Payday loan opponents struggle to get a fair hearing

Payday loans are high-interest short-term unsecured small loans that borrowers promise to repay out of their next paycheck, typically two weeks later. Interest rates are typically 300% to 500% per annum, many multiples higher than the exorbitant rates charged by banks on their credit cards. A typical payday borrower takes out payday loans to pay utility bills, to buy a child’s birthday present or to pay for a car repair. Even though payday loans are dangerous financial products, they are nonetheless tempting to people who are financially stressed. The growth of payday lenders in the last decade has been mind-boggling. In many states there are more payday lenders than there are McDonald’s restaurants. In Missouri Payday lenders are even allowed to set up shops in nursing homes. Missouri’s payday lenders are ferociously fighting a proposed new law that would put some sanity into a system that is often financially ruinous for the poor and working poor. Payday lenders claim that the caps of the proposed new law would put them out of business. Their argument is laughable and their legislative strategy is reprehensible. Exhibit A is the strategy I witnessed Thursday night, February 18, 2010. On that night, Missouri State Senator Joe Keaveny and State Representative Mary Still jointly held a public hearing at the Carpenter Branch Library in the City of St. Louis City to discuss two identical bills (SB 811 and HB 1508) that would temper the excesses of the payday loan industry in Missouri. Instead of respecting free and open debate and discussion regarding these bills, payday lenders worked hard to shut down meaningful debate by intentionally packing the legislative hearing room with their employees, thereby guaranteeing that A) the presenters and media saw an audience that seemed to favor payday lenders and B) many concerned citizens were excluded from the meeting. As discussed further down in this post, payday lenders are also responsible for flooding the State Capitol with lobbyists and corrupting amounts of money.carpenter-branch-library When I arrived at 7:00 pm, the scheduled starting time, I was refused entry to the meeting room. Instead, I was directed to join about 15 other concerned citizens who had been barred from the meeting room. There simply wasn’t room for us. But then who were those 100 people who had been allowed to attend the meeting? I eventually learned that almost all of them were employees of payday lenders; their employers had arranged for them to pack the room by arriving en masse at 6 pm. Many of the people excluded from the meeting were eventually allowed to trickle into the meeting, but only aspayday-employees other people trickled out. I was finally allowed into the meeting at 8 pm, which allowed me to catch the final 30 minutes. In the photo below, almost all of the people plopped into the chairs were payday lender employees (the people standing in the back were concerned citizens). This shameful tactic of filling up the meeting room with biased employees has certainly been used before.

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Warming to Climate Claims

As Washington D.C. gets record snowfall, climate denialists cackle with glee. It was a cool summer, and now a cold winter. So, they wonder, where is this global warming? "People," I want to condescendingly say, "look at the sun." Weather girls of all genders and persuasions are mentioning that this is the coldest winter in 11 years. Notice that? Are they unaware that there is an 11 year cycle of solar warming and cooling that corresponds to -- and can be measured by -- sunspots? So it's like saying with implied importance that this is the coldest month since 12 months ago. The spots are just starting up, much like the days getting longer at the end of December. Here is a nice look at the sunspot phenomenon. It is intuitively confusing that dark spots mean more heat. But the pair of images here shows visible and ultraviolet views of the same scene. Those dark spots are tunnels into the gamma-hot regions of the sun. Our eyes can only see one octave on the spectrum. Both hotter than blue and cooler than red ranges are invisible. Dark. Red hot is the coldest temperature that gives off light. (Read about Black Body Radiation if you want to know how this is known.) Another detail that climate denialists get wrong is the meaning of heavy snowfall. If you get heavy precipitation, it implies much moisture aloft. That is, many more megatons of water are evaporated. By heat. So before you point to a low local current temperature as evidence against global warming, please look at the time scale that climatologists use, like the Temperature record of the past 1000 years, or even for the last century and a half:

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Can you tolerate NAMBLA?

image courtesty of the Federal Art Project, via Wikimedia Commons You think you're open-minded? What if the North American Man-Boy Love Association wanted to distribute a newsletter in your town? What if they wanted to hold a local parade celebrating pederasty? I am currently studying social psychology in graduate school, and I'm particularly interested in political psychology. One of my present research interests is political tolerance. "Political tolerance" refers to individuals' willingness to extend equal civil liberties to unpopular groups. When political scientists and psychologists measure political tolerance, they often probe individuals for their ability to withstand the most offensive, outlandish groups and speech possible. For example, a liberal-minded person may be asked whether they would be willing to allow a rally for the Klu Klux Klan or some extremist, militaristic group. Paradoxically, a truly tolerant person must be willing to allow racially intolerant speech. Political tolerance plays a cornerstone role in functioning democracies (at least, we think so). If voters can strip away the civil liberties of disliked political groups, those liberties lay on precarious ground indeed. If we cannot tolerate the words of anarchists or members of the Westboro Baptist Church, then we do not really believe in the boundlessness of speech at all. Academics say as much. In reality, voters are not so tolerant.

