Amused Muse

The Zooniverse is Expanding

2011-06-11T10:40:00.004-05:00

On Thursday, June 2, I attended a presentation to the Minnesota Astronomical Society by University of Minnesota professor Lucy Fortson, formerly of the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. The topic of her presentation was, “Birth of the Zooniverse: How Citizen Scientists are Taking on Research from Galaxies to Climate Change.”

Galaxy Zoo

The Zooniverse grew out of Galaxy Zoo, a scholarly effort to get many pairs of eyes analyze and create a taxonomy for the “data flood” of deep field and ultra deep field galactic images taken by the Hubble observatory. In contrast to the thousands of bright galaxies photographed onto glass plates by the Palomar Sky Survey in the 1950s, the number of digital photographs of bright galaxies needing identification exceeded one million, much more than is possible for any graduate student to handle.

Human beings understand relationships via taxonomies. When a field is largely unknown, and the development of galaxies is still not understood, scientists first gather large amounts of data, then sort and classify it by carefully defined criteria. (Computers also do a wonderful job of storing data, and associating data in relationships that nevertheless must first be defined by human beings.)

Astronomers attempted to have algorithms identify and classify these galaxies, using color as a proxy for shape. Computers, however, are great at crunching numbers but still have only limited success at pattern recognition and matching. Meanwhile, this “data flood” was producing blue ellipticals and red spirals, creating contingencies that crossed the color proxy parameters set for the algorithms. Neural networking also had limited success, and duplicated the same problems. Therefore, the solution was to find volunteers without astronomical knowledge, who would provide fresh eyes, to identify spiral armed, spiral barred, and elliptical galaxies among the images.

In 2007 the astronomers launched a website, Galaxy Zoo, which they expected to gather a few thousand volunteers at most. The response from the public was overwhelming, and it crashed their servers. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary people from around the world participated (the astronomers saw a marked dip in classifications when the Egyptian government shut down the internet for a while), and soon the questions were coming in from the volunteers. Unable to answer them all, the astronomers set up a forum for the volunteers.

Also, in order to eliminate empty clicks, false identifications, and practical jokers or random clicks by children, statistical analysis is applied to the results.

Known unknowns and unknown unknowns

Here is where the project truly becomes interesting for me: unable to get their specific questions answered, this increasingly astronomically literate community, which started out with very limited astronomical knowledge, began to do literature searches of refereed journals. They began to make discoveries celestial objects predicted but not yet observed. One of the volunteers, frustrated with the “hunt and peck” method of going through this “data deluge,” even wrote a query of the Sloan site’s spectral data.

The project has yielded 20 peer-reviewed scientific papers—including the MNRAS papers—and one comic book. (I can’t help but wonder what Guillermo Gonzalez was doing all this time if he was serious about attaining the qualifications for tenure.)

New research projects have been designed around these lessons learned, and thus the Zooniverse was born. New projects include an avian and entomological project with the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, a study of ocean temperatures recorded in British ship logs during World War I (climate change is driven by the oceans, yet most of our data comes from land-based temperature sensors, yet the British recorded the ocean temperature faithfully every four hours), and the reconstruction and translation from the Greek of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri from Egypt.

The role of the citizen scientist

It must be stressed that, when one uses nonexperts as citizen scientists, it is imperative that their roles be clearly defined and coherently limited by a strict definition of “citizen science.” There were also strict parameters set (spiral versus elliptical, etc.). This is not a top-down agenda to employ vulnerable adults seeking assuagement of eschatological fears in a campaign to get “new” (fringe or pseudo-) science into high school curricula, or a one-stop shop for bullet points to provide “corroboration” for a foregone conclusion. For example, though there are an abundance of amateur astronomers, these volunteers were not solicited to gather images, but to identify them based on good faith eyeballing. Eyeballing identifies simple shapes and colors (not “complexity”) and should only be used for this. Naïve eyeballing by nonexperts was expressly sought after in this particular case for a particular reason: to eliminate the bias that experts would show in performing what for them would be considered a menial task.* To the public, however, looking at images of galaxies and identifying their shape was a meaningful exercise that led to open-ended inquiry and, importantly, greater information literacy.

*For example, my eye doctor apologized to me for putting me through glaucoma tests after seeing an abnormal cup size on my optic nerve. He admitted that he had just attended a conference on glaucoma and had been viewing so many abnormal optic nerves that that may have influenced the false positive that he saw in my case.

