Two little rants here.

First -- I think commercial television is completely untenable. You have to be a hopeless loser to sit and watch the staggering volume of commercials that these companies force down our throats. I turned on CNN yesterday at 12:47pm. There were THREE commercial breaks between 12:47 and 12:58. They would literally do one segment and then go back to commercials. It's clear that CNN is in the commercial distribution business, not the news business. The only way I can watch CNN is to get 30 minutes behind on my DVR so I can forward through the commercials. Let's be clear: this is network's and advertisers' fault, not viewers. I would sit through commercials if they were less frequent, less long and more informative or entertaining. These 5 minute commercial breaks every few minutes is insane and I don't feel bad in the slightest that my DVR allows me to circumvent it.

Second -- I'm going to pick on Showtime again. I have been waiting a year to be able to legally download season 3 of Weeds. iTunes still doesn't have it. I downloaded a Showtime plugin for Windows Media Center and I can buy Season 1 and Season 2 but not Season 3. They are advertising Season 4 and nowhere do they ever mention Season 3. It's like it doesn't exist.

I can tell what is going on -- some agreement was made that every other available channel was going to be exploited before they would sell it online. I can almost see the 65 year old grey haired white male who made this decision. ARE YOU ON FUCKING DRUGS? The fucking world voted and the medium that we turn to for music, movies and TV shows is the Internet. The fact that I can give Amazon $30 for season 3 of Weeds but I can't give Showtime or Apple $30 is insane. Please, can someone fire the 65 year old grey haired white male who doesn't understand the world in 2008?

Finally, since I'm on a roll, it boggles my mind the number of news web sites that put pre-roll ads in front of their online videos. These video players are invariably wrapped in all sorts of marketing and advertising. What moron thinks that they have to poison every conceivable piece of content with advertising? You already have me at your site and you are jamming as much advertising as you can at me. Can I just watch the damn video please?

Big media companies are idiots who are FAIL and their lunch is going to be eaten if they don't get their shit together.

Yes, Rush Limbaugh is a big fat idiot. Al Franken nailed that one on the head.

It's sad and pathetic that retarded Republicans like Rush Limbaugh would interfere with the democratic process. Do you believe in democracy or not, Rush, you dumbshit?

Over at scienceblogs there is a recurring argument debate about "framing". My definition of framing is wording an argument in a manner that your audience is going to be most receptive to. It's crafting an argument carefully with the goal of convincing people of its authenticity.

Using this definition its literally self-evident that if you want to convince people of something that you should approach your argument in a manner most likely to do so! That's just obvious.

It's a separate question whether you should have that goal or not. I.E. it would be a tedious world if everyone always spoke with utter care for maximum convincing power. I'm going to talk about religion differently if I'm with a bunch of atheists than I do if I'm at a funeral. Sometimes we preach to the choir and enjoy reveling in our superior views.

But, yes, if your goal is to convince, framing is a no-brainer.

Generally the framing debate at scienceblogs relates to the "new atheists" and the "battle of science and religion". Dawkins and Myers alienate the people they are trying to convince, says one side. Dawkins and Myers respond: fuck you, we have every right to speak our opinions when and how we feel.

They are both right.

Dawkins and Myers do alienate the people they are trying to convince by focusing on the most radical and ridiculous examples of religion. That's not all they do, by a long shot and I agree with them on literally almost everything. But they do alienate people. That's a fact whether you like it or not. Religious moderates, who are an important political ally of secularists, are painted with the same broad brush as loonies like young earth creationists.

But on the other hand, and really more importantly, what Dawkins and Myers have done is say what they think. They used their best judgment. They have no responsibility to religious moderates, secularists or anyone else. Their words have been a very important part of the debate and we would be much poorer without them. We're all grown ups and we should be able to handle it if it gets a little rough sometimes.

First of all, I grew up in North Dakota and back in the day if you decided you didn't want your cat or dog anymore, you killed your cat or dog. It wasn't a big deal. You did it quick and humanely. (Although I have never personally killed a pet.) Being "put to sleep" is no more humane and, in my view, probably less humane than a quick unexpected blast from a shotgun.

I've loved a lot of pets in my day but I hate my cat. It's fair, though, because my cat hates me. I think it's fair to say we've always hated each other. You see, we got him first (Case is his name) and we instantly didn't hit it off. So we got one of his brothers, too, whose name was Q. Q was an awesome cat. I loved that cat. I would have died for that cat. But having Q around did not loosen Case up. He pretty much hates all people. Oddly (or not) my dog Stella is apparently the only creature on earth that Case doesn't hate.

I have never harmed this cat. I have tried to be friends. It hasn't worked out. The feeling is mutual and we're both OK with it.

But lately I have been trying to think of the best way to kill my cat, if I was to kill my cat. It must be legal for me to kill my cat, right? Here's what I've come up with so far. Let me know if you have others to add.

