18 February 2009: Final Post of the Day

Humor, intentional and unintentional

I resent the implication!

Auto Security

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Academic Deans: do they really moonlight as bicycle thieves?

Seen at a Michelle Malkin event (she is a wingnut)

Now is this clown saying that Nazis back Obama? They’d be surprised. Or is he calling Obama a Nazi? Perhaps he is a Clayton Bigsby fan?

What an idiot.

Other topics:
Did you know the following:

Here’s one excerpt:

So, I saw this U. of Minn. survey that came out a while back. Perhaps you saw it as well. It asked Americans, who do you trust? And they broke it down into categories: Do you trust a Christian? Most said yes. In fact, Christians were at the top of the list. Do you trust a black person? A Muslim? A homosexual? etc.

The group that came out at the very bottom of the list — and I’m talking about below terrorists, below sexual predators, below the guy who skins babies alive and wears the skin as a mask and then dances in the moonlight while gargling the blood of his infant victim — after that guy, was atheists.

The blog article I linked to gives some suggestions at how atheists might improve their image. What I find funny is that the vast majority of people do trust atheists (as most elite scientists are atheist or agnostic); they just are unaware that they trust them.

And speaking of atheists: did you know that there are still laws on the books in some states (mostly southern…what a shock) that require office holders to “believe in god”? Of course these laws are unenforceable by means other than that of the ballot box.

A state legislator in Arkansas is trying to get that changed in that state. I wish him luck; I’ll be very surprised if the woos don’t come out of the wordwork on this one.

Evolution and Creationism
This is how you respond to creationists who ask for a debate (I am reproducing a small part of the letter, which was written by a scientist who was asked to debate a creationist

Academic debate on controversial topics is fine, but those topics need to have a basis in reality. I would not invite a creationist to a debate on campus for the same reason that I would not invite an alchemist, a flat-earther, an astrologer, a psychic, or a Holocaust revisionist. These ideas have no scientific support, and that is why they have all been discarded by credible scholars. Creationism is in the same category.

Instead of spending time on public debates, why aren’t members of your institute publishing their ideas in prominent peer-reviewed journals such as Science, Nature, or the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences? If you want to be taken seriously by scientists and scholars, this is where you need to publish. Academic publishing is an intellectual free market, where ideas that have credible empirical support are carefully and thoroughly explored. Nothing could possibly be more exciting and electrifying to biology than scientific disproof of evolutionary theory or scientific proof of the existence of a god. That would be Nobel Prize winning work, and it would be eagerly published by any of the prominent mainstream journals.

Politics
Robert Reich warns us to not confuse American Companies with American jobs:

Do not confuse American companies with American jobs.

The new stimulus bill, for example, requires that the money be used for production in the United States. Foreign governments, along with large U.S. multinationals concerned about possible foreign retaliation, charge this favors American-based companies. That’s not quite true. Foreign companies are eligible to receive stimulus money for things they make here (as long as the nations where they’re headquartered have signed the WTO procurement agreement). [...]

I’m not arguing against an auto bailout. But it ought to be focused on helping American auto workers rather than helping global auto companies headquartered in America. Why pay the Big Three billions of taxpayer dollars to stay afloat when, even after being bailed out, they cut tens of thousands of American jobs, slash wages, and shrink their American operations into small fractions of what they used to be?

That’s backwards. The auto bailout should help American autoworkers keep their jobs or get new ones that pay almost as well.

In the same article, Reich also warns against protectionism.

Stimulus Bill

This is Recovery.gov.

So, what say the Republicans? Well Dick Morris says that, well, Obama should lie more?

It’s rare to criticize a politician for being all action and no talk, but that’s one of the big things that’s wrong with Obama’s battle against the economic crisis. One of the key variants in any stage of the economic cycle is what the president says is happening. If he talks down the economy, it drops. If he is bullish and optimistic, the markets are likely to listen. Particularly early in his term, when his credibility is high and the spotlight is shining on him, a concerted effort by Obama to inject optimism into his economic commentary could have a very positive effect.

Unfortunately, the president is so anxious to use the bad economy as an excuse to get every last little bit of government spending in the budget, he has pushed the markets down by a nonstop drumbeat of bad news and harsh predictions. When the president says that we may be entering a downturn from which there is no ready escape, investors, consumers, producers and businesspeople tend to listen and avoid any spending or risk. Obama has spent so much time warning of the disaster ahead that he is doing little from his bully pulpit to avert it.

Pessimism comes naturally to the party in opposition, and it takes a while for its members to get the message that they need to embrace optimism once they take power.

Actually, I’d rather a politician tell it to me straight. We’ve had 8 years of “its going to be ok” even if the signs showed otherwise.

But that’s just me.