Women Clergy as bad as Child Rape Sez Vatican

Yep, that's right, allowing a woman to be a priest is as bad as raping children, or so says the Catholic church. I guess that means if they catch any ordainers, they'll just move them around instead of punishing them or bothering the proper authorities about it.

Fast Food Anecdote

Inspired from this discussion

It seems clear to me that fast food is hopelessly unhealthy and expensive compared to almost anything home cooked. I don't buy the "I don't have time" argument either, unless one is on the road between destinations. Nonetheless...

...while in college in 1984, drained of funds and willing to do nearly anything ethical to get by, I took full advantage of the McDonald's Olympic game. This is the one where you get free food if the Americans medal in the event printed on your free game card you get when you go in. I would wander by between classes and scoop up game cards left by those not as desperate as I. When the month to turn them in came, I did so. All of them. Every day. 3-4 times: a Big Mac, fries, and a coke, for a month. I didn't gain a pound, nor notice any ill health effects.

Then again, my main mode of transportation was my bicycle, and to say my metabolism was high would be a major understatement. The lesson I take from that is not that fast food isn't unhealthy, or can't be cheap for that matter. It's that one shouldn't do medical research with a sample space of one. Oh, and never eat 3-4 Big Macs a day for a month. It's likely to cause you to never eat one again.

Dealing with Traveling Evangelists: Preach The Boot

Here's a great story about two effective ways to deal with traveling evangelicals. You can impale them on their own spear:



Or you can satirize them:



In this second scenario, a student set up next to the evangelist and preached the word of the boot, and it's protection from the evil wetness. Shamed, the evangelist had little to say except "You're all going to Hell!". Like their cousins the Teabaggers, they have little defense from satire, because most people can't tell the difference at a glance. For the greatest example of this, read Mark Twain's The War Prayer.

The victims in the pictures are Brother Jed and Sister Cindy, who, those of you who've gone to college in the last 50 years know, travel around the country delivering their folksy fire-and-brimstone Christianity. I remember spending part of my afternoons mocking Cindy mercilessly. The big burr up her ass then was rock-n-roll, and it was going to send us to the LAKE...OF...FIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIRE!!! We'd bring a jam box and sing along to Stairway to Heaven while she ranted. I also recall one year a huge transvestite dressed for Halloween showed up and confronted Cindy, who literally curled up into a ball until the, um, guy(?) left.

Jed wasn't much fun then, looks like nothing changed. They must have found a fountain of youth somewhere, they don't look to have aged a day in 20+ years. But then, they came pre-aged.

Science and Intuition

Good science often starts with intuition. Bad science ends with it.

Stupid Things Democrats Say: Here's Your Chance Democrat Haters

For all of you splitting at the sides at my policy of not allowing tit-for-tat partisan political comments, this post is for you. Here's your chance to make good your boasts that the Democrats are just as stupid as the Republicans. Think my posts are biased against the GOP because its stupidity gets highlighted more than that from the Democrats? Now's put-up-or-shut-up time. To maintain focus and avoid the tactics of obfuscation (which is one of the main bases for my policy), here are the ground rules:

1) Give an exact quote by a Democrat with either a primary source, or a respected non-Rupert-Murdock-owned secondary source. No paraphrasing, no "watch this link", no "Ann Coulter said so", no "Some people say".

2) Describe what changes would need to be made to the statement to make it correct, and if it is a scientific subject, source your answer to some widely respected authority on the matter (ie a scientific organization or representative of its view). We can't measure how wide of the mark an idiotic statement is if we don't know what a true statement would be, and differing with GOP orthodoxy does not idiocy make.

3) Tell me what statement by a GOPer is comparable. Be sure to keep in mind #2, as well as how respected the speaker is on his side of the aisle, and how large an audience he has. It's hardly reasonable to compare something said by a Gaia tree-hugger whose group meets in a phone booth with something Sarah Palin said.

Failing to conform to this criteria will result in noninclusion. This is not an opportunity to toss as much shit against the wall as you can in an effort to see what sticks.

