My father was Satan

(BuzzFeed)

At BuzzFeed, there's a post about the 15 questions atheists are sick of answering. It's pretty good, but... I really have to disagree. I don't get tired of answering such questions, even the really dumb ones.

And also, I have to admit that question #2 is valid, because Dad really was Satan.

But he was a good dad. He was good to me and the rest of the spawn of Hell. He was very good to Mom (unlike God, Satan didn't hate women). He worked hard to provide us a good life.

My earliest memories are of Dad and his pitchfork. He wouldn't let me play with it, because that sucker was sharp, but I got a little toy pitchfork for Christmas one time. (Yes, we celebrated Christmas. Get over it!)

We used to go on vacation in August, when Nebraska and Hell become pretty much indistinguishable. Dad kept his temper well enough, all things considered - Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? - but we kids were usually smart enough to shut up when the trees started to spontaneously combust as we drove past.

OK, he wasn't perfect, but who is? I must admit that the furnace in our house was a little creepy. The screams would keep me awake at night, sometimes. But on the bright side, it kept us toasty warm, even in January.

For better or worse, I take after my mother. Still, after I've been out in the sun awhile, you can really see my resemblance to Dad, too. (Admittedly, I'm not usually that horny.)

Sadly, Dad is dead now. Science and reason killed him. But that's OK. It was time for him to go. It really was. And we still have the memories...

Gun accidents just didn't happen in the past

Right-wing Christian pastor, turned pseudo-historian, David Barton is at it again:

After a decade of debunking pseudo-historian David Barton’s claims about American history, it’s pretty hard for anything that comes out of his pie hole to surprise me, but even I was taken aback by the utter preposterousness of one of his latest claims — that gun accidents just didn’t happen in the founding era! ...

BECK: “Kids did not shoot each other.”

BARTON: “Oh no. No, no, no. Again, two accidents I have seen in two hundred years of everybody having guns. It just didn’t happen.”

Barton claimed on his radio show to have “searched” and only found two gun accidents in the founding era, but his claim became even more incredible on [Glenn] Beck’s show. Now it’s two gun accidents in two hundred years!

I really have to wonder just where the eminent historian Barton actually “searched” to only find two gun accidents in two hundred years when I was easily able to find countless reports of gun accidents in just a few minutes with nothing more than a quick search of Newsbank’s historical newspapers archive. All it took was simply searching on a few combinations of words that you’d expect to find together in articles about gun accidents.

I found a plethora of articles about hunting accidents and other accidental shootings among adults, but what I primarily want to focus here on the accidents involving children, since Barton’s claim is that all children were taught to use guns and that is why there were no gun accidents.

This is a just small sampling of the articles I found, many of which, as you’ll see, sound just like the articles you see today — most of them ending with warnings to parents about leaving guns around children or letting children play with guns, and many of them noting that gun accidents were a very frequent occurrence...

Why do people believe anything David Barton says? Partly, I suppose, it's because he sounds so authoritative. And he's an evangelical Christian pastor. He wouldn't just lie, would he?

This isn't just about religion, unless you think Jesus was a big fan of assault rifles. Barton is that combination of religious nut and right-wing political fanatic that's so common in the Republican Party these days.

As she says, Chris Rodda has been debunking Barton's claims for decades. And in this post, she points out some other examples of his dishonesty. For one thing, she shows how he used excerpts of a letter from John Quincy Adams to deliberately give the wrong impression on Glenn Beck's show. And then there are the parts he leaves out:

Not to digress too much, but I can’t help but mention something else here about the way Barton portrays John Quincy Adams and his son George. In addition to the letter about learning to use guns, Barton loves to bring up the letters that Adams wrote to George instructing him on how to read and study the Bible. But what Barton never mentions is how George turned out. What was the result of the strict regimen of Bible study and manly-man activities that Adams imposed upon his son? Well, George took to drinking and gambling, knocked up a servant girl at the home of a family friend, and eventually committed suicide at the age of twenty-eight. Barton never gets to that part of the story.

But my favorite is how David Barton takes a story from a work of fiction and presents it as history:

After reading from the letters of Jefferson and John Quincy Adams, Barton told his tale about a classroom full of gun-toting elementary school children in the 1850s saving their teacher’s life by whipping out their guns to stop a gunman who came to their school — a story that appears to have come not from an actual historical event, but from the Louis L’Amour novel Bendigo Shafter, as I wrote last week in my post “Is David Barton Now Getting His ‘History’ From Louis L’Amour Novels?” (An update on that post: Barton never answered my email requesting a source for his story.)

This is the kind of "historian" David Barton is. But, of course, he's not a historian. He's a right-wing pastor trying to rewrite history to suit his political and religious beliefs.

And he's very popular on the right. After all, those real historians are all just liberal eggheads following Satan's orders to promote the socialist New World Order, right? So who are you going to believe?

If you're watching Glenn Beck in the first place, you're probably going to believe Barton. Well, when you're faith-based, you're going to believe what you want to believe. But this wouldn't be a problem if it were just Glenn Beck's audience. No, it's a lot wider than that. It's become the entire Republican Party these days.

No, not every Republican believes this stuff, I'm sure, but these are the people who control today's Republican Party. Thanks to the GOP's notorious 'Southern strategy,' these people have become the Republican base.

