Historic TV moment: 'I'm actually an atheist'

Someday, somebody's going to look back at this moment on CNN and draw a "before and after" line in the history of the U.S. and religion.

All I can say is, thank God for this lady.  Oh wait, woops!  I mean, just thank this lady for being honest about the good fortune of her decision, but with tolerance and a sense of humor for those who want to chalk it up to an invisible, all-powerful ghost.  If only religious folks would show the same tolerance when faced with those who don't share their "wrong" beliefs!  





I'll say it again, I can't stand people saying, "Thank God," or "Thank the Lord" when they've survived some tragedy while many others died. That makes no fucking sense. Do they think God wanted them to live and everybody else to die, or what? What makes them so fucking special, do you think?  Or is it all just part of God's mysterious plan that they got lucky? [Spiritual shrug of the shoulders].  

Same deal with those killed in a tragedy.  Believers say, "It was God's will," or "It was their time to go," or "They're in a better place now."  Oh really?  Are you sure?  Has anybody ever managed to interview the dead people flattened by debris in tornadoes, drowned by floods, swept away by tsunamis, or swallowed by earthquakes, where they're actually at (besides a grave) and if indeed it's better than where we're at, alive?  The dead tell no tales, they say.  That's OK, we tell spiritual fairy tales for them.  

Well, I'm glad more & more folks are realizing how self-serving and presumptuous our rationalizing really is.

UPDATE: A friend of mine replied:

You are irritated at religious people who are intolerant, yet you go off in your blog about hating it when people thank God for not being killed when some kind of natural disaster happens.  Practice what you preach a little.

Besides, what people mean when they use phrases like "thank God", or "due to the grace of God", what they doing is acknowledging that it could have just as easily been them that were killed.  If they had the attitude you want to believe they did about being "special", they wouldn't be thankful for anything.

Stop being so intolerant and judgmental.  You like this lady because she is a brave atheist.  Great, be happy for her.  To use it as an opportunity to kind of give a middle finger to those people who lost their homes, but survived and who happen to believe in God, is pretty low class.  Coexist.

To which I replied:

Wolf Blitzer, who is allegedly part of the liberal media axis, pushed this woman whom he didn't know to thank the Lord she was alive.  That has been considered a normal, even appropriate reaction to tragic events.  However she didn't cooperate.  On live TV.  That is historic.   

Imagine if the Blitzer had said, "It wasn't God or fate that saved you, but your own quick thinking!  Right?  Right??"  You and all the conservatives would be up in arms about the lib'rul media and the degradation and godlessness of modern culture.   

Just have a bit of honesty and admit that your side dominates the conversation, and it's a rare person who has the courage to stand up to people like you, for fear of offending your precious half-thought-out beliefs and being ostracized. 

I am precisely criticizing the thoughtlessness in the phrase "thank God!"  It means something!  It applies not only to the person saying it, if you follow it to its logical conclusion.  But no, you choose to leave it at that.  It's brainless.  I can and do coexist with thoughtless people, I have no choice, but I'm not going to ignore their flawed thinking.  If they -- you -- can't take my pointing out the crazy logic in their beliefs, it's not my problem, it's a problem with their logic.  Don't blame the messenger.

Bad news

I'm not going to stop being a news junkie, but I have to admit there's a heckuva lot of truth in Dobelli's essay on the uselessness of news. According to him:

• News misleads. 
• News is irrelevant.
• News has no explanatory power. 
• News is toxic to your body.
• News increases cognitive errors.
• News inhibits thinking.
• News works like a drug.
• News wastes time.
• News makes us passive.
• News kills creativity.

The irony is, you have to be reading this news in order to find out the news is bad for you.

UPDATE (05.21.2013): I've been giving this article some more thought.  Why is it wrong, or at least, not entirely right? First, because of bloggers like me who do try to process and analyze the news.  This activity is not passive and it does involve thinking. 

Second, you could probably apply some of these same criticisms to reading literature. Nobody ever got rich reading Joyce or Nabokov.  It's hard to say how The Great Gatsby is relevant to my life.  And yet literature enriches the soul and deepens our understanding of and empathy with our fellow man.  Reading news can do the same, if we let it.  I mean, as a human being I think it's important to know, for example, when people elsewhere are suffering, and why.  It's important to crawl out of our own skin once in a while. This world isn't all about our own personal happiness, after all. 

