Merry Spandex Christmas….

More of this from our friends at Republican Faith Chat. Sample:

Where is the Tax Return, Mr. Romney?

Mr. Romney isn’t releasing his tax returns as other presidential candidates have (post Watergate).

I wonder why…it isn’t because capital gains are only taxed at 15 percent, is it?

Check out the site: What Mitt Pays, courtesy of the DNC.

“Sure”, you say, he is rich because he is a wealthy businessman and therefore qualified to run the economy.

Well, remember that businesses are successful when they are the most profitable; that is, when they maximize revenue with a minimum of cost. In other words, they deliver as little as they can get away with while raking the most in…and they do this by laying off workers, overworking the workers as much as they can, and by running competitors out of business.

Why anyone would want a government run “like a business” I’ll never understand; perhaps BUSINESSES should be run like a business?

Evolution, Religion, North Korea, Statism and Stuck Santa

I am about to get on the road (maybe 30 minutes from now); I have to remember to stretch a bit.

Posts
People are hailing this as an Obama victory (New York Times):

President Obama did not win much substantively with his victory Thursday over House Republicans in their showdown over extending payroll tax cuts and unemployment aid for two months. But he got a lot politically: a big start toward retiring the perception — fair or not, and even among Democrats — that in a pinch with the other party he will inevitably surrender.

Actually, I think that the Republicans may have helped themselves a bit; they showed that they can get within the shouting distance of reason if push comes to shove.

World Events How should other countries react when a despot dies? Interestingly, North Korea is upset that South Korea isn’t mourning?

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea urged South Korea on Friday to “show proper respect” over the death of its leader, Kim Jong-il, calling the South’s decision to express sympathy for the North Korean people but not to send a government delegation to Mr. Kim’s funeral next week “an unbearable insult and mockery of our dignity.”

The statement, carried on the North’s official Web site, Uriminzokkiri.com was the new Pyongyang leadership’s first comment on a South Korean policy since it announced on Monday that Mr. Kim died of heart attack last Saturday.

Though North Korea was an officially atheist country, they used “Dear Leader” as a type of public deity:

North Korea is not an example of the evils of atheism. Here are two excerpts:

Kim Jong-il, the Shining Star of Mount Paekdu, was not, of course, born in a log cabin on the mountain at all, but in exile in Siberia. (I am also unable to confirm the reports of talking birds and celestial miracles.) But the birth of a great Son to a great Father in humble-yet-holy circumstances, accompanied by heavenly signs, is very familiar, as is death and reincarnation. Mithras, a pagan sun-god, was apparently born of a virgin to great miracles, and died and was reincarnated. That story has many obvious parallels to that of Jesus Christ. In Greek mythology, Dionysius, the son of the great god Zeus, was killed and resurrected. . .

None of this is intended to mean that religious societies are all going to be like North Korea, or that religion implies dictatorship, or that all atheists are lovely people. But to suggest that North Korea is what happens when atheism holds sway in a country is equally ridiculous. Saying Kim Jong-il was a Lefty atheist is like saying that Hitler was a conservative Catholic, and we all know that that is very silly indeed.

The funniest miracle of Kim Jong-i’s life is one recounted by UK Reuters, taken from official Korean news sources:

And legend has it that the first time Kim played golf, he shot 11 holes-in-one and carded a score about 20 strokes lower than the best round ever for a professional event over 18 holes.

The first time he played golf! The man was surely a god!

The notion that dictatorships like that of North Korea are not atheist regimes but theocracies—complete with godheads, miracles, slavish worship, and sacred books—was best expressed in a talk on the “Axis of Evil” that Christopher Hitchens gave in California. I have never seen him give a better talk, and it appears to have been done entirely without notes.

This reminds me of a couple of things:
1. Remember the old Soviet Union? One of their “statist” decisions to overrule science lead to agricultural disaster.

2. Pat Robertson claimed a 2000 pound leg press. Interesting…given that Florida State football players leg press a bit more than…1/3′rd of that?

But the bottom line: one can reject the standard gods/religion and be far from what I’d call an atheist. This is also why if “making religion illegal” was on the ballot, I’d protest it. I am for religious freedom…and for persuading my friends/loved ones that there is nothing to be gained by accepting the supernatural (in any guise) or in accepting the incredible without having a substantial amount of evidence to support accepting it.

Speaking of religion: Jerry Coyne points out that many of the (educated) religious apologists do not want to accept that many (most?) believers really do accept the magical and illogical in their religious stories. It is true that SOME (mostly educated) believers use a metaphor approach; others cherry pick miracles to accept or reject (often accepting “long ago” miracles) and some just operate with cognitive dissonance; they claim to accept science but allow for selected violations of science. Francis Collins is perhaps the best known example of that.
(and yes, he is a very smart, accomplished human being; I even like him. I don’t understand him on this issue though).

And yes, rejecting a miracle claim or a belief as “nonsense” doesn’t make you an angry person.

Some science for the road
Froggy Love (via why evolution is true)

Andrew Sinnott has contributed a pair of lovely frogs, along with the story:

I thought I’d appeal to your amphibian soft spot in submitting this photo for consideration for the website. It’s a pair of Smilisca cyanosticta (blue spotted tree frog I think is the common name) in amplexus [JAC: "amplexus" is the grasping of a female by a male amphibian just before spawning] that I shot in Belize in the summer of 2009.

I was there as a research assistant for the University of Manchester studying Agalychnis moreletii and Agalychnis callidryas and for all sorts of reasons it was really hit and miss if we saw more than a handful of either species, let alone any other, but this night was like a goldmine for an amateur herper! On this six foot wide, four foot high bush overhanging the pond there were maybe eighty frogs, of I think six different species. At one point a colleague held up a two foot twig that had six or seven moreletii males clambering over each other to get to the nearest female.

If you like frogs, surf to the link for a cool photo.

Evolution tracing: there has been a breakthrough in “calibrating the molecular clock” (via Sandwalk):

The earliest fossil examples of most animal classes and phyla appear in the fossil record at about the same time in the Cambrian (about 530 million year as ago (Ma)). This period of apparent rapid divergence is referred to as the “Cambrian Explosion.”

It seemed unlikely that this disparity could have evolved in just a few million years so many scientists have been searching for fossil antecedents in the early Cambrian and Ediacaran (635-541 Ma). Many trace fossils have been found in the past few decades, indicating that the fossil animals of the Cambrian were preceded by small wormlike creatures.

The other approach has been sequence analysis. One can construct molecular phylogenies by comparing the sequences of genes in modern extant organisms. This approach has been highly successful over the past fifty years so that we now know a great deal about the relationship of the various animal phyla. The correspondence between the old morphological taxonomy and molecular evolution is the most powerful evidence we have that evolution explains the history of life [see Twin Nested Hierarchies].

The problem with sequence comparisons has always been getting accurate dates using the molecular clock. It is hard to get an accurate date when dealing with events that occurred 500 million years ago because there aren’t very many calibration points. An accurate calibration point is a known time when two lineages diverge.

Surf to the post to read the rest of the argument. There is also a chart that outlines what is going on.

Science marches on.