From The Pain

There’s a writeup with the comic, too, which is worth reading. From it:

I know a lot of people will raise the objection that the space program is a pretty frivolous and costly enterprise; shouldn’t we be spending that money on health care/education/poverty, etc.? To these well-meaning people, who do make a valid point, I would respectfully submit that you please go take a flying leap off a low-gravity planetoid. We weren’t ever going to spend that money on health care/education/poverty, etc. because no one in power in this country actually cares about those things. And as long as we’re not going to spend it on that stuff, why not spend it on science? So what if manned space exploration is frivolous? It’s harmless and beautiful and inspiring. It contributes to human knowledge and elevates our estimation of our own species. At least it’s not lethal. The Department of Defense, on which we blow a fifth of our Federal budget, is a gigantic and inefficient engine designed to kill people. So how come we always hear this argument made against the space program instead of the military? It’s like picking a fight with the class geek instead of the class bully. As my instructive chart shows, we’ve blown like three times more accomplishing it’s not clear exactly what in Afghanistan than we spent putting men on the Moon. I am not even counting Iraq, for the cost of which we could probably build a floating pleasure-dome on Io. So how about knock it off with the why-are-we-spending-this-money-on-space horseshit already and do something useful with your pipsqueak pious outrage instead?

Yeah.

And since I looked it up, according to wikipedia: “The final cost of project Apollo was reported to Congress as $25.4 billion in 1973″

From a CNN poll:

Americans estimate that foreign aid takes up 10 percent of the federal budget, and one in five think it represents about 30 percent of the money the government spends. But the actual figure is closer to one percent. [...] The public estimates that the government spent five percent of its budget last year on public television and radio. [...] The real answer is about one-tenth of one percent.

This is hardly news, unfortunately.

The most important areas: Defenese, medicare/medicaid and social security are all about 20% each.

By the way, if PBS got 5% of the US budget, that would be over 170 billion dollars. That could buy a nice set for Charlie Rose!

Some people have contested my claim that San Francisco is widely known as “The City Of Smells”. I’m not claiming that San Francisco is the only city to sport a distinctive set of scents, much like Paris is not the only city with lights… same idea. I have assembled some photographic evidence of this fact.

Caption: A cloud of a smell envelops downtown San Francisco

Caption: Former San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom addresses a crowd of supporters: “If there’s one thing San Francisco is known as, it is The City of Smells.” Newsom continued, “It has been the policy of my administration to preserve and enhance the wide variety of smells that permeate this city, so that they may continue to be enjoyed by all San Franciscans today and for years to come.”

Caption: One of San Francisco’s many hills. The hills were built in the 1970s in order to separate different “scent zones” of the city, giving it the name “The City of Smells”.

Caption: The fire following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake converted many flavors into the smells that San Franciscans take for granted today.

Thanks for reading. I now consider this matter closed.

Miss South Carolina must be interning in their graphics department:

(via media matters)

From CBS News:

It still amazes me that people whose job it is to visualize data would abuse the y axis like that, making it look like the debt had tripled. Nobody can comprehend trillions of dollars, so I think in this case the relative change is far more important than the raw numbers. I’m not trying to minimize the importance of the debt, of course.

I went to the trouble of repairing the chart for them:

The Atlantic made a bunch of recession statistic graphics that are worth a look. Most interesting/surprising to me? The average minutes spent reading per weekend day for 15-to-19-year-olds went from 16 to 5 from 2007 to 2009.

“When I was growing up ‘elitism’ was a word sneered from the lips of the Left, now it is sneered from the lips of the Right. The sneering was ugly then and it is ugly now. Knowledge, science, understanding, literacy and curiosity are absolute goods and to hell with anyone who tries to follow that American habit here and attempts to construct a discourse in which only a despised liberal elite are interested in science, the arts, history and ideas. Such wickedness reminds one of those who opposed Education For All at the end of the nineteenth century. All knowledge should be free and available and all people should be encouraged to acquire it. It will not necessarily lead to liberalism, but it will lead to understanding and a desire for openness and decent, non-tribalist exchanges of the kind that can only enrich our democracy.”

(source)

The Saint Petersburg Times’ PolitiFact.com picked its Lie of the Year, and the distinction goes to retired government employee Sarah Palin, for “death panels”:

Her assertion — that the government would set up boards to determine whether seniors and the disabled were worthy of care — spread through newscasts, talk shows, blogs and town hall meetings. Opponents of health care legislation said it revealed the real goals of the Democratic proposals. Advocates for health reform said it showed the depths to which their opponents would sink. Still others scratched their heads and said, “Death panels? Really?”

I can’t think of a more influential but demonstrably false statement from this year, can you?

“A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.” –Robert Frost

A video about open-mindedness that I’ve been meaning to share for a while:

Facts!

Reihan Salam reads a Pew poll:

“of voters who approve of Obama’s job performance, 7 percent believe that he’s a Muslim”