Creeping Sharia mops

(AP Photo/Erik Schelzig)

Be afraid, be very afraid. Muslims are infiltrating everywhere in America. Even our mops are turning Muslim:

Building managers and legislative staffers have sought to reassure some concerned Tennessee lawmakers that recent renovations at the state Capitol did not install special facilities for Muslims to wash their feet before praying.

“I confirmed with the facility administrator for the State Capitol Complex that the floor-level sink installed in the men’s restroom outside the House Chamber is for housekeeping use,” Legislative Administration Director Connie Ridley wrote in an email. “It is, in layman’s terms, a mop sink.”

Who were the patriotic Americans who alerted us to this new threat? It seems that we can thank Republican legislators Bill Ketron and Judd Matheny, although the latter can't actually remember it. ("It's not ringing a bell.")

Apparently, he's been a Republican so long that there's nothing left in his head but a vast, empty, echo chamber of right-wing slogans.

But this isn't the first time they've taken a principled stand against freedom of religion:

Matheny and Ketron were the main sponsors of a 2011 bill that sought to make it a felony to follow some versions of the Islamic code known as Shariah law.

Hundreds of Muslims came to the Legislature to express fears the measure would outlaw central tenets of Islam, such as praying five times a day toward Mecca, abstaining from alcohol or fasting for Ramadan.

Aren't we lucky to have such brave political leaders who are willing to fight against the Constitution of the United States like that? Not since the Confederacy have we seen such patriotism!

But now that our janitorial supplies have been infiltrated by the Muslim menace, good, God-fearing Republicans are not even safe in their closets. Oh, Jebus, help us!

It works, bitches

Clearly, Richard Dawkins has a sense of humor!

Although, did he really say that, "if you base medicine on science, you kill people"? I'm not sure that's what he meant to say. :)

[Edit: In comments at YouTube, they say it's actually "you cure people" in Dawkins' British accent. Still sounds like "you kill people" to me, but that would make a lot more sense, huh?]

Oh, and that phrase is from xkcd, I think (here and here).

The war on Easter

Easter eggs are a "Judeo-Christian tradition"? Really? I didn't realize that Easter was a big holiday for Jews. And did I miss the part about the Easter Bunny in the Bible?

For Bill O'Reilly and his elderly viewers, though, "Judeo-Christian tradition" is everything they did when they were kids. OK, fine. I have nothing against tradition, assuming that it's not something like slavery. Or wife-beating. But who is waging a war on Easter, anyway?

The fact is, I'd be willing to surrender immediately in this "war on Easter" - especially since I didn't actually realize I was fighting it - if the right-wing would only agree to shut up about it! As it is, I suppose we can be thankful that Fox News "won" the war on Christmas, huh? I assume that means they'll stop talking about it? Heh, heh. Yeah, right.

But actually,... I take it all back. No surrender! This stuff is much too funny. It's so funny that I don't want them to shut up about it. Just the reverse, in fact. So, on with the war! Set up your chocolate bunnies and I'll mow them down. :)

PS. It's also funny that O'Reilly seems desperate to keep the right to "criticize minorities," isn't it? He's just terrified that he won't be able to do that anymore (in some mythical future America, at least). Well, he knows his audience, doesn't he? All those old white racists are pretty concerned about stereotyping minorities, and they don't want to pussyfoot around when it comes to their language, either.

But what's really, really funny is that the Republican Party is currently trying to change its "messaging" to minorities (not its actual policies, of course) as a result of the last election. And that's happening at the exact same time Fox 'News' - the propaganda arm of the Republican Party - is waging a war to be allowed to say whatever nasty thing they want!

Heh, heh. How dumb do they think minorities are? How do they think that 'outreach' is going to go, when Fox 'News' is busy scaring the party faithful about political correctness at the same time other party leaders are pretending (to minorities) to be inclusive?

Oh, well. The debacle should be fun to watch, anyway, don't you think?

Glenn Beck connects the dots

Guns, marijuana, soda pop, Cyprus, and the Nazi Party - I'll bet you never realized how those all tie together, did you?

"Cyprus is the answer." Of course it is, Glenn. And who could imagine that people would mock you for things like this. :)

But I wanted to post this mainly to point out the YouTube channel of RightWingWatch.org. It's just chock full of short little video clips (at more than 2 minutes, this is the longest one I've see) of the craziest people in America saying the craziest things.

Here, for example, is another clip of Glenn Beck, this time urging people to hoard cash, because ATMs stopped working "the last time the progressives tried a utopia."

Here is Pat Robertson explaining how environmentalists don't care if "a couple billion people around the globe die from starvation." And here he warns people - he really does - against "scamsters in religious garb, quoting the Bible." Well, I can't argue with him there!

And speaking of which, here's John Hagee explaining how Sodom and Gomorrah was just God practicing his response to the "homosexual society."

Here's white-haired old Bryan Fischer, of the American Family Association, ranting about young people. Fischer thinks that the Republican Party should forget about appealing to young people and just stick with old white men like himself. (I hope the GOP follows his advice.)

Ben Shapiro's advice to the Republican Party is a little different (maybe because he's much younger?). He thinks that they've just been too nice to Barack Obama. Liberal bullies have been pushing Republicans around, and the right-wing, never one to make a scene, has been far too civil in response. When will the GOP start criticizing Obama?

