parianocafeneio

parianocafeneio

Lorin Maazel (1930-2014)

Former PSO conductor Lorin Maazel has passed away at the age of 84.

Some obituaries:

• New York Times
• The Trib
• The Post-Gazette

Maazel conducting Beethoven:

Scaife Must Be So Proud

From Dana Milbank at the Washington Post:

Representatives of prominent conservative groups converged on the Heritage Foundation on Monday afternoon for the umpteenth in a series of gatherings to draw attention to the Benghazi controversy.

But this one took an unexpected turn.

What began as a session purportedly about “unanswered questions” surrounding the September 2012 attacks on U.S. facilities in Libya deteriorated into the ugly taunting of a woman in the room who wore an Islamic head covering.

Yea, no one would have expected that!  I mean look at who was on the panel:

Unanswered Questions, Unaccountable Officials, Broken Trust

Chris Plante, WMAL Talk Radio Host (Moderator)
Clare Lopez, Member, Citizens' Commission on Benghazi, and Vice President for Research &; Analysis, Center for Security Policy
Brigitte Gabriel, Founder, President and CEO, ACT! for America
Frank Gaffney, President, Center for Security Policy

So we have of the 4 people on the panel half are from the Center for Security Policy.

That would be the same Center for Security Policy that got about 52% of its foundation support from foundations controlled by Richard Mellon Scaife ($5.126 million from Sarah Scaife and an even $1 million from Carthage out of a total $11,612,809, according to the Bridge Project)

And, of course, it was a Heritage Foundation event so which got about 20% of it's foundation support from foundations controlled by Richard Mellon Scaife ($24.235 million from Sarah Scaife, $2.544 million from Carthage and $1.35 million from Allegheny out of a total of about $146 million, according to the Bridge Project)

Go read Milbank for the ugly Scaife funded details.

Yea, he must be so so proud of himself.

Congratulations, Newlyweds!

"Mayor Bill Peduto presides over Pittsburgh's 1st same-sex wedding"

(Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/local/city/2014/06/16/Mayor-presides-over-1st-wedding/stories/201406160066#ixzz34oBoYiWb)

(Photo via Twitter)

The President On Climate Change

From his Commencement Address at the University of California at Irvine:

Now, part of what’s unique about climate change, though, is the nature of some of the opposition to action. It’s pretty rare that you’ll encounter somebody who says the problem you’re trying to solve simply doesn’t exist. When President Kennedy set us on a course for the moon, there were a number of people who made a serious case that it wouldn’t be worth it; it was going to be too expensive, it was going to be too hard, it would take too long. But nobody ignored the science. I don’t remember anybody saying that the moon wasn’t there or that it was made of cheese.

And today’s Congress, though, is full of folks who stubbornly and automatically reject the scientific evidence about climate change. They will tell you it is a hoax, or a fad. One member of Congress actually says the world is cooling. There was one member of Congress who mentioned a theory involving “dinosaur flatulence” -- which I won’t get into.

Wait. Dinosaur flatulence?  Who the heck said that?  It was Representative Dana Rohrbacher (R-CA):


Yea, T-Rex farts. That's the reason.

Rohrbacher seems to be saying that since we don't know that it wasn't dinosaur farts that raised the temperatures millions upon millions of years ago, then we can't say for certain what NOAA says is undeniable.

You know what else hasn't been disproven regarding the current rising climate cycle?

• The Illuminati
• Bertrand Russell's orbiting teapot
• The Harvest Goddess, Demeter, is now approaching middle age and is having hot flashes
• God is punishing the world for being just so nice to teh gays

Look each of them up.  You'll find nothing to disprove any of those theories (and remember, climate change like evolution is only a theory) anywhere.  So therefore, climate science can't be trusted.

Or...or you can go with science and rational thinking.

How NOT To Do It

Ok, so my weekly issue of The Nation arrived yesterday   The cover in blaring red and white reads "1 in 5 Women Is Sexually Assaulted in College" and so I immediately turned to the cover story.

The writer, Michelle Goldberg, wrote a very important piece about a very important issue, without a doubt.

But she made a mistake.  Perhaps not a big mistake, but perhaps a mistake big enough so that someone inclined to disagree with her outright might use it to discredit her general argument.  The mistake's in this paragraph:

As months of harrowing headlines have made clear, the dimensions of that crisis are staggering. According to an April report of the White House Task Force to Protect Students From Sexual Assault, “One in five women is sexually assaulted in college.” This figure, which comes from the National Institute of Justice’s 2007 “Campus Sexual Assault Study,” has been much disputed by conservatives, but according to a detailed analysis by PolitiFact, “the overall findings in the study were on par with similar surveys conducted over the years that have measured sexual assaults on campus.”

