An EToWJB Update

I feel like I have been slacking on my blogging duties in a big way. A lot of it has to do with available time, which has been an issue lately. Another lame excuse is the lack of interesting news since there is a lot of issues I'm feeling strongly about lately (hence the rant the other day). However, days like today make it easy to blog. Here are a few interesting e-topics I discovered today while exploring the internet instead of working. And by "exploring the internet" I mean "reading the CarpetBagger Report for 5 minutes."

First, let me admit to you a deep, dark secret. As a freshman at UCSD I took Philosophy 10: Intro to Logic. This class was at 9:00 am, which was way too early for me that year, so I rarely made it to class (maybe 50% of the time). I got sick maybe 10 minutes into the first midterm and left to vomit on my way to Student Health, where they checked my poo and declared that I had food poisoning. (This was not a shock since I had eaten breakfast at ClubMed, one of the more sketchy eating facilities at UCSD). After that, I missed maybe 3 straight classes. When I returned to class with a new determination, I was lost because they had somehow moved into the math part. Therefore I dropped the class and took my only "W" during my college tenure. Where am I going with this? Well, the part that I actually learned from this class dealt with logical fallacies. As it turns out, other people have picked up on Bush's frequent use of the logical fallacy called "Straw Man" where you create a false weak argument to make yours look better. Read the link to get a better explanation. The CarpetBagger Report has referred to this a few times now, and there has also been response to the AP article (that I linked to) in the conservative PowerLine blog. One example of a Bush Straw Man: "Now, I understand some say, well, maybe they're just isolated kind of people that are angry and took out their anger with an attack. That's not how I view them." Here's the thing: there are no "some" that he's talking about. This was also a big point in the movie "Outfoxed" about FoxNews. I could make the argument "some people think that educating our kids is bad, I say that we need to do it." The fact is there are really no people that say education is bad, but I would be trying to make myself look better by making up this fictional group of "some people." Read the article and see other examples.

Second, I also found another interesting report through the CarpetBagger Report. It shows which states give the most to taxes and which states get the most money from the feds. It turns out that 9 of the Top 10 states that spend the most relative to what they give are states that generally vote Republican. 8 of the Top 10 that spend the least relative to what they give are Democrats. For example, for every $1 that Mississippi gives to the government in taxes, it gets $1.77. California, on the other hand only gets $0.79 for every dollar it gives in taxes. What does this really mean? I don't know. But I guess reducing big government isn't that important to some Republican voters. Note: there are probably other factors that go into the numbers, but that does not make them less interesting.

Finally, I realize that I have not given out the Pat Robertson Douchebag of the Week award for over two weeks, but I promise that there will be a comprehensive edition within a few days. It just means I have to start giving the monkeys more incentive to type faster. I'm heading to the South Pasadena farmer's market tonight. Maybe they'll have some good bananas. Or pistachios.