Oh, there's lots, lots more there. There's Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann and Louie Gohmert and Jim DeMint,... and on and on.  If you want crazy, RightWingWatch has the greatest hits on video.

Bridgeway Funds semi-annual report

I don't often blog about investing, but I was reading the latest semi-annual report from the Bridgeway Funds, and a few things caught my attention - this graph, for example:

(click to embiggen)

The top line graphs the price per book value (one of many valuation metrics) of the U.S. stock market, going back to 1972. The bottom line is the price/book of just high yield dividend-paying stocks.

The point of this was to demonstrate that high yield stocks have generally been valued less than the market as a whole, but how that has changed recently:

On the basis of one measure of valuation, “price to book value”, they are the most expensive, relative to other stocks, we have seen at any time in our data history going back to 1972. On this measure, the price of these stocks has already been bid up on a relative basis. For the first time in at least four decades, high yield large cap stocks are actually more expensive than the broader market. Buyer beware.

That's interesting enough, for some of us, so I'll elaborate (and if you're not interested in this kind of thing, you might as well stop reading now).

Stocks which pay a high yield in dividends might be, for example, government-regulated utilities which make a reliable profit (since they can raise rates to cover costs), but will never make an excessive profit (because regulators won't let them gouge their customers too much).

Others might just be large companies in mature industries. They make a good profit, but there's usually not much growth potential, so the company is not valued as highly as other companies.

These days, most companies don't pay out much in dividends, because they want to use that money to grow. You see, a bigger company benefits the people who run it (and the people who make these decisions), and wealthy investors don't need the cash and don't want to pay taxes on a distribution.

Now, if you're a retiree on a fixed income, you probably want a steady stream of cash. But unless you own enough stock that you don't actually need the money yourself, you're not going to have much influence in any of this. Technically-speaking, you might 'own' part of a company, but you don't control it.

So most retired investors tend to own a lot of bonds. Besides, they're normally safer than stock (safer and less volatile). But after the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression, bonds yield hardly anything at all, and cash is even worse. So retirees have been searching for higher yield (and taking on more risk in doing so, though some of them may not realize that).

This is just basic supply and demand. More people are searching for yield, so they've bid up the price on these high yield dividend-paying stocks. Now, they're very expensive, compared to other stocks, by historical standards.

Please note: this doesn't necessarily mean they're too expensive. It doesn't necessarily mean that you shouldn't buy them. It doesn't even mean they won't hold up better if the market crashes. It's just, well,... buyer beware. It's seldom a good investment if you pay too much for it. (How much is too much? I have no idea.)

But take a look at that graph again, this time at the general market (the top line). Look at the late 1990's. Look at that peak in 2000 and at what happened afterwards. Trying to pick the short-term moves of the stock market is a fool's game,... but why wouldn't everyone have been worried about valuations like that?

For the most part, though, it was just the reverse. That was a time of irrational exuberance. The stock market was screaming upward and it would never drop again! Supposedly. (And suppose you saw how expensive it was and got out in 1997 or 1998. The market continued to scream upward after that, for another couple of years, anyway. And everyone but you would be making money.)

That graph even understates it, because some parts of the market were still dirt cheap back then. At work, they switched our 401-k plan at the very peak of the market, dumping the boring old funds they'd had previously and loading up on the go-go growth funds which had been climbing ever higher.

I remember going to a meeting of plan participants and asking for just one small-cap value fund in our investment plan, just one. But the 'experts' who were providing this plan to us (not our HR department, but the investment professionals they'd hired) explained that "no one" wanted to invest in small-cap value funds anymore.

Within a few months, the collapse came. Note that this wasn't like 2008, where everything dropped. No, this collapse was focused on those particular go-go growth stocks, and especially on tiny internet stocks with massive valuations and no revenue. Those small-cap value stocks I'd wanted did extremely well then.

But just for an idea of how things went with the more speculative investments, here are the results of the NASDAQ Telecommunications Index: Up 103% in 1999, Down 54% in 2000, Down 49% in 2001, Down 54% in 2002. I knew a guy who'd bought at the peak, when our company 401-k was switched into this kind of stuff, and finally got out at the bottom, three years later, just as the market was ready to turn around again.

Last I heard from him, he was wondering about finally getting back into the market again. This was not long before the 2008 crash. After all, everyone else had been making money for four or five years by then...

Anyway, there are many things I like about the Bridgeway Funds (including their rule that the CEO can't be paid more than 7 times as much as their lowest-paid full-time worker - compared to the more typical corporation where the CEO might get 300 or 400 times as much as the average worker), but this post is too long, already.

I do, however, want to point out how much fun it is to look back at the annual returns of their funds, since this report also indicates whether they did better or worse than their primary benchmark (which varies, depending on the fund). Take the Ultra-Small Company Fund, which was the first fund I bought from them, many years ago.

This fund invests in very, very small companies, and it's... unbelievably volatile (it dropped 46% in 2008, which was actually a little better than its category). The first years I owned it, it just blew the lights out. I didn't have much money in it back then, but it was certainly an incredible fund. Then came that crash I've been talking about at the end of the 1990s.

In 2000, the S&P 500 dropped 10% and the NASDAQ, which contained more of those high-flying growth stocks, dropped 39%. The Bridgeway Ultra-Small Company Fund gained almost 5%, beating its benchmark. (Remember how I said that not everything had dropped?)

