She asked me to come along as moral support, to be that person she could turn to and ask the all important question, "Is it me or is it them? It's them, isn't it?"

I won't say I felt "right at home" in a conference of skeptics, but I certainly had been in similar situations before. It was a nerd herd. It was somewhere between a professional nerd herd and a amateur nerd herd. For me, an amateur nerd herd is a board game convention or about back in the 1990s, a sealed deck Magic The Gathering tournament. Professional nerd herds have been things like the Computer Game Development Conference back when I did that for a living or math symposiums now.

Since the idea of SkeptiCal was plunking down money to hear people talk, it's more like the professional. By that standard, this was pretty weak. I will be kind and name the only speaker worth his salt, while others will be described but not named.

The first fellow was a member in good standing in the skeptical community who had appeared on Survivor a few times. We spent an hour learning about the ins and outs of a show I have never watched all the way through. (Personal note: The last drummer for my old band The Wonders of Science has been on more than one season, and I still haven't watched one full hour of the show in my entire life.)

Here's the inside dope. What you see is real, but it's all about the editing.

Thanks. I already figured that out without watching. I didn't need an hour's explanation of it. (Karlacita! tells me that in the line to the ladies' room after, my feeling about that hour was echoed several times.)


The next speaker was Peter Gleick from the Pacific Institute, a climate scientist who is also a blogger on the Huffington Post, giving a talk entitled Climate Change Misperception. His inclusion on the speakers' list was a source of controversy for reasons I will discuss later.

Gleick's talk was the only one where I actually learned something from the speaker. (I learned plenty from Karlacita!, but that can happen when we're just hangin' out and I don't have to plunk down forty five simoleans to do that.) He discussed several of the critical thinking fallacies - ad hominem attacks, appeal to authority, appeal to consensus, cherry picking data, etc. - and showed concretely how climate change deniers use these tools. He also stated that climate science consensus might look like an argument by consensus, but that it is more that the scientists are convinced by the data and that data forms a valid scientific consensus.

The skeptical community, if one can call it that, is a very contentious bunch and internecine squabbles are common. Gleick showed an e-mail from a skeptic who would not attend because Gleick's inclusion showed the group had obviously caved to the Warmists, as deniers sometimes call the vast majority of climate scientists. This was the last mention of any alleged grudge or slight in Gleick's talk.

There are dozens of tacks the deniers take to poke holes in the climate data. Having only an hour to talk, he only brought up a few examples directly and showed Power Point slides that proved the statements, some of which I had heard before, were egregious examples of cherry picking.

1) Polar ice coverage is not shrinking because April 1989 coverage was less that April 2009 coverage.

Refutation: Yes, April 1989 was less than April 2009, but every other month in 2009 had less ice coverage than 1989, often quite a bit less. Classic cherry picking, especially since there was exactly one cherry in twelve matched pairs of data.

2) Global warming stopped in 1998, even though CO2 levels continue to rise. (I hadn't heard the first argument before, but I had heard this one, notably from George F. Will, who couldn't prove the Pythagorean Theorem with an hour's head start and the address to mathworld.wolfram.com.)

Refutation: Average yearly temperatures go up and down. 1998 was warmer than 2008, but 2005 was warmer than either, and now that 2009 and 2010 data have been added, both far warmer than 1998, this argument is complete bunk, though deniers still quote it.

Again, Gleick's talk was the closest to the quality I would see at a math symposium, most of which are free of charge. (Quibble: everyone who used technology had trouble with it, including Gleick. For most of his talk, the computer resolution was wrong and his slides were cut off at left and right. To his credit, when the problem was pointed out, Gleick is the only one who fixed his technical difficulties.)


You may not have heard of the skeptical community. For example, when Karlacita! told the Gosh Darned Pater Familias about where she was going, neither he or any of his friends had ever heard of people describing themselves as skeptics.

In this small community, the great celebrity is The Amazing Randi, a magician and debunker of paranormal claims. His greatest moment of glory is going on Johnny Carson's show and showing the famed spoon bender Uri Geller was a fake. He is the founder of the modestly titled James Randi Educational Foundation, or JREF.

In December 2009, The Amazing Randi wrote a piece doubtful of climate change, which he has since recanted with a standard non-apology apology. For me the money quotes are using the wry quotations marks around "politically correct" label he gave to the academics who do the hard work he is not willing or able to do and most damningly, the first sentence in paragraph six:

I strongly suspect that The Petition Project may be valid.

For those of you unaware of The Petition Project, climate change deniers got it into their heads to put together a petition of scientists NOT in the field, as though ten sociologists counterbalance one climate scientist. This is obviously both an appeal to completely unearned authority and an appeal to consensus.

