Bill O'Reilly: "There must be a god, because I don't know how stuff works"

Oh, my. Watching this video actually made me feel profoundly embarrassed … for Bill O’Reilly. Sort of like when my elderly neighbor clicks the Forward button on his impossibly illogical, obviously faked, right-wing wacko email screeds - and they end up in my In Box. The only difference is that Bill O’Reilly isn’t really old, white haired, kindly and grandfatherly like my neighbor.

No, Bill … it doesn’t really take more faith not to believe in why the tides happen, or how the moon got into it’s familiar orbit. It does take some hubris and stupidity on a level not seen since … well, the last time Pat Robertson opened his mouth publicly.

This is really priceless. Bill O’Reilly is essentially telling us that since he is the ‘poster child’ EPIC FAIL of all science students that have ever snoozed through a classroom lecture, then of course this massive level of ignorance proves the existence of god.

Bill is so wrong that it’s EPIC WRONG. But, fortunately, he provides me the opportunity to address a couple more logical fallacies. (As maven digs through papers to pull out her Baloney Detection Kit)

Argument from ignorance (AKA Appeal to ignorance or God of the Gaps Fallacy): This ‘argument’ goes thusly:

• There is a gap in understanding of some aspect of the natural world.
• Therefore the cause must be supernatural.

Unfortunately for Bill, but good news for the rest of us, there isn’t so much a gap in the understanding of how the tides respond to the gravitational pull of the moon/sun or how the moon/sun/planets got where they are. We may not yet know all the minor details, but we have the broad understanding down pretty well by now.

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Hey, boys and girls! You can come listen to Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson speak - tomorrow evening, right here in Reno, Nevada!

Show up at 7:00 p.m. at the Redfield Auditorium, UNR Campus, for “The World as Seen Through the Lens of a Scientist” presentation by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, the Frederick P. Rose director of the Hayden Planetarium Department of Astrophysics, American Museum of Natural History in New York.

This man does know what causes the tides. How cool is that?

I digress. Back to Bill’s COLOSSAL LACK OF UNDERSTANDING about things like natural sciences, physics and uh, Wikipedia and Google.

Bill hasn’t learned to use the lending library, not to mention the internet, apparently. If he did, he’d know that Mars has a couple of moons. Those moons and ours were the result of a Mars sized chunk of rock hitting the earth. A huge mess resulted, as you can imagine (but Bill O’Reilly can’t). Gravity being what it is - and has been at least since the time of Newton  - that cosmic mess coalesced into larger chunks that fell into orbit (gravity again) around the Earth and Mars. Venus doesn’t have a moon, he’s right there. So what? Was god just being pissy and unfair? Had Venus been bad?

The Sun got there due to a lot of gases, dust and cosmic crap from the Big Bang that also coalesced and collapsed under its own weight - igniting nuclear fusion. Voila. Big fireball. It’s still happening throughout the universe, and we are observing it regularly through advanced astronomy.

Bill is right to suggest that science doesn’t ‘know’ everything. That’s why humans are still doing science - since we’re an endlessly curious bunch.

We didn’t know what caused disease at one time. Does that mean that disease was a punishment from god? That’s what people believed for centuries until science proved the existence of germs, viruses and such. Now we wash our hands, don’t cough on our neighbors and get vaccinated.

It’s a shame to see people wallow in ignorance and then want to be celebrated for it, but this is what Bill O’Reilly is doing. He is also failing to advance understanding - at a time when it is so critically needed - that science isn’t an end in itself, but rather a process and a way of thinking that has given humanity a much safer, healthier and more rewarding existence than they would otherwise have had.

Bill O’Reilly lives in a very, very small, fearful world. Such a pity.

BTW -There are some other informal logical fallacies that come to mind here:

Negative proof fallacy - that, because a premise cannot be proven false (that god did it, for example), then the premise must be true; or that, because a premise can’t be proven true then it must be false. Remember that (in the words of the late Carl Sagan and Marcello Truzzi)  “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.”

Demanding negative proof - this is what O’Reilly is using. He is avoiding the burden of proof for his fantastic claim of ‘god did it’, by demanding proof of the contrary from whomever questions his claim.

Statements like O’Reilly’s also touches upon other illogical fallacies such as Complex Question/Fallacy of Many Questions, Fallacy of a Single Cause, and Proof by Verbosity (especially true of the motor-mouthed O’Reilly. If you can’t win with facts, win by never shutting up) and the always popular with creationists, Either/Or (or False Dilemma).

-maven

Monday Musings: May 3, 2010

“Ironically, that reversal of the New Deal regulations that had operated successfully for 60 years, the Glass-Steagall Act, was referenced by Blankfein in his Tuesday testimony explaining how Goldman and other firms spun out of control.

