McClatchy calls out Cheney on his lies

Good for McClatchy, publishing an article detailing Dick Cheney's recent lies regarding torture conducted by the United States.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney's defense Thursday of the Bush administration's policies for interrogating suspected terrorists contained omissions, exaggerations and misstatements.

If Cheney really wants to claim that the U.S. mistreatment of prisoners produced information that "prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people." OK, Cheney. If that really were true (it isn't) tell us what information was obtained and how it saved thousands of people. Just give us one example of how that information saved any lives at all. It's hard to believe that this clown was theVP of the United States. He could never gotten his way invading Iraq in the first place if all the media had been as diligent as McClatchy has been over the years. Note that the article doesn't limit itself to Cheney's speech, but reviews many of the lies and distortions of the Bush Administration.

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The correlation between religiosity and intelligence.

Gad Saad of Psychology Today reports that really smart people tend to not be religous. I know that this topic is going to stir up a lot of emotion, but it is quite clear that our smartest scientists tend to not follow religions. Not that there aren't lots of blisteringly smart believers out there, some of them first-rate scientists. The trend says that Nobel Prizes mostly go non-believers.

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Proper Prayer Position for Practicing Postulants

Do not be deceived that the science of prayer underutilizes the modern tools of charts and graphs and pursues the metrics of metaphysics in less than thorough regard for the contemporary demand for logical breakdown of the very physics of divine petition. One need only look here to begin to glimpse the dedication to the Popular Mechanics model of spiritual presentation. In many ways, this reminds me of The Third Eye, with its fake Tibetan flowcharts and associational metaphysics. At the turn of the 20th Century there were many groups organized around the notion that spirituality was merely a forgotten science and that if the methodology of enlightenment could be found (in tradition Victorian faith-in-science manner) then we could all stop buzzing about churches and indulging fuzzyheaded scattershot traditional religions as a means of elevating ourselves to higher planes. The Victorians loved diagrams. Rather like patent applications, really, and that wedded them to invention and progress. So it only made sense to tackle this whole question of the afterlife and souls and such by the same sort of techniques---if one could reduce a question to a blueprint, as it were, one could get quickly to the center of the matter. Now we have the phsyiology of proper prayer. If nothing else, this could be good for one's posture---except for the constant bending forward, which could exacerbate a stooped shoulder aspect and aggravate osteoporosis... Well, I suppose there are drawbacks to everything. Enlightenment at the cost of a straight spine. Better, I suppose, than a renewed interest in self flagellation and scourging.

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The Crisis of Credit – visualized!

In my never ending quest to understand more about why we are currently in a recession and why my house is worth less than a brace of Latte's from Starbucks, I seek insight from teh intertubes. I found such insight at the Church of the Apocalyptic Kiwi - (who were also inspirational during the presidential race, fyi) Enjoy!

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

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P.Z. Myers concurs with Charles Pierce that Americans are turning into idiots

P.Z. Myers concurs with Charles Pierce that Americans are turning into idiots. Myers' post springs from this passage from a new book by Pierce, How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free:

The rise of Idiot America, though, is essentially a war on expertise. It's not so much antimodernism or the distrust of the intellectual elites that Richard Hofstader teased out of the national DNA, although both of these things are part of it. The rise of Idiot America today reflects — for profit, mainly, but also and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power — the breakdown of the consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people we should trust the least are the people who know the best what they're talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a scientist, or a preacher, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.

Continue ReadingP.Z. Myers concurs with Charles Pierce that Americans are turning into idiots