The Economist (one of my favorite publications) ran an article Dec.22 disputing Paul Krugman’s contention that the wealth gap is worse now than it was in the “Gilded Age” of the robber barons. They didn’t quibble with Krugman’s numbers; their point is that the lifestyles of the poor are now much closer to those of the rich. Both have cars, television sets, and refrigerators; both eat meat and milk – whereas a century ago the poor were on foot and without meat. Following is a letter to the editor of the Economist.
Sir
Your article on the wealth gap — “The New (Improved) Gilded Age”– is the 21st century version of “Let them eat cake.” I hope you’re right that lifestyles of the poor are closer than ever to those of the rich even though the income gap is growing wider. This will relieve the consciences of us progressives because it means that when we finally confiscate the obscene wealth of the billionaires, they can continue to live quite well.
The New York Times doesn’t like to publish our querulous letters, so we just publish them here. Since newspaper circulations keep shrinking while the audience for this web site has increased by over a billion percent since last year (when it didn’t exist) we may soon be able to cut them out of the loop entirely. Here are two of the latest.
To the Editor:
Get some new headline writers.
The ones you have are trying to destroy the paper and the country. Two sneak attacks this week alone.
1. For a story on Bush administration lies about CIA tapes, a subhead so bad that even Liar in Chief George Bush and Apologist-in Chief Dana Perino are able to demand and get a withdrawal and correction. That’s setting the bar so low even the centipedes can clear it.
2. On Friday’s front page, a headline that will enable right-wing religious fanatics to convince their zombie armies that stem cell research causes cancer. It says, “Scientists weigh stem cells’ role as cancer cause.”
Twenty-six paragraphs later, on page A-26, it’s mentioned that cancerous stem cells are not the same as embryonic stem cells. Who reads 26 paragraphs of anything?
So now the forces of darkness — enemies of science in the Bush administration, the honey-dippers of talk radio, and religious posturers of the far right — have all been handed an invitation to tell the world that the New York Times says stem cells are not only immoral but also carcinogenic.
You’re giving aid and comfort to Rupert Murdoch’s sinister subversion, and he didn’t even have to buy your newspaper to get it.
AND FIRE THE PROFESSORS
To the Editor
In “More Juice, Less Punch” in your Saturday (Dec 22) Op-Ed, authors Jonathan Cole and Stephen Stigler are statisticians who are violating the most fundamental rules of a statistical study.
They purport to show through statistics that pitchers and batters named by the Mitchell Commission actually fared no better after taking drugs than before taking them. They admit that the advancing age of these players might otherwise have worsened their averages but then brush off this factor as unaddressable by their data,
Worse, they ignore the need for a control group. Had they compared their statistics for drug-taking players with a group of pitchers and batters of comparable ages not known to have taken drugs, they might have a conclusion worth considering. How did the “clean” players fare as they aged, pitching and batting against players who were juicing?
The professors should take some research-enhancing drugs.
Oh, weep for Adonais, he is dead! Pain, pain, pain, forever pain! See? It took two great poets to summon the proper grief for the death of service in American business. Oh, the humanity! (That last one wasn’t a poet; it was Herb Morrison, a radio journalist reporting on the crash of the Hindenburg.)
But perhaps I exaggerate. It was only a local banker. Holly opened an account for her ceramics business, which (on the spur of the moment, filling out a form in the bank) she named Holly Pots. So checkbooks and things began arriving addressed to Holly Pots.
But there was more: Bart, the banker who signed up the account, said he wanted to see Holly’s place of business. Not to inspect it – she wasn’t trying to borrow any money – just because he was fascinated and because the bank cares about its customers. So an appointment was made for 9 a.m. Wednesday.
The administrative, creative, pot-throwing, glazing, manufacturing, and shipping operations of Holly Pots and its staff of one are housed in a 12 foot by 15 foot, second floor corner space in a 19th century firehouse on Pittsburgh’s North Side. Other potters, artists, and sculptors rent similar spaces there. But Holly’s is prime real estate because it contains the pole the firemen once used to slide down to the first floor when the bell rang.
Wednesday at 9 a.m. proved to be a propitious time for a visiting banker, because a glaze firing was scheduled that day for the big kiln in the Firehouse, carrying the hopes and fears of three different potters – who can curse in three different languages – through the perils of 2350 degrees Fahrenheit and whatever could possibly go wrong in firing a kiln. It takes hours. Everyone was alerted to the banker’s imminent arrival and prepared to treat him as if had never been guilty of banking in his life.