Third, reading the news makes you a more interesting, engaging person. It least it makes me more interesting.  During just about any conversation I'll recall something I've read in the news.  I don't always bring it up, but I have the choice.  Now, I may sound like a liberal snob, but if a group of people around you are discussing, say, the civil war in Syria, and you have no clue what's going on there, do you really think they're going to think you're very smart?  I guess a certain type of person could take pride in not following the news; but then he ought to be extra clever when it comes to other things.  Otherwise he's just a willfully ignorant bore.  

Fourth, there's that whole Fourth Estate thing, you know, that myth that tough, brave journalism is necessary for a democratic polity to work.  If you think that democratic politics matters, and that you have an obligation to be part of it, then information matters.  Nowadays the news is more likely to mislead and offer us zero context, I admit, but it is still possible to find good information.  (If I could explain how to judge good information from bad, believe me, I would, I'd write a primer on it for my mom and Republican friends.)  Without good information you have... only personal experience and anecdotal evidence with which to make judgments about the world around you... which is exactly what conservatives do.  Yes, they seek confirmation in the news for their biases, but they usually seek out the anecdotal.  They seek out the journalistic equivalent of talking to one's buddy or barber.  Whereas we liberals do rely on journalists to bring us empirical facts and statistics with which to make informed judgments.

News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier

By Rolf Dobelli

April 12, 2013 | Guardian

URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli

MB360: US student debt grew 284% from 2004-13

The facts behind the mountain of student debt: 13 percent of students owe more than $50,000 and nearly 4 percent owe more than $100,000. Student debt grew by 284 percent from 2004 to 2013.

Posted by mybudget360 

May 18, 2013

Many Americans view a college education as a way to build a better life.  College is seen as an avenue for better prosperity and the ability to pull yourself up beyond your current circumstances.  In fact, after World War II programs like the G.I. Bill allowed many Americans the opportunity to pursue a college degree.  In many cases, the United States at this time developed the largest middle class the world had come to know.  This is still the case today but the economic trends show a shrinking middle class that is largely having a tough time competing in this quickly globalizing economy.  One fact that stands out is that back in 2004, student debt was the smallest portion of all non-housing related debt in the US.  Only a short nine years later, student debt is the largest portion of debt in non-housing related debt.  What happened in this short period of time and what information can we pull from the mountains of student debt information?

Student debt and the decade of massive growth

One could argue that every segment of the economy experienced a growth in debt over the last decade.  That is not true.  Let us examine non-housing related debt carefully:

Source:  Federal Reserve, Equifax

This is an interesting chart.  What we find is that Auto debt was the largest debt segment in 2004.  This was followed up by credit card debt and then other debt.  Student loan debt at this time was $260 billion.  In total, student debt made up 12 percent of all non-housing related debt back in 2004.

Fast forward to where we stand today:

Source:  Federal Reserve, Equifax

Student debt is now by far the largest portion of non-housing related debt in our economy.  Student debt is now well above $1 trillion.  The growth of student debt in this short window was 284 percent.  Student debt now makes up a stunning 36 percent of all non-housing related debt.  What is interesting then is when we compare this to the growth of the other segments of non-housing related debt:

Growth between 2004 and 2013

Non-housing related debt

Auto loans:       9%

Other:              -31%

Credit Card:     4.5%

Student Debt:  284%

In essence, nearly all the growth in non-housing related debt over this time has come from student debt growth.  This makes the following data more troubling regarding the amounts of student debt by tiers but also the rising number of delinquencies:

“(NY Times)  According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, almost 13 percent of student-loan borrowers of all ages owe more than $50,000, and nearly 4 percent owe more than $100,000. These debts are beyond students’ ability to repay, (especially in our nearly jobless recovery); this is demonstrated by the fact that delinquency and default rates are soaring. Some 17 percent of student-loan borrowers were 90 days or more behind in payments at the end of 2012. When only those in repayment were counted — in other words, not including borrowers who were in loan deferment or forbearance — more than 30 percent were 90 days or more behind. For federal loans taken out in the 2009 fiscal year, three-year default rates exceeded 13 percent.