2001 was a little different, though. Thanks largely to the 9/11 attacks, the overall market was down again, and this time, the Ultra-Small Company Fund did worse than its benchmark index. However, it still went up 34%. Yes, if I remember correctly, the average small-cap value fund was up almost 40% that year. And this is when those growth stocks were still crashing.

In 2002, the Ultra-Small Company Fund again beat its benchmark, with a gain of 4%. But the overall market did very badly that year. For most indexes, it was the worst of three very bad years. So what would you do then? You win the prize if you said, "Buy!" because 2003 was a very good year indeed!

True, my fund failed to outperform its benchmark, but with a gain of almost 89% that year, it's hard to complain much about that!

Note that this fund hasn't done as well recently (although it had a good year last year). But you can't buy it, anyway, since it's closed to new investors. Indeed, even current investors can't add to their holdings, since Bridgeway wants to keep this fund very small. (At the bottom of the market, in early 2009, I was able to put a bit more money into it, but that opportunity didn't last long.)

In fact, that's why I'm mentioning it here. You see, I don't want to give investment advice, even by implication. I'm not qualified to give investment advice, so please don't think that any of this is a suggestion of what you should be doing. I just think this stuff is interesting, so I wanted to talk about it. That's all.

Well, there's lots more I could say, but I think we've all had enough, haven't we? :)

A billion active users of YouTube

Have you noticed that I tend to post a lot of YouTube videos here? :)

From Reuters (at Yahoo Finance):

Google Inc's YouTube said 1 billion unique users were now visiting the video-sharing website every month, or nearly one out of every two people on the Internet.

"If YouTube were a country, we'd be the third largest in the world after China and India," YouTube said in a blog post on Wednesday. (http://r.reuters.com/dev76t)

Expanding high-speed data networks across the world and increased availability of internet-enabled smartphones have helped to connect billions of people to the Internet, fuelling growth in social media and video-sharing websites.

I believe it. And if I were a television executive, I'd be absolutely terrified of YouTube. Certainly, I spend a lot more time watching YouTube videos than watching television. It's not even close.

Then there's this:

YouTube was an instant success after its founding by three former PayPal employees in 2005, adding millions of users in its first year. Google bought it for $1.65 billion in 2006.

The fast-growing video site, which had about 800 million unique monthly users a year ago, now represents one of Google's key opportunities to generate new sources of revenue outside of its traditional internet search advertising business.

Google does not break out revenue from advertising on YouTube, which is a free site, but its contribution in terms of Google's overall revenue is relatively small.

How would you like to create a company and then sell it - one year later - for 1.65 billion dollars? Not a bad investment, huh?

Of course, like any corporation, Google's interest is entirely in making as much money as it can. And a free YouTube doesn't seem to be doing that, despite the huge user-base.

AdAge reported in January that Google planned to offer paid subscriptions to some content later this year.

YouTube had reached out to several video producers, asking them to submit applications to create for-pay "channels," AdAge said, adding that the first such channels could be available by the second quarter for between $1 and $5 a month.

That's fine (though just another thing for television producers to worry about), but what then? If YouTube has paid channels, then all those free videos will be competition to them.

Right now, those free videos attract customers and make Google some money from advertising revenue (if not as much money as they'd like). But what happens when those free videos turn into unwelcome competition for their new paid channels?

How long will Google even tolerate free videos after that? What happens with even a grudging tolerance? Will users see more and more restrictions?

Will Google kill the goose that laid the not-quite-golden-enough egg? I guess we'll see, huh? Meanwhile, maybe we should enjoy YouTube while we can.

Shack Tactical

I don't normally play war games (although I did buy the Arma III alpha just recently). In fact, I don't even know what game this is (edit: apparently, it's Arma II: Operation Arrowhead), but I thought it was neat.

It's a night mission, of course - which is why most of it looks black and white - but I really liked seeing the teamwork here. This is where multiplayer games shine. They're not for me, but I can see how you could get hooked on them.

Lawrence Krauss - we provide our own meaning

Nice, isn't it? "We have to force our ideas to conform to the evidence of reality, rather than the other way around."

Is reality not exactly as you'd wish it? Tough! We live three or four times as long, on average, as our ancestors, and you want to whine about it?

Christians often tell me that they don't care what the truth is, because they want to believe what they want to believe. I don't get it. How can you not care about the truth of what you believe? Don't you feel like a complete coward?

And besides, does it actually feel better to think you were designed for the sole purpose of praising some ridiculously insecure deity for eternity? What kind of purpose is that? I'd pass on that kind of everlasting life, myself.

As Christopher Hitchens used to say, at least you can die to escape North Korea!

White supremacists at CPAC

I thought I'd post this, not just because it's kind of funny, but because I hear a lot of this kind of thing, myself.

Yes, it's a "short political memory" - or a complete ignorance of history - and political opportunism, both. Certainly, today's Democratic Party is not the party of 100 years ago, let alone the party of 150 years ago!

I often talk about the Republican Party's 'Southern strategy,' because it's so important in understanding why the GOP has become what it has. After all, the South (white Southerners, at least) had been solidly Democratic for more than a century, though increasingly unhappy with that.