It happens: despite the fact that the word “archive” [sic] is used many different ways in the vernacular, the second I see that word I focus immediately on it. (Actually, use of the word "archive" is a giveaway, as professionals use "archives" even in the singular.)

The Synthese Flap, and the Sound of Silence

2011-05-07T11:23:00.010-05:00

By now, many of you are aware of the controversy surrounding the disclaimer that was inserted, in the print copy only, of the issue number two of Synthese 178, which Glenn Branch and James Fetzer had guest edited. To Branch's and Fetzer's surprise, and to the utter surprise of the contributors to this journal (Barbara Forrest, John Wilkins, and Wesley Elsberry among them), the editors-in-chief included the following disclaimer in the print edition:

Statement from the Editors-in-Chief of SYNTHESE
This special issue addresses a topic of lively current debate with often strongly expressed views. We have observed that some of the papers in this issue employ a tone that may make it hard to distinguish between dispassionate intellectual discussion of other views and disqualification of a targeted author or group.

We believe that vigorous debate is clearly of the essence in intellectual communities, and that even strong disagreements can be an engine of progress. However, tone and prose should follow the usual academic standards of politeness and respect in phrasing. We recognize that these are not consistently met in this particular issue. These standards, especially toward people we deeply disagree with, are a common benefit to us all. We regret any deviation from our usual standards.

Johan van Benthem
Vincent F. Hendricks
John Symons
Editors-in-Chief / SYNTHESE

You can read more about the inappropriateness, and the unprofessionalism, of this clandestine inclusion here (Chronicle of Higher Education) and here (Inside Higher Ed), sources that hardly have an axe to grind when it comes to the evolution/creationism controversy.

The editors-in-chief have refused to respond, as they should, to the scholarly community as to why they would circumvent normal publishing ethics and transparency to include a disclaimer that indeed "poisons the well" against established scholars and writers of repute (or as it turns out, one particular scholar).

However, another and perhaps more alarming, question has arisen. Wesley outlines it here:

One piece of hard data is that Francis Beckwith, one of the third-party complainers, submitted his “response” to Barbara Forrest on February 7th, 2011, and the response includes in it explicit reference to the disclaimer in the print edition of Synthese 178:2. This sets the latest date at which Francis Beckwith could have been apprised of the disclaimer’s print status. I didn’t hear about it until Glenn Branch emailed me on March 9th, 2011, to say that a disclaimer had been printed. But I’d like to know exactly how much lead time Beckwith had. The Synthese Editors-in-Chief haven’t been very forthcoming when asked questions about this affair, so that leaves Beckwith to be asked about the situation.

Wesley has e-mailed Beckwith asking how he was informed about the disclaimer before anyone else, including the guest editors of and contributors to Synthese 178. The silence from Beckwith has been deafening - all the more disturbing because Beckwith takes Barbara Forrest to task for supposed "errors" in her article, claiming that "all she had to do was e-mail me." Indeed?

Time to answer your e-mail, Francis Beckwith! Quit blogging about how "awful" Barbara Forrest's writing is to show the forthright honesty and transparency that you expect from others.

As a budding scholar myself, still fresh out of grad school, I want to see the proper behavior modeled for me by my colleagues and mentors, especially those who make the extraordinary claim that there is a concerted effort to silence any evidence for design in scholarly communication.

Shimmies to The Austringer

Dead or Alive

2011-05-01T23:53:00.008-05:00

Gaddafi, you're next. Thus always to terrorists.

All my shimmies to the troops. (And I was not offended when President Bush said, "Dead or Alive." I supported the war in Afghanistan.)

UPDATED: He was killed, in a mansion not a cave, using a woman as a human shield (unfortunately she was killed, too), by a firefight close-hand with Navy SEALS, not a drone. And on the 100th anniversary of naval aviation, too. The Navy has done us proud!

SECOND UPDATE: Why They Cheered (from Inside Higher Education)

Fossils, Bones and Primates: Enriching High School Teaching

2011-04-17T10:13:00.012-05:00

I attended the science teachers' workshop at the American Association of Physical Anthropology Annual Meeting, and met educators, graduate students, and other colleagues from around the area and from the Smithsonian (for which I have a special place in my heart). The half-day workshop focused on equipping educators with training modules that incorporated the latest research and discoveries in human evolutionary biology, paleoanthropology, primatology, and forensics.

I hope to turn this into a published article, like my article about the presentation on the Brooklyn Public Library's Human Genome Project Community Conversations curriculum at last year's American Library Association conference (to be published soon).