Here's the 2007 report and here's Politifact's analysis of it.  And that's where Goldberg errs.

Whereas it's absolutely true that Politifact says (twice, in fact) that the "overall findings...were on par with similar surveys..." and so on, the analysis also says (and this is the sentence immediately preceding one of the times it's quoted):

Experts we spoke with said that while that statistic is commonly used, the source, a survey of just two colleges, may not be representative of the entire population.

Leaving that part out is the mistake as it misrepresents the entire analysis.

But why might not the study be representative?  Here's why:

[T]he Web-based survey yielded a relatively small response rate of about 42 percent, which the researchers note is lower than other methods, like face-to-face interviews. They hoped, however, that anonymity provided more candid answers and better data.

Additionally, as we noted, only students at two large universities were included in the survey. Experts we spoke with said this is a glaring caveat that makes it difficult to create a national estimate from the results.

"This ‘one in five’ statistic shouldn’t just be taken with a grain of salt but the entire shaker," said James Fox, professor of criminology, law and public policy at Northeastern University.

Large universities may not be representative of experiences at mid-size or small colleges. Further, the two colleges selected may not even be representative of large campuses, Fox said.

Which poses another smaller problem for Goldberg as she opens with this incident as an example of the mistreatment of rape victims on campus:

During her freshman year at Occidental College in Los Angeles in 2010, Audrey Logan says, she was raped on two separate occasions by a young man she considered a friend. Because she knew him and had been very drunk both times, it took a while for her to identify what had happened as an assault. “I really believed rape happened in the dark, by people you barely or don’t know, and weapons or group force were always involved,” she says.

Occidental College describes itself as a "a small, highly selective and diverse liberal arts college in a big city" by the way.

If it's the case that the CSA study, as it's based on web surveys at two large universities, might not be representative of mid-sized or small-sized institutions, then including an illustration from an admittedly small liberal arts college only blurs the lines.  And if the study might not even be representative of large campuses then using it at all only blurs those lines further.

And certainly supporting an argument (even if only in part), by citing a Politifact analysis that doesn't completely support the statistic at the center of that argument is, simply a mistake.

In fact, Mary Koss (author of the 1988 study "Hidden Rape: Sexual Aggression and Victimization in a National Sample of Students in Higher Education") is quoted by Politifact saying:

[T]he Campus Sexual Assault Study "is not the soundest data (the White House) could use."

Needless to say:

"Without a doubt, sexual assault and date rape are of great concern on college campuses," Fox said. "It should not be dismissed. At the same time, we should be careful not to cite national estimates that are shaky, at best."

And I'll leave it at that.

Yea, This Is One Reason We Separate Church And State

Look at what's surfaced in Oklahoma:

Voters in Oklahoma could be literally stuck in a rock and a hard place with Tea Party candidate Scott Esk.

Esk, who is running for a seat in the state’s House, reportedly discussed the stoning and killing of homosexuals in July 2013 Facebook conversations, which were discovered and posted by Oklahoma-based website The Moore Daily Tuesday.

The link gets us to this facebook conversation.  In it candidate Esk cites Romans 1:26-27, Romans 1:32, Leviticus 20:13 to justify the stoning and the killing, even though (and these are his words):

I think we would be totally in the right to do it. That goes against some parts of libertarianism, I realize, and I'm largely libertarian, but ignoring as a nation things that are worthy of death is very remiss.

He also says:

Men were commanded to put guilty parties to death who were guilty of certain acts, like homosexuality. Laws to put people to death who were guilty of such practices have been in existence in various countries in Jesus' time and afterwards, too. If men wink at such perversions, God may have no choice than to judge such nations with calamities. [Emphasis added.]

And that would be "commanded by God" of course.  A direct command from the Creator hisself.  And then Esk explains his federalism:

If it helps any, I consider it a violation of federalism to deal with such things on a national level, and different states will have different laws on the matter. I would hope that libertarians who don't think perversion should be punished in any way between consenting adults would be open-minded and look at the different results between a state that ignores it, and 1 that punishes it severely. And within a state, cities and communities may well have different policies, and I cheer that. That way, people can decide for themselves whether they want to live in a particular community based in part on how things like this are dealt with.

So if a large enough section of our population (one that believes that The Bible is inerrant truth and that God's law should be THE law) votes for stoning teh gays, that's fine with Esk.

And if you don't like it you're free to simply move to someplace that tolerates the perversions that God detests.

Yea separating church and state suddenly sounds a bit more rational, don't it?