How dead is dead?

Sometimes, you really have to wonder about people. At least, here's an article in The Economist that really makes me wonder.

Researchers were wondering how people perceive those in a persistent vegetative state, and they stumbled across something rather shocking:

They first asked 201 people stopped in public in New York and New England to answer questions after reading one of three short stories. In all three, a man called David was involved in a car accident and suffered serious injuries. In one, he recovered fully. In another, he died. In the third, his entire brain was destroyed except for one part that kept him breathing. Although he was technically alive, he would never again wake up.

After reading one of these stories, chosen at random, each participant was asked to rate David’s mental capacities, including whether he could influence the outcome of events, know right from wrong, remember incidents from his life, be aware of his environment, possess a personality and have emotions. Participants used a seven-point scale to make these ratings, where 3 indicated that they strongly agreed that he could do such things, 0 indicated that they neither agreed nor disagreed, and -3 indicated that they strongly disagreed.

The results, reported in Cognition, were that the fully recovered David rated an average of 1.77 and the dead David -0.29. That score for the dead David was surprising enough, suggesting as it did a considerable amount of mental acuity in the dead. What was extraordinary, though, was the result for the vegetative David: -1.73. In the view of the average New Yorker or New Englander, the vegetative David was more dead than the version who was dead.

Weird, huh? So they ran a follow-up study:

To investigate that, they ran a follow-up experiment which had two different descriptions of the dead David. One said he had simply passed away. The other directed the participant’s attention to the corpse. It read, “After being embalmed at the morgue, he was buried in the local cemetery. David now lies in a coffin underground.” No ambiguity there. In this follow-up study participants were also asked to rate how religious they were.

Once again, the vegetative David was seen to have less mind than the David who had “passed away”. This was equally true, regardless of how religious a participant said he was. However, ratings of the dead David’s mind in the story in which his corpse was embalmed and buried varied with the participant’s religiosity.

Irreligious participants gave the buried corpse about the same mental ratings as the vegetative patient (-1.51 and -1.64 respectively). Religious participants, however, continued to ascribe less mind to the irretrievably unconscious David than they did to his buried corpse (-1.57 and 0.59).

This seems to indicate that the "irreligious participants" were not entirely rational themselves, though more rational than the religious. I mean dead people - embalmed or not - are at least as dead as those in a persistent vegetative state, wouldn't you think?

And I can at least vaguely understand the justification for the religious in this. They want to believe that there's life after death - more life even than before death, apparently - and a person in a persistent vegetative state is probably a difficult gray area for them.

Of course, the evidence indicates that our thought processes, our memories, our personalities, our emotions - all are firmly linked to our flesh and blood bodies. An injury to your brain can damage all of these, so how can you imagine that they'd still exist when your brain was completely destroyed?

Really, there have been plenty of examples - for more than a century now - of people with brain injuries whose personalities were changed completely by the event. If an injury to your brain can change you from a pleasant, good-natured person to a nasty, disagreeable one, where is there room for a "soul" in that?

And if you can lose memories - permanently - due to a brain injury, how can you have any memories at all without a brain? Well, I've never understood this kind of thinking.

Finland's successful schools

Here's another interesting article in the Smithsonian, "Why are Finland's Schools Successful?"

And they are successful:

The transformation of the Finns’ education system began some 40 years ago as the key propellent of the country’s economic recovery plan. Educators had little idea it was so successful until 2000, when the first results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a standardized test given to 15-year-olds in more than 40 global venues, revealed Finnish youth to be the best young readers in the world. Three years later, they led in math. By 2006, Finland was first out of 57 countries (and a few cities) in science. In the 2009 PISA scores released last year, the nation came in second in science, third in reading and sixth in math among nearly half a million students worldwide. ...

Ninety-three percent of Finns graduate from academic or vocational high schools, 17.5 percentage points higher than the United States, and 66 percent go on to higher education, the highest rate in the European Union. Yet Finland spends about 30 percent less per student than the United States.

Now, yes, Finland is not America. Only 4% of the country is foreign-born, so they are a much more homogenous nation. However, Finland's schools work for immigrants, too, not just for ethnic Finns.

I suspect the difference is that Finland is willing to spend money on minorities. They even spend extra in "positive discrimination money." Americans, on the other hand, are far too worried that their tax money might go to help "those people."

