The public brushes off the "scamdals"

After a couple of weeks of the right wing desperately flailing at the deceased equines of Benghazi, AP, IRS/teabag, Marine-umbrellagate, and whatever else they can come up with, the American people have drawn their own conclusions.  Those conclusions are not what the passed-on pony pummelers were hoping for.

Here's a summary of the relevant results from the latest CNN national poll.  Obama's approval rating is at 53%, actually up a couple of points from the last poll in early April.  The Democratic party's favorable / unfavorable rating has seen a net shift of 11 points in its favor, far outside the margin of error.  The Republicans' favorable / unfavorable rating is 35-to-59, eight points worse than in early April -- and the worst unfavorable rating they've had since CNN started tracking the question in 1992.  (Update:  More analysis here.)

(And as noted in the last link round-up, Democratic candidates in Virginia and Massachusetts have even gotten a boost in the same period.)

As I've said before, if the Republican party were a centipede, it would still be running out of feet to shoot itself in.

There are already signs that right wing is starting to realize the scamdals aren't working.  The Washington Post describes them as "falling apart".  Skimming major wingnutosphere sites such as RedState, PowerLine, Breitbart, and PJ Media, at least at the moment I see far less front-page coverage of them than in the last week or two, though Hot Air is still giving them plenty of play.  PowerLine even posts that the "narrative" on one scamdal "isn't compelling".

The tornado disaster in Oklahoma and Texas will probably provide a face-saving opportunity for the right wing to back down on the scamdals, letting them fume that it drove them from the headlines just as the public was surely about to start paying attention and turn against Obama.  I worry a bit about where that could lead, though.  How long will it be before we see a "tornado truther" movement claiming that Obama somehow staged the tornado to distract the public?

Link round-up for 19 May 2013

Guess which nationalities Americans rate as most sexy.

When using the internet, you need to be able to know rubbish when you see it.

Since the escalation of Republican histrionics over what I call the "scamdals", Obama is up a couple of points in Gallup, and Democratic candidates in Massachusetts and Virginia have gotten a boost too.  The Republicans' nonsense isn't fooling the voters, it's just annoying them -- but David Frum worries that they'll escalate.

Four Presidents, four umbrellas, one outrage (found via Progressive Eruptions) -- and check out comments at the Daily Caller.

Sometimes you need to just shut up and listen.

One individual tries to bring a little sanity to the Paultardosphere -- but check out the comments.

Admiral William Lee vows to defy the military's new rules against religious harassment (found via Republic of Gilead).

That Tennessee bill to shield meat industry animal abuse has been vetoed.

Bigotry turns cruel in Texas.

Pablo Pantoja, the Republican Director of Hispanic Outreach for Florida, has quit and become a Democrat.

Bishop David A. Zubik is an utterly clueless dumbass.

This is the President we need for 2016.

A Kentucky atheist responds to Christians (found via Lady Atheist).

The deficit just keeps on shrinking.

Kate and Louise go to a Christian women's conference (found via Republic of Gilead).

Right-wing talk radio is classy as ever.

Sara Ylen's life was an elaborate scam -- which sent an innocent man to prison for ten years.

Republicans won't find it easy to buck the demographic trends.

The Monsanto Posilac case illustrates the danger of corporate dominance of the media (see this too).

 Seriously, would you hire this guy?

One of Britain's leading slime-buckets finally gets his comeuppance.

Here's some more of the ugly history fueling tensions between Greece and Germany.

The Catholic Church in Lithuania doggedly opposes a convention to prevent violence against women.

Latin America is turning against the insane "war on drugs".

Christian bigotry fuels persecution of gays in Singapore (found via Republic of Gilead).

Honor killing: Lebanese Muslim Jihad al-Issa murdered his sister for being pregnant out of wedlock -- but he was the one who had impregnated her.

Alicia Gali was drugged and gang-raped in Dubai -- so the authorities jailed her for eight months.

Here comes the smart rifle.

