Can Math Really be Trusted?

As the creationist movement continues it’s march into public school classrooms all over the US (thanks to Texas FFS??), it behooves all parents to consider the motives and implications of those who are championing this cause.

If you are one of the eighty million Jeebus Camp supporters the answer to the question, “Can math really be trusted?” is not something you need look any further than your Bible to answer.  Why, you ask?

Without written proof from the divine, devout believers are nervous to trust even their own observation that there are an “equal” number of fingers on each of their own “two” hands.

If the Bible said otherwise, then they would assume that their personal observations were being influenced by demonic forces that (somehow) needed expunging.  The emperor runs naked in their kingdom with no fear of over exposure.  The native instincts of any youth who might see it otherwise are squelched at Jesus Camps, which seem to inflict the exact type of emotional mayhem on the participants as the Jihadi variety we are more akin to being shown on US television, though I’m sure they would argue otherwise.  But I digress.  Can we trust math?

I mostly trust math, but then I am considered mostly a godless atheist by many of my fellow countrymen.  Because I lack the necessary fervor to engage in cheer-leading for supernatural causes (or genuflecting to imagined creationist deities), my personal “faith” curries about as much favor in the US as Mitt Romney these days (or alternatively the Mormon idea that beer, coffee, Coca Cola, tea and hot chocolate are all a gateway drugs to Hell).  I love the math. It is the math that is telling me Romney and the Republicans are going to be tossed on their butts in spectacular fashion come Nov 7. #cleansweep

To the minor extent that I don’t trust mathematics, I blame Richard Feynman. I doubt he is very well known in Christian Fundamentalist groups because of his personal views on God.

I decided to check into the issue of how the evangelical fundamentalists in the US feel about math, since it is so obvious that they have total disregard for many of the physical sciences that are entirely reliant on it, with evolution and evolutionary biology being a particular thorn in the side of the lunatic fringe (80 million) activist evangelicals.  Upon review, I found the Bible to be as hazy on the subject of math as it is on just above every other subject.  Questions involving Jeebus the carpenter making misstatements on math are brushed aside, explained as a consequence of his situational humanity.  Pi is three in the Bible because God was rounding to the first digit for brevity’s sake (remember, this is a guy that supposedly created everything else in just six days so he was used to taking shortcuts).

Believe me when I tell you that the “field” of Christian Apologetics is truly getting a workout these days, and the number of people “employed” in that regard is an astonishing thing to behold.  God literally has an army of people out there making apologies for all the crap he did in the Bible that no morally sound and reasonably minded imperfect human would ever imagine.  Takes a great mental leap to “faith away” the ancient slaughter of innocent women and children by the “loving” deity you propose to extoll.

For the Christian Fundamentalist, mathematics is a good thing when it is used in science to cure Grandma’s cancer.  On the other hand, they view work done in fields of math and science that undermine their belief system as an inevitable (evil) consequence of man’s sinful nature.  A desire to know too much.

Rick Santorum, one of the more virulent and high profile of their genre, and a fellow whose Christian belief system leads him to want to impose national laws forcing our wives and daughters to carry the illegitimate spawn of rapists to term, recently stated that people who “know too much” are of no value in his vision of America’s Republican future.  The problem for people like Mr. Santorum, Mr Romney, and the rest of the American Taliban that supports them, is that they have now overly expanded and demonized the group of people who “know too much” to include nearly the entirety of the US voting population.  At the end of the day, I am left to conclude that these folks definitely have more reverence for the crazy ideals they trumpet than the math of public polling that clearly shows how out of touch they are with the electorate they wish to represent.  #cleansweep.

Enjoy.

No Experts Needed

This information is old news in the world of political junkies, but since Santorum is (momentarily) the hottest notRomney on the ticket, I’ll give Santorum the fifteen minutes of attention (it won’t go past that I guarantee you) he so desperately craves.

The Santorums took their miscarried fetus home for the night to meet the rest of the family.  Exerts think this is unusual.  I wonder if ABC thought to ask the cast and crew of their newsroom what they thought about it?  I asked twenty of my non-expert friends if they had ever heard of such a bizarre thing.  These folks are, on average, about fifty years old, so between the group of twenty, there is something like a thousand years of recent American cultural history to be culled.   None could provide an example of any person they’d ever heard of doing something so bizarre.  When asked to select a single word to describe such a practice, no one said “unusual”.   Weird,  freakish and bizarre were the modifiers most prevalent in the responses.  A couple of my friends also thought it bordered on child abuse to submit his living children to such an ordeal, but Santorum is a devout Catholic so I’ll give him a pass on that.  After all, child abuse is pretty low on the radar of Catholic mortal sins which Santorum is so passionate about.

