It’s a key point and it is good that Matthews pushed it: appeasement does not mean “talking to”. It means giving up something in hopes of avoiding a conflict. Neville Chamberlain tried to appease Hitler by signing the Munich Agreement, conceding part of Czechoslovakia to Hitler.

John F. Kennedy said “Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.” I agree with him. I think Bush is a dumbshit.

lolife [10:15pm] % history | awk ‘{print $3}’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
73 ls
53 svn
38 cd
35 ssh
28 lepton
21 sudo
19 vi
17 ping
13 exit
12 pwd

I use tcsh so my command is a bit different than his.

Stung by criticism that his Monday letter explaining a veto of legislation to ban a fire retardant and a known toxin in children’s toys was “riddled with inaccuracies,” Gov. Tim Pawlenty yesterday acknowledged factual misstatements and apologized.

But he still stands behind his veto:

And so, the governor altered his reasons for vetoing the bill which, he said Tuesday, was because “many studies regarding the impact of DECA do not support a ban.”

Meanwhile, in reality:

Dahl said the “overwhelming conclusion” of independent, peer-reviewed studies is that DECA is a “dangerous neurotoxin.” She produced a long list of abstracts for scientific papers documenting known hazards of DECA, and another list of studies on another toxin, phthalate (pronounced fail-ate), that would be phased out in the vetoed bill.

Dahl said that both DECA and phthalate do not bond to the products in which they’re used, meaning that the chemicals are released as children chew on playthings or as products heat up.

Forty-one nations, including the European Union and Mexico, have banned phthalate; the giant retailer Toys R Us and toymaker Mattel have vowed to be phthalate-free by the end of the year.

The flame-retardant DECA — a “developmental neurotoxin” similar to PCBs, which were banned in Minnesota in the 1970s — is used in textiles, mattresses, and electronics. Heat causes DECA to be released, exposing firefighters to elevated chemical risk as they respond to fires.

Children are affected as heat from laptops and TV sets release DECA into dust that then circulates around the home and into carpeting.

Hmmm, I wonder whose pocket the Gov. is in on this one?

(via MinnPost)

It’s Republicans, of course, that piss me off the most. They try to spin liberals as wanting a nanny-state where the government does everything for everybody, forcing legislation and regulation down our throats. Yet they are so quick to call upon government intervention where they want it. People shouldn’t be allowed to be gay married! Abortions should be illegal! We need half of our budget to go to the military! People shouldn’t be allowed to grow pot! Hell, if you drive your car into an affluent Republican neighborhood you can’t even park on the street without a permit. They love government, but only when it directly benefits themselves. With Republicans it is a politics of convenience — “I’m a socialist when it is your stuff and a capitalist when it’s my stuff”. Thus, Republicans, when they use the “government should leave us alone” argument, are complete hypocrites.

Libertarians, on the other hand, think that government has one role — protect personal property. They think the only good laws are laws that protect personal property. All other laws are just government interference in our lives.

I think libertarians are not hypocrites but they are much too willing to allow the tyranny of the majority and much too unwilling to use government cooperatively for the common good. Libertarians seem to think that, if you get sick from mishandled food at a restaurant, you should not patronize that restaurant anymore. If you don’t want to work in a dangerous mine or a smoke-filled bar, don’t apply for the job. If you can’t afford health care, too bad so sad.

While I am certainly more sympathetic to the libertarian viewpoint than the Republican viewpoint, I think it’s impractical and wasteful to not band together for the common good, it guts our economical potential and it abandons our humanitarian ideals.

My favorite Paul Wellstone quote is “We all do better when we all do better.” Our greatest economic potential is moving people out of poverty. We should do this for humanitarian reasons alone, but the economic reasons cause the initiative to pay for itself! Welfare programs that get people on a track towards economic independence are fiscally conservative. The health care “crisis” is another example where, if we increase the size of the risk pool and use our dollars more wisely, everyone benefits. A pure free-market approach to health care leaves behind the poor and costs us much more money in the end. Free markets cannot be trusted to do the right thing in the long term for the population as a whole. Free markets benefit those who are savvy and have means. They brutalize the poor.

Thus, we should abandon empty platitudes like “government should leave us alone”. In the best case its naive and in the worst its hypocritical bullshit. I agree entirely with the notion that we must be wise about what we choose to do with government. Government is the wrong tool for many, many jobs. But, on the whole, government is a force for equality, opportunity, fairness and justice. The anti-government rhetoric of libertarians and Republicans is just plain wrong and, in the latter case, is just a shallow attempt to deceive people with a campaign slogan.