1. Drive it out to the country and shoot it.
2. Drive it out to the country and leave him there.
3. Bring it to the vet for a shot in a sterile room.
4. Put it in a 5-gallon bucket with a tight lid and let him suffocate.
5. Fill the bucket in #4 above with water.

For #1, my cat would be freaking out (not in its normal environment) so I'd have to put it in a cardboard box and then just shoot the box a few times. But if I'm gonna drive to the country, I may as well give him a chance to live off the land (#2). I personally think #3 is really lame. If I had to kill my cat at home I think I'd put catnip in a bucket and try get him in there and all fucked up and then I'd put the lid on real tight and let him go to sleep (#4).

What do you think?

I'M KIDDING!

(or am I...?)

There are many ways to roam
The world
But only one way home

Here is a very interesting interview I did with Ernan McMullin. He is a fascinating guy who knew Schrodinger and Carl Sagan. He is a priest and he studied theoretical physics. He is currently the O’Hara Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame and the godfather of a good friend of mine. I blogged about him before in regards to Intelligent Design, which he thinks is nonsense on both scientific and theological grounds. It's a fairly long but highly interesting interview. Check it out!

Download/Listen (MP3, 01:13:19, 34.4MB)
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I was raised, for the most part, in Grand Forks, North Dakota, home of the University of North Dakota, which is home of the UND Fighting Sioux. There has been on on-going controversy about the name/mascot of the Sioux because it is the name of several living Indian bands. The NCAA has rules which prohibit the use of Indian names, nicknames and mascots.

It's been an extra controversy in Grand Forks because a rich dick by the name of Ralph Engelstad donated a bunch of money to UND for a new hockey arena (a sport which UND excels at nationally) and then threatened to withdraw it when they considered changing the name.

But the name has got to change. It saddens me, as a long time Sioux hockey fan, to lose the tradition I grew up with. But my respect for the living nations that were once part of the Oceti Sakowin (Great Sioux Nation) is greater. You can't honor people against their will. And while many North Dakotans are respectful of their Indian neighbors, many are not and many hockey fans are not and the cartoons and caricatures of Native Americans as entertainment for white people is wholly inappropriate.

It's not the name that makes the UND Fighting Sioux the UND Fighting Sioux. We'll love our hockey team regardless of the name. It's never too late to do the right thing.

(Thanks to massdistraction for taking a nice pic of my Sioux t-shirt!)

1. I think it is retarded that people protest the price of gas. It's called a market and protesting does nothing.

2. It is even more retarded that here in Minnesota the Republicans are trying to blame the price of gas on a $0.02 gas tax. Oil was $30 per barrel when Bush took office and now it is $130. I don't think it is the $0.02 gax tax you fucking idiots!

3. Further to #2, destablizing the Middle East is a really, really bad idea if you are concerned about the price of gas. We are spending 3 TRILLION dollars sending the military to the oil fields of Iraq. We could have purchased 23 billion barrels of oil at $130 per barrel with that money or 100 billion barrels at $30 per barrel. The most expensive oil in the world is the oil you need to send your military to protect.

4. Oil is a dead-end technology. It's like hunting for whales. In retrospect it will seem like the dumbest thing we've ever done. Wind, solar, surf and nuclear power, using hydrogen as a battery, is the future of the American economy but our current leadership is too stupid to lead us there.

And finally, the high price of gas is a Good Thing^®. It's a regressive "tax", which sucks, but the only way we can get people to break out of this dead-end mentality is to make the alternatives more attractive. America's biggest security risk is our lack of energy independence. Too bad the neo-Cons pushed us in the entirely wrong direction for the last 8 years.

This cracks me up. It cracks me up because it hints at a very deep truth -- the struggle to use written text in a way that adequately communicates emotional content. Never before have we had this near-instantaneous interpersonal written communication. Never before have we conducted so much business and navigated so many relationships in a written medium.

When someone reaches for that caps lock key, they are emotional and they want to holler at someone. They want the text to holler for them. And it does! We add the emotion back in when we read it.

Think about it -- we lose information when we type an email message and that information is put back by the recipient, using clues from the text. Things like italics, bolding, case and punctuation, in addition, of course, to the word choices in the message, try to convey a multi-dimensional interpersonal communication over a single, written channel. The emotional content of emails is often (some might say always) misinterpreted by the recipient.

Except, perhaps, when we unleash the fury of caps lock.

For someone as brilliant (and humble) as I am, I often wonder why I am so fantastically ignored on the Internet. I get very few comments and almost no one links to me. I never get forwarded clever little "memes". I'm just one of a billion little blogs that garners almost no interest.

Using my un-experience I have developed a simple 4-point list so that you, too, can be a successful blogger:

1. Post a lot. If you don't post a lot you won't be successful, period. Post no less than several times per day. When in doubt post an "open thread" or post about how you are too busy to post.