There are also screams of disgust from the usual rightwing apologists, not about the incident itself, but the sudden high profile exposure of this extremely aberrant incident.  “Why are you prying into the private affairs of family?” and “Have you no shame?” seem to be about the best that the rightwing sycophants can come up with.  Their protestations of media exposure might hold some water if the “bring dead fetus home for the night” story had been born of a late night paparazzi stalking the Santorum household instead of being included in his wife’s book:

In her book, Karen Santorum wrote about bringing the body home to their other children.

This freakish incident was something his wife thought was worth sharing to the rest of the world, so it’s hardly a reasonable argument that people shouldn’t be talking about it!  So let’s talk but let’s not judge.  Just because 99.9% of Catholics probably don’t follow the ‘bring dead baby home for the night’ sacrament doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with it.  It’s not like Rick was really electable anyway, given his bronze age beliefs in so many other areas, but there is no way people are going to vote for a FREAK and whatever else you think about Rick, this incident with the dead fetus is definitely freakish.

Here’s a great example of an apologist post I ran into while researching this entry.  I still have the taste of astroturf in my mouth from reading it.

So Romney is a shoo-in unless people actually take that tired, old worn-out cliche of “Who would you like to drink a beer with? to heart.  Romney is part of a “suspect” religion that doesn’t allow drinking and Santorum is too freakishly up tight to enjoy it.  Under that scenario the nomination is either going to Ron Paul or Sarah Palin.

Seriously:  At the end of the day, Romney will get the nomination precisely because the religious extremist movement in this country isn’t strong enough to stop the corporate interests behind him.   Obama will crush Romney of course, but in the meantime it’ll be fun to watch all the religious extremists go absolutely bonkers at being shoved back into the shadows once more.  Thank goodness the religious crazies are doing the work of undermining and ridiculing themselves better than Christopher Hitchens even dreamed of.

Enjoy.

 

Dog Blogging Thursday etc.

On the dog-blog side of things, my two US expat dogs, Lizzy and Bandit appear normal and healthy. The question at hand is, what are their thoughts? Are they ok with the Euro-version doggie lifestyle?  Lizzy is now officially older than Methuselah, yet still retains the sprightly energy of youth (when her arthritis isn’t acting up).  Her movements are much more restricted over here.

Lizzy used to free-roam the neighborhood back in the US. Does she truly appreciate the ability to sit under our table at an upscale restaurant over here more than she misses her unbridled “gin & juice” gangsta-bitch lifestyle back home?

The mail carrier in our old neighborhood, a diminutive yet stout woman, seemed an unlikely candidate to curry favor for roaming dogs, yet even she was running tandem with Lizzie on her morning delivery route for a couple years back in the late 90′s.  Lizzy had a lot of friends in the neighborhood (way more than me!) because her gentle demeanor belied an uncanny discrimination between friend and foe.

One memorable example was her out of character response of literally backing down a carload of guys who had just pulled into the driveway of a neighbor lady.  My attempted apologies upon retrieving Lizzy from the scene of her ‘crime’ were quickly overwhelmed with expressions of appreciation and relief by the lady.  Lizzy was actually interceding on the neighbor’s behalf against a group of people the lady didn’t want to see!!  She THANKED me for letting Lizzy roam the streets.

Lizzy is/was so good with kids that another neighbor used to bring their two year old daughter outside just to visit with Lizzie on her daily rounds.  I found out much later that Lizzy was so special in their lives that they often let her inside the house to visit.

My favorite Lizzy ‘protection’ story?  One night, a philandering buddy of mine is at my house during our weekly video-golf tournaments.  You know THIS guy.  He keeps two cell phones so he won’t get caught by his telephone history log.  We’re constantly waiting on him when it’s his turn to play because he’s always focused on his phone like a hungry hawk on a field mouse, tap tap tapping away sextmessage after sextmessage. So frequent were the delays caused by his enthusiastic phoned-based finger banging that I coined the phrase “Tappy Doo Bullshit” in reference to it.  But I digress.  Halfway through the weekly tournament, Lizzy goes into full alert mode at the front door.  We all look out the window but there’s nothing there.  Back to the golf.  Lizzy won’t relent.  We look out the window again…nothing.

