Every once in a while, I see Bush’s execrable poll numbers, and I think, “Maybe Americans are finally seeing the light. Maybe they’re getting tired of the bloodshed. Maybe they’re realising that the Iraq War was just a scam, devised by people who never served in the military. Maybe they’re getting smarter.”

Then I get an email like this from my sister.

Cindy Sheehan asked President Bush,
“Why did my son have to die in Iraq?”

Another mother asked President Kennedy,
“Why did my son have to die in VietNam?”

Another mother asked President Truman,
“Why did my son have to die in Korea?

Another mother asked President F.D. Roosevelt,
“Why did my son have to die at Iwo Jima?”

Another mother asked President W. Wilson,
“Why did my son have to die on the battlefield of France?”

Yet another mother asked President Lincoln,
“Why did my son have to die at Gettysburg?”

And yet another mother asked President G. Washington,
“Why did my son have to die near Valley Forge?”

Then long, long ago, a mother asked,
“Heavenly Father, why did my Son have to die on a cross outside of Jerusalem?”

The answers to all these are similar–
that others may have life and dwell in peace, happiness and freedom.

No I didn’t write this one…it was e-mailed to me with no author;
and I thought the magnitude and the simplicity were awesome…

And I realise, no, they’re not sick of it yet. It must go on a bit longer. The carnage must continue until the pile of bodies becomes impossible to ignore. When the economy grinds to a halt, when the military can no longer support the insane demends of the president, when the USA can no longer push itself upon the world because it has gone it alone one too many times, only then will the 37% wake up.

No author? I wouldn’t put my name on that either. Bush isn’t Washington, and he certainly isn’t God. He isn’t even Truman, though he would give Nixon a run for his money.

American soldiers are dying in Iraq because Bush hopelessly bungled the war effort.

And now for the morning report on how peeance and freeance are doing in Iraq:

Up to six car bombs have ripped through a Shi’ite area in east Baghdad, killing 46 people and wounding more than 200.

The apparently coordinated attacks on markets in Sadr City have raised fears sectarian reprisals could again plunge Iraq into civil war.

They happened while political leaders met to discuss forming a national unity government that might avert a bloodbath.

Oh, come on, people, turn those frowns upside down.

Meanwhile in Washington, President Bush expressed hope about the future of Iraq, saying he is optimistic that Iraqis will overcome the challenges they face.

Just believe harder, and it’ll work. Faith can do miracles. Keep the emails going. That is all.

Spoiler Alert — Amazing Race fans, beware.

I noticed another example of magical thinking on the latest episode of The Amazing Race, Season 9. (Could that be right? Nine seasons?)

As the teams frustratingly battled San Paolo traffic to get to the Pit Stop, John and Scott invoked “genie power” to try and will themselves to the finish line in time to avoid elimination. However although they claimed it had never let them down before, the invocation wasn’t enough to get them to the line before the sisters, resulting in The Amazing Race host Phil Keoghan having to tell them that they were the first team eliminated from the Race.

For John, invoking “genie power” means crossing your arms in a Barbara Eden pose, and nodding vigourously twice. Though it may not win you a prize, it will earn you the attention of your cab driver.

Maybe it’s true that they always got what they wanted by doing the ‘Genie Ritual’ in the past. Or perhaps they engaged in the other two behaviours that help to prop up these kinds of false beliefs:

1) Change the parameters so you can claim a win, or
2) Forget the times that it doesn’t work.

They couldn’t do that this time though. It was caught on tape for all to see.

A harmless belief? Perhaps. And sorta cute too. But this is just one manifestation of magic thinking, which makes bogus cures and belief systems so tempting. It keeps the Gurus of Get in business, selling their message that if you only believe hard enough, you can influence the universe with your mind (or prayers, or what have you). And the more devout the believer, the more contorted the mental gymnastics when it fails to work.

I confess, I have influenced my surroundings using my mind. But only when I back it up with effort.

It was a birthday for one of the boys last week. We had it at one of those ‘laser tag’ places. It was quite fun, I must say — I found it quite easy to get into Predator mode.

Between games, I listened to the boys playing air hockey, and I kept hearing the new verb ‘to verse’.

“I’m next,” said one boy.
“No,” said another. “I’m versing him next.”

It would appear that to verse someone is to compete against them in a game or contest. I’ve only been hearing it in the last few years, only among schoolkids. Apparently they’ve backformed it from Latin versus (against), the little dickenses. It make sense though. Normally you’d hear ‘versus’ in a situation like ‘X vs. Y’. By coincidence, this sounds like 3rd person singular ‘verses’, and the kids have inferred the infinitive ‘to verse’, with its inflected form ‘versing’.

For comments: Would anyone say ‘I want to verse you’ where you are? Who would say it? How long ago did you hear it?

It’s not liberal atheists burning down black churches; it’s white Christians.

Three Birmingham college students were arrested and charged Wednesday in connection with a string of Alabama church fires that is described in court papers as a joke that “got out of hand,” authorities said.

