Nice poster!

(via Pharyngula)

Nice poster from the Students and Academics International Assistance Fund in Norway. Of course, the Iranian Embassy is protesting (Google translation).

Michele Bachmann in Sioux City

Michele Bachmann was in Sioux City, Iowa, the other day, spewing more crazy things. Man, she's just the best, isn't she? She doesn't have the slightest chance at the nomination, but she's willing to do what it takes for comedians everywhere.

Who says Republicans don't have a jobs plan?

I was born and raised in a small town near Sioux City (in Nebraska, though), so I took particular note of this. In honor of that, here are a few of her craziest statements that day (excerpts from the Des Moines Register):

Bachmann argued that taxes are too high, and called for a return to the tax policies of the 1980s.

“We had an economic miracle in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan,” Bachmann said. “I want to bring  those positive solutions into the tax code.”

Later, Bachmann clarified that she supported bringing back policies like those enacted in the Economic Recovery Tax Act, of 1981, known as ERTA, which slashed income, corporate, investment and estate taxes.

But Reagan-era rates of income taxation for both the top and bottom tax brackets were actually higher than current rates, even after the 1981 cuts.

Following ERTA, taxpayers in the highest income bracket were taxed at 50 percent — while today the highest rate is 35 percent. Taxpayers in the lowest bracket, meanwhile, paid income taxes at rates ranging from 11 to 15 percent between 1981 and 1989; today they pay 10 percent, according to data from the National Taxpayers Union.

Funny, huh? Republicans have been screaming "class warfare" because Barack Obama wanted to raise the top bracket back up from 35% to 39%. Can you imagine the screaming if Obama wanted to raise the rate to where Reagan lowered it? Heh, heh.

(Note that no one actually pays 35% of their income in taxes. After all, capital gains are taxed at a maximum of only 15%. After deductions and capital gains rates and everything else, billionaires frequently pay a lower rate than you do - which is the whole point of the Buffett Rule.)

Then there are these two crazy comments:

Turning to what she called excessive federal regulations, Bachmann called for the abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. departments of education and energy, all of which she said levied regulations that stifled business growth. ...

She described visiting the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge — the pristine nature reserve that has been a flashpoint for arguments over U.S. energy policy for years — and dipping her toes in the Arctic Ocean. The visit, she said, convinced her that energy should be harvested from the site. [my emphasis]

But the absolute craziest Bachmann quote?

“In the United States we should be demanding both from Libya and from Iraq that they take their oil revenues and they use that money to pay the United States back for the treasure and the toil that we spent to liberate those countries,” she said, to applause.

Heh, heh. And note how the morons applauded. Republicans are still bummed that something as fun as war - watching it, of course, not fighting in it - might actually cost something. Republican leaders promised us that the Iraq War would pay for itself, so how could you pass up a deal like that?

After all, there's no draft, so Republicans didn't have to worry about risking their own lives in it. President Bush avoided the Vietnam War like the plague, but it's a lot different when you get to prance around in a flight suit, playing "Commander-in-Chief." And the war was going to be free, too. A FREE WAR!  Jesus, how could anyone pass that up?

As it turned out, adding trillions of dollars to our nation's budget deficit isn't exactly the same thing as "free." But for Republicans at the time, it was pretty close. I mean, it's still a free lunch if someone else pays for it, right?

But Republicans today - most of them the same people who supported the war back then - don't want to pay for it, either. Or anything else, for that matter. But they still dream the dream of free war. Yeah, we invaded a completely innocent country for no reason, we destroyed their infrastructure, and they ended up with hundreds of thousands of people dead. So they should pay us for that wonderful, wonderful event...

After all, didn't they have televisions? They could watch our missiles exploding, just like we did, right? Wasn't that great fun? Entertainment isn't free, you know. Well, it should be free to us, because we're the ones who put on the show. But why should it be free for them, just because they didn't ask for it or anything?

As far as Libya goes, well, if someone contracted out the U.S. military for that, if we were merely acting as paid mercenaries, that someone should probably pay us the amount we both agreed to. But I've seen no contract, myself. We helped the rebels for our own reasons. You can like it or not, but I was just glad we weren't dumb enough to invade another country - again.

Compare this lunacy with the Marshall Plan after World War II. Back then, we Americans paid billions of dollars to help rebuild the economies of our enemies - and turned them into our staunchest allies. We'd learned the lesson from World War I, when the allies went after "reparations" and just ensured an even worse war later. And yeah, doing this caused our own economy to boom, too!

But we don't learn anything from history these days, do we? Heck, we don't seem to learn anything from anything. We've clearly forgotten all that we learned years and years ago. We forgot everything we learned in the Great Depression. We forgot everything we learned after World War I and II. We forgot what life was like without Social Security and Medicare and government regulations.

Well, historians are "elitists," right? And so are scientists and economists and anyone with education, experience, and expertise. In America these days - at least in the Republican Party - we just believe what we want to believe. That saves wear and tear on the little gray cells.

That might not be the dumbest thing Michele Bachmann has ever said. After all, that's setting the bar pretty darn high. But it's still pretty crazy, isn't it? Yeah, and she's running for president of the United States. If that makes you feel queasy, just think of how the rest of the world is feeling right now!

QOTD: Rick Perry's problem

Quote of the Day:

Stuart Stevens — Mitt Romney's senior adviser — on the major issue dragging down Rick Perry's campaign recently…

"Rick Perry has a Rick Perry problem, not a Mitt Romney or Herman Cain problem."

So, that means that Perry only has to change that one thing, and he'll be right back on track.

It worked really well for Romney. - Dennis DiClaudio

Arguing with your crazy uncle

Scientist and science fiction author David Brin has an interesting take on climate change denialism:

Forget "left-versus-right." Or even arguments over taxes. The centerpiece of our current Phase Three of the American Civil War is the all-out campaign to discredit science.

Elsewhere I show that the War on Science is part of a much wider effort to destroy public trust in every "smartypants caste" -- from school teachers, journalists, medical doctors and attorneys to professors, civil servants and skilled labor. (Name a center of intellect that's exempt!) But nowhere is it more relentless than by savaging the one group in society that's unarguably among the smartest and best educated.

It's having the intended effects. Chew on this. Thirty years ago, in the era of Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley, 40% of U.S. scientists were Republicans. Today that fraction has plummeted to around 6%.  Can you blame them?

Why is this happening? I go into it elsewhere -- the underlying motive for a campaign that will leave only one elite standing. In fact, I'll go so far as to say that everybody has this thing backward.  Scientists are not being undermined in order to argue against Human Generated Climate Change (HGCC). Rather, the whole HGCC imbroglio serves as a central rallying point in the campaign against science.

Get that? It's not that Republicans are attacking science in order to discredit global warming. Instead, they're attacking the science of global warming as part of their campaign against science itself.

It's an interesting idea. After all, the Republican Party has been hijacked by religious fundamentalists, and true believers have long warred against the science of evolution. Well, religion has distrusted science at least since Galileo. Religion thinks that it already has the answers, and science doesn't make itself very popular by showing otherwise.