When asked by Sen. Ted Kaufman, D-Del., how Goldman had morphed from a traditional investment bank backing sound business ventures to a market gambler in fanciful products, Blankfein attributed it, somewhat forlornly, to “a change in the sociology of the business that took place over the last 15 to 20 years.” He added, “I’m not sure that it was precipitated by the fall of Glass-Steagall or it caused Glass-Steagall to fall. …” 

Of course there was nothing inevitable about the fall of Glass-Steagall in 1999, since it was the result of decades of lobbying by the financial industry. That change was followed by the total deregulation of financial derivatives by the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which Rubin had pushed and which President Clinton signed into law.” Robert Scheer column, ‘What a Piece of Crap’

Yes, there was nothing ‘inevitable’ about the fall of Glass-Steagall - beyond what you would expect from nearly 20 years of brainwashing that said any and all government regulation is bad, bad, bad … for business.

Starting with the GOM (Grand Old Man) of the GOP, Ronald Reagan and his witless jokes about government, leading through the Clinton years and ending with Bush, all the hard fought and hard won regulatory gains meant to protect ‘We the People’ were shredded and tossed. The country has been thoroughly sold on the idea that government is necessarily bad, unions are unnecessary and that the only thing that needs to be BIG is the military-industrial complex.

You’re looking at the wreckage of this ‘thinking’ in the Wall Street mess, the toxic oil sludge that is about to flow inexorably across the sensitive wetlands and valuable fishing grounds of Louisiana - thanks to BP and a Tea Party chant of ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’- and miners dying in one lousy, unsafe mine after another.

So far as I can see, very few business below the dizzying heights of Goldman Sachs, are doing very well sans the government regulatory environment of old.

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Monday Musings: April 5, 2010

Oh, gosh. Did you read Bill O’Reilly’s lame defense of the Nazi pope in Sunday’s paper? I never woulda’ realized that Bill is a practicing Roman Catholic nazi pope apologist.

“A number of Catholics have left the church because of the priestly sins, but not me. From the beginning, in Sister Claudia’s first grade class, I understood that the Catholic Church was about Jesus, not Father Flannery. Believe me, I saw so many loons in my Catholic school days that I should be a Buddhist. But it is the theology, not church leadership, that keeps me in the fold.”

Bill O’Reilly

Apparently, had Bill O’Reilly been confronted by Nazi atrocities, he would’ve been able to find that very, very fine line between Super Race philosophy and that ‘bad egg’ - Hitler, and ease himself over it.

Thunk.

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Monday Musings: March 1, 2010

OMG. The very young ‘new guy’ at work just told me that I remind him of Erin Brockovich. What am I supposed to make of that? Especially since I got a major hair style and color overhaul on Saturday, to what I refer to as my ‘cougar’ or Angie Dickinson look.

I must have gotten a panicked look, since he quickly added that it was ‘a compliment’.

When I told my step-daughter about it tonight, as she drove home from work over in the Bay Area, she asked me “did he mean Julia Roberts?”

I wish.

Yikes. So this is the way I’m starting the week, and the weekend wasn’t much better. It was one of those lost weekends where nothing - zip - got done.

The kitchen floor looks like the dog and several racoons ( we have a doggie door ) partied hardy at the midnight hour.

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This atheist doesn't want coal or Bill O'Reilly in her stocking

Updated on Monday, December 7, 2009 at 22:43 by mavenandmeddler

I couldn’t help myself this morning. There was Bill O’Reilly’s column in the Reno Gazette-Journal with the somewhat provocative headline: Have Yourself A Godless Little Christmas. Could it be? Has Bill discovered rational thinking and joined us in the ranks of atheists and secular humanists?

Oh, no. He’s instead all in a huff since it’s obvious that the atheists are intent on spoiling christmas for both Tiny Tim and Bill himself. He refers to us as ‘the coal in the stocking crowd’.

Count me surprised by this momentous news.

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Friday Fish Wrap: September 18, 2009

Today, there was an article in Flying magazine that illustrates a terrible lesson. No matter how experienced, how intelligent and how old we are …

Relaxation of Vigilance by Peter Garrison, Flying, October 2009

“It was one of those fine, late-fall, California desert night: velvety-black, moonless and calm. The 182 tood off from the North Las Vegas Airport bound for Rosamond, California, which is in the Mojave Desert about 70 miles north of Los Angeles. The pilots aboard, two ATOPs who had logged between them 53,000 hours in military and civilian flying, possed ratings and qualifications for practically every kind of aerial conveyance. Their airplane was turbocharged, and equipped with an autopilot and a Garmin G1000 panel that could display, among many other things, a terrain map. They had filed a VFR flight plan to cruise at 10,500 feet and contacted Las Vegas Departure control shortly after taking off. Once in radar contact, the pilot left the frequency briefly to open the flight plan with Reno FSS; then returning to the departure control frequency, he exchanged a couple of routine transmissions with the controller.

The last radar return from the flight came about 13 minutes after takeoff. The 182 was at an altitude of 7,000 feet, climing steadily, with a ground-speed of 100 knots.

A police helicopter on patrol that evening observed an explosion near the summit of 8,500-foot Mount Potosi, 20 miles southwest of downtown Las Vegas. On the way to investigate, he saw several more fireballs ignite on the mountainside, and upon arriving at hte scene, he and his partner found that the cause was an airplane crash. The 182 had flown, apparently under control, into a nearly vertical rock face almost 1,000 feet below the summit of the mountain.

