OMG
The Intelligent Design approach to the scientific proof of God.
In other words, you know what happens when you assert: you make an ass out of er and t.
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November 30, 2005
November 27, 2005
The Singularity Is Near
Ray Kurzweil is a very interesting man. He's one of those scientists who is also incredibly accomplished; the intellectual rubber hits the practical road. Essence shapes Accident.
Some may look at his books as the pie-in-the-sky-ish or over the top, or cartoonish, but they miss the point: there's always value in blue-skying. And even more value in faith. Yes, faith. Not Faith like I'm sure the literalists will insist you accept, but the kind of faith that's based on prior accomplishments. The kind of faith that tells you the road will continue past where you can see, or the sun will rise tomorrow, or that the process of learning increases the rate at which you can learn. In other words, faith is the entropy, the free energy from which we humans can direct our own destinies.
A synopsis of Ray's new book, from one of his websites:
The Singularity is an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today—the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity.
Tall order. But that's the beauty of exponential growth. I'm sure you've heard of the term, “exponential growth”. Most people, I think, have. But there's a difference in understanding it and really feeling it—that is, getting it on a visceral level.
Humans tend to think in linear ways. Velocity is an easier concept than acceleration. We know a thing. We can know things about that thing. But beyond that, we start to lose our own traction: consider what you might know about the things about the things about a thing? Meta-meta-meta. Meh-meh-meh. M-E-H-meh.
And see? I've introduced a new concept, gone and switched gears on you. I'm now talking about metadata. What does that have to do with exponential curves? Well, I'll leave that to you to think about (and after? try thinking about how you thought about it. And then, in having thought about how you thought about it, will understanding how you went about understanding help you understand more quickly in the future?).
Anyhoo. The Singularity is Near is the book I'm reading now. Kurzweil has some crazy-ass ideas, ones that fuck with my sense of the relationship between matter and energy and information. It makes me think of protein folding and IC fabrication and how some cafes will stack glasses or mugs between plastic trays. It makes me think of sub-atomic goings-on and the Egyptian pyramids and genetically-engineered square watermelons and a little brain game my 4th Grade teacher did with us involving a glass jar, marbles and sand. Yeah, it's one of those kinds of books.
I don't think it's going to sit well in my noggin. In fact, I know it won't. But I have faith in my own abilities to adapt to new and even radical ways of thinking, ways of looking at the universe. It'll stew for a good long time, and I'll reconcile it eventually with things that happen on our human time- and activity-scales, even if it means acknowledging that even those scales aren't fixed, and are, in fact, accelerating, and are relative—to their own prior iteration.
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The Retreat of the Solidus
Ebb and flow. Yin and Yang. Donny and Marie.
Just as the tide slaps and slops the shore with foamy hand, as a till lifts and turns a loamy land, the come and the go (the come and the leave, for that matter) answers to nothing but time—and here I sit banging the chime of gratuitous rhyme.
Quoth the raven nevermore. Dirty whore.
There are creation times and tearing-down times; but creation also brings separations, boundaries; and destructions also bring freedom and open spaces. Good and Evil don't like periodicity, find it ununderstandable. Probably like you are feeling right now. Don't worry, I'm feeling the same.
And thus comes the solidus:
sol•i•dus |ˈsälidəs|
noun ( pl. -di |-ˌdī|)
1 another term for slash 1 (sense 2).
2 (also sol•i•dus curve) Chemistry a curve in a graph of the temperature and composition of a mixture, below which the substance is entirely solid.
3 historical a gold coin of the later Roman Empire. [ORIGIN: from Latin solidus (nummus).]
ORIGIN Latin, literally ‘solid.’
It's odd that three definitions of the same word should be so different; stranger still, that three wildly different definitions manage to conflate, then meet at a strange tipping point (dare I say, a critical point along its solidus curve) where all three meet, refuse to overlap, and also refuse to withdraw.
Yeah, I'm in a weird state of mind.
