Wassail

Winter is coming. With that in mind, Wassail is a big favorite. And we shouldn't be the only people who can make it right (seriously, we keep getting told ours is better, which is just stupid). It's one of the simplest hot drinks ever (unless you like microwaving your water). I don't even measure, really (all metric measurements are approximate).

So, dust off that crock pot you haven't used since you got it for your wedding.

Wassail
Cloved orange
2 sticks cinnamon
1 palmful allspice berries
2 quart apple cider (about 2 L)
2 cup cranberry juice (about 1/2 L)

Add everything together in the crock pot. Turn it on high for an hour, then leave it at low. You can drink it straight, or add rum, bourbon, whatever.

The only tricks are:

• A cloved orange is just an orange with whole cloves driven straight through the skin. Over the whole surface, about 1/2 to 1" apart (1-3 cm)
• Both juices should be unsweetened. Just trust me. That's the most obvious mistake. (And don't even think about cranapple. The proportions are all wrong.)
• If you're storing leftovers, the orange should get thrown away. It'll make the rest of the batch bitter and sour.

That's all there is to it. (Now, maybe you'll find other uses for that crock pot, since you've started.)

Risk and the Ape

It's no secret that a sizable number of people are very concerned about the risk of Ebola and that either as part of the cause or part of the effect, the media are obsessive in their coverage, grasping for any aspect of the disease, its history and its treatment, that can be talked about by an ever-changing cast of experts as well as the same familiar faces.  They may pause to cover a plane crash, a shooting, but the business of the day is Ebola: those who have it, those who may get it and those you might get it from whether you're in Bayou Sorrel, Louisiana or Braggadocio, Missouri.

How do we choose what we worry most about?  What scares us the most?  Psychologists like Slovic, Lichtenstein and Fischoff  have done studies about the public perception of risk.  The public, they argue, will assess  the danger of death from disease as equal to death by accident as being equal, but disease is 18 times as likely to kill you as a gun or a car or certainly a policeman.  Death by lightening seems less likely to those in their studies than the risk of death from botulism, although lightening is 52 times more likely to get you.

"The Lesson is clear:"  Says psychologist Daniel Kahnemann. "estimates of causes of death are warped by media coverage. The coverage is itself biased toward novelty and poignancy.  The media do not just shape what the public is interested in, but are also shaped by it"  

Rare and unusual occasions make good press in the competitive news and entertainment game and when the supply runs low and the demand high, the more commonplace or quotidian may be dressed up for the prom.  Have you turned on CNN recently?

"The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality"

says Kahneman, understating the obvious. People make judgements and assessments of risk by consulting their emotions and not by examining the numbers.   A scary and unusual or gruesome thing looms larger than the Flu which may be millions of times more likely to kill you than Ebola. That Tylenol overdose accounts for 33,000 hospitalizations every year and hundreds of deaths simply doesn't enter the equation when we hyperventilate about the "risk" of Ebola or international terrorism or disease-carrying Mexican immigrants. And we don't feel fear when taking it or even read the label. 

Enter affect heuristics, the snap judgement mode under which we asses risk based on quicker, emotionally biased and less accurate calculation. .As Psychologist Jonathan Haidt said:

 "The emotional tail wags the rational dog."

If this doesn't seem pertinent to you, consider the studies of Antonio Damasio with people who do not, usually because of brain damage or abnormality,  display "appropriate" emotional responses.  They tend not to make decisions as well or as beneficially as others.  Indeed one's feelings do seem to enter into decisions we think of as truly rational. Asked to assess risk Vs. reward for specific technologies, one's feelings toward technology seem to determine the outcome. If you don't see genetic engineering as having any benefit at all, if you see danger in using Ammonium nitrate from the factory over  nitrates from manure, it's probably because of your bias against or lack of knowledge about science. If you tend to overlook real dangers from nuclear power, you probably already enjoy and understand technology and science. 