So apparently he can’t love his own sister because of his religious beliefs but he can fuck around on his wife for years and drive drunk. I guess I missed that part of the Bible.

I don’t care, necessarily, that people are imperfect. I do care when they are lying, hypocrites who act as if they hold the moral high ground politically.

Let’s see, Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) fucks call girls, Rep. Vito Fossella (R-N.Y.) cheats on his wife and drives drunk. At least Elliot Spitzer (the only D in this post) had the decency to resign.

I found this quote interesting from Is Evolution Atheistic? by Dr Denis Alexander:

Evolution itself is not atheistic. A robust Christian theism readily encompasses evolution as an expression of God’s creative actions. But, sadly, there are prominent scientists, like the Harvard sociobiologist E.O.Wilson, who left their earlier Christian experience to become atheists because they faced hostility to evolution. Arguably, attacks by well-meaning Christians on evolution promote rather than counteract atheism.

It makes two great points: 1) Evolution does not at all deny the existence of God; and 2) Ignorant attacks on evolution by well-meaning Christians actually undermines their aims.

If you are a frequent visitor I would highly encourage you to register. Then I can approve you so you can comment without moderation. I’m going to try to set the perms as liberally as I can without being bombarded with spam.

The old version of lolife.com/blog is here for a little while in case I screwed anything up.

It’s all pretty funny but the last line really cracks me up: “No matter where the evidence leads.“. They are implying that Dawkins, Scott and Myers, have made up their minds regardless of where the evidence might lead as if to imply that their viewpoint is unscientific.

I have a theory for you — the moon is made out of cotton candy. Now you are going to claim that we’ve been to the moon and we brought samples of the moon home with us. Or you are going to say that we can measure the density of the moon through various methods. You’ll bring up all sorts of “science” reasons why my theory is wrong. But face it — your mind is made up. You are not willing to consider that the moon is made out of cotton candy? What is wrong with you? You are some freakish zealot.

Intelligent Design (ID) has about the same amount of evidence supporting it as does my theory that the moon is made out of cotton candy. You will be expelled from science school if you believe that the moon is made out of cotton candy. There are no credible papers in scientific journals discussing the theory that the moon is made out of cotton candy.

Thus, this whole Evolution vs. Intelligent Design debate would be on entirely different footing if there actually was a theory of Intelligent Design. There isn’t one. There never has been one. The religious people hope they’ll find one someday and that’s great. No one has any problem with people pursuing their own scientific research. It’s not the fault of Dawkins, Scott or Myers that ID has no support in evidence. Poking “holes” in the theory of natural selection is not a theory.

Fer fuck’s sake, they named their institute “The Institute for Creation Science” and then they have the gall to accuse scientists of ignoring evidence? These guys predetermined the outcome of their research when the chose their name. They are complete frauds.

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.

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?

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.

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…?)

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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!)

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

We just finished remodeling our basement and I had my buddy Shane from SED come over and punch everything down all pretty. I don’t even need to show you pictures of my basement, this very nicely organized phone/cable/network box is all you need to see!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Dear CNN, fuck you.

Michael

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?

“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.

They call it the “Highway of Holiness.” Others call it Interstate 35.
Evangelicals throughout the Midwest, from Laredo, Texas, to Duluth, Minn., have been praying at 24-hour prayer rooms for a month for Interstate 35 in order to “light the highway.”

…The scriptural basis for the new movement comes from Isaiah 35:8, which reads, “And a highway will be there; it will be called the Way of Holiness. The unclean will not journey on it; it will be for those who walk in that Way; wicked fools will not go about on it.” Because of chapter 35, believers say the highway mentioned must be Interstate 35. In addition, a number of people in the “Highway of Holiness” movement claim to have had prophetic experiences that involve Interstate 35.

Now there is a phrase for this: COMPLETELY FUCKING CRAZY. I was appalled at how “respectful” everyone was being about this. This is insane. You are insane if you believe that Interstate 35 is written about in the Bible. This sort of quackery should be ridiculed and these people evaluated for possible institutionalization. They should be arrested for abusing their children with this insanity. The last thing we should treat this tripe with is respect.