Even the leaders of the Republican Party praise David Barton. He's a real favorite on Fox 'News.' In the right-wing bubble they live in, they create their own reality, and David Barton's rewriting of history is just the kind of fantasy they want to believe.

We've seen how today's Republicans have become anti-science. We've seen how they reject anything they don't want to believe about the real world, despite overwhelming evidence. But this is how they treat history, too. And this is the history they want to teach to children, as well - in some states, like Texas, the history they do teach to children.

The fact that it's not true is immaterial. Their faith will make it true, right? As Winston Churchill said, history is written by the victors. And they're determined to win in America, no matter what it takes.

Chuck Hagel's 'Friends of Hamas'

Funny, isn't it? Well, not really. But at least the Republicans are eating themselves.

Here in Nebraska, I'm quite familiar with Chuck Hagel, since he used to be our senator. He's a conservative Republican, so I never voted for him, but I still respected him.

I disagree with Hagel about most things, but he's not insane. In fact, that's why he's no longer our senator. He wasn't insane enough for today's Republican Party, so he quit, rather than face a likely primary fight.

He doesn't deserve this mess. He doesn't deserve the lies being spread about him. But it's his own party. If you're sane, you don't belong in today's Republican Party. And if you stick around anyway, your own party will eventually make that very clear. (Colin Powell gets much the same treatment these days.)

As a Republican politician, Chuck Hagel supported this kind of stuff. Oh, I'm not claiming that he took part in it himself, but at the very least, he knew that it was happening. It is, after all, the very heart of Fox 'News.' So he actually benefited from it, when it was directed - as it usually is - at Democrats.

Well, that's how the Republican Party operates, and has operated for years now. And Hagel is still a Republican. So, at some level, I'm enjoying this, even though Hagel doesn't really deserve it.

As Cenk Uygur points out (from this column at Slate), it started with a right-wing blog post where, as usual, the author just pulled a wild claim out of his ass. Then, the rest of the right-wing blogosphere repeated it, and soon it was everywhere in the right-wing bubble.

After all, where there's smoke, there's fire, right? Of course, they're all smoking the same stuff! That reality-free bubble they all inhabit is so full of smoke they can't see anything else, but it's all coming from within the bubble itself.

And if that's not enough, here's the sequel:

A conservative blog today claimed that Hagel suggested in the speech that Israel controlled the State Department. The former Republican senator has come under fire from Republicans for being critical of Israeli policy in the past and referring to the “Israel lobby,” so the State Department quote would be problematic, if true.

It turns out Hagel may have said no such thing, though he did talk of cooperation with Iran on Afghanistan, including the idea of reopening a consulate in the country, which may pose its own political problems.

But the increasingly unhinged campaign against Hagel has been so single-minded in its quest to dig up dirt on him that it has seized on anything that has even a whiff of pro-Palestianian, anti-Israel slant, no matter how dubious. For instance, the bogus claim that Hagel received donations from a nonexistent group called “Friends of Hamas” plays perfectly into the notion that he coddled the sometimes terrorist group that controls the Gaza Strip. But it has the disadvantage of being untrue.

Applying the Republicans’ standard on Hagel to others — including themselves — complicates the situation.

Take Sen. Jim Inhofe, for instance. He’s the ranking Republican member on the Senate Armed Services Committee and has been one of the leading figures opposing Hagel’s nomination. Inhofe told Foreign Policy’s Josh Rogan that Hagel’s relatively soft stance on Hamas, among other things, meant that Inhofe could not support him.

But in 2006, after Hamas won the Palestinian elections, Inhofe did not seem concerned. Hamas has done “some good things, even as a terrorist group,” he told the Oklahoman. He compared the group to one of the country’s largest charities, saying Hamas is like “the Salvation Army with loaded guns.” [And we all know how Republicans love guns. I'm sure Inhofe thinks the Salvation Army should carry loaded guns.]

“I would prefer that they not have won, but I don’t think it’s the end of the world,” he added.

The quote may not be damning on its own, but if there were a concerted smear campaign against Inhofe’s stance on Israel, it would be about as bad as anything brought against Hagel. In other words, using his current standard, Jim Inhofe might have a hard time voting to confirm Jim Inhofe.

The problem with Hagel? The entire problem with Hagel? It's just the fact that President Obama has nominated him. That's it.

Republicans are so determined to oppose Barack Obama on everything, no matter what it is, that they'll gnaw off their own leg if that's what it takes. Well, we saw this with 'Obamacare,' too. As soon as the Democrats adopted the Republican position, it became 'socialism' to the GOP.

Personally, I hope that Obama keeps nominating Republicans for government positions. I'm really enjoying the feeding frenzy, even though Chuck Hagel doesn't actually deserve this kind of treatment.

Mass Effect 2

Commander Shepard, with Jack

When I finished Mass Effect a couple of weeks ago, I immediately started Mass Effect 2. I'd really enjoyed the setting and the story, and I wanted to continue with both.

That was both good and bad, I think. It was good because I could remember the characters so well. You can import your Mass Effect saved game into the sequel, so your character will look the same, and your actions in the first game will be remembered. I like that. And if it had been longer, I probably wouldn't have remembered who some of those people were.