Through misunderstanding and[solidus]or miscommunication I have been accused of blurring the distinction between altruism and selfishness, and consequently, of misinterpreting the altruistic efforts of some as utterly selfish.
More misunderstanding[solidus]miscommunication: I never blur the distinction. Outright, I will say directly that there simply is no difference, per se. Sufficiently indirect selfishness is indistinguishable from altruism. There, I said[solidus]wrote it.
Then again, look to the people that are just giving a “head's up” when really, they're gossiping and who speak for others without permission and who lord themselves over others, all in the name of “tough love”. There, intention is everything. Such indirect selfishness, when genuine, often comes at a shorter-term expense to a friendship or other relationship. If you're getting your jollies giving a heads-up or you find yourself speaking out of turn to prop up your own moral authority or the “tough love” routine is puffing up your sense of place or elevating your own position, chances are....chances are....well, you know what I'm getting at (at the very least, my favorite pastry chef will recall a conversation about altruism).
It's the coin of the realm these days, the currency among the constellation of players in my life, all of whom hover over the wrong place in that curve, trying to solidify that which must necessarily remain fluid. And they do it by deconstructing the separation between and and or, and by running roughshod over whatever boundaries are there.
Reach exceeds grasp and precious things come off the high shelf and shatter and the only reaction is that someone else should clean up the broken glass.
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November 25, 2005
Movable Tradition
A couple of weeks ago, I agreed to do a thing that I didn't really want to do: spend Thanksgiving day with people I don't know. Normally, this isn't something that bothers me. In fact, I'm one of those people that thrives in a group of large people, and although often it takes me a while to engage strangers in that kind of situation, I eventually do. And it's fun. And I always learn a thing, even if that thing is that I don't ever want to be around that person again. Kidding. Kinda.
It didn't have anything to do with where we were spending it. In fact, if it were other than Thanksgiving (well, or Christmas), I would have been eager to go. There are just some traditions, I guess, that when they “get in” early enough and/or deep enough, they stick with you no matter how far away from your origins you discover your own true center.
As I said, Thanksgiving and Christmas—the “dreaded Winter Holidays” as Sam calls them—have me wanting to be with my family (including the chosen family of friends as well) or to be a homebody, hunkered down with any kind of food and a stack of movies, huddled next to Sam and shuttered away from the rest of the world, and, most importantly, not around a bunch of strangers.
So we went, and I'm so very glad I did. Matt Consola had graciously offered to include us in his family's holiday—30 people at dinner!—and so we headed down to San Jose (not all that far from the Mothership, as it turns out).
I met some people when we walked through the door—the kitchen was a crazyhouse of activity as you might imagine—and headed out back. Matt showed me his father's “year 'round” garden and we talked about Italian peppers and how I am still convinced that citrus trees are a ruse to fool us non-Natives and that oranges and the like are actually produced in factories, and then I decided it was the right time to call my own family.
So, standing in the garden wearing just a dress shirt and slacks—hey, it was 70 degrees out! On November 24!—I called my parents. Mom answered the phone and that's when the gnawing ache started: I wanted to be there with them. I talked to her for a while, then she told me that one of my long-lost (see “crazy bitch ex-sister-in-law” entries) nephews was actually there for dinner! She put him on the phone; he didn't remember my voice, and I certainly didn't recognize his. I only knew it was not any I recognized and I deduced it was Nick. We talked for a bit—he's 15 and thinking about coming out this wintertime so we can all go snowboarding/skiing in Tahoe—and then he put my dad on the phone. More gnawing ache. I love my dad. I love all my family, and I'm so much like both of my parents that I can't give priority, but I love talking to my dad. We are not of same temperament, but we are of the same kind of disposition: abstract, artistic, visceral, emotional. We have plans to talk sometime next week and I can't wait for it.
I also talked to brother Sam, then his wife Karen. Then my brother Anthony and his fiancée Jess (both formerly of Phoenix and now back living in Pennsylvania). By the time I hung up the phone I was exhausted and invigorated, missing them and having them immediately there close in my heart. And the phone read: 40:10. That's the longest I've been on a phone call that I can remember.