British scientists have developed a super-wheat that could increase productivity by 30% (and it's non-GMO).

There's no such thing as an alpha wolf.

Cutting carbon emissions won't beat global warming -- we need to clean up what's already in the atmosphere.

Video of the day -- the vileness of Ratzinger

Richard Dawkins delivers the indictment on the occasion of Ratzinger's visit to Britain in 2010.  On the Nazis and Christianity (and evolution), more here.

Behold the Master Race!

A photo report from the American Nazi convention in Atlanta -- evil, yes, but rather goofy and pathetic too.

Video of the day -- Click

A quiet, simple, understated yet effectively creepy short film.  Use fullscreen (icon to the left of the word "Vimeo") for best effect.

Link round-up for 12 May 2013

Here's a clock for fans of silly walks.

Check out these unintentionally erotic church signs (found via Lady Atheist).

This man really does give a shit.

There's a reason why American entrepreneurship is on the decline.

That dreadful South Carolina creationist "science test" -- is real.

The cases of Jason Collins and Tim Tebow aren't the same.

Parsley's Pics posts an obituary for Kansas.

Bigoted Christians doggedly cling to the myth that they are persecuted rather than persecutors (found via Republic of Gilead).

The theater management responsible for this needs to be sued into oblivion.

Ed Brayton has an example of how religion destroys families.

Benghazi wasn't the first.

Elizabeth Smart has been speaking out on the effects of "abstinence education".  A note on Republican education ideas here.

Here's a good example of why scientists are rejecting the Republican party (found via Progressive Eruptions).

Jindal pushes creationism even harder in Louisiana.

Students at Carnegie Mellon stand up for free expression (found via Faye Kane).

Is your pension plan defined-benefit or defined-contribution?

To combat the anti-abortion crazies, we must be use honest language.

A real Dunwich horror?  A town of that name is England's Atlantis.

Oskar Lafontaine, a co-founder of the disastrous euro currency, now calls for its abolition.

"Atheists must be hanged!"

Talk to your baby -- the effect on language development is huge.

That tiny "alien" skeleton from Chile is human, though still somewhat mysterious.

Due to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide, the Arctic ocean is rapidly becoming more acidic.

Video of the day -- a deconversion

Found via Lady Atheist (who has several more deconversion videos).  A little too much "noble savage" attitude for my taste, but it's one man's genuine story of how he was led out of the darkness.

Teabonics -- signs of the times

Some people are uncomfortable about how much they see and hear Spanish in some parts of this country.  I'd say we have a bigger (bagger?) language problem to worry about.

Maybe if we did make it the official language, people would respect are-country enough to learn to spell it.

If he meant "femdom", he's right -- they charge plenty.

"Will do anything" except learn to form letters correctly, it seems.

What about Beavis?

On this one, I don't even know where to start.  But points for the costume at least.

I agree with the first part, and don't think I understand the second.

This one is a classic, of course.  I like to think the reason her mouth is open so wide is to suggest another "option".

Can you imagine attempting to have a rational conversation with this person?

 But give away their H.

Another classic sign.  He'll never live this down.

Seriously?  You live in this country and you didn't know that "Obama" starts with an "O"?  How is that even possible?

I'll close with one that's correctly written -- one from our side, after last year's election:

Heartily seconded.

Video of the day -- Dmitry Itskov

Dmitry Itskov (Дмитрий Ицков) is the Russian billionaire funding the 2045 Strategic Social Initiative (a.k.a. Russia 2045), a project dedicated to achieving radical human life extension via robotics.  More info and a longer interview here; previous posts of mine on robotics and life extension here and here.

The real peace-keeper

Even by the familiar debased standards of the Nobel Peace Prize, 2012's award was asinine; the committee bestowed the prize on the European Union for its "advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights". This after years of the EU's imposition of austerity policies which have wrecked the economies of the southern member states, inflicting mass poverty and unemployment and driving the most capable young people to emigrate, and its dogged pursuit of deeper integration despite the opposition shown by repeated referenda in member countries, making a mockery of democracy.