Finland is willing to do whatever it takes. Education is a priority for them - and that's not just lip service, like it is in America. And with our worship of competition, we've taken a completely different path:

In the United States, which has muddled along in the middle for the past decade, government officials have attempted to introduce marketplace competition into public schools. In recent years, a group of Wall Street financiers and philanthropists such as Bill Gates have put money behind private-sector ideas, such as vouchers, data-driven curriculum and charter schools, which have doubled in number in the past decade. President Obama, too, has apparently bet on compe­tition. His Race to the Top initiative invites states to compete for federal dollars using tests and other methods to measure teachers, a philosophy that would not fly in Finland. ...

Some of the more vocal conservative reformers in America have grown weary of the “We-Love-Finland crowd” or so-called Finnish Envy. They argue that the United States has little to learn from a country of only 5.4 million people—4 percent of them foreign born. Yet the Finns seem to be onto something. Neighboring Norway, a country of similar size, embraces education policies similar to those in the United States. It employs standardized exams and teachers without master’s degrees. And like America, Norway’s PISA scores have been stalled in the middle ranges for the better part of a decade.

Of course, we don't want to "throw money" at schools, right? Isn't that what we always hear? (But we have no problem with throwing money at the military, do we? We value our military. We don't value our schools - certainly not the schools other people's children attend.)

And note that Finnish schools haven't always been good:

Finland’s schools were not always a wonder. Until the late 1960s, Finns were still emerging from the cocoon of Soviet influence. Most children left public school after six years. (The rest went to private schools, academic grammar schools or folk schools, which tended to be less rigorous.) Only the privileged or lucky got a quality education. ...

In 1963, the Finnish Parliament made the bold decision to choose public education as its best shot at economic recovery. “I call this the Big Dream of Finnish education,” said Sahlberg, whose upcoming book, Finnish Lessons, is scheduled for release in October. “It was simply the idea that every child would have a very good public school. If we want to be competitive, we need to educate everybody. It all came out of a need to survive.”

Fancy that! And what's even more amazing, they followed through with it! We could do this, too. If we wanted to. If we were willing to do whatever it took, as the Finns are. If "no child left behind" was more than a campaign slogan in America.

America used to have the best system of public education in the world, bar none. Our public schools were the envy of the world. Well, no longer. Now we're lucky to be average. Well, you can't be average if you expect to effectively compete in the global marketplace. Certainly, you can't afford to be average in education if you expect to stay a world superpower.

And education is an investment. We can't afford to spend the money right now? We can't afford not to. If we won't invest in our children, what does that say about us? If we'd rather give tax cuts to the rich, what does that say about our priorities? What does that say about our common sense?

Instead of making excuses for why Finland is beating our pants off, why don't we learn what they have to teach us? But we don't want to do that, do we? When you get right down to it, we just don't care that much.

"Holmes on the Range" by Steve Hockensmith

It's a cold February in Montana, in 1893, when two cowboys - brothers - take a job at the Bar VR ranch, a place with a very unsavory reputation.

The younger brother, "Big Red," is literate, loquacious, and a bit too fond of alcohol. His brother, "Old Red" - all of 27 years old - is illiterate, but intelligent and discerning. He desperately wants to be a detective, like the great Sherlock Holmes. As it turns out, they both find plenty of mystery and danger at the ranch.

I haven't read a western since I sampled a few Zane Grey novels when I was a kid (always being desperate for something new to read). So the setting in this mystery didn't exactly appeal to me. And, well, I don't read that many mysteries, either, since they seldom do much for me. But I've been trying out a few recommendations lately.

Holmes on the Range (2006) was entertaining right from the start. I liked the humor in the book. The banter between the $5 a week cowhands was both funny and quite plausible. (I've worked in situations that weren't all that different, even a century later.)

But I really didn't expect to like the book at much as I did. As I say, it was fun enough, right from the start. But there came a time when I picked it up to read just a little more,... and I couldn't seem to put it down.

I'm not sure why that was, but I think it's just that, the more I read, the more I liked the characters. Those two cowboy brothers, all alone in the world except for each other, just grew on me. Oh, I liked them well enough at the beginning, but by the end of the book, I found myself wondering what happens next. (And this is the first book in a series, so I guess I'll find out.)

I'd guessed most of the mystery before they figured it out, but that doesn't bother me too much. I don't really read mysteries for the mystery, but rather for the characters (which is probably why I rarely find a mystery series I really like).

