Headline Muse, 8/15

Casting blame has already begun
Not a group will be spared ere we’re done
So we don’t have to think
Of the grim headline ink:
“Man decapitates disabled son”

Headline:Police: La. man decapitated disabled son, 7

The comments after the New York Daily News version of the article are an exercise in cognitive dissonance. The death has been blamed on Obama, on Republicans, on “trailer trash”, on whites, on liberals, on conservatives, and on “black DNA”. No one, yet, is owning up to the notion that the father is a member of their own group.

In the complete absence of any info about his beliefs, we get:

Commenter “New Yorker” writes: Hmm, I’m guessing the man was an atheist. No ‘Fear of God’ . . . . . yet.

Commenter “Theoham” writes: Louisiana is in the bible belt. Total rat dropping!

*****
Even (perhaps especially) when confronted with a horrible story of human behavior, we make a distinction between the actions of that person and anything remotely associated with ourselves.

Raise Your Hand!

Republicans across the land
Will stand with those who raise their hands
Thus caving to the right’s demands
For “No New Taxes!”
They’ll hear no ifs, nor ands, nor buts,
No compromise! More cuts! More cuts!
And showing they’re completely nuts
They raise their axes.

It’s just exactly what was feared—
The moderates have disappeared—
They’ve all marched right; it’s rather weird
But quite expected
Some seem quite real; some must be fakes
But all of them will lie like snakes
They’ve figured out, that’s what it takes
To get elected.

But raising hands one August night
And claiming they will fight the fight
Might put them in a different light
Come next November
They’ll do their best to sugar-coat
Because they need the centrist vote;
We saw the hands, and we made note,
And we’ll remember.

Via Ed, a bit on the surreal moment from the GOP debate. Given that Perry was not among the debaters, he needs to have his answer put on record–preferably before a similarly minded crowd.

Lady Franklin’s Lament, 2011

“Lady Franklin’s Lament” (AKA “Lord Franklin) is a haunting ballad, telling of Lord Franklin’s British Arctic Expedition (1845), an attempt at finding the fabled Northwest Passage. For centuries, that passage has been a dream; climate change is making that dream a reality. First, my favorite version of the song, then my update:

They sought a passage through the frozen seas
Where brave men searched and died for centuries
The dream of merchant-men and sailors too
Amid the icy white, a waterway of blue

To sail from Newfoundland to Beaufort Sea
A Northwest Passage when from ice it’s free
Now rising temperatures and cloudless skies
Have opened channels, and cleared the Passage prize

A land of Eskimo and polar bear
The metal ship is an intruder there
Once thought impossible, a sight so strange
What has happened, to bring about this change?

The lure of money means we’re bound to see
Canada challenged over sovereignty
This Northern treasure, never seen before
The perfect reason, for economic war

The north is changing at a growing pace
Because of challenges we all must face
The fate of Franklin no tongue can tell
Now I worry… about our fate as well.

Via NPR this morning, a story on the Northwest Passage. Clearly, one could write entire books on the subject, so any brief story will be necessarily incomplete, but it touches on a number of interesting bits. For me the most frightening is that the US sees the Northwest Passage as international waters, and Canada sees it as an internal waterway. Oh, and we can add to this the notion that perhaps a fifth of the world’s oil might lie under Arctic ice.

Think about that.

Alien Invasion

Watching “Curiosity: Alien Invasion”; it occurs to me that we really don’t know how aliens will react toward us–different “experts” will justify their own hunches–but we have a pretty decent guess as to how we would act toward aliens. This was from the old blog, a couple of years back:
*****

Daringly, erringly,
Children in Panama
Saw a strange being, and
All held their breath:

Certain the creature was
Extraterrestrial,
Showed they were human, and
Beat it to death.

In some of the pictures, the “creature” looks like E.T., or “a fetus”, or some unidentifiable alien being. In the video, it is fairly clearly (to my eye, anyway) a three-toed tree sloth. But “teens beat sloth to death” is not nearly so cool a headline as “unidentifiable creature found in Panama” (the title of the linked video). Note the use of “unidentifiable” rather than “unidentified”; a small but crucial difference.

