FairAndUNbalanced.com

 

From PZ Myers:

Clearly, the reason I sleep well is because I’m an atheist — you know, unconflicted by storms of Catholic guilt or Protestant sanctimony. At least, that’s the implication of a study. After all, when it’s called a “study”, you know it’s serious business.

A new study out of Baylor University finds that 73% of atheists and agnostics sleep at least seven hours a night, compared to only 55% of Baptists and 63% of Catholics. Atheists and agnostics also reported fewer difficulties falling asleep at night. The findings held even after controlling for details like age and socioeconomic status.

Gosh, it fits my personal experience as an atheist, so I get that little buzz of confirmation. I don’t have any personal experience sleeping as a Baptist or Catholic, but I still get a little buzz at the idea that the Others are tossing and turning at night. And now, when my religious friends (if I had any!) show up at work tired and red-eyed, I get the smug satisfaction of being able to tell them they ought to become an atheist so they can get a good night’s rest for a change.

If I were an idiot.

I took a look at the study.

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From Margaret and Helen:

You are right. The number of US COVID deaths is wrong. 200,000 Americans have not died of COVID-19. And you should share this with everyone.

If you don’t believe that almost 200 thousand Americans have died from COVID-19, you are right.

I dare you to keep reading…

There seem to be two different but related theories out there suggesting that the number is closer to 10,000. One theory is that hospitals are making more money by recording as many deaths as possible as COVID deaths. Another theory suggests that it isn’t about money, but rather its about the way you count COVID deaths even if the patient died of something else. In that theory, a patient who has COVID but dies in a car crash would be counted as a COVID death. Neither are true. First, hospitals don’t have that power. Second, there are not that many bad people. And last, scientists are not that stupid.

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From The Propaganda Professor:

You’ve no doubt seen it more times than you can count: a friend or relative shares something on social media that is manifestly erroneous, to the point of being self-parody. Yet it’s something that this person, and many others, passionately and unquestioningly believe to be accurate and valid. They have passed it on because they saw someone else pass it on, and it resonated with their beliefs, so they shared it without bothering to do one second of research about it. They, in short, have exhibited blatant confirmation bias — which, as the name suggests, is a bias toward confirming the validity of your biases.

Actually confirmation bias consists of three biases in one. First there’s selection bias, which causes you to focus only (or mostly) on information and narratives that support your beliefs. If you believe, for instance, that undocumented (“illegal”) immigrants pose a threat to your safety, then you might zero in on news stories about the instances of such individuals committing crimes — and ignore (or deny) statistics showing that they actually commit fewer crimes than U.S. citizens.

Then there’s interpretation bias. Not only do you selectively seek out facts, you selectively interpret the facts you find. Continuing with the anti-immigrant example, you’d attribute the criminal behavior of the individuals in question to their being undocumented immigrants, rather than considering other factors that are probably much more important. If the criminal is a murderer, for instance, it would be much more logical (if also absurd) to focus on the fact that he is male, since males commit by far the greater share of violent crimes, and thus gender is certainly a much more significant factor than immigration status.

Finally there’s memory bias, which prompts you to be selective and even creative in what you remember, for the sake of supporting your beliefs. Thus, if you’re an anti-immigration person, you would recall all the cases in which immigrants commit crimes, but not have such strong remembrance about the instances when American citizens commit the same crimes. Furthermore, you might even remember those select incidents rather differently from how they actually occurred.

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From Frances Langum:

The Laura Ingraham Hour of BS includes the very stupid insistence that Antifa is setting wildfires.

This is the job she gets paid for, otherwise she’d be answering phones at the Judicial Watch “offices.” And really, who’s the bigger joke, Ingraham or Victor Davis Hanson, because I do not know.

LAURA INGRAHAM (HOST): Did Biden anywhere in that speech lay out his solution to prevent any wildfires in the future or the people who are intentionally setting them in California, including Antifa?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON (GUEST): No, he didn’t and I’m looking out of my window right now and I can hardly see anything because it’s dusk but it looks like a nuclear winter.

Oregon law enforcement has debunked this talking point because sadly they had to use resources to do so.

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From Max’s Dad:

I mean this President has appointed some real doozies. Some of the dumbest, most corrupt grifters known to man have been given power by the Grifter in Chief. I mean we’ve had the likes of Rick Perry in charge of nukes and Betsy DeVos in charge of children and Mike Flynn in charge of national security and Omarosa in charge of whatever and an endless line of liars talking to the press. But as corrupt and grifty as they were nobody has actually suffered an actual mental breakdown as Michael Caputo the CDC hack has.

Live on Facebook, the home for mentally ill morons all over the world, Caputo began to rant in a real concerning manner stating for the Facebook record, “you understand they’re going to have to kill me because unfortunately I think this is where this is going “……Who “they” is depends on which voice Caputo hears in his head as he continued “I dont like being alone in Washington…” and carrying on about “shadows on the ceiling of my apartment, there alone, shadows are so long”………Uh yeah

Oh theres more….