Much of the information was old news to me, and some of it revealed gaps in my knowledge, but the session focused on effective means of communicating scientific nuance to high school students, who can come away from their science classes looking for a neat linear succession of fossils ("This evolved from this, and this evolved from this," etc.) and who could reinforce rather than question their own assumptions about skin color variation and "race," since a person's so-called "race" is so immediately apparent to us.

An important point that can get lost in teaching human evolution is that other primates are not "failed humans," but evolved creatures in their own right. Our cousins have their own place in the ecosystem and evolved alongside us. Your cousin is not "striving" to become you! Evolution is messy, not a straight-line process, and not aiming for us; Homo sapiens got lucky, and we are the one human species left over. We did not "win" anything; if anything, other species of humans lasted longer than we likely will.

The teachers expressed particular concern about their difficulties in getting teenagers in particular to see that race is a social construct, whereas skin color variation is not an accurate indicator of ethnicity. There is greater skin color variation within so-called "races" than between them. Laying down skin color tones in a line visually reinforces the fact that skin color exists on a continuum, even within families. Unlike eye and hair color, skin color is not determined by a simple gene pairing but by an array of genes, and it is not the case that lighter-skinned indigenous people were always found in the higher latitudes, whereas darker-skinned indigenous people were clustered around the equator. Different ethnicities co-evolved with their ability to absorb and retain certain vitamins, with their diet, with their ability or not to tolerate heat or cold, and these factor into skin color.

It was particularly instructive to me that most of the questions in the Q&A focused on practical needs, such as ways for teachers to collaborate, to communicate effectively to their students, to find sources of funding, and to keep up with the latest research. Creationism was brought up only at the very end, and most of the people in the room seemed to have the resources that they needed to deal with classroom disruptions or upset parents. Actually, one educator stated that her time at a science table during a fair in Iowa was boring; farmers especially accept evolution and do not find it to be "controversial."

If anything, I have long suspected that ID has made inroads with youth who are estranged from the land and from animals, who see food as something that comes from the grocery store rather than from the land, who do not get the chance to observe that each animal is a genetic individual, and who cannot imagine how heredity works. I am not inspired by the idea that nature was "manufactured" in the same manner that the Coca-Cola Company manufactures soda pop. The idea of children seeing themselves as commodities of a manufacturer deity strikes me as compatible with the corporate agenda to turn them into consumers, to make them see themselves as people who wear this or that corporate brand, who root for this or that corporate sports team, and who are easily swayed by this or that corporate scare tactic.

Food for thought: creationism/ID remains a concern, but it is not the biggest concern in teaching evolution today; and cultivating media literacy--seeing through the clever tactics of advertisers and anyone else with an agenda--in young people is related to teaching science effectively. Certainly this has become more evident to me as the proponents of ID try to adopt a "hip, now, new generation" style of marketing. (Could little sayings on cans of Faygo be far behind?)

Oh, Dear Me, I Almost Forgot! Evo Dead in Five Years and All That...

2011-04-04T19:30:00.004-05:00

My apologies, people! How could I forget such an important occasion as Teh Countdown to Waterloo? (Emphasis on loo.)

Evolution theory on last legs, says seminary teacher

By Dylan T. Lovan
ASSOCIATED PRESS

Technical Fiction: A Proposal

2011-01-30T21:48:00.006-06:00

It's up at the Triumvirate.

It was a dark and stormy night...

2010-08-21T15:31:00.005-05:00

I just vacated my temporary internship position at the Smithsonian...

I just received the first round of comments and corrections paper that I submitted for peer review...

Holy crap, does this situation sound somewhat familiar?

The irony! The irony! I could make such a Sternberg joke right now! ;-) But peer review is not for whiners.

(Actually, the bulk of my paper survived and I found the criticism to be well founded. After going to SAA this year, I actually disagree with parts of my own paper now.)

Ah, back to the drawing board. That's the name of the game. Plus, I'm working on other articles and projects - while sitting in the hot tub. A strong stomach for rejection - I has it!

(I'd better have it...)

Should Steven Hatfill Get the Nobel Peace Prize?

2010-05-18T11:30:00.006-05:00

I have just read this article on Steven Hatfill, the man originally accused of the anthrax attacks in the wake of September 11.

This is an enraging, frustrating article to be sure, highlighting once again that cheesy cloak-and-dagger speculation is no match for good old fashioned gumshoe work in uncovering the facts. I was literally in tears reading how a strapping, enthusiastic, and eccentric scientist was reduced to an unemployed, disheartened shadow of himself, watching himself be accused on TV while federal agents tailed his every move.