My contention, as made evident by my many blog postings on this subject, is that the "breathtaking inanity" (Bush-appointed Judge Jones' description of the Intelligent Design crowd) expressed by GOP politicians and supporters dwarfs that of Democrats by orders of magnitude, both in wideness of the reality mark, and the audience and respect such views get. It's never been my contention that there are NO stupid crazy democrats. But democrats who say things every bit as crazy as what creationists say are mostly laughed at by other Democrats, or hidden in the attic. They don't nominate them for Vice President. They don't make their views part of the party platform. The GOP does.

On every issue where there is a clear scientific consensus, and the two parties differ, it is the GOP on the ignorant side of the aisle. Whether it is evolution, global warming, stem cell research, abstinence-only birth control, and a host of other issues, it's the democrats that side closest to the best science we have. The Republicans pay lip service to science, and try desperately to give the impression that their ideology is supported by it, but in the end when science clashes with their ideology, ideology wins. That goes for overtly religious subjects like evolution, to more secular religious views like supply-side economics and pure capitalism. The Laffer curve is every bit as religious, and evidence-free, as a 6,000 year-old-earth is, as is the notion that government ruins everything. Ever hear of WWII, the moon landing, or the interstate highway system? Government programs all.

Again, that's not to say the Democrats are above criticism. On too many subjects, they deviate from clear science and mathematics (the drug war, gun control, social security, etc.) It's just small potatoes compared to what Republicans do, and is usually a lesser level of error. I'd compare the Republicans and Democrats to two doctors presented with our sick society. The Democrats want to bleed it with leeches. The Republicans want to pray for its recovery. While both solutions are clearly flawed, the Democrats are epistemologically eons ahead. At least their proposal understands that there are physical forces at work here, that they are part of the body politic, and curing what ails it means changing that physicality somehow. The Republican method doesn't even seem comfortable with objective reality, and is essentially relying on magic. The Democrats flaws can be changed with data. The GOP is stuck where it is forever, because to them, what seems true in their gut, or their mind, makes scientific evidence-gathering irrelevant. Republicans are, in every way that matters, still living in the 18th century. They never went through the scientific renaissance. They are still Aristotelian.

Think I'm wrong? Here's your chance to prove it.

More Tea Party Loonies Coming to a Race Near You

Think Ron Paul and his aversion to aspects of the Civil rights Act are just dandy fun, be sure to check out this summary of Teapartiers running for office, where you'll find gems like these:

World Wrestling executive Linda McMahon

Tim D'Annunzio, for whom we find this wonderful description:

In Hoke County divorce records, his wife said in 1995 that D'Annunzio had claimed to be the Messiah, had traveled to New Jersey to raise his stepfather from the dead, believed God would drop a 1,000-mile high pyramid as the New Jerusalem on Greenland and found the Ark of the Covenant in Arizona. A doctor's evaluation the following month said D'Annunzio used marijuana almost daily, had been living with another woman for several months, had once been in drug treatment for heroin dependence and was jailed a couple times as a teenager.

The doctor concluded that his religious beliefs were not delusional. A judge wrote in a child support ruling a few years later that D'Annunzio was a self-described "religious zealot" who believed the government was the "Antichrist." The judge said he was willfully failing to make child support payments.

Sharon Angle, the Tea Party’s top candidate in the GOP primary to challenge Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), is benefiting from an implosion by frontrunner Sue Lowden, who has been sinking in the polls ever since she suggested that poor Nevadans could “barter” with their doctors, perhaps by giving them a chicken in exchange for services...Angle’s ultra-conservative positions, which include abolishing the Department of Education and ending virtually all campaign finance restrictions

Ain't it great where the person suggesting we pay our doctors in chickens is the sane one?

Vaughn Ward, an Iraq war vet who had been endorsed by Palin and was highly touted as a recruit by the national party...was caught recycling lines from then Sen. Barack Obama’s 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention. Ward had also been rebuked for making it appear that Idaho Sen. Mike Crapo endorsed his campaign when, in fact, he had not. And on at least two occasions, Ward suggested that Puerto Rico, where primary opponent Labrador was born, is a foreign nation.

Well Hell, what do you expect from a party whose presidential candidate didn't know where Spain is.

Will America really elect insane people to office. Tune in November.

The Free Market of Health Care: A Simple Rebuttal

Homeopathy.

Millions of people have decided, via their rugged individual minds, that water is medicine. "Inefficient market" is too kind a term.