2. Pretend you have a theme, even if you don't. So name your blog "Math Blogger" or "Sex Blogger" or "Evolution Blog" or some name that makes people think you have one and only one main theme. Then post whatever you want. It's not having a theme that's important, it's making people think you have a theme.

3. Be hot. If you are hot, put your picture on your blog. Better yet, be female and hot. No amount of clever, intelligent posting can make up for being hot. If you aren't hot, only post pictures of you that make you seem hot. Again, it's not the reality that's important here.

4. Shamelessly self-promote yourself all the time. Go to every trendy conference, befriend other A-list bloggers, get pictures of yourself with famous bloggers and ruthlessly shove your persona down Twitter and Facebook and every other social meme that erupts. You're not a blogger, you're a brand!

I'm just kidding. I don't feel at all sorry for myself. I have no idea why some people get jillions of readers and jillions of comments for writing ordinary and obvious things. It's a cult of personality that is impossible to predict.

Here's what we know:

1. 13.73 billion years ago, the universe was created.
2. Somewhere around 4 billion years ago the Earth was created.
3. Around 3 billion years ago, life formed.
4. Life evolved and grew more and more complex and diverse.
5. Today there are millions of species.

The Intelligent Design (ID) movement, exemplified by the movie Expelled, has a problem with #4. They think God mucked around in #4. Science doesn't have a theory (yet) for how the universe was created (#1). We know exactly what happened milliseconds after the Big Bang, but we don't know how the Big Bang banged. We don't have much of a theory about how life was created (although we are making significant progress) (#3). We have really, really good theories of #2 and #4. They are based on hardcore science and have been argued about and tested very thoroughly.

So if you are fervently religious and want to believe that God did #1 and #3, fine, great, have at it. We'll probably prove you wrong on #3 someday but for #1, God snapping his fingers is as good of theory as any.

But why would you argue with #4? Evolution is obvious. Natural selection is obvious and if you think God is smart then he might think of a way to do things that was clever! He didn't zap fully formed humans into existence He created a beautiful machine that opened up like a flower over billions of years from which stepped a mind capable of wondering and worshipping. Evolution is a testament to the patience and the brilliance of God. Science is never and could never be at odds with the will of the Creator.

So ID isn't just bad science, it's bad theology, it's bad philosophy, it's bad everything. It's especially destructive because it falsely presents itself as being on the side of believers. That is nonsense. True believers are in awe of God's creation, including the Big Bang, the old earth and natural selection. Science studies God's creation, it doesn't oppose it.

From Maureen Dowd (via @Chuckumentary)

“The time has come. The time has come. The time is now. Just go. ... I don’t care how. You can go by foot. You can go by cow. Hillary R. Clinton, will you please go now! You can go on skates. You can go on skis. ... You can go in an old blue shoe.

Just go, go, GO!”

I personally don't think it is a bad thing at all that the Democratic race is still on-going. The Republicans like to spin it like it is great for their candidate, but their candidate is a tired, old, rich, white man who thinks in lock-step with George W. Bush on way too many issues, including the war. They have huge problems so they delude themselves and the American public to whatever extent necessary to make it seem like they have a chance.

I do not want Hillary Clinton to be the candidate.

Thank you, micadelic, for one of the most inane analyses I've seen of the Expelled issue:

i just wonder why, if mr. pz is so smart, he's doesn't realize he was used as part of a pretty clever publicity stunt. expelling him from expelled! and then he rushes to the nearest computer to breathlessly report how he was kicked out. priceless.

pretty funny if you ask me (and i believe in evolution). i just think pz is an insufferable intellectual snob and it's great to see him get punk'd.

I suppose I should stop being surprised at the things you think...

PZ attempted to see a movie that he was in. The makers of the movie knew he was coming and waited until the last moment to kick him out. (They could have just emailed him and told him he wasn't welcome.) The "clever publicity stunt" made those tools look like extra special tools when they kicked out PZ and let Dawkins in! Oops, sorry, didn't recognize the most recognizable atheist in the world (who is also in the film!). PZ's reporting of the incident was hilarious and the press associated with the incident was 100% critical and negative towards the movie. Oh, yes, very clever.

I've met PZ and he is a very humble and very nice person. He is not a "snob" in the slightest. What he is is extremely knowledgeable about this issue -- evolution -- and he is constantly defending generally accepted science against people who don't know a single fucking thing about it. Yes, I suppose one can seem like a snob when you are an expert on a subject and you are debating self-righteous idiots without a clue WTF they are talking about.

The core issue here is very interesting -- how the Right pretends to be anti-intellectual. Anti-intellectualism is an agenda of elevating mediocrity and small-minded thinking while denigrating education and intelligence. It's completely nuts and it gets us incompetent leadership like George W. Bush -- a "regular guy" completely devoid of the skills necessary to do his job.

We need a hell of a lot more "intellectual snobs" and a lot less influence by ignorant people too lazy to be intellectually engaged with the world.

PZ has another great post slicing and dicing ignorant creationists.

