"If science disagrees with your ideological/philosophical/ethical/political viewpoint, it is science that is wrong, not your subjective opinion."
--A thoroughly sarcastic Jen McCreight on BlagHag.
I'd stopped reading her for a while, but I'm swiftly catching up and kicking myself for missing the excellence. Keep it up, Jen!
"Is there any way you can think of to make the elder Gosselins go away? I AM ALL EARS."
--Mommy Wants Vodka. (Preach on, sister.)
From The Redheaded Skeptic:
1. You can do or be anything, but you can’t do or be everything. Prioritize: let some things go, and keep what matters.
2. Sometimes, a picture is worth more than 1000 words.
3. Not getting what you want sometimes paves the road that gets you what you wanted more.
4. No news isn’t always good news.
5. It’s okay not to be perfect.
6. It’s okay for people to not think you’re perfect.
7. Failure does not permanently suit me: I will overcome no matter what it takes or how difficult it gets.
8. Sometimes, you think you lost something you didn’t actually lose. And sometimes what you did lose wasn’t as important as you thought.
9. Sometimes, it’s worth it to face adversity just to prove to yourself that you can do it.
10. Just keep swimming.
You know, this is the one good thing about getting old...you can say anything you want and not give a damn anymore...
Honestly, if I could , I would put the entire Republic party over my knee and give them a good spanking. What does it say about our country if the biggest debate of the decade is no longer about the two wars we are fighting but rather about preventing children and families from having access to affordable healthcare? I’ll tell you what it says to me. It says the Christian Right never really was and Value Voters aren’t very valuable.And she gets personal, too:
Sarah Palin is worried about death squads. I think she should spend a little more time worrying about getting at least one child into college.
Rush Limbaugh is worried about Socialism. That’s a big word for a college drop out, but isn’t it nice when such a wealthy person shows so much concern for poor little us. I wonder if he’ll spend a little of his $400 million contract and write you ditto heads a check when you can’t afford your hospital bills.
And go read what she has to say about Michele Bachmann.
Eldon "Fat Cyclist" Nelson lost his wife, Susan, to cancer last month. The following week, he got to give away a SICK excuse for a road bike as a prize for donating to his LiveSTRONG team: a 2010 Orbea Orca with Dura-Ace Di2 electronic shifting, and Dura-Ace carbon tubeless wheels. Like I said, a bike so sick, it should be sterilized instead of cleaned.
Naturally, Fatty was drooling on his keyboard as he blogged about it, saying he wanted to keep it so bad he could taste it.
Shimano and Orbea heard him.
Orbea gave him a ridiculous discount on an Orca frame.
Shimano GAVE him the Di2 drivetrain and DA carbon tubeless wheelset. That's about, oh, $5,000 worth of parts, fuhcryinoutloud.
Granted, if I was him, I'd rather ride a beat-up shop frame and still have my wife healthy and happy. But it's nice to see good things happen to good people.
I've been doing some branching out recently from my usual blog sites (Pharyngula, The Daily Dish, Dispatches from the Culture Wars, etc.). And I've found a couple of gems.
Angie Jackson, blogging as Angie the Anti-Theist, or ATAT for short (apologies, George Lucas) is a very smart, funny young lady whose grandmother was a cult leader. In fact, she has a book coming out soon (excerpt here) that sounds grimly fascinating. It's the kind of cult where they believed in faith-healing and children died because of it. Angie's only been a non-irrationalist for a couple years now, tops, but she's already got game in the writing department. Angie, welcome, and keep it up.
Also, one of my favorite targets for contempt--the "Church" of Scientology--has a stupendous counterpunch: Ask the Scientologist. It's written by a couple of long-term CoS members who have come to their senses. And like me with the Catholic Church or Angie with her grandmother's cult, there's nothing like a former member to tell you what's really going on.
They're both excellent. Check 'em out.
If you don't know who Simon Singh is, read my previous blog post. Singh is being sued by the British Chiropractic Organization Association for libel for daring to suggest their claims of treatment not only don't hold up to scientific scrutiny, but are also actively harmful to normal, healthy patients. In solidarity, I just found the following button on Orac's blog and have decided it would fit in nicely with the rest of my decoration:
Being the passionate believer in free speech and a dreadfully rude believer that you should back up your scientific/medical claims with data and not lawyers (or if you use the latter, you'd better produce the former), I can do not otherwise.
Cheers!
Skepchick has followed suit with my suggstion...
"We don’t delve too much into politics here, but this is a serious issue that touches on many issues that require hardcore critical thinking: government fraud (the election was called in favor of the incumbent before the votes could even begin to be counted), censorship (the government is blocking gmail and other services and requiring people to use proxies), and the spread of misinformation (as it appears the government is flooding Twitter with fake news stories).You can follow the news on Twitter using the hashtag #IranElection and see the photos from the scene on Flickr. Here’s a CyberWar guide from BoingBoing."
Thanks, ladies.
There's a number of chains in this time line I'm skipping, but these two are completely relevant:
From a well-written and articulate blog, Cure Faith:
And I totally want that cross-into-double-helix logo as a tattoo.
A beauty of a picture here:
From The Dish's description:
"Image via SUNY Stonybrook Department of Geosciences (h/t: Ian Swain, Martin Prosperity Institute). This poster, courtesy of the city of Muenster, Germany, illustrates the different amounts of space taken up by different kinds of transit.I'd love to hear what certain dimwits in the media have to say about this. George Will went on a rant the other day:
- Bicycle - 90 sq. m for 71 people to park their bikes.