A curious aspect of this accident was that both pilots were prominent in the Civil Air Patrol, which searches for down pilots and aircraft. The left-seat pilot had been the CAP Nevada wing commander for several years; the second pilot was director of operations for the CAP Pacific Region. Neither pilot could have been unaware that the terrain around Las Vegas is mountainous.”

I got the call later in the evening, that my dear, dear friend had flown into a mountain, with another pilot who had just flown an aircraft into Las Vegas for, of all things, NASA.

And so, nearly two years and a lot of second guessing and speculation later, the final report from the NTSB is in.

For all the technology in our world today, the human factor is still the one that we can’t quite account for. I sat there and still asking myself “how in the hell…?”. It still hurts. Getting caught up in the gee-wizardry of complex GPS displays, air traffic controllers in the middle of a shift change. Neither man was a reckless or complacent pilot despite their years of experience. But, they were merely human.

This is a cautionary tale that I’ll carry with me always, and when I’m dangerously close to thinking that I’m always right, always smarter than the next person, and perhaps a bit invincible … I think of Dion and Ed. I get the dose of humility that I need.

It’s a hard fucking lesson, but it’s one that we could all reflect on more often.

Okay, now back to our regularly scheduled progamming….

I’ve just entered the Twilight Zone. That’s the only thing that can explain what I’m going to tell you next.

Bill ‘Windbag’ O’Reilly has just declared himself in favor of a ‘public option’. Yes, you read it right, now listen:

WTF?

Have I misjudged this sweet, if misguided, man all these years? This is what I mean by checking on your assumptions occasionally. But, has Bill actually stepped up and beyond the inflammatory rhetoric and ideologue distortions that have characterized this debate over providing fair, affordable health insurance to every American citizen that wants it?

Meanwhile, back at the health care ranch, nobody with half a brain is buying that Baucus bill, especially the Republicans who were locked in the same room with him. That should tell everybody what they need to know. DOA.

Ron Wyden, Democratic Senator from Oregon is proposing a voucher system as an amendment to the DOA Baucus bill. How lame is that? Ron, take a number right behind Sen. Conrad from North Dakota.

Vouchers have done such a great job at reforming education, that we ought to try it with - gasp! - healthcare. Not. Get a clue. The insurance lobby, as Wyden right claims, is responsible for blocking real reform ( now, there’s a brainstorm ) but fixing it with vouchers? Every employer would have to offer - gasp, again! - a choice of two plans? Whoa.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe has rightly discovered that the Republican Party that she joined so many years back has changed, and perhaps not for the better. Hmmmm, where have I heard this “I haven’t changed, my party has” line before? Arlen Specter?

Moving right along, the impotent rage expressed by the wingnut fringe seems to be wearing thin with more Americans than every. Maybe this was the plan all along. Wow. How devious. Think about it, to support Obama and real health care reform - including a public option - by going out in public and acting like a screaming ideologue nutcase.

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Don’t you have to wonder about the kind of business model being expressed by CNN and FOX News where they pander to the extremist nitwits of the nation, expecting those boneheads to have two cents to rub together and buy from their advertisers?

I’d be thinking about dumping any stock in CNN or Fox.

You have to wonder about big networks - CNN and FOX News with a business model that leans waaaaayyyyy over to the nutcase fringe, apparently to the exclusion of normal Americans. Do they think that people who really believe that Obama is not an American citizen have the dollars to buy anything other than ShamWow?

Oh, well, that about it for the week.

I bagged out of the workplace early today and went for a mental health retreat - camera and hiking boots - up in the Mt. Rose meadows. It’s really nice just before sunset. I highly recommend it. It’s way better than grunting and sweating in a stinky gym.

Oh, and I want to wish a very happy birthday to my sweet sister-in-law, Joan. Have a great day!

So sit and relax. Have a glass of wine.

I’ll let myself out.

Blame Bill O'Reilly and the smell of smoke

Every once in a while, for the entertainment value and because a blogger needs to be ‘pumped up’ to blog, I’ll actually read the dear old bloviating windbag, AKA Bill O’Reilly. Today was just perfect vintage O’Reilly, proving the axiom ( I’m not really sure there is one. Perhaps we should make one up. ) that when you don’t have anything thoughtful to say, make stuff up.

I’ll get to the made up part in a moment, so be patient. First, the mean old O’Reilly part.

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'D' for Duh: Bill O'Reilly predicts Titanic's sinking

Updated on Monday, January 26, 2009 at 20:45 by mavenandmeddler

Updated on Tuesday, January 27, 2009 at 10:39 by mavenandmeddler

“There is much irony in the fact that while liberals have won power in Washington big time, the left-wing media is collapsing all over the place. In the past couple of weeks, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the mother of all liberal publications, the New York Times, all have issued SOS announcements.” Today’s column by Bill O’Reilly.

Wow, that’s astounding Bill - you’ve managed to connect the long standing financial crisis facing newspapers across the United States with ‘liberalism’ and the election of Obama. How do you ever find shirts and jackets with sleeveslong enough to accomodate that stretch?

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