But what about peace?  After the conflagrations of World Wars I and II, and before them the Franco-Prussian War, the Napoleonic wars, etc., etc., etc, Europe has now gone 68 years without such a major conflict.  Doesn't the EU deserve credit for that?

Actually, there's no reason to think the EU had any role in preserving the peace during this period.  There has never been an instance where two EU member countries approached war but were stopped by the EU, nor could the EU have done anything to stop them if they had.  In the bloodiest conflict on European soil since 1945, the Yugoslavian wars, the EU was utterly impotent; what eventually mitigated the damage was American military intervention.  It was not the EU that deterred a Soviet invasion -- NATO did that.  As for "advancement of reconciliation" and promoting good relations, the EU's disastrous austerity policies and authoritarian bullying have created a state of mutual contempt and even hatred between the Mediterranean member nations and the Germanic core.

Some conservatives, pouncing on these obvious points, have argued that NATO should instead get the credit for keeping the peace.  This, too, is absurd.  The division of Europe (and most of the developed world) into two rival alliance systems replicates the conditions which made World War I inevitable.  It was those alliances which allowed a local dispute between Austria-Hungary and Serbia to trigger a continent-wide mass slaughter engulfing major powers which did not even have any vital interest in the original local dispute.

So what did keep the peace all this time?  Why has Europe (and the world) gone so long without another World-War-II-scale conflict?

As is so often the case, politics and ideology have been surface epiphenomena, while the true decisive change was a technological one.  What differentiated most of that peaceful 68 years from the period before was the existence of the H-bomb.  With both superpowers holding massive arsenals of these weapons, another all-out war between the two rival alliances would have meant the immediate annihilation of both sides, something that neither government dared risk.

During the Cold War, there was no shortage of events which could easily have played the role of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, triggering another all-out war between the two great alliances.  The Soviet blockade of Berlin, the suppression of Hungary in 1956 and of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the proxy wars in Korea and Vietnam, the Cuban missile crisis -- any of these could have triggered a new global war, if not for the H-bomb.  Indeed, going by historical precedent, it seems safe to say that one or another of those events probably would have triggered a global war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, likely even bloodier than World War II, if not for the H-bomb.  It was the H-bomb, and only the H-bomb, that spared us that.

Fear has always been one of the most effective motivators of human behavior, and the fear of total annihilation has been strong enough, for 68 years, to overcome the kinds of impulses that led politicians in generations past to blunder -- or strut proudly -- into all-out war.  There was simply no point in launching an all-out war when it would have looked like this:



To note the latest example of the kind of backlash the EU is provoking in the real world, just this week Britain's upstart new anti-EU nationalist party, the UK Independence Party (UKIP) stunned analysts by winning 23% of the vote in local elections in that country, just two points behind the ruling Conservative party.  Anti-EU nationalist parties, some of them disturbingly right-wing or even fascist, are on the rise in France, Italy, the Netherlands, Greece, Austria, and other countries, as voters ignored by the pro-EU establishment parties turn to the only forces through which they can make their voices heard.

Link round-up for 5 May 2013

Have a giggle at the ten stupidest Islamic terrorists.

Real scientists visit the Creation Museum (found via Lady Atheist).

Mario Piperni has a round-up of cartoons on the Bush library.  The fountain design should definitely be this.

People kill people, but guns help.

This homeless guy came up with an interesting religion test.

Budget-cutting and hard economic times mean an explosion of wage abuse (found via Crooks and Liars).

This looks like a movie to watch out for.

Here's a difference between top liberal and conservative media people.

Republic of Gilead looks at those who are fighting back against the War on Women.

You're not imagining things -- some right wingers really do hate the environment.

Ground turkey, yum!

Never forget, never forgive.

The meat industry has a new gimmick to prevent exposure of its abuses.

