Pinch Yourself–Did You Burst?

Tags

astronomy, Mars, Michele Bachmann, Mitt Romney, Mormonism, science, taxes, voting rights, welfare reform

 

 

This is one of the first shots taken by Curiosity of its new home in a crater, looking out on a mountain that is in that same crater.

No word yet whether Curiosity can see Russia from her porch.

Yeah, I know, she’s a non sequitur now, no need to beat a dead horse.

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Given that Willard tends to avoid like the plague any discussion regarding his faith, you might be interested in a New Yorker piece about four new histories of the movement. I am not a person who makes fun of what anyone chooses to believe as long as it doesn’t include harm to others, but after attempting to read the book of Mormon, simply as an exercise in being “informed” I gave up, finding it to unalterably boring to push through.

But the story of Joseph Smith and his magic tablets is fascinating, so you might decide, after reading the New Yorker review to pick up one and have a go.

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Willard must have the shortest memory in the history of homo sapien sapien. I swear he must. Again, he is vilifying the president for something he (you got it) supported himself. The President would allow states to opt out of certain welfare work requirements upon proof that they had come up with a more innovative (lest costly and workable) alternative. Now Willard says that amounts to just sending people a welfare check. Of course he said the opposite when he was governor of Massachusetts, when he praised and pushed for such a waiver system. Click on the link and you can see his fat signature on the letter.

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I almost hate to post this as a joke, since frankly, you and I both know, it’s all too possibly true.

From the Onion:

H/T to Joe.My.God.

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We have been a waiting for weeks now Willard’s tax returns. Willard says he ain’t a gonna give ’em up, since the mean old Democrats will only twist them, and ya know, ask for more.

Well, I have moved that “answer” around in my mouth for a good while now, and it’s time to spit out the truth. Whatever the tax returns say are FACTS. They are what they are. Perhaps they can be twisted but they can’t be made into some awful lie because facts are facts. Unless of course you are of the Romney mind: then facts are irrelevant and you can just say they mean the opposite of what they commonly mean. Is that what he is afraid of? That the Obama folks will invent new meanings like he does?

The burden is on Willard. As everyone says, he can clear this up in a heartbeat. Release them, and fair-minded people will read the truth.

But Willard can’t stand the truth. And that must mean that there is something gawd-awful in them.

As Hunter at Daily Kos says:

Whatever’s in Mitt Romney’s old taxes, whether it be zero-tax years or Swiss tax amnesties or non-tithing or that he made several million dollars on a new product called Fetus Chow, it’s apparently so bad that America wouldn’t vote for the rich business guy if they saw it.

It ain’t goin’ away Willard. You can refuse, deny, and look the other way, but we can smell a rat.

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Editorial alert:

As a law student, I heard this phrase a dozen or more times: We believe it is better than a 100 guilty go free rather than one innocent be wrongly convicted. Indeed nothing can be more shameful than the periodic release of yet another innocent who has been imprisoned for years for a crime he did not commit. (The phrase goes back at least as far as Blackstone and English law, but has been attributed to many others, including several justices down through the years.)

What this speaks to is our special commitment to justice.

If there is a hallmark to a democratic state it must be the right to vote. I can think of no other more important right than the ability of one to cast their vote for a candidate of their choice. Indeed, one wonders why the far right which is always a titter about “our freedoms” isn’t more vocal on this most important freedom of all.

Yet, clearly the GOP is trying mightily to inhibit the right to vote for literally millions of Americans across the country–and doing so quite openly, all under the guise of “stopping voter fraud”. This voter fraud of course proves to be non-existent when looked at, averaging less than one possible case PER state, per year. In NO CASE has there been any fraud that changed an election of threatened to do so.

Is is not better that 100 potentially fraudulent votes be cast rather than one rightful voter be denied the vote? I would think so.

You?