Many skeptics fell in line behind Randi and have not changed their position even though he has weakly recanted.

I've seen this before in nerd herds. Way back in the day, a guy named Chris Crawford, a writer of video games that didn't sell well but that he thought were "important", started the Computer Game Developer's Conference (CGDC) to get his ideas out. I had more than a few run-ins with him and his tiny cult, but eventually the business was making too much money to have such a meeting be a yearly pilgrimage to his shrine and he left, though the level of volunteerism in departure is disputed. Once The Great Man was dislodged, the CGDG actually became a Big Damn Deal.

Here's the thing. We can all of us fall prey to these problems with critical thinking. When it comes to hero worship in math, I am honest to Lenny* proud of the fact that I shook the hand of Donald Knuth, the author of The Art Of Computer Programming, and can remember chapter and verse the conversation I had with Frank Harary, the father of graph theory.

Here's my defense. Knuth and Harary actually moved human endeavor forward. As someone who teaches math, it is my job and my glad duty to make sure their names, and more importantly their ideas, are never forgotten.

I cannot say the same for the Amazing Randi.

* For those new to the blog, "honest to Lenny" is my oath to my favorite mathematician in history, Leonhard Euler. Yet another example of hero worship and one I will defend to my last breath.

Here endeth the lesson.

Somebody call the cops.

Dr. Harold Camping is at it again. Judgment Day did happen on Saturday, it was just really quiet. The big damn noisy one will be October 21. That will be the actual end of the world.

Recall that he first said it was in September 1994, though he had bad feelings about 1988. When Don Lattin of the San Francisco Chronicle interviewed him in 1995, Camping said with a straight face that 1994 wouldn't be officially over until March 31, 1995.

You might not have any specific memories of March 31, 1995, but one thing you probably will recall is that is was one of those days when the world didn't end. Days when the world doesn't end have a distinctive and easily recognizable pattern, the sun rising in the east the next morning.

If you look at the end of this article from the Associated Press, you will see that Camping's Family Radio is sitting on a boatload of cash. $18.3 million in donations last year, assets of more than $104 million, including $34 million in stocks or other publicly traded securities.

It's time to charge the guy with fraud and take his money.

I realize there's a whole bunch of free speech and exercise of religion stuff involved here, but Camping believes the era of the church is over, so he can't very well call himself a church. He's just a very successful scam artist. Time to separate this fool from his money and give some of it back to the fools who sent it to him in the first place.

As DeForest Kelley might have said in my situation, "Damnit, Jim, I'm a mathematician, not a lawyer!" Even though he looks like a frail old man of great conviction, I swear he's no different from Donald Trump. You can't believe a word he says and it's in the public interest to stop him from fleecing the sheep.

The penis: Necessary evil or evolutionary dead end?

Reading the news these past few weeks has been ultra creepy. It's nothing but penises, penises, penises.

It's not exactly like this Bay to Breakers post from sfmike, which you should DEFINITELY NOT CLICK ON AT WORK. Compared to the real news, this is almost quaint and endearing.

No, the news is filled with penises getting their users in serious trouble. You can't swing a dead cat right now without hitting a live penis, and probably an erect one at that.

I could go with a picture of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, whose penis has put him in actual jail, or Newt Gingrich or Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose penises have made them unelectable laughingstocks, but instead I go with John Ensign, who should have resigned from the Senate a year ago but waited until just recently, when he found out his penis did more than cost him a mint, it will probably mean he will be on trial and several of his Christian pals who helped engineer payoffs to clean up his penis trouble might find themselves on the wrong end of a subpoena as well.

To make matters worse, I got some movies from the library this week that in one way or another re-enforced the idea that penises are more trouble than they are worth for society. In Venus, Peter O'Toole plays an aging actor who lead a reprehensible life and is still a dirty old man.

Quite a stretch for his penis, I'm sure.

All the people who find him a cad are bad people in the film.

Then why did I find myself agreeing with them?

Having seen Thor, which is the latest film directed by Kenneth Branagh, I decided to rent Dead Again, a movie he directed and starred in with his then wife Emma Thompson before he decided Helena Bonham Carter was juicier. The movie doesn't hold up very well. It was kind of impressive at the time how good their American accents were, but since Xena:Warrior Princess, it's not such an amazing feat. There's also a scene with Campbell Scott that makes no sense, a very greasy Andy Garcia and a silly supernatural plot.

Not Ken's best work.