If you're elderly, watch out for scams like this (the phone numbers may be just for Ohio, but no doubt other states have something similar).

No, the US military is not persecuting Christians (found via Republic of Gilead).

The junior anti-sex league gets its panties in a twist at UCLA.

Ron Paul's new think tank is a nest of defenders of tyranny.

Even with economic recovery, the wealth gap grows.

The West, TX explosion was a case of regulatory failure, part of a broader pattern.

Here are some pictures from the Beltane fire festival in Scotland.

Check out the stunning nautilus house of Mexico City.

Apologists for religious craziness abet the harassment of an activist.

Would you have the guts to do what Imad Iddine Habib did?

Check out these photos of modern walled cities.

Enjoy the ecosystem, while it's still here.

PZ Myers takes on the "aquatic ape hypothesis" (found via Lady Atheist).

Danish research works toward a cure for AIDS.

Republicans, devouring their own

How well can the Democrats hope to do in next year's Congressional elections, and the contest to succeed President Obama in 2016?

First, 2014.  The historical pattern is that a two-term President's party normally sees its share of House seats drop in the mid-term election of his second term.  This has been the case with every second-term midterm election since the Civil War -- except one.  The exception was 1998, under Clinton -- the most recent Democratic President before Obama, which makes it perhaps a relevant precedent.  Admittedly, the Republicans at that time were in the midst of obsessively trying to blow up the Monica Lewinsky affair into a major scandal, an endeavor which exasperated the public and may have cost the Republicans some votes -- but the Republicans of today are, if anything, even more prone to clutch at such straws of ersatz scandal (see Benghazi).

They're also prone to damaging themselves in other ways, such as the recent defeat of gun background checks, which was yet another exercise in opposing anything Obama supports, as Senator Toomey recently admitted.  Obstructionism for the sheer hell of it doesn't play well with voters, especially on a proposal which 91% of them supported.  I don't know how much impact the background-check débâcle will have on an election which is still 18 months away, but the odds aren't bad that they'll pull one or more further such self-immolating stunts closer to voting time.  Right now the polls actually favor us, which doesn't guarantee anything, but it does limit the Republicans' margin of error for recovering from blunders.

As for the Presidential election in 2016, most polls show Hillary Clinton utterly obliterating any Republican opponent, even being competitive in states like Texas and Georgia.  I'm not so sure she'll run -- she'll be 69 on election day and, if victorious, would be 77 at the end of her second term.  But people who would vote for one Democrat would likely at least consider another; and Obama, his legacy at stake, will be putting his not inconsiderable campaigning prowess and organization to work for the nominee.  And there's another factor at work.

2012's Republican primary season resembled a cross between a clown show and a demolition derby, with a field of mostly colorful but un-serious characters being slowly winnowed down as the teabaggers and religious nuts tried and rejected one not-Romney after another.  For 2016, right-wingers seem convinced they have a much stronger field, but there's a quite different dynamic at work; they've started the demolition derby long before the primary season gets here.

First, Chris Christie, one of the few major Republican figures with a demonstrated ability to appeal to large numbers of Democrats, was demonized for working with Obama in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, and recently again after once more praising the President.  The consensus of the hard-right base is that Christie is finished as a Republican Presidential contender.

Next came the turn of Marco Rubio, who until a few weeks ago was being lionized as the party's great 2016 hope among those convinced that (a) the key to party revival is to do better with Hispanics and that (b) the way to achieve this is to nominate a Hispanic candidate.  Now, though, Rubio is being demonized for his support for the current illegal-immigration reform plan.  The vehemence of the histrionics I'm seeing across the wingnutosphere suggest that he, too, is now out of the running for 2016.

At this rate, before 2016 even arrives, every plausible Republican Presidential candidate will have been excommunicated and struck from the list of possibilities for one sin or another.  What are they going to do then?  Run Palin?  Let's also not forget factors like the hysterics of the religious-nut element over the party's tentative efforts to move to the center on gay marriage, or how the attacks on Rubio are likely playing among those Hispanic voters the party needs to attract.  As I've said before, if the Republican party were a centipede, it would still be running out of feet to shoot itself in.