Admittedly, most of those people weren't a big part of this story - especially the people who'd had a chance to die in the first one. Well, that makes sense, since a developer can't waste a lot of time on a character who won't exist for many players, but it's still a little disappointing.

Liara is a lot colder than she used to be.

I missed Liara, my asari lover in the first game. Shepard kept her picture on his desk - another way my actions in the first game influenced this one - and that was nice, but otherwise, she just showed up briefly (she'd moved on) and never joined us on the ship.

In Mass Effect 2, Shepard can apparently make love to just about every female - alien or not - on his ship. I don't know if he can choose them all or just one, because the whole idea seemed rather... unprofessional to me. He was, after all, the ship's captain and their superior. Plus, you're supposed to be saving the galaxy, not living the life of a spoiled playboy.

Anyway, for role-playing purposes, I chose to remain faithful to Liara. I have to admit, though, that I wonder what Tali looks like under her armor. You never even get to see her face. And although she's an alien, she clearly had it bad for Commander Shepard.

What does Tali look like under all that?

Anyway, playing the sequel so soon after Mass Effect was also bad, because the contrast with the first game made this one rather disappointing. Everything I didn't like about the first game was even worse in this one. And many of the things I liked were also worse - or missing altogether.

I won't say much about the setting and story here. You can read my review of Mass Effect, if you want. The setting is the same, and the story continues from what began in the first. In this one, though, you end up working for Cerberus, who were enemies - although not the enemy - in the first game.

I don't know. I didn't like the storyline in this one nearly as much, but it's the middle game of a trilogy, so that's not at all unexpected. And it wasn't the story that disappointed me.

Honest, this closeup of Miranda's butt was the game developers' idea.

Hmm,... where do I begin? For one thing, this was even more a movie in disguise than the first one. There were very long cut-scenes, which often happened without warning - and segued into or out of long conversations, too.

It's really frustrating when I can't make those decisions myself, or even save the game in the middle of them, since, as I say, they were very long. And the game took a lot longer to load than the first one, too - a lot longer (so I really didn't want to reload a saved game and go through all that again).

The combat was a little different in this one, but not better. In the first game, you had to worry about weapon overheating, so you had to pause occasionally. That worked well, I thought. In this one, though, you run out of ammunition (although they don't call it that).

You could pick up more as you went along, if you looked for it, but that didn't make much sense and wasn't fun at all. And since I'm a very bad shot, I was usually short of ammunition.

A change of clothing, but still this focus on Miranda's butt.

There are also three different kinds of defense - armor, biotics, and shields - in this game, and you were supposed to vary your ammunition or your attacks to match. I didn't like that, either. It seemed like a needless complication. But then, I'm terrible at those kinds of things, which might be why I don't like them.

Those mini-games I hated in Mass Effect? They were different in this game, and I did like these better, because they were easier. But the very long load times, whenever I failed and needed to reload a save, made them just as frustrating. (Why were the loads so short in the first game and so long in this one?)

Even worse, there were arcade sequences on some missions where you couldn't save the game. Now I'm really, really bad at arcade games, and since I couldn't save the game in the middle of them, I'd have to replay the whole thing if I failed near the end. Luckily, I was playing on Easy difficulty, so it wasn't that bad (or I would have quit long before the end), but it wasn't great, either.

Then there's Samara.

And then there were the changes they made to what I really liked in the first game. For example, I loved exploring planets in that little rover, the Mako, in Mass Effect. Well, you can't explore planets at all in this one.

Instead, they have you survey planets from orbit in what has to be the most boring, pointless exercise I've ever experienced in a game. What in the world were they thinking? You can't even walk around the Citadel in this game - not outside, at least, not anywhere beautiful or interesting.

There were all sorts of solar systems I never visited at all in Mass Effect 2, because there didn't seem to be any reason for it. In the first game, you could find random stuff - even quests - by exploring worlds, but I never found anything but minerals through surveying planets in this one (and I had far more of most minerals than I needed).

Thane

As I say, you can't explore planets at all in this one. And you can no longer find loot in Mass Effect 2. Well, you can, but it isn't anything... interesting. In the first game, you could find different kinds of weapons all over the place, and although that wasn't plausible, it was still fun. (Sometimes you can find schematics in this one, but it's just not the same.)

In the first game, I became fantastically wealthy, with no reason to spend money on anything. In this one, I never had enough money. In fact, I wasn't able to buy everything I needed wanted for the final mission, because I couldn't afford it. (And I was pretty much forced into the final mission, rather than choosing to do it on my own. I really hate that kind of thing.)

Mordin

It's funny, after all that, to admit that I enjoyed the game - and that I actually finished it. Again, that's rare for me, but - again - this game is a lot shorter than most of the RPGs I play. It was about 25% longer than the first game - according to Steam, I've played it for 53 hours - but that's still pretty short.

That's OK with me, though. I wouldn't have finished if it had been much longer. No, I certainly didn't mind that.

But even though I enjoyed the game, I don't particularly like this kind of game. Yeah, I love the setting in these Mass Effect games, and the general storyline is great. But I don't especially like the gameplay. I liked this game as an interactive movie, but not much as a game.

