Have at it.
Archives for April 2011
Albert Einstein was a Friend of Mine, and I Can Tell You, Representative: You Are No Albert Einstein*
From Think Progress (h/t Daily Kos) we learn that in the midst of yet another creationist eructation, a Tennessee state representative has invoked the ghost of the good Dr. Einstein to defend the teaching of woo to the unwary:
Rep. FRANK NICELEY (R-Strawberry Fields): I think that if there’s one thing that everyone in this room could agree on, that would be that Albert Einstein was a critical thinker. He was a scientist. I think that we probably could agree that Albert Enstein was smarter than any of our science teachers in our high schools or colleges. And Albert Einstein said that a little knowledge would turn your head toward atheism, while a broader knowledge would turn your head toward Christianity.
I don’t have much truck with the argument from authority, but just this once, let me let it rip.
__
Dude: I wrote the book here.** Well, not the book, but one more in the seemingly limitless pile of Einsteiniana that has chased the poor man through the years.
So, a couple of things. First: Einstein himself was high school and college science teacher. He taught secondary school briefly during the years between his graduation from Zurich’s ETH (1900) and the start of his job at the Swiss Patent Office (1902), tutoring a private student or two as well. He became a university professor in 1908, and taught at that level until his move to Berlin in 1914. He’s part of the set that the Representative — perhaps stunned by a too-prolonged exposure to tangerine skies — would seek to diss.
But the real howler, the grotesque lie, comes with the claim that Albert Einstein, famously Jewish and equally so an atheist by most senses of the word, would suggest that deep learning and understanding would make a person a Christian.
This is, of course, nonsense, and worse that that — a willful deception and one more example of the urge to invent a comforting falsehood when reality bites too hard. Which sums up the whole modern GOP world view, sadly. (Cue the Rogers (kfMonkey) post in 3…2…1)
But for the record: Albert Einstein disdained the notion of a personal god. He was dismissive of god-talk in public affairs. He saw nothing in the acquisition of knowledge that would tend one towards organized faith; quite the reverse. He located the source of knowledge to be material experience, whose signals were to be processed by the 1200cc or so of very intricately organized meat we (most of us) keep in a round-ish vessel above our necks.
And just so we all get our fill of Einsteiniana, here are some supporting quotations:
Why is Kausfiles still a TPM approved site?
Mickey Kaus’s latest is hardly isolated. He’s been an embarrassment for at least five years now.
Why does Josh Marshall continue to support these dude? Kaus is one of about 12 “TPM approved” sites. What the fuck? Did they spend Michaelmas at All Souls together or their kids go to Brooklyn Friends together or did Mickey buy him a bespoke suit once or what?
I know some of you don’t like these kinds of petty, meta, navel-gazing topics, but I do.
Why is Kausfiles still a TPM approved site?Post + Comments (97)
Mickey Kaus is a jackass
Via Yglesias, here’s Mickey Kaus on Obama:
Cost doesn’t go into why Obama managed to get to the top of politics without being all that good at it. The answer is distressingly obvious: Obama’s the biggest affirmative action baby in history.
Consider this an open thread.
Unforced error
Two hundred thirty five Republicans just voted to end Medicare. I don’t know that many districts all that well, but I can tell you that, barring a major redraw of her district (I don’t know when the post-Census redraws begin in NYS), Ann Marie Buerkle will not be serving in Congress come 2013.
This is insanity. They should have at least let freshmen from swing districts vote “present” or “nay”. Control of the House is now in play in 2012.
Here’s the Greenberg Quinlan Rosner memo on how much voters hate the Ryan plan. Thank you, Andrew Sullivan, David Brooks, and Joe Klein for helping to convince these jack asses to sign their own pink slips.
The saddest story I ever heard
Bobo on Paul Ryan’s hurt fee-fees (CEPR via PBS):
“It is sad, although not strange, that in today’s Washington they have never had a serious private conversation. The president has never invited Ryan over even for lunch.”
I’ve been trying to avoid saying things like that I hope huge meteors hit Bethesda and Georgetown but you’d have a hard time convincing me that it wouldn’t be the for the best.
Update. I see John already wrote about this! Sorry.
No budget for old white men
In a chaotic scene characterized by shouting more typical of the British parliament, the Republican Study Committee’s (RSC) alternative to Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) 2012 budget went down in a 119-136 vote.
It was gaveled shut only after Democratic leaders started pushing members to switch their “no” votes to “present,” in order to force a face-off between conservatives and the Republican leadership. A total of 176 lawmakers voted “present.”
That’s from the Hill.
To illustrate just how dishonest the Republican budgets really are, read Jason Kuznicki’s “Return to Normalcy” budget:
It’s got four basic parts:
- Return to Clinton-era rates of taxation, or at least something like them. As Ezra Klein has noted, this is very likely to happen in any event, because we’d need sixty Senate votes to extend the Bush tax cuts. We’ll just let them expire. As we’ll soon see, our Senators will be busy enough elsewhere.
- Remove the cap on the Social Security payroll tax. Yes, that means raising taxes. Yes, on the rich. Someone call the Koch brothers!
- Cap Medicare spending at GDP plus 1%. This is a doozy, I know. Can we do it? We’ll probably have to, like it or not, in any balanced budget plan.
- Reduce military spending to 1990s levels. In other words, bring the troops home. From everywhere. Let the force shrink by attrition. Cut spending on new weapons systems. Tell the world — much of it industrialized and friendly — that they will have to pay for their own defense, because we can’t afford it anymore. We’ve been doing way more than our fair share for way, way too long, and they can hardly say otherwise.
More or less, the plan would look like this.
This is similar to John’s do-nothing budget, or the do-nothing budgets of Annie Lowrey or David Leonhardt, or my budget. All these budgets have one thing in common: the end of the Bush tax cuts. To help illustrate where that will put us in the Big Scheme of Things, a chart!
Surely letting the cuts expire will lead to America becoming Somalia. A much more Serious idea would be to let the poor and elderly fend for themselves and get rid of all these pesky healthcare entitlements.