Last and by no means least, I watched Crimes and Misdemeanors, which I would still rank as one of Woody Allen's best. On screen, it's Martin Landau's penis that is the major cause of grief and chaos, but it's hard to ignore that Allen cast then wife Mia Farrow as the object of his character's hopeless affections. More than that, the innocent love he feels for his niece is more than a little creepy now, though none of the creepiness is in the script or the performances.

I want to say that I am not advocating the abolition of the penis. I have owned one for over fifty years and it's gotten me into very little trouble. I'm just saying that if it was an optional extra you got from a doctor instead of standard equipment, today's FDA would never approve it.

Kind of like aspirin.

A word that should return to regular usage: Mountebank.

Mountebank: a fraud or charlatan; one who makes money by deceiving others.

Etymology: Italian. The direct translation means "mount a bench", which is the way sellers of miracle cures would stand above a large crowd to get attention.

You see the word in 19th Century literature quite a bit. W.S. Gilbert broke up with Sir Arthur Sullivan for a time and wrote an operetta titled The Mountebanks with Alfred Cellier in 1892. The play had a long run in London and short run in New York, but is rarely performed today.

Please do what you can to bring this wonderful word back into usage. There are many mountebanks in the world today. Reading about the derivatives market, mountebanks appear to be the engine of the world economy.

Thank you for your kind attention.

More from Donald Trump, pathological liar.

In an interview this week, Donald Trump said “I actually got lucky because I had a very high draft number. I’ll never forget, that was an amazing period of time in my life.”

I spent a few minutes on Wikipedia and knew he was lying.

Trump left school in 1968. The draft lottery started in December 1969. The reason I knew Trump was lying was because my brother, four years younger than Trump, graduated high school in 1968 and had no plans to go to college, and he was told to show up at the draft board within weeks of graduation.

Young people won't remember this, but back then, the draft board didn't play.


So after leaving school in 1968, Donald Trump must have been in the same boat as my brother. The good folks at The Smoking Gun did a lot more digging than I did, and Trump's lie is exposed. He got several student deferments and in July 1968, he was re-classified 1-A. By October 1968, more than a year before the lottery, he is 1-Y, a medical deferment.

I'm not trashing people who got medical deferments back then. My brother Michael got one because of an allergy to penicillin.

I'm trashing Trump because he is a miserable lying scumbag. He is now and he always has been.

Of all his accomplishments, only the list of women he has had sex with stands up to scrutiny. He has bagged some fabulous babes. Everything else, his alleged success as a student or businessman or anything else, is just another pack of lies.

This guy can't help but lie. If his mouth is open, he's lying. He lies while gargling, for pity's sake.

And what's worse, this is exactly the kind of sack of shit we can't get off the stage in this ridiculous age in which we live.

Lying like a rug in service of the greater good.

Jon Kyl said on the senate floor that abortions are 90% of what Planned Parenthood does.

Somebody fact-checked him, the dirty meany bullies. 3% of the services Planned Parenthood does are abortions, and none of those can receive federal funds. Because abortions are more expensive that birth control, abortions are about 15% of the billing at Planned Parenthood.

Still, there's that 90% number. What was that? Kyl's office was reached for comment, and they said that what he said was not intended to be a factual statement.

I guess I could take the time to rip Kyl a new one, but thankfully for the Republic, we have Jon Stewart, Wyatt Cenac and Stephen Colbert to help out on that front.

The Daily Show - Countdown to the Next Countdown - Jon Kyl's Planned Parenthood Statistics
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

The Daily Show - Countdown to the Next Countdown - Jon Kyl Lies About Planned Parenthood
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

The Colbert Report
Tags: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

And, oh yeah, the folks at Fox and Friends are equally full of shit.

What a surprise.

I read it for the articles.

Silvio Berlusconi is prime minister of Italy. He also runs a major Italian television network, and always seems to be "hands on" when hiring the honeys that will be on his network.

And we are definitely talking "honeys", as in very pretty and very plural.

Think Newt Gingrich's politics, Donald Trump's ethics and Hugh Hefner's horny-ness, with more money than all of them combined.

Talking Points Memo has a slideshow of the many women involved in the multiple brewing scandals, including this young lady who got a lavish gift from Berlusconi for her 18th birthday. Berlusconi turns 75 this year.

Enjoy the slideshow. You may want to turn the lights down. Some Marvin Gaye might also be in order.

"There's... nothin' wrong with me-eee... lovin' you-oo!"

(I take it back. There might be something wrong, like certain laws.)

Knock me down with a feather.

Just when you think you can't be surprised.