And Mass Effect 2 is far worse in that respect than the first game. I have my objections about that one, too, as my review indicated, but the sequel took almost everything in the wrong direction, as far as I'm concerned. (You may, of course, think otherwise.)

Miranda, Shepard, and Joker

I'll probably wait till next winter to play Mass Effect 3. I won't have as much time, soon, and I've had enough of these now, anyway. Still, I must say that I'm surprised I enjoyed these two games as much as I did, since there's so much I don't like about them.

Games aren't movies, and they shouldn't try to be movies. But there's still something quite appealing about starring in your own movie, I guess. :)

___
Note: Check here for my thoughts on other games.

Discriminating against Christians

From TPM, here's an Illinois Republican arguing that allowing gay marriage discriminates against people who want to discriminate against them.

Illinois State Senator Kyle McCarter's Facebook page:

To redefine marriage is discriminatory towards those who hold the sincerely held religious belief that it is a sacred institution between a man & a woman.

I'm reminded of L. Sprague de Camp's 1939 story, Lest Darkness Fall. It's a classic alternate history science fiction tale of a man who suddenly finds himself transported to 6th Century Rome, a man who single-handedly tries to prevent the coming Dark Ages.

How is this pertinent? Several times in the book, local Christians complain that they're being discriminated against because they're not allowed to persecute other Christian sects. It's just not fair!

I remember thinking that was funny, and clever, but I never realized I'd be hearing the same thing in the 21st Century - especially not from an elected political leader in America! (Of course, at my most pessimistic, I never imagined today's Republican Party.)

But I must admit that McCarter has a point. When we eliminated slavery, we discriminated against people who had the sincerely held religious belief that owning people was part of God's plan. Make no mistake, those people knew their Bible, and it was abundantly clear that God approved of slavery.

When we let women vote, we discriminated against people who had the sincerely held religious belief that women should remain subservient to men. Again, they pointed to the Bible to oppose women's suffrage. Doesn't letting women vote discriminate against them?

(Here's Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1897: "In the early days of woman-suffrage agitation, I saw that the greatest obstacle we had to overcome was the bible. It was hurled at us on every side.")

When we legalized interracial marriage, we discriminated against people who had the sincerely held religious belief that the races should not mix. Heck, polls show that a large proportion of Southern Republicans still think that interracial marriage should be illegal. (They don't just say they wouldn't marry someone of another race, or even that it's wrong, but that it should be illegal.)

And you can bet that those people point to their sincerely held religious beliefs, too. After all, the South is very definitely part of the Bible Belt in America. So aren't we discriminating against them when we don't allow them to discriminate against other people?

You know, we could use this argument for pretty much... anything, couldn't we? You can't let other people have civil rights, because doing so will discriminate against the bigots who want to keep persecuting those people. And yes, it's invariably because of "sincerely held religious beliefs."

I laughed at this in Lest Darkness Fall, but I thought it was just fiction. How little I knew, huh? Today's Republican Party really is stranger than fiction.

Meteorite hits Russia

This is quite a video clip, isn't it? Keep in mind that he couldn't have been very close to the explosion, given how long it took for the sound to get there.

Luckily, this wasn't a dinosaur-killer, or even big enough to cause a nuclear winter. But those will happen someday, if we don't develop the technology - and the will - to identify and stop them.

Of course, the idiots are out in force. I've already seen comments about UFOs, and there's at least one Russian politician blaming America:

One Russian politician said the event was not a meteor shower but a US weapons test, Russia's Interfax news agency reported.

Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of the ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party, was quoted as saying: "Meteors are falling. Those are not meteors, it is Americans testing their new weapon."

TPM has other videos of this meteor strike in central Russia here. According to the BBC, nearly a thousand people were injured, two seriously.

President Vladimir Putin said he thanked God no big fragments had fallen in populated areas.

Hmm,... believers seem to have remarkably low expectations for their supposedly omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent being, wouldn't you say? The best he can do is keep "big fragments" from population centers? Gee, that's really impressive, huh?

I think this demonstrates that we human beings need to protect ourselves. This was a very small meteorite. If an asteroid hit us, that could mean extinction for human beings (and countless other species, as well).

PS. Apparently, it's a "meteor" as it's burning through our atmosphere, but a "meteorite" when it actually hits the ground (most aren't big enough for that and simply burn up as "shooting stars").

Missouri bill redefines science

Last I heard, only 6% of American scientists now call themselves Republican. Is it any wonder? (Not that the Democratic Party is always great, when it comes to science, but they're not this bad.)

And all this is just to push Creationism! How crazy is that? After all, evolution is the foundation of modern biology. It's the bedrock on which the rest of biology stands. There is no controversy in science about that.

Everything we've learned in the past 150 years or so has just confirmed evolution. Charles Darwin didn't even know about genes, let alone about DNA. We know vastly more than we did back then, and it's just made the scientific consensus about evolution even stronger.

No, this "controversy" doesn't exist in science. It's all just a matter of religious zealots pushing a 2,000-year-old myth. It's the 21st Century, but they still want to think that 'God' made Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden - literally! Incredible, isn't it?

Arizona's gun posse

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All I can do, when I see something like this, is feel a great sense of relief that it's not Nebraska.

Yeah, we may not be great, but at least we're not Arizona, huh?