Today's Republican Party has adopted the faith-based mindset of religion and abandoned the evidence-based mindset of science. Note that this isn't just a characteristic of Christianity, either. This is exactly the same mindset as held by Muslims, including those in al-Qaeda.

If you don't want to believe in evolution or global warming, then it pays to attack all of science. And if you're faith-based, you're unlikely to limit that mindset to religious issues. Republicans claimed that tax cuts for the rich - the "job-creators" - would pay for itself and actually decrease the budget deficit. Just the reverse actually happened, but Republicans still have their faith.

Faith means believing without evidence, or even despite the evidence. So if you still want to believe, it definitely pays to discredit evidence-based thinking in general. And what better example of evidence-based thinking is there than science?

Here's how David Brin put it earlier:

As part of a more general assault on the very notion of expertise, the narrative starts with a truism that is actually true:

 "Not every smart person is wise..."

only then extrapolates it, implicitly, to a blatant falsehood

"all smartypants are unwise, all the time; and my uninformed opinion is equal to any expert testimony."

Does that sound like a polemical stretch?  But it is precisely the implied subtext - a perverse kind of populism - at all levels of the War on Science.  In the specific case of GCC, since almost all top atmospheric scientists accept human-propelled climate change, they must be all cretins, corrupt, or cowards.

Here's a telling point. This uniformity of craven venality has to include even the ambitious postdocs and recently-tenured junior professors who, in every other field, sift constantly for some flaw in the current paradigm in order to go gunning after the big boys and thus make a reputation.  What, even the Young Guns are sellouts?  Even the paladins of skeptical enquiry are conspiring together in a grand cabal to...

...to what?  Ah, now the story gets even better.  All the scientists and post-docs are colluding to foist this scam, in order to win a few ten-thousand dollar grants.  This  loose-change-grubbing, paradigm slavery is cited to explain the GCC imbroglio -- while the oilcos and petroprinces, who operate major propaganda outlets and have TRILLIONS staked in the status quo... they have no agenda at all.

Of course, to typify any lawful profession as across-the-board corrupt or cowardly is absurd, but to so besmirch the one professional cohort that is unambiguously the most brave, individualistic, honest, curious and smart of all, well, there has to be an agenda behind such drivel -- and there is one. The good old Boffin Effect.

My late colleague, Michael Crichton, crystallized it when he claimed "there is no such thing as scientific consensus,"  and thus he deemed it reasonable to ignore measures recommended by 99% of the people who actually know stuff about a problem that might damage our nation and world.

This isn't just a war on science, it's a war on expertise. Why? Partly, it's economics. We saw the exact same thing from the tobacco industry years ago, when they tried to discredit medical science about the dangers of smoking. Well, there was a lot of money at stake. And there's even more money at stake these days when it comes to fossil fuels.

And partly, it's political. It used to be, in America, that certain things were bipartisan - environmentalism, the separation of church and state, even civil rights (back then, the Democratic Party was full of "Dixiecrats" who opposed integration). But not anymore. The fact that the Democratic Party supports these things today just gives Republicans a reason to oppose them.

And finally, it's religious. The GOP has been captured by religious fanatics. These people are faith-based. And when you're faith-based in one area, you're likely to be faith-based in others. If you just believe what you want to believe, refusing to admit that you're wrong even when the evidence clearly demonstrates that, then you really need to start discrediting evidence-based thinking.

As Brin notes, it's not just the right that's anti-science. The far left spent years waging their own war on science, and there's still plenty of woo on the left. But the far left has zero political power in America these days. Faith-based thinking on the left is just as wrong as faith-based thinking on the right, but the serious danger to our nation is clearly on the right.

Bottom line: there is a reason why only 6% of U.S. scientists are Republicans!

One more excerpt, still from David Brin, but this time from several years ago:

According to Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science, we need look no farther than an alliance of two reactionary forces: Big business and religious fundamentalism. This era's burgeoning hostility toward rationality, skepticism, accountability and can-do ambition is little more, and no less than, a deliberate campaign against modernity on the part of "conservatism." A matter of right versus left.

On February 18, 2004, the conservative war on science, which had been gathering momentum for decades, finally jolted the media and American public to attention. All it took was a little star power.... Over sixty leading scientists and former government officials, among them twenty Nobel laureates, had signed a statement denouncing the administration of George W. Bush for misrepresenting and suppressing scientific information and tampering with the process by which scientific advice makes its way to government officials. Examples included distorting the science of climate change, quashing government scientific reports, and stacking scientific advisory panels. "Other administrations, have, on occasion, engaged in such practices, but not so systematically nor on so wide a front," the statement read.

Mooney presents a long list of cases to support his indictment, portraying a methodical campaign to politicize, ignore, twist or undermine science. His list of topic areas will sound familiar: the effects of smoking and of air pollution, the feasibility and benefits of energy savings through increased fuel efficiency standards, global warming and stem cell research, educational standards and the Drug War, all the way to a campaign aimed at teaching "alternatives to evolution" in the classroom. Some of these matters are still under some legitimate dispute among reputable scientists, implying that we need more research, pursued promptly and professionally. Others have coalesced around deep and profound expert consensus, with clear majorities of qualified experts recommending urgent action.

Mooney shows there are countless tricks, some old and others innovative, that special interests can use when scientific consensus becomes politically inconvenient. One has been to banish science from centers of power -- for example, when the GOP-led Congress dismantled its own, nonpartisan advisory tool, the Office of Technology Assessment, because its counsel kept conflicting with ideological views. Another is for political aides to edit the reports of scientific panels, so that final versions offer conclusions quite different than panel members intended. Threats to job security can squelch whistleblowers. Another method, used more frequently of late, has been to pack advisory groups with "experts" who were selected on a basis of ideology, or industry affiliation, or promises to reach a predetermined outcome.

Mooney disapproves of the mass media's obsession with gladiatorial opposition when covering contentious issues like Creationism and global climate change. Countless news stories seek entertaining "balance" by portraying both sides as evenly matched, equally vehement. This appeals to viewers' sense of fair play, sometimes even cheering underdogs vs. snooty, scientific authority figures. But such "balance" can also empower fringe groups to stay in the fray forever, magnifying uncertainty indefinitely, preventing any conclusion from being reached.

Unlike past dogmas, science claims not to fear uncertainty. Young scientists are taught to nurse some residual doubt toward even the strongest theory. (And yes, even a widely held "consensus" can sometimes be wrong. Graduate students look for rare "faulty paradigms" which, if toppled, can make a reputation.) This healthy skepticism accompanies -- but does not generally undermine -- the collaborative process of building ever-better and increasingly valid models of the world. Models that have risen, like our cities, after centuries of steady improvement. Opponents of science try to turn this strength into a weakness by exaggerating doubts, portraying all theories as equal, or even calling "scientific consensus" a meaningless phrase.

Note that Brin (in that first article I mentioned) gives a good example of this, where some loon in the Wall Street Journal implies that we can't know anything about science because a few scientists have recently questioned part of Einstein's theory of relativity. Heh, heh. How crazy is that?