Heck, in 1948, the Dixiecrats ran Strom Thurmond as their own segregationist candidate for president and almost cost Harry S. Truman the election - not because he took many states, but because all of those electoral college votes would have normally been a lock for the Democratic candidate. Republicans had no power at all in the South.

That's completely upside down now. After the Democratic Party decided to support equal rights for racial minorities - doing the right thing, even when it was going to hurt them politically - the Republican Party deliberately set out to woo racists and took the entire South for themselves. The South went from being solidly Democratic to solidly Republican, just like that.

African Americans, who used to support "the party of Lincoln" (when they were allowed to vote at all), left the GOP in droves. Well, what else would you expect? But the idea that 90-some percent of African Americans support the "KKK party" is just asinine. I mean, how could you even imagine something so stupid?

Oh, well. The Republican Party wooed racists just like they wooed Christian fundamentalists (often the same people) and for the same reason: political power. They wanted to use those people in order to give tax cuts to the rich. But those people became the GOP base, and they weren't willing to settle for rhetoric.

Well, now that America is changing, Republican leaders want to do the same thing with Hispanics (in particular) and other racial minorities. They don't want to change their policies, of course. They just want to persuade them to vote Republican, so the GOP can get the political power to continue supporting the wealthy.

After all, they're pretty shaken up. In the last election, they discovered that money is not a complete substitute for votes.

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead

(Anvilfolk)

Yeah, instead of doing my taxes - or anything else productive - I decided to play Cataclysm again. :)

I blogged about the game last summer, but this is a new version. The original developer moved on to new things, and a group of fans have been adding to the game. Now it's called Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.

It's still free (a Windows version is here, or try this) and still lots of fun, though I worry about the whole 'designed by committee' thing (that it might get too cluttered, with everything under the sun, I mean). There's no graphics pack for this one, not yet, so it's just ASCII. And it's still under intense development, so it's quite buggy. But if you like games,... you really have to try this thing!

When you start the game, you can set various options by choosing 'Help,' then pressing '2.' You can enlarge the window there, for one thing, although there's no full-screen option. And that does nothing to make the fonts bigger. So, rather than changing my screen resolution every time I want to run the game, I just use the Windows 7 Magnifier to double the size of my whole screen. That works fine.

Another option, the static spawn option, is turned off by default, but I really should explain that one. Normally, as described in my earlier post, you start the game at 8 AM, but zombies don't start to appear until 9:30. (Child zombies, which are something new to this version, might still be around, I don't know. Wild animals certainly are.)

So a typical tactic, given that you start with almost nothing, would be to look at the map, identify the closest sporting goods store, hardware store, gun store, or other useful buildings, and run off to loot them as fast as possible.

You can only carry one item in your hands, and maybe a few small items in your jeans pocket, so a backpack or something similar (even a purse or two) is always your first concern. But without zombies, you can smash windows to loot almost anything, if you make it quick (most doors are locked).

At 9:30, when zombies start to appear, they're just the ordinary zombies, at first. They're slow and weak, though deadly in numbers. However, at that point you really want to watch the noise. Noise will not just attract existing zombies, it will cause more zombies to spawn nearby, too - especially loud noises (like smashing down a door or firing off a shotgun).

Special types of zombies, very dangerous types, will start to appear as well. And for the rest of the game, zombies will be virtually unlimited in number. No matter how many you kill in a town, more will spawn - especially if you're noisy about it.

So, with a normal start, your tactic will almost always be to loot the nearest city, then get out before things get too tough. Assuming that zombies don't follow you out of town (more on that later), you'll be reasonably safe in your evac shelter, with a nice assortment of equipment to get you started. (Note that there are plenty of dangers outside the towns, too, but you don't usually have to worry about zombies there.)

With the static spawn option, though - which is what I've been playing - the entire game is different. You start the game with every zombie - including the very dangerous types - already infesting the towns. Entering the center of a city during the day is simply suicide. You still start with nothing, pretty much, and you've got no easy way to get anything, either.

On the other hand, zombies won't continue to spawn. You can even clear out a town, if you're tough enough to take on the specials. Zombies are still infinite in number, because the world is infinitely large and some might always wander in from other cities. However, I like the sense of accomplishment with this option, knowing when I kill a zombie that it really is one less zombie. :)

It's a lot harder to start, though, and your tactics have to be completely different. I highly recommend starting with one point in mechanics skill, so you can make a crowbar right off the bat. Grab a rock from right outside the evac shelter, smash a locker to get a pipe (the shelter will normally be far enough from town that the noise won't attract zombies), then beat the pipe into a crude crowbar.

With a crowbar, you can pry open doors without making too much noise. Then you need to loot isolated homes in small towns, where you can hope to avoid zombies or, at least, not attract anything really tough. You probably won't find military surplus gear, but a couple of purses will help you hold loot, and there's usually food and drink there, at least at the start of the game.

Almost everything you find is useful, and with the static spawn option, I find that I'm just absurdly grateful for all of it. A purse? How wonderful! :)

I started my first game,... and walked out of the evac shelter to immediately discover a cougar which thought I looked like lunch! I didn't have anything but a rock I picked up from the ground, so I turned around and ran back to the shelter, hoping that the NPC inside would help me out.

