24 January 2010 (Part II)

Halftime of the Jets-Colts; great game so far.

Students: I’d never believe that I’d find myself saying this, but in this instance, I side with the Snowflakes.

Another rare event: though President Obama spoke out against Proposition 8 in California and he favors repealing the Defense of Marriage Act, he does not support gay marriage (he supports civil unions).

Evidently Cindy and Meghan McCain (Senator McCain’s wife and daughter) support gay marriage, as do I.

Kudos to the McCain women!

Personal Comment
Yes, I still play with stuffed frogs. Yes, at times, I talk to them and give them personalities.

So, my wife claims that this is evidence that I am eccentric.

I thought about her statement. But let’s look at the facts:

1. I know that the frogs are stuffed and that their “personality” is what I give them.
2. I don’t expect the frogs to solve my problems.
3. I don’t think that the frogs have the power to change the outcome of events in the universe.
4. I certainly don’t expect the frogs to forgive the wrongs that I do.

So, now, why am I eccentric?

Note: this reminds me of this old Bill Maher clip (from 2007; the relevant part starts at about 2:35.)

Yes, Mr. Maher is completely wrong on things like vaccinations. But he is right about this.

THAT didn’t take long: Gillian Cooke Fan Page!

I was thinking of starting a fan page, but someone beat me to it.

Athletic butt, and tight (but weak) spandex. What more could a guy want?

Hey, this is nothing I haven’t wished would happen in yoga class (happening to the woman in front of me, that is. )

24 January 2010

Workout notes 4000 yard swim: 500 back/free, 500 side/free, 500 drill/swim (fins), 5 x 100 (25 kick, 75 free) on the 2, 5 x 100 (25 3g, 75 free) on the 2, 5 x 100 fist on the 2 (1:43-46), 5 x (50 free, 50 paddle), 400 of fly practice (300 with fins), 100 IM. Note: the second fin set started to bother my ankle.

Then 2 miles on the treadmill: 15 minutes (1.6 miles) of running, 5 more walk/jog, then 7 miles on the elliptical.

Though this wasn’t a superb workout, my joints were kind of achy from the get-go, so I was ok with the result.

It is rainy and cold here; most of the snow is gone and you could see the ice/slush in the river.

Posts
Evidently, women sleep better when men are in the bed with them, but men sleep better alone. Frankly, I honestly think that I sleep better with my wife next to me. I like the physical warmth.

Political humor My pet peeves about polls and how they are reported are outlined here.

Hypothetical example: Obama starts at 50.5 percent approval today and then “drops” to 49.8 tomorrow. The paper wants to know “why”? Next poll, he is “up” to 50.75. “Rebound” the papers say. Uh….”margin of error”, anyone?

Politics
Robert Reich understands the “mad as hell” movement but has some words:

With the mid-term elections months away, both Republicans and Democrats are scrambling to embrace the Mad-As-Hell Party as their own. Republicans are hoping the mad-as-hellers forget the gushing corporate welfare of the Bush administration and the last Republican congress. And Democrats have become born-again economic populists, blaming the nation’s problems on the same “fat cat” bankers and corporate lobbyists they’ve been cozying up to for years.

If the Mad-as-hell Party helps get money out of politics it will do a world of good. I might even join up. But if it just fulminates against the establishment, forget it. Wrecking balls are easy to wield. Rescuing our democracy is hard work.

Bottom line: the tea baggers might want a “return to the Constitution given by the founding fathers” but they are many like me who actually like progress. I might want single payer health care as do many of my friends, but the rest of my fellow Americans ARE NOT WITH ME. IT ISN’T GOING TO HAPPEN (at least not any time soon).

All of us have to work with people that we don’t see 100 percent eye to eye with. Deal with it.

Health Care Reform

Perhaps we might get the Senate Bill through the House? Paul Krugman is hopeful.

Politico reports that Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are working on a strategy that just might save health care: get the House to pass the Senate bill, while the Senate uses reconciliation — a process that avoids the need for a 60-vote supermajority — to address some of the concerns of House Democrats.

That’s very good news.

Of course, if they do this, there will be howls of protest — they’re defying the will of the 41-59 Republican majority in the Senate! This violates the spirit of the Constitution the very strange rules the Senate has imposed on itself. But I hope Democrats have learned by now that the public doesn’t know or care about such things.

Nate Silver points out that much (though NOT all) of the opposition to the current Senate Bill comes from those who don’t know what is in it:

Reasonable minds can come to the conclusion that the bill is bad policy, and people are also 100 percent within their rights to believe that the bill might be bad for them for self-interested reasons (if they make greater than $200,000 per year and would be subject to the increase in the payroll tax, for instance.)

With due respect to Megan, however, the debate over health care is not playing out like the one in elite circles of public opinion, in which Ezra Klein and I represent the pro-bill coalition and she and David Brooks the opposition. As this month’s tracking survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation makes clear, there are a lot of beliefs the public has about the bill which are objectively wrong.