But Bart the Banker bailed out. He never called. He never showed. Imagine! A mighty river of money – literally hundreds of dollars will flow through that account, generating dozens of dollars in fees and incalculable prestige – and no banker.
The long-awaited confluence of art with capitalism, thwarted. A sad day for banking. A sad day for America. But the potters were happy – nothing blew up.
Congress is showboating again, pretending to address U.S. energy dependency. They just passed new fuel efficiency standards – which they also did in the 1970s, and fuel efficiency of cars is worse now than it was then. The game is, they set standards to be met in the future, then their fervent contributors in the oil lobby and the car industry lobby get them to back down as soon as people begin to forget.
At the same time, congress is moving toward a huge program to convert corn and other biomass into ethanol, which is driving up food prices and consuming as much energy as it saves. That boondoggle will also evaporate, after making a number of insiders rich.
My energy plan has no such cynicism and corruption. It’s pure science and common sense.
First, measure the energy potential of biomass. You can use Einstein’s equation, e=mc2, if you plan to convert all of the matter into energy, but most people cringe at nuclear power. I use a different, more realistic measure:
The worse something tastes, the more energy it contains.
Gasoline and uranium taste terrible. Corn is pretty good, so it’s a weak energy source. The worst tasting, most powerful energy generators of all figure to be parsley, cilantro, and ratatouille. Ask the French army – their machine guns go ratatouille, ratatouille, ratatouille!
As for parsley, I subscribe to the theory that it’s controlled by the Mafia. Nobody wants it. Everybody gets it.
I was going to include gazpacho soup because that could be piped directly into the refinery, but Barb likes gazpacho, so I’ll substitute asparagus. And chicken sausage.
Of course tastes differ, so we can all show up in the town square with our own choices, and have a priest bless the whole pile and then say a biomass.
Okay, so it won’t generate much energy. It won’t use much, either; and people like me will feel much better knowing that the insiders are on the outside, there are no billions to steal, and the parsley has gone to glory.
If you don’t ingest anything else from the news media this month (and who could blame you?) at least read Frank Rich in the Sunday Times Op-Ed pages: “Latter-Day Republicans and the Church of Oprah.” (You no longer have to be a subscriber to access NYTimes.com)
Some quick quotes:
*
referring to The McLaughlin Group:
“…one of the Beltway’s more repellent Sunday bloviations.”
*
“When I wrote here two weeks ago that racism is the dog that hasn’t barked in this campaign, some readers wrote in to say that only a fool would believe that white Americans would ever elect an African-American president, no matter what polls indicate. We’ll find out soon enough. If that’s the case, Mr. Obama can’t win in Iowa, which roughly 95 percent white, or in New Hampshire, which is 96 percent white.”
*
“After hearing someone like Mitt Romney preach his narrow, exclusionist idea of ‘Faith in America,’ some Americans may simply see a vote for Mr. Obama as a vote for faith in America itself.”
*
“This country has had its fill of often hypocritical family-values politicians dictating what is and is not acceptable religious and moral practice. Instead of handing down tablets of what constitutes faith in America, Romney-style, the Oprah-Obama movement practices an American form of ecumenicalism. It preaches a bit of heaven on earth in the form of a unified, live-and-let-live democracy…”
So the White Queen says to Alice, “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Lewis Wolpert uses this as the title for his book on the evolutionary origins of human beliefs (Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, W.W.Norton). We can’t do justice to it here, but it’s a fascinating synthesis – tying together three of the milestones on the road to becoming human: tool use, language, and the habit of causal inference. In his schema, the human trait of thinking in terms of cause and effect was engendered, or at least reinforced, by the use of tools, eventually developing the basis of all science and technology.
Trouble is, when we can’t identify the cause, we make one up. Or, we believe some conjecture, fable, or fairy tale that someone else made up – which opens the floodgates to religious and paranormal beliefs, superstitions, miracle cures, conspiracy theories, and political spin.
Folked-Up Medicine
On the subject of miracle cures and believing impossible things, chemistry professor and Washington Post food science columnist Robert L. Wolke has found a treasure trove of examples and shares them with the readers of Skeptical Inquirer in their January issue.
