Newt is an Arrogant, Lying Sack of Shit

So the giant Jabba the Hutt blob of butter with a fat head that is campaigning under the name of Newt is an arrogant, lying sack of shit...  However, we already knew that.  Why am I so pissed?  Not because he said particularly insensitive stuff on Martin Luther King day, or anything like that.  But he said some particularly egregious lies about food stamps and poor people, and made them sound like lazy people who are just too damn dumb to know how to fill out a job application or even find one to fill out.

Why does this have me mad?  As Military.com reports:

more than $31 million worth of food stamps were used at commissaries nationwide in 2008 – an increase of about $6.2 million, or more than 25 percent – from the $24.8 million redeemed in 2007. That contrasts with a 13 percent overall increase in food stamp use by Americans for the same period,

Okay, now that may sound like some sort of increase that validates his claims that President Obama has somehow put all these people on food stamps, and that he is responsible for these great increases (and keep in mind, this isn't the totally the amount spent by the active duty folks on foodstamps, which numbered 2100 in 2003, the last time they surveyed).  Again, that's not quite right:

In 2000, there were slightly more than 17 million Americans on food stamps, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington-based think tank focused on issues impacting low-income Americas.
By 2005, the number had increased to nearly 26 million while a government report issued earlier this year found that more than 32 million people are on food stamps. 

Under Bush, the increase was about 9 Million people.  And then the increase during the latter half of Bush, and then Obama, we have a total of a 6 Million people increase.  Even if ALL of those were blamed on Obama, last I checked, 6 is less than 9... How can President Obama be responsible for putting more people on Food Stamps than any other president, when he clearly isn't?  Oh yeah, sanctimonious, bullshit pandering logic that gets you a standing ovation from braindead hicks... What I would like to do is find a military member on food stamps, and have this guy get into Newt's face and ask him exactly how he can "own the fucking job he already has"?  Especially one that has himself not served, and seems to be totally out of touch with the intelligent and hard working Americans that think he is a pompous ass, which should be everyone...  Of course, that's just my opinion.

Update on Dynamic Quotes Sig Generator

A while back I posted about A Dynamic Random Quote Generator Sig. Something fun for forums that allow you to place a IMG in your signatures.  Well, I have updated it as well for myself.  The two on the previous post still work.  Although one of the owners updated the font and I really don't like it at all.  So I went through the forum and gathered up all the quotes that I could fit, and made my own and had my brother-in-law help me with getting it set up.

So here is the new URL:


http://3meese.com/3meese/random/godtroll.php Giving:



Have fun. 

Now, if you want to make your own random sig generator, what you'll need to do is grab two files:
http://3meese.com/3meese/random/godtroll.txt

And

http://3meese.com/3meese/random/arial.ttf
Once you have these two files, you can do what you want. There will be a couple of things you will need to edit though. First of all, in the TXT file, you will see a line that says

$font = '/3meese.com/random/arial.ttf';. That will need to get changed to whatever your domain root structure supports. Then there is the part that starts off with: // array of random quotes $quotes = array( "If every trace of any single religion died out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense. If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again. - Pen Jilette", "It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds which follows from the advance of science. - Darwin", "The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry. - Richard Dawkins", "There's this thing called being so open-minded your brains drop out. - Richard Dawkins", This is where you can add in more of your quotes. Just start typing them in or copy paste them in above the previous quote. Just make sure that the start of the quote is where you start the quotation marks ", and when you get to the end (including attribution) is where you end the quote with another quotation mark and a comma ",.  That will give you the full quote.  And you can add as many as you want.  Then save the TXT file as a PHP, and upload it along with the font file.  Easy as that!