This goes deeper than Republican vs Democrat or right vs left. This isn't about what we think, but how we think. We need to understand and accept evidence-based thinking. And no, that doesn't mean looking for evidence to back up what you already believe. You need to be looking for ways to challenge that.

Science has clear procedures to combat bias. Scientists are human, too, but there are specific mechanisms in the scientific method designed to overcome natural human tendencies to believe what we want to believe.

As just one example, science offers its highest rewards to successful heretics. In science, as in anywhere else, you can go along to get along. But if you really want to be successful, you'll show that current thinking is wrong in some respect. Scientists dream of upending mainstream thinking. Successful heretics are the heroes of science.

Compare that to religion. Compare that to politics. No one likes to be wrong, not even scientists. But scientists revere their fellows who've successfully demonstrated that. If you could disprove evolution or disprove global warming, you'd win a Nobel Prize and have your pick of prestigious positions. This is a very strong encouragement to look critically at orthodoxy.

Science is the best at this, but evidence-based thinking is prized elsewhere, too. And it's generally prized where education is prized, where learning is prized. People who sneer at the "elites" - all except the financial elite, for some reason - are those who want to believe what they want to believe. People who are faith-based are threatened by evidence-based thinking because they're threatened by the truth.

"Yeah, if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" It's funny how wealth gets respect. Even if you just inherited it, even if you just won it in a lottery, wealth gets a lot of respect among these people. But not education. Education can be useful, but it's also something to be feared. What if your child stops believing what you do, what you just know - despite a complete lack of evidence - is true?

At any rate, David Brin makes a lot of good points. And if you really are arguing with your crazy uncle about climate change, he provides some pretty good arguments there, too - as well as links to some useful websites.

But this war on science is bigger than just global warming. Basically, it's a war between people who believe what they want to believe - or who want you to believe something, at least - and people who really value the truth. The truth may not always be what we want to hear. But some of us are willing to accept that.

For me, fantasy is better left in fiction. When it comes to the real world, I want to know the truth, not some pleasant lie.

All those burning bushes...

From Indecision Forever:

I realize how difficult life must be for practicing Christians in America. Sure, children are permitted to pray in public schools, but can God even hear those prayers when teachers and administrators are not allowed to lead them? And of course, self-identified Christians make up about three-quarters of the U.S. adult population, but all those secular math classes have failed me…that's basically a minority, right?

In any case, I thought the War on Christmas was the worst injustice inflicted on our Christ-loving neighbors, but during yesterday's speech in South Carolina, Rick Perry's wife explained the situation was much worse: Christians aren't even safe in a Republican primary anymore…

In an address that was sometimes teary, [Anita Perry] offered a window into how the family has been dealing with this first two months of the campaign, and admitted to drawing a surprising conclusion: Rick Perry is being attacked by the other Republican candidates because he is a Christian. ...

Funny story about God: turns out He is quite the prankster. His schedule is filled with everything from awarding touchdowns to worthy NFL teams to sending deadly hurricanes ripping along the eastern seaboard, but He still finds time to tell Republican presidential candidates that they, and they alone, are commanded to fulfill Jesus's mission of cutting capital gains taxes and discriminating against gay people (raised a Jewish atheist, I'm a little rusty on Christian theology).

God told Michele Bachmann to run for president. Karen Santorum heard God calling for her husband. Herman Cain humbly admitted he felt "like Moses when God said I want you to go into Egypt and lead my people out." Which must be very confusing for Rick Perry and his wife…

She likened Perry's decision to run to encountering a "burning bush," a reference to the Biblical story of Moses receiving a sign from God. And Anita Perry suggested that her husband's current difficulties were a "test." ...

For his part, Rick Perry agreed with his wife's interpretation of events, though personally, I'm still inclined toward the Can't Debate to Save His Life secular humanist theory of Perry's decline.

Funny how God wants all of those people to be president at the same time, isn't is? What a kidder!

Of course, an alternate explanation could be that "God" doesn't exist, that all of these Republicans are just believing what they want to believe, and that there's no way for them to tell that they're wrong, because they're faith-based, not evidence-based.

Nah, couldn't be that, could it? After all, God wanted George W. Bush to be president, too, and look how well that turned out!

If God were up for re-election

(College Humor)

My brother sent me this. But as it turns out, there are a lot more of them here. They're all pretty funny, but maybe I'll just post one more:

Elizabeth Warren: the woman who knew too much

(Vanity Fair)

In yesterday's post, I provided a link to this article about Elizabeth Warren in Vanity Fair, but I like it enough that I thought I'd post a few excerpts today:

At a time of record corporate profits, a time when 14 million Americans are out of work, when millions have lost their homes and, according to the Census Bureau, the ranks of those living in poverty has grown to one in six—that Elizabeth Warren could be publicly kneecapped and an agency devoted to protecting American consumers could come under such intense attack is, ultimately, the story about who holds power in America today.

When the C.F.P.B. [Consumer Financial Protection Bureau] was first proposed to Congress, in early 2009, the Chamber of Commerce, the leading business lobbying group in the country, announced that it would “spend whatever it takes” to defeat the agency. According to the Center for Public Integrity, from 2009 through the beginning of 2010, it would be one of the biggest spenders among the more than 850 businesses and trade groups that together paid lobbyists $1.3 billion to fight financial reform.

Although a Gallup poll in the fall of 2010 would show that 61 percent of Americans supported Dodd-Frank—which was designed to curb the risky bank activities that triggered the 2008 meltdown and the ensuing recession—the financial establishment would continue to attack it even after it became law on July 21, 2010. ...

While Wall Street and the banks oppose virtually every aspect of Dodd-Frank—from the new rules on derivatives to higher capital requirements—the C.F.P.B. would become among the most controversial aspects of the reforms, the banking industry’s particular bête noire. Its chief mission, on the face of it, would seem unremarkable: enforcing the rules protecting consumers already on the books, bringing laws that had been overseen by seven different federal agencies under a single authority. Most of the rules were overseen by the bank regulators. The catch was that none of them had paid much attention to consumer protection. Their primary focus had been ensuring the “safety and soundness” of the banks, which for decades had translated as ensuring bank profits. For the banks, the C.F.P.B. meant not only a new regulator rifling around in their books but also a regulator with a mission that did not focus on their bottom lines. And in a world where the banking industry makes billions of dollars off consumers from what’s hidden in the fine print—including $22.5 billion in credit-card penalty fees last year, according to R. K. Hammer, a bank-card consultant—the banks perhaps had reason to be concerned.

Talk to most bank executives and they’ll still place the blame for the 2008 financial crisis on “irresponsible consumers” who took out mortgages they couldn’t afford; dishonest mortgage brokers; and—at the top of the list—the government, which used Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to finance mortgage lending to “people who shouldn’t own homes,” as one senior New York bank executive put it to me recently. All of which is partly true but omits the enthusiasm with which Wall Street feasted on that market, and the fact, as Warren puts it, “that Wall Street made tens of billions of dollars” from it. In short, there is no remorse, let alone a sense of obligation, because bank executives generally do not believe they were the cause of the financial collapse. As Neil Barofsky, Treasury’s former inspector general charged with oversight of TARP, the $700 billion government bailout of the banks, recalls from his interviews with bankers, the attitude instead was that “shit happens.” The state of denial has been massive. On Wall Street today, says the vice-chairman of a private-equity firm, “there is this enormous persecution complex in the banking industry about Dodd-Frank, that everyone is going after the banks.” ...