We're not guaranteed to win 2014 and 2016.  But they're ours to lose.

Update:  Republicans' Hispanic outreach threatens to blow up in their faces.

Quote for the day -- being on the wrong side

"I say all this to say that if I regret anything it is my pose of powerlessness -- my lack of faith in American democracy, my belief that the war didn't deserve my hard thinking or hard acting, my cynicism. I am not a radical. But more than anything the Iraq War taught me the folly of mocking radicalism. It seemed, back then, that every "sensible" and "serious" person you knew -- left or right -- was for the war. And they were all wrong. Never forget that they were all wrong. And never forget that the radicals with their drum circles and their wild hair were right."

Ta-Nehisi Coates


This thought occurred to me some time ago:  On any controversial issue, if you're not sure which side you should be on, check which side most of the people wearing dress shirts and ties are on.  That's the side that's wrong.  It works in at least 95% of cases.

Video of the day -- Reach for the Stars

Much to my dismay, the Faye Kane video of Will.i.am's "Reach for the Stars" which I posted three weeks ago seems to have vanished from YouTube.  However, I found another very good video of the song, mostly using (apparently) NASA video.

Back in the days of the Wright Brothers, who would have thought we'd be doing this kind of thing barely a century later?


Here's Will.i.am talking about the song.  He seems a hell of a lot more aware than most entertainers -- or people in general -- these days.

Link round-up for 28 April 2013

You can now buy this car, built to a truly classic design.

Yes, I'd say these pictures need some explaining.

A household in Weatherford, TX experiences a home invasion with a difference.

Here's the best cartoon on the Bush Library.

Gosh, who would have thought this sign might be controversial?  (found via Republic of Gilead).

Faye Kane recalls the sixties (NSFW blog).

No, you flaming idiots, Chechens are not Czechs.

Here's the evolution of God in one picture.

Christians at the Hilltop Conference in Virginia pledge to fight against women's rights by mumbling to themselves and not eating (hey, it's their choice of tactics).

Swallowing the Camel blog has a round-up of fake dead aliens (don't miss the funny comments by semi-literate alien believers).

I'm not sure who gets to vote in Prospect's poll on leading world thinkers, but they made an excellent choice for #1 (and for #5).

Natural selection in action:  Faith-healing believers lose a second child after relying on prayer rather than medicine (sent by Ahab).

If you're ever in Oklahoma City, stop in at Grandad's Bar.

Ron Paul's new think tank is a menagerie of crackpots.

Exercise in Futility takes on Buddhism, a religion too much neglected by Western atheists.

A Republican state legislator claims the Boston bombings were a government conspiracy.  And there's more nuttiness where that came from.  More intemperate rhetoric here.

LadyFreethinker looks at five historic horrors caused by religion.

West, TX blogger Yellowdog Granny remembers the first responders. The explosion was yet another case of corporate lies (found via Lady Atheist) and inadequate regulation.  Then there's this.

Don't believe the lies -- the deficit is already under control.

Is that South Carolina creationist science test that's going around for real?  Stay tuned.

A lot of Republicans aren't happy with Rubio.

An Idaho pastor attacks the slavery-abolition movement.

Here's a Republican talking sense on Social Security. And here are a few trying to move forward on gay marriage.

A public school in Mississippi is being sued for flagrant First Amendment violations (found via Republic of Gilead).  And this Indiana university evidently missed hearing about Kitzmiller v. Dover (found via Lady Atheist).

Another school tries to silence a rape victim in order to protect a star athlete.

Wales loses its oldest oak tree to a storm.

Britain's austerity-strangled economy stumbles again, heading for a triple-dip recession.  France, too, is sacrificing itself to the insane dogma.

Donald Trump is still making an ass of himself in Scotland.

Christian violence against gays continues in France.

