Some optimists say that in Army Gen. David Petraeus, Bush has finally found his Gen. Grant. That may or may not be true, but it is beside the point. The problem is that Petraeus has not yet found his President Lincoln.
Read the whole thing. (Hat tip, Lee).
Now this is interesting.
WORKER ants accurately gauge their life expectancy, regardless of their actual age, and take on riskier tasks as they feel their days ebbing away.
In social insects such as ants, bees and wasps, workers change tasks depending on their age. Older workers do the relatively risky foraging outside the nest, while younger ones engage in safer maintenance tasks within it. By extending the workers’ average life span, this fine-tuning helps to maximise the fitness of the colony. However, no one knew whether the division of labour in ants was activated by age-related physiological changes or through some other mechanism.
A key argument for atheim is that human beings are the only animal that know they will die. Our sense of mortality forces us to make up fairy tales about God and the afterlife to compensate.
Of course, this isn’t true at all. The atheists are asserting something that is not proven. We are discovering every day that animals are smarter than we think. Elephants bury their dead, for example. But if we now have evidence that ants know they are mortal, that blows a key plank of atheism right out of the water.
See what I mean? Atheism can be a belief system too. When you assert that animals don’t know they are mortal with precisely zero evidence to support this position, that’s no different than asserting that God has a white beard.
In what kiind of a world does Firefly get cancelled after 13 episodes but Caveman is allow on the air? Even seeing the commercials makes me angry.
Apparently, the NYT doesn’t think that a New Yorker winning the Congressional Medal of Honor is worthy of being printed in their paper. I mean, it’s nice and all. But the NYT is reserved for people who really achieve something.
You know, it’s pretty clear what these guys over at Sully’s blog are saying.
They are saying that they don’t need to call themselves atheists because not believing in God is normal and natural. They’re just humans. It’s the rest of us who need to call ourselves something because we’re all psychotic weak individuals who need to label our mythical beliefs.
My attitude toward this can probably be discerned by my tone.
As I said some time ago, the new wave of atheists are growing increasingly arrogant in the rightness of their lack of belief. They will smile smugly at you the same way the most annoying Evangelical will and for the same reason. They are utterly convinced that they are the enlightened and the rest of us are fools.
We have quickly reached the apotheosis of this arrogance. Atheists no longer want to even call themselves what they are. (I’m reminded of liberals who don’t want to be called liberals anymore. When you’re confident in your beliefs, labels don’t bother you). They are just “normal”.
Hogwash.
This is downright disturbing:
Thanks to guidelines issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics and supported by the commonwealth, doctors across Massachusetts are interrogating our kids about mom and dad’s “bad” behavior.
We used to be proud parents. Now, thanks to the AAP, we’re “persons of interest.”
The paranoia over parents is so strong that the AAP encourages doctors to ignore “legal barriers and deference to parental involvement” and shake the children down for all the inside information they can get.
One of the reasons doctors have left the AMA? They endorsed this Soviet Union 1984 horse manure. Only a fascist state tries to get kids to inform on parents.
Ugh, I was up until 4 am working on proposals. So here is my list of Monday links:
When I saw the segment on The Daily Show, I knew the quote was being taken out of context. Why am I smarter than people who analyze the news for a living? How can a dippy blogger be more attentive to this sort of thing than people getting paid for it?
There’s some controversy brewing over Brian de Palma’s Redacted, a dramatization of the brutal Mahmudiyah Killings (Note that our “evil” military is tossing these assholes in prison for potentially the rest of their lives). The movie won the Silver Lion at Venice and the user ratings at IMDB show something interesting:
US Voters: 3.4
Non-US Voters: 8.2
Now, raise your hand if you are surprised that a film portraying a brutal atrocity by Americans is very popular in Europe. (Put that hand down, Chris!). Europeans loved Loose Change and every other 9/11 conspiracy book/movie. My cat could make an anti-American movie and win, at minimum, the Palme d’Or.
I’ll wait until the November release to try to decide whether or not to join in the inevitable Right Wing bloviation-fest. But I should note something about the newly certified Great Film-Maker Mr. De Palma.
Number of Oscar Nominations for Brian de Palma: 0
Number of Golden Globe Nomination for Brian de Palma: 0
Number of Razzie Nominations for Brian de Palma: 5
I’m just sayin’.
Good thing he made this. Now he’ll get some nominations, even if the film itself is his usual crap. When your best film is The Untouchables and the best thing you’ve done in the last ten years is the lesbian scene in Femme Fatale, I guess it’s time to go political.
I must say that I agree with Ebert. This drive me frickin’ nuts when I see it.
What Sullivan says:
Three times as many black men will spend tonight in a prison cell as in a college dorm room. That number is almost as bad for Hispanics. A quarter of a century ago, the ratio was even.
What the study actually says:
The numbers, driven by men, do not include college students who live off campus. Previously released census data show that black and Hispanic college students — commuters and those in dorms — far outnumber black and Hispanic prison inmates.
Now my reading of this is that blacks and hispanics have moved off campus — much like the rest of the student body. The crowing headline that “three times as many black are in jail as in college” is pure hysterical race-baiting that misses and obfuscates the more important point:
The data show that big increases in black and Hispanic inmates occurred since 1980.
Not stated is how big the increases have been for whites. I went to the Census Bureau website but their data is almost deliberately opaque. I couldn’t get a handle on what it actually said and nor find the answer to the real question: Over the last 25 years, how has the incarceration rate changed for blacks, white and hispanics?
One things I’ve learned about social scientists. When they present you with answers to the wrong question, it’s because the answer to the right question didn’t fit their agenda.
The real story here is that our prison population has exploded over the last thirty years, primarily because of the War on Drugs. That’s something that affects all of us, not just black people. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. That needs to change. For everone.
MSNBC has a fantastic article on the “more fame than talent club“. So I just know you want my opinion:
There are many times I could add to that list, if I weren’t gooned on cold medication. Ben Affleck is a name that immediately jumps to mind. Michael Bay is another. Martin Lawrence. Richard Gere. Sandra Bullock. So many pretty not-so-talented people; so little time until I have to give my talk tomorrow.
Today, I bought my daughter her first toy. Or at least tried. All I wanted was a simple straight-forward rattle. Just a damned stick with a damned ball on one end that made a lot of noise and that I will one day step on and subsequently fall down the stairs.
You can’t buy one. Babies R’ Us doesn’t have them. Nor does Amazon, nor does Ebay – except for expensive souvenier rattles. They have plenty of soft stuff and “natural” or “educational” toys but not just a simple God-damned rattle that my little girl can pick up and shake and make happy goo-goo noises as a result of her burgeoning musical talent.
What the hell?
I’ve got a few more posts up at Right Thinking as Hal_10000. I’ve been hitting Mahmoud pretty heavily this week.
While I’m posting, read this obit for the mime. I had no idea he was a Holocaust survivor.