In those speeches, sometimes using slides filled with numbers and graphs, she [Elizabeth Warren] would, as she did at a speech in Manhattan in early June, outline the impact on middle-class Americans of rising health-care costs, burgeoning debt, and the depletion of not only their savings but also, with the rise in joblessness, their confidence. She spoke of “the Wild West” conditions deregulation had created, where banks could sell virtually any product they wanted, on any terms: mortgages they knew consumers could not pay off, credit cards whose rates they could raise at whim, products that came with a mind-boggling array of penalty fees, many of them not fully disclosed. But it was her final remarks that brought down the standing-room-only house in June. “We cannot run our country without a strong middle class. We cannot run a democracy without a strong middle class,” she said, her voice quavering slightly. “If we hollow out the middle class,” she said, “then the country we know is gone.”

But while audiences applauded her, Warren’s opponents lacerated her. She was called incompetent, power-hungry, ignorant, a media whore, and, in a widely televised moment, a liar, by a Republican congressman during a hearing in May. “It was like she was the Antichrist,” says Roger Beverage, the president of the Oklahoma Bankers Association and one of the few bankers who publicly supported her. She had become the lightning rod for the opposition to the C.F.P.B. Says Barney Frank, the Massachusetts congressman who is the “Frank” in “Dodd-Frank,” “It’s partly sore-losership. They are blaming her for something they all swore would never happen.” But it was also because she was eloquent and convincing, and relentlessly tough in her criticism of Wall Street and its enablers.

That bluntness was evident in an interview even in late May, when Warren, who learned only in July that she wouldn’t get the job, still believed that Obama might ask her to run the C.F.P.B. “It’s money and power, the only two things we are talking about here,” she said, speaking of the people who were trying to kill the C.F.P.B. “in the back alleys,” as she put it. “There are many who are rich and powerful who say the system works fine as it is,” she continued. “America had been a boom-and-bust economy going into the Great Depression—just over and over and over, fortunes were wiped out, ordinary families were crushed under it. Coming out of the Great Depression we said, We can build a structure that makes us all safer. And notice, it’s from the end of the Great Depression to the 1980s that we built America’s middle class. That’s when we got stronger as a country. That’s when that big, solid, boring, hardworking, play-by-the-rules group in the middle emerged and defined what America was. You still had the ability to become a billionaire, but the center stayed strong and, notice, provided opportunity for growth, opportunity for getting ahead, opportunity that your kids were going to do better than you did. That was what defined America. And then we started, inch by inch, pulling the threads out of that regulatory fabric, starting in the 1980s.” ...

By this spring, Spencer Bachus, along with his fellow Alabaman, Senator Richard Shelby, was one of the C.F.P.B.’s leading opponents. But they would be joined by the vast majority of Republicans. Some of them had previously admitted to having no particular interest in or understanding of banking, but had developed strong feelings about the C.F.P.B. after receiving campaign donations from banking groups. Among them was former MTV Real World star Sean Duffy, a Wisconsin Republican elected to Congress in 2010, who has been showered with $178,000 in campaign donations from the financial sector for his next election. But the real battle was against Dodd-Frank. Attempts were popping up throughout Congress to slash the budgets of regulatory agencies, including the C.F.P.B. There was even one that denied funding for a consumer-complaint database at the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which businesses had opposed on the grounds that consumers might call in fake complaints. In a sense, says Barney Frank, the C.F.P.B. and Warren had become “a symbol” in a broader battle that was partly ideological. The anti-government, free-market, unregulated-business-as-the-savior-of-America sentiment of the Republican Party today, assisted by Wall Street’s campaign donations, dovetailed perfectly with the interests of the country’s banking Goliaths. To a degree, the attitude regarding Warren, Frank says, was “How dare this woman criticize the free-enterprise system?” ...

As for Elizabeth Warren, on September 14, ending weeks of speculation, she officially announced that she was entering the Massachusetts Senate race. Today, Warren is considered the Democratic front-runner in what is likely to be one of the most closely watched congressional elections next year. In early September, one poll put her within nine points of Scott Brown—even before she had announced her candidacy. A few weeks later, after her official entry into the field, another poll had her ahead of Brown by two points.

Speaking from a car on her way from one campaign event to another, Warren told me that the stakes are too high for her not to run, too high not to try to continue the fight “for the middle class.” Too high not to try to bring it into the belly of the beast, to the floor of the U.S. Congress. Middle-class families “are getting hammered and you know Washington doesn’t get it,” she said. “G.E. doesn’t pay any taxes and we are asking college kids to take on even more debt to get an education, and asking seniors to get by on less. These aren’t just economic questions. These are moral questions.”

There's a lot more to the article - more about Elizabeth Warren's background (born in Oklahoma, she started out as a Republican) and more about Washington politics, including her treatment by Barack Obama and other Democrats, who are also eager for campaign funds from the banking industry.

I recommend that you read the whole article yourself. And then,... well, here's Elizabeth Warren's website in her campaign for the U.S. Senate. Decide for yourself what's next.

"The Truth of Valor" by Tanya Huff

(cover image from Amazon.com)

The Truth of Valor (2010) is the fifth in Tanya Huff's science fiction series starring tough-as-nails Gunnery Sergeant Torin Kerr of the Confederation, a multi-species galactic society.

I haven't written reviews of any of the others, so let me start with a little background. In this future, an advanced civilization ended up in a war with another multi-species society and, being ill-suited for warfare themselves, they recruited human beings - and later two other species - to fight it for them.

The first book in the series, Valor's Choice, begins centuries later, with the war still going strong. The whole series is light-weight military fiction, but quite entertaining. Tanya Huff always holds my interest, and in this particular case, I must also admit that I'm a sucker for multi-species galactic societies.

Her hero, a staff sergeant in the first book, is the perfect noncom. Never at a loss, she handles raw recruits and her superior officers with equal skill. And you really don't want to face her on the battlefield. Note that there are three different species fully integrated into this military, plus there are other - civilian - species in their society, and still more species who are their opponents. It's great fun.

Starting in the second volume, The Better Part of Valor, there's a mystery here, too. There's a reason for this centuries-old war, and it's not what they've always thought. All these things make quite an entertaining storyline.

But I'd assumed that the fourth book, Valor's Trial, would be the last. By the end of the book, the mystery had been solved, more or less, the war was over, and Torin was leaving the military. To be honest, I wasn't entirely pleased with that book, because Torin seemed to stop using her brain and her training.

Rather than devise a plan, she just moved straight ahead, mopping the floor with anyone and everyone who got in her way, hardly even needing troops. She'd always been pretty much perfect, but now she was nearly superhuman. OK, the book was still fun, but it seemed to be time to end the series.

And then this book was published. In The Truth of Valor, Torin is no longer in the military. Instead, she's joined her lover on a two-person salvage ship. But when they're attacked by pirates, her lover kidnapped by vicious sociopaths and Torin left for dead, she's back in action.

