For all of you know-it-alls

You know…if The President just would listen to YOUR wisdom and “common sense”; if those “so called experts” just had the “real world intelligence” that YOU have…based on your major successes in life….ok, you haven’t really had any but that isn’t your fault…

This post is just for YOU.

Talking Dog FAIL

This is right up there with the demonic pear.

I love Rat!

Some of the best of Rat from Pearls Before Swine:

12 May 2010 (am)

Workout notes 2650 swim; 500 pull (easy), 10 x (25 fist, 25 free) on the 1, 10 x (25 3g/25 free) on the 1:10, 10 x 50 free on the 1, then 3 x (100 pull, 100 paddle) + 50 back pull cool down.
Yes, this was the last morning swim of the semester and there were two women in little bikinis there! Ok, then two stinky guys showed up.

Afterward, I went upstairs, walked 2 miles (3.2 km) on the track at a 14:xx pace (some “form” 200 meter) then finished with 1 treadmill mile on an incline: 1, 2 , 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and focused on bending my knees.

Local at 6:15 the city had a riding power mower mowing the median in front of our house. Our neighborhood is never quiet during the day; there is a constant drone of power tools and lawn mowers. Reason: most people here can afford a lawn service or the landlords (who rent to students) contract out the lawn work. So during the day, there is ALWAYS droning and the whine of engines; you don’t hear this as much in the other neighborhoods I walk in.

I suppose this is one reason I love the long walks on trails; it is one of the few times one actually gets some semblance of quiet.

Posts:

Don’t throw stones if you live in a glass house

Bill O’Reilly snivels about most Americans not being to name the 9 Supreme Court Justices. Ok, here is my confession: I could only name eight: Thomas, Scalia, Roberts, Alito, Kennedy, Ginsberg, Stevens and Sotomayor. I missed one of the liberals: Breyer. But guess what: O’Reilly got it wrong too! He thought that Souter was still on the SCOTUS.

H Y P O C R I T E.

Now about Kagan: yes, some conservatives are lampooning her lack of physical attractiveness.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again:

This is Justice Scalia:

(yes, he is a brilliant man)

This is from a tea-party rally in 2009:

Really conservatives: when it comes to physical unattractiveness, you have no room to throw stones.

Fun: A fellow progressive atheist blogger shows off her Joe Biden “HCR is a BFD” shirt. Yeah, she looks great in it.

(surf to her blog to see the full sized photo)

Politics The UK had their elections. No party won a majority but the Conservatives won a clear plurality. So, after negotiations, the Liberal Democrats (who ARE liberal) formed a coalition government with them. Evidently, liberal-conservative coalition governments are not that uncommon in Europe.

Economy This is interesting: Senator Lincoln Blanche is under fire and is likely to be one blue dog who loses her seat. But she has a good idea. Robert Reich explains:

Right now, the biggest battle in bank reform is over a provision introduced by Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas that would force the giant Wall Street banks to give up their lucrative derivative trading businesses if they want the government (i.e. taxpayers) to continue insuring their commercial deposits.

The five biggest Wall Street banks have had the derivatives market (derivatives are bets on whether the price of certain assets will rise or fall, bets thereby “derived” from asset prices) almost entirely to themselves. Last year their revenues from derivatives trading totaled a whopping $22.6 billion. Their advantage comes from their large size, plus government insurance of their commercial deposits that allows them to raise money more cheaply than other financial institutions.

Derivatives lie at the point where the basic saving-and-lending function of commercial banking meets the private casino of Wall Street investment banking. You and I subsidize the biggest players in the casino who, precisely because we subsidize them, have grown too big to fail. The Glass-Steagall Act once prevented the casino from using commercial deposits, but since 1999, when Glass-Steagall was repealed, the game has exploded. That’s part of the reason the giants on Wall Street could make wild bets that ended up threatening the entire economy, costing millions of Americans their jobs and savings, and requiring a massive taxpayer-financed bailout.

Lincoln wants to force the banks to put their derivatives into separate entities that aren’t subsidized by you and me. This is just common sense. Her move would also end the big banks’ monopoly over derivatives, thereby reducing their risk to the financial system. It would also cut dramatically into the big banks’ profits.

Professor Reich thinks that her idea has a chance of becoming law; surf to his blog (link above) to see his political analysis.

Religion
PZ Myers gets it right: violence is not free speech:

Lars Vilks, the cartoonist who drew Mohammed as a dog, has been attacked while lecturing on free speech. He was not seriously harmed. There is a video clip showing the attack, the chanting spectators, and the police quelling the mob.

