Tag Archives: US

Math is hard

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Or at least it seems to be for the notorious U.S.-based network Fox News. The first picture above is from a month ago and anyone even casually glancing at it should realize that something is wrong with that pie chart. Apparently Fox News didn’t just make a mistake in getting the graphics right, its news anchor Byron Harlan actually spoke these figures out loud as part of his news report.

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This second graphic appeared only recently and again, it’s very obvious that the figures don’t add up. What’s worse is that the original statistics came from reputable polling agencies and their original figures certainly make sense but Fox News seems to have decided to interpret them more creatively. This post on Think Progress explains that fuzzy reasoning. Goofing up the occasional graphic is understandable, but when your news anchors repeat these mistakes on air, it smacks of a deliberate conspiracy, especially when well-educated, highly intelligent news anchors pretend to be dumb in order to better connect with an anti-intellectual audience.

One Nation under God

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This painting by Jon McNaughton is currently making the rounds of the Internet. It’s easy enough to tell what the artist is getting at, but if you really need some rather heavy-handed hints, you can check out a full-sized picture at the artist’s own website where he also provides handy mouse-over explanations on what all of the symbolism is supposed to mean. Everyone who reads this site should know by now that I’m no fan of Christianity or any other religion, but what this artist and many other conservatives (in the modern rather than the classical sense of the word) in the U.S. are trying to do should be regarded by all Christians everywhere as being ridiculous and faintly blasphemous.

For one thing, they claim that the U.S. is uniquely blessed by the Christian God. It shows Jesus Christ appearing out of nowhere with a copy of the U.S. constitution in his hand and the Founding Fathers and deceased heroes of the country behind him. In the lower left corner, one immigrant is even depicted as cowering in shock as he realizes what the source of America’s greatness is. Of course, this is just one painting but it’s emblematic of the whole conservative movement in the U.S. For example, just take a look at the Conservative Bible Project, which is an initiative to create a better version of the Bible by removing “liberal” influences from it.

Secondly, the painting presents an untruthful view of history. The artist implies that the separation of church and state in the U.S. is the work of activist judges, hence why a Supreme Court judge is depicted as on the side of Satan, whereas in reality the separation is written in the U.S. constitution at the instigation of Founding Fathers such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. The painting  even portrays Thomas Paine as being on the side of Jesus Christ, the same man who wrote the following passage:

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

Finally, the painting infuriates Democrats because it mercilessly attacks the liberal movement (e.g. the liberal news reporter and the professor who holds a copy of Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” in his hand) while appropriating liberal heroes like Susan B. Anthony and John F. Kennedy for its own side. It even includes a black soldier who’s supposed to be a reference to Martin Luther King, Jr. as if King wouldn’t be considered a liberal in today’s political climate.

Of course, the funniest thing in the painting is the tree symbol on Jesus’ chest. The artist claims that it is a reference to the “Tree of Life” but it looks suspiciously like the White Tree of Gondor, prompting someone on QT3 to ask whether Jesus is supposed to be from Minas Tirith.

U.S. healthcare chart

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This chart is the funniest thing I’ve seen so far this week. You can view the full version of it here. To be fair, it’s just something the Republicans cooked up to mock the Democrats’ plans to reform healthcare in the U.S., so it’s meant to be frighteningly complex and byzantine. Even so, it’s clear that the health care system is a huge mess that I wouldn’t want to be tangled in. I’m a libertarian, but healthcare is one of those things that I think government should provide, at least at a basic level, and for this at least, I’m glad that we have, if not exactly good, at least fairly decent public hospitals here in Malaysia.

Just who is an African-American?

I’ve done my share of railing against political correctness in this blog, so here’s another. As this news article from abc News relates, Paulo Serodio, a naturalized American citizen, is suing a New Jersey medical school, claiming that he had been harassed and ultimately suspended. His crime: for self-identifying as an African-American. The thing is, Mr. Serodio was indeed born and raised in Mozambique, but he happpens to be white, not black. From the article:

After Serodio labeled himself as a white African-American, another student said she was offended by his comments and that, because of his white skin, was not an African-American.

According to the lawsuit, Serodio was summoned to Duncan’s office where he was instructed “never to define himself as an African-American … because it was offensive to others and to people of color for him to do so.”