Aliens welcome in Glasgow

Some bizarre... human being (presumably) filed a Freedom of Information request with the Glasgow, Scotland, City Council asking about their plans for alien contact.

Yeah, weird, huh? But at least their reply was entertaining:

The response, from Dr Kenneth Meechan, admitted the council had not laid out concrete plans for alien contact.

He said: "The legal framework regarding making contact with extraterrestrial lifeforms is not entirely clear."

Dr Meechan went on to say it was unlikely Glasgow would be the aliens first point of contact, whether it be over radio or in person.

As reported in the Herald, he said: "The general consensus in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence community is that contact is most likely to be made through radio communication, since faster-than-light travel remains in the realms of fiction and it would take an improbably long time to travel between the stars at sub-light speed.

"The council does not own or control any radio telescopes, so we do not expect to pick up any signals from space. One of our secondary schools has a large aerial of unknown providence, but if this is capable of acting as a radio telescope, we are not presently using it.

"If, contrary to this expectation, first contact is through a landing on earth, we note that Glasgow covers around 0.008% of the world’s population and 0.00003% of the total surface of the earth 0.00012% of the land area. On a purely statistical basis, we therefore consider it unlikely that aliens, should they land on earth in the next five years, will initially land in Glasgow."

But if extraterrestrials do decide on a tour around the globe, they would be more than welcome in Glasgow.

Dr Meechan said: "Glasgow is of course a vibrant and exciting city for visitors and has been awarded any number of accolades by national and international travel guides. We are sure that any (non-hostile) alien visitors would want to include Glasgow on their list of places to visit, and we can assure them of a warm and peaceful visit."

That's all very well, but what are their plans in the event of a zombie apocalypse? That's what inquiring minds really want to know.

Fewer guns, more punching

CollegeHumor's Favorite Funny Videos

Sorry for the title change, but I just couldn't write "less guns." :)

Gee, and this is supposed to be 'college' humor, too!

Pope Benedict XVI is resigning

In honor of Pope Benedict XVI, who has just announced his resignation, I thought I'd post this song. Note that it's... probably not safe for work. :)

Also, note that Tim Minchin has released this song for free download here. (It would make a nice ringtone, wouldn't it?)

Death takes no holiday

Here's a rather depressing article from NBC which tracks gun violence in America over just one weekend:

It was after midnight, early on a Saturday in the college town of Moscow, Idaho, and student Jason "Cowboy" Monson was at the police station to get back his Desert Eagle .45-caliber handgun.

In McDonough, Ga., about the same time, two teenage brothers were still awake. A friend was sleeping over, and their mother had let the boys handle her .38-caliber revolver, which was unloaded. She'd gone to bed.

In South Valley, N.M., it was quiet at the Griego household as 15-year-old Nehemiah waited for his father to come home from the night shift at a homeless shelter. The son was holding his father's AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.

In the next few hours, the freshman in Idaho, one of the brothers in Georgia, and most of the Griego family would be dead, victims of three forms of gun violence — suicide, accident and murder — that are everyday occurrences in the United States.

More than 91 Americans were killed by guns over that three-day weekend - far more, most likely, because the average is about 86 people every day. Unfortunately, gun violence is so common in our country that most of it doesn't get much press (especially the suicides).

But the point of this article is to put a face on these anonymous victims, at least these particular victims. And they're a diverse bunch:

You can get killed throwing your daughter a 17th birthday party, if your angry estranged husband shows up. Without a gun, you might have an angry confrontation and maybe some tears. With a handgun, the birthday girl in Grapevine, Texas, lost her mother and father in a murder-suicide, police said.

Or you can get killed buying a taco from a vendor on the street in Los Angeles, if you get into an argument with the wrong person, and that person has a gun.

Or catching a train: A bystander was killed at a Bay Area Rapid Transit station in San Leandro, Calif., when a couple of gangs started trading shots.

You can get killed spending an afternoon with grandma. Just as the president was beginning his inaugural address and talking about making children safe, a gunman in Cocoa, Fla., burst into a home before a children's birthday party, shooting to death the mother of several of the children and seriously wounding their grandmother.

The article is just the first in a week-long series on Guns in America. But as it points out how common gun violence is here, and how diverse, it's clear that no one proposal will solve the whole problem.

No, this will be about chipping away at the problem, bit by bit - as we've done with drunk driving, for example. People still drive drunk, but we've attacked that problem from many different angles and successfully reduced their numbers.

Of course, few people are big fans of drunk drivers. Before we can do anything, we need the will to do something.

It's always sunnier in Germany

Cenk Uygur: "Don't you want to check anything? I know it's Fox News. I know it's a fact-free zone. But do you really want to go on national TV and say that Germany gets more sun than the United States?"

Here's more from Steve Benem:

Let's unpack this a bit, because energy policy is awfully important, and anyone who watched the Fox segment might be confused right about now.

First, Germans do not get more sun than Americans. In fact, every American state other than Alaska gets far more sun every year than Germany does. Fox's report had this backwards.

Second, the Obama administration's subsidies to the solar industry haven't failed; they've vastly improved domestic solar output and expanded the industry's reach. So, Fox's report had this backwards, too.