Sure enough, as I got close - already bleeding - he shot his .44 pistol through the window at the cougar. Unfortunately, he missed the cat and hit me, in the head, instead - critical hit, 135 pts. of damage, game over. That was the shortest game of Cataclysm I've ever played!

My next character had a similar experience, though I'd given him the Animal Empathy trait, and the cougar was a long way off, so I hoped it would ignore me. I'd created a crowbar, too, so I wasn't completely helpless. I headed east, away from the cat and towards the nearest, rather isolated, house.

Unfortunately, the big cat followed me - not immediately hostile, but 'tracking.' I got around to the other side of the house and pried open the front door - all without seeing any zombies - and was able to close it, while I looted the home. There were a few useful things inside, but no weapons. And the cougar was camped at the front door.

I didn't realize at the time that I could open windows from inside a house, without smashing them, and leave quietly that way, so I tried to lure the cougar inside - inside an interior room, too - where I might be able to shut the door on him. But, as luck would have it, my first completely-unskilled swing with the crowbar accomplished a critical hit on the cougar's head, and he dropped dead in the doorway.

I hadn't found a knife, not yet, so I couldn't butcher the carcass for meat and pelt, but it was certainly an encouraging start. Unfortunately, I ran into a nasty bug after awhile, so I had to start a new character on a new map. Or maybe that wasn't so unfortunate, since I really love my current map!

As I noted, I've been playing with the static spawn option turned on, so cities are a deathtrap - in the daytime. Oh, they're plenty dangerous at night, too, but my character has the Night Vision trait, which lets him see just one square further than normal, and the Light Step trait, which means that he walks very quietly, too. So it's not actually suicidal to raid cities at night (just very, very dangerous).

(Note that the Light Step trait came in very handy in my second game, too, where I never saw a rabbit, a squirrel, or a deer, but there were dirt mounds all over the place.)

My character still smells like a human being, though, and zombies aren't just attracted by airborne scent, they can also trail a person almost like a dog can. If you're curious, here's a video which shows exactly how that works in the game.

Basically, if you hang around in one spot, your scent will spread, attracting more zombies. If you move quickly through an area, you'll leave only a thin scent trail. You'll still end up with a bunch of zombies on your trail, but if you've designed a fast character (and you're not injured or sick), you can outrun most things. It's still really dangerous, and you don't want to lead them back to your home base, but it makes raiding possible.

In my first nighttime raid on a nearby city, I tried to get to the gun shop and to the military surplus store, but both were packed with zombies - including some of the specials. But I took off running, around this big expanse of bomb craters I'd discovered (since rough ground will slow zombies, and injure them, too) and got far enough ahead that they lost my trail.

Then, when I looped back to the military surplus store, it was clear enough that I could quickly loot it and get away again. Apparently, I'd drawn off the zombies with my initial dash through the area.

I tried that again on another night, still trying - and failing - to get into the gun store, and ended up with another big pack of specials, plus a huge, poisonous wasp, right on my heels.

I couldn't accomplish anything that night, but I did get away (accomplishment enough, huh?) by lighting and then throwing a Molotov cocktail on the ground next to my closest pursuers. I don't know if I killed any of them, but fire works great for disrupting a scent trail. So at night, with my Light Step perk and no scent trail to follow, they couldn't follow me any further.

(Note that zombies aren't smart enough to avoid fire, either. I once lured a brute - a bigger than usual zombie, especially good at melee fighting - into lava, and then did the same thing with a shocker zombie, a little later.)

My biggest problem in my current game is that I've caught a cold. Funny, huh? But my character feels lousy, plus he coughs frequently - nothing you want to do when you're trying to avoid zombies. I still don't have a good weapon, since I've found guns but no ammunition (and without a silencer, I probably wouldn't want to use them, anyway).

But I've got a crossbow I took from a trap (a squirrel set off the trap for me), and I can make wooden bolts for it. It's silent, but it's also very slow to reload. So I can shoot it once in a fight, but then I need to wield something else.

For most things - and for the rabbits and squirrels that keep me fed - throwing rocks works just fine. Rocks are pretty much everywhere, and even when I miss, I train my throwing skill, a bit.

Still, I'd feel a lot better with a gun, if only to train my skill in firearms. I need a shovel, too. And a hacksaw. Well, there's a lot of stuff I need. It's funny, but I had a heck of a time just finding a cigarette lighter, which is absolutely essential for starting fires. (With a fire, and a pot, I can boil the water I get from broken toilets, and other less-than-sanitary sources, to keep my character from puking his guts out.)

Cougars and wolves aren't a problem now, nor are ordinary zombies, provided I can deal with them one at a time. But those are the least of the dangers in the zombie apocalypse. And most things aren't considerate enough to attack one at a time, either. :)

PS. For complete beginners, if you're wondering, this is the character build I'm using right now: strength 8, dexterity 8, intelligence 12, perception 9. Negative traits: Glass Jaw, Trigger Happy, Weak Stomach, Wool Allergy, HP Ignorant, Truth Teller, Ugly. Positive traits: Fleet-footed, Quick, Light Step, Night Vision, Fast Reader, Animal Empathy, Optimist. Skills: Mechanics 1.
___
Note: You can find more of my posts about specific games here.

Anything but an atheist

My brother sent me this. Nice, isn't it? Why is atheism so threatening?