Is this a terrible thing?  Does it spell some disaster in that humans cannot expect to make the right decisions based on objective reality?    The public, says Slovic, actually makes finer distinctions than  the experts who assure us that you won't get Ebola from a certain person or by breathing the same air.  Finer distinctions between random, unpredictable fatalities and fatalities, like automobile accidents, that come from voluntary decisions. From this he concludes that  we should resist the "rule" of experts.

Others look at examples where relying on experts might have prevented  popular excess, popular emotion from entering into public policy as with the expensive fiasco in 1989 about Alar and apples, where people were so afraid of apple juice they were taking it to toxic waste dumps and making terribly unreasonable claims of conspiracy based on nothing. Popular sentiment quickly snowballed or cascaded out of hand and beyond the universe of fact and reason.

Some psychologists like Timur Kuran and Cass R. Sunstein speak of  an Availability Cascade, A  mechanism through which biases flow into public policy, a self-reinforcing cycle that explains the development of certain kinds of collective beliefs, when explaining things from the Love Canal incident which somehow didn't kill us all or even some of us, yet had a colossal affect on public policy and public spending.   Does it explain demonstrations that insist that "we can't go to the movies any more" because there was an isolated shooting?  In truth, choking on milk duds poses a greater risk but our minds see some qualitative difference between those deaths.

Can it be part of human nature that we either ignore small risks because they are small risks -- or invest them with incredible imminence and attach tremendous fear to the point where we abuse the innocent, the non-dangerous as though we were running from a burning theater with evey man for himself?  We ignore or we panic and there are no other choices.

So perhaps we're overreacting in a predictable and intrinsically human way when we see immense danger from someone who might have been exposed to Ebola but who, we are assured, isn't contagious?  Are we asking ourselves for something we are not really capable of: a rational nature?  We evolved in a world where overreacting or reacting without much thought can save our lives but doesn't do much harm if the danger was less than expected. So if this is not exactly a critique of pure reason,  I'm still  not arguing that we should or even can throw out our inbred nature and I'm suggesting that  we accept the ape even while we keep him under close supervision.

TODAY IS ELECTION DAY

Meet the candidates:

Tuesday is Halloween!

EBOLA AND THE BIKE RIDE

I applaud Kaci Hickox for defying the reactionary political hacks and demanding release from a mandatory quarantine but I also fear for her safety. The pols and the media have managed to create yet more hysteria and hype which of course has brought out the craziest of the crazies.
The comments concerning Kaci have run from take her nursing license, send her back to Africa to charge her with murder if anyone becomes infected and dies of ebola in Maine.
Kaci does have the support of much of the actual medical community. HERE is a article from the New England Journal of Medicine which reads in part: "We have very strong reason to believe that transmission occurs when the viral load in bodily fluids is high, on the order of millions of virions per microliter. This recognition has led to the dictum that an asymptomatic person is not contagious; field experience in West Africa has shown that conclusion to be valid. Therefore, an asymptomatic health care worker returning from treating patients with Ebola, even if he or she were infected, would not be contagious. Furthermore, we now know that fever precedes the contagious stage, allowing workers who are unknowingly infected to identify themselves before they become a threat to their community."
The ANA (American Nurses Association) has also made a statement HERE in regards to mandatory quarantine. This reads in part: “The American Nurses Association (ANA) opposes the mandatory quarantine of health care professionals who return to the United States from West African nations where Ebola is widespread. ANA supports registered nurse Kaci Hickox, who recently returned to the United States after treating Ebola patients in Sierra Leone, in her challenge of a 21-day quarantine imposed by state officials in Maine, her home state."
There have been a total of 9 cases of ebola on American soil. Thomas Duncan is the only one who unknowingly brought it with him from West Africa and subsequently died of the illness. Of all the people he was in contact with, including family members who shared living quarters, only two people were actually infected with ebola from Mr Duncan and that was the two nurses who either broke protocol or were inadequately prepared by their hospital administration. Of all the people they came in to contact with, NONE have come down with ebola. The other six ebola cases were all Americans working in West Africa who were knowingly returned to the US for treatment in Atlanta, Nebraska and Oklahoma. No health care workers have become infected from treating these patients and they have all recovered.
Now that the flu season is upon us, let's take a look at that. Every year hundreds of thousands of Americans come down with the flu. Of those 20,000-40,000 die from complications of the flu. Every year people go to work and interact with others while knowingly or unknowingly being infected with the flu. Unlike ebola where you have to symptomatic to be infectious, with the flu you have a 1-4 day incubation period and you can be infectious at least one day BEFORE symptoms appear!
Can you imagine applying the same hair-brained logic to the flu as to ebola? Mandatory quarantine if you come in to contact with someone who has the flu. If you go to work with the flu and your co-worker's 90 year old Aunt Louise dies two weeks later from complications of the flu, you should be charged with murder. And if you won't stay home and you have an Asian strain of flu then we should just pack you up and send you and your flu to Asia!
People need to get a grip and community leaders need to grow a brain - caving to public hysteria and pandering to the fear mongers because it is an election year is some of the WORST reasons to make unreasonable demands on decent, caring people who go above and beyond to do the work they love.
We DO NOT have an ebola epidemic in the United States and there has NOT been a state of emergency declared anywhere in the United States due to ebola so therefore any mandatory quarantine is a criminal offense called unlawful restraint or kidnapping.
This is the same kind of ignorance and irrational fear that led to witch burnings and the Grand Inquisition. 

