Son of Hovind gets major butt hurt

The sad part is that the sixth grader has a very simple argument, and if you watch the mental calisthenics Eric twists himself into a pretzel with, you realize how shallow theology really is.

"You cannot know anything without knowing everything, or it is revealed to you by God."

OK, so how can we know that?

War on Christmas 2012

Gingrich, President of Space

Chick-fil-A, Free speech defender

Chick-fil-A, Lego Modeler of Marriage

F&F after an exhausting session wondering why
Christmas is being banned by liberals

CEO of Private Enterprise > President of USA? [Updated]

Remember Mitt Romney?

The last man who echoed the Republican pablum that you need an experienced businessman to run the country, because they are held accountable? Well, he's gone.

The last woman who did that was Meg Whitman. In California, when she ran for governor. Apparently, you can coast through in political office without consequences, but you are held accountable in the private sector. Or so they said.

In September 2011, she was appointed CEO of Hewlett Packard.

Moderate Republicans?

As I have been saying to anyone who'll listen, the country has been shifting right for a long time. So far right that Reagan would not be elected by these Republicans. Moderate Republicans are becoming extinct.

A glance at this chart from Stuart Benjamin at volokh.com should settle it:


The Senate, for example was never as liberal in the last thirty years as it is conservative today. You have far fewer moderates than you did in the eighties, almost none among the GOP.

I do not even want to look at the House.

Bad Cop...Good Cop

The "47 percent remark" cost Mitt Romney heavily. I do not think it was the single reason why he lost it, but it weighed heavily in his defeat. A disdain so viciously articulated in front of a friendly private audience when you are expected to speak truthfully does not augur well when those who are never supposed to hear it, do get to hear it.

So ask yourself why would Mitt do it again? On a telephone conference call, where he knew reporters from the media would be listening, and surely one or more of them would be recording it.



"Because Mitt is an idiot!"

Nope, wrong, try again.

Conservative Values, Part 187123

Remember Dr. Red Dildo?

Turns out that conservatives values are strongly steeped in hypocrisy.  Just as I suspected. Dr. Dildo won re-election by a whopping margin in his Tennessee district running on a platform of family values, pro-life and "hey look, black guy is the President." It did not matter that he had an affair with one of his patients.  It did not matter that he had an affair with two of his patients. It did not matter that he pressured his mistress to consider an abortion.

Because conservatives believe in pro-life and family values.

Well, turns out that when he was married, he mutually decided with his wife that she should have an abortion or two.

Two.

That story came out recently as papers from his divorce proceedings were released.

That is bad for Dr. Dildo. Had they been leaked during the election, he'd have won by a bigger margin than a mere 56 to 44 squeaker. The extra money he saved could have been well spent on flying his next mistress to Washington for an abortion.

God bless Tennessee and its good people. They deserve staunch defenders of life, and family values.

The Nerd Wars

xkcd.com

Normally Deviate

Worse than expected... this result based on the posterior of pundits

And the circus that was the press coverage of the 2012 presidential election continues on! That ever-so-degrading bastion of news-turned-entertainment, CNN, has now posted this story, the equivalent of the Monday morning water-cooler talk about why the football game was lost on Sunday (in this case, it was the Democrat Donkeys versus the Republican Elephants).

Here's a snippet:

Was it the wrong candidate, low voter turnout, a few dumb comments, a superstorm or falling out of touch with a shifting American demographic? 

Listening to Republicans try to explain what went wrong in their worse-than-expected election thumping reveals a party struggling to define itself amid continuing change in the nation it seeks to lead.

http://xkcd.com/1131/

Worse than expected!? What universe do these people live in?

Factoid

Number of presidential elections since 1988: Six
Number of times the GOP candidate has won the popular vote: One

Bullshit! [UPDATED]

The corporate media, whose pundits were handed their collective behinds on the 'twas-a-toss-up-till-Sandy election predictions are now showering praise on Boehner.  

Some headlines:

• Boehner Strikes Conciliatory Tone in Talk of Fiscal Cliff
• John Boehner Welcomes Big Deficit Deal, Pledges to Work with President Obama
• Partisan tones soften after Obama victory
• Republicans, Democrats see election mandate for bipartisanship
• Boehner: 'We're willing to accept new revenue'
• Top Republicans ready to talk tax compromise with President Obama after reelection

So it'd seem that Boehner is willing to raise the marginal tax rate on the top bracket, and let the Bush-Obama tax cuts expire, right?

The Prayer Experiment

Two years ago a septuagenarian woman named “thea” (a nickname) living in the US southwest announced in an online religious debate group that she would begin praying for me. By doing so she provided an opportunity by which to test the effectiveness of prayer. I’ve been posting monthly updates on the progress of her prayers ever since. We just passed our second anniversary. This is the story of my forced march from atheism to theism. If you don’t read any further, for the record I’m still marching.

Thea’s specific prayer was for God to “make himself known to me.” When asked, she was not exactly forthcoming about what “making himself known to me” entails (thea doesn’t do straight answers), so I was left to interpret it to mean that she was praying for God to introduce himself to me in some unmistakable manner. If an omniscient God exists then he must know that nothing less than a direct meeting with him or one of his supernatural representatives would convince me to stop being an atheist. Of course meeting God would not necessarily mean I would worship God; it would only mean I would cease being an atheist. Thea is welcome to try to convince me God is worthy of worship after her prayer succeeds.

Historic!