The problem this time is that there are no troops or superior officers to manage. Even more than in the last book, this is just Torin Kerr kicking butt. She does get three former-marines to join her, but even that hardly seems necessary. And there's no humor in it.

In the first books, there was at least some humor. As I say, Torin had to manage sometimes-green troops and manipulate her superior officers. And inter-species relationships are always good for a laugh or two. But this is the superwoman of the previous book with just... nothing else.

There's nothing added, either. I'm always up for pirates, but here, there are no insights into piracy, there's no plausible economic model for it, there's no organizing to fight it. Huff doesn't seem to have given this much thought. The pirates just seem to exist to make particularly nasty enemies.

I don't want to give you the wrong impression. This was still an enjoyable read. Tanya Huff always writes an entertaining story. But I've got to say that this is easily the least successful Torin Kerr novel. The things that made the series special are completely absent in this book.

If you're a fan of the series, you'll still want to read this one. But don't expect too much. Even though I enjoyed the book, I was disappointed. Tanya Huff can do better than this. The earlier books in the series were better than this.

I guess I think that Huff has worked herself into a corner. Torin's love interest was a mistake, at least if Huff planned to continue this series. Torin Kerr the gunnery sergeant was a great character. But Torin Kerr the ex-gunnery sergeant, not so much. This was enjoyable military fiction, but take the military out and it really loses something.

President Obama's approval rating soars!

President's Approval Rating Soars After Punching Wall Street Banker in Face

Yeah, it's fiction. Too bad, huh?  :)

Elizabeth Warren announces her bid for the Senate

OK, not really Elizabeth Warren, perhaps. But I think I like this version almost as much as the real one.

Incidentally, here's a great profile of Elizabeth Warren - the real one - in Vanity Fair. You wonder why she's so popular? That might help.

Guns in bars is SUCH a good idea...

Excerpt from TPM:

A Tennessee lawmaker who is a major proponent of legislation allowing gun owners to carry firearms in bars was arrested on Tuesday and charged with driving under the influence and possession of a handgun while under the influence, Davidson County Sheriff's Office confirmed to TPM.

Rep. Curry Todd (R) was pulled over around 11:15 p.m. Tuesday, according to the local Fox affiliate. Todd allegedly failed a roadside sobriety test and refused to take a breathalyzer test, the Associated Press reports. The gun -- a Smith & Wesson 38 Special -- was holstered next to the driver's seat and loaded.

According to the police affidavit, Todd was "very unsteady on his feet, almost falling down at times. ... His speech was slurred, his eyes were red, watery and bloodshot. ... The subject was obviously very impaired and not in any condition to be carrying a loaded handgun."

Yes, guns make us all so much safer, huh? And mixing guns and alcohol is like mixing cars and alcohol - it's just the American way.

Honestly, what "real" American could object to carrying guns in bars, in schools, in office buildings,... really, anywhere at all? And a couple of shots of whiskey will just steady your aim. Gee, haven't you ever watched a TV or movie western?

Religious bigotry is alive and well in America

Religious discrimination in America? In America, the land of the brave and the home of the free? In the world's first nation with complete freedom of religion? Oh, yes. In some ways, we've become the land of the cowards and the home of the bigots.

Here are a couple of recent examples. The first is from Gawker:

Irum Abbassi alleges that on March 13, Southwest Airlines employees unlawfully removed her from a flight from San Diego to San Jose, where she was headed to finish research for her Master's thesis. According to the complaint, Abbassi "was readily identifiable as Muslim by what she wore: a long shirt, pants, sweater and hijab, or Islamic headscarf." She was detained at security for a second screening, but was allowed to board.

When boarding, Abbassi says she was on the phone with a Verizon representative in order to activate her smartphone. When the plane was getting ready to depart, Abbassi alleges she told the representative "I've got to go."

Soon after, there was an announcement that an "administrative delay" would hold up the flight, at which point a TSA agent came on board and asked Abbassi to get off. From the complaint:

Once at the jetway the TSA agent explained to [Abbassi] that the flight attendant believed that she had been acting suspiciously. Although the flight attendant admittedly could not adequately hear [Abbassi], she reported that [Abbassi] might have uttered 'It's a go' into her cell phone.

Shortly after, the complaint alleges, the TSA agent determined that Abbassi was not a security risk, and said she could re-board the plane. But at the gate she was told that the captain would not let her board because the crew was "uncomfortable" with her on the plane.

Remember, this is America. How do you think it looks to the 1.5 billion Muslims in the world when we Americans are this bigoted and this cowardly?

And this kind of behavior is supposed to convince Muslims that the extremists are wrong? Maybe we should have tortured her a little bit, just to be sure...

My second example involves a group of people even less popular than Muslims. From AlterNet:

A few months ago, Todd Stiefel -- philanthropist and founder of the Stiefel Freethought Foundation, which provides financial support to atheist and other nonprofit and charitable organizations -- approached the American Cancer Society with an offer. He wanted local atheist groups around the world to participate in the American Cancer Society's Relay for Life program, as a national team, under the banner of the humanist charitable organization Foundation Beyond Belief. In order to make this happen, he made a generous offer: a $250,000 matching offer from the Todd Stiefel Foundation, which, as a matching offer, was likely to bring in a half million dollars to the American Cancer Society.

And he was stonewalled.

The offer was initially approved, and the Foundation Beyond Belief even brought on an intern to manage the program. But then the American Cancer Society stopped responding. Repeated emails and phone calls from Stiefel were not returned for over a month. And the eventual responses from the ACS ranged from apathetic at best to hostile at worst. As Stiefel told AlterNet:

Reuel Johnson of ACS was completely disinterested in the matching gift. He made no effort to try to gain the money and attempted to ignore that the offer was even made. When I brought it up to him, he referred to it as merely "fine" and then started complaining about how it was a hassle to ACS to have to try to track the challenge. Of course, it should not have to be a hassle; they have an automated system to track team and individual performance. I don't know why he acted like this, but something clearly was amiss.

After many go-arounds, Stiefel was finally told no. He was told that the Relay for Life program was focusing on corporate sponsors for the National Team program, and was no longer including nonprofits in the program. Despite the massive size of the offer from the Stiefel Foundation -- and despite the fact that several nonprofits are currently participating in the program, including Girl Scouts of the USA, Phi Theta Kappa and DeMolay International -- the ACS insisted that nonprofit participation in this program wasn't cost-effective, and would no longer be welcome.

Every attempt to find an alternative form of participation for the Foundation Beyond Belief was stymied. ...

Now, in case you're wondering if this is standard behavior, find someone who works as a development director for a nonprofit. Ask her what her response would be to a $250,000 matching offer from a philanthropic foundation. And ask if her organization would be drooling, celebrating wildly, and bending over backward to make it happen -- or if they would be evading, delaying, dodging, deflecting, changing their stories, treating the potential benefactor with irritation and dismissal, and finding an endless series of excuses for not accepting the offer?

And now ask: Why did it unfold this way with the American Cancer Society and the Foundation Beyond Belief?