However, midway through the article changes. We are introduced to an American who was always a bit "off," a bit of a weirdo, a weight-lifting, tobacco-chewing, rare-steak-eating, superphysician novelist who dressed in black (I like him already), who anguished over having to administer experimental drugs to animals, who tended the ailments of indigenous peoples, and who is determined to revolutionize medical labs.

I remember the FBI sweep of his apartment, and the press conference that Hatfill's attorney gave. "Guilty or not," I thought, "he is presumed innocent, and this is a travestry." Of course, I had no way of forming an opinion about Hatfill's guilt or innocence, but if we Americans rush to judgment, we may as well let the terrorists win and go back to being a colony of Great Britain.

However, I did not become convinced that Steven Hatfill is a deserving candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize merely because he fought injustice and won exoneration. Nor do I think it because his fight was also on behalf of all of us, Americans who must cherish and uphold due process, and who must insist that journalists act like investigators instead of the government lapdogs that they have become. This is what convinced me that Steven Hatfill should at least be considered for the Nobel Peace Prize:

When he had had enough, when he was done with watching the television in his girlfriend's home (having lost his own home, any job prospects, and his health insurance), when he was done drinking a little too much, eating too much chocolate (at least he has good taste!), and feeling sorry for himself, Steven Hatfill dug out his old textbooks and began studying again, and then signed up to be part of the relief effort in Sri Lanka after the tsunami. Healing people helped him to heal himself.

He also had an epiphany: build mobile labs to be able to penetrate the remote areas of the earth, where the plants and fungi, out of which antibiotics are made, are found! The FBI tailed him to the hobby shop and back, after which Hatfill began designing his vision in modeling clay.

For Hatfill, rebuilding remains painful and slow. He enters post offices only if he absolutely must, careful to show his face to surveillance cameras so that he can’t be accused of mailing letters surreptitiously. He tries to document his whereabouts at all times, in case he should ever need an alibi. He is permanently damaged, Hatfill says. Yet he still professes to love America. “My country didn’t do this to me,” he is quick to point out. “A bloated, incompetent bureaucracy and a broken press did. I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing today if I didn’t still love my country.”

Much of Hatfill’s time these days is devoted to teaching life-saving medical techniques to military personnel bound for combat. They are his “band of brothers,” and the hours he spends with them, Hatfill says, are among his happiest. He also serves as an adjunct associate professor of emergency medicine at George Washington University.

Then there is his boat.

Hatfill has committed $1.5 million to building his floating genetic laboratory, a futuristic-looking vessel replete with a helicopter, an operating room to treat rural indigenous peoples, and a Cordon Bleu–trained chef. Hatfill intends to assemble a scientific team and cruise the Amazon for undiscovered or little-known plants and animals. From these organisms, he hopes to develop new medications for leukemia, and for tuberculosis and other diseases that have been growing increasingly resistant to existing antibiotics. Any useful treatments, he says, will be licensed to pharmaceutical companies on the condition that developing nations receive them at cost. Hatfill hopes to christen the boat within two years. Scientists at USAMRIID, where the FBI once suspected him of stealing anthrax, have expressed tentative interest in helping him mount his expedition.

Throughout it all, one gets the sense of a man who really, really loves his country and what he does, and whose greatest desire is to help others. He is bitter toward the government bureaucracy, but not the people of the United States who comprise the true government. His suffering was unimaginable, and yet now he's going to go on safari in his super-boat for more medical cures. He more resembles Superman temporarily weakened by Kryptonite, or Indiana Jones, than a victim of a Kafkaesque bureaucracy. I can hardly believe that someone like this exists! It is a testament to how resilient the human conscience, and our capacity for creativity, really is.

It is time that journalists quit merely reporting Hatfill's lawsuits for libel, and start talking about what this extraordinary man has done and is doing. I know what reading this article did for me. It scared me and made me angry, but it also filled me with gratitude that there are people out there willing to stand up for our rights, and to reclaim their passion despite what the entire world thinks of them. Isn't that what the Nobel Peace Prize represents?

Thank you, Steven Hatfill. I doubted your guilt and applauded your exoneration, but now you are a hero in my eyes.

Blogging the Writing of the Peer-Reviewed Paper, Part 5

2010-05-14T16:51:00.002-05:00

Good news and bad news at the Triumvirate.