Maryland's Question 6 will pass by a margin of about 51.5% to 48.5%
Maine Question 1 will pass by a margin of about 54% to 46%
Washington Referendum 74 will pass 52% to 48%
Minnesota Amendment 1 attempt to ban gay marriage constitutionally is tied at 49-49, but trailing ever so narrowly. [updated: 11/7/2012] The attempt to ban failed 50 something to 49 something.

This is fucking GREAT compared to 2008 when Prop 8 failed passed in California.

Bigotry is beginning to die on this issue, and no longer can bigots claim "not at the ballot."

Punditry Watch

From xkcd.com

Today's the day we get to watch how the Punxatawney Phils did with their prognostications. The New York magazine has collected a pretty exhaustive list of pundits who have been bold enough to put their names next to a number.

As have pollsters and poll aggregators, although for those, the predictions were not final at the time the list was compiled.

Nevertheless these stand out for what appears to be a disconnect from reality:

Jim "No, no, no, Bear Stearns is fine" Cramer.  He has Obama winning 440 electoral votes and the popular vote by a margin of 10 points.
George Will. He has Romney winning 321 electoral votes but he has Obama winning the popular vote by 1.3 points. To put that in perspective, in 2000, the winner had 271 electoral votes (won by 5) but had lost the popular vote by 0.5 points. So what George Will is saying is that Romney will win 50 more electoral votes than George the Younger, but will lose the popular vote by a margin that is 2.5 times worse!

That is not the scary part.

The scary part is that they will continue to have jobs, will not have to explain why they disregarded data, and will continue to be considered "respected pundits."

Hey, Juan Williams does not look so bad, does he?  He has Obama winning 298 electoral votes, but Romney winning the popular vote by 1 point.

That's what happens when we grade punditry on a curve.

No one will even notice the pundits who got the winner wrong. They'll have excuses ready. Sandy.

I'll quote a journo's (seemingly honest) opinion on the matter:

STREETNOISE: Worked in the news profession for 30 years, 15 of which have been where it ought solidly be considered entertainment, albeit all teeth grinding and no fun. But then, the U.S. press has always been owned by corporations and conglomerates, so let's get real and cherish the days when those corporations were actually good stewards of the 4th estate and of the country: pre-Reagan, mostly, and decidedly pre-Bush II. For a moment, there was the promise of well-educated and informative internet press, then that, too, was scooped up, co-opted and turned into drivel. The other shoe is yet to drop. Now that those same corporations have gutted the newspapers, turned cable news into a partisan trailer park, and fired all the bona fide journalists, there are next to no press alternatives. Get ready for across the board mainstream media/news paid internet content that isn't worth the bandwidth.

Imagine what happens if Nate Silver, Sam Wang, Mark Blumenthal et. al. get it wrong?  The likely reason for all of them to wrong would be bad polling, since they do not poll, they just aggregate, but does anyone think the pundits won't crucify them?

Science has always strangled priestdom. Punditry is priestdom, science is its natural enemy.

Where were the Romney Birthers?

Domestic-looking foreigner

I'm curious, how come it's okay for Republican Presidential candidates to be foreigners but it's not okay for American Democratic Presidential candidates to look like a foreigner?

Mitt Romney's father George (see photo at right) was born in Colonia Dublán, Galeana, Chihuahua, Mexico on July 8, 1907. It was a Mormon colony (I can't help wondering if Mitt wears the standard-issue magical underwear). Mitt's grandfather went there because he was being persecuted in the US for wanting to have exclusive sex with many different women. George sought the Republican nomination for President in 1968 but lost out to Richard Nixon.

Foreign-looking domestic

Barrack Obama (see photo at left), on the other hand, was born on August 4, 1961, at Kapiʻolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital (now Kapiʻolani Medical Center for Women and Children) in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Maybe this will shut Donald Trump up. Maybe not. 

Alien-looking extraterrestrial

...And They All Turned Commie

Acts 4:32-37

King James Version (KJV)

32 And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common.

33 And with great power gave the apostles witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus: and great grace was upon them all.

34 Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold,

35 And laid them down at the apostles' feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need.

36 And Joses, who by the apostles was surnamed Barnabas, a Levite, and of the country of Cyprus,

37 Having land, sold it, and brought the money, and laid it at the apostles' feet.

The Corporate Media Narrative if Romney Loses

Well, three more days, and it'll be done. National polls have been tight, with a tiny lead for Romney, but the state polls, especially the battleground states have been breaking largely in Obama's favor. Multiple poll aggregation sites, such as Nate Silver's 538, Sam Wang's Princeton Election Consortium, PuffHo's Pollster (all declared Obama supporters) and Real Clear Politics (Republican leaning site) have this.

To summarize as of 11/3/2012

[UPDATED: Obama's win had little to do with Sandy]

• Nate Silver has Obama winning 305 electoral votes, 50.6% of the popular vote, 83.7% chance of winning.
• Sam Wang has Obama winning 323 electoral votes, with a 98.0%+ chance of winning.
• Pollster has Obama winning at least 277 electoral votes
• RCP has Obama winning 290 electoral votes (no tossup model), with 47.4% of the popular votes, (Romney has 47.2%)

I'll leave the cranks aside, because they have Romney winning. This narrative does not apply to them.

Star Wars Episode VII : 2015 WHAT?!?!?!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_sequel_trilogy#Disney-Lucasfilm_Star_Wars_episodes_VII.2C_VIII.2C_and_IX_.282012.E2.80.93present.29

I think I'm at a loss for words...

...

...


(fifteen minutes later)

I mean... but... but....

...

(fifteen more minutes later)

WHAT?!?!?!?!

Okay, deep breaths.