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Avatar

Okay, so I contributed to the James Cameron Self Love Fund and saw AVATAR. Yesterday we went to the 3-D showing (no way I would spend money on the normal view, I can wait for the DVD the way I do with 99% of the movies I see anymore). I’ve had a day to think about it now and I’ve come to some conclusions, which are hardly profound, but I think worth saying. Let me say up front that I wasn’t bored. Visually, this is a stunning achievement. But that’s what everyone is saying. It is, in fact, the best 3-D I’ve ever seen. Often in the past the effect is minimal and the cost in headache high. This was neither. And it fully supported the visuals rather than masking mundane or poor image elements. Pandora, the planet involved, is magnificently realized. Cool stuff. Real gosh wow. The biology is problematic. You have a wide mix of lifeforms analogous to Earth. Some big lumbering critters like hippos or rhinoceri that also have features of a dinosaur, and some small things that are clearly wolves, and one big nasty cat-like thing that’s like a sabertooth tiger. It’s unclear if any of these creatures are mammalian, but it doesn’t matter much. Dinosaur analogs. Most of them apparently four-legged. But the “horses” the natives ride are six-legged, reminiscent of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ thoats. How does that play out in evolutionary terms? Well, maybe that’s a quibble. How then do you evolve humanoids out of this? Well, maybe that’s a quibble, too. This film is not about science on any level, regardless of the few bits of dialogue suggesting there are, you know, scientists, and that there is a studyable cause to any of this. Because the story, basically, is hackneyed, cynical, and cliched. [more . . . ]

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Daniel Dennett: Why Darwin’s idea was the greatest ever

In this terrifically engaging and accessible video interview, Daniel Dennett (talking with Richard Dawkins) explains his view that Darwin's idea was the greatest idea ever. Dennett, who authored Darwin's Dangerous Idea explains that natural selection unified the world of mechanism/material/physical and the world of meaning/purpose/goals which, until Darwin, seemed to be unbridgeable. Many people feel that Darwin's idea destroyed their sense of meaning, but Dennett argues that this "immaterial immortal soul" is a "crutch," and that Darwin replaced that idea with that of a "material mortal soul." Dennett describes our material souls as made of neurons. "They are blind little bio-robots . . . They don't know; they don't care; they are just doing their jobs." If you put enough of these simple little bio-robots together, you end up with a soul. Out of these little bio-robots, you can assemble the control system of a complex organism. Simple little parts can self-organize into sentient being that can "look into the future . . . because we can imagine the world in a better way, and we can hold each other responsible for that." There's no need to assume that a God implants any sort of soul. Rather, according to Dennett, a functional soul can "emerge" from soul-less little individual parts. The simple little parts don't need to exhibit the functions and abilities of the assembled groups of parts, but this illusory jump is a huge stumbling block for many theists. They wonder how you can "make a living thing out of dead stuff," but that is exactly what happens, "and that's the wonder of it." Science has also shown that you can also "make a conscious thing out of unconscious stuff." Over great periods of time, natural processes can constitute the design function that allows these incredible results we see in the world. It is not necessary that complex things need to be created by even more complex things. Darwin's ideas destroyed this misconception and "this is a really stunning fact. Purpose can emerge from the bottom up." The brain itself is a fast-paced evolutionary device; the learning process is a matter of generation and testing and pruning, over and over. Dawkins asks Dennett to explain further how "cranes" (simple natural processes) can really account for the wonderful complexity of life in the absence of "sky-hooks" (supernatural beings). You could argue that our planet has grown a nervous system and it's us. The above summarizes only the first ten minutes of the fifty-minute interview. Numerous other topics are discussed in the video, including the following: - Modern wars and strife constitute growing pains resulting from our being flooded with great amounts of information about each other. (15:00) - Cultural evolution clearly exists. Languages and musical ideas evolve, for example, without anyone initially consciously "laying down the law." - Dennett's recent brush with death (his aorta suddenly burst), resulting in many intriguing observations (21:00), including a deepened understanding of the phrase "thank goodness." You can put goodness back into the world, "and you don't need a middleman" (God). You can directly thank the doctors, nurses and medical journalists, the peer reviewers and the entire scientific enterprise that allows elaborate cures such as artificial aortas. According to Dennett, don't bother thanking God, "go plant a tree, go try to teach somebody something . . . let's make the world better for our children and our grandchildren." - Dennett elaborates on being part of this elaborate social and scientific fabric, this complex exploratory process. He finds this view much more inspiring that the idea that he is "a doll made by God . . . to pray to him." (24:00) - The scientific process is double-edged, exacerbated by the Internet. We can't tightly control this information, and their effects might be detrimental. We need to think "epidemiologically" about this possibility, and to better prepare people to deal with the ideas gone awry to protect them. (26:00) Knowledge can be a "painful process," yet we need to honor other people to make their own considered decisions. - Darwin offers some consolation regarding our impending deaths: that they had the opportunity to walk on this planet "for awhile." (29:00) Dawkins adds that it is a huge privilege to have been born, in that "you are lucky to have had anything at all . . . stop moaning." Dennett adds that we are not aghast at the thought that there were many years that passed before we were born when we were also not alive . . . it shouldn't bother us that we will someday again no longer be alive. Our grief at someone's death is a measure of how wonderful someone was. - The urge to thank someone for the many good things in one's life is a great temptation for believing in God. (33:00). Dawkins argues that contemplating that amazing process that gave rise to you "is better than thanking because it is a thoughtful thing to do . . . You're not just thanking your Sky-Daddy." He argues that the urge to thank should be "sublimated" into the drive to understand how it all happened. Atheists, too, can feel the sense of "awe." Dennett exclaims, "Hallelujah! It's just spectacular. It's so wonderful! The universe is fantastic!" Dawkins adds, "Hallelujah for the universe and for the fact that we . . . are working on understanding it." This June 2009 video is uncut; it is the full Dennett interview by Richard Dawkins. Parts of this interview were used in a British television documentary entitled "The Genius of Charles Darwin."

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