And yeah, this "Sherlock Holmes on the range" thing is a gimmick, but a clever one. I think Hockensmith pulls it off because his characters are both plausible and unique, as well as being likable. And it's probably also the case that the humor makes me take the book less seriously than I otherwise might.

But don't get me wrong. This story sneaks up on you. Hockensmith actually has a lot to say - about his characters and about their society. It's not a deep book, but it's deeper than it seems at first. The humor disguises that, I think.

At any rate, I'll be reading more. There are four more books in the series, so far. Now, I'm not going to rush out and buy them all, but I will definitely continue with the next volume. For me, with mysteries, that's about as good as it gets.

The struggle within Islam

Here's a rather optimistic article in the Smithsonian. "Terrorists get the headlines, but most Muslims want to reclaim their religion from extremists."

I'd like to believe that, so I need to remind myself to be appropriately skeptical. Then again, there are a lot of people in America who want to use fear - fear of Islam just one of many - for political gain. So we Americans are far more likely to hear a different kind of story, I think.

And stereotypes are invariably wrong. No group of people are exactly alike, and we're all more alike than we're different. Irrational fear is just that, irrational.

But let me just post some excerpts:

[E]ven as the outside world tried to segregate Muslims as “others,” most Muslims were trying to integrate into a globalizing world. For the West, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, obscured the Muslim quest for modernization; for Muslims, however, the airliner hijackings accelerated it. “Clearly 9/11 was a turning point for Americans,” Parvez Sharma, an Indian Muslim filmmaker, told me in 2010. “But it was even more so for Muslims,” who, he said, “are now trying to reclaim space denied us by some of our own people.”

This year’s uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen and beyond have rocked the Islamic world, but the rebellions against geriatric despots reflect only a small part of the story, obscuring a broader trend that has emerged in recent years. For the majority of Muslims today, the central issue is not a clash with other civilizations but rather a struggle to reclaim Islam’s central values from a small but virulent minority. The new confrontation is effectively a jihad against The Jihad—in other words, a counter-jihad. ...

By 2010, public opinion polls in major Muslim countries showed dramatic declines in backing for Al Qaeda. Support for bin Laden dropped to 2 percent in Lebanon and 3 percent in Turkey. Even in such pivotal countries as Egypt, Pakistan and Indonesia—populated by vastly different ethnic groups and continents apart—only around one in five Muslims expressed confidence in the Al Qaeda leader, the Pew Global Attitudes Project reported.

Muslim attitudes on modernization and fundamentalism also shifted. In a sampling of Muslim countries on three continents, the Pew survey found that among those who see a struggle between modernizers and fundamentalists, far more people—two to six times as many—identified with modernizers. Egypt and Jordan were the two exceptions; in each, the split was about even.

In the first month of Egypt’s uprising in 2011, another poll found that 52 percent of Egyptians disapproved of the Muslim Brotherhood and only 4 percent strongly approved of it. In a straw vote for president, Brotherhood leaders received barely 1 percent of the vote. That survey, by the pro-Israeli Washington Institute of Near East Policy, also found that just two out of ten Egyptians approved of Tehran’s Islamic government. “This is not,” the survey concluded, “an Islamic uprising.”

That's just an excerpt, which doesn't get into the details of the article. And the details are quite interesting. I recommend that you read the article itself.

It is easy to stereotype other people - other scary people, in particular. Likewise, we tend to give too much attention to the recent past, especially when it includes events such as 9/11, which shocked our entire nation. But the future does not have to be the same as the past. In fact, it rarely is.

Now don't get me wrong. I'd prefer that Islam disappear, just as I'd prefer that all religions fade away. I think that faith-based thinking is inherently a bad idea. Even if you happen to come up with the right answer, you've used the wrong method - a method which will very likely give you the wrong answer on the next question.

And I doubt if Islam is ever going to be my favorite religion. There are too many parts of it that just rub me the wrong way (the whole idea of submission, in fact - which is literally what "Islam" means).

But although I can, and do, argue against religion in general, it's not my place to tell everyone else what they must think, what they must believe. I strongly support freedom of religion as the best thing for the religious and non-religious alike. I strongly support the separation of church and state for the same reason.

And I'm sure that most American Christians do, too. For more than two hundred years, we've lived in a society where your religion, if any, was your own business, not your neighbor's, and certainly not your government's. That's worked very well for Christians, and it can work very well for Muslims, too.