And third, if anyone who cares about reality wants to know the real reason Germany's solar industry is ahead of ours, it's because the German government has invested heavily in environmental technology. Indeed, Max Greenberg's report flagged this Bloomberg Businessweek report from a few months ago.

Unlike the U.S., Germany has a national solar policy, a quick, inexpensive permitting process, and a national mandate that utilities sign up rooftop installations under what's known as a feed-in tariff--essentially a long-term contract whereby the utilities agree not just to allow the solar on their grids but also to buy the excess power from consumers.

In other words, the Fox segment might as well have come with an "Opposite Day" disclaimer.

Do you wonder why Fox 'News' viewers are more ignorant than people who don't watch any news at all? Well, this is a good example why.

I'll also point out that this is how we should be doing it, too. Instead of building massive solar power plants in fragile desert environments, we should be putting solar panels on every roof.

Put it close to where we need it, and use up some of that space that's not used for anything else, anyway.

Wake up to the Truth with a red pill

Wake up, sheeple! The red pill will set you free from "confusingly nuanced" issues.

And this is exclusive, just for you. After all, we don't let just anyone take the red pills. It's "sort of like Mensa for anti-Semites and misogynists."

God made a factory farmer

God Made A Factory Farmer - watch more funny videos

I never saw the original ad, but I like this version.

Bird-like UFO sighting

From the International Business Times:

Eight unidentified flying objects were spotted in the skies of Mexico during the last week of January.

A video uploaded on YouTube showed eight unidentified objects flying in a synchronised manner which could be mistaken for birds. But a closer look revealed that the wing-like structures attached to each object do not flap and the rest of the body seem to emit fluorescent light.

The objects change the course of flight together making it appear as if they were controlled by intelligence.

The two-minute, fifty-nine second long video with the caption 'UFO,S Incredible Fleet synchronized OVNIS oleada Enero 203 mexico' has gone viral across the internet fetching 36,178 viewers so far. The video footage was uploaded on YouTube on Jan 31 by a user who goes by the name 'pisosmadera'. ...

After the video footage grabbed wide attention speculations emerged that the flying objects could be human-built aircrafts or drones that were being tested in Mexico.

Scott C Waring of UFO Sightings Daily said, "At first glance I made the mistake of assuming this was a video of seagulls. I was mistaken. Not a single one of them flap like a bird would. These objects appear to be a fleet of UFOs or even possibly DARPA drones being tested in Mexico. Notice how the UFOs or drones synchronise in flight and clearly show that they are controlled by intelligence. They also look a little like the secret aircraft the TR3B."

I'm not going to embed the video, since it's blurry and in Spanish, but you can check it out here, if you want. But the reason why these UFOs, with their "wing-like structures," could be mistaken for birds is because they are birds - white pelicans, to be precise.

(White pelican)

White pelicans are very large white birds with black flight feathers. They fly and migrate in flocks, soaring around on thermals and rarely flapping their wings. They can gleam brilliantly in the sun, then seem to disappear when they bank (so they're edge-on to the viewer), only to reappear moments later.

But I must say that I never once suspected that they could be misidentified for aliens, or even military drones! Well, I'll agree with Scott C. Waring of "UFO Sightings Daily" about one thing: they're definitely not seagulls. Heh, heh.

___
H/T to Doubtful News for the link.

Our scandalous postal system

(Lapham's Quarterly)

Here's an interesting article in Lapham's Quarterly about the early postal system:

“The post-office system offers a facility for clandestine correspondence which no respectable father or mother on the European side of the Atlantic would think of without a shudder, if it were proposed to give our young women a similar privilege.” —Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, January 1867

Communication of and by women has always struck fear into the hearts of men (see: novels; epistolary), but until the middle of the nineteenth century it was largely manageable—husbands and fathers, even servants, monitored a lady’s letters, and the wild fluctuations in cost of mail kept all but the wealthiest of girls and women from taking pen to paper on a regular basis. That changed with the standardization of postal prices in 1845. The cost of mailing a letter was reduced to three cents, making the mail accessible to working women, middle-class housewives, and schoolgirls with pocket money. Suddenly, wide swaths of women had access to two dangerous things—the mail and the post office. Anthony Trollope’s 1852 invention of the pillar-box had given British girls a chance to subvert the authority of their scandalized parents by mailing letters in secret, but their New York counterparts who visited the post office could both send and receive mail almost entirely unmonitored by those who might want to regulate their epistolary lives.

There's more, including the introduction of home delivery, both as a way to protect (and control?) women who might otherwise visit a post office and to receive letters from the many Civil War soldiers away from home. It's quite interesting.

I should warn you, though, that you can spend a lot of time browsing Lapham's Quarterly, since there are all sorts of interesting articles there, from the West Point Egg Nog Riot of 1826 to the really gruesome details of ergot poisoning. It's a real time-waster.

Magic underwear Religious briefs

This guy really likes apostrophes!

(Joe. My. God.)

There really seems to be a lot of religious news today, but maybe I can get through the rest of this stuff pretty quickly.

For example, I don't have much more to say about the above image - besides the caption - except to wonder what "P.K's" might be, or "High Fullutent." Any idea? I can certainly see that he's a man ("Loud Mouth Women"), and not too bright (obviously).