Huh. I don’t get it. Maybe it’s Brother Theodore funny rather than Seinfeld funny.

They burned down five churches with predominantly black congregations, and four with white.

Moseley told investigators that he and Cloyd set the other four fires “as a diversion to throw investigators off,” the affidavit states. When questioned by investigators, “Moseley said the diversion obviously did not work.”

Of course, burning down black churches is a seasonal sport in the American South. I remember hearing about a similar spate of arson around 1992. I was discussing it with a Utah girl at the time. She was amazed that people were burning down black churches.

Finally she said, “Why don’t they just paint the churches a different colour?”

“God bless you, my good woman,” I said.

Many people think that they can influence the universe with only their thoughts. It goes by ‘faith’, ‘manifesting’, or ‘creating your own reality’.

Whenever I run into one of these souls, I sometimes tell them about the Parking Spot Effect, which I’ve blogged about before, and which was mentioned in Gilovich’s “How We Know What Isn’t So. Here’s how the PSE works: You believe — really believe! — that you’re going to get a spot, and your thoughts somehow go out into the universe and cause people to vacate spots close to where you’d like to park.

I was telling a dear friend about this over the weekend, only to find that she was a fervent believer in PSE. “Oh, yeah, that totally works. I do that all the time,” she said.

“It could work,” I said. “Or it could be that you’re just noticing the times you get a good spot and not noticing the times you don’t.”

She didn’t like that very much. I think I was being insufficiently believing.

I explained how you could test the idea statistically. Compare how often you get a ‘good spot’ to how often not. Time it. Try ‘believing’ and ‘not believing’.

But she refused the test. Her reason? “If you believe it, you wouldn’t do the test. You have to believe all the way, not sort of believe and sort of doubt.”

And so her faith in PSE will go unchallenged by facts.

Why is it that the PSE seems to have such a hold on the minds of credulous folk? I think it may be the fuzziness of the test. How often would you completely fail to find a spot and have to return home? Never. So you have a huge chance of finding some spot within a wide range of time.

A good test would look like this:
The PSE works if you
a) do a concrete ritual to influence the universe.
The ritual needs to be concrete so that you can try doing it and not doing it, and compare the effects either way.
Once you’ve done the ritual,
b) find a ‘good spot’
c) within a ‘narrow range’ of time.
And then you define ‘good spot’ and ‘narrow range’ in terms of meters and minutes.

Compare this to what folks usually do with the PSE:
a) ‘believe’ somehow, which is very fuzzy,
b) find some spot (revising the definition of what a ‘good spot’ is so that any spot you get is a ‘good one.’)
c) within any range of time.

Under these circumstances, it would be difficult for the test to fail, and there are a lot of out-clauses.

The PSE shares a lot of features with other kinds of traditionally religious faith. The Priest says “Exercise faith and you’ll get something that you want.”
If it works, the system is considered true.
If it doesn’t work, extend the parameters and definitions so it still seems to work.
If even that fails, you can claim the conditions weren’t met (you didn’t have enough faith), or the desired outcome wasn’t part of the Plan.

Anything to salvage the belief system. Just don’t examine it too closely. When you examine something fake too closely, it breaks. If it’s real, it works whether you believe in it or not.

The odious “PATRIOT Act” has been renewed by the Senate. (Warning: PDF link.)

Here in Australia, we have a mostly functioning opposition party. It is vocal against the Howard government, and makes the Liberals fight for everything they get. Usually.

It’s sad that the Democrats in the USA aren’t able to do the same. However, if there is a bright spot, it exists in the form of senators like Patty Murray (D-WA). She was one of only ten senators to vote against this legislation. She is a Democrat who isn’t afraid to act like a Democrat, and that gets my support.

It’s hard not to feel worn out sometimes, not only by a corrupt White House, but by a Democratic Party who is so fearful of conflict that they sell out every time. Senator Murray’s opposition to the Bush regime is the closest thing to an opposition party — and a conscience — that we have in American government today.

Who wouldn’t like their computer to warn them about their language? After all, computers aren’t intrusive or annoying enough yet. Laura from lanceandeskimo.com has noticed that Eudora warns you if your emails (coming and going) are a little spicy.

For one thing, Eudora assigns a “chili pepper rating” from one to three. Actually, two to three. No one has ever gotten one chili pepper. I attempted this feat several times by sending myself emails with various levels of swearing in them, but finally I gave up. On the way, though, I did make a few interesting observations.

They are interesting — and hilarious. (But not work-safe. You are warned.)

But surely it wouldn’t be hard to surpass the performance of Eudora’s classifier. From these examples, it seems to examine a very narrow n-gram window (2 or 3 max), doesn’t attempt word-sense disambiguation, and leaves out some really juicy lexical items. Does Eudora do this poorly on spam detection? This makes me want to trawl for filthy Usenet messages and build a better classifier. Anything for science.

While my mind’s in the gutter, I should mention that ‘Good Reason blog’ scores a slatternly 23.81% on the Slut-o-Meter.