Another cold front and….

Michele Bachmann’s New Book Cover

Bonus

7 February 2011: pm

Blog It has taken me 1499 days (first post was on 10 December 2006) but now I’ve finally reached half a million hits. Sure, that is perhaps one day for, say, Daily Kos. I started by averaging 20 hits per day or so; right now 500-600 is typical; that is tiny compared to many.

So, if you are reading this, thank you.

Posts
Football: in the NFL, going to the ground in celebration after a touchdown is illegal, unless:

When I wrote about this issue a couple years ago, the National Football League’s Vice President of Officiating, Mike Pereira, had this to say:

The whole issue is, you can’t go to the ground on your knees or with your hand or anything. There’s only one time that you’re going to be allowed to go on your knee after you score like this, and that’s when you want to praise the Lord. If you do that, then I’m going to allow that, because I do not want to be struck by lightning, I promise you that. We will allow that.

The NFL is a private organization, of course. They can issue (or not issue) fines however they would like. But some consistency in the rules would be nice. If they want to allow Christian prayers after a touchdown, why not just come out and say it?

I admit that this is a good business decision; my guess is that many fans are ok with people giving gratitude to their invisible friend.

I found this 3quarks daily post to be interesting:

Our book Reasonable Atheism does not publish until April, yet we have already been charged with
accommodationism, the cardinal sin amongst so-called New Atheists. The charge derives mainly from the subtitle of our book, “a moral case for respectful disbelief.” Our offense consists in embracing idea that atheists owe to religious believers anything like respect. The accusation runs roughly as follows: “Respect” is merely a euphemism for soft-pedaling one’s criticisms of religion; but religion is a force of great evil, and thus must be fought with unmitigated vigor. Atheist calls for respect in dealing with religion simply reflect a failure of nerve, and must be called out. Anything less than an intellectual total war on religion is capitulation to, and thus complicity with, irrationality.

In our case, the charge of accommodationism as a failure of critical nerve is misplaced; anyone who actually reads our book will find that we pull no punches. But we also think that, as it is commonly employed in atheist circles, the idea of accommodationism involves a conflation between two kinds of evaluation which should be kept distinct. Some clarification is in order. [...]

You can read the rest of the post. But, accommodationism is more about making the claim that religion, as understood by most western believers anyway, is compatible with current science. Sorry, but it isn’t; after all current mainstream religious thought has humans being the intentional outcome of a creative process and science has shown that evolution is an undirected process.

Jerry Coyne talks more about this:

There are two points to be made here. First, even the “tolerant” official views of religion can be anti-science. While the Catholic church officially accepts evolution, it accepts theistic evolution, in which God guided the process and casually slipped an immortal soul into the hominin lineage. And theistic evolution, in which God has a role in the process, is not acceptance of evolution as we biologists understand it. So yes, the true biological view of evolution as a materialistic, unguided process is indeed at odds with most religions. Organizations that promote evolution, such as the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), prefer to avoid this critical point: all they care about is that evolution get taught in the schools, not whether believers wind up accepting the concept of evolution as it’s understood by scientists. (If all they want is evolution to be taught, that, I suppose is fine. But it’s not fine if they want public understanding of evolution.)

Second, if you construe “religion” as “what religious people believe,” then there certainly is opposition to evolution among members of all religions. For example, despite the position of their church, many Catholics adhere to the form of young-earth creationism accepted by 40% of Americans. That 40% does not comprise only Bible-waving fundamentalist Protestants.

When we’re totting up resistance to evolution, then, we have to do more than look at official church positions: we have to see what religious people actually think. And we should stop claiming that theistic evolutionists are fully on the side of science, because they aren’t. They’re on the side of the angels (whose existence, by the way, is accepted by 75% of Americans). These theists see evolution as involving miracles at one point or another.

Only about 20% of Americans agree both that humans evolved and that this process wasn’t guided by God. If you’re a naturalist, those are our real allies. The rest are what Anthony Grayling calls “supernaturalists.”

Of course people should be respected and of course, there are intelligent believers. But accepting that doesn’t make one an accommodationist. Accommodationism is pretending that there is no logical incompatibility between science and mainstream religion.