You should read the whole thing but here is a humorous little quote:

Even if physicist discovered that the Big Bang was a result of a cataclysmic battle between Odin and a gang of frost giants, it would not perturb our understanding of life's history here. It would make the cosmologists freak out, which would be fun, and it would shape our philosophical understanding of our presence here, but evolution is built on evidence on this planet, evidence that will not go away whatever the physicists discover about events 14 billion years ago.

It is amazing that none of the IDiots take on the very specific points that PZ makes in this post. Their arguments are really weak and easily refuted and yet the believers just ignore ideas that undermine their weird little superstitions.

I'm not usually a proponent of violence, but it is time for Robert Mugabe to step down and it looks like he is preparing to use violence to override the will of the people. The people of Zimbabwe have taken enough of this crap. Mugabe has destroyed Zimbabwe. It's time to destroy Mugabe.

MinnPost discusses the sad state of politics in Minnesota:

What many people overlook — silly us — is that politics in Minnesota has degenerated into a cynical game. The object of the game is no longer to achieve the public good through rational compromise by mature adults. How quaint. No, the object of the game now is to wage tribal warfare and punish enemies.

Now forgive me, but I expect chief executives to rise above the partisan fray a bit. Pawlenty has acted like a spoiled child though his entire terms. We have this concept called a balance of power. This means that compromises are necessary and expected. Pawlenty has proven over and over that he has no class whatsoever. He is a petty,small-minded partisan who puts the Republican party and his vice-presidential ambitions over the will of the people of Minnesota. Every. Time.

I know politics is politics. I'm not crying because Pawlenty wields his power. I'm crying because he constantly wields his power like he is governor of only those Minnesotans who are Republicans. Damn it, Timmy, you are my governor, too, and you owe me a lot more than this partisan bullshit that you have become known for. Grown up.

PZ Myers commanded suggested that we make sure you all knew about Expelled Exposed, the site which thoroughly debunks and discredits that piece of shit of creationist propaganda.

I heard a saying once, I believe attributed to Frank Herbert of Dune fame:

Two plus two does not equal five no matter how many people vote for it.

This is democracy's principle flaw. Majorities have made all sorts of atrociously wrong decisions that trampled the rights of minorities. Legal slavery under the constitution of the US comes to mind. Religious persecution, racism, sexism -- all the creation of majorities.

So the idea of a republic is rather a good one, where the people elect representatives who make decisions rather than the people making decisions directly. It allows a bit of a buffer zone between "mob rule" and government. The problem with this is what America is facing today -- your government goes up for sale to special interests when it is in the hands of greedy, petty people.

I've always wondered why lobbying is effective. Most of the people in the US congress are not hard up for money. In fact, most of them are independently wealthy. So why does money sway them? If I were a politician I would say, donate to my campaign if you want me to use my best judgement. I promise nothing in return for your campaign contribution except to be as wise as possible in rending my judgement and as idealistic as possible, while as pragmatic as necessary, to make a positive difference in people's lives.

Government walks a very fine balance between providing the foundation which makes law and justice possible while treading as carefully as possible on the individual liberties that we take to be self-evident.

Government is necessary and therefore it must be effective and therefore we need our best and brightest at the helm and therefore we are compelled to get the money-grubbing, ideological crooks out of our government. To do that we must render the notion that [s]he who spends more get more votes impotent.

The power is with the people. The only people who serve in public office are the people we put there. We are failing.

Can some conservative please help me out? Our government, in their infinite wisdom, passed a law that Medicare cannot negotiate with drug companies. Someone please tell me how this is consistent with conservative ideals of free markets?

As an aside, in defense of socialized health insurance, I'll quote this little gem:

Administrative costs for Medicare are 2-3%. Approximately 30% of private insurance premiums go to overhead, profits, and executive salaries. Doctors and hospitals have to employ huge staffs just to process insurance claims from a multiplicity of insurance companies. About 20% of the income of private doctors goes to pay for this staff. Overall, the administrative costs of private insurance exceed $400 billion a year. That.s enough to cover all of the uninsured without raising taxes.

As usual the people that conservatives are trying to protect are rich corporations.

The global climate change debate has something in common with the evolution "debate". (As an aside, I'd call the former an actual debate. The latter is only a debate in the minds of the deluded.) The thing in common is that in both cases you have one side arguing against scientific consensus and the other side defending scientific consensus.

Generally people who are arguing against scientific consensus point to past failed hypotheses to indicate that science can be wrong, has been wrong in the past and should not be treated as infallible. They are right about this, of course, but they miss a very, very, very important point: it was science itself that corrected these mistakes. It was not op-ed pieces or vague conjectures by untrained people, it was "big science" that found the correct answer.

So people who defend scientific consensus are not defending a particular conclusion, they are defending the processes that make such conclusions possible at all. Without science we can't debate global climate change or evolution.