There are a great many stories already, and there will be more. Even CNN is going with the “unknown/unknowable” angle. As of this writing, Google news lists a mere 120 news articles. Any bets?

My favorite coverage thus far is this nicely skeptical article:

The story begins at a waterfall near the town of Cerro Azul, Panama. A group of teens, four in all, were playing in the area when the mystery creature, a large hairless monster, shuffled out from a cave hidden by the waterfall. According to most accounts, the creature approached the boys. Growing alarmed, they began to throw rocks at the monster. They continued to do so until it — Gollum, E.T., monster, whatever — stopped moving. Satisfied that they had killed the hairless mystery creature, the Panamanian emissaries of Earth tossed E.T. into the water.

But in all the pictures being circulated on the web, E.T./Gollum looks more like a hairless sloth (and has been identified as such by many who have seen a full body picture of the Panamanian mystery creature), which means that the animal moves at an extremely slow pace (it is difficult to move across the ground on its hooked-claw feet). Which means that the teens might have been alarmed when they first saw the creature but could have easily outran it, so remaining frightened at something that presents no real danger probably did not occur. And they certainly did not have to pelt the mystery creature with stones until it died. That the teens decided to make a sport out of hitting the mystery creature with rocks sounds like a typical teen reaction. But it is doubtful they did it out of fear.

So they lied. They’re teenagers. It’s what they do best, besides eat and sleep and whine about being bored.

There are other news outlets showing evidence that it is a sloth:

…

Nevertheless the local media has played up the story, reporting that zoologists are unable to identify the “alien-like” creature. But DNA testing should soon confirm what most are saying: the animal is a sloth.

As a consequence of a slow news cycle towards the end of summer, August and September tend to be peak months for sightings of “strange” and “unidentified” creatures including unusual marine life, malformed animals and the mythological beasts like the Chupacabra, the Mongolian Death Worm, Big Foot, and the Loch Ness Monster.

I wonder how long it will take CNN to correct themselves?

It’s a sloth. They are teenagers. Ignorance->fear->kill it. No wonder the aliens all choose to show themselves to isolated individuals with lousy cameras. They are scared!

Sunday Schooling

In honor of the completely irrelevant pre-season win by the Browns last night, a reposting of a musing on the popularity of those competing Sunday activities…

Predictably, we see reports
Of godly, fundamental sorts
Complaining that we worship sports
Instead of god

It happens once or twice a year
When tournaments or playoffs near
And empty pews are cause to fear
The other squad

The Lord commands for all to see
To “have no gods ahead of me”
Which clearly makes idolatry
A mortal sin

Their future hanging by a thread,
They claim that fans have been misled
They know, if they went head to head
They wouldn’t win

It should not surprise anyone to find, on CNN’s Belief Blog, a report on christian churches coveting the fanaticism of… well, fans. Sports fans. Apparently, idolatrous worship of real, live athletes is getting in the way of worshipping imaginary beings.

“That’s … one of the major things I decry in my book,” said Tom Krattenmaker, author of “Onward Christian Athletes,” who’s based in Portland, Oregon. “The lack of that sort of prophetic distance from sports or the willingness to critique sports, the lack of setting priorities so that the worship of God is more important than this idolatrous relationship with sports.”

Sports worship, of course, predates christianity by centuries, but that doesn’t fit the narrative:

“There have been changes… in Christianity, particularly in evangelicalism over the years, and as sports has increased its popularity and increased its ways of invading our lives,” said Shirl James Hoffman, author of “Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sport.”

“Instead of exploring creative ways sport might serve true religious purposes such as spiritual growth and enrichment, the Christian community has seized on sport as a tool of status enhancement, advertising, and evangelism,” he says.

Maybe it’s because I have the Onion News Network on TV right now, but I’m tempted to think that this report recognizes the absurdity, and simply hangs it out there.