- Car - 1000 sq. m for 72 people to park their care (avg. occupancy of 1.2 people per car).
- Bus - 30 sq m for the bus."
"Does (Transportation Secretary Ray) LaHood really think Americans were not avid drivers before a government highway program "promoted" driving? Does he think 0.01 percent of Americans will ever regularly bike to work? Intercity high-speed rail probably always will be the wave of the future, for cities more than 300 miles apart."Matt Yglesias schools him:
"Will claims to find it unbelievable that as many as 0.01 percent of Americans would ever bike to work regularly. But rather than tossing off ridicule, he might have looked up the Census Bureau’s statistics on commuting patterns and seen that right now 0.4 percent of commuters normally get to work on bicycles. Now that’s a small percentage. But it’s forty times larger than a percentage that Will deems unrealistically utopian. This would be like saying Dwight Howard is 2 feet tall.As for high-speed rail, San Francisco and Los Angeles aren’t that much more than 300 miles apart. Indeed, they’re about as far apart as Barcelona and Madrid, which are currently served by a very successful high speed rail link. What’s more, while metropolitan San Francisco is about the same size as metro Barcelona (4.2 million people, give or take), metropolitan Los Angeles’s 12.8 million residents is a much larger city than Madrid with its 5.3 million."
IOW, Will is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Which is a shame, because we need smart conservative commentators, not just those who can throw out pithy phrases about things they don't like.
As both of my readers can tell, I have a new link over on the right. It’s the Atheist Blogroll, and if you can’t figure out what that means, go back to Liberty University.
Anyway, my name is Paul, I’m a middle-aged skeptic from Ames, IA. I was a cradle Catholic who is every bit as nauseated by that particular cult as anyone in their right mind should be. I realized by the time I was in (Catholic) high school that I was having an awfully hard time rectifying all of the Church’s version of the truth with what my eyes and ears were telling me and how my mind was interpreting it. By the time I was a high school senior, I realized the Church was total bullshit. I quit for good four years later, having graduated from college. The two years I spent away from religion of any kind made me realize my life was no different, and I certainly didn’t miss the boring word-salad-sermons.
Subsequent years weren’t exactly rosy, but I won’t get into that. I have had more than one person equate atheism with personal dissatisfaction, to which I say simply, “Don’t confuse the issue.” And to those who wonder why atheists have to be so angry all the time, Greta Christina has the greatest explanation I’ve ever read as to why.
Welcome to Cycle Ninja. Fix yourself a drink, piss on the holy book of your choice, and be sure to tip the waitress.
Ouch, this has got to sting...
"(H)ere's the thing: if it's a matter of your faith, you lose. Your faith cannot dictate civil rights, any more than it could when the southern states invoked Scripture to justify slavery during the Civil War. So please, be honest and let's just be done with this hate and bigotry."I don't know who Nicole Belle is, but I'd hate to be her opponent in a debate.
Although, having wheat grass stuffed up your bum sounds like an experience worth ruining...
"We were in the sauna, and my friend and I were discussing the nutritional value of wheatgrass. We were trying to be quiet, and not disturb the other ladies in the sauna, but I think I hit a nerve with our nearest neighbor when I said that wheatgrass was at best a placebo."The woman piped in testily that it was not just a placebo, and that wheat-grass contains valuable chemicals found in no other food. I told her she should just go eat an orange."
Via Skepchick.
Watch this, Sarah Palin, this is your opponent:
And a damn fine point: She's hoovering up every media appearance she can find to complain about the media. Can we just not use the term "the media" ever again, please? They aren't all united in their purpose, they're not receiving their marching orders from one source from which they fear retribution if they step off the path.
Well, OK; Fox...
I wonder if Keith Olbermann still wears blue jeans under the anchor desk? Me, I blog naked.
HT: Matt Yglesias.
Wonder if anyone's going to be picketing Jewish temples over this?
Have I mentioned how religion leads to bigotry? I wonder how many atheists voted in favor of Prop 8? Maybe nobody bothered to tally those figures. We don't count in this country, after all [/sarcasm].
You ever have one of those days when you get up and down mixed up? That's this post in a nutshell: I had originally intepreted it to mean that Jewish voters had supported Prop 8, but they hadn't; they were opposed to the measure and defending gay rights to marry. I screwed up royally, and I'm sorry. I'll do better.
How fitting. NBC has been making use of Luke Russert, son of the late Tim Russert, to report on the "youth vote" from Indiana University. Sure, it's a token gesture, but how classy is that?
Interesting how NBC News is teasing us. Brian Williams is exhorting people to stay tuned for breaking news at the top of the hour. Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan has spilled the beans by saying Fox News calls Virginia for Obama. Looks like a lot of people in the traditional media (tradmed, if you will) still have something to learn from neo-media. Instant gratification hath no greater friend than the Internet.
If Obama wins this thing, I can't help but wonder how much of a trickle-down effect this is going to have. How many organizations are all of a sudden going to pay more attention to promoting minority figures and marketing their products to them as a result of reading the ethnic tea leaves? Katie Couric broke ground as the first female anchor for one of the big three tradmed news organizations. When will we have a black person heading the news division of such a place? All I know is this: racism looks more and more stupid by the day. GOOD.
Now for the next step: an end to the nasty demonization of people of the opposite party. Well, OK, that ain't never going to happen. But the practice will become harder and harder. Matt Yglesias had a smart take on how the right-wing liars have their work increasingly cut out for them to spread their damagogic feces because of an increasingly "progressive" (read: liberal) infrastructure in the media, traditional and otherwise. Fascinating stuff.