So back to the immediate festivities I went, striking up a conversation with Uncle Joe (Guiseppi), talking about Chicago and Pittsburgh and the fact that I went to Carnegie Mellon and that he knew someone who went there, too. And the differences between their Italian family and the Italian part of my ancestry and the neighborhood Italians I grew up with. I told him what my sister in law, Karen, had said about the “wops” (Uncle Joe and I laughed about that word): “Gobble-freakin'-gobble!” was the judgment of Thanksgiving by the “goombahs” back home. Joe laughed at that one, too. As did his wife, Pat.
We talked about finding “Home”, which is for some of us different to where we grew up. He is, perhaps, 15 years my senior, and new to me, and yet we were talking like old friends.
Remarkable.
Most of the “pups” were also there, and as Sam pointed out in his blog, no drama ensued. But in large part that's due to labored avoidance on my part. Labored, until, as I pointed out, I discovered Uncle Joe and whiled away and waxed poetic about family, about our pasts and about the collective past of the Valley (“yeah, well, Pat remembers when there was an actually orchard at Stevens Creek and De Anza!”).
We also talked about wine. And drank wine. We practically ran the gamut on reds—Italian wines, our fine California wines, and even “frog wine” as Joe called the Frenchie-French stuff.
Conviviality continued through dinner and afterwards, more alcohol. This time in the form of a caustic, kerosene-like aperitif called Fernet Branca. Supposed to ease the digestion, they said, but I patted my own belly and reminded myself that I have no trouble with digestion. Still, I tried it. I think parts of my tongue are necrotic because of it. Seriously. I think it was all a dare.
I'm so glad I went. I'm so glad that I talked to my own family (but that's always true). I'm glad that Matt Consola is in my life.
I have a pretty good life, I must say. My 'sense of abundance', as my therapist Ronald calls it, is unassailable. Bad things happen to everyone, it's all in how you handle them, or abide them, or dispense with them. Or learn from them. Or transmute them into something rife with positivity.
Does that make me some kind of pollyanna? Well, fuck you too, if you try to trivialize me thus. :)
It might surprise some of you out there, those of you who have some idea of what life has been like for me in the recent and receding past, to hear me talk about how much I love my life, but I hope you get to know me better: at least well enough to not be surprised by the engine of optimism that drives my life onward and upward. To that end, these Counting Crow lyrics may help:
The devil’s in the dreamin’
You see yourself descending
From the building to the ground
And you watch the sky receding
And you spin to see the traffic
Rising up and it’s so quiet
And you’re surprised and then you wake
For all the things I’m losing
I might as well resign myself to try and make a change
I'm not losing anything more than we all are, as we trundle along in our lives on these borrowed days, but still, I try.
Traditions are not designed, they emerge. And in emerging and continuing, they change. And the best kinds of change are expansions. Like how Matt's parents expanded the meaning of family and holiday and tradition to include strangers like us, thus improving our experience and hopefully us improving theirs.
And now understanding that things can be improved, why not do the thousand little things each of us can nearly-effortlessly do to make a change?
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November 23, 2005
This Is How It's Done, Anne Heche
Charlize Theron is beautiful. Liz-Taylor-and-Paul-Newman-in-Cat on a Hot Tin Roof beautiful. Like statuary.
So when I saw this quote from her, about her and her boyfriend Stuart Townsend's talks of getting married:
We came up with a new idea that we said that we would get married the day that gays and lesbians can get married -- when that right is given to them. We've decided that we're gonna use that in a positive way, so the day that law gets passed then we'll get married.
—how could I not make sure as many people as possible knew how cool she was?
Anne Heche could have learned a thing or two about class and about doing the right thing when it comes to things she's intimately aware of—and Charlize does it from a sense of sympathy, not empathy.
You go, girl!
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November 22, 2005
Love the Birth, Hate the Birther
In a stunningly unstunning move, a Catholic school moved to dismiss a teach because she was pregnant without benefit of legal- or church-approved-marriage to a penis.
