I get thrown the miracle of the shroud of Turin on a regular basis — just last week someone confronted me with it, basically saying "A-ha! Jesus existed because there's an old scrap of cloth with a face on it!" It doesn't matter that I point out that it's been dated to the 13th century, and was nothing more than a profit-making 'relic' for churches that would also hawk Jesus's foreskin and John the Baptist's pinky bone. They'd usually retort that it was not humanly possible to make the shroud, so it had to be a religious miracle.
Now there's more ammo. The Shroud of Turin has been recreated, using simple medieval technologies. No magic, just acidic pigments.
I know, it won't stop the kooks, but it's still useful to know. Next up, we need more evidence against the patently goofy Miracle of Luciano, which is the other 'proof' of god that gets flung around a lot.
From the November (not yet online) issue of Automobile Magazine, we learn the hard numbers from this summer's Cash-for-Clunkers program.
1: Rank of the Ford Explorer as the most-traded-in clunker.
1: Rank of the Toyota Corolla as the most-often-purchased new car.
$2.878 billion: total cash dispensed
15.8: average mpg rating of the clunkers traded in
24.9: average mpg rating of the cars sold under the program
28: days' supply of Chrysler Corp inventory at the program's end (typical inventory is 60 days)
55: days the program was in effect
$4,170: average clunker rebate
690,114: total number of cash-for-clunkers transactions
To a certain extent, this may be a good thing. People who don't follow the mechanics of government are getting a pretty good education on the legislative process. We didn't watch the resolution to authorize the use of force in Iraq as closely as we're watching this legislation. We all remember "How a Bill Becomes Law" from Schoolhouse Rock, but that didn't really tell the whole story. You've got your horsetrading and your conference committee and your internecine political warfare; this is how the sausage is made and we didn't tell kids about it back in the day because we didn't want them to grow up cynical and convinced that the political system blows. It's a real education.
Keep reading: http://griperblade.blogspot.com/2009/10/good-news-is-that-it-probably-cant-get.html
The bottom line? Even this extremist Iranian regime is open to negotiation. Which makes it more sane than our own Republican Party...
Nauseating fact: A new Pew poll has found that 61 percent of Americans would support military action to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Only 24 percent said it is more important to avoid military action, even if it means that Iran develops such weapons.
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Morford - 10 hot news items you might've missed.
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Wow. I had no idea that the Constitution was a religious document or that during the hot Philadelphia summer of 1787, Jebus flew to America to deliver it, but that's what we learn here. If you click around the painting you can learn lots of cool things, but the good stuff is in the bottom-right corner:
Spend the rest of your afternoon with it!
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Medical researcher who exposed the Bush misadministration's misuse of science for political ends is awarded Noble prize for Delayed but So So Sweet Justice.
Elizabeth Blackburn, former Bush critic, is one of the three American winners of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Medicine.
From 2001 to 2004 [Blackburn] served as one of only three full-time biomedical researchers on Bush's "President's Council on Bioethics." In 2004, she was fired from the council, along with another member who disagreed with the administration's position on some of the relevant issues.Eat it, Pretzaldouche.
Blackburn spoke out about the Council, demonstrating that despite its written mission to be a body that monitors research developments and recommends appropriate guidelines, it was really just a tool for parroting the Bush administration's positions on certain hot-button issues -- particularly embryonic stem cell research. Thus, Blackburn played a central and important role in revealing the extent of the political interference in science that pervaded the Bush misadministration.
IN YOUR FACE, repukes! USA once again tops list of "most admired nations."
Not-too-Breitbrat: "It is kind of like the world community saying to President Obama, 'Not only no, but hell no.' "
Limpbag: "The world has rejected Obama."
Drudge: "World rejects Obama."
World: "Uh, that would be not only no, but 'hell no,' assholes."
Bwaahahahaha!
The United States is the most admired country globally thanks largely to the star power of President Barack Obama and his administration, according to a new poll.Ha ha ha ha ha! Eat it, pukes.
It climbed from seventh place last year, ahead of France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Japan which completed the top five nations in the Nation Brand Index (NBI).
"What's really remarkable is that in all my years studying national reputation, I have never seen any country experience such a dramatic change in its standing as we see for the United States for 2009," said Simon Anholt, the founder of NBI, which measured the global image of 50 countries each year.
Though the notion of responding to a Jewish nominee with the word "fumigation" is potentially a new low, even for these folks. Last week we had a top conservative publication discussing whether it might be wise to have a military coup against President Obama. And this week they're talking about using poison gas to purify the government of Jewish nominees.
I wonder what kind of database Obama uses to locate people like this? Is it Monster.com? That would be appropriate. Or is it FreaksUnlimited.com? Maybe Obamanations.com? No, it's got to be Perverts.gov.
I'm telling you, the entire federal government is going to have to be fumigated some day when these deviants and degenerates are finally sent packing.
In other news, Republicans don't like their black committee chair. "He's on a short leash here," said one top House GOP leadership aide.
And the National Republican Congressional Committee has a problem Nancy Pelosi. "Taxpayers can only hope McChrystal is able to put her in her place." (Wonkette says, 'Republicans tend to hate it when ladies have jobs. They should be at home, cranking out babies, because of the Bible. Sometimes they conceal this hatred, sometimes they don't, and sometimes they don't in official NRCC press releases.')
Glenn Beck goes bananas again, whines that people are picking on him and sez Fox Nooze is "the Alamo for truth." Dude. The Alamo is the place where everybody got killed. So Fux is where news goes to die? Damn. You finally got one right.
That little speck looks like an artifact of the photo, but it is not. That is Earth, our home planet, as seen from 3.7 billion miles away by Voyager I in 1990. As Carl Sagan said over ten years ago: Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.And yet, no matter how many times this is pointed out, we cannot get along. This planet is loaded with self-important small-minded men who seek to impose their views, their moralities, their ideologies on others. They persist even though it is pitifully obvious by now that this planet is less than a speck, a mote, in a vast sea of darkness.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
Many of them feel that they are called by God to do so, to be the moral, if not actual authority over everyone else on that little speck. Because their version of God told them to, they will try to bring about death and desolation to everyone else who does not follow their path. From the distance that Voyager I took that photo, nobody would have a clue who prevailed on that little mote in the sky.
Voyager I is now three times as far away as when it took that last photo of our world. Its cameras, even if they still worked, could not resolve our world.
If only we put a fraction of the effort into trying to understand and live with each other on this habitable mote of cosmic dust that we spend into being ready to kill each other.
But as that will probably never happen, I sometimes wonder why it was even worth the 30 minutes to do this one blog post. We, as a species, seem to be hard-wired to want to kill each other, because we really are nothing more than a bunch of literate baboons with powerful weaponry.
Sometimes I think that we really are screwed.
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