Two graphs illustrating the relationship between bigotry and stupidity

Last updated on: September 20, 2011 at 10:54 am By Fred Clark

Andrew Gelman of Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science brings us the “(Worst) graph of the year.” It’s a graph that purports to show the tendency toward violent militancy of “pious and devout” believers from various world religions. Which is to say it’s a piece of execrable BS tossed together by anti-Muslim bigots who suckered the FBI into paying them for this nonsense. No, really, the Federal Bureau of Investigation paid for this in the name of “counter-terrorism” training.... Read more

TF: Amanda Hugginkiss

Last updated on: September 19, 2011 at 5:48 pm By Fred Clark

Tribulation Force, pp. 407-413 The central theme of this series of books is always the same: You are right and someday everyone else will see that you were right all along. That triumphalism plays out on a cosmic scale throughout this story, but it also pervades even the smaller, more intimately human-scaled scenes of these books. Here, as we finally get to meet the woman Rayford Steele is about to marry, this same theme is replayed yet again. Amanda White... Read more

Job Seekers Open Thread

Last updated on: September 19, 2011 at 5:00 am By Fred Clark

. Job seekers: Let us know where you are and what you’re looking for. Everybody: Skim through and see if you know something, or know someone, or know someone who knows someone, who might help out one of our job seekers. Read more

Sunday favorites

Last updated on: September 18, 2011 at 5:45 am By Fred Clark

Galatians 5:12-14 I wish those who unsettle you would castrate themselves! For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ Read more

'Heather' is pushing 30

Last updated on: September 17, 2011 at 6:22 pm By Fred Clark

Mega-church pastor, televangelist and “Bible prophecy” peddler John Hagee really needs to update his stock sermon about how America is turning into Sodom and Gomorrah due to the secular humanism threatening the safety of our good, godly children. Seriously, John Hagee’s “Faith Under Fire” sermon rallying the persecuted majority reads like he wrote it during the Clinton administration and hasn’t bothered to change any of it since then. He gave this sermon last month, but is there a single reference... Read more

Mark Speese, Queen of putrescence

Last updated on: September 16, 2011 at 2:25 pm By Fred Clark

This is not a post about government regulations or legal consumer protections. Nor is this a post about financial education, personal responsibility and helping the working poor to make smarter choices. What this post is about, rather, is this: That’s Margery Mason in The Princess Bride, in a role listed in the credits as “The Ancient Booer.” And I would like to see her greeting of Princess Buttercup here become a relentlessly familiar scene for Troy Aikman and Mark Speese.... Read more

It's not elves exactly

Last updated on: September 16, 2011 at 5:00 am By Fred Clark

You shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you … When my wife found some big rocks in the garden last summer, she asked me to move them. I lugged them away and placed them at the bottom of the slope in our yard by where the exposed roots stuck out from the shrubs the previous owners had planted in an effort to keep the hillside there from washing away. The shrubs weren’t working. What we really needed was... Read more

'Being upborne on a great wave'

Last updated on: September 15, 2011 at 12:16 pm By Fred Clark

Matt Yglesias discusses the myth of a flat Earth: People assert all the time that the Earth “looks” flat, but it’s hard to know how to understand this. The Earth looks exactly the way a large roughly spherical object would look precisely because it is a large spherical object. If you sit in a boat on the open ocean, the angle between your eye and the surface of the water changes only very slowly but eventually you hit a horizon... Read more

Phone calls carry more weight than emails

Last updated on: September 14, 2011 at 3:25 pm By Fred Clark

Macroeconomic Advisers LLC says President Barack Obama’s American Jobs Act “would give a significant boost to GDP and employment.” The various tax cuts aimed at raising workers’ after-tax income and encouraging hiring and investing, combined with the spending increases aimed at maintaining state & local employment and funding infrastructure modernization, would: Boost the level of GDP by 1.3% by the end of 2012, and by 0.2% by the end of 2013. Raise nonfarm establishment employment by 1.3 million by the... Read more

No offense

Last updated on: September 14, 2011 at 8:55 am By Fred Clark

The problem with taking offense is that it’s impotent and indulgent. It may feel good, but it doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t matter. Offendedness is a pale, watery substitute for anger. Anger, that beautiful daughter of hope, demands action. Anger changes things. It seeks to correct the injustice that offendedness merely wants to savor. Anger sees injustice and tries to rip it out at the root. Offendedness looks at injustice the way a oenophile looks at a nice bottle of... Read more