Dr. Wolke ran across an issue of a tabloid called Lighthouse, which calls itself “a chronicle of meaningful living.” Actually, it’s mostly adverttising, and he compiled lists of the therapies being offered, the promises they make, and the academic degrees claimed by their practitioners. A few are recognizable – MBA, MD, PhD, and RN – but then there are ABMP, DMQ, LPC, NBCCH, SSRM, and 21 others including AISI, which I’ve always thought stood for the American Iron & Steel Institute.
The catalogue of therapies, products, and services runs to 156 entries, so we can only cite a few: ioncleanse detoxification, lymphatic therapy, Lomi Lomi (I and II), mandala assessment, angel cards, group angel parties, hermetics (comes from the Greek for “We ain’t telling”), Vedic vibration technology, and regression therapy (disclosure: in a prior incarnation, I was a dial tone).
And what wonders might you experience from such esoteric nostrums? Again, a few of many promised epiphanies:
Being in touch with your totem animals, freedom from undetected obstacles to your soul, stronger connections to guides and angels, enhancement of your stem cells, the opening of your third eye (and the procurement of new glasses?), the clearing of your aura, and of course health, wealth, strength, success, and fulfilled desires.
All this, and trembling in anticipation of Lomi Lomi III.
Chimps vs. People
Creationists bristle at any mention of the fact that we share 98% of our genes with chimpanzees. Well, they had better stop bristling and hit the books because they’re being left in the dust by five year old chimps.
Japanese researchers set up a carefully monitored match of young chimps vs.young adult humans in tests of short-term memory, and the chimps won. These particular chimps had been taught the order of Arabic numerals 1 through 9, which may be more than some creationists have mastered, but the chimps had to compete against bright college students. Shown a screen displaying the numbers in random arrangement, the chimps and humans were to touch each one in numerical order. But when they touched #1, the rest turned into blank squares, so to finish the job they had to remember where each number was positioned.
On that test, the chimps made the same number of errors as the humans but finished faster. On a similar test using only five numbers – flashed on the screen for just two to four tenths of a second — a chimp named Ayumu beat all nine student competitors by a wide margin.
One consolation: Ayumu’s mom did even worse than the college students. Apparently, this is a skill that dissipates with age in both species.
Glowing Report on Cat Cloning
If anyone asks permission to clone your cat, say no.
South Korean researchers from two universities report they have cloned three Turkish Angora cats, modifying them in the process. They took skin cells from a cat and inserted a gene that codes for a red fluorescent protein before transplanting the modified cells into eggs.
Result: the cats glow in the dark. What an achievement.
It’s the first time cats with modified genes have been cloned, and the scientists say that such animals will be enormously useful in developing new cures for genetic diseases.
Me, I saw that report and threw out every red fluorescent protein in my medicine cabinet.
Warren Buffet, in a CNBC interview, quoting some Wall Streeter whose name I didn’t catch:
“Why did the banks have to go and invent new ways of losing money when the old ways of losing money were working just fine?”
“It is probably not to his advantage that Mitt Romney’s clean-scrubbed, youthful presence so readily reminds voters of those earnest Mormon missionaries knocking on their doors.”
–Laurie Goodstein in the NYT 12/9/07
Mike Huckabee is a Baptist minister from Arkansas, and I happen to know from personal experience that the Baptists invented waterboarding.
When I was a kid, they used to come down to our swimning hole at McKissock’s farm, on a bend in Glade Run creek, and chase us all out of the water so they could baptize their new recruits.
There was no Passenger Bill of Rights for the Baptist Rites of Passage. They held each one of them underwater three times and mumbled things until the lucky inductee was damn near drowned. I was a Catholic kid. We used a “font” in the back of the church and just sprinkled some water on babies’ heads, so I thought the Baptists were barbaric.
I won’t vote for Huckabee even if his running mate is Mitt Romney, a loyal American who believes that the Garden of Eden is in the Middle West, not the Middle East. Or at least that’s what he’s supposed to believe, because Mormon founder Joseph Smith proclaimed that Eden is in Missouri and said that, after the Fall, the descendants of Adam and Eve moved down the Missouri and Mississippi valleys.
That would suggest that Noah was actually Huckleberry Finn, and I’m not going to waste my vote on that. I mean, even aside from the waterboarding, Noah was just a fictional character.