Of the Variations

Did you know that there are over 38,000 different recognized versions of christianity?  There are five main movements in judaism (with each movement also having differing movements within them totaling over 50 different recognized movements, and probably more fringe movements).  Amongst the believers of islam, I was only able to find listings for about 100 different denominations.  Now, my first thought would be that the christians seem to have seriously fucked up their system.  They are the "middle" in terms of age, and seem to splinter at the slightest disagreement on scripture.  The jews seem to have their shit together for the most part since they are the oldest, and have on several orders of magnitude fewer variations.  The muslims, being a younger group, even though quite volatile, don't seem to have splintered as much as the christians, but decidedly more than the jews.  Sort of reminds me of a quote:

If every trace of any single religion died out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense. If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again. - Pen Jilette

One would thing that the word of god wouldn't be left open to so much interpretation?  Doesn't speak well of the supposed inerrancy of any particular text.  I wonder why that is?

The problem with religious thought is that it starts off on a bad foot.  It says that the holy books proclaim truth, and that truth can't be questioned.  Whereas science gives a conditional acceptance of a finding.  Should new evidence come to light (through better measurements, new tools, etc.) science will indeed change.  That's one of the fundamental strengths of science.  However, when religion encounters a conflict with reality, it attempts to remain unbending according to its holy books.  It has the entire observation chain backwards.  That's why I think that Pen Jilette hit the nail on the head!

Adam Savage: Food for the Eagle

In April of 2010, I drove down to Harvard with my daughter and her friend to see The Mythbusters.  When I got the tickets, I really had no idea what to expect.  Also, went to the wrong building at first, so we had horrible seats, but it was all good.  The Harvard Humanist Society was handing out awards to these guys, and they gave a couple of speeches.  Adam was using an iPad (which had just come out), while Jamie had a huge laptop that wouldn't fit on the lectern.  All in all it was a great time.  My daughter and her friend reacted is if a rock star had just taken the stage when Adam and Jamie came out (made me proud).  After their speeches, there was an audience Q&A session, and they both got a chance to ask Adam and Jamie a question.  My daughter still talks about the event to this day.

The reason I wanted to talk about it though was that I really enjoyed Adam's speech.  While it was full of rather irrational imagery and drew from a book that may have been entirely a work of fiction presented as fact, it was still a great speech (things Adam acknowledges).  So just for no other reason than that I happened to run into this speech recently on the net, I am going to post it for you here:

Food for The Eagle

By Adam Savage

Good evening.

I hope you don't mind, but I'm going to read my speech from my new iPad.

Yep. I'm not only a humanist, I'm also an early adopter.

I want to start by saying that, to me, any discourse from me about how one can live a moral existence without religion or the church would sound improperly defensive. That there's an opposite to be defended is absurd and based on a provably false premise. So let's dispense with that.

(To be clear: I'm referring to the humanist axiom "Good without God," whereby "good" means morality. It's provably false that there exists no morality outside of religion, therefore the statement sounds defensive to me.)

By what route does anyone come to believe what they believe? We all like to imagine that it's based on a set of logical facts, but it's often a much more circuitous route.

For me it was pretty simple. I'm actually the fourth generation in my family to have no practical use for the church, or God, or religion. My children continue this trend.

Here are a few things I've learned.

Prayer doesn't work because someone out there is listening, it works because someone in here is listening. I've paid attention. I've pictured what I want to happen in my life. I've meditated extensively on my family, my future, my past actions and what did and didn't work for me about them. I've looked hard at problems and thought hard about their solutions.

See, I order my life by the same mechanism that I use to build things. I cannot proceed to move tools around in the real world until my brain has a clear picture in it of what I'm building. The same goes for my life. I've tried to pay attention. I've tried to picture the way I want things to be, and I've noticed that when I had a clear picture, things often turned out the way I wanted them to.

I've concluded by this that someone is paying attention—I've concluded that it's me. I've noticed that if I'm paying attention to those around me, to myself, to my surroundings, then that is the very definition of empathy. I've noticed that when I pay attention, I'm less selfish, I'm happier—and that the inverse holds true as well.

I think one of the defining moments of adulthood is the realization that nobody's going to take care of you. That you have to do the heavy lifting while you're here. And when you don't, well, you suffer the consequences. At least I have. (And in the empirical study I'm performing about interacting with the universe, I am unfortunately the only test subject I have complete access to, so my data is, as they say, self-selected.) While nobody's going to take care of us, it's incumbent upon us to take care of those around us. That's community.