And she's fighting back. Go, soon-to-be-Mom!
I wish it would stop amazing me, already, the sheer audacity of the Papists to talk out their collective anus. Pro-Life? Yeah. Riiiight.
It's another clear-cut example of how they're pro-birth and nothing more. They don't care that they're adversely affecting that yet-to-be-born child's future by firing his/her mom. They don't care about the mom, clearly, leaving her to be jobless and a future single-parent.
They care about appearances. They care about their dogma. They care about punishing those who don't fit into their own myopic and narrow view of how Life Should Be.
So the NYCLU and others step in to support the woman. Supposedly, the pre-marital and extra-marital sex behavior is the basis for the woman being fired. And hey, the proof is in the pudding—or at least the bun in the oven—right?
Trouble is, where's some similar proof for men? How do you detect if your male teachers are having sex outside of marriage or without benefit of the marriage bed or are even—dare I say it—masturbating?
Well, you can't. That's the problem. And isn't it funny that the Catholics don't seem to much care if straight men are doing any of those things, and yet women and gay men are under scrutiny?
Yes, gay men. The Catholics are also screening seminarian candidates for homosexual activity or—whatever this means—“strong support of gay culture”. I guess they just don't have much faith in the power of god's forgiveness via the Confessional.
I know that bureaucracy and P.R. long ago overshadowed the sacramental, but do they actually believe that can so blatantly parade the fact and not have anyone question it?
Watch out for more sloppy linguistic gyrations from the Papists as they try to defend themselves and continue to sacrifice the greater ethic for their own worldly gains.
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November 17, 2005
Diagnostilicious!
I have been sick this week. Again. It's been a weird year for it. I took a couple of sick days, and worked from home another day so as to not spread the “wealth” around the office.
I really couldn't afford any more downtime than absolutely necessary, so I got in to see my doctor (the sublimely fabulous Lisa Capaldini) on Monday. She thought it might be strep, and offered treat me for that even though the results of the throat culture wouldn't come back for a couple of days.
“Yes, treat me now,” I answered.
“Pills, or a shot in the butt?”
“Butt, please,” I said, all atwinkle for her benefit. No, really.
When she returned to the office, she was carrying a preloaded syringe, something that looked more like a contraption than the standard disposable syringe+sharp that I'm used to seeing.
“Drop your pants,” she said, her turn to twinkle. “This is so 1950s! This tube of a syringe and good old-fashioned medicine.”
I dropped trou, furry ass catching the chill of the AC in the office. “Yeah, this has to be great for you.” I rolled my eyes. “Y'know, being a dyke and all.”
“Ahhh, I love my job! Left or right cheek?”
“Uhhhhh, wow. I was just thinking about which side I might prefer, and you actually did ask...Left, I guess.”
Getting an IM (intramuscular) shot is a two-parter of pain. First there's the actual needle stick of an 18-gauge sharp. Then there's the liquid pain of the not quite osmotically- and/or pH-matched penicillin. Don't get me wrong, it's not a lot of pain, but it did take me back to other times, when I was a kid, where the pain was the worst that I could imagine—and no, it wasn't in the 1950s, smart-asses.
“I love my job!” she says, with a nuanced glee that speaks to our long history as doctor-patient and as friends and, back in the day, as co-caregivers to Allen. “Remember, you have to stick around for 15 minutes so we're sure you're not going to have a reaction and die or something.”
“Yes, Ma'am.”
•••
Lisa is a very good diagnostician. As he has been talking about lately, there's too much shame-based behavior and prejudice around sex and even simple human biology, but none of it with Lisa. She just “shows up” (her words) for her patients. And helps as she can, bringing to bear her clinical experience and her medical knowledge.
Regular readers will know I've been on a bit of a tear lately in response to the bit of a tear the crazies (Pat Robertson and Bill O'Reilly, specifically) have been on, and I chuckled when I <sarcasm>considered that maybe I was being punished by jod himself!</sarcasm>
Which then got me to thinking, what if others who led with that spiritual smegma known as dogma were my diagnostician?