I think most Muslims understand that. I'm confident, at least, that most American Muslims understand it. In many Muslim nations, they haven't had much experience with freedom. And freedom results in bad things as well as good. You have to understand that the good far outweighs the bad, and you have to realize that you can't get the good without the bad.

That's a difficult thing for even American Christians to accept. Certainly, Republicans seem to have trouble with it. But it's not an impossible concept for anyone. Most Christians do understand it, I think, and there's no reason most Muslims can't. Indeed, they might already.

Let me end this with one more excerpt, one more optimistic excerpt:

“Today, Al Qaeda is as significant to the Islamic world as the Ku Klux Klan is to the Americans—not much at all,” Ghada Shahbender, an Egyptian poet and activist, told me recently. “They’re violent, ugly, operate underground and are unacceptable to the majority of Muslims. They exist, but they’re freaks.

“Do I look at the Ku Klux Klan and draw conclusions about America from their behavior? Of course not,” she went on. “The KKK hasn’t been a story for many years for Americans. Al Qaeda is still a story, but it is headed in the same direction as the Klan.”

Let's hope that's true, huh? More importantly, let's work to make sure it becomes true, if it isn't already. Demonizing Muslims is not the way to empower the moderates. Just the reverse, in fact. Unfortunately, it might be a good way to get elected in America.

History repeating itself

(RJ Matson)

Gawd, let's hope not, huh? How could any of us be this stupid?

James Randi challenges top "psychics"

From JREF:

The James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) has just directed its Million Dollar Challenge toward the celebrity "psychic mediums" featured on last night’s episode of ABC’s Primetime Nightline: Beyond Belief.

“James Van Praagh and Allison DuBois have turned the huckster art of ‘cold reading’ into a multi-million-dollar industry, preying on families’ deepest fears and regrets,” said James Randi, founder of the JREF and a renowned magician and skeptic who also appeared in the episode. “They should be embarrassed by the transparent performances they revealed to the world on last night’s show.”

The JREF’s Million Dollar Challenge Director, Banachek, also featured in the episode, said, “We’re issuing a challenge to these fakers: for once, show that you can get this supposedly supernatural knowledge without cheating. If one of you can demonstrate your ‘psychic’ abilities on randomly chosen strangers—not celebrities—under mutually-agreed conditions, without relying on known cold-reading techniques such as fishing around with vague questions, and without just using Google—we will donate our million dollars to you or to the charity of your choice.”

In last night’s episode on “Psychic Powers,” self-proclaimed psychic medium James Van Praagh performed a reading on Good Morning America anchor Josh Elliott. Elliott initially appeared surprised by Van Praagh’s accuracy before finally revealing that “every talking point of the reading” seemed to have been lifted from a two-year-old interview with Elliott that was available through a simple internet search. When Van Praagh was asked to repeat his performance on the spot with an ABC producer, he declined to try, claiming he had become too tired.

In a later scene, “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” reality-show actor Allison DuBois, also billed as the inspiration for the TV drama Medium, performed a similar reading on ABC News correspondent David Wright. Self-proclaimed medium Rebecca Rosen also performed a reading, and both readings focused on Wright’s family and his late mother. Wright was surprised by their accuracy and said they revealed “details that don’t pop up on Google.” Yet, shortly after the show aired, a Twitter user posted a link to a New York Times wedding announcement that contained the relevant details about the Wright family.

So what do you think? How soon after Hell freezes over will these "psychics" accept Randi's challenge?

The problem in Oklahoma and Texas

Here's an article in the Los Angeles Times about the extreme weather this year. I noted particularly the situation in Oklahoma and Texas:

Oklahomans are accustomed to cruel climate. Frigid winters and searing summers are often made more unbearable by scouring winds. But even by Oklahoma standards, it's been a year of whipsaw weather. ...

Oklahoma's heat wave has so far claimed 14 lives. Since 2000, Oklahoma has had more federally declared weather-related disasters than any other state. ...

Drought-caused agricultural losses in Texas have been tallied at $5.2 billion so far. Some of the state's water-starved cities are beginning programs to recycle treated sewage for household use, a practice known as "toilet to tap."

The Lone Star State has been so beset by weather emergencies that Gov. Rick Perry has made a state disaster declaration every month since December.

So how do you explain this? Well, climatologists can't say that any particular weather event was caused by global warming, but they do point out that this is exactly what they've predicted to happen. But most people in Oklahoma and Texas don't "believe" in science.