ANYONE KNOW A GOOD LAWYER … ANY LAWYER?

Apparently, House Speaker Boehner is having little luck finding a law firm to handle a lawsuit against the President. For the second time in two months, a major law firm has withdrawn from the case. Last time it was Baker Hostetler; this time - Quinn Emanuel.

If there is no merit in it, then spin it - as spokesperson Kevin Smith says:

“The litigation remains on track, but we are examining the possibility of forgoing outside counsel and handling the litigation directly through the House, rather than through law firms that are susceptible to political pressure from wealthy, Democratic-leaning clients.”

Here’s that old shibboleth: “Wealthy, Democratic-leaning clients” as if the GOP doesn’t have its own coven of wealthy right-leaning donors.  But some donors are more equal than other donors; and this isn’t a democracy anymore.

Elections don’t matter, especially two back-to-back elections convincingly won by the president. Legislative mandates don’t matter, especially passage of an Affordable Health Care Act in the Senate by a veto-proof majority. A Supreme Court decision doesn’t matter, especially the Affordable Health Care Act - deemed constitutional; but the GOP doesn’t care.

One Republican candidate for the Senate wants to criminalize politics and prosecute the president for simply doing his job.

Remember Sharon Angle and her infamous “Second Amendment Remedy?” Here is another Republican candidate for the Senate who reserves the right to nullify any Federal law not to her liking at the barrel of a gun.  Democracy by “my-way-or-the-highway;” democracy by prosecution, democracy by litigation, democracy by bullying and intimidation! This is dangerous stuff – the seditious words of demagogues and would-be tyrants. Where is the indignation? The outrage?

The neo-fascist tendencies of the Tea Party are all too obvious. If you fail to vote – and vote wisely - you will lose more than merely another two years of legislative gridlock and deadlock: You may lose your birthright.

As it happeneth

As it happeneth to the fool, so it happeneth even to me; and why was I then more wise? 

-Ecclesiastes 2:15- 

For a long time after I began to write here, it was enough to enumerate the foolishness of the "other side," the Tea Party, the NRA, Fox News. . . and as the man said, the danger is in becoming the monster you oppose, because one gets used to the other side being not only wrong but demonic and at best, foolish.  It does not follow that if mine enemy is wrong, I must be right. It's a vanity we all share. The model of the world we form in our heads; the model we nourish and prop up with facts, with truisms and tropes, with axioms and articles of faith, is not the real world any more than the Tao we can discuss is the real Tao. Can it be that our cherished wisdom is no more than a vanity? 