Related articles

• Tax Returns Smoke Hides a Blazing Inferno of Romney Lies (politicususa.com)
• Something Fishy Mr. Willard Mitt Romney? (4youmyviews.wordpress.com)
• Mormonism And Racism: Why Is This Being Ignored? (theobamacrat.com)
• Republican Congressman: Romney Tax Return Issue Not Going Away (redsfan.newsvine.com)
• Welcome to Mars, Curiosity! (pbs.org)
• On Mormonism (wnyc.org)
• NASA hopes Curiosity landing site is a Grand Canyon of Mars (latimes.com)

 

Exploring the Known Unknown

Tags

anti-matter, Asteroids, astronomy, atheists, brain science, conversation, Earth, happiness, Mars, moods, physics, psychology, quarks, science, sub-atomic particles, trust, water

From time to time, it occurs to me that I have been derelict in my duty to you in bringing you the latest in scientific discovery. No doubt, you depend on me for this, and so I’ve been shopping the blogs for the best and most useful bits of mystical magical info found around the Internets. (It’s the tubes you remember, a highway where kazillions of bytes are swirling through a vacuum induced plumbing maze.)

So, get pen and paper ready to jot down these factoid particles so that you can wow them at the next office lunch.

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It’s a case of the more you look the more you find. And I’m not sure this is any longer a good idea. It seems that with newer techniques, more and more asteroids are being found around the Earth.

This cannot be a good thing, for no one wants one of those darned things to run into us. And plenty of that has occurred in the past, and present as well, if you believe all those made for TV movies such as Attack of the Killer Asteroids.

Frankly knowing this is about as comforting as knowing that Yellowstone sits atop one of the hugest volcanic calderas known to man, or alien probably for that matter. One day, that baby is gonna blow, and well, won’t we all wish we lived in Hawaii then? So sweet dreams with this piece of juicy news.

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Once upon a time, we wondered if there was water on Mars. Now it seems we can’t stop finding it. Once thought to be confined to the polar regions, it seems the dang stuff is just everywhere now. Most if not all in icy glacial type configurations.

I recall that just last week, I heard that they were now thinking that there was actually water, again in frozen form, on the moon. I’ve become rather suspicious.

After all, WE have been to both places. In the case of the moon, we have been there quite literally, tramping around on foot and by vehicle (emissions control? did we have any?), and in the case of Mars, via little rover landers.

So, given that we have nearly trashed this planet, no doubt we have induced climate change on both the moon and Mars as well. And that’s a fine how do you do isn’t it? I imagine God might be a tad ticked at us.

***

Heads up liars and cheats, another tool in the old arsenal is not working. You thought that getting me in a good mood would make me susceptible to trusting you? WRONG!

So say scientists anyway. It seems that our predisposition to trust or not is only enhanced by being in a good mood. It doesn’t make us more likely to trust the likes of low down scoundrels who are out to take us to the cleaners.

Another plus for the good guys. As to who thought up this wonderfully quirky experiment,  I have no clue. But do continue to ply me with free lunches, free booze, and well, anything free in an attempt to woe me to your side. I’ll be happy to accept your largess if I still refuse to give you my life savings.

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Speaking of happiness and all, this just in. It may be time to cancel the cocktail parties and other water cooler type conversations. You know the ones I mean. Hanging over the partition between your cubicle and your office mates. Chatting about the weather, the football pool, and the chances of nuclear fusion as a good energy source. Okay, maybe that last one goes in the other column.

Anyhoo, again the ubiquitous science community has determined for your social pleasure, that people are much happier the more they engage in real deep conversation rather than the polite meaningless drivel we mostly engage in most of the time. Who would guessed? I mean are these folks geniuses or what?

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I suspect I need say little more, since the diagram at left pretty much is self-explanatory.

But in case you are even slightly confused, physicists want you to know that they are busy creating new stuff, most of it of the anti-matter sort. Somehow, it’s not dangerous, or so they say.

What you see here is an anti-nucleus, containing an anti-proton, an anti-neutron, an anti-Lamda particle, as well as what you can clearly guess on your own, an anti-strange quark. Said, anti thingie was present at the Big Bang, when God (okay, maybe not, but maybe) wiggled his finger and thought, “A universe, now that would be nice. Start cooking up while I baste the turkey.”

As you undoubtedly already see, this discovery opens up unprecedented ideas about, well, particles, and asymmetries. You understand, I’m sure. The strangeness value  means that non-zero errr, strangeness exists at the core of collapsed stars. Go and check any collapsed stars you have stored in the freezer and see if I’m not right.

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Where do atheists come from? I was pulling for the Isle of Man or the Northern Hebrides, but alas, no actual location was given.