When it comes to religion, no matter what you believe, it's a minority belief, worldwide. Face it, whatever your beliefs, the majority of human beings disagree with you. But that doesn't seem to bother most modern believers, not when it's some other religion. Not having a religion at all? That's a problem.

You can be a Muslim, a Mormon, or a Moonie, and the Boy Scouts will welcome you with open arms. You can worship Kali, Thor, Zeus, or Quetzalcoatl, and they won't have any problem with you. But don't believe in a god at all? That's not allowed, not in the Boy Scouts.

Why are atheists so threatening, but Hindus aren't? At a time of virtual holy war in the Middle East, when Muslim terrorists have struck at innocent Americans and vow to do so again, why are Muslims still more accepted - far more - than atheists?

Don't get me wrong, I think Muslims also have a right to their beliefs. I think they're wrong, but that's OK, since they think I'm wrong, too. We can agree to disagree. I certainly don't assume that they're all terrorists. But many people do,... and still they fear atheists more.

Funny, isn't it? Why is it OK to believe in any religion you want, but not OK if you don't believe in any of them? If you're Christian, members of all those other religions disagree with you. Heck, even within Christianity itself, there's little agreement. But it's generally only atheists you fear and hate.

Why is that? Is it because you think we're right? Maybe you don't fear all those other religions, because you know they're just superstition. You're never going to join the Scientologists, the Sikhs, or the Buddhists anyway, so they're no real threat. But atheism is a threat, because you just might decide to face reality someday?

Is that it? I don't know. But what else could it be?

K.D. Lang sings Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah

Nothing new, but I got this from Mario Piperni's website, and I just had to pass it on. Beautiful, isn't it?

I have no idea what the song means, if it means anything. With its religious imagery, it probably wouldn't be anything an atheist could embrace, but so what? It's still beautiful.

That incredible thing Bush said

Last night - in a dream, of course - I was sitting on the couch in George W. Bush's house listening to a well-known journalist interview our former president.

I don't know why I was there. It's not as though George and I are best buds. Heck, I haven't even met the guy - and I don't know any journalists, either.

But during the interview, Bush said something so incredible, so noteworthy, so newsworthy that I had to make a note of it. So I dug out my little dogeared notebook, the one I use for shopping lists, and started to write it down, verbatim.

Bush had left the room by then, but that reporter tried to see what I was writing, so I decided to scribble even worse than usual, so he couldn't read it. But,... I couldn't remember the line I wanted to write down!

You know how bad your memory is in dreams? Well, my memory, at least. I don't know about you, but I can't remember anything in dreams. I leave a party and I can't remember where I parked my truck, or how I got there at all. I try to remember the details of a point I'm trying to make, and it's like wading through a fog.

I'm introduced to someone and I can't remember her name. (OK, that always happens when I'm awake, too.) But even things that happened earlier in that same dream seem completely out of reach, no matter how hard I try to remember.

In this case, I could remember the gist of the sentence,... but even that faded as I struggled to remember the exact wording of it.

And it was so important, too! It shed such light on our former president's mindset! It explained so much about the nonstop disaster that was the George W. Bush administration! It would have made such a great blog post!

But I guess you'll have to make do with this, instead. :)

Science vs feelings

I especially like this: "So if there's one thing that separates the scientists from the junk science 'feelie,' it's the battle of observation, measurement, and calculation against feelings, belief, and guesswork."

This video really struck me because I'm always hearing similar things from Christians. In fact, I just had an interesting, and rather pertinent, discussion with a believer which started from a YouTube comment.

I don't want to pick on him/her, because most Christians quickly run away from even discussing this stuff, and I respect anyone who cares enough about the truth to debate it. (Most of the time, I hear "Well, I don't care if it's true or not, because I wouldn't want to live in your world.")

But this guy (for convenience, I'll assume he's a guy) said he had "a lot" of good reasons for believing in God. I asked him for his best reason, because a million bad reasons would still be useless, while one really good reason would probably be sufficient.

What he gave me was several ways he thought science was wrong - mostly having to do with cosmology, but some arguments against evolution, too. But here's the deal: he's not a scientist. He just felt that those things couldn't be true. Oh, he had arguments. Indeed, he claimed that "scientific principles" proved he was right.

But why would you think that you'd just... idly thought of something that the entire scientific community had missed - indeed, a bunch of things they'd missed? If it were really that simple to disprove established science, don't you think that scientists would have already demonstrated that? After all, the best way to make a name for yourself in science is to show that other scientists are wrong.

Now, you might 'feel' that scientists are wrong, and you might even be able to justify that feeling to yourself. But science isn't based on feelings. It's based on observation, measurement, and calculation.

I'm not a scientist either, but even I could tell that he'd misunderstood the science in most of the examples he gave. Well, I've heard many Christian apologists misrepresent science to their flock. And to be charitable, maybe they're not actually lying, but are just really ignorant, themselves.

But heck, why would you think you knew enough to disprove science, especially when it's not even your field of expertise? Why would it even occur to you that you knew enough about it? Don't you know that science is based on demonstrable evidence from research which is confirmed by independent investigators? How do your feelings stack up against something like that?

Feelings aren't what scientists use to determine what's real and what isn't. They use evidence - evidence they can clearly demonstrate to other scientists. So if it really were this easy to show they were wrong, don't you think scientists would be the first to notice that?

