Believe What You Wanna Believe

(extracted from a video I posted this past Sunday)

What if a friend told you they're totally into Zalmoxis; an ancient demigod who is of course invisible, but he's really really there; and they'll never die because Zalmoxis has cleansed their soul with his sacred magical blood, which grants them the privilege of immortality, living forever in a place that nobody can see.

The cult of Zalmoxis

I always come back to a really great point that Dawkins makes:  We're all atheists in one way or another, because we all refuse to believe in one god or another.

Gods come and go.  They're born of whatever fervor (or fever) you care to document or imagine; they grow (if a group of suckers followers can be mustered in sufficient numbers); they flourish - sometimes dominate for a while; and then in time, when people stop worshipping them, and stop making sacrifices to them - they die.  As it should be.  As god intended.

Bullshit

I love Penn's explanation of their use of the language and the "terminology" on the show.

If you call them scamsters liars and frauds, they can sue your ass - so ya just call 'em assholes and bullshit artists instead, and that's OK.  America and Americans never fail to amaze me.



"Skits for money cannot replace loving memory.  How low do you have to be to exploit someone's true grief to sell some bullshit book?"

Some Good News

...for a change.  I'm always a little leery of these fluffy feel-good stories when they run on network news.  It just seems like somebody's trying to "buck me up"; telling me "it's not all as bad as we make it look every goddamned day".

hat tip = Democratic Underground

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So it occurs to me that maybe the Press Poodles could try a little harder to make more of these connections; taking a story of something really shitty that happened, and connecting it with something that somebody across town - or even half a world away - is trying to do that might help solve whatever problem is causing these shitty things to happen in the first fuckin' place.

(Gee - if only we had some kind of really cool technology that helps us find out what's going on in the world; so you could just sit at your desk and browse the entire planet if you wanted...silly me; dreamin' again. Just a tho't.)

Anyway, did you hear it?  It pops up at about the 1:10 mark, and then again near the end of the clip: "...futures made a lot brighter by a crazy idea...".  And what was the new principal's "crazy idea"?  To make the school feel more like a school and less like a fucking prison.

Treating people like people - that's what passes for a "bold new idea" now.

And Jesus wept.

The Krugman Speaks

Captured in its entirety at NYT:

May 1, 2013, 5:30 pm 37 Comments

Speaking of Getting It Wrong

My heart goes out to Brad DeLong, who debated Alan Reynolds and discovered that his opponent really doesn’t understand at all how either fiscal or monetary policy work.

But here’s what I find remarkable about Reynolds and people like him: they have a track record. Here’s Reynolds in 2009 ridiculing my claims that we were in a liquidity trap, so that even large increases in the monetary base would not be inflationary. Here he is in 2010 declaring that Ireland’s embrace of harsh spending cuts will produce an economic boom.

And here we are in 2013, with the Fed’s balance sheet up by more than 200 percent and no inflation, with Ireland still mired in a deep slump with at best slight hints of an upturn. And Reynolds remains quite sure that he knows The Truth about macroeconomics and that Keynesians are fools.

It’s quite impressive, really.

If you're gonna have a debate that actually means something, then both sides hafta know what they're talking about.

In way too many instances, the "conservatives" keep trying to tell us they know something when it's obvious they don't.

I imagine we'll eventually hear somebody come right out and say, "Austerity didn't fail - we failed austerity".

Today's Dead Americans

I haven't posted much lately on how stoopid we are about guns, so I'm playing a little catch-up here:

Lexington KY: 

Police in Cumberland County are investigating after a five-year-old boy playing with a rifle accidentally shot and killed his two-year-old sister.

The incident happened at about 1 p.m. CST at a home on Lawson's Bottom Road. Police say the five-year-old was playing with a .22 caliber rifle when it went off an hit his sister. The child was transported to the Cumberland County Hospital where she was later pronounced dead by the Cumberland County coroner.

 --and--

Nashville TN:

A 4-year-old boy grabbed a loaded gun at a family cookout and accidentally shot and killed the wife of a sheriff's deputy, authorities said on Monday.

The shooting Saturday evening was inside the Lebanon home of Wilson County Deputy Daniel Fanning.

Fanning was showing his weapons to a relative in a bedroom when the toddler came in and picked up a loaded gun on the bed, officials said. The weapon discharged as soon as the child picked it up, hitting 48-year-old Josephine Fanning, said Wilson County Sheriff Robert Bryan.

Josephine Fanning was pronounced dead at the scene. The child was not related to her or her husband.

--and--

Oregon City OR:

A 9-year-old girl who was shot in the head around 5 p.m. Sunday afternoon in Oregon City died shortly after, according to Oregon City Police.

Police say the initial report was that the mother's boyfriend was cleaning a handgun inside the house when it accidentally discharged. The bullet shot through the wall of the house, located near 12th and Division streets.

Police found the girl in the backyard upon their arrival where she had been playing, reports said.

A LifeFlight helicopter transported the child to Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, where she was pronounced dead shortly after her arrival.

Fun With Numbers:
Per CDC, in 2011 there were 14,675 reported accidental shootings in the USA.