Pronatalist Fanatics Dump a "Motherless" Constitution

2010-05-10T18:11:00.012-05:00

UPDATED: Here an extraordinary article on how "child-centered" culture creates angry children who act out, whereas adults who keep their children near but focus on adult things raise happy, respectful, cooperative children.

Maternity is not prophesy.

SECOND UPDATE: In a rational counterpoint to Michael Roston, a man who, without irony, presumes to dictate which women can speak for other women, Keli Goff at the Huffington Post has a much more sensible take on the "duty" of a Supreme Court candidate to procreate. Maybe it's due to the fact that she is a woman, Mr. Roston, and can speak for other women better than you can? What do you think about that, Mr. Roston? Hmmmmm?
-----
If you're a woman and don't have kids, you don't deserve to be on the Supreme Court.

I'm speechless. I'm actually speechless. I'll just let this piece of work blogger speak for himself:

To me, if a woman doesn’t have a child, she has only an abstract ability to pass judgment on issues where motherhood is concerned.

If I may ask, do Catholic or Orthodox priests have only "an abstract ability to pass judgment on issues where motherhood is concerned"?

Women with the concrete knowledge of the decision-making that comes with motherhood simply know better – ‘A mother knows best’ as we so often say.

Well, a woman who consciously makes the decision that she would not be a good mother - and many childfree women come to that conclusion - are themselves demonstrating "concrete knowledge of the decision-making that comes with motherhood." And I'm sorry, I have a better quote for Mr. Michael "Mangina" Roston:

I wash the dishes, rush the older children off to school, dash out in the yard to cultivate the chrysanthemums, run back in to make a phone call about a committee meeting, help the youngest child build a blockhouse . . . then scamper down to the washing machines where my thrice-weekly laundry includes enough clothes to keep a primitive village going for an entire year. By noon I’m ready for a padded cell. - Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

I swear, we have gone back to the 1950s. Atheists, once a staple of American life, can't run for public office. Even among my educated co-workers, the women did inside chores, and the men did outside chores. I stood out because I actually shoveled the sidewalk. When I go out in shorts and a tank top, I get the stink eye as if I were walking around naked. Everything is so fucking "family-friendly" to the point that people drag their kids into bars and to art openings. ("Now we don't touch the sculptures, do we? We don't - Breahanna and Jusstyn! Breahanna and Jusstyn! We don't - I'm going to start counting! One... Breahanna and Jusstyn! Don't you want some juice? Oh, we're sorry that they broke it, but you know that they're just children." AAUUGGGH! So leave them home with a sitter!)

American children are interrogated as to "whether you are, or have ever, played doctor" or engaged in sexting activity, and harshly punished if they were. You know that leads to sexual molestation and Satanic rituals, right? The three little girls that Tonya Craft is accused of molesting were "harshly disciplined" for playing doctor. Of course, Craft herself is "not a nice person" anyway because she wears thong underwear, mows the lawn in a tank top and shorts, and once had a same-sex relationship. She must be guilty of something! According to media-whore Wendy Murphy, homosexuality makes an adult a pedophile as well. Yes, she actually said that - I could not believe my ears! What can I say - that's really back to the '50s (as well as back to the Salem witch hunts if you can believe that children "never" lie).

The main hazard at work for a woman is not the glass ceiling - it's the invisible knife in your back (from another woman!). And we must foam-pad the world for the children, who today must never feel any boredom, frustration, or delay in gratification. Even into their twenties, children's helicopter parents are now pestering their university administrators about classes and grades, or their bosses about why Ashlleigh did not get a raise. In our child-centered universe, mothers aggressively try to ram me off the sidewalk with those horrible, double-wide strollers, or try to push in front of me at Caribou Coffee ("I have children."), and not because their children are with them - because they have to hurry because their children are waiting for them at home!

And yes, I am to understand that it is I who is selfish and who lacks empathy. My judgment cannot be trusted because I have never interrupted a civil conversation with "But you don't have any babies at home" and then launched into a lecture about the other person's ignorance - as many mothers have interrupted my conversations to lecture me.

Well, let me tell you something: for all this current pandering to "Motherhood," I still don't see anyone out there willing to pay a living wage for it. Not even Michael Roston. And I don't think that I am anywhere close to a fool. Women today are being sold a bill of goods - the same old "feminine mystique" if you ask me - that if you don't have children, you're "not a woman." If you're a career woman and don't have kids, you should not advance in your career. To which I posit: Mom Jeans and Sarah Palin.