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From News Corpse:

Trump is losing bigly to a candidate that he says is not only mentally deficient, but also a radical socialist bent on destroying America. If you can’t beat someone like that, you might as well give up.

In the latest Fox News poll (which Trump has a love/hate relationship with), Biden is beating Trump with a majority of likely voters (51-46%). Biden’s favorables are positive (54-45%), while Trump’s are underwater (46-53%). Biden is also leading on an array of the issues most important to the electorate. According to Fox News…

“Likely voters trust Trump over Biden on just one issue: the economy, by 5 points. Biden is favored on racial inequality (+12), coronavirus (+8), health care (+8), Supreme Court nominations (+7), and immigration (+7 points). Voters also trust Biden over Trump on ‘policing and criminal justice’ (+7), while the two are rated about evenly on ‘maintaining law and order’ (Biden +2).”

Trump has been especially obsessed of late with what he is characterizing as a nation besieged by violent insurrectionists like Black Lives Matter (a peaceful equal justice advocacy movement) and Antifa (a figment of Trump’s imagination). So it’s particularly notable that Biden is regarded by voters as the better candidate on policing and Trump’s adopted catch phrase, “law and order.” His hysterical rhetoric is having zero effect on voters, or worse (from his perspective), it’s alienating them and driving them in the opposite direction.

Perhaps the most noteworthy finding in this poll is that voters regard Biden as more fit mentally than Trump. The poll shows a majority of 51% attesting to Biden’s mental soundness. Conversely, Trump has a majority of 51% worried about his mental infirmity.

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From Infidel753:

This November, one of two things will happen. Either Biden will be elected president, or Trump will be re-elected. Many people fervently believe there should be some third option. There isn’t. It’s going to be one of those two.

This post is addressed to those who, for whatever reason, don’t like Biden. Maybe you consider him too centrist or too old or too old-fashioned or “Republican-lite” or whatever. Maybe you think the Tara Reade accusation has credibility (though there are good reasons to believe otherwise). Maybe you think the process by which millions of rank-and-file Democrats chose the nominee (from among a remarkably large and varied group of candidates) was tainted in some way. Maybe you hold that your vote has to be earned and Biden hasn’t done this or that thing that qualifies him as having done so.

None of that is a good enough reason to let Trump be re-elected.

None of that is a good enough reason to let him saddle the whole country with a 7-2 majority of reactionaries and theocrats on the Supreme Court for decades to come.

None of that is a good enough reason to risk four more years of migrant family separation and kids in cages, or of rhetoric which blatantly scapegoats Latinos, Muslims, and whatever other minority makes a convenient target.

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From Michael John Scott in MadMikesAmerica:

Bob Woodward writes a book, Rage, exposing the many faults of the full-grown fool who squats in the White House. Woodward’s revelations were powerful, as his quotes come directly from Trump, and they are recorded. So one would think Democrats would be applauding Mr. Woodward for his research, but NO, that’s not the way Democrats work.

You see, on November 3rd people are being asked to determine who will be the president for the next four years: Biden or Trump. Bob Woodward, of Watergate fame, is being attacked by liberal Democrats because he didn’t warn the public of Trump’s stance.

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From Tommy Christopher:

The hashtag #AllBuildingsMatter was a top trending topic on the 19th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, generating outrage that appears to have been the entire point.

The hashtag was intended as an object lesson for people who say “All Lives Matter,” which is itself a retort to Black Lives Matter — both the phrase and the movement. It’s based on a canny chunk from comic Michael Che’s stand-up routine in which he contrasts entreaties to Black people that they should “get over” injustices historic and recent with the 9/11 mantra of “Never Forget.”

“That’s why this September, I’m getting a t-shirt that says ‘All Buildings Matter,’ see how that works out,” he says.

The hashtag generated over 100,000 tweets, including those that advanced the object lesson in question, those who were outraged by the hashtag, and those who explained that the outrage was exactly the point — as well as other provocative reactions.

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From Hackwhackers:

Kristin Urquiza’s Message Increasingly Powerful

The memorable line from her is that her dad’s “only pre-existing condition was trusting Trump.”

Now, Kristin is commenting on the revelations in Bob Woodward’s new book “Rage” that contains, in Trump’s own words, damning evidence that he downplayed and lied about the virus for months, and still does when he says he didn’t want “people” (i.e. the stock market) to “panic.” Kristin told reporters earlier today:

“Sure, my dad did not panic, but instead, he died,” said Kristin Urquiza, founder of Marked By COVID, a group founded in honor of her father, Mark Anthony Urquiza, who died from the illness caused by the novel coronavirus. “These are serious actions that have resulted in insurmountable, preventable loss of life, and I’d much rather have dealt with a father who was a little scared versus one who was led to his death.” (our emphasis)

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