The people who argue against scientific consensus often say, "We're not anti-science, we are against the squashing of debate perpetrated by 'big science'. They get a theory and everyone jumps on the bandwagon at the expense of other valid scientific explanations."

They are wrong about this. Global climate change and evolution, to stick with my two examples, are under constant attack by scientists. There are a million mundane (and perhaps a couple profound) controversies that are debated within the scientific community constantly. Literally, it never ends. That is what science is.

If we assume that we have 10 competent, honest scientists in a room and 8 of them agree with hypothesis A and 2 of them agree with hypothesis B, we call hypothesis A the scientific consensus. It does not mean that A is true and B is false, it means that the arguments of A convince more scientists than the arguments of B.

I'm personally not an expert at climate science or evolution. I can't really make up my own mind based on the scientific data -- I don't have the training. Chances are, neither do you. My problem with the "anti-science crowd" is that their disagreement with scientific consensus is not based on the science but instead based on other factors such as their political leanings or their religion. Those are piss-poor reasons to take a view radically different from scientific consensus.

The bottom line is, either you trust the scientific process or you don't. The only people capable of creating more successful theories are scientists. Unless you are personally an expert on the scientific matters at hand, your only rational alternative is to defer to scientific consensus.

A Right Wing group was recently brought to my attention, the Minnesota Majority. They have an agenda just like the now defunct Moral Majority, as the name would suggest. It's rich in idiocy, homophobia, xenophobia and irony. This is from their About Us page:

Are you tired of allowing a well-funded vocal minority:

[1] Dictating what we can say, do or think?
[2] Suppressing our freedoms of religion and speech?
[3] Having more rights than the rest of us?
[4] Telling us that they are offended by what we say or do?
[5] Preaching tolerance while demonstrating utter contempt for anyone with a different view than their own?
[6] Exploiting our legal system to advance their agendas at the expense of our rights?
[7] Destroying our nation's traditional values?

Then do something about it by joining Minnesota Majority. We are a non-partisan issue advocacy group seeking to restore traditional values to Minnesota's public policy.

I added the numbers so I could address the sins of the "well-funded vocal minority" in order.

1. Dictating what we can say, do or think?

Give me one example of this, anybody. The only examples I can think of are related to things like hate crimes. I doubt they are pro-hate crime. So WTF are they talking about? Laws? Are they against laws? Yes, we have laws that say you can't ejaculate into someone's milkshake. Do they have a problem with that?

2. Suppressing our freedoms of religion and speech?

Again, one example please. The Right has always been too stupid shallow to realize that the separation of church and state is there to protect the religious! The fundamental issue that the founders were trying to protect was the freedom of religion. They were wise enough to understand that this meant a hard, bright line between the state and religions.

3. Having more rights than the rest of us?

Who can they be thinking of here? The only people I can think of with "more rights than the rest of us" are ridiculously rich people who buy influence in our government.

4. Telling us that they are offended by what we say or do?

So they are pro-freedom of speech but anti-freedom of speech?

5. Preaching tolerance while demonstrating utter contempt for anyone with a different view than their own?

I'm definitely sensing some contempt here. To me this is the ol' "why aren't you tolerant of bigots" argument. If you hate homosexuals, want to destroy the separation of church and state and seek to enforce your personal morality on me, you should expect some contempt and intolerance.

6. Exploiting our legal system to advance their agendas at the expense of our rights?

Again, the only people I know who have the resources to exploit our legal system are rich people. The fact that there is a independent judiciary was a stroke of brilliance by our founders and it is an important part of the balance of power with the executive and legislative branches of government. This point is major evidence of the bankruptcy of the Right Wing agenda -- they don't like the independent judiciary, something they share philosophically with fascists and dictators.

And if you want to talk about protecting our rights I assume you are a strong supporter of the ACLU and the EFF? Those are the organizations out there protecting our rights.

7. Destroying our nation's traditional values?

I prefer to judge values today. I think the gains that minorities have made in the last century are a sign of the maturation of the USA. Ben Franklin warned us about the "tyranny of the majority". That's why our constitution was so carefully crafted with a balance of power and a fundamental right to equal opportunity. The implication that traditional values are better or more moral or more natural has never been proven. Why does a group that has as #1 on the list a disdain for people "dictating what we can say, do or think" also have on their list a desire to dictate what we can say, do or think!

Look -- these people are probably nice, well-meaning and smart people. It's not them I am attacking, it's their ideas. Their agenda is misguided on virtually every count. I've tackled only their "About Us" page. On every page they reveal a nonsensical misinterpretation of the issues. It's an agenda of the 1950's, ridiculously out of place in 2008.

Some people might confuse this issue so let me be clear: the movie Expelled is irrelevant and Intelligent Design (ID) is irrelevant. They don't matter at all and they are not a threat to actual, bona fide science in the slightest. Research continues unabated and it is not slowed down in any way by these religious kooks who are trying to create controversy where there is none.