40 every day - and that's just the shit that happens by accident, and that's just the ones that require a visit to the hospital, and it's just the accidents that get reported as accidents.

Total Non-Fatal gunshot wounds of all kinds per year = 200,000 (more than 500 every day)

The Univ of Penn study from a few years back found that while the cost of Medical Care was around $17,000 per gunshot injury, the total lifetime cost beyond the medical expense (business productivity, personal income and earnings, etc) jumps up into the Billions - over $100 Billion every year, with about half of the tab being picked by taxpayers.

So here's the thing for you "conservatives":  if you just can't get with any kind of Gun Control because Freedom!!! - you get to shut the fuck up about what a clear-eyed-capitalist, taxation-is-theft, libertarian-super-genius you are.  You ain't shit.

Yeesh

Say it with me, America!

We're number 30, we're number 30, we're number 30!!!

On the list of the best airports in the world, there are no American airports in the top 25.  Zero. Zip. Zilch. We got bupkis.

The best we could do is Covington (just over the river from Cincinnati) - the 30th best airport in the world - where you get to climb up and down nice big flights of stairs and ride a bus to get from one concourse to another.  Woohoo.

The airport in Lima Peru ranks 5 places ahead of our best airport.  Lima.  I didn't know airplanes could even fly that high.  Lima-fucking-Peru!?!

There are, however a few "bright spots".  When they break it down by traffic volume (passengers), we show a little better.

Still - just another example of how smart it is to invest in your infrastructure.  Every business plan of every company worth half a shit includes a hard cold look at transportation issues.  If your town can't offer a decent level of easy access - including modes of transport as well as travel routes - then your town isn't a good place for that company to be, and the same goes for the rest of your country too.  It's almost that simple.

Fuck austerity - make the right investments now.

hat tip = Addicting Info

Krugtron The Invincible

Economists aren't supposed to have personalities - not the good ones anyway.  Paul Krugman is one of those genius-level guys who can take something as ridiculously complicated as economics and explain it in a way that makes it more or less understandable for a dope like me.

April 28, 2013, 8:01 am 244 Comments

Knaves, Fools, and Me (Meta)

One criticism I face fairly often is the assertion that I must be dishonest — I must be cherry-picking my evidence, or something — because the way I describe it, I’m always right while the people who disagree with me are always wrong. And not just wrong, they’re often knaves or fools. How likely is that?

But may I suggest, respectfully, that there’s another possibility? Maybe I actually am right, and maybe the other side actually does contain a remarkable number of knaves and fools.

The first point to notice is that I do, in fact, perform a kind of cherry-picking — not of facts, but of issues to write about. There are many issues on which I see legitimate debate, from the long-run trend of housing prices to the effects of immigration on wages. And in happier times I would probably write more about such issues than I do, and the tone of my column and blog would be a lot more genteel. But right now I believe that we’re failing miserably in responding to economic disaster, so I focus my writing on attacking the doctrines and, to some extent, the people responsible for this wrong-headed response.

But can the debate really be as one-sided as I portray it? Well, look at the results: again and again, people on the opposite side prove to have used bad logic, bad data, the wrong historical analogies, or all of the above. I’m Krugtron the Invincible!

Am I (and others on my side of the issue) that much smarter than everyone else? No. The key to understanding this is that the anti-Keynesian position is, in essence, political. It’s driven by hostility to active government policy and, in many cases, hostility to any intellectual approach that might make room for government policy. Too many influential people just don’t want to believe that we’re facing the kind of economic crisis we are actually facing.

And so you have the spectacle of famous economists retreading 80-year-old fallacies, or misunderstanding basic concepts like Ricardian equivalence; of powerful officials instantly canonizing research papers that turn out to be garbage in, garbage out; and so on down the line.

I know, the critics will respond that I’m the one who’s being political — but again, look at how the debate has run so far.

The point is not that I have an uncanny ability to be right; it’s that the other guys have an intense desire to be wrong. And they’ve achieved their goal.

Fugelsang

Y'are What Ya Eat

...so knowing what you're shoveling into your gob every day is kinda the key to the whole "Know thyself" / "To thine own self be true" thing, ain't it?

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One of the things we have to get done is to take the FDA back from the Big Ag and Big Pharma mega-corporations that own it now.

Today's Numbers

The most recent WingNut Fuck-Around is North Carolina.  Kornacki spent most of his show yesterday highlighting the horror stories that always pop up whenever one political entity has too much power.

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Here's the brightest shiniest fact from the discussion of what the Repubs are up to all over the place - not just in North Carolina - Voter ID and the rigging of the election process:

In the 12 years from 2000 to 2011, there were 18,000,000 votes cast in NC elections.  

During that same time, there were 22 cases of voter fraud.  

For the benefit of all my fellow math-challenged history majors, I have it on good authority that it works out to .000122222%.

It's a horrible huge pressing problem with just over 1 Ten-Thousandths of one percent of the votes cast in a single state in 12 fucking years.

And yes - it's about the power - the GOP just happens to be the most convenient vehicle for this kind of coup right now.