Next, this article struck me, because a Lutheran pastor is apologizing for attending that interfaith prayer vigil with President Obama at Sandy Hook, the site of the recent elementary school shooting. Is he apologizing for blurring America's separation of church and state? No, that's not it.

A Connecticut Lutheran pastor has apologized for participating in an interfaith prayer vigil for the 26 children and adults killed at a Newtown elementary school in December because his church bars its clergy from worshipping with other faiths.

The December prayer vigil was attended by President Barack Obama, leaders from Christian, Muslim and Jewish faiths, and relatives of the 20 first graders who were gunned down in their classrooms two days earlier after a gunman entered their school.

You see, Lutherans have got the only real religion, which they believe by faith, while all those other faith-based people are wrong. (How do you know that? Well, faith, of course.) So you can't hang around with those people, since it might imply that they're equals, you know.

Or maybe, since none of you have a good reason for your beliefs, it might get people wondering why they should believe any of it?

Lest I seem to be picking on Protestants, here's the Catholic Church planning a "massive fundraising campaign." Gee, I wonder why they need the money?

The non-profit Guidance in Giving lists the Los Angeles-area Catholic Church among its "diocesan accounts" and says it is exploring a campaign to raise $200 million for the diocese to meet "a variety of needs," including "priests' retirement, seminarian education, Catholic schools, Catholic Charities and parish needs."

That might sound reasonable, unless you know that "a variety of needs" includes this:

In 2007, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles agreed to a $660 million settlement with 562 victims of abuse by priests and other church personnel. According to the Times, financial reports show that the church remains $80 million in debt.

The effort to shore up church finances is the initiative of Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez, who was installed in 2011, and now seems keen to move the church away from its tarnished past.

On Jan. 31, Gomez presided over the release of thousands of pages of priest personnel files that had been the subject of a legal tussle for six years. The 12,000 pages, made accessible through the archdiocese web site, reveal many communications among officials who appear to be concealing allegations of the priests' sexual abuses from police.

The court ordered the documents be released in 2007 as part of the settlement, but the church lawyers fought to redact many of the names in the documents until earlier this month, when a judge ruled against them.

Furthermore, there's this:

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles released 12,000 pages of internal files last Thursday on priests accused of sexually abusing children, saying that it was finally abiding by a settlement it signed with victims six years ago to make the painful history public.

But it now appears that the files the church released with much fanfare are incomplete and many are unaccounted for, according to the abuse victims’ lawyers. In addition, on many documents the names of church supervisors informed of abuse allegations were redacted by the archdiocese, in apparent violation of a judge’s order.

At issue is whether the survivors of abuse and the public will ever learn which church officials were responsible for mishandling or covering up allegations of sexual abuse.

And then there's this:

The quake that hit Los Angeles last Thursday (Jan. 31) was an ecclesiastical one, but still pretty earth-shaking for the Catholic Church: After the release of thousands of secret personnel files detailing decades of sexual abuse of children by clergy, Archbishop Jose Gomez publicly rebuked his predecessor, Cardinal Roger Mahony, and stripped him of his official duties.

But here’s the question: Did anything really change for the embattled cardinal? ...

The first indication that Gomez’s pronouncement was less than it first appeared was a clarification early Friday morning by longtime archdiocesan spokesman Tod Tamberg in response to initial news reports. He noted that as a retired archbishop, Mahony in fact had no administrative duties, so Gomez’s injunction on that score had no teeth. Indeed, canon law explicitly says that a cardinal’s authority is universal and cannot be curtailed by any bishop except the pope.

Tamberg also noted that Mahony remained a “priest in good standing” and that his day-to-day activities would not change. The cardinal would not be presiding at confirmation rites, Tamberg said, but as one local priest put it, confirmations are not popular tasks so “this is hardly a severe punishment!”

At the same time, in Rome, the Vatican’s spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, seemed to distance the pope from the battle in America’s largest archdiocese. Lombardi told reporters that the issue was being handled by Gomez, and that anything Gomez did would not affect the “other duties assigned by the pope to Cardinal Mahony in the Curia.”

In other words, Mahony, who turns 77 later this month, would still be eligible to vote in a conclave for a new pope, and as a cardinal would still be considered a “prince of the church” and a top adviser to the pontiff.

A few hours later, Mahony himself upped the ante by publishing on his personal blog a sharply worded private letter that he had sent to Gomez, defending his track record and pointedly writing that Gomez had known everything about the secret documents for three years and never took any action until they became public last week.

By late Friday, Gomez was forced to issue a statement under his own name stating that Mahony – as well as Curry – remained “bishops in good standing in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, with full rights to celebrate the Holy Sacraments of the Church and to minister to the faithful without restriction.”

It's not surprising that the church would like to put such things behind it, but how do they plan to do that? Well, not by punishing the people who protected child rapists, letting them move on to new victims in fresh parishes, but by convincing the gullible to send them money.

Yeah, an extra $200 million would be nice, wouldn't it? Bless you, my son.

And speaking of Catholics, here's the University of Dayton:

The University of Dayton is a private Roman Catholic school in Ohio. Like many religious institutions of higher learning, they seem to welcome students who hold a variety of beliefs, including ones that don’t always fall in line with Church teachings, which explains why the Muslim Student Association, Spectrum (a gay-straight alliance group), Face AIDS (A group that supports condom distribution in Africa), and Quidditch Club (witchcraft!) are all registered student organizations at the school.