I remain hopeful we can overcome the politics and rhetoric of this debate and pass a bipartisan transportation bill this session.

Doesn’t that sound reasonable? But Robson calls this out as the complete bullshit that it is:

Let us flash back not that far, to May of 2005. A bipartisan transportation funding bill was passed, out of both the DFL-majority Senate and a State House of Representatives then controlled by Republicans.

Gov. Pawlenty’s response to that bipartisan bill? He called a press conference and then, for the benefit of the cameras, pulled out a huge red VETO stamp and affixed it firmly down on the bill. “How dumb can they be?” he sneered at those who dared send him the bill.

Yup, I guess Pawlenty is the only one who is allowed to use politics and rhetoric.

Then just yesterday he pulls out the same old “no new taxes” bullshit:

I still have an important tool to restrain taxes and spending,” he stated. “I call it the taxpayer protection pen, otherwise known as the veto pen. As you know, I will not hesitate to use it to stop government from digging into your wallets.

With all due respect, retard, the problems our state faces are due to a systematic starvation of our government by its wealthiest residents and a chief executive that thinks that the worst possible place for our money is in his hands. You want transportation? Pay for it. The sole instrument of our collective will comes from “digging into our wallets”.

They are one of those companies who sees customer support as an expense. So some retarded MBA says “Gee, what can we do to drive down these support costs?”

I know the perfect way to drive down those support costs — sell less software! If you mange to sell no software at all, your support costs will go away completely!

Dell is a company that has seen the light and they now lavish their customers with support. I suspect MYOB will be a company that will die a long slow death as they MBA their way to complete customer alienation.

Google Terms of Service

Welcome to Google!

1. Your relationship with Google

1.1 Your use of Google’s products, software, services and web sites (referred to collectively as the “Services” in this document and excluding any services provided to you by Google under a separate written agreement) is subject to the terms of a legal agreement between you and Google.

In this day and age of malware, viruses and trojans, someone thought it was a good idea to download things to people’s hard drives without permission. L.A.M.E.

Not to mention some fleet of fucking lawyers are whinging to Google that they should even consider something this stupid.

Google, just letting you know that I hereby do not accept your terms of service. Please feel free to prevent me from accessing your services. By continuing to allow me access to your services you are agreeing to MY terms of fucking service, which I am under no obligation to disclose to you.

This include lolife, starhouse observatory, slacker astronomy and raintribe. You can also view this aggregated feed as a pretty web page.

Here it is!
The Ultimate lolife RSS Feed

Oddly, one of my objections to Hillary was that she was unelectable. Now it seems like she is one of the more attractive candidates to the Righties.

This is gonna be a weird one.

So they started a site: Save Windows XP.

Microsoft plans to end most sales of Windows XP on June 30, despite a deep reluctance by many business and individuals about moving to Vista. InfoWorld believes such an expensive, time-consuming shift with problematic benefits should not be forced on Windows users, so we have decided to rally XP users to demand that XP be kept available.

I like to point out at times that Apple successfully went from the Motorola chipset to Intel and from the legacy “classic” Mac OS to the modern, unix-based OS with barely a hiccup. Not only did they not create a cry of whiners like those above, people actually had the reverse reaction: they liked it! The evolution of the Macintosh from a 1980’s toy to a modern computing platform has been managed beautifully. It is now just as common to see scientists, engineers, sysadmins with a Mac as designers and web hackers.

But I digress. Let me clear this up for the folks at InfoWorld: XP was a finely polished turd. Vista is really no worse and probably much better. Leave the past behind, folks. Don’t be scared. Change is good. You can handle it. Really, you can.

Or, if you can’t, you can always move to something better. Like say Linux (ok, Cairnarvon?). Or a Mac.

Their vehicles collided head-on Monday afternoon on snow- and slush-covered Hwy. 14 in Winona County, killing the 17-year-old Stiehl, the State Patrol said today.

As for the Rusert, 54, of Utica, Minn., he had “no apparent injury,” the patrol report said.

Airbags deployed in both vehicles. The patrol described both cars as severely damaged.

This is a pet subject of mine. How could any intelligent person drive a car in snow and slush covered roads and not wear a seatbelt? There is no rational reason to ever not wear a seatbelt. Driving is the most dangerous activity you participate in.

Here is a “live” version of a really great song by Romantica. I’ve mentioned them before but I highly recommend you get on out