The fiction of continuity and stability that your parents have painted for you is totally necessary for a growing child. When you realize that it's not the way the world works, it's a chilling moment. It's supremely lonely.

So I understand the desire for someone to be in charge. (As a side note, I believe that the need for conspiracy theories is similar to the need for God.) We'd all like our good and evil to be like it is in the movies: specific and horrible, easy to defeat. But it's not. It's banal.

There's a quote I love: "Evil is a little man afraid for his job." I always thought some famous author said it, but I asked my 200,000 followers on Twitter today, and it turns out that Roy Scheider said it in Blue Thunder.

No one is in charge. And honestly, that's even cooler.

The idea of an ordered and elegant universe is a lovely one. One worth clinging to. But you don't need religion to appreciate the ordered existence. It's not just an idea, it's reality. We're discovering the hidden orders of the universe every day. The inverse square law of gravitation is amazing. Fractals, the theory of relativity, the genome: these are magnificently beautiful constructs.

The nearly infinite set of dominoes that have fallen into each other in order for us to be here tonight is unfathomable. Truly unfathomable. But it is logical. We don't know all the steps in that logic, but we're learning more about it every day. Learning, expanding our consciousness, singly and universally.

As far as I can see, the three main intolerant religions in the world aren't helping in that mission.


For all their talk of charity and knowledge, that they close their eyes to so much—to science, to birth control education, to abuses of power by some of their leaders, to evolution as provable and therefore factual (the list is staggering)—illustrates a wide scope of bigotry.

Now, just to be clear. If you want to believe, or find solace in believing, that someone or something set these particular dominoes in motion—a cosmic finger tipping the balance and then leaving everything else to chance—I can't say anything to that. I don't know.

Though a primary mover is the most complex and thus (given Occam's razor) the least likely of all possible solutions to the particular problem of how we got here, I can't prove it true or false, and there's nothing to really discuss about it.

If Daniel Dennett is right— that there's a human genetic need for religion— then I'd like to imagine that my atheism is proof of evolutionary biology in action.

There may be no purpose, but its always good to have a mission. And I know of one fine allegory for an excellent mission should you choose to charge yourself with one: Carlos Castaneda's series of books about his training with a Yaqui indian mystic named Don Juan. There's a lot of controversy about these books being represented as nonfiction. But if you dispense with that representation, and instead take their stories as allegories, they're quite lovely.

At the end of The Eagle's Gift, Don Juan reveals to his student that there's no point to existence. That we're given our brief 70-100 years of consciousness by something the mystics call "The Eagle," named for it's cold, killer demeanor. And when we die, the eagle gobbles our consciousness right back up again.

He explains that the mystics, to give thanks to the eagle for the brief bout of consciousness they're granted, attempt to widen their consciousness as much as possible. This provides a particularly delicious meal for the eagle when it gobbles one up at the end of one's life.

And that, to me, is a fine mission.

Thank you.

— Delivered to the Harvard Humanist Society, April 2010

Through These Godless Eyes.

Okay, so I posted a video by philhellenes, and discovered that this guy has a whole series of videos.  I won't post all 169 videos that he has (at least try not to!), but I did want to post this one.

I also wanted to post a couple quotes that I found along with this video:

"You take your holy book, I'll take a parachute, and I'll see you at the bottom of the cliff." - philhellenes

"We're a species of mammalian bacteria evolved to be temporarily resistant to the earth's penicillin." - mindhacker

Profoundly Emotional for Science

Over at the RatSkep forums, a poster started a thread about the profound emotional experiences a person can feel when they are exposed to some natural wonder.  Generally people experience this when looking up at the stars.  Looking at the sky is indeed a very humbling experience.  Now we know that we are looking out at a vast, vast expanse.  A universe so large, that our little planet is a statistically insignificant part of the universe.  That's right, statistically insignificant!  If we assume that the earth is the only known planet to have life, if we used the entire volume of the earth as life supporting planet, then that means roughly 0.0% of the universe is capable of actually supporting life.  Of course, the other part of that insignificance should be that we are indeed here, and it's the wonders of the universe that allow for that.  While we may seem incredibly remote and disconnected from the stars, we are only here because of the stars.  As Lawrence Krauss said:

“Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.” 