Surf to the blog to see the “offending cartoon”; it really isn’t much. Also: hat tip to the Invisible Pink Unicorn.

On Finding Common Ground with Believers

Of course, most Americans believe in a deity of some sort and 60 percent accept a personal deity:

Of course this number goes down with educational level, and scientists with Ph. D. degrees believe at a much lower rate:

Nearly 38 percent of natural scientists — people in disciplines like physics, chemistry and biology — said they do not believe in God. Only 31 percent of the social scientists do not believe.

In the new study, Rice University sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund surveyed 1,646 faculty members at elite research universities, asking 36 questions about belief and spiritual practices.

“Based on previous research, we thought that social scientists would be less likely to practice religion than natural scientists are, but our data showed just the opposite,” Ecklund said.

Some stand-out statistics: 41 percent of the biologists don’t believe, while that figure is just 27 percent among political scientists.

In separate work at the University of Chicago, released in June, 76 percent of doctors said they believed in God and 59 percent believe in some sort of afterlife.

“Now we must examine the nature of these differences,” Ecklund said today. “Many scientists see themselves as having a spirituality not attached to a particular religious tradition. Some scientists who don’t believe in God see themselves as very spiritual people. They have a way outside of themselves that they use to understand the meaning of life.”

Ecklund and colleagues are now conducting longer interviews with some of the participants to try and figure it all out.

Of course, belief is even more scarce at the very elite levels: only 7 percent believe in a personal deity.

Of course, my “in person” friends tend to have Ph. D.’s and I hang around places like Richard Dawkins.net or Daily Kos where unbelief is the norm.

So, what do I have in common with believers? Well, at first glance, it appears that the answer is “not much”; though many educated believers (and clergy among the mainstream religions) claim to accept science (e. g., accept evolution), there are some big differences. Jerry Coyne discusses these here; he points out that while some at the pulpit may well accept a form of evolution, relatively few in the pews actually do. He also points out that those who claim to accept evolution really don’t accept the version that scientists do. For example, evolutionary theory has most mutations being random (save those induced, say, by a radiation accident); of course, which mutations get passed on via reproduction are NOT random; natural selection is a huge factor (though there is some scientific debate as to the relative magnitude of the influences of natural selection, genetic drift, changes in environment, etc.)

In short, if one views humans as the intended outcome of the evolutionary process, then one doesn’t accept scientific evolution; in fact experiments (such as the Michigan State experiment) show that evolution will advance down different paths if “started over”).

The fact that we humans are here now IS an accident and not the intent of some greater design!
Of course, some might believe in some type of deity that would have allowed such an accident to take place, but this isn’t the “god that cares about humans” deity of the Bible or the Koran.

Nevertheless, there are those believers that I have something in common with. For example, read this post by Brotherpeacemaker:

Someone was trying to tell me how powerful and omniscient god was and said that god knew when a sparrow fell from the sky. My first reaction was to laugh, not because I thought this person was wrong. But I have to ask the question, why would god be interested in a sparrow falling out of the sky? I don’t know too many people who believe in god and don’t believe that he is all powerful and all knowing but are we so arrogant to believe that we rate that high on god’s attention meter.

The universe is a seriously vast entity. According to the simple human interpretation of the space and time continuum, the universe stretches from one side of infinity to the other and god is working across it all. Throughout all of this there are countless galaxies with countless stars with a number of planets with a countless numbers of individuals and plants and animals and god is supposed to expend his limitless power on knowing when one of the countless sparrows on this single planet buys the farm. If such a concept was uttered by a five year old it would be cute in its total simplicity. Such a notion would rank right up there with the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, the Great Pumpkin, the caring American, Peter Pan, Captain Crunch, and the like. As a people, we really need to do a better job developing our understanding of our relationship with the infinite being and grow out of the simple, feel good notions we learned back in Sunday school when we were knee high to our parents.

Our self importance in the cosmos knows no limit as well. If we are taught to believe that god is some voyeur all up in our business because we are just so special then it is a prime example of humanity’s self centered-ism at its finest. God gets furious about our adultery. God hates our active sex lives without marriage. God punishes the evil that people do and is ready to pounce because we’re all that and then some. People need to learn a little more humility. God is a busy Supreme Being. As I write this and as you read it god is building entire galaxies at the outer edge of the universe. Millions of planets need forming and countless species need planning. And that’s in this universe alone. There are other universes and other realities that need his attention as well. And he’s supposed to stop all this activity to take note of a little birdie that’s about to hit dirt.