The Nigerian government is starting a bribery case against Halliburton and officials say there is a good chance that charges with be brought against Dick Cheney, former president of Halliburton, former Vice President of the United States and currently leader of The Dead Who Walk The Earth. There's talk of an Interpol arrest warrant.
(recent photo from AFP)

Trying to kick the schadenfreude habit, but backsliding from time to time.

Schadenfreude is the pleasure one feels at the misfortune of others. I consider it a trait for a poorly evolved person, so let me say this about Tom DeLay being found guilty.

OOOK OOOK OOK AAH AHH AAAAHHH!

Evolution humor. Heh heh.

Tom DeLay is the quintessential example of why I hate a certain type of Christian. He smiled in his mug shot so people could see the love of Jesus. He said he wanted a speedy trial, but his lawyers delayed and delayed and delayed the proceedings. Of course, that was his lawyers' doing. His hands were clean, not unlike Pontius Pilate's.

The words "liar" and "scumbag" in the dictionary should have this picture next to them.

He and his defenders in the press said the charges were nonsensical and a witch hunt and he would be shown to be completely innocent of all charges. After all, all he did was get a check directly from corporations for $190,000 that he couldn't give to political campaigns, sent it instead to the Republican National Committee who sent checks totaling $190,000 to various campaigns.

In the period of about one business day.

This isn't the textbook definition of money laundering. This is the textbook definition of EXTREMELY BAD money laundering. Money laundering usually follows a convoluted route over an extended period of time. Forensic accountants should be up all night sorting through shadow accounts and dummy corporations and finally at three o'clock in the morning drinking cold coffee say "AHA! That's how they did it. We've got them!"

DeLay and his lawyers are now saying it's a gross miscarriage of justice.

Horse. Shit.

This was a quick trial and the defense was perfunctory. The jurors took 19 hours to deliberate and they get to have Thanksgiving at home with loved ones. The judge thanked them for their service and so do I.

Delay could be sentenced to up to life in prison. I think that is ridiculous when murderers get a couple years. What I would like to see the judge do is count the years between the crime and the trial and multiply that by two. Give Tom DeLay sixteen years in The Big House and tell him it would have been shorter if his lawyers could have pulled their thumbs out of each others' asses a little quicker than they did.

Again, I am not feeling very evolved about this, but Tom DeLay gets off easy. I wish we could find a way to get him to be bunk mates with Joran van der Sloot down in Peru.

Justice in Texas. Unlike Southern California, they don't play.

Exciting new ideas in disenfranchisement!

During the 1980's, a popular meme was that the left has no new ideas and the right was the ideology moving forward. Of course, the main idea of the right is very old.

"We hate government. If you let us run government, we promise you will soon hate it as much as we do."

I suppose when you have an idea as catchy as that one, you really don't need new ideas. Most of the weirdest ideas from the Tea Party crowd are obvious variations on that theme.


Where can we find exciting new ideas? Why, Hollywood, of course!

Enter Pat Sajak, deep thinker, connoisseur of ceramic dogs, every bit as good at math as Vanna White is good at spelling, which is to say he can read numbers off a teleprompter. Writing in the National Review Online, Pat puts forward the exciting new plan to take the vote away from public employees. After all, public employees want to keep being paid, so doesn't that mean they have a conflict of interest whenever an issue would mean less revenue is taken in?

To be fair to Mr. Sajak, he doesn't want to take my entire right to vote away. He doesn't want to put public employees in the same boat with ex-felons. He just thinks the 240,000 people like me who are California state employees shouldn't vote on measures where we have our livelihoods at stake. I expect he feels the same way about local government employees voting on local bond measures. Extend that to everyone who cashes a government check that isn't federal and we are talking about millions of people across the country.

As a public employee, lemme 'splain, Pat. I don't have a conflict of interest. I have an interest. You have an opposing interest, an interest in paying as little in taxes as you possibly can. You are right that it's easier to win an argument when you don't let the other side speak, but here's the chance of this little ploy gaining traction. Zero. Even if this nonsense got on the ballot somewhere AND more than 50% of voters thought it sounded like a good idea, the courts would kill it. You don't get to take away people's citizenship rights just because they work for the government.

I first heard about this over on the progressive website Talking Points Memo. Most of the commenters went with jokes that were some variations on "Pat, I like to buy a _____." Instead of ending with a gag, I'll end with a brag. This is yet another moment when I'm proud to say I won my money on Jeopardy! and not on your crap show, Pat.

You should stick with the prize packages. This "thinking for a living" gig is harder than it looks.

Suffering under cruel regimes. Not just for foreigners anymore.

At nearly every World Cup, there is at least one match that is a flat out embarrassment, and since the field has been increased to 32 teams, the probability of an awful mismatch has risen to a near certainty.