Bill O'Reilly: we let the cellular terrorists have you.
William Dembski: your disease is too complex to have evolved on its own.
George Bush: God spoke to me and said He did it.
Fred Phelps: God hates you, faggot!
Sean Hannity: God did it because he's on our side. Shut UP. Cut his mic.
Rush Limbaugh: God did it. Want some pills?
Margaret Thatcher: who cares?
Andrew Sullivan: I'm sure you didn't get it the good way.
hoody: God did it because you're disordered.
green-flash: It's just sin.
Pat Robertson: God's turned his back on your immune system.
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November 16, 2005
Oooo-oooo, That's My Shit
My favorite new nerdy site is called Cool OS X Apps. It's one of those in-between places, that is, in between a personal blog and a just a site to find software (though, versiontracker.com is an essential for all you Mac folks).
On one of their recent entries, they talked about blogging tools. There's a text macro-expansion utility, a text editor, a clipboard extender/manager, an FTP client and a handy utility edit/effects tool.
While each of those apps in their own rights seem to be—or, with ones I've used before, actually are—fine applications, I rarely need more than ecto.
I've never ever been a fan of editing anything inside of a web page—at least nothing that can't be reproduced with a few mouse-clicks. So Movable Type's editor is there, in the admin pages, but I never use it except in a pinch.
So my kit for blogging is this:
- ecto
- there is no 2nd item
The Book list on the left here, is done by embedding another blog, and that blog is written by using ecto's Amazon Tool: I type in the name of the book, choose the right one from a list, and the right HTML (with links, including info to get credit for a purchase made, if you have an associate ID). Same with iTunes links. Same with browsing your iPhoto library to drop in images.
And speaking of images, you can embed or thumbnail an image, set borders and bufferspace, alignment, whatever.
Ecto also automatically handles adding the right HTML for technorati tags, and for pinging all the proper places to let them know your blog changed.
So my routine in writing a blog entry is just that. Write it, publish it. No uploading of files, no generating my own links, nothing. It's like writing in Text Edit and saving it to disk.
All of this goes back to one of the primary goals of User Experience: know what the user wants to accomplish and then take as much out of the way as you can, as a software developer. Also one of the big differences between Mac folks and Windows folks: Windows folks pride themselves on knowing the steps it takes to carry out a task; Mac folks tend to just to know what they want to accomplish and set out to do it.
Two different null hypotheses, two different approaches.
So this is a meme, of sorts, that I'm starting: how do you do what you do when you blog?
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The Sanctity of Marriage
Move over Britney, you're not the poster-child for penis-vagina-only marriages anymore.
It could be worse, I suppose. The state could decide that the uterus involved was under their jurisdiction and, consequently, decide for themselves the fate of the pregnancy.
But then again, who in their right mind would ever wish the state to be that invasive?
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November 13, 2005
Fun with Albert
November 11, 2005
The Good and Decent Right
It's a strange tack to take, not only pigeonholing the infinite, but then having the audacity to speak on behalf of His Holy Infinity, but Pat Roberts has managed to do just that. Again.
Now, before I launch into this, I should put Pat in some perspective. He's not the only Christian who does this sort of thing. Many other Christians climb their bully pulpits every Sunday and remind their fellow Christians that heathens and the profane should fear the Christians. Not only fear the Wrath of God, but fear, in earthly and malevolent ways, Christians.
And to also be fair, there are an enormous number of Christians, who, despite the hubris and pomposity of claiming to know their Creator's wishes in the first place, are really rather decent, mild, meek, helpful people.
But these days, those people remain silent. Perhaps they've bought into being afraid of not toeing the Christian party line, too?
So Pat Robertson, the sore loser (at least ideologically) in Dover, PA, not only tells the fine, smart folks of Dover, PA—who rightly punished those who wanted to suborn science by removing them from power—that they've turned from God (hey, I thought “Intelligent Design” wasn't about God!), but that God has turned from them:
I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city...And don't wonder why He hasn't helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I'm not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that's the case, don't ask for His help because he might not be there.