7 February 2011 (AM)

Workout notes Treadmill: 10 minutes of walking, 20 minutes of “jog 1, walk 1″, 30 minute jog (SLOW!), 2 minute cool down walk. About 5 miles total (various inclines), but a very easy effort; this workout was nothing more than an extended warm up. I needed that.

Other stuff:

The Obama-O’Reilly interview. No fireworks here.

Climate change
Both of these are pretty good.

The interesting thing: many climate change denialists claim that I am somehow “following Al Gore”. Yes, Al Gore is a smart successful man and he did a good job with his film though NOT a perfect job. But he is reporting what is there; what I go by is what the scientific community says.

End of the NFL Season

Ok, the Steelers were done in by two turn-overs (converted into touchdowns by the Packers). So while the Steelers rallied to cut a 21-3 lead to 28-25, the Packers held on to win 31-25; it was a good game.

Commercials: not enough of a butt-shot:

(this one was a favorite)

The Ronald Reagan Legacy

I am hoping that President Obama can undo it….perhaps President Obama can do for intellectuals what President Reagan did for dummies.

More snow :-P But….

I’ll….

Look on the Bright Side of Life……..
and Be Happy!

(via Dizzy Miss Lizzy)

Good news: I’ve been off of pain killers for a couple of weeks, shoveled a good deal and added lat-pull downs (not ready for pull-ups). And still I slept the night with no shoulder pain. I really have turned the corner on the rotator cuff injury.

Update: 4 miles outside on snowy roads with Lynn (she fell once) then 6 more (1:14) on the treadmill (walking, of course). I am feeling better.

Obama didn’t like Ronald Reagan

Paul Krugman makes some correct points but…

And it’s also why the furor over Barack Obama’s praise for Ronald Reagan is not, as some think, overblown. The fact is that how we talk about the Reagan era still matters immensely for American politics.

Bill Clinton knew that in 1991, when he began his presidential campaign. “The Reagan-Bush years,” he declared, “have exalted private gain over public obligation, special interests over the common good, wealth and fame over work and family. The 1980s ushered in a Gilded Age of greed and selfishness, of irresponsibility and excess, and of neglect.”

Contrast that with Mr. Obama’s recent statement, in an interview with a Nevada newspaper, that Reagan offered a “sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.”

Maybe Mr. Obama was, as his supporters insist, simply praising Reagan’s political skills. (I think he was trying to curry favor with a conservative editorial board, which did in fact endorse him.) But where in his remarks was the clear declaration that Reaganomics failed?

For it did fail. The Reagan economy was a one-hit wonder. Yes, there was a boom in the mid-1980s, as the economy recovered from a severe recession. But while the rich got much richer, there was little sustained economic improvement for most Americans. By the late 1980s, middle-class incomes were barely higher than they had been a decade before — and the poverty rate had actually risen.

When the inevitable recession arrived, people felt betrayed — a sense of betrayal that Mr. Clinton was able to ride into the White House. [...]

It’s not just a matter of what happens in the next election. Mr. Clinton won his elections, but — as Mr. Obama correctly pointed out — he didn’t change America’s trajectory the way Reagan did. Why?

Watch the first minute of this video:

Mano Singham’s Web Journal: Stephen Colbert on Bill O’Reilly’s latest argument for god

Mano Singham’s Web Journal: Stephen Colbert on …, posted with vodpod

5 February 2011

Workout notes shoveled a path to the alley. Then I “ran” 5 miles on the track (10:04, 9:48, 9:52, 9:49, 8:58 (48:33)) then walked 1 more (outer lane) 15:10 for 1:03:45 for “not quite 10K”.
Then stretching, sit ups (4 x 25 on various incline)
rows: 10 x 190, 10 x 200, 6 x 200, 10 x 190
curls: 3 sets of 15 x 20 lb. dumbbells
incline press: 10 x 115, 10 x 115, 10 x 125
lat pull downs: 3 sets of 10 x 120 strict
rotator cuff
That about finished me off.

Hey: it is better than nothing. Note: my lower back (right side) was stiff and I had a hard time loosening it up.

I saw my running buddy Tracy there and we chatted a bit.

Note: it appears that training at my age (early 50′s) consists of injury management; one has to keep those little aches and pains from becoming big ones. Hence one must balance pushing hard enough to meet a performance goal with staying healthy enough to make it to the starting line to begin with. Start lines at races are good; doctor’s offices are bad.