There are still more matches to play in the round robin tourneys, but the game that looks like it will take this year's Bambi Meets Godzilla award is North Korea getting shellacked 7-0 by Portugal, a squad that played the Ivory Coast to a terrible 0-0 draw in their first match. Way back in 1966, Portugal and North Korea played an exciting 5-3 match in the knockout round, with Portugal finishing on top on goals by the first African football superstar Eusebio, who was born in the Portuguese colony of Mozambique.

Being from Northern California, I can empathize with the poor North Korean fans, as East Bay football fans are tormented by the uglier and older brother of Kim Jong Il, the senile and vicious tyrant Kim Jong Al. Everyone realizes that neither of these despots will ever give up power voluntarily, and those who thirst for freedom and a better life must wait like vultures for the Grim Reaper to sweep these human plagues away.

Sadly, even the escape provided by their inevitable deaths is thwarted, as both seem prepared to have their respective idiot sons take the reigns of power from their cold dead hands.

Oh, bitter fate!

Confederate History Month

Bob McDonnell, Republican governor of Virginia, issued a statement proclaiming April Confederate History Month. His first proclamation made no mention of slavery and this caused protest, even from some of his ardent backers. His later statement corrected this oversight, but it also included that ever popular weasel language "if any Virginian was offended, I apologize to them." This creepy non-apology implies that it is just the thin skinned who might dislike this sort of thing. This is the "fair and balanced" view that there are always two sides and each side should be heard.

This is wrong. Sometimes one side is completely in the wrong, and pretending that slavery is just an insignificant issue when dealing with the Civil War is completely wrong.

So I am going to write a post for Confederate History Month, not as a Virginian but as an American and not just about the four year act of treason the South committed, but the causes and consequences of this dark period in American history.

The stain of slavery and the founding of our nation: Most of the presidents of the United States before the Civil War owned slaves. Some of the non-slave owners had very clean hands, most notably John Adams and John Quincy Adams. It should also be noted they were the only one-term presidents among the first seven, all the rest slave owners.

At least one slave owner, Martin Van Buren, had a major change of heart and became an abolitionist late in his political career. The worst offenders were the richest men, Washington and Jefferson. The three presidents just prior to Lincoln did not own slaves, the northerners Pierce, Fillmore and Buchanan. But they were pathetically weak presidents who made the inevitable war that much worse by their inaction.

The leaders of the Confederacy were fools and the Bible makes that clear: Jesus states in Luke 14:31: "What king, marching into battle would not first sit down and decide whether with ten thousand troops he can successfully oppose another king marching upon him with twenty thousand troops?" The situation at the beginning of the war was even worse than this, because the South fired first with an inferior force. Maybe they thought God was on their side. Perhaps they thought their generals as clever as Julius Caesar, who won several battles in the Roman Civil War with smaller armies than those who opposed him.

But this turned out not to be a war merely of battles but a war of attrition, and after Lincoln had run out of idiots to lead the Union Army and installed Grant, the bloody and vicious conclusion was an inevitability as long as the president did not waver in his resolution to restore the Union.

Turning bloody war into uneasy peace: The modern view of history is that though wars end, they often sow the seeds for the next war. Though he was killed by unrepentant traitors only months after the war's end, Lincoln set forward a policy of restoring the Union that worked, though the hard feelings and divisions last to this day. In my lifetime, the uneasiness between Northerners and Southerners has waned considerably, but the violent civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s were like low level warfare continuation of the Civil War that had ended some ninety years before the Montgomery Bus boycott.

From the end of the war to the end of the 19th Century, every presidential election was a political re-enactment of the war. Republicans then were not like Republicans now, except that that shared the trait of being bold. It was common for Republican politicians to "wave the bloody shirt", to remind voters that everyone who had been a traitor to his country was a registered Democrat. The polarization of politics today is tame compared to American politics after the Civil War. Many historians claim that the first event after 1865 that brought Americans together as Americans was the sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana in 1898.

The great political inversion: For generations after the Civil War, the Democrats were the party of the South and the Republicans the party of the North. Glenn Beck, a weak historian with a relatively large audience, believes all evil in this land can be laid at the door of progressivism, and he includes Teddy Roosevelt in his list of villains. (Beck, an obvious buffoon, also thinks Thomas Paine, the most socialist leaning figure of the Revolutionary era, would be on Beck's side if Paine were alive today.) T.R. was definitely a Progressive, and his leaving the Republicans to start his own party is an important step in the Republican Party's move to the right. His cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt was a Democrat, and F.D.R.'s administration is a bellwether moment in the Democratic Party's shift to the left. But even in F.D.R.'s time, the Democratic coalition included the southern Democrats who resisted all efforts to give full de facto citizenship rights to the descendants of slaves.