Another of those wonderful question and answer things, wherein conclusions are that the better educated and more IQ’ey among us are more likely to disdain the idea of a God, and opt for idolatry of the human as the highest form of intelligence.

Before all you non-believers start patting each other on the backsides and high fivin’ and all, listen up. I’ve read elsewhere that most “scholars” are not impressed with the self-reporting analysis much.  In fact, a close look at the numbers suggest that the highest educated seem a bit more believing than the undergrad types.

What is of perhaps more interest is what constitutes the atheist mind? That answer is not yet forth coming. I’m of the opinion that its a little too much puppy dog tails and horseradish myself, but so far the jury is out. Other contenders are too much fish sticks for lunch during the formative years of six through twelve, or exposure to too many episodes of  the Honeymooners.

Happy Weekend to ya!

Of Science and Truthiness

Tags

astronomy, evolution, hypotheses, Mars, red planet, religion, science, theories

Mars, you remember Mars right? Fourth planet from the sun, little bro of earth, last best hope for mankind should we trash this place to unlivability? Yeah, that’s the one, red in color.

Red, uhuh, and what caused that? I always figured that God spilt his strawberry kool-aid while poking Jupiter in the “eye.” Failing that, an all out planet paint war game where in the red team won?

Nah. Actually scientists always thought that the rocks were largely iron and that when the planet had a lots of water on it, that it rusted the dang old place, making it the original junk yard.  But, science always trumps itself in revising old theories. The new one is that it wasn’t water at all. They think it was just the usual mix of oxides in the rocks that wore away over gazillions of years through erosion. Yep, good old fashioned erosion.

We owe this new idea to those famous pesky land rovers “Spirit” and “Opportunity” that just wouldn’t say quit and collected enough evidence that there were chemicals present in Martian soil that wouldn’t be there had water covered the land. So the red dust came after water had retreated off the landscape.

That’s what I love about science. It’s one of the only truly honest and honorable forms of human endeavor. Oh, don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of personal pet theories on just about anything to go around, and plenty of in-fighting for research grants and publication space. But in fairly short order, good ideas win out over bad. Every now and then somebody holds out a different theory and never lets go, and perhaps once in a huge while on some obscure issue, the minority point is eventually proven true. But it doesn’t happen often, and never on huge issues.

Certainly not on ones that increasing transcend disciplines. This is I suspect a fairly recent phenomenon, this cross disciplining. Archaeologists look to chemists and biologists and geologists and others to come in and work in the same general field. Of course, it wouldn’t work if each of these came to wildly different conclusions, they must fairly clearly support one another, or something would be declared quite radically wrong with some number of the theories.

So, in the end, the conclusions reached today are a good deal more reliable than ones in the past that relied solely on a single disciplines standards and theories. Of course the Genome project did hugely support the evolutionary biologists in their ongoing work. According to some scientists, they thought that it would put to rest any question about the efficacy of the theory. Not so, one can never under estimate the power of a personal need for results to be something other than they really are.

Scientists, it seems to me, are pretty much like other humans. They want recognition, and they want funding for their research, and they want to add to the volume of human knowledge. They would never knowingly or even suspiciously engage in work they knew to be false or suspect, because it would mean their lives would be meaningless, of no  purpose or result.

This is not to say that some pseudo scientists don’t try to pull the wool over the public’s eyes for the short term. But their motives are to secure a windfall quickly and then disappear from the scene when the jig is up.

Real scientists live for that elusive once in a life time discovery. Their research is designed for only that purpose–to make a singularly significant advancement, one that from that moment on directs the rest of the discipline’s energies to  a new set of parameters. This is no different than the doctor who strives to create a new and better treatment for a specific disease, nor the lawyer who writes a brief from a novel point of view, attempting to revision a concept of law.

In other words, scientists don’t waste time on nonsense, and things they know or suspect to be fallacious. In that they are more truthful and honest than most of us. Charlatans may hold sway for a short time, but evidence accumulates and the misleaders, the out right frauds are discovered, ferreted out, and dismissed in utter disdain.

The same cannot be said for politicians surely. They are more than willing to ignore the truth totally in pursuit of personal aims of re-election and power. Preachers and religious proponents have shown themselves more than willing to obscure the truth, fan the flames of untruth, and otherwise distort reality in pursuit of lining their own pockets, their churches, or their personal theology. They can often function in a world of “doing it for the people’s good.”