“It’s crazy,” Serodio’s attorney Gregg Zeff told ABCNews.com. “Because that’s what he is.”

The problem of course is that the term African-American doesn’t really mean an American citizen of African ancestry. Instead it’s a code-word for being black, but due to political correctness, actually calling someone black is considered offensive these days. In the US, being labelled African-American opens the possibility of being eligible for affirmative action programs and other forms of assistance that specifically target minorities, but the unstated assumption is that the aid is supposed to be directed to blacks, so things get ugly when a white guy calls himself an African-American.

More generally, this case represents yet another example of why special assistance directed towards specific groups based on their culture or ethnicity always run into problems of defining just who is a valid member of the targeted group. It just makes more sense to qualify aid using objective criteria, such as poverty, scholarly excellence etc. It’s just another case of trying to shoehorn people into pre-defined groups, instead of seeing them for the individuals that they are.

Why the USA is a great democracy.

I get frustrated whenever I hear people criticize the USA for being a flawed democracy or not being a real democracy. It’s true that elections in the U.S. cost a whole lot of money and that lobbyists representing special interest groups wield a disproportionate amount of influence, but for all that, the U.S. truly represents a democracy like no other and this editorial published in The Economist nicely sums up why.

The whole article is worth reading, but I’d like to point out this passage in particular:

But the best thing that can be said for the system is that it is so democratic. In most countries party leaders are chosen by political insiders. In America rank-and-file party members (and some independents) get to choose—and this year they upset all political calculations by rejecting the inevitable Mrs Clinton on the left and choosing the maverick Mr McCain on the right.

Every democracy is flawed, I don’t need to quote Winston Churchill again, but America’s version, with its open primary allowing the grass roots to push up the candidate of its choice, is probably the best of the lot and surely deserves recognition for that.

Trees vs. Solar Panels: Fight!

As a libertarian, the subject of environmentalism often makes me uneasy and this dispute in California makes for a good example of why that is. The facts of the case are as follows: from 1997 to 1999, Richard Treanor and Carolynn Bissett planted eight redwood trees in the yard behind their house in Santa Clara county. In 2001, after the trees were already planted, their neighbour, Mark Vargas, decides to install a 10-kilowatt solar power system in his house. At the time, Vargas knew that his neighbours’ trees would eventually grow so big as to cover the sunlight that his solar panels would need, so he approached Treanor and Bissett and asked them to remove the trees or trim them back. They refused, stating that they planted the trees for privacy reasons. Vargas went ahead and installed his solar system anyway.

Continue reading Trees vs. Solar Panels: Fight!

Atheist Adoptions

This story was spread around a few days ago and got digged. It really is a bit of a non-story though, since it’s based on a Time magazine story that’s dated 7th December 1970. It concerns a case in which a pair of parents in the United States, one an atheist and the other a pantheist, was denied the right to adopt a baby because a judge ruled that since the parents did not believe in a Supreme Being, it would be tantamount to unduly influencing the child and depriving her of the freedom to worship as she sees fit. In any case, as far as I can tell, that ruling was overturned in 1971 in which the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that it was illegal to deny adoption solely on the basis of lack of belief in any religion.

Still, raising this old story did serve to raise public consciousness for a few days about atheists’ rights as the story made the rounds on the internet and on public radio talk shows in the US. Personally, I’ve long found that religious people tend not to accord atheists the same personal belief space that they automatically give to believers of other religions. For example, a Christian instinctively knows that it would be rude to even so much as utter a praise to Jesus in the presence of a Muslim or a Buddhist, but no such consideration is ever afforded to atheists. Yet as a recent special report in The Economist noted, if atheism were considered a religion, it would be the fourth largest religion worldwide.

This is of course because religious people tend to believe that atheists don’t really take their atheism seriously and so are ripe for conversion. This might be true for many atheists and, perhaps even truer for self-proclaimed agnostics, but at the same time, from my observations, many of the religious don’t take their own religious belief particularly seriously either, being religious only as a form of social networking or as taking the path of least resistance.

But for me at least and for others I hope, atheism is a conscious, rational and carefully thought out choice and I dare say that I have spent more time and effort on researching the basis of my beliefs than many religious have spent on theirs. That I think is something that ought to be respected. So if you religiously inclined yourself, keep that in mind the next time you hear someone profess to be an atheist.