So don't confuse our passion for science, reason and rationality with any actual concern about the ID "movement". It will have literally no impact on our scientific progress.

The reason we give so much attention to these kooks is because it is amusing. It is amusing what otherwise smart people will do while under the influence of religion. They pick and choose their science to accommodate their pre-determined conclusions. They believe so strongly in their mythology that they feel it trumps the time-proven work of thousands of scientists. They think that pointing out "holes" in the theory of natural selection gives weight to their mythology. Apparently they are desperate for proof of the creator they are so sure listens to their prayers every night. They just don't want to live in a world that can be explained without such a deity.

That's fine. I don't need to change their minds. I don't care what foolishness they teach their children. I don't care what movies they go to or what movies they make. I don't care if they think evolution is some big conspiracy of "big science" and I don't care at all that religious kooks get fired for being incompetent scientists. I just think it is funny.

So keep it up, Ben Stein. Your career is soon to be pigeon-holed into speaking to churches about the evils of "big science". While you are speaking in these mega-churches the A/C will be running, thanks to the ideal gas law, the PA system will work because of electromagnetism and quantum mechanics and you won't be lifted bodily into heaven thanks to the universal law of gravitation.

Science delivers every day for the godless and the deluded alike.

I just read a great comment by Joe Kilner on a post over at Good Math, Bad Math. I'm taking the liberty of quoting it in its entirety, but click on over to Good Math, Bad Math if you want to see the rest of the excellent discussion.

Natural selection is basically a tautology, which is why denying it as a mechanism is "not even wrong".

The argument (although many on both sides seem to miss this) is whether the mechanism of natural selection is sufficient to describe the variety of living organisms on earth. Anyone who thinks that it isn't hasn't spent any time suffering, I mean studying, invertebrate palaeontology (apologies to all fossil bivalve lovers out there).

Proper appreciation of the massive chains of development, the enormous time scales and the huge variety of life both past and present is hard and boring, which is why a lot of people don't really do it and which so many see ID etc. as a viable alternative - because they can't imagine how you get from bacteria to horse. Seeing in detail even one section of the journey is enough for you to say "Yes, OK, I give up, the evidence is overwhelming, please don't ask me to identify another brachiopod". But without the detail to make it real you are just left with the limits of your imagination, which is actually a pretty restrictive limit.

People forget how god damn long 3 billion years is. The Earth has been here for 4 billion years. They estimate life got started about 1 billion years later, or about 3 billion years ago. Just for reference, if you consider a human generation starts every 25 years or so, that is 120 million generations. By contrast, Jesus lived only 80 generations ago and Adam only 240 generations ago. Anatomically modern humans first showed up about 4000 generations ago. That only gets us back 100,000 years or 0.003% of the way back to 3 billion years ago.

The point being, you and I can't conceptualize how long that is and our intuition fails us when we try to contemplate what is and what is not possible in that time frame.

The EFF exposes Bachmann for the lying hypocrite that she is:

On Friday, Representative Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) wrote an op-ed in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune that epitomizes the sort of unvarnished misrepresentations and scare tactics that the apologists for the President and the phone companies have increasingly resorted to in the fight over amending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Click the link and you'll see that the facts fully support this assertion.

Further to my brief post below, here is a lovely review of Expelled, from which I quote:

"Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" may be the first volley in the next battle by creationists to give their movement intellectual weight. But its cartoon version of evolutionary theory, Its remarkable lack of evidence for its case, its unbalanced and hysterical portrayal of the "martyrs," its dismal and depressing musical score, and its lack of genuine humor will persuade only the already persuaded.

...and Richard Dawkins is allowed to attend.

It's kind of atheist inside baseball but you have to read this.

I decided to support the One Laptop Per Child project. You buy 2 and they send you 1 and the other they send to a child somewhere in the world who needs one. I think it is nice that I can make a donation of technology to the third world and still get a nice little toy for my own child.

The laptop arrived today and it is really, really cool. It's small, capable and fun! I think Myles is going to have a lot of fun with it and I'm going to make sure he knows that there is another one out there somewhere with a child using it who wouldn't otherwise have the opportunity.

Geraldine Ferraro said something fairly stupid, or at least something that could easily be construed as stupid. She said:

If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman of any color, he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.

What she meant, from what I can tell, is that there is a strategic advantage to have a black Presidential candidate right now. That the times are right, from a political strategy standpoint, to capitalize on a candidate of color. She says her own candidacy for Vice President was specifically because of her gender.

That's not a racist comment and I don't believe she is a racist. I think she's wrong, though. I don't think Obama's candidacy or popularity is because of his race in any way. For the more backwards-ass in this country, it's actually in spite of his race. For most people, I think his race is irrelevant. It is for me.

I'm very happy, of course, that women and people of color are closer than ever to being President of the United States. I think the monopoly that white men have had in that office is unwarranted and largely because of historical bias. But that doesn't mean I would support any candidate solely because of their gender or their race. Obama is smart. That's why I like him.