At this point, philandering dude says “hold on a minute” and gets up from his tappy doo bullshit. He steps onto the front porch outside my house where he spots his wife’s car sitting at the bottom of the hill, a good ten houses down the street from mine.  She is stalking him to catch him cheating, and he waves at her!  She drives up the street and I invite her to come inside, since she’s already in the neighborhood….lol.  Sensing her concern that we might have “a ‘hoe’ hidden somewhere up in this crib” she is offered the full house and garden tour.  Witnessing my totally banal lifestyle firsthand must have harshed the mellow of her relief in the lack of hooker, as she hung around just long enough not to appear rude, and then excused herself and left.  Philandering buddy was so overwhelmingly impressed that Lizzy could sniff out trouble (his wife at the bottom of the hill-lol) that he dam near adopted Lizzy as his own.

It’s too bad Lizzy couldn’t protect the glove compartment of his car, because that’s where he ‘hid’ his “super secret double-life cell phone”.  That would be the very same phone his wife retrieved from said vehicle glove-box while he was in the shower at home a few days later.  Fast Forward to the scene of philandering dude’s possessions being flung out the window of his recently purchased home (on a golf course no less) by angry wife.  He’s single now.  We still keep in touch.  I tried to tell him that “Teeny Bopper Bullshit” (another term I coined…1979) wasn’t worth it.  Whocouldanode that painting the toenails of your teeny bop girlfriend might seem a tad boring to a guy over forty when the sex is done?  Cue Steely Dan…Hey Nineteen….”she don’t remember the Queen of Soul”

FWIW, then as now, I strongly advise against cheating on your spouse. Ferchrissakes, is it stretching the bounds of human decency to just get permission beforehand?
I’m out.
Enjoy.

Anti-Gay Marriage State Rep. Accused Of Offering Young Male Money ‘For A Really Good Time’ | TPMMuckraker

Anti-Gay Marriage State Rep. Accused Of Offering Young Male Money ‘For A Really Good Time’ | TPMMuckraker.

The Forty Year Old Virginess

Christine O’Donnell, the Republican teabag candidate running for the Senate from Delaware, claims to have led a totally abstinent life.  I just realized that she’s over 40 years old and is claiming a degree of virginity that one could only assess (because she tells us so and she is so afraid of lying that she’d have outed Ann Frank to the Nazis if asked) as inhumanly bizarre.

Not only does she claim virginity, but she also claims that she doesn’t believe in masturbation as well.  In this regard she has more in common with your average Muslim male suicide bomber than any American I know.   Like a horny Muslim shepherd pondering a good sheep buggering, she must be seething with hormones that cannot be otherwise dissipated.

This type of behavior breeds an anticipatory delight for sex that is so strong, it fuels an army of young Muslim men to commit some of the most unfathomable acts of violence.  They’ll literally do anything to get a shot at some of those 72 virgins promised to martyrs.

The big difference between those sexless, single Muslims and Christine O’Donnell?  She is free to deviate from the excessive prescriptions of fundamentalist Catholicism without the fear of reprisal.  Many Muslims are not.  The enforcement division of the Catholic church has lost the ability they once wielded in earlier eras.   The average American Catholic, along with the vast majority of the population at large, refuse to inflict the type of social consequences that once helped the Church maintain social compliance at the neighborhood level.

So well and good then.  It’s a marginally free society we live in, and Ms. O’Donnell is well within her rights to practice her peculiar lifestyle as she sees fit.  Her official status as part hot chick and part American Taliban,  makes ignoring her as difficult as refraining from watching the most popular viral Youtube videos.  It’s not like it’s my dam fault I’m a sucker for a good puppy video.

The question for America that is looming larger and larger is this:  At what point in a representative democracy does the train go off the rails when the actual people doing the representation are an aberrant abstraction from the people at large?  What force of nature (the pretty as Palin factor?) causes a majority of any group to choose a leader so removed from their own personal experiences?

Which leads me to my final question.  Did they ever really get those Diebold electronic voting machine irregularities issues sorted out to the satisfaction of all?

Enjoy.