Make that a cold bath. It hit 107° F here Friday. 15th consecutive 100°-plus day? 17th? 200th?
Birds refuse to bathe in the bird bath — they’re saving it to drink. The sprinkler system misfired yesterday — had to kill the power to fix a kitchen light and the clock on the sprinkler got a few hours off — and we were alerted by dozens of bluejays broadcasting the news. “Water!” they screamed. Dallas isn’t supposed to be home to robins, but there were three of them dancing on the wet sidewalk with the jays, plus assorted other birds — house finches, mourning doves, white-winged doves, cardinals, and that little scamp, the Bewick’s wren. The woodpeckers declined to land on the ground. No room for grackles.
While soaking, and cooling, what do we read? In total chaos, or at least, in no particular order:
Cartoon by Chicago cartoonist John T. McCutcheon, 1909
Reagan’s mythology leading us off a cliff? Paul Rosenberg of Random Lengths, lists the false myths about Ronald Reagan that, he says, poison political discussion today and bring Washington to gridlock. Oddly enough, Rosenberg’s piece got carried on the English Al Jazeera site. Is it true that Bill Clinton was more popular than Reagan? Maybe progressives should get a group up to start naming things after Bill Clinton; or maybe we should just name it the Ronald Reagan National Debt.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman gives a sober assessment of Republican politics these days in his New York Times column: “Getting to Crazy.” Sez Krugman:
A number of commentators seem shocked at how unreasonable Republicans are being. “Has the G.O.P. gone insane?” they ask.
Why, yes, it has. But this isn’t something that just happened, it’s the culmination of a process that has been going on for decades. Anyone surprised by the extremism and irresponsibility now on display either hasn’t been paying attention, or has been deliberately turning a blind eye.
And may I say to those suddenly agonizing over the mental health of one of our two major parties: People like you bear some responsibility for that party’s current state.
If you’re discussing whether various states execute innocent people, an informed discussion better include Herrera v. Collins 506 U.S. 390, the 1993 case in which Texas won the right to execute an innocent man — innocence being not a good reason to reopen the case, the Supreme Court ruled. If God is punishing the U.S., I think this case may be why.
You voted for Obama, but he’s not given the performance you think he should have? So you’re thinking of voting for a third-party candidate? Read this. It makes Santaya’s Ghost smile.
Planning to join Texas’s candidate for Saul of the Year Rick Perry at his pray-in? Don’t bring your gun. That means you, Mr. NRA!
This is the astonishing sort of statement that makes P. Z. Myers in his crabbiest modes of atheism look completely calm and cool in his rationalism.
Our old authoritarian, anti-discussion friend Neil Simpson said:
As a Christian, I scoff at superstitions. I leave those to non-believers.
Yeah, the same Neil Simpson who holds superstitious convictions that evolution is wrong, warming doesn’t occur and CO2 can’t be a greenhouse gas, etc., etc. Check out his blog — is there any statement he makes that is not based in superstition?
He’ll probably argue that he has proof of Jesus, so what Jesus would have called faith, Simpson will call evidence-based views.
How can someone practice the faith when they deny it’s faith? Aye, there’s a huge problem for Christianity these days.
superstition [soo-per-stish-uhn] – noun
1. a belief or notion, not based on reason or knowledge, in or of the ominous significance of a particular thing, circumstance, occurrence, proceeding, or the like.
2. a system or collection of such beliefs.
3. a custom or act based on such a belief.
and,
relgion [ri-lij-uhn] – noun
1. a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.
2. a specific fundamental set of beliefs and practices generally agreed upon by a number of persons or sects: the Christian religion; the Buddhist religion.
3. the body of persons adhering to a particular set of beliefs and practices: a world council of religions.
And, why do people so very, very much, want that story to be true and not fictional?
Here’s the list of stories from this blog that were most popular over the past seven days; the top two stories hold about those ranks week in and week out:
Sarah Palin's custom-painted bus, parked -- is this abandoned parking lot the last stop?
That’s rather unusual, don’t you think? Our Band of Merry History Teachers stuck to our bus tour last week until the bus wore out. I’d expect Palin to keep it up so long as the air conditioning held out.
No, I’m not running. I may be better prepared than some of the candidates, but I have a job to do, and I can’t speak Mandarin.
Ed Darrell wrestling with the Presidential Seal and a balky teleprompter.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
The fictional but very popular memes that environmentalists hate humans, humanity and capitalism wouldn’t bother me so much if they didn’t blind their believers to larger truths and sensible policies on environmental protection.
One may argue the history of the environmental movement, how most of the originators were great capitalists and humanitarians — think Carnegie, Laurance Rockefeller, Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, and all the early medical doctors who warned of the dangers of pollution-caused diseases — but it falls on deaf ears on the other sides.
No kidding, these are actual comments. Did the authors think no one would notice?
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The good people at WordPress, using Akisment, do their best to keep that spam out of comments, too. Thanks to them.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
BRUSSELS (The Borowitz Report) – In what many are hailing as a breakthrough solution to Greece’s crippling debt crisis, Greece today offered to repay loans from the European Union nations by giving them a gigantic horse.
Finance ministers from sixteen EU nations awoke in Brussels this morning to find that a huge wooden horse had been wheeled into the city center overnight.