Watching Bill Maher's panel of the wise the other night was like being at the same circus you've been watching for too long.  When the clown car pulls into the ring, you already know the names and number of the clowns and when the discussion turned to the Washington State school shooting I knew it was only a matter of time until every last one climbed out, from the NRA to Drone Strikes.  But even a circus car can hold only so many.  There's hardly room for objective truth and no part for him in the show.  Why drone strikes When Muslim armies are raping torturing and beheading innocents?  Because the drone strike clown is part of the circus crew and the mission of the crew is assigning blame, prescribing from the official pharmacopoeia as well as to blame everyone but the perpetrators,  and of course he's a distraction, a way of substituting an answer we have, an argument we favor to any real discussion of what happened, its relation to other happenings and a way of attaching blame to what just might be random.

Last out of the clown car was the editor in chief of The Daily Beast to tell us that "surveys show" the people want background checks, which might have prevented this and the NRA was opposed. Facts are that we have had mandatory checks for decades, the gun in question was bought pursuant to one and was registered to a legal owner. But it's a small car and the clown has to stretch his legs.

So it happeneth to the fool and I'm getting tired of it happening to me.  Just what is the risk to any one of us from Ebola, from ISIS insurgents,  Central American child refugees,  racist police -- and how does it compare with the risk of heart disease,  urban street gangs and soccer moms texting while driving?  Don't ask because you'll become the enemy yourself, the enemy of those who insist on there being trends and conspiracies and the ever growing risks of living in America today.  Yes, the subject of drone strikes came up (Cornell West) as supporting evidence of Western sin along with the details of how "we"  arbitrarily created countries to our benefit and thus earned the enmity of the Muslim world.  Did anyone bother to ask if this mechanism made thousand year enemies of Japan and Germany after we conquered and occupied them?  No because that would challenge the model of Islamic innocence.  Do we examine the possibility that the media circus surrounding any of the events CNN chooses to obsess about every week or so, has made it glamorous for disturbed teenagers to become a bright shining star and go out like a supernova?  No, that distracts from the need to obsess about the NRA and to reenact our passion play about weapons of war, spraying high caliber, armor piercing, cop killer bullets and the total absence of all gun control measures. The chess board is set up and only the official pieces can be played.

And how then are we wise?  How do we decide what's true and what the risks are and who is to blame?  There is much written about this question and related questions of  how we see the world as we are, through rose colored or dark glasses.  The psychologist Paul Slovic's oft quoted article in Science, about risk perception theory and what he called affect heuristics, the particular heuristics and biases people invent to interpret the amount of risk in their environment.  Is the risk of Ebola running rampant to be compared with the existing risk of the flu, (about 2.5 million deaths per year) much less all infectious diseases still endemic in the US?  How many die because enlightened people oppose vaccinations?  Indeed fear of science rides in that clown car as it does in the Tea Powered version. Is the NRA opposition to study of gun crimes any different than the steadfast refusal of their opposition to discuss ( or to read or admit the existence of)  gun laws and their statistical correlation to positive results?

Did Florida's revised self defense laws really "Make it illegal for black people to go outside" as one pundit said about a case that did not, by his own admission, involve that law, or is that the result of vision through a bias darkly?  Did a  "gentle giant" really commit a robbery and assault a police officer or is his innocence to be presumed and to the extent that we need no fair trial to hang the policeman?  The answer was in the bias, the affect heuristics of the observer and the judgement to which he is accustomed to snap.  Does the fact that over 90% of the shootings of young black men are by young black men enter into the equation and cause wonder about the lack of  media circuses when that happens?  Can we really not go to the movies any more, or send out children to school where they are statistically safer than they are at home or driving with mom and her smart phone?

Can we see current events and the surrounding hoopla as anything but a cosmic frame shop, selling framed reproductions of  paint by the numbers reality?  Should we look at the news of the day as another day's entry in the logbook of the ship of fools?  Will our inherent nature ever let us be the rational beasts we pretend to be?  

 "For there is no remembrance of the wise more than that of the fool forever; seeing that which now is in the days to come shall all be forgotten.  And how dieth the wise man?  as the fool."

CRIMINALIZING POLITICS

Georgia Senate Candidate David Perdue Wants To 'Prosecute' Democrats:

“What would you do to end partisan gridlock and dysfunction in Washington?” asked Georgia Senate candidate Michelle Nunn (D) of her challengers, David Perdue (R) and Amanda Swafford (I). Here is the exchange:

Michelle Nunn: “I think that we do have a very clear contrast in terms of how we see breaking through that dysfunction. I don’t think it’s about prosecuting the other party; I think it’s about problem-solving.”