Of course, as a proof for God, this was useless even if it had all been true. Scientists could be wrong about everything, and it still wouldn't get believers one step closer to evidence that a god exists.

'God' isn't the default. 'God' isn't the answer you get when you can't think of anything else. If you could somehow disprove evolution, or the Big Bang theory, or anything else in science, the best you could say would be "I don't know." Evidence that science is wrong is not evidence that a god did it.

To rationally believe in a god, you need to show evidence that that god exists, not that scientists are wrong about something. Indeed, I'm sure that scientists are wrong about some things. So what? Scientists never claim they can't be mistaken. But how is that evidence for a god? Even if you can't think of an alternative, that's still an argument from ignorance.

Getting back to the video, this shows how feelings mean nothing (well, not in this domain, at least). If you've got real evidence that scientists are wrong, you need to present that evidence to them in peer-reviewed scientific journals. If you don't have the education and the scientific background for that, then what makes you think you're qualified to argue against the scientific consensus in the first place?

After all, anyone can claim anything, especially if it's on the basis of feelings. But why should we give their feelings about how the world must work any consideration at all without evidence? Most likely, they're just ignorant about science and/or too eager to believe what they want to believe.

This video clip demonstrates that pretty well, I'd say.

Lie Witless News

Funny, isn't it?

I don't know if this is real (most likely, they're all actors) - or if it is real, how many people they had to interview to get these responses - but it is pretty funny.

One YouTube commenter, BailiffQuimby, says, "I wouldn't necessarily say all these people are stupid. I suspect they are just desperate to sound informed of current events or a little ashamed that they are not."

Yeah, that makes sense to me. If someone with a news camera asks you a question on the street, you don't want to seem ignorant. You might pay no attention to the news, or simply haven't been paying attention lately. Either way, you hate to admit it. But even if it wasn't a scam, followup questions are liable to get you into trouble.

Let's face it, if you're a devout Catholic, you're likely to say that the pope is doing a good job, no matter what. If you're an atheist, like me, you'll likely say he's doing a terrible job, because you know any new pope is likely to follow the policies of the old one (popes appoint the cardinals who choose their successor, so you're unlikely to see big changes).

In either case, admitting your ignorance is probably wise, but not always easy to do. Ah, human nature! Where would comedy be without it?

The Bible in ten minutes

OK, it's not the entire Bible. It's part 1 & 2 of the History Channel's "The Bible" (the History Channel being to history what Dr. Pepper is to doctors).

I haven't seen "The Bible," but ten minutes seems to be more than enough of that. And have you ever tried to read the Old Testament? You'd be surprised at just how boring it is. Yeah, rape and mass murder and incest made boring, imagine that!

So, trust me, ten minutes is definitely all the time you want to spend on it. I wouldn't mind seeing more of Eve in this video, but you had to know that was just a tease, right? Otherwise, this is pretty good.

I wish this were my senator!

(AP, via TPM)

I'm not sorry I donated money to Elizabeth Warren's senate campaign, especially not when I read things like this:

Progressives fell in love with Elizabeth Warren because they saw in her a fighter — someone who would break from Washington’s longstanding tradition of cozying up to big banks and instead hold them accountable for bad behavior.

She hasn’t disappointed. ...

The latest example came last Thursday during a Banking Committee hearing, when Warren demanded answers from a panel of federal regulators as to why the multinational bank HSBC got off with a fine for money laundering for Mexican drug cartels — along with violating international sanctions against several countries, including Iran and Libya — when people caught with drugs go to jail for life.

“No one individual went to trial, no individual was banned from banking and there was no hearing to consider shutting down HSBC’s activities here in the United States,” Warren said. “So … what does it take? How many billions of dollars do you have to launder for drug lords and how many economic sanctions do you have to violate before someone will consider shutting down a financial institution like this?” ...

“If you’re caught with an ounce of cocaine, the chances are good you’re going to go to jail. If it happens repeatedly, you may go to jail for the rest of your life,” Warren said. “But evidently, if you launder nearly a billion dollars for drug cartels and violate international sanctions, your company pays a fine and you go home and sleep in your own bed at night — every single individual associated with this. I just — I think that’s fundamentally wrong.”

I, too, think that's fundamentally wrong. We may have always had a two-tiered justice system, one for the very wealthy and one for everyone else, but it's come to truly ridiculous proportions, don't you think?

Elizabeth Warren is a brand-new United States senator, but the Democrats gave her a seat on the Banking Committee and she's come out swinging. That's not the only example, either.

That hearing followed an exchange in mid-February when Warren caught a panel of half a dozen senior bank regulators flat-footed by asking them, simply: “Can you identify when you last took [one of] the Wall Street banks to trial?”

“We do not have to bring people to trial,” said Thomas Curry, who leads the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. She retorted, “I appreciate that you say you don’t have to bring them to trial. My question is when did you bring them to trial?”

None of the regulators could answer, responding with a series of dodges and non sequiturs. Warren had made her point — and she didn’t hesitate to drive it home.

“There are district attorneys and United States attorneys out there every day squeezing ordinary citizens on sometimes very thin grounds and taking them to trial in order to make an example, as they put it,” the freshman senator said. “I’m really concerned that ‘too big to fail’ has become ‘too big for trial.’”