Greece exposes German hypocrisy on loans.

Australia is changing.

Religious faith burns brightly in Chile.

This Dubai rapist chose the wrong victim to attack.

More assimilated than they knew:  Jihadists from cushy modern Britain wimp out at the rigors of terror training in Pakistan.

Climate change is displacing populations in east Africa.

Nanocrystal arrays may give artificial skin a sense of touch -- another step towards artificial bodies.

Video of the day -- strangled minds

Found via The Immoral Minority.

Know the enemy -- the mechanism of death

A couple of weeks ago I linked to this article about British doctor Sam Parnia, who specializes in resuscitation of patients thought to be hours beyond the point of death.  Yesterday a reader sent me this one, which explores the phenomenon further.

What we're really seeing here is that our whole long-established concept of what death is, is mistaken.

We think of death as a sudden shift from one state to a qualitatively different state, which happens at a precise instant, the exact time of which is specifiable in principle, even if it's sometimes hard to pin down in practice.  Furthermore, death is irreversible -- that is, once death occurs, a person cannot be restored to the living state, short of a miracle (literally so, since one of the miracles attributed to Jesus in the Bible is returning a dead person to life).  If a person is said to be dead and later returns to life, it means we were mistaken and the person was not "really" dead in the first place.

All of this is wrong.  It doesn't accurately describe what really happens.

In most cases, death seems to be more analogous to what happens to a machine as it stops running after the failure of some critical part.  The heart or lungs or some other critical organ stop working, due to injury, or loss of energy (due, for example, to massive blood loss from an injury elsewhere), or exhaustion from the gradual decay of aging, or for some other reason.  Other processes which depend on the failed organ begin to slow down and stop; cells and systems which depend on those processes stop functioning.  Decay sets in, in the form of bacteria which start to consume cell components once the immune system stops keeping them in check, and chemical reactions which are no longer constrained to proceed in the ways normal cellular operations require.  At some point fairly early in the process, brain function is sufficiently disrupted that it can no longer sustain consciousness -- and in any case, traumatic injury often shocks the brain into unconsciousness anyway.  Eventually, so much damage has accumulated in the cells that there is no possibility of normal function being restored.

The point is, this is a fairly protracted process.  There is no sudden moment one can point to which constitutes the border between "being alive" and "being dead".  As so often is the case in nature, what seems to us to be an absolute distinction is in fact marked by a gradual transition.  We tend to think that "the moment of death" is the point where the process becomes irreversible -- but as the linked articles show, this point varies depending on the type of technology available.  As our knowledge and machines become more sophisticated, we can restore life in cases which, a few decades ago, would have been judged past the point of no return.  There is also the question of how much "life" can be restored.  Bodies can often be kept mechanically functioning even after brain damage is so severe that consciousness cannot be restored.  Such a person is "alive" in some senses, "not alive" in others.

(People used to define death as the moment the "soul" leaves the body, but this was simply another primitive misunderstanding.  Your consciousness, or "self," or whatever term you prefer to use for it, is not a "thing" distinct from the body, it's a set of processes which your brain is constantly running.  Like programs running on a computer which is suddenly unplugged or damaged so it stops working, these processes don't "go" anywhere when your brain stops working -- they just stop.  Whether they can be set going again, and how well, depends on whether brain function can be restored and how much deterioration has happened in the meantime.)

This raises the hope that the more advanced our medical technology becomes, the later after apparent "death" it will still be possible to restore life.  If we can develop the capabilities in nanorobotics that some futurists expect, it may even be possible to reverse a fairly advanced state of decay by re-arranging the atoms of decay by-products back into the organic compounds from which they came, molecule by molecule, cell by cell -- of course, such technology could prevent most forms of death from happening in the first place.

In any event, the more we know about what death is and how it happens, the better.  Death is the ultimate enemy of humans (hence the post title), and the better we know the enemy, the more victories we can win against him, and the closer we come to achieving his total defeat.