David Perdue: “I disagree […] When you have a failed presidency, you have to prosecute it.”

Why stop there! Let’s prosecute every former president for every official act – good, bad, or indifferent. Let’s prosecute former President Jimmy Carter for the Iran hostage crisis; then charge Ronald Reagan, in his grave, for sending arms to Saddam Hussein. Let’s impeach former President Bill Clinton for one more blowjob; then indict George Bush for a mismanaged war and a broken economy.

Let’s regulate free speech and reign in human rights that have been allowed to run rampant for far too long. Let’s shelve the U.S. Constitution and trade in our dusty old democracy for a used Trabant.

According to the latest polls, David Perdue holds a two-point lead over Michelle Nunn. Do you trust the voters of Georgia to do the right thing? I have reservations – for a permanent residency hotel in Belize.

Party and Ideology Aside Senator Rand Paul Makes Valid Arguments...

by: Les Carpenter 

 This fiscal conservative and social libertarian certainly does not agree with or advocate all of Senator Rand Paul's positions. Nor is it clear at this point the Senator from Kentucky has the attributes to eventually assume and execute the duties of the presidency of the United States of America. However, the points the Senator makes in the following video with respect military action and how our nation has reacted to current world events, especially in light of our Constitution, are worth serious consideration. Our world has changed and continues to change at an ever accelerating pace. With the above in mind can someone, anyone, point out errors in Senator Rand Paul's speech? If so what are they and why do you believe they are errors in judgment?



 Full text of the Senator's speech and be found BELOW THE FOLD. 

 Via: Memeorandum 

 Cross Posted @ Rational Nation USA

Nothing changes

Even when it does.

Oh goodie, we can stop obsessing about Ebola and the Ottawa shooting and renew the obsessive hysteria about school violence until something else happens.  Of course something else is happening constantly, but there's no money in discussing it when you compare it to the blockbuster ratings boost from red-eyed, glued to the tube, round the clock repetition of the same damned video clips under the rubric of "breaking News!"

I suppose there will be little or no comment on the likelihood that the massive coverage will produce copy-cat incidents of suicide by shooting spree and the usual refusal to attempt perspective by noting that such things seem to clump, but all in all have been declining significantly - over 50% - for more than 20 years. It's more profitable to claim that schools aren't safe although impartial statistics seem to show it's more dangerous at home and that any one American school can expect to have a gun or explosives incident only about once in 12,800 years.  People are demonstrably terrible at assessing risk and news providers get rich by helping them panic while other institutions of reform and anti-reform distract and misinform to promote their programs, all of them so convinced of their rightness and righteousness, truth can be damned as an obstruction and lies praised as noble.

Bias

Bias, everything is about frame of reference.  If you don't agree, go argue with Einstein.  It's unavoidable and that's why news outlets need to spend more time on verification than on making sure they're the first to air a rumor, or indeed a slander: to spend more time on being right than on ratings, more than on being for a Right or Left wing audience.

If you read the comments on this blog, you'll remember that a short while ago there was a bit of conversation about Public broadcasting and the Republican antipathy toward it. Does the relatively small financial support PBS gets from the Federal government really create a risk of bias in news reporting?  Is that risk countered by the absence of pressure for ratings?  Has the government censured PBS for contradicting the President?  Perhaps this is one of these arguments argued from 'principle' rather than from experience, because experience is other than is predicted by theory. Is the test in how well facts fit the theory or in how much the theory fits you?

 I can easily remember, having spent many hours as a boy listening to programming from Radio Moscow during the Cold War, and to US and European based propaganda stations, just what propaganda looks like. It doesn't look like the McNeil Lehrer News Hour. It looks more like a panel of out of work politicians giggling and speculating and providing no facts. It looks like talking for weeks about every last rivet and piece of upholstery on a Boing 777 just to keep you watching, about speculating on what a shooting means until it means nothing or everything.