Well! How about that, Dover? You're up shit's creek without a Deity.
<sarcasm>And then there's my good buddy, Bill O'Reilly</sarcasm>.
So miffed was he over Prop I, or rather, miffed over the fact that we San Franciscans approved Prop I, that he's handing us over to the terrorists. It takes him just a little bit of time to get there. First he leads with what each and every one of us who voted in favor of Prop I knew could be the consequences:
You know, if I'm the president of the United States, I walk right into Union Square, I set up my little presidential podium and I say, “Listen, citizens of San Francisco, if you vote against military recruiting, you're not going to get another nickel in federal funds.”
That's how our government forces schools to permit military recruiters: by paying them to do so, or at least threatening to starve them of funding if they don't. I suppose patriotism and sense of duty should be the driving factors, but, whatever.
But then he becomes his usual insane self. You can almost hear the wheels fall off the wagon of his sanity:
Fine. You want to be your own country? Go right ahead...And if al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead.
Didn't he just commit an act of treason? And more to the point, isn't he going to get stretchmarks? All this from the man who wants his values pushed in schools and will do anything, no matter how unsavory, to make that happen, ranting at a bunch of people who want their values reflected in schools and actually go through a constitutionally-approved, let-the-voters-decide procedure to make that happen? Why, Bill, one might think you're a hypocrite, if you're not careful.
So Pat Robertson hands Dover, PA over to the forces of Hell, and Bill O'Reilly encourages terrorists to blow up San Francisco.
Where are the hoody's and the Vigilante Papists and the Aquinas-brown-nosers and the teen-age martinet-marionettes railing about God's love and how these people should be punished for their moral relativism? Probably we'll hear apologies, excuses, rationalizations, because clearly sacrificing people for their own agenda is more important than the pro-life agenda itself.
Watch, world. Watch how the theocrats decry nothing.
You didn't hear it here first.
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November 09, 2005
Praos Theory
Whew!
Some of those nasty state Props were close to passing (although the couple of what I thought were good ones also failed to pass).
Politics is a funny business, where often one is called to speak other than they think (and dare to call that “diplomacy”!). And these days, add to that that one is called to speak and proselytize other than what they believe (when I was growing up as a good Catholic boy, we were taught that that was called “lying”, though today it's just called “doing God's work”).
And what is God's work these days? Well, that depends on who you ask. There are plenty of absolutists about, daring to claim theirs the One True _____, daring to insult, desultorily or otherwise, the beliefs of others as inferior. Their Truth is Everyone's Truth, and to challenge that Notion, well, makes you a moral relativist and Not To Be Trusted!
The strange thing is, when it comes to the domain of opinion, or belief, or supposition, observable fact has very little to do with anything. Which means that Science has no entry point, nowhere to gain traction. So it goes where it will, it does what it does and leaves the opining-believing-supposing to those who need someone else to define their own places in the world for them.
You'd think religion would do the decent thing and return the favor: leave observation, analysis, empiricism, theory and fact to the scientists. But then again, many of these are people who so desperately need to believe in something that they'll go to great lengths to attach their cosmologies to things which cannot and must not ever be proven-observed-experimented! Certainty is the enemy of Faith. Those who talk to God are prayerful. Those to whom God talks back are crazy.
Crises of Faith come from within. Crises in science come from without. That is to say, the only “crisis” science can honestly admit to is the onslaught of outsiders who feel threatened by findings, or by prima donna individuals who place their own ascendancy before the ethic (and hell, the god-ridden have those, too!).
Being wrong, or being not-entirely-correct is not a bad thing in science. Often it's a good thing. Often it's the pudding which supplies the proof that the Scientific Method, the ethic of reproduceability, the mechanism of peer review and the rigors of scientific publication actually work. It makes for better scientists and that makes for better science.