What do bankers risk if they violate the law? Nothing, really. We're talking serious crimes, too, not petty misdemeanors. If they get caught, even repeatedly, their corporation might get fined. But the people committing these crimes? They continue to enjoy their multi-million dollar bonuses in their gated communities, bitching about how hard it is to get good servants.

They don't have to worry about jail, because they don't even have to worry about being charged with a crime. They're too important, too wealthy, for such petty concerns. Even when they collapsed the global economy, no one was held accountable for anything.

So why should they even care what the laws are? If it's profitable, they'll make lots and lots of money, and there's a good chance they won't get caught. But if they do get caught? Well, nothing will happen, anyway. Jail is for the petty drug dealers, not the people on the top, laundering hundreds of millions for drug cartels.

In Elizabeth Warren, we've finally got someone fighting for us. She may not be able to change the system, not all by herself, but she can make noise. She can draw attention to this stuff. And the bankers really hate her for that.

I've got to credit Senate Democrats, too. They might be too timid or too friendly with bankers, themselves, but they did give Elizabeth Warren a seat on the Banking Committee. They could have buried her away somewhere, especially given her lack of seniority. But they didn't do that. They gave her a soapbox, and she's using it.

Another Republican reversal

As TPM says:

Paul Ryan and Republican leaders started off opposing the Affordable Care Act’s Medicare cuts, then turned around and twice passed budgets that kept them, then campaigned against those cuts in the 2012 election, and are now embracing them again.

The details are here:

When he unveils his budget plan this week, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) will complete a 720-degree flip on President Obama’s cuts to Medicare providers in the Affordable Care Act.

As he revealed on “Fox News Sunday,” Ryan’s upcoming budget will sustain the cuts. ...

Ryan ran for vice president last year against Obama’s cuts to Medicare, which don’t target beneficiaries but instead lower reimbursements for hospitals and private insurance companies under Medicare Advantage.

“Obamacare takes $716 billion from Medicare to spend on Obamacare,” Ryan said last October. “Their own actuary from the administration came to Congress and said one out of six hospitals and nursing homes are going to go out of business as a result of this.”

And yet GOP budget chief’s new position is a return to an earlier stance. His House-passed blueprints in 2011 and 2012 also assumed the same level of Medicare savings as the Affordable Care Act, while repealing the rest of the law.

But even that was a reversal after Ryan and his GOP colleagues strenuously objected to the Medicare cuts before Obamacare passed, warning as he did during the 2012 campaign that the lower provider payments would harm services for current seniors.

In other words, Ryan and Republican leaders started off opposing the ACA’s Medicare cuts, then turned around and twice passed budgets that kept them, then campaigned against those cuts in the 2012 election, and are now embracing them again.

This isn't just the twists and turns which we tend to see from every politician, but a deliberate attempt to mislead voters. Medicare is very popular, so when running for office, Republicans claim to be defending Medicare from the Democrats. (Although, you really have to wonder how anyone can be dumb enough to believe that, don't you?)

But they also want to pretend to be fiscally prudent, so they adopt the same cuts for their own budget plans. That really takes a lot of gall, don't you think? And they don't just switch positions once or twice, but over and over again, expecting that ignorance, apathy, and Fox 'News' will provide all the cover they need.

Is it any wonder that Republicans rely on low-information voters? I'm continually reminded of this when it comes to 'Obamacare,' too.

Obamacare had its start in a right-wing think tank, the Heritage Foundation, as a free-market, insurance company-friendly alternative to the single-payer health care plans of other developed countries. It was widely supported in the Republican Party, and Mitt Romney was praised for pushing it and signing it into law in Massachusetts.

But all that ended when the Democrats, in a spirit of bipartisanship (and because most Democratic politicians are rather conservative themselves), adopted it, too. Instantly, the GOP's own plan became 'socialism' with 'death panels,' a deadly threat to Mom, apple pie, and the American way.

Is there anything Barack Obama could propose which wouldn't get the same treatment from today's  Republican Party? Even when he nominated a conservative Republican for Secretary of Defense, that was filibustered by Senate Republicans!

And now, here's Paul Ryan with yet another Republican flip-flop, proposing (again) the same thing they campaigned bitterly against last fall. It's just astonishing, isn't it? How can they get away with this, over and over again? Either American voters are really dumb, or our media are really bad. Or both.

Matt Dillahunty - 'We Are Atheism'

I really like this guy. Matt Dillahunty, one of the hosts of the Atheist Experience TV show, is just so good at explaining this stuff!

He tends to be even better in debates and interviews than he is on the television show (and he's great on the show), because he tends to get frustrated by the callers they get. Not that I blame him for that. Most of them would try anyone's patience (certainly mine).

Last Kiss Couple-Up

(Last Kiss)

Usually, I don't think much of these caption contests, where the cartoonist supplies the art and his readers suggest the dialogue, but I thought this was funny.

And even funnier, as John Lustig explained:

A surprisingly large number of you basically told me that you’d rather be flogged in your skivvies on national TV than submit anything on Facebook.

So I crumbled and said I’d pick an additional winner—this one from just the submissions made on GoComics.

So here is that one, which I like even better:

(Last Kiss)

And the runner-up, which is almost as funny:

(Last Kiss)

I might be changing my mind about these contests. There are apparently a lot of clever people out there!