Is it because the Foundation Beyond Belief are atheists?

This is America. You have the right to believe anything you want. I don't have to agree with it. I don't even have to refrain from criticizing it. But you have the right to believe it. Fundamentally, it's none of my business what you believe, at least if you don't try to force me to believe it, too.

All I ask, as an American, is that you treat me the same way - indeed, that you treat everyone the same way. Is that too much to ask? This is America, after all.

If you're such a coward that you won't fly a plane with a Muslim on board, then get a different job. I have no sympathy for bigots like this. That Southwest Airlines captain should be fired.

Likewise, unless your plan is to "pray away the cancer," instead of using medical research to find a cure, then the religious beliefs of your donors are none of your business. I don't care if you're a Christian yourself. I literally don't care. But you'd damn well better give me the same consideration!

For crissake, people, this is America? What has happened to us?

A Tea Party win!

From the St. Petersburg Times:

Pinellas County will stop adding fluoride to its drinking water, ending a cavity-fighting effort that riled critics of Big Brother government despite decades of advocacy by dental and medical experts.

After three hours of polarizing debate, the County Commission voted 4-3 Tuesday to halt fluoridation to about 700,000 residents of the county and most Pinellas cities. ...

The vote came despite pleas from a dozen dentists and health officials who told commissioners that fluoride reduces dental illness while lowering costs to the county for dental care for the needy. ...

"Fluoride is a toxic substance," said tea party activist Tony Caso of Palm Harbor. "This is all part of an agenda that's being pushed forth by the so-called globalists in our government and the world government to keep the people stupid so they don't realize what's going on."

A Tea Party activist complaining about "the world government" and how fluoride is keeping people stupid? Heh, heh. Irony alert!

Now we get stupidity and bad teeth. Great, huh?

Who's bankrolling climate-change denial?

From Time magazine, here's a rather scary article about the effective political campaign to deny real science. It isn't the first time we've seen this, but these people are getting better and better at manipulating public opinion.

Some excerpts:

Not too long ago, belief in climate science wasn't a political issue. Honestly! As recently as the 2008 U.S. presidential election, both the Democratic and Republican candidates professed belief in the threat of global warming, and each advanced policies designed to curb U.S. carbon emissions. Senator John McCain had even co-sponsored one of the first congressional bills to create a carbon cap-and-trade system. And it wasn't just McCain; Mitt Romney, runner-up for the GOP nomination last time around, supported a regional cap-and-trade program while he was governor of Massachusetts. ...

Not anymore. With the exception of Jon Huntsman — who barely registers in polls — you can't find a Republican presidential candidate who unequivocally believes in climate science, let alone one who wants to do anything about it. ...

As the sociologists Riley Dunlap of Oklahoma State University and Aaron McCright of Michigan State University suggest, climate denialism exists in part because there has been a long-term, well-financed effort on the part of conservative groups and corporations to distort global-warming science. That's the conclusion of a chapter the two researchers recently wrote for The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society. "Contrarian scientists, fossil-fuel corporations, conservative think tanks and various front groups have assaulted mainstream climate science and scientists for over two decades," Dunlap and McCright write. "The blows have been struck by a well-funded, highly complex and relatively coordinated denial machine."

For those who've followed the seesaw of the climate debate in the U.S., there's not much new in Dunlap and McCright's chapter, but they do lay out just how long and how intensively some conservatives have been fighting mainstream climate science. Fossil-fuel companies like Exxon and Peabody Energy — which obviously have a business interest in slowing any attempt to reduce carbon emissions — have combined with traditionally conservative corporate groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and conservative foundations like the Koch brothers' Americans for Prosperity, to raise doubts about the basic validity of what is, essentially, a settled scientific truth. That message gets amplified by conservative think tanks — like the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute — and then picked up by conservative media outlets on the Internet and cable TV.

All of the naysayers seem to be following the playbook written by the tobacco industry in its long, ongoing war against medical findings about the dangers of smoking. For both Big Oil and Big Smoke, that playbook is lethally simple: don't straight-up refute the science, just raise skepticism and insist that the findings are "unsettled" and that "more research" is necessary. Repeat that again and again regardless of the latest research, and you help block the formation of the solid majority needed to create any real political change. That's made all the easier because whether you're quitting smoking or oil, the job is painful — and voters don't like pain.

Voters don't like pain, and it's always easy to believe what you want to believe. We want to believe that we can have our cake and eat it, too - that constant tax cuts will actually cut the deficit and establish a utopia in America, that oil will never run out and never cause any problems, that America can be "exceptional" without making the slightest effort to maintain that status.

And Americans are hopelessly ignorant about science. Think about it, the most technologically advanced nation in the world, yet we're one of the most backward in our beliefs about science. But you see, we're also the most religious of the advanced nations. And science has always told us things that religion does not want to hear.

If I want to believe that the Earth is flat, I'm going to be eager to think that those egghead scientists are wrong about other things, too. I'm not going to understand the value of the scientific method if my peace of mind depends on my not understanding it.

This all began with evolution, I suspect. Once you deny science just because you don't want to believe it, well, it then gets easier to deny other science, too. Pretty soon, you just sneer at science and scientists in general. And we end up with one of our two main political parties completely anti-science.

To my mind, willful ignorance is cowardice. This is what happens when human beings are too cowardly to face reality. But it's also a result of greed - the greed for short-term profits, no matter what happens to our world in the long-run, and the greediness of political ambition. If it helps elect Republicans, then do it. The end justifies the means.

It's very, very scary stuff. Because if we don't smarten up, if we don't man up and face reality, if we don't stand up and work for change in the real world, instead of our fantasies, we face a bleak future. We're on the wrong path here in America, and there's only a limited time to change course. Yet we seem to be rushing faster and faster down that road to ruin.

PS. My thanks to Jim Harris for the link!

Mitt Romney's crowning policy achievement

From Politico:

Governor Mitt Romney's official portrait in the Massachusetts State House — unveiled in 2009 — pictures him seated with various meaningful objects, including a folder on the desk behind him.

That folder, the AP wrote at the time, is "a leather bill binder emblazoned with a medical seal, symbolizing the first-in-the-nation universal health care law he signed in April 2006."

It is, a reader reminds me, rather strong evidence that Romney considered the law his crowning policy achievement.

Funny, isn't it? Romney was proud of that health care law in Massachusetts - and rightly so. But now it's kryptonite in the GOP. But you reap what you sow.

Romney didn't invent "Obamacare." The basic plan came out of right-wing think tanks in the 1990s. It was mainstream conservative policy back then, the Republican alternative to the Clinton health care plan. And Republicans generally supported it, right up until it was accepted by Democrats, too.

Then, suddenly, it became positively satanic, according to the right-wing. After "death panels" and similar crazy accusations, all gleefully pushed by Fox "News" and other Republican leaders, what was originally their plan became the worst thing since gay marriage.

And there was Romney, stuck with his "crowning policy achievement" in Massachusetts, a good policy which helped many people (i.e. the kiss of death in today's Republican Party). Well, when you let fanatics take control of your political party, this is what happens.

