Excellent coffee deserves an excellent mug, don’t you think?
All I know is, I have one, and it makes my rooibos tea (coffee only at home–at work, rooibos tea; I am a creature of habit) taste wonderful.
The fundamental atheist—the fire-breathing kind—
Is as radical an entity as any that you’ll find.
He or she’s the mirror image of the faithful they despise
Though they’ll claim they’re vastly different—just another of their lies
An example of the power of the god-belief they lack?
Though we changed the pledge to put in God, they want to change it back!
We put God on all our money, but they want it taken off!
And they never say “God bless you” on the chance you sneeze or cough.
They complain about religion, which itself is quite a shame,
But they never see, their own demands are really just the same!
When we pledge “one nation, under God”, and they refuse to stand
It’s the same as forced compliance, under law, across the land
It’s a crystal-clear agenda, and it’s radical and brash
Like the lunatics who spend their time de-Godding all their cash
Fixing money in a workshop, twenty quarters at a stint
Is the same as printing millions with the power of the mint
You can see, they’re all extremists—fundamentalists, in fact—
Driven solely by beliefs they held, or those they claim they lacked;
But you never will convince them all (and Lord God knows I’ve tried)
That the atheists and faithful are the same on either side!
Over on NPR’s Cosmos and Culture blog, Adam Frank writes about Religion, Science, and Easy Answers (although, strangely enough, the URL says “religion-science-and-no-easy-answers”, and the headline bar says “Religion, Science And Magic Fairy Cellphones”; I guess there was some toying around with different possibilities). Immediately, in the comments, came the predictions, and realities, of what commenters would say.
So today’s verse comes courtesy of those who see atheists as just as extreme as fundamentalists. Even the small percentage of us who actually do cross out “God” in our money’s “In God We Trust” (as I’ve said before, I sometimes go a bit further and use my engraver to remove God from my coins as well) could not possibly be the equivalent of a the system that imposed that God on an entire population. Refusing to say the pledge cannot possibly the equivalent of requiring the nation’s schoolchildren to recite it. If the act of removing God from something is seen as radical, surely (equal and opposite, and all that) the act of putting God there in the first place must be seen as radical as well, and on a far grander scale.
“In the beginning, God created
The heavens and the earth”—
A most myopic story of
The universe’s birth
The lenses on the Hubble
Look through time as well as space
The ancients might have spied with it
Their vast Creator’s face
The skies they saw were very small
Those centuries ago
We’ve traded in those old beliefs
For things we really know
If we should keep exploring
All that science will allow…
Imagine how much more we’ll know
Two thousand years from now!
NASA just released their latest deep-field image–the XDF, or eXtreme Deep Field, which combines ten years’ worth of images. There are over 5,000 galaxies in this image. That would be over 5,000 galaxies more than the people who wrote about “the heavens and the earth” could even imagine.
How tiny a fragment of the sky is this? Take a look:
Deep Field in perspective
I wonder how long it will be before we look at these images as important but quaint artifacts, long surpassed by pictures with better resolution, more detail, surprises we can’t even imagine at present. I also cannot imagine thinking that a world view that hasn’t changed in 2,000 years is somehow superior to one that changes with each new discovery.
I can’t hear through the noise that I’m makin’
As the bones in my knees get to shakin’
It’s the worst news I’ve seen
For Two Thousand Thirteen—
We’ll be facing a shortage of bacon!
We’ll pay more, or we’ll just do without
But the shortage is real, there’s no doubt!
The source of our pain
Is the absence of rain
We’ll be victims of this season’s drought.
With the global pig industry troubled,
Where the market collapsed ‘ere it bubbled,
Better rein in your fork
Cos the prices of pork
They expect, by next year, to be doubled.
Via the Chicago (Hog Butcher for the World) Tribune, news of an unavoidable bacon shortage in the second half of next year. The Financial Times confirms that this is a global crisis; swine herds in Poland are down nearly 10%, and informal surveys of UK farmers suggest nearly double that.
Drought conditions have led to jumps in global prices of corn (maize), wheat, and soybeans, while US politicians ignored any mention of climate change. Maybe–just maybe–the politician’s natural affinity for pork will finally make a difference.
As someday it may happen
An election we must hold
I’ve got a little list
It’s not a little list
Of the lies and utter falsehoods
That this Romney chap has told
Which must not be dismissed
They cannot be dismissed
Sadly, I don’t have time right now to complete the Mikado list song–might have to revisit this concept, or just let you do it. But the list itself is now in the neighborhood of 700 documented lies, in weekly installments by Steve Benen each Friday on the Maddow Blog. You can find the 35th installment of the list here. It has links to all the previous versions.
(Their standards are a bit stricter than mine–repetitions of the same lie on different occasions counts for them, and some of the lies are, I think, open to interpretation, although an honest observer would have to admit that Romney is at minimum stretching the truth beyond its capacity to recover. With my looser standards, you’d only have perhaps a couple hundred unique lies being told. Which is still plenty of grist for the lyrical mill.)