The following table combines two sets of questions from the Kaiser survey, each of which ask people about the individual components of the bill. One set of questions asks people whether they believe that the bill contains each provision; the other set, which I’ve tabulated on a net basis, asks them whether they’d be more or less likely to support a bill if it contained such a provision.
[...]
What we see is that most individual components of the bill are popular — in some cases, quite popular. But awareness lags behind. Only 61 percent are aware that the bill bans denials of coverage for pre-existing conditions. Only 42 percent know that it bans lifetime coverage limits. Only 58 percent are aware that it set up insurance exchanges. Just 44 percent know that it closes the Medicare donut hole — and so on and so forth.

Silver points out that the Senate Bill is, on the whole, better than what we could get via reconciliation alone (of course, there is the idea of combining the two approaches)

Dan Barker’s Book Godless: my reaction

(see here)

In some sense, Dan Barker’s book Godless is a standard: “what I was like, what happened, and what I am like now” kind of story. He started out steeped in fundamentalist Christianity, developed doubts, became an atheist and then became involved in atheist/free thinker/freedom from religion causes.

What is different though is that he devotes the first part of his book to describing what he was like when he was a “believer”.
I could relate, in a sense, as I was a “cradle Catholic” who grew up following Notre Dame football, going to Sunday school and church, going to confession, etc. In fact, I seriously thought about becoming a priest (though my friends told me that I lacked the patience/people skills; they said that I ought to be a religion professor instead).

But this is where the commonality is: Mr. Barker and I were/are both seekers; it was important for us to keep seeking “the truth”. And yes, when we were in our religion, we both thought that we had found it.

But as we learned more (history, science, natural history, etc.) the inconsistencies began to gnaw at us. Doubts grew…”how could THAT be possible”; “if this miracle is false…well…why believe any miracle”, etc.

I am convinced that is why I ended up an atheist instead of ending up as a religious liberal; my mind simply wouldn’t permit some sort of “ration of miracles”. A belief in miracles is inconsistent with scientific principles and I am unwilling to live with cognitive dissonance.

As Barker said, our stop at our respective religions was due to the same journey that lead us to atheism; it isn’t as if we had changed personalities but rather it was a matter of learning more.

But back to the book: the book features a standard rebuttal on most religious claims (not much new here) but it also has an interesting chapter on Jesus and gives a wide variety of arguments, including those arguments which claim that Jesus was never a single historical figure!

Barker notes that there are no contemporary writings about Jesus; the first ones that appear are the writings of Paul, and Paul says nothing about the details of his life. There are other gospels but these were written around the same time (or later) than the canonical gospels, which were written about 70-90 C. E. Secular writings about Jesus were non-existent, save a very brief passage from the work of Josephus called Jewish Antiquities. There was a somewhat longer fraudulent addition to this work and many historians think that the brief mention wasn’t in the original.

Of course, that might mean that Jesus simply wasn’t popular and famous during his lifetime and therefore unworthy of being written about at that time.

Sure there are other mentions of Jesus oriented groups forming and mentions that they believed stuff about him, but there is no contemporary mention of him or his deeds.

Of course, the gospels do draw on the literature of the day to tell their story, (see: Gospel Fictions by Randal Helms ) but that in and of itself doesn’t infer that Jesus wasn’t historical. After all, fictional narratives are often used to describe current figures.

In short: I am glad that I bought the book. I learned some facts and I enjoyed the story. But mostly I came to understand why I ended up as an atheist (or at least, as someone who understood that he was an atheist) ; I wouldn’t have had I not had this “seeker” drive.

For many of my last years as a self proclaimed Christian, I said that I believed in a deity, but in reality I believed that the events of this universe were all completely naturalistic.

Review: The Man Who Haunted Himself (film with Roger Moore)

It starts with a very proper, very, well…meticulous Roger Moore (playing the part of a young, overworks, hard charging and sexually repressed executive of a technology firm) getting into his car, putting every thing in its place and obeying the letter of the law.

But on the drive home….a different personality takes over and there is a crash…..and it is very touch and go in the operating room. He eventually pulls out and recovers….or does he?

There seems to be a double of him who is causing him trouble (no, not in the Who is Harry Kellerman and Why is he Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? manner). But is it really a double and if so, why? Or is this a descent into Schizophrenia? Or, is there another possibility?

I won’t tell you; but if you like Roger Moore, or if you like fantasy thrillers with a psychological theme then you will enjoy this. I got the idea to watch this film from reading Roger Moore’s book My Word is My Bond (which I did enjoy; it has interesting tidbits about his life and shows his sense of humor). In My Word is My Bond, Moore states that this was the one film in which he was really “permitted to act” and, in my opinion, he did an excellent job.

Rotten Tomatoes has a review here.