I also found this video that I wanted to share.  It's a sort of anthem/creed for science that I heartily agree with.  Sorry to be on this video binge, but it sure is easier than reading my ramblings.

Open-mindedness

I have been accused of not having an open mind in terms of theism.  Actually, my position should truly be described as agnostic atheist on the issue of deism (See this chart for an explanation) - I don't believe in any god(s) and live my life as if they didn't exist, and I don't think that the question can be reasonably answered (yet?). Although, I do claim gnostic (or strong) atheism on gods that are defined to actually DO things in this universe, since those actions have failed all evidentiary inquiries

The thing that would change my mind?  Evidence.  Of course, that supposes that people actually understand what the word evidence means.  Admitting "I don't know" is not the same as saying "I don't know, therefore [insert my favorite idea]".  "I don't know" is simply that, and only that.  Nothing more.  It's perfectly okay to leave the jury out on a question if we don't haver the answer.  Unlike many theists, my mind is indeed open for evidence (not assertions).  What is really more open minded?  Actually admitting ignorance on a point and reserving judgment, or proclaiming that a totally UN-evidenced mechanism is the One True Answer^(TM)?

So I think this is an appropriate QualiaSoup video to present:

Irreducible complexity cut down to size

And here is QualiaSoup's second video on irreducible complexity.  It really does dismay me that made-up terms like this get so much attention because of the "argumentum ad ignorantiam" fallacy... It's all a Manufactroversy. That is, a manufactured controversy that is motivated by profit or extreme ideology to intentionally create public confusion about an issue that is not in dispute.  And anyone who denies our understanding of evolution is indeed adherent to an extreme ideology...  Just imagine how you would react to someone who was a proponent of "intelligent falling" as opposed to gravity.  You'd label them as daft, right?  (Yes, I know that it's an Onion Parody, but it applies.  Just like a flat earther, or geocentric follower is equally daft.)

Rebuttals: irreducible complexity

The next two videos will be about "Irreducible Complexity"... I know, I'm sorry, but dealing with made up stuff seems to be part and parcel of dealing with irrational thought.  And this is a particularly insidious made-up bit because it deals in things that pretty much only the experts in whatever particular field has the required understanding to provide an adequate rebuttal.  As I say over at my Facts, not Fantasy page where I discuss evolution, I mention:

* What about the "Irreducible Complexity" of the eye, blood, flagellum, etc.?
Well, first of all, "irreducible complexity" is a non-sense term invented by creationists and intelligent design proponents. All it really says is that they can't possibly understand a particularly complex mechanism, so therefore something else did it. The basic premise behind irreducible complexity is to take a well designed item, remove a part to break it, and proclaim that it's broken... The problem is that it's entirely backwards thinking, and doesn't take into account how something was actually built up. Every single item of irreducible complexity has an answer, however creationists and intelligent design proponents will keep throwing out examples of complex systems until they hit upon one that their debate opponent may not have all the facts on. As soon as they find that one thing that someone may not know the answer to, they proclaim victory for their entire side, totally ignoring all the other instances where their argument was trounced.

However, I think that QualiaSoup says it quite well in this video, and the one that will be posted tomorrow. Enjoy:

Putting faith in its place

This is another QuiliaSoup video, on faith.  Not necessarily the faith of religion, but the dictionary faith of accepting something just because someone says so.  You know, that NON-critical thinking thing. Again, understand the differentiation of what he's addressing, yet also see how it applies to many things you may hold dear.  It's not an attack on those things, but rather an invitation for you to examine those things.  I'm sure you have at one time or another in your life been told something is one way, only to discover upon further contemplation and examination, that it's actually not that way at all.  Santa Claus, tooth fairies, easter bunnies, and the like spring to mind?  Maybe you also initially accepted that homeopathy worked, only later to figure out that it's full of shit (literally if water does have memory, right?).