The civil rights movement made a new breed of Democrats in the South, though credit should be given to Dwight Eisenhower for sending Federal troops to Little Rock, the kind of action that would strike fear into the hearts of the weak minded Tea Party people today. It was Richard Nixon, easily the cleverest Republican president of my lifetime, who made the inversion complete with the Southern strategy. Many of the unrepentant racists of the South, people who were always welcome to air their grievances in the pages of William F. Buckley's National Review, were welcomed into the Republican Party after they realized they would have no seat at the table in the new Democratic Party. A disgusting racist like Richard Russell of Georgia, who died in 1971, would remain a Democrat until the day he died, but those who survived either became Republicans like Strom Thurmond or independents like George Wallace.

I am all in favor of teaching Confederate history, the history of traitors and idiots, both the idiots at the top of the food chain that started a war they couldn't win and the useful idiots at the bottom of the food chain who gave up their lives in the hundreds of thousands to preserve the right to own slaves, a right they would never be able to exercise because they were dirt poor. Virginia in particular should remember their special place in the Confederacy, because it was their Slave Codes of 1705 that allowed the grotesque inequality of wealth that made the bloody conflagration inevitable. Perhaps learning a little Confederate history, the buffoonish people in the Tea Party will realize they are more the descendants the cowardly traitor John Wilkes Booth than they are the heirs to John Hancock.

Here endeth the lesson.

Doing the right thing and other unthinkable options.

There is a saying that became popular after Watergate, "The cover-up is worse than the crime." Like any conventional wisdom, it has its moments and other times, it doesn't even come close to conveying the truth.

We should start with the difference between a scandal and a crime. Michael Steele is the head of the Republican National Committee, and while there have been plenty of scandals during his tenure, none have risen to the level of criminality. The latest, a $2,000 expenditure for a trip to a high end strip club in West Hollywood that ended up as a receipt paid for by the RNC, is getting plenty of play in the press but is of no interest to any law enforcement agency.

It's just embarrassing. Or if you watch The Daily Show, it's just HIGH-larious.

Technically, no crime and no cover-up, just another of many embarrassing gaffes that have been the hallmark of the Steele tenure as RNC chairman, a tenure all liberals and progressives hope will last for many years to come.

Oh, heck, let's go for it. We want Steele as RNC chair for life.

The right thing to do for Steele if he wants to help his party is to resign, but obviously, the right thing is not an option.

Having sex with a woman who isn't your wife isn't a crime, unless some idiot actually succeeds in turning the Ten Commandments into statute law. So in this case the cover-up is worse than the act it covers up, because the cover-up might actually involve crimes. According to reports at The Huffington Post quoting a Nevada political reporter named Jon Ralston, the Justice Department is doing due diligence on an indictment of Senator John Ensign of Nevada for payments he made to the family of his mistress Cindy Hampton. Ms. Hampton and her husband both worked on Ensign's staff, and the odd ways that money got into the Hampton bank accounts may have broken several laws.

John Ensign is one of those upstanding Christians that belong to an odd little group called The Family (no relation to the Charles Manson cult of the same name). The Family maintains a nice little sleepover mansion on C Street in Washington, a Christian fellowship that believe that God's work is done by special people with lots of power who commune with Special Jesus, not that scruffy commie Jew boy who got himself killed about 2,000 years ago.

Ensign came forward and asked for the resignations of both Bill Clinton and Larry Craig for their sexual misdeeds. He could do the right thing, but obviously that isn't an option.

And then there is the cover-up that is nowhere near as bad as the crime, because the crime is multiple instances of the rape of children. Joseph Ratzinger, now going under the alias of Pope Benedict XVI, was deeply involved in the hiding and re-assignment of pedophile priests. I chose this picture of him that makes him look like an old and decrepit underworld boss who cannot be touched by the law because that is what he currently is.

In some ways, this should be a legal matter and not one for the church. The parents of the molested children could have gone to the secular authorities instead of the to church bureaucracy to get justice done, but in a place like Ireland, if the church refuses to co-operate, can anyone be sure the police or the prosecutors or the judges would do the right thing? Would a cop be willing to arrest a priest and would that cop's superiors back him up? If the cops are clean, are the district attorneys? And if the system works all the way up to that point, who's to say some judge won't defend the rights of the corrupt church instead of the rights of the completely innocent victims?