Sometimes I think we could do better than some of the state standards if we just used a New Yorker cartoon standard: Kids will be considered educated when they can explain all the cartoons in four consecutive issues of The New Yorker, and tell why they are funny.
In the same piece, Borowitz digs at Palin’s supporters and al-Qaeda’s new CEO. It’s worth the click.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Republicans and Tea Partiers in Michigan can’t exactly be accused of throwing their grandmothers under the bus, but only because there was no bus coming at that moment.
U.S. Rep. Justin Amash, R-Michigan, scheduled a meeting with Tea Party supporters last Saturday. When senior citizens showed up, apparently fearing they would raise some questions about the Republican budget plan with figuratively throws grandma under the bus with drastic cuts to Medicare, organizers called police, claiming the post-65 group had started physical violence.
You couldn’t make this stuff up, could you? If it were fiction, who would believe it?
One way Republicans have found of dealing with the bad press and hostility they’ve faced in public meetings over their highly unpopular budget plan has been what’s actually a pretty typical Republican response: censorship. They’ve clamped down on reporters and citizen journalists, barring them from recording the events.
In Michigan, they’ve taken it up a notch, courtesy of Tea Party control freaks who not only banned a group of senior citizens and reporters, but called security on them at an event with Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI).
Rep. Justin Amash held a townhall meeting sponsored by a Tea Party group on Saturday sponsored by a Tea Party group, but a group of senior citizens and two reporters — including this one — were denied entry to the event.The traditional purpose of a townhall meeting is for an elected official to meet with his constituents in public, giving the people a chance to ask questions and engage in dialogue with their representatives. But neither the organizers nor Amash apparently wanted to hear from or speak to a group of concerned senior citizens — even at a time when the fate of Medicare is being debated in Congress.
About eight senior citizens arrived at the Prince Conference Center on the Calvin College campus for a chance to question Amash concerning his voting record in regards to eliminating Medicare.
Once barred from attending the event, the seniors stood out in the parking lot where they were taking questions from this reporter and Tanya Somanader of Think Progress, the two members of the media who were denied access. Eventually, six security guards arrived on the scene and said that both the seniors and the reporters had to leave.
Amash, and the Michigan Republicans, appear to be too embarrassed to talk about the GOP budget approved by the House of Representatives. Those senior citizens kicked out of the meeting had been invited to attend by the Tea Party, apparently unaware that their ideas are unpopular among their own nominal supporters. Invited, then kicked out.
Amash and Republicans should be embarrassed.
At least the security guys who responded also saw the humor in the ridiculous situation
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
I get e-mail that makes me smile on a dreary day (everything below quoted from the e-mail):
Ed —
Let me introduce you to Jerome Corsi.
This week he released a new book that the publisher says will be a bestseller “of historic proportions.”
The title is “Where’s the Birth Certificate?” — yes, really.
Corsi’s work is a greatest-hits reel of delusions, ranging from 9/11 conspiracies to claiming that there is an infinite supply of oil in the Earth’s core. In 2008, he published a book about Barack Obama claiming, among other things, that he (a) is a secret Muslim; (b) is secretly anti-military; (c) secretly dealt drugs; and (d) secretly supported terrorist actions when he was eight years old. So many secrets!
FactCheck.org called Corsi’s work “a mishmash of unsupported conjecture, half-truths, logical fallacies and outright falsehoods.”
There’s really no way to make this stuff completely go away. The only thing we can do is laugh at it — and make sure as many other people as possible are in on the joke.
Last year, the President said, “I can’t spend all of my time with my birth certificate plastered on my forehead.”
This is about as close as we can get.
If the facts can’t make these ridiculous smears go away, we can at least have a little fun with it.
And then we’ll get back to the important work of supporting the President as he tackles real problems like high gas prices, the deficit, and unemployment.
Thanks,
Julianna
Julianna Smoot
Deputy Campaign Manager
Obama for America
The financial crisis in one handy tattoo: surely you remember the formula that caused the financial crisis. But you haven’t seen it like this, from a creative friend of Marketplace who works for advertising firm Wieden + Kennedy, based in Portland. He enlisted “the ever-brilliant designer James Tung, computational typeface author Donald Knuth, and the steady hand of Cheyenne at Atlas Tattoo, according to his Facebook post[.]
RYSSDAL: This guy, David Li, what was he trying to do?
SALMON: What David Li was trying to do was look at lots of different bonds and try and work out whether they were all moving in the same direction or not. Whether they were correlated or not. Whether they were independent of each other or not. And he created this astonishing piece of mathematics called the Gaussian copula function, which sought to answer that very question.
RYSSDAL: What does that mean — Gaussian copula? I mean, if I can just take a little sidebar here for a second.
SALMON: People get very scared when they hear the word Gaussian. But this is just one way of looking to see whether one set of probabilities is associated with another set of probabilities. The really key part of the Gaussian copula function is the copula bit. It’s what’s known as a multivariant copula. You can take lots of different bonds or stocks or any kind of securities you like, and you can throw them all into one big equation and out the end get a single number which is easily manipulable and trackable as they say in the world of quantitative finance.
If you mention “Gaussian copula functions” at a cocktail party, you might do well to avoid anyone who appears to know what you’re talking about . . .
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 