The crises that faith suffers are from those who question openly, and from those who question in their own minds and hearts the veracity of what parents and other people of religious authority have asserted. And get it right, these are assertions. Not fact. Not Truth. They're not even evidentiary, much less proof.
When Science meets the Unknown, there is elation: more to discover!
When the Faithful meet the Unknown, there is one-note: God did it.
Thus armed with the weaponry of Christ go they into the world, a seed crystal of regimented (at least publicly) thought and behavior attempting to fix the world into a conformity that is nothing but replicative of themselves. More of the same, larger crystal. Pretty! Smooth facets and hard vertices. The only self-organization in the world they're willing to admit to.
Never mind the Brownian motion outside their own keeps. The 'theory' goes like this: give up your freedom of thought and belief and think how we do and believe how we do—or die. They'll clench so tight as to force an entire world down the long narrow path of their own neediness-based religion, and to hell with what horrors it creates along the way, to hell with the strife and the difficulty. To hell with fact and observation and rationalization.
Chaos and disorganization and rioting and mobs are useful tools when they happen to someone else. In fact, it's what the faithful have prayed for: praos.
It's the 11th Commandment, the “Godenfreude Amendment” if you will: though shalt delight in the misfortune of the profane and the heretical.
It's the only commandment they enjoy keeping.
Proposition 73, which sought to moralize young women through heavy-handed use of the government (remember when Republicans wanted the government to stay out of people's lives?) machinery, is a terrific illustration of Praos Theory. Make their bodies not their own and let the state have them: yes, dear, we know it's your uterus, but we're going to make our own use of it because we know better.
Praos Theory is the tactic of the Religious Right. Suborn human nature by praying. And show the godless that you mean it by hoisting whatever weaponry you can find as your praying to god makes a big spectacle of it. Offer them a choice: brandish the weapon or be at the business end of it.
Kansas school board fired that weapon because the heretics just wouldn't listen. Science is in crisis there because it's being silenced, or at least being led away from unobstructed search for the truths of our reality.
I hope some Kansas teachers who will be forced to teach the utterly debunked (from a science perspective) “theory” of Intelligent Design, who have been utterly reassured that it's NOT Creationism and it's NOT about God “per se” will remember that the world was created by Zeus and the other Olympians, and that the Hebrew god, like the platypus, was created by Apollo much by accident when he burnt his ass on the Sun as he pulled it across the sky and exclaimed “God Dammit! Jesus Christ on a Cross!”
I know I'll be praying they do.
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November 08, 2005
A Propped Up Guv
The huge corporations Republicans One-Terminator has pushed for this expensive special election, putting any number of propositions on the ballot to further entrench big businesses, take away money from schools and actually attempt to create activist judges in state politics.
Isn't it strange that he spends so much time and money putting things in front of the people to know what they are thinking, but vetoes without a second thought, the legislature-approved same-sex marriage bill based on five year old data? Why didn't he put it on the ballot this year, during the special election, so he—a true man of the American people—could find out what the people thought?
He figures that most liberals will not bother voting, but I saw in the paper this morning that voter turnout is expected to be nearly 7 million. I'm going to be sure to get out and vote down some of these heinous things. I love how the Republicans accuse the liberals of social engineering, then crap out things like Prop 73. Stupid, duplicitous assholes.
So get your ass out and vote! Don't let them win because decent people did nothing to stop them.
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Dear Kansas
As far as I'm concerned, the existence of Kansas schoolboard members utterly invalidates “Intelligent Design”. I mean, who the fuck would design such unutterably, stultifyingly idiotic morons?
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Fuck Texas
I've known for about fifteen years now—ever since I'd met Allen, who then worked for the Midland (TX) Reporter-Telegram—that Texas was ass-full of backward-ass homophobic, racist, gun-toting fuckheads.
And after today's election results, I have quantitative evidence to support that assertion, for about 70% of them.
Dear Lone Star State: you suck.