Texas governor - and Republican presidential candidate - Rick Perry claims that global warming is some giant conspiracy by greedy scientists. And Oklahoma's Tom Coburn is one of the most notorious global warming deniers in the Senate.

But they do believe in God. So the explanation is obvious. People in Oklahoma and Texas have clearly angered the big guy. Now maybe just electing Republicans did it. That would be enough to anger any reasonable deity, I'd think.

But my guess is that there's just not enough of them worshiping Allah. Or maybe they're not facing Mecca when they pray. Every governmental body in both states holds a prayer before getting to business, but how many of them are Islamic prayers? Maybe they should be praising Mohammed, not Jesus.

Well, I don't know what else it could be. OK, maybe I do, but these people believe in faith, not science. From their point of view, this must be divine punishment, right? I've certainly heard warnings of that from them often enough. So maybe both states should become majority Muslim and see what happens.

Or maybe it's the Hindu deities who are upset. Well, they can try that next. In fact, there are all sorts of different religions they could try. Unfortunately, Christianity just doesn't seem to be working for them - not when they're being plagued with extreme weather and Republicans both!

Why don't you believe in evolution?

(Deep Cover)

African Eve

You've probably heard the story of "African Eve" or "Mitochondrial Eve," the matrilineal most recent common ancestor of all human beings. But do you know what that actually means?

I was reading this post at Slashdot about "evangelical scientists" who are trying to adjust their faith with reality and have come face to face with the fact that it's "unlikely that we're all descended from a single pair of humans."

Here's how the original article at NPR puts it:

According to the Bible (Genesis 2:7), this is how humanity began: "The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." God then called the man Adam, and later created Eve from Adam's rib. [*]

Polls by Gallup and the Pew Research Center find that four out of 10 Americans believe this account. It's a central tenet for much of conservative Christianity, from evangelicals to confessional churches such as the Christian Reformed Church.

But now some conservative scholars are saying publicly that they can no longer believe the Genesis account. Asked how likely it is that we all descended from Adam and Eve, Dennis Venema, a biologist at Trinity Western University, replies: "That would be against all the genomic evidence that we've assembled over the last 20 years, so not likely at all."

OK, there's nothing too unusual about this. Americans who are ignorant about science - often willfully ignorant - might believe almost anything, but when people start learning more about biology and genetics, they find it increasingly hard to believe ancient myths.

But then I saw this comment at Slashdot:

>it is unlikely that we all descended from a single pair of humans.

I thought that Lucy/African Eve was the one that we're all descended from. Or was that a single pair of humans ... Lucy and multiple males.

There seems to be considerable confusion there, and I suspect that it's widespread. So let's take a look at this. (Note that I'm just a layman, no particular authority on any of this stuff. But I think I can explain the errors fairly well.)

First, there's the problem of confusing "Lucy" with "African Eve." Lucy is just a particular fossil of an Australopithecus female from 3.2 million years ago. She really has no connection with this "African Eve" idea.

African Eve, also called Mitochondial Eve, is an estimate of the matrilineal most recent common ancestor of all humans, based on mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down in the egg from your mother only.

With nuclear DNA, you get half from your mother (in the egg) and half from your father (in the sperm which fertilizes it). That mixes things up so that even siblings aren't normally identical.

But an egg is a lot bigger than sperm, and it contains a lot more. In particular, it contains mitochondria, which "power cells," more or less. Since you get it only from your mother, your mitochondrial DNA is identical to your mother's, except for any mutations. Obviously, when there is a successful mutation, that's often passed down to succeeding generations, too.

Therefore, we can follow this process in reverse, using an estimate of how frequently mutations occur, to get an idea of when our matrilineal most recent common ancestor lived. (We can do the same thing with y-chromosomes to find "Y-chromosomal Adam." It's the same basic idea.)

But what does this actually mean? First, we're all related, so it's inevitable that we would have a "most recent common ancestor." You could say the same thing about human beings and dogs, for that matter. The common ancestor of humans and dogs is much further in the past, but if you go back far enough, it's inevitable that we do have a most recent common ancestor.

So there's nothing unusual in having a most recent common ancestor. It's inevitable. And "Mitochondrial Eve" almost certainly isn't even it. She's just our most recent common ancestor entirely in the matrilineal line. We all got our mitochondrial DNA from our mothers, and they got it from their mothers, and so on - back to this so-called "Eve."