There are times when the power of the church has been severely limited, sometimes in a power struggle with some other powerful institution, sometimes because the faithful rose up in protest. It's time for some of the old grumpy people pretending to be John Hancock and Sam Adams in this country change their goofy outfits and walk around in public pretending to be Martin Luther. The church is unclean and deserves to wither and die if it does not purge itself and reform.

Pope Benedict XVI could do the right thing and resign, but I think you've caught on to the pattern if you've read this far.

Making heroes out of cowards.

In America, we have always shown reverence for the Founding Fathers. The clearest manifestation now is the grumblings of a bunch of old white people who have called their movement the Tea Party. It's not surprising that their message is one of unfocused violence, because they have decided that cowardly scum were actually heroes, a lie we have been feeding impressionable kids for over two hundred years now.

The men who led the original Boston Tea Party, the most famous of their number being Sam Adams, were a bunch of racist vandals. I work on a college campus where vandalism is a fact of life, and I have a hard time making heroes out of people destroying other people's property, whatever the reason. Worse than that, they dressed up as Indians, if I can use the quaint term we learned back in the day when I first heard this story in school. It was a stupid ruse and everybody saw through it at the time, but these weasels lied about it anyway. You have to imagine the guys who thought it was clever were pretty well liquored up when they decided it was worth a go. I always think of these jerks as the inspiration for people like the child murderer Susan Smith or the woman who put a backwards B on her forehead during the 2008 election, people who commit awful acts and throw the blame on some made up scary black guy.

If you are going to make heroes of cowards, the next logical step is to commit cowardly acts yourself, and that is the story this week from the Tea Party crowd. There have been several acts of vandalism and many threats of violence from these creeps this week, most targeting the offices of Democratic lawmakers. One of these self-proclaimed constitutional scholars decided to vandalize the home of a brother of a congressman. Do they think this makes them look serious?

These unstable idiots are being egged on by jerks on talk radio. I am loath to predict the future, but I do not see this ending until blood is spilled, until these deluded so-called patriots and revolutionaries kill somebody. I don't know what will happen after that. I expect that it will splinter the already fractured Tea Party movement even further. The assholes that think they are the modern day equivalent of the racist coward Sam Adams will want more violence, while a lot of everyday folks will realize this isn't a second American Revolution, just an extension of the white Reign of Terror that plagued the South when I was young, the last gasps of stupid people on the losing side of history.

It's felt like this for more than a year now.

Charles Schulz died ten years ago, but his strip lives on. Whether that's a good thing is debatable, but given the strip's longevity, I am confident that even young people know what this panel means.

For me, it's an analogy to the health care debate we are now told is mere days or weeks from being resolved.

If I can pick at my own analogy, the flaw is that in the comic strip, it was always the same football, it was always Charlie Brown hoping to kick it and it was always Lucy Van Pelt pulling it away. With the health care debate, the football has changed, there have been several hopeful kickers and several people happily pulling it away at the last second.

The Republicans are barely in the Charlie Brown-Lucy metaphor. Maybe for a little while Olympia Snowe was playing hard to get, but for the most part, the part of Lucy has been played by Democrats or independents. Max Baucus had a few weeks when he got to pull the football away. When the public option died early on and the Medicare buy-in plan was the strong fallback position, it was the despicable scumbag Joe Lieberman who played Lucy, opposing a plan he had supported mere months before. House Democrats as different as Bob Stupak, Nancy Pelosi and Dennis Kucinich have all taken their turn pulling the football away, whether the thing being pulled away was the whole bill or just the public option. The death of Ted Kennedy and the result of the special election was yet another defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.

There are a lot of parts of the bill as it currently stands that I don't love. That's politics. I'm not convinced that the defeat of health care is the end of the Obama presidency. Bill and Hillary Clinton lost the heath care debate early in his first term and he still won re-election. Presidential elections have a lot to do with the actual candidates running, not just the electorate's mood towards the parties, and right now the Republicans are not inclined to put forward a nominee as moderate as Attila the Hun. With all that said, I do want the House and Senate to get a bill together that Obama can sign. I know it won't shut the Republicans up, but it might get the press off their narrative that Obama can't get anything done when in fact a lot of changes have been implemented.

People allegedly in the know say we are at the end game. Still, it feels like there's a football, there's someone trying to kick it and someone else promising to hold it, and we've seen this story before.

Believing mad things.

I nicked this picture from the website Talking Points Memo, who were following up on a press release from the SEC. The man in the remarkable picture is Sean David Morton, professional cat breeder and writer, director and producer of a zero budget film entitled Joe Killionaire, a slasher film/reality TV parody.