Sport is huge in human history. What an incredible achievement, to reach a point where we have comfortably met our immediate and future needs to an extent that allows us to compete with one another, not for food or shelter, but for sport! This, more than religion, is the marker of humanity. As Friedrich Schiller put it, “Man… is only completely a man when he plays.”

I know many people who find sports obsession to be silly. Perhaps. We can probably reach near 100% agreement that other people’s sports obsessions are silly. But in this particular war over weekend activities, I know which side gets my support.

The Last Straw (Poll)

We see now how the voting went—
The winners now can holler—
With so much time and money spent,
How many votes per dollar?

Or maybe (gosh, I’m cynical)
A different stat to note:
In reaching Ames’s pinnacle…
How many bucks per vote?

The Iowa straw poll is the furthest thing imaginable from a scientifically valid sampling; it costs money (often paid by the candidates’ organizations) for a self-selected, non-representative sample to cast votes… for an incomplete representation of the available candidates, all of whom might not have even joined the race at this point.

So it’s no surprise that more straw poll winners have lost the eventual general election than have won it.

But that’s not my question. I have two questions, neither of which I have been able to find answers for. Perhaps it’s too early, perhaps I am an idiot and have been looking in the wrong place.

First: How did Rick Parry (with an A, for America. An A for IowA) do? I have heard tales of Parry being counted with Perry, and of Parry voters being yelled at by poll officials, but I have seen no official mention of Parry votes in any tally.

Second (and far more interesting): If we divide votes received by dollars spent, how do the candidates rank? In this straw poll, it is perfectly within the rules (I think–please correct me if I am mistaken) for a candidate to pay the voting fee for individuals, in exchange for their pledge to cast their vote for that candidate. So it seems to me a very reasonable question–once we factor in how much money each candidate has poured into this event, how did they do?

If anyone knows, I’ll gladly update this post with the info!

Oh, Wait.

My God is pretty self-assured, and quite convinced He’s right.
He made me in His image, so He’s green-eyed, blond, and white;
And He’s very, very wrathful with the folks who disagree;
He’ll hold a grudge for centuries—Oh, wait—that might be me.

He’s insecure enough to want to hear how much you love Him
And He never will forgive you if there’s someone else above Him;
He’ll jealously react to any threat to His domain
By smiting all His enemies—Oh, wait—that’s me again.

He’ll make the world a better place for those who think like Him
For those in opposition, well, the situation’s grim;
He’ll call jihad, or else crusade—some form of Holy War
Because He knows He’s always right—Oh, wait—that’s me once more.

He’s handsome, bearded, steely-eyed, deep-voiced and somewhat haughty
So wonderful, his naughty bits are never seen as naughty
But perfectly proportioned, grand and firm and never shrinking,
A miracle of awesomeness—Oh, wait—that’s wishful thinking.

****

From the old digs, a million years ago. Originally a response to a British poll that found (surprise!) that people anthropomorphize god, and see Him as a “him”, complete with male gender. But of course god looks and acts like us–sometimes it seems god’s only function is to externally justify our internal evils.

Living The Dream

Look at the fearless Republican candidates
Telling the people their comfortable lies
Magical thinking, revisionist history,
Alternate versions as seen through their eyes

Compromise seen as a sign of your weakness,
No one admits to his previous deals
Matching the facts is completely irrelevant
Truth is determined by how a thing feels

Lying is raised to an art or a science
The bigger, the better, or that’s how it seems
People are frightened by too much reality
Better to peddle them beautiful dreams

There in the crowds, cotton candy surrounds them,
Melting away into sugary air
Sweet little nothings, political promises
Served by the ton at the Iowa Fair.

In the New York Times, an editorial, “Magical Unrealism“, examining the antics of not the extremists, but the putative center of the Republican party. It’s one thing when the wingnut faction lives in fantasy land; it’s quite another when the mainstream is building castles in clouds.