But that's not to say that there aren't more recent common ancestors, not just in the patrilineal, but in descent that wasn't entirely in one gender. In fact, that's far more likely to be the case.

So this also tells us that we have many, many common ancestors, some of whom almost certainly lived at the time of "Eve." We are not descended just from Eve and her mate(s), not at all. Most likely, we are all descended from many people in Eve's own village, and certainly many people who lived at the same time.

I think that "African Eve" has just been hyped by too many people. Yeah, that sells newspapers, no doubt. But it's led to widespread confusion about what it actually means. It's not really all that significant. In fact, it's inevitable that a "Mitochondrial Eve" would exist at some point. I think the only scientific interest in it is the estimate of dating.

And if you want an example of how inconsequential this really is, look at those dates. According to Wikipedia, Mitochondrial Eve, the matrilineal most recent common ancestor of all human beings, lived approximately 200,000 years ago. But our most recent common ancestor lived perhaps only 2,000 to 5,000 years ago.

Now that's quite remarkable, don't you think? (And no, that doesn't imply that Adam and Eve were real, not at all. We aren't descended just from that ancestor.)

* PS. I've actually known people who thought that men had fewer ribs than women, based on that old myth in Genesis about God creating Eve from one of Adam's ribs. Funny, huh? But I suppose it's a logical assumption if you actually believe that stuff.

Christopher Hitchens thinking on his feet

Since we were just talking about Christopher Hitchens (in the comments here), I thought I'd post this brief video clip.

Apparently, this comes at the end of a debate between Hitchens and Frank Turek, but I'm not sure which debate it was. They debated twice (the first is here, and the second here), and I just don't have time to watch them now.

Where do Texas governors come from?

From ABC News comes this quote of Texas Governor - and GOP presidential candidate - Rick Perry, replying to a young boy and his mom:

"Here your mom was asking about evolution, and you know it's a theory that's out there, and it's got some gaps in it. In Texas we teach both creationism and evolution in our public schools," Perry said.  "Because I figure you're smart enough to figure out which one is right."

But obviously, Perry himself isn't that smart.

So, OK, this kid might indeed be smarter than Rick Perry. But if all schoolchildren are that smart, where do Texas governors come from?

Mount&Blade multiplayer

I don't play online multiplayer games, but I can really see the attraction in something like this.

Of course, I'm really, really bad at Mount&Blade, much as I enjoy the game, but it doesn't seem to matter much in this kind of play.

Anyway, I thought this was kind of fun to watch. And yes, I'll bet it's a lot of fun to play, too.

Stephen Fry on the Catholic Church

This isn't new. It was part of the Intelligence Squared debate, broadcast by the BBC, on the topic "The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world." I think that was in 2009, but I'm not positive.

I might have posted about it before. Heck, I might have posted this same video before. It's hard to keep track. But I stumbled across it (again?) today and it's too good to ignore. If you've seen it before, just skip it.

And if you want to watch the full debate, it's here. This excerpt is a whole lot shorter - and to my mind, it's probably the best part of it.

Economic facts: separating fact from fiction

Here's a great article at ProPublica that looks at five economic myths.

With the recent Iowa straw poll and President Obama's bus tour, Americans are hearing a cacophony of arguments about the wobbly economy. The federal stimulus package passed in 2009 was either a deficit-busting failure full of wasteful projects or an unparalleled rescue that would have been more successful if it had only been bigger. Taxes are either stifling or the lowest they've ever been. America needs to invest in infrastructure, or "infrastructure" is merely a euphemism for more government spending. So, here's our guide to the most prevalent economic myths.

Click on the link if you want to check them out. The nice thing about it is that it really is pretty balanced. This isn't a liberal organization. In fact, it's led by the former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal.

I'd actually say that it's a little too balanced, giving too much credit to conservative thinking. But I can't call it right-wing, either. It really does seem to be an independent investigation, which is exactly what ProPublica strives for.

And although they don't eliminate the BS entirely, they do a pretty good job of separating fact from fiction. I'm impressed. If you check it out, I think you will be, too.

I do wonder about this part, though:

Other economists, including John F. Cogan and John B. Taylor at Stanford University and the Hoover Institution, argue that the amount of stimulus spending wouldn't have mattered because it mainly reduced borrowing by state and local governments rather than increasing spending. So, they contend, the predicted benefits were washed out.