But guess who they won't allow to form a club? Yup, atheists. Diversity is one thing, but let's not go overboard, huh? You can disagree with the Catholic Church, but if you're not superstitious at all, that's where they draw the line.

I'll end with some good news, though. (Actually, now that I think of it, it's probably good news that the Catholic Church is so scared of us, don't you think?) Anyway, here's an editorial in the Buffalo [NY] News:

It is tough for a student to stand up and say the teacher is wrong. But an unidentified Cheektowaga High School kid did just that, when faced with a science teacher who carried her religious convictions into the classroom.

The teacher, 29-year-old Joelle Silver, is now making a federal case out of it. But my sympathies are with the student who gave the teacher a lesson on the separation of church and state. ...

Aside from the church/state issue, a classroom is not a gathering of equals. Silver is the authority, with disciplinary and grading power. By posting biblical verses, she takes advantage of her bully pulpit to promote her religious views. Up against that pressure, I applaud the kid who had the guts to toss the First Amendment penalty flag.

I have no idea if that high school student is an atheist or not, and I really don't care. I suspect so, given that he/she contacted the Freedom From Religion Foundation, but either way, it's admirable to stand up for the United States Constitution.

In fact, I'm wondering if it's entirely respectful to call him/her a 'kid,' as that editorial does, in this particular situation. That action shows a lot of maturity, don't you think? I wouldn't have done it, when I was that age.

And it's always hopeful when young people act so responsibly. Then again, that teacher is pretty young herself, from my point of view. And she must at least have a bachelors degree. So maybe this isn't quite as encouraging as I first thought.

Atheists on television?

(The Good Wife)

Earlier this week, I suggested that we atheists take a page from the gay rights movement and 'out' ourselves (but only where that won't cause big problems).

Well, there's another way that LGBT people have become more visible - and more accepted - and that's on television. And now, according to Hemant Mehta, the Friendly Atheist, we atheists might be starting to see that, too.

At least, two atheist characters have apparently just outed themselves on The Good Wife. I don't watch the show, but Mehta explains how it went:

Reporter: Ms. Hayward, how do you respond to the controversy over your actions at last week’s benediction?

Maddie Hayward: My actions… you mean the video on the Web of me not bowing?

Reporter: Yes. During prayer. There’s been some chatter about your insensitivity.

Hayward: Well, I apologize if it, uh, seemed insensitive. I was just trying to avoid being hypocritical. I am an atheist.

Reporter: Really? Don’t you worry about how that’ll play in a state where only 15% call themselves non-religious?

Hayward: I worry about everything. [Nervous laughter] But I am who I am and I don’t think you should run away from that. Let’s just let the voters decide.

Reporter: And what about you, Mr. State’s Attorney?

Peter Florrick: I respect Maddie’s point of view.

Reporter: But you don’t share it.

Peter Florrick: Well, it’s different. I was in prison. Belief means a great deal there. In fact, sometimes, it was the only thing we had.

Reporter: And your wife?

Peter Florrick: Oh, well, I think my wife can speak for herself.

Alicia Florrick: I’m an atheist. [Smile.]

That's great, but I wonder how it will go from there. I remember the first episode of The Mentalist, where the former psychic (fake, of course) was surprisingly open about his atheism. Among the detectives, the only true believer was a young woman clearly portrayed as naive and gullible. (The others were noncommittal, but didn't seem to respect her faith much.)

In succeeding episodes, though, the show really backed away from that (probably because their advertisers were unhappy, don't you think?). Patrick Jane was never shown as religious, but they were never as clear about it, and they never again made the faith-based girl seem especially naive.

In fact, they even started including mysterious psychics in the show, people who weren't obviously scamming the public - and apparently making even Patrick doubt, a bit. But I didn't watch it long, not after that, so I don't know where that went or how it is now.

Will these two atheists in The Good Wife find religion? I guess we'll see. (Well, not me, probably, since I don't plan to start watching it.) This sounds pretty good so far, though. And this is another thing we need, to be seen as ordinary people - perhaps even admirable people - in the entertainment media.

Dear Malala

Taslima Nasreen has written a letter to Malala Yousafzai:

Pakistani schoolgirl activist Malala Yousafzai, who was shot in the head by the Taliban, is getting better following the treatment she has been receiving at Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital, UK. She says she is recovering because of god and prayers. ...

Malala, you say that you are recovering because of god and prayers. But the truth is, you were shot because of god and prayers, and you are recovering because of medical science and skilled doctors.

Such a tragedy, isn't it? How could anyone shoot a little girl in the head, just because you disagree with what she's been saying? Well, that kind of evil takes religion, doesn't it?

Ironically, she believes in the same religion they do! Her disagreement is minor indeed. But no, educated women apparently threaten the patriarchal misogynists who want to control them.

Taslima is right. It's religion that got Malala shot, and it's secular science that's given her a chance at recovery.

Note that, if her attackers had merely prayed at her, there would be nothing to recover from. I wish these loons actually believed in their god, because then maybe they wouldn't think they'd need to help their omnipotent, omniscient deity kill someone.