Of course, this isn't the only reason Republicans distrust Mitt Romney. Even they can see how phony he is. I mean, it's pretty hard to do a complete 180 on every policy position, trying to seem liberal to Massachusetts voters, then turning around and assuring the GOP you're really a right-wing true-believer, without pretty much everyone figuring out what's up.

Mitt Romney has only one firm belief, that he should be elected to high political office. Everything else is negotiable, and every person in America knows it. Mitt will be whatever the voters want him to be. He'll even suck up to the Tea Party, he's that desperate. But will he stay bought? That's the question.

So it really is funny to see his "crowning policy achievement" become a millstone around his neck. And now, according to Indecision Forever, that millstone has become even heavier:

Back when he was governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney crafted a disturbingly compassionate and effective reform bill to address the issue. Now there's more troubling evidence suggesting Commonwealth Care served as a model for our death-enpaneling, insurance-providing president…

Newly obtained White House records provide fresh details on how senior Obama administration officials used Mitt Romney's landmark health-care law in Massachusetts as a model for the new federal law, including recruiting some of Romney’s own health care advisers and experts to help craft the act now derided by Republicans as "Obamacare."

The records, gleaned from White House visitor logs reviewed by NBC News, show that senior White House officials had a dozen meetings in 2009 with three health-care advisers and experts who helped shape the health care reform law signed by Romney in 2006, when the Republican presidential candidate was governor of Massachusetts. One of those meetings, on July 20, 2009, was in the Oval Office and presided over by President Barack Obama, the records show…

Romney is "the father of health-care reform," said [Jon] Gruber [an MIT economist and former Romney adviser]. "I think he is the single person most responsible for health care reform in the United States. … I'm not trying to make a political position or a political statement, I honestly feel that way. If Mitt Romney had not stood up for this reform in Massachusetts… I don’t think it would have happened nationally. So I think he really is the guy with whom it all starts."

I've got to laugh. Mitt Romney is so phony it's hard to see the downside in this. Then again, who would you rather have as president, a guy who pretends to be crazy or one of the other Republicans running for that office who really is crazy?

The thing is, I think Romney wants to be president so badly that his imitation crazy will be hard to tell from the real thing. So I'm not so sure we'd be any better off with the fake version.

Go Huntsman!

Jon Huntsman is a right-wing conservative, but he's the only Republican presidential candidate who accepts science - or at least the only candidate who'll stand up publicly for science (clearly, Mitt Romney will accept anything Republican voters want him to accept).

So how is Huntsman doing? In the latest Washington Post-Bloomberg News poll, he gets zero support - zero - among self-identified Republicans and Republican-leaning independents.

Hey, good luck with that nomination, Jon. I guess you just didn't drink enough of that Kool-Aid, huh? (Hmm,... I just learned that Kool-Aid is Nebraska's official state drink. That explains so much!)

Christopher Hitchens: the atheist in the foxhole

Christopher Hitchens is dying, and he knows it. He's that proverbial atheist in a foxhole. And what's his response? "I'm not going to quit until I absolutely have to."

And what won't he quit? Well, if you've seen any of his debates, or even his speeches, you already know that. He won't quit poking fun at absurdity. When the emperor has no clothes, Hitchens will say so. He won't quit standing up for reason and evidence and human values.

This was Hitchens receiving the Richard Dawkins Award at the Texas Freethought Convention in Houston this week. Richard Dawkins himself presented the award, and his speech is here. There's also a very brief video clip of Christopher Hitchens answering a question from the audience.

Note that these seem to be rather amateurish videos. They all start in the middle of a sentence, and there's a lot of camera shake. Apparently, it was a spur of the moment idea to videotape them at all. If that's true, well, the convention organizers really fell down on the job.

But maybe better videos will become available later. At any rate, these are far better than nothing, huh? And it looks like we'd better cherish Christopher Hitchens while we still have him.

Defending Deuteronomy

If domestic violence isn't enough for you, how about defending "honor killing"?

Here's a post at The Atheist Experience, discussing this article by Matt Slick at the Christian Apologetics & Research Ministry (CARM). Some excerpts from that post:

Slick begins by quoting a lengthy passage from Deuteronomy in which God’s laws for dealing with an insufficiently chaste bride are detailed. The passage first declares that any groom who is caught trying to weasel out of his marriage by lying that his bride was not a virgin will be fined 100 shekels and then forbidden from ever divorcing his wife as long as he lives (which I imagine is considered the worse punishment). On the other hand, if it turns out that the bride was indeed not a virgin at her nuptials, then the skanky ho is to be taken out and stoned to death.

So let’s review. Man at fault = fined money. Woman at fault = murdered. Yeah, that sounds ever so egalitarian!

To attempt to defend a practice so primitive, inhumane and frankly monstrous, one would, you’d think, have to be not only an idiot, but someone plumbing hitherto unexamined depths of idiocy just to see how far he could go before imploding into something like a black hole of idiocy so dense that nothing, not even light, can escape. Well, folks, we have that intrepid explorer right here. Step right up, Mr. Slick. ...

Let us briefly consider what is involved in stoning someone to death.

Matt Frauenfelder at Boing Boing (too many Matts in this piece, I must say) has helpfully provided us with an illustrated guide. This graphic shows how they do it in the Muslim world, which is the only contemporary culture I know of still goat-fucking barbaric enough to pull this crap. The details might have been different when the ancient Jews did it, but I suspect the results were the same: a dead girl.

(from BoingBoing - click to embiggen)

First the victim is partially buried standing up, because it’s no fun if the stonee is running around frantically for her life. You might miss and hit your mom or something. Then, the actual process of killing the victim can take anywhere from 20 minutes to a couple of hours, depending on, I don’t know, whether the victim’s skull is especially thick, or whether the stones are nice and hard or soft and crumbly, or maybe it’s just a matter of how goddamned sadistic the killers are feeling that day. ...

Anyway, let your imagination run with all this as you continue to read Slick’s apologia. Remember the above is what he’s defending.

Sexual purity was very highly valued, unlike today, and when a man would marry a woman, her virginity was critical. In ancient times a dowry was paid to the father of the bride and the rightful expectation was that the bride would be a virgin.

So there, you see? She’s his property, so that makes it okay. And notice the snide aside about “sexual purity [being] highly valued, unlike today.” Yeah, because we all know a woman’s hymen is of more value to her male owner than her fucking life. There’s your religious “morality,” gang. ...

Slick steadfastly avoids passing any moral judgment upon the killing, while telling “critics of the Bible” they are in no position to pass a moral judgment either, which is itself a moral judgment. Somehow, you can’t condemn death by stoning (if it’s ancient and Biblical, that is, because something tells me Slick would flip-flop in a picosecond when presented with the spectacle of modern-day Islamist stonings), but you can condemn those who’d condemn it, on the ground that they are somehow applying “subjective” moral standards.

So what is the Godly “moral absolute” on this issue then, Mr. Slick? Can young women be treated as chattel by their fathers and husbands, or not? Can they be murdered for making men embarrassed about their pee-pees, or not? If a “morally subjective” approach is the wrong way to think about all this, then clearly a “morally absolute” approach is the right way. So what does the absolute moral lawgiver have to say, Mr. Slick? Is he pissed off that we no longer stone our women to death? If his morals are absolute, shouldn’t this still be common practice today?