Perhaps because of the stringent controls in science, the need of replication, and “showing your work” such shenanigans are not prevalent, except in those fringe areas where in fact result is assumed and means are manufactured. And that is where the fringe loses its power. Their fantastical theories cannot hold up for long because they cannot either show the work or replicate by means of experiment their claims.

Science is our most trustworthy ally in discerning truth, simply because truth must prove itself in an objective way. Science doesn’t start with a conclusion and then seek proof to sustain itself. That is the province of the charlatan. Science starts with a hypothesis, and then designs methods by which to TEST the hypothesis. If tests fail to confirm the hypothesis, a new one is constructed. Plain and simple.

Ironically, we have no trouble trusting science when it comes to our expectations at the light switch, the ignition switch, the power button of the computer, the efficacy of medicine to cure our ailments, or any of a thousand other instances of science which are accepted in every day life.

Only when science butts heads with somebody’s personal theology of how things are “supposed to be” do we find the phenomenon of disbelief and argument that science is engaged in a conspiracy of deception. It continues to astound the scientific community, and it continues to astound the rational mind of most thinking humans. Such is life, and so perhaps I’m right, that God spilt his strawberry kool-aid on Mars. I mean it could be true, right?

Lil Bits of Rancor or Not 7/17

Tags

Anglicans, astronomy, Congress, Election 2008, FCC, gay rights, Health care, herb, History, HIV/AIDS, Iraq, Jesus, maps, Mars, McCain, Media, Republicans, spices, tex-mex, War, Women's issues

McBu$h loves the press, especially his cadre that rides the MacBus. But only to a point it seems. The new McShame plane has a couch and captains chairs reserved for “special journalists”the good guys who have to earn a seat by saying good things about the Mav. Yep, let’s hear it for Democracy McBlech style.

The entire purpose of the surge in Iraq was not to develop a strategy to win the war–that is impossible by most rational accounts. It was to reduce violence to a degree that would allow time to work out a means of withdrawl in a way that allowed the Iraqis some reasonable opportunity to take over. That is what neither Bush nor McBush seem to get. John Bruhns has a fine explanation at the Huffington Post.

Lest we forget, a lot of folks are excited these days. They are astronomers and they are having a ball with all the new photos of Mars. If you would like to take a look at some, then link here. Exciting stuff!

If you think that the mainstream media sucks as I do, then trot over to this site and sign the petition to inform congress how you feel about consolidation of media outlets by large conglomerates. In the past, citizenry have had an impact so it’s worth the time to sign on.

Secret Recipe Blog has a nice recipe for Copycat Lawry’s Taco seasoning. The packets are expensive, and you usually don’t need all of it. Most of this stuff you have on hand, and so make up a batch, and put in a saved used spice jar and you have it ready when needed to spice up that Tex-Mex meal.

When you try to talk out of both sides of your mouth, it almost always fails. McCain again can’t remember what he said 2 months ago, 2 years ago, or yesterday for that matter. His interviews are starting to be fun, as his staffers have to clean up after him, explaining his inexplicable remarks. Today it’s gays and adoption, yesterday it was insurance coverage and viagra. Read it and giggle.

Another wingnut of late, Senator Elizabeth Dole, has the chutzpah to try to rename a HIV/AIDS bill after deceased Jesse Helms. Does this strike anyone as insane? The man palpably hated AIDS patients and had NO sympathy for their disease. Ms. Dole seems to be partaking of the same senility water than Mr. McCain imbibes regularly.

The Church of England has voted to ordain women bishops. Women of History has a in depth look at the vote and the debate. Women have already of course been ordained as bishop in the American Church, the Episcopal and also in Australia. The ultra right wing of the Catholic church is of course sick, since they were hoping for a reunion of the two churches. They of course are rabidly against women priests.

World History Blog has a great little link to a site that specializes in maps, both domestic and international. Apparently you can put in modern day addresses and even trace land ownership back through several layers. There are more than 200,000 maps to access so it looks like it might be a fun and educational place to stop by.

Angry African on the Loose has a pretty interesting and thought provoking essay entitled “Who would Jesus vote for?”It’s worth your time. Rearranging one’s priorities is always worth time. Take five minutes and think. It’s as Martha says, a good thing. Keeps that Alzheimer’s at bay too.