The Minnesota Monitor is reporting:

A bipartisan effort is under way to end Minnesota's "blue laws." As state laws currently stand, Minnesotans who want to do their car shopping on the weekends or buy beer for a Sunday night party have found themselves out of luck. The selling of strong liquor or automobiles on Sunday is currently against the law in Minnesota.

Unfortunately, it doesn't sound like they are optimistic on getting the job done:

Ultimately, the bill is mostly symbolic and intended to generate a discussion. "We don't expect these bills to get out of committee, but we wanted to let people know that these silly laws exist," said Kahn.

I don't understand at all what is hard about repealing these backwards-ass laws.

Goodbye Molnau. We are looking forward to throwing your boss out at the end of his term, too. Good riddance. As I've written about in the past, I absolutely noticed a deterioration in MNDot long before I ever heard the word "Molnau". Add the bridge collapse, the shady business deals (she sold her farm to a developer for 6 times its market value 8 days after pushing through a bill that expanded Highway 212 to better service that area) and a damning legislative auditor's report, this is an obvious step to take.

The Righties will argue that it is a witch hunt and all of that. They will protect their guy. But the fact is, if you believe in accountability and responsibility then the person at the top of the chain gets axed when things go shitty. Now it looks like Pawlenty's failure of leadership ("new new taxes") has led to a large looming budget shortfall. Luckily, thanks to some reasonable Republicans, his veto of the transportation bill was overrode.

I really wish Amy Klobachar had run for governor instead of senator. She's a great senator but she would have been a great governor as well. We need some smart, experienced person who puts real executive leadership in front of a partisan ideology.

First of all, I think Ralph Nader is right about just about everything. I agree with his politics and viewpoints. I think that the stranglehold that corporations have on our government is decidedly anti-American. I'm a capitalist and I enjoy free markets. But our government should not be for sale. That should be obvious.

I also think Ralph Nader should not worry about harming the Democrats. We need more choice in politics, not less.

My bitch with Nader is that he seems oblivious to political strategy. By that I mean, in the 11th hour when it is clear that he has no chance in hell of being elected, he should move his support to a candidate that can win. Idealism is a great thing but effective idealists need to be pragmatists as well. In 2000, the day before the election, Nader should have dropped out and asked his supporters to vote for Gore. His idealism got us further from his objectives, not closer. You are not being very smart if you undermine your own goals because of your idealism.

So Nader, yes, please run for President. Shake things up, get your agenda across and get a real liberal agenda on the agenda. But when the 11th hour comes, be practical.

Micadelic said:

And, in another post, you said that universal health care is fiscally conservative. Dude, that is laughable, and yes, insane.

No, you're bad at math. Right now we have a situation where millions of Americans without health insurance get no preventative care at all. So they wait until they are very sick before they go to the ER. They can't pay their bill so the hospital is stuck with it. The rising cost of health care, among other things, reflects the fact that WE ALREADY PAY FOR THESE PEOPLE but we do so in a manner that gives them no access to preventative care and thus, it costs us much, much more.

This is a fact, by the way -- that preventative care saves tons of money on the back end.

Add to this the fact that Medica, Blue Cross and all those other crooks make billions of dollars. Their business model? Make it a pain in the ass to collect benefits, both on the individual side and on the doctor's side. Ask any doctor about it and they will tell you that those companies are professionals at dragging their feet and delaying or omitting payments. They add no value whatsoever. They just sit in the middle and get paid.

Finally, the cost of catastrophic health insurance isn't that much! If we covered everyone with high-deductible policies that provided access from the 1st dollar to preventative care, compared to the amount of money pumped into the system today, we'd save billions of dollars. The whole point of insurance is to spread the risk around as much as possible. How about we spread it out among 3 billion people?

I thought Republicans were all about getting rid of waste? We waste money throughout the entire chain because you guys have a Red Scare called socialized medicine. We should not socialize medicine. We should absolutely socialize health insurance.

I got a note from an acquaintance:

Mike, I just wanted to drop you a note letting you know how much I enjoy your lolife blog. I've been a silent reader over the years and appreciate the efforts you put into it. I have paid extra attention to your religion posts as I have taken the final step and now call myself an atheist. I have done a fair amount of reading and couldn't deny it any longer...your rants have been helpful! I do miss your podcasts, but hope you continue to post...Thanks!

I welcome the positive feedback. <cry>I get surprisingly little!</cry>

But besides enjoying a compliment I was proud of my friend -- I do respect people who make "the final step". It takes a lot of courage to reject the mysticism of your family. It takes courage to look the universe in the eye and demand the separation of fact from fantasy. It takes courage until you realize -- it doesn't! It's the most natural thing in the world.

We reject claims without evidence. We know that Reason is, like Carl Sagan said, a candle in the dark. It's why medicine works, why technology works, why people are less likely to die from disease and why standards of living around the world are going up. Reason is the single faculty that separates humans from animals. God is a myth. Reason rules.