But is that really true? It's not for Nebraska, because my state is required to balance its budget every year. And I was under the impression that many, if not most, states were similarly restricted from deficit financing. Am I wrong?

In states like Nebraska, stimulus spending kept us from being forced to make even deeper cuts than we did. I suspect that was a big help to our economy. So I wonder how many states can run deficits.

And surely, even those wouldn't have borrowed everything they got in federal stimulus funds. It's just ridiculous to think that. They might not have cut everything, but they would have made deeper cuts than they did. And that would have made the recession deeper.

(Thanks, Jim, for the link!)

Giving versus taking

(Calamities of Nature)

Click to embiggen, since this chart is too small here to see well.

But basically, it shows how blue states - Democrat-leaning states - tend to pay more in taxes than they receive from the federal government, while red states - Republican-leaning - do just the reverse. Maybe we should let the red states secede!

And as Tony Piro, the cartoonist, notes, the Tax Foundation is generally considered to be a conservative organization. That's where he got the data.

I've seen this before - or a chart very similar, at least - but it's worth repeating. (My only gripe is that he seems to have forgotten Nebraska even exists.)

And if 100 things weren't enough to irritate a Republican, you could always email him this. :)

Cartoons

(Ed Stein)

I haven't posted many political cartoons lately, so I thought I'd arrange a nice assortment today.

Don't expect to laugh, though. Crying might be more appropriate.

(Tom Toles)

(Lalo Alcaraz)

(Stuart Carlson)

(Matt Davies)

(John Cole)

(Chan Lowe)

100 things you can say to irritate a Republican

(Clay Bennett)

From Addicting Info, here's 100 things you can say to irritate a Republican:

1. A Socialist wrote the Pledge of Allegiance.
2. Jesus healed the sick and helped the poor, for free.
3. Joseph McCarthy was an un-American, witch hunting sissy.
4. Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee were traitors.
5. The South lost the Civil War, get over it.
6. The Founding Fathers were liberals.
7. Fascism is a right-wing trait.
8. Sarah Palin is an ugly cow (said to conservative males).
9. The Earth is round.
10. Reagan raised taxes eleven times as President.
11. Reagan legalized abortion as Governor of California.
12. Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency.
13. Ronald Reagan supported gun control.
14. Global warming is real.
15. Republicans hate illegal immigrants, unless they need their lawns mowed or their houses cleaned.
16. The military is a government-run institution, so why do Republicans approve the defense budget?
17. The Cold War is over and the Soviet Union no longer exists.
18. Paying taxes is patriotic.
19. Republicans: Peddling the same failed economic policies since 1880.
20. The Republican Party began as a liberal party.
21. The Presidents’ full name is Barack Hussein Obama and he was born in the United States of America.
22. George W. Bush held hands with the King of Saudi Arabia.
23. President Obama saved the American auto industry, while Republicans wanted to destroy it.
24. Hate is not a Christian virtue.
25. Jesus was a liberal.
26. Republicans spend MORE money than Democrats.
27. Tea parties are for little girls.
28. Public schools educate all children; private schools are for indoctrinating children.
29. The Constitution is the law, NOT the Bible.
30. Sharia law doesn’t exist in America.
31. The President is NOT a Muslim.
32. Corporations are NOT people. People are people.
33. Fox News isn’t real news, it’s just a racist, sexist, hateful, right-wing propaganda machine.
34. The Federal Reserve was a Republican idea.
35. Women are equal citizens who deserve equal rights.
36. Women control their own bodies.
37. Abortion is a relevant medical procedure, just ask Rick Santorum.
38. Please use spell check.
39. It’s “pundit”, not “pundint”.
40. Social Security is solvent through 2038.
41. Health care is a right, not a product.
42. Roe v. Wade was a bipartisan ruling made by a conservative leaning Supreme Court.
43. G.O.P also stands for Gross Old Perverts.
44. The donkey shouldn’t be the Democratic mascot because Republicans are the real jackasses.
45. Barack Obama ordered the killing of Osama Bin Laden. It took him two and half years to do what Bush couldn’t do in eight.
46. Waterboarding IS torture.
47. 9/11 happened on George W. Bush’s watch, therefore he did NOT keep America safe.
48. Republicans invaded Iraq for oil, so Iraq should be allowed to invade Texas to get it back.
49. Separation of church and state is in the Constitution, it’s called the First Amendment.
50. Muslims are protected by the Constitution, just as much as Christians.