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November 03, 2005
God of Biscuits: The Video Game
These guys had a contest with one rule: photoshop a violent video game box into a non-violent one. The results are hilarious. Go see!
There are some truly terrific ones, but my favorite one, predictably, is:
Not being the bleeding-edge videogamer, I don't know what the original game was. Can anyone help?
What might be the play for such a game? Bake cookies that you then use to deflect falling giant words before they land on you? Throw enough cookies at Republicans until they fall into sugar comas?
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November 01, 2005
Pandemic?
Never mind Iraq my low approval numbers Scooter Libby KKKarl Rove Scalito Harriet “Quag” Miers that I'm a moron Fitzmas day the man behind the curtain [ibid. Rove], says our feckless leader, George W. (where dubya is the long form of 'duh') Bush, we have a freakin' pandemic! to worry about!
Well, ok, we don't actually have a pandemic yet, but gull durn it, we will! And after all, the Republicans have an amazing track record on paying attention to the science of epidemiology, population mechanics and the like. Right? Riiiiiight? (is this thing on?)
The idea of being ready for a flu outbreak is a terrific idea, don't get me wrong. But I have trouble believing President Bush on this one, because he's being alarmist at the same time. I mean, it makes a certain amount of sense that if the smoking gun of a viral outbreak is found, then in some sense it's already “too late”. Wait. No. Mushroom cloud. Too Late. Smoking Gun. Prettybirdprettybird!
Ahem.
So he keeps using the word “pandemic”, which actually means:
pan•dem•ic
adjective
(of a disease) prevalent over a whole country or the world.
noun
an outbreak of such a disease.
Whereas “epidemic” means:
ep•i•dem•ic
noun
a widespread occurrence of an infectious disease in a community at a particular time : a flu epidemic.
• a disease occurring in such a way.
• a sudden, widespread occurrence of a particular undesirable phenomenon : an epidemic of violent crime.
The built-in Dictionary.app in Mac OS X Tiger (10.4)—which I believe uses these sources, even goes so far, in notes for the definition of “epidemic”, to make the distinction among “pandemic”, “epidemic” and “endemic”:
USAGE A disease that quickly and severely affects a large number of people and then subsides is an epidemic: throughout the Middle Ages, successive epidemics of the plague killed millions. Epidemic is also used as an adjective: | she studied the causes of epidemic cholera. A disease that is continually present in an area and affects a relatively small number of people is endemic: malaria is endemic in (or | to ) | hot, moist climates. A pandemic is a widespread epidemic that may affect entire continents or even the world: | the pandemic of 1918 ushered in a period of frequent epidemics of gradually diminishing severity. Thus, from an epidemiologist’s point of view, the Black Death in Europe and AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa are pandemics rather than epidemics.
And so I have to wonder why the President would use pandemic when clearly it isn't even an epidemic yet? Did he feel the need to politically elevate a potential epidemic to a full epidemic to a full pandemic?
From cnn.com:
“A pandemic is a lot like a forest fire,” Bush said. “If caught early, it might be extinguished with limited damage; if allowed to smolder undetected, it can grow to an inferno that spreads quickly beyond our ability to control it.”
WHAT?
Forgiving for a moment the alarmist misuse of the word, why aren't the Reagan asskissers out there taking Bush to task for insulting the former President's public health policies?
It all reminds me of a Peanuts cartoon, where Linus overhears Lucy telling someone that “Indian Summer” was a ruse created by Native Americans to lull the pilgrims into a false sense of complacency. Linus, tongue out, can only say, “I think I'm going to be sick.”
Is that what you're doing to the pilgrims, Mr. Bush?
Don't get me wrong, I think something like this should be in place. But I also think it should be motivated by people wanting to protect other people, gunning for the ounce of prevention instead of the pound of cure. But this isn't that. This is grandstanding and panic-inducing. This is the same tactic he used to get us into a war. This is motivating by Bush imploding.
When are the pilgrims going to realize he just doesn't care about anything but himself? More to the point, that he can and will climb over the backs of any American to get the brass ring for himself?
When?
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