In interviews on TV shows,
In papers, or in someone’s blog
The campaigns fight like no one knows,
To claim the title “underdog”.
One candidate’s the president
And one a multi-millionaire;
Some sympathy’d be heaven-sent
And underdogs make people care
Let’s make a play for sympathy
And keep the expectations low
We’re not expecting much—you see,
We’re underdogs in this year’s show
“The other side” both sides proclaim
“Is clearly in the privileged seat”
It’s almost like it’s all a game—
The only rule is, don’t get beat.
Your tactic’s weak; the best you’ve got’s
A line of bullshit claims to flog
These stupid claims, and low cheap shots
Dilute the name of “Underdog”. [Read more…]
“Romney’s chances of winning are low”
is the message wherever I go
But what keeps me up nights–
Do I only chose sites
That confirm what I already “know”?
Confirmation bias, that’s what frightens me. You see it everywhere, especially the big news/opinion sites. Read about the latest poll and what it means in an article, and then check what the readers have taken away.
Republican commenters will point to one or two outlying polls as “accurate”, and to others as “liberally biased”. I have (no, I won’t dig it up) seen commenters utterly certain that Rove has “put the fix in” in a handful of districts, and really, it only comes down to a handful of districts in a handful of states. I have heard, again and again–and from both sides–“just you wait until November; you’ll see!”
I remember a reporter, back in 1988, who was just gobsmacked that Dukakis had not won. The reporter had been assigned to the Democrat’s campaign, and as such was inside the protective bubble of spin control. Every bit of news was filtered through an environment that heard what it wanted to hear, and refused to hear what it did not, to the point where a supposedly objective newsman fully expected, even in the last weeks, a Dukakis win.
It makes perfect sense that, in an age of information glut, where we simply do not have time to take in all the available information, that we pick and choose what we will read or listen to. And it is perfectly human of us to be biased when we do so. My mother in law fully expects a Romney/Ryan landslide. All the polls she has seen point that way. I find myself visiting Nate Silver’s blog and hoping he’s right.
In my visits to news sites, I see people utterly convinced of the truth of diametrically opposed realities. And it scares me to death.
Not because I see it in them.
But because I don’t always see it in me. And yet, the odds are I am doing the same thing.
Oh, and the “push polls” have started! These are polls that are designed with clearly biased questions, intended to force the respondent to respond favorably to whoever is behind the poll (“given X’s history of mistakes, can he be trusted to…?”). These biased polls are intended to give a picture of support, or of momentum, or of some sort of consensus for a candidate above what the candidate has actually earned. So the polls my mother in law cites, for instance, may well exist, although they may be methodologically suspect.
And since none (or very few) of us have the time or resources to check the methodologies of all of the relevant polls, we all too often trust… the ones that agree with our expectations.
And that frightens me.
It was not a great week. Or, it was.
We’re succeeding—creating a buzz!
Inconsistent? You bet!
But that’s all that you’ll get:
It’s Reince Priebus; that’s what the man does
Headlines (a twofer!):
Priebus on Romney: ‘Not the best week’
and
Priebus: ‘In Retrospect,’ Last Week ‘Good Week’ for Romney Campaign
That last one, yes, was the inspiration for my last post. Which means you get another limerick, too, cos I added one in the comments there:
In the race for Republican seats
Party spin and the truth rarely meets
So they have to make do
With fake bullshit (sham poo)
Which Reince, in a lather, repeats
“Our week was good, in retrospect;
The polls should make that clear.”
Where is this place called “retrospect”?
It sure as hell ain’t here.
Heh. The article at the National Review Online is titled “Priebus: ‘In Retrospect,’ Last Week ‘Good Week’ for Romney Campaign” Priebus seems to have looked back on a very different week than his fellow Republicans. It takes industrial strength spin control to tumble-polish a turd like last week. Don’t try this at home, kids.
Or maybe “Retrospect” is the name of the planet Romney will rule over in the afterlife.
I read it just this morning (I will need to make this clear,
But I had to check the calendar to verify the year)
On what claims to be a news site, and a major one, I fear—
They debated the reality of Hell
I thought Hell was merely fiction; just a myth from long ago
An adapted form of Hades, which the Greeks saw down below
For an educated person, this is something you should know
It’s a story that the ancients used to tell
In our modern world, the concept of a Heaven or a Hell
Or creation in a paradise from which our species fell
Is a sign that the believer isn’t thinking very well—
Those are remnants of beliefs from way back when
Or at least that’s how it should be; I was truly shocked to see
In our age of information (and so much of it is free!)
Such an ancient and outdated view—so how, then, could it be
On the home page—yes, today—at CNN?
No, really! Look:
Ah, but on the story’s page itself, the title is a bit less sensationalistic: Different Takes: Should we abandon idea of hell?
(Oh, and given the predictable nature of the comments, I am a bit disappointed in CNN that they didn’t tweak the comments page to read “Abandon all hope, ye who enter”)