So, yes, the more atheists the better. We reject claims without evidence. We separate what is tested, proven and tested again from the wild speculation of people who are afraid to die. We are appalled at the wars of the Christians, the Muslims and the Jews and, no, we don't think you do know what God wants and we're sick of you guessing wrong.

Stop the madness. Recruit an atheist.

Welcome aboard, Randy!

Go check out this podcast or watch this video. Susan Jacoby talks about her new book, The Age of American Unreason as well as my favorite topics like secularism and politics. She also wrote the very excellent book Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism.

Lots of people like to portray secularists as angry atheists. Listen to Ms. Jacoby and you'll hear the true message that the "new atheists" are trying to propagate -- reason!

Sweet random quote:

But you can't believe that the Bible is literally true and still believe in evolution. There's a wonderful book on religious literacy by Stephen Prothero ... which cites a poll that half of Americans can't name Genesis as the first book of the Bible. ...[T]his is part of the total dumbing down of our culture. ...One of those books apparently that ... 50 percent of Americans aren't reading is also the Bible or they would know that Genesis was the first book of the Bible. It's sort of like, you know, "I don't know what Genesis is, but I believe it."

The podcast I linked above starts with a fascinating segment about the national debt, especially in light of the recent Attack of the Righties here at lolife.com. Moyers interviews Jean Johnson and Scott Biddle who wrote Where Does The Money Go? Your guided tour to the federal budget crisis. These guys do not strike me as liberals but I agree with them. In fact, it inspired my previous post about balancing the budget. I balance my budget at home and at work. I have no choice, really, in the long term. Why can't we expect our government to balance the budget?

Sweet quote:

BILL MOYERS: You dedicate your book to Lawford W. Bittle, Jr. and John Jay Johnson. Who are they?
SCOTT BITTLE: Our fathers.
JEAN JOHNSON: Our dads, yeah.
BILL MOYERS: And why did you dedicate this to them?
SCOTT BITTLE: Because neither of them would have left debts for us to pay.

Kind of a fascinating read: Say What You Will (Requiem for a TV News Career)

Dear CNN, fuck you.

Michael

Jim said:

One thing? OK, here's one thing where the liberal viewpoint can be considered mentally insane: supporting affirmative action while ostensibly opposing discrimination.

Thank you!

Well, affirmative action is corrective. It's not meant to be a permanent thing. You'll recall that a lot of the wealth built during the first half of our history here in the USA was built on the backs of slaves. They were not paid for their work. Their work, if you will, was stolen from them. So while white folks were so rich they were giving huge endowments to universities, black people were slaves. Anything about that strike you as unfair?

Now add on top of this that once you are rich, all sorts of opportunities arise for you. When you are poor, you have very little in terms of opportunity. Yes, it is possible and it happens that poor people get rich but that is much, much harder for people who are being harshly discriminated against.

So now put these two things together: white people are richer and have more opportunity so they continue to do well. Black people are poorer and have less opportunity so they don't do as well. On average.

Now if you think that all men are created equal then it should bother you that, to this day, black people don't do as well as white people, on average, due solely to the "criminal" way that white people treated black people during our early history up through the civil rights moment, which was yesterday in historical terms. Even today you have employers and landlords that blatantly discriminate against people based on their own racism.

So, yes, I agree: we should live in a world where affirmative action is not necessary. Unfortunately it is necessary because the system has been rigged to favor white people over black people. I hope it is not necessary for much longer.

What is funny to me -- when white people face even the most minor discrimination they act like it is high crimes. They are up in arms. Why then are they not up in arms when others are victims of discrimination? Why do they oppose remedies to past, blatant, murderous discrimination?

It's like we're running a race and the white folks get to run downhill and the black folks have to run uphill. Affirmative action is a temporary reversal of that situation in an effort to get more proportional representation of race among, what has historically been white-dominated institutions.

Now I understand that you might not agree with my viewpoint here. Do you think it is accurately described as mentally insane?

From the Ann Coulter school of psychiatry:

"Based on strikingly irrational beliefs and emotions, modern liberals relentlessly undermine the most important principles on which our freedoms were founded," says Dr. Lyle Rossiter, author of the new book, "The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness." "Like spoiled, angry children, they rebel against the normal responsibilities of adulthood and demand that a parental government meet their needs from cradle to grave."

I sure hope this person isn't employed by anyone. If so, they should be fired. I also certainly hope that this retard doesn't work directly with patients. This kind of blatant political lie, marked up to pretend it is medicine, should completely undermine this dipshits credibility. Are you a doctor? Or a political hack?

A parental government? Like ones that wants to watch what we do in the bedroom? That arrests us for growing plants that make us feel good? Ones that make our children pledge their allegiance to God every morning?

The reason that people like Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and this moron get any traction at all is because they lie about the liberal agenda. If they don't lie, they have no point. Their argument is completely bankrupt.