I'll let you check the source if you want to see the rest of them. Yeah, there are some of these I wouldn't use (though I think I understand the point of #8), but in general, I like the list.

And I'll just repeat his last line here:

Bottom line? If you want to anger a conservative, tell them the truth.

Oklahoma Freethought Convention 2011

This is the first of the talks at the recent Oklahoma Freethought Convention. This speech and the other four are all available on The Thinking Atheist's channel on YouTube. Here's the playlist.

The videos are long - 45 to 55 minutes each - but the speakers are all really interesting. I highly recommend them.

It's a shame that something like this gets little or no attention in the mainstream media - apparently, there wasn't a single reporter there - and that it doesn't get a wider venue on television. But at least it's easily available on the internet, something that wasn't the case not many years ago.

As I say, they're all really interesting. Check them out.

A backlash in the GOP?

Are we starting to see a backlash in the GOP against the loons who've taken control of the party? Well, I wouldn't get your hopes up, but a former Reagan official did call Rick Perry an idiot recently.

From TPM:

Ronald Reagan's chief domestic policy adviser took Texas governor Rick Perry to the woodshed Friday for recent controversial statements -- in particular about his suggestion that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke would be committing treason by printing money to boost economic growth.

"Rick Perry's an idiot, and I don't think anyone would disagree with that," Bruce Bartlett said on CNN's American Morning.

Of course, Bartlett did write a book in 2006 with the title Imposter: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy, so I don't suppose he's been all that welcome in Republican circles for awhile now.

But then, Jon Huntsman, who's still a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, has actually come out in support of both evolution and the scientific consensus on global warming, and neither position will do him much good with the GOP base.

Here's how Huntsman explained it:

[Jake] Tapper asked, "Were you just being cheeky or do you think there's a serious problem with what Governor Perry said?" Huntsman's response: "I think there's a serious problem. The minute that the Republican Party becomes the party - the anti-science party, we have a huge problem. We lose a whole lot of people who would otherwise allow us to win the election in 2012."

Huntsman went on to describe what he sees as the long term political downside to questioning science:

When we take a position that isn't willing to embrace evolution, when we take a position that basically runs counter to what 98 of 100 climate scientists have said, what the National Academy of Science - Sciences has said about what is causing climate change and man's contribution to it, I think we find ourselves on the wrong side of science, and, therefore, in a losing position....I can't remember a time in our history where we actually were willing to shun science and become a - a party that - that was antithetical to science. I'm not sure that's good for our future and it's not a winning formula.

He also noted that he wouldn't trust his Republican opponents on the economy:

Well, I wouldn't necessarily trust any of my opponents right now, who were on a recent debate stage with me, when every single one of them would have allowed this country to default. You can imagine, even given the uncertainty of the marketplace the last several days and even the last couple of weeks, if we had defaulted the first time in the history of the greatest country that ever was, being 25 percent of the world's GDP and having the largest financial services sector in this world by a long shot, if we had defaulted, Jake, this marketplace would be in absolute turmoil. And people who are already losing enough as it is on their 401(k)s and retirement programs and home valuations, it would have been catastrophic.

(Incidentally, TPM has a long list of prominent Republicans who claimed that default wouldn't be a big deal. Considering how the stock market has been crashing lately, most of them are trying to walk back from those claims now, I suspect.)

But here, too, I wonder. Huntsman isn't exactly a frontrunner in the campaign. I mean, he got a total of 69 votes in the Iowa straw poll the other day (Michele Bachmann got almost 5,000). Heck, Rick Perry got more than ten times that as a write-in candidate!

So I'm not counting on a sudden outbreak of sanity in the GOP. And although I'd love to see an outbreak of courage and common sense among independent voters, I'm really not seeing that, either. If there's a backlash coming, it's not real evident.

Neil deGrasse Tyson: we stopped dreaming

Dr. Tyson is right. And although I hate to plug my own blog posts - especially one that didn't catch anyone else's interest - I really must link to this one. We have become a timid little people, a people afraid to dream big, a people who think of all the reasons why we can't do something, rather than being courageous enough to try.

This isn't just about money, not even these days. And it's not even just about distrusting science, although that shows a similar level of cowardice, of refusing to face the truth. We used to dream big. Now, even our dreams are tiny, insignificant, timid little things.

If we can't regain that bold, optimistic, "can do" attitude we used to have, there's no hope for us. What has happened to my America? Really, what has happened to us?