Neither of those pursuits is in any way illegal. The SEC has nailed him because he bills himself as "America's Natural Prophet" and claims psychic powers. Unlike Benny Hinn's extremely bad track record as a prophet, Mr. Morton claims that he correctly predicted the dates, times, epicenters and Richter scale measurements of several major earthquakes of the past, including ones in Kobe, Japan, Northridge and San Francisco, though technically he should have called the 1989 earthquake the Loma Prieta.

He also says he predicted the exact dates of the high and low points for the Dow and NASDAQ over the past few decades, and put these claims up as his bona fides for his new job, a foreign currency trader. Since 2006, over 100 people have sent him roughly $6,000,000, which means an average of $60,000 a pop. Morton and his wife have siphoned off $240,000 to their Psychic Research Institute, and this is the act the SEC found objectionable.

I was going to make a small blurb about this on The Other Blog, but this isn't a story the tabloids would follow, as much fun as it is, because Mr. Morton is in no way famous. Instead, the part that I want to write about is the 100 people who believed this nonsense, each to the tune of $60,000 or so, more that the median yearly household income in the country.

Mr. Morton is a minor league grifter, but six million bucks is still a nice amount of walking around money is anybody's book. He's less than nothing compared to Bernie Madoff and his personal fortune is a pittance compared to the amount of money Benny Hinn and his wife will now split up. But about 100 people, a tiny percentage of the American population, sent this guy a substantial amount of money not based on religious teachings like Hinn or a strong but unwarranted personal reputation like Madoff, but instead because they believe in perfect psychics.

I try hard not to believe in mad things. But as I wrote about six months ago in a post about true believers and confirmation bias, people believe what they want to believe and assume that people who believe otherwise are mad.

We won't be having a ridiculous TV news debate about Sean David Morton, with the idea that "some people believe this" and "some people believe that". I expect this guy has next to no defenders right now. But something doesn't have to be as minority a view as belief in psychic currency traders to have its true believers, and the opposite view will also be so blessed, with each side thinking the other is stupid or deluded or evil, or perhaps a combination of all three.

This is obviously the situation dealing with climate change or global warming, whichever phrase you prefer. Over the past century, the average temperature across the world has been rising, there is no argument about that. Deniers note that the rise has not been statistically significant over the past fifteen years, and they extrapolate this to mean the problem is over. Statistical significance is harder to achieve with smaller data samples, but it's too much to ask a public often proud of their mathematical ignorance to know this.

And then there's the separate question of whether human actions have anything to do with the situation. The debate has been oversimplified to CO2 levels, and the deniers correctly point out that CO2 is a naturally occurring compound that is important for living organisms, most especially plants, the organisms responsible for creating oxygen, vital for the animal kingdom. Human sources only add a little more CO2 to the system, but sometimes only a little more can have a dramatic difference. Also, there have been climate changes before the Industrial Revolution, when humans had a much smaller population and their main pollution source was burning wood. These are the numbers that convince the deniers they are right in their view that all these warnings amount to nothing.

Science isn't math. There are no puzzling counterexamples to the Pythagorean Theorem. The data that convinces me that something is happening deals in very big numbers. It's been about 15,000,000 years since CO2 levels have been this high. A "permafrost" in Siberia that covers as much area as Germany and France combined is beginning to melt for the first time in 10,000 years, and that releases more methane into the atmosphere, heightening the CO2 problem without being "man made". I don't trust predictions of the future, either by psychics or by scientists. I have no idea how soon we can expect an ice free Arctic Ocean in the summer or if it will ever happen, or the shifting of the Gulf Stream due to changes in the heat balance in the Atlantic. I don't know what problem caused by a changing climate will be the first to impact a massive number of people, but I do believe it's coming.

Here's why it's coming. We aren't nomads anymore. We have built major cities in places previously completely inhospitable to human life because of the invention of air conditioning, which sucks up massive amounts of energy. We travel to nasty places and set up camp because we can find petroleum there. When the bad things happen, large numbers of people will be stuck like glue to the worst places on earth.

Here's why I believe that humans are helping to cause the problem, a little example of the law of unintended consequences. For a few days after September 11, 2001, air traffic in the United States effectively came to a halt. No planes meant no contrails, those thin visible clouds that appear after a plane in the right conditions. Most contrails just vanish soon enough, but some become seeds for creating actual clouds, some that become rain clouds or heavy cover. Not flying planes for less than a week across the Continental United States changed the weather patterns. That tiny part of what humans do habitually and without thinking made a difference. Humans do so much habitually and without thinking that it seems impossible to me that the totality of our rapidly changing life style has no effect on the largely closed system in which we live.

Some who disagree with me may read this. I promise you I'm not mad.