I think I’ve said enough. If any article demonstrates better than this one how badly religion can screw up a human being’s fundamental sense of right and wrong, I’ve managed to miss it. Religion, far from providing anything like morality, simply sets a list of arbitrary rules that allow any number of vile acts to be visited upon the helpless, and it is all elaborately justified with feeble rhetoric later. Secular morality may not be perfect either, but it is immeasurably stronger for being rooted in basic human empathy and reason. Not only do I not need a God to tell me that “honor killings” are a horrible evil, but it appears that people who do have a God don’t think it’s all that evil after all.

So, what can I really add to that? Just that this is the problem with faith-based thinking. You know that the Bible is God's word (if you're a Christian, at least, since if you were a Muslim, you'd know that the Koran was God's word, even though in both cases it's just a matter of what you were raised to believe), so you simply have to find a way to justify even the worst parts of it.

OK, sure, more liberal Christian denominations just believe the parts they want to believe. That makes those people less crazy, for sure, but it doesn't make their beliefs any more true. Of course, evidence-based thinking isn't guaranteed to be right. Maybe the evidence is misleading. But if it's not right, it will get corrected when additional evidence is discovered.

If you really care about the truth of what you believe, then you don't want to believe first, then look for reasons to justify that belief. Instead, you want to ask yourself why you believe, and whether or not you have good evidence backing up those beliefs,... and then never stop asking those questions.

Whenever someone believes something truly batshit crazy like this, you can just about guarantee it's because of religion. It reminds me of this quote from Steven Weinberg: "With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."

For good people to believe that evil things are good, that, too, takes religion. Anyone can be mistaken. But to be this batshit crazy? That takes religion.

How to save money: legalize wife-beating

Oh, yeah, here's a great idea from Kansas. Budget problems? Don't want to raise taxes? Well, that's simple - just make domestic violence legal:

The city could repeal an ordinance banning domestic violence because some say the cost of prosecuting those cases is just too high:

Last night, in between approving city expenditures and other routine agenda items, the Topeka, Kansas City Council debated one rather controversial one: decriminalizing domestic violence.

Here’s what happened: Last month, the Shawnee County District Attorney’s office, facing a 10% budget cut, announced that the county would no longer be prosecuting misdemeanors, including domestic violence cases, at the county level. Finding those cases suddenly dumped on the city and lacking resources of their own, the Topeka City Council is now considering repealing the part of the city code that bans domestic battery. [...]

Since the county stopped prosecuting the crimes on September 8th, it has turned back 30 domestic violence cases. Sixteen people have been arrested for misdemeanor domestic battery and then released from the county jail after charges weren’t filed. “Letting abusive partners out of jail with no consequences puts victims in incredibly dangerous positions,” said Becky Dickinson of the YWCA. “The abuser will often become more violent in an attempt to regain control.”

The YMCA also said that some survivors were afraid for their safety if the dispute wasn’t resolved soon. Town leaders and the district attorney all agree that domestic abuse cases should be prosecuted — but no one would step up to foot the bill. The city council is expected to make its decision on decriminalizing domestic violence next week, but the back-and-forth over funding has already put battered women and their families at increased risk of harm. ...

It should go without saying, but apparently doesn’t, that preventing domestic abuse is essential to promoting communities’ economic and social well-being. That the Topeka City Council would even consider such action is a heartbreaking illustration of the consequences of austerity.

Yeah, governments are always bad, right? Certainly, raising taxes is always bad. So what if men beat their wives and girlfriends? That's just God's plan.

We've been cutting taxes for decades (especially on the wealthy). And now, this "fiscal austerity" crap is really destroying our communities. Why can't we recognize that?

For that matter, why didn't they just stop prosecuting non-violent drug crimes? Now that would save a lot of money (especially if they started taxing what's now sold illegally). But no, they've got to throw battered women under the bus.

Disgusting, isn't it?

Letters from an Atheist Nation

(cover from Amazon.com)

Hmm,... this sounds interesting:

So, last week I happened to stumble upon an old Unreasonable Faith post celebrating the firebrand atheism of Charles Chilton Moore, whose turn of the century Kentucky newspaper, The Bluegrass Blade, was like the Pharyngula of its time. (Moore even did a stint in jail for scandalously claiming that “Jesus Christ was a man exactly like I am and had a human father and mother exactly like I had.”) Little did I know at the time that just a week later, Thomas Lawson would publish a book of letters to The Bluegrass Blade, called Letters from an Atheist Nation in which everyday atheists from every walk of life in 1903 explain in their own words how and why they became atheists.

And here's the product description at Amazon.com:

In 1903, the "Blue Grass Blade," a Kentucky/Ohio-based freethought newspaper, which started as the only Prohibition newspaper edited by "a Heathen in the interest of good morals," requested letters from its readers describing how and why they had become atheists. Lawson has meticulously transcribed these letters from the digitized copies available at the Library of Congress's "Chronicling America" website and has edited them for a 21st-century audience. He touches on the stigma that has been placed on atheism in America and why atheists feel they have to hide their true personalities from their closest friends and family. Like today's atheists, the writers of these letters hid behind initials and "nom de plumes," and Lawson has done us a great service by deciphering many of the letter writers' mysterious pseudonyms to reveal their true identities. Will you find a branch of atheism in YOUR family tree?

The phrases and voices in these letters are over one hundred years old, but the thoughts and sentiments have changed very little, unlike the dogmas and doctrines they were hoping their descendants would have abandoned by now. Their thoughts could be pulled from the latest blogs of non-believers, but these are not merely letters from scientists, scholars, or intimidating intelligentsia, no, these are personal revelations from physicians, lawyers, dentists, veterans, pioneers, settlers, farmers, tradespeople, teenagers, and housewives. These letters are ironically Bible-like in that they are lyrical, repetitive, prophetic, and poetic, but the "revelation" will be left to the reader. If these century-old thoughts sound familiar, it would appear that there is nothing new about OUR century's "new" atheism.

Note that the book is apparently only available as a Kindle download (for $8.99), so I'm not sure if I'll buy it myself. But it does sound intriguing.

And what it tells me already is that progress isn't guaranteed. These were atheists of a hundred years ago, yet I never knew a single other atheist all the time I grew up. They may have hoped for their descendents to abandon religious dogma and doctrines, but it probably didn't happen.

Well, I've also heard that race relations in America were better in the latter part of the 19th Century than in the early 20th Century. So we may progress, but it's not guaranteed, and it's certainly not without its ups and downs. Progress, like liberty, takes continual work, and backsliding is all too common.

Anyway, that book really does sound interesting. We atheists have always been around. But until fairly recently, atheism was dangerous to admit, and it's still unpopular enough that most of us remain in the closet.

Still, these days you can easily find communities of atheists on the internet, if not in your own hometown. In 1903, it must have been a lot harder. That freethought newspaper was probably the only connection to other atheists most of them had.

___
Edit: My review of the book is here.