America is distinctive among advanced industrialized countries in the burden it places on students and their parents for financing higher education. America is also exceptional among comparable countries for the high cost of a college degree, including at public universities. Average tuition, and room and board, at four-year colleges is just short of $22,000 a year, up from under $9,000 (adjusted for inflation) in 1980-81.”

Averages do hide a lot of the facts but what we can deduct is that the 13 percent that owe more than $50,000 and the 4 percent that owe more than $100,000 have largely come in the recent decade.  While the cost of tuition has soared in this short period of time a large part of it has not corresponded to actual earnings:

What is interesting about the above chart is that real tuition is up (with new data) by close to 70 percent while real earnings are roughly the same as they were back in 1991.  So over a 20 year period college costs have soared but the return doesn’t seem to justify the rise.  We also have the proliferation of non-profit schools that target lower income Americans and provide them a questionable level of education.  Yet this is only one small part of the larger issue.  The addiction to debt.  We have discussed how this recession has hit young Americans incredibly hard.  In the current marketplace it has become hyper-competitive and expensive while starting salaries have fallen behind when it comes to inflation.  The rising number of delinquencies also shows that many students are simply unable to pay their debts.

If student debt were to grow at the current rate, we would be at $3.84 trillion in student by 2023.  Do you think that is sustainable?  If not, something has to give.

Silver: Repugs NOT singled out for IRS audits

Silver's sober little analysis tickled my mental "Like" icon.  First, because it's a good lesson on how to be a critical consumer of news and information. Silver reminds us of the statistical principle that "a handful of anecdotal data points are not worth very much in a country of more than 300 million people."  That's too bad for many Republicans, whose political views are shaped by handpicked anecdotes.

Second, because it shows Republicans' criticisms of the "evil" IRS are usually baseless and stupid.

Statistics guru Nate Silver, (the political analyst who predicted with perfect precision how Obama would win the 2012 election), estimates that about 380,000 of Mitt Romney’s voters were audited last year vs. 480,000 of President Obama’s voters.  

Too bad Rush Limbaugh didn't see that before his Friday show when he agreed with a paranoid caller: 

This IRS thing, what's the message? The government's after us.  Conservatives have been put on notice here.  You think this is gonna stop?  This isn't going to stop.  They're just going to find new ways to do this.

And like David Cay Johnston, Silver reminds us that "one-third of [IRS] audits pertained to people who claimed the Earned Income Tax Credit, a benefit for low-income taxpayers."  Why?  Because it's easy for the IRS to check up on.  Auditing rich people and corporations is too hard.

The truth is, IRS employees are overworked and underpaid, and their agency is chronically underfunded because of far-right Republicans who equate tax collecting, no matter professionally done, with theft.  Then they turn around and moan about the deficit.

New Audit Allegations Show Flawed Statistical Thinking

By Nate Silver

May 17, 2013 | New York Times

URL: http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/fivethirtyeight/2013/05/17/new-audit-allegations-show-flawed-statistical-thinking/

Greenwald: Elites debate, Is AUMF awesome or totally awesome?

Here's how Greenwald sums up the "Dr. Strangelove" absurdity of the AUMF hearings in Congress, and the thinktank-media-judicial-political elite that wants to keep and expand it:

Nobody really even knows with whom the US is at war, or where. Everyone just knows that it is vital that it continue in unlimited form indefinitely.

In response to that, the only real movement in Congress is to think about how to enact a new law to expand the authorization even further. But it's a worthless and illusory debate, affecting nothing other than the pretexts and symbols used to justify what will, in all cases, be a permanent and limitless war. The Washington AUMF debate is about nothing other than whether more fig leafs are needed to make it all pretty and legal.

The Obama administration already claims the power to wage endless and boundless war, in virtually total secrecy, and without a single meaningful check or constraint. No institution with any power disputes this. To the contrary, the only ones which exert real influence - Congress, the courts, the establishment media, the plutocratic class - clearly favor its continuation and only think about how further to enable it. That will continue unless and until Americans begin to realize just what a mammoth price they're paying for this ongoing splurge of war spending and endless aggression.

Like I said, Congress ought to have thought twice before it handed the Executive branch carte blanche and an undated, blank check to wage war on anybody all over the globe...including at home.  And we citizens should have been screaming at our Congress for years now.

Washington gets explicit: its 'war on terror' is permanent

By Glenn Greenwald

May 17, 2013 | Guardian

URL: http://gu.com/p/3fqqb