Ok, one might quibble with the notion of an infinite universe; it may well be a compact manifold of some sort. But here is the money quote:

We may pray for god to save all the little children. But truth be told, if god wanted to, he could keep every child safe from now to eternity. But why would god be so moved to do so? God knows about people dying everyday and he allows it to happen. Why? As a people we already have everything we need to keep our children, our family, our community, and our world safe. As a collective, we simply choose not to. It’s always somebody else’s problem. Rich people could share their wealth with the people in need, but that would be welfare and no good for anybody because it was tried before and failed. But people forget, the very people who work hard to keep racism alive are the very same people who were in charge of the welfare program; the white mindset. God cannot be prayed into wanting to help us more than we want to help ourselves. [...]

God hasn’t charged anyone to stop abortion. God has never charged anyone with the duty to invade another country and kill thousands upon thousands of people while friends coincidentally get rich robbing the national coffer. God didn’t abandon the people in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina. People who were in the position to help but didn’t abandoned the people in New Orleans. God doesn’t have to save every child on the planet. We need to change our collective spirit so that we can develop a global community that truly wants to leave no child behind instead of using it as a catchy slogan to obtain a political office.

God has already answered our prayers. We have everything we need. We simply choose to squander it in a system wrought with favoritism and privilege for the few and indifference and struggle for the masses. This isn’t god’s plan, it is our plan. We’re either going to stick to it and let civilization rot or change it for the better. Quite frankly I don’t see things changing anytime soon. Our very existence may now be in jeopardy with global warming and we are too shell shocked from our day-to-day life to do anything to stop it. But as soon as the point is reached where it appears that divine intervention is the only thing that will save us we’ll pray for god to save us and wonder why he doesn’t and say it’s the lord’s will when in all actuality it is our will that doomed us.

No, I don’t accept this notion of deity (which sounds a bit like a deist god). But I agree: the only thing that we can do is to work to change the things that we can; no deity is going to pull our fat out of the fire or save us. I think that then Senator Obama, Senator Edwards and Senator Biden got it right:

Of course differences remain; one can claim that some deity was responsible for the creation of our spacetime continuum. Of course, I’d like proof before I believe that, and I haven’t seen any.

But when it comes to our day to day life I agree with Mano Singham:

What atheists like me say to religious believers is simply the following: If the existence of your god has empirical consequences, then provide empirical evidence that supports your contention. If it has no empirical consequences whatsoever, then say so and we will not interfere with your theological and philosophical ruminations because we do not really care to speculate on the properties of what we consider to be a mythical entity.

Conclusion: if you believe in a deity that set things in motion and then let it go, we’ll agree to disagree (until I get some evidence to the contrary). But in our day to day lives, we have some common ground and can therefore have a very nice coexistence and even friendship!

Cavaliers-Celtics Game 5

Ok, I’ve watched this from the start, and at then end of 3 it is 80-63 Celtics.

Paul Pierce has 16 points and 10 rebounds so far. Garnett is having a good game (16 points), Allen has hit some 3′s (22 points) Rondo didn’t score in the first half but opened it up for others and has scored 14 in the 3′rd quarter.

But mostly, it appears as if the Celtics are the hungrier team; they are getting the rebounds, lose balls and making most of the “hustle plays”. You get the feeling that the Cavaliers weren’t expecting a hard game.

Now it is 85-63 with 10:31 to go.

Make it 90-66 with 9:13 to go; the Cavaliers still have time but they are going to have to get stops.

Now it is 92-68 with 8:16 to go; if the Cavs don’t get some stops they are toast.

97-74 with 5:50; it is getting harder and harder for the Cavaliers.

Davis is having a good game and has 12 4′th quarter points; 98-75 with 5:20 to go. Make it 100-75 with 5:00 to go. Ok; I am getting the feeling that this one is over.

Now it is going to be “foul, foul, foul”. 102-78 Celtics with 4:40

Make that 105-78 after another Allen 3. 3:58 is left. The Celtics don’t even need to score again to win.
Now it is 110-85 with 2:40 left.

It finishes 120-88. Cleveland lead 23-20 at the end of one but then Boston scored 30, 30 and 40 points; Cleveland couldn’t get any stops.

BUT I remember the 1988 season where the favored Celtics fell behind the Hawks 3-2 with game 6 in Atlanta. Boston won on the road and then won a narrow game at home. That could happen again, but only if the Cavaliers play more inspired than they did tonight.

(photos from yahoo)