Looking back at the world of 60 years ago, I've had to admit that although grossly exaggerated, some criticism of the US was true, but really, the Soviet news agencies, owned and operated and with scripted "news" reports that praised them and assaulted us can't be compared to a network that spends a few hours a day reporting events and the bulk of it's time with educational programming. In principle, yes, one must suspect government news releases as much as one must suspect the corporate news releases like the ads and articles that tell you Toyota Camrys are wildly exiting vehicles for loveable rogues and 4 door Nissans can't be distinguished from race cars.  Can we compare how well the various sources do that?  The "independent" sources seem more about speculation and conjecture disguised as "telling both sides" and about fewer stories. PBS tends to stick to reportage, in my opinion anyway.  In all these years I don't remember any PBS stories about Saginaw Michigan outlawing Christmas, the sort of thing that's daily fare at a certain "independent" News company. They have refrained from suggesting that not only is Ebola not Pandemic in the US, but speculating that Obama is in favor of it or even now that all proof is visible that Obama is not from Kenya. Is it bias to refrain from Swift Boat Stories or is it "just the facts ma'am?

To Quote the fictional Dr. Gregory House: "everyone lies" and  as we all know, the wheels of commerce and the gears of government are greased with Bullshit.

One might be tempted to argue that we turn off the tube altogether.

But do we leave it at that:  the suspicion that the McNeill Lehrer Report is government supported propaganda while "independent" MSNBC is owned by the Democrats because they don't report things Obama is not guilty of, while Fox, their endless speculations and conjectures, their well documented fabrications, false statistics and scurrilous attacks on Liberal principle can be trusted?

Is CNN really so financially independent that it can avoid obsessive sensationalism while ignoring the important events of the day, that they can resist publishing Apple press releases as news?  My answer is brought to you by the letter N, which stands for NO.  Everyone lies or at least everyone has their frame of reference when they get fare enough away from saying it rained this morning or a bomb went off in Boston.  The rest is politics and advertising - and sometimes lies.

I fear the argument against PBS usually stops with the theoretical because, as with so many arguments, the facts don't support the arguments for bias and in fact many of those arguments don't really support the sanity of the proponents.  Are the Teletubbies really trying to make your kids gay?  or are you a crackpot? Is Sesame Street radicalizing your kids or are you an extremist loonie?  Are McNeil and Lehrer covering up for Obama's secret agenda just as they covered up Clinton's secret plan to turn the US military over to NATO?  Are they being biased by failing to provide "fair and balanced" coverage of all those Fox Fables that never happened, like Obama's blocking of white voting rights, lack of a US birth certificate, that Home Depot has given up selling Christmas trees ( go look for yourself ) or that the Post Office forbids the use of the word God on their premises?  Or is all that harder to establish than that Charles Krauthammer is a pathological and irresponsible liar who makes up statistics. Will any of the independents spend a moment proving that wrong -- oh excuse me, MSNBC provided proof, thus showing their bias no doubt.

They're all biased in some eyes and to those visionaries who think their personal interests trump the national interest. Ask yourself how much coverage PBS gave to the Malaysian airliner or to the two US cases of ebola relative to the 18 to 20 hours a day of all the "independent" news sources?  Who made it all about blaming it on their political enemies? And who was it that tried to blame Obama for failing to have a Surgeon General or an "Ebola Czar" after obstructing his every effort to appoint one?  It wasn't MSNBC with their alleged ownership by the Democratic Party, or CNN with their corporate puppet strings firmly attached, it was Fox with their heavy financial relationship with the GOP.  It was not PBS.

To me, and of course that's only my opinion because I don't have the patience to write the thousand page list of  irrefutable acts of dishonest propagandizing in the various news outlets: to me the heaviest and smelliest load of that universal lubricant is produced by the segment of the political right that worries about PBS being a government news outlet out to steal your money, to put you in a FEMA camp, import indigent colored people into your living room and outlaw your religion.  If I can indulge in an analogy, it's like the people who support the destruction of a river because they profit from it but want to fine you for leaving a cigarette butt on the ground because they don't -- on principle, of course. Principle is important.