The "motherless" Constitution says nothing about having or not having a "motherless" Supreme Court. Maybe we should, ah, throw the baby out with the bathwater and get rid of the Constitution, too?

(Shimmies to William L. Anderson.)

The Government Just Got out of Your Prayer

2010-04-16T10:23:00.008-05:00

We all have private ails. The troublemakers are they who need public cures for their private ails. - Eric Hoffer

No tradition existed in 1789 of Congress requiring an annual National Day of Prayer on a particular date. It was not until 1952 that Congress established a legislatively mandated National Day of Prayer; it was not until 1988 that Congress made the National Day of Prayer a fixed, annual event. - U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb

This is not just about atheists - all Americans should be celebrating this:

The "National Day of Prayer" has just been ruled unconstitutional, finally. This law required the President of the United States - required him, mind you - to declare a national day of prayer. Americans have the right to pray anywhere at any time, even in school. What is at issue here is publicly required, collective prayer, especially since this is an overt effort to push Christianity.

Go to the National Day of Prayer's website and take a gander at all the references to God as "Him," the invoking of Jesus, and the quotes from the Bible. Do a search for Buddha or atheism as I did, and see what comes up. It stands to reason as one visits this site that, if the government can tell you to pray, it can tell you how to pray - and that is not what the Founding Fathers intended. This organization most certainly tell you how to pray: to Jesus Christ.

Look at who is the "chairman" of this organization: namely Shirley Dobson, wife of James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family. This is a Christian organization, started by Billy Graham in 1952 in an effort to innoculate our nation against "communism" by intruding upon the private lives and thoughts of American citizens. This is not an ecumenical organization. Even if it were, it still excludes atheists, as well as Buddhists and Taoists who don't worship or conceive of a god at all, and is still an endorsement of a certain kind of religion (deity-centered, monotheistic religion). There is no such thing as a "generic form of God" in the world.

It's interesting that Christians seem to be rushing to the government to favor their religion. During the 1970s, when I was exposed to a great amount of very conservative religious radio on the AM dial while riding in a car (Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority were years in the future), these preachers often railed against public prayer, and certainly against "vain repetition." Even as a young girl I was never comfortable with collective, repeated prayer in church, aside from the issues of what was being said (which later I was also uncomfortable with).

The evangelical fervor of the time was filled with predictions of the immanent End of the World, various speculations as to who the Antichrist was (since to believers' disappointment it had turned out not to be Lyndon Johnson), and even dates - Hal Lindsey had predicted the Second Coming of Christ by 1986, whereas another preacher received a lot of press for predicting it in my junior year of high school. Christians were to hold apart from the world in preparation, not get involved in politics. Some of these preachers - and I don't remember their names (they sounded all the same, anyway) were openly contemptuous of the National Day of Prayer as a form of Mammon.

What a change today! Clinton turned out not to be the Antichrist, and so did Gorbachev, and so did Saddam Hussein. 1986 passed, and Hal Lindsey's theology got replaced with the even more laughable Left Behind series, that seems more interested in branding and profit than judgment. (No one writes about the people who supposedly were raptured - why is that? Well, we know whose name is being bandied about today as a candidate for the Antichrist, don't we?) Now, the government is asked to put its Caesar's touch upon everything religious - especially evangelical Christian - as if it were Midas.

It's almost as if Christians want the government to help them pretend to believe what they really don't anymore - as if, because they're afraid God really doesn't exist, they want to either rule the world (via National Prayer Breakfasts) as if they were Jesus, or help the world end itself - not so much in order to get somewhere, not even to get to heaven, but to escape where they are now, to leave behind things as they are, and not deal with the meaninglessness of their lives.

Since when did government become a shortcut to heaven for the evangelical Christian? When did Caesar become Jesus for them? Step by step - by demanding that reality conform to their fantasy; by demanding that science look like their theology; by demanding one's own facts in the fact of facts; by lying to oneself to the point that one's own belief in god became one's own contrivance, and this god a mere symbol of their own narcissism. As Eric Hoffer points out, the essence of the true believer/extremist is not that he believes something deeply, but that he deeply believes nothing. He is a nihilist.

The fanatic is not really a stickler to principle. He embraces a cause not primarily because of its justness or holiness but because of his desperate need for something to hold onto. - Eric Hoffer

Appeal to the government to enforce one's religion is the ultimate form of nonbelief, of distrust, of nihilism in one's religion. As I said, real believers should join atheists in celebrating this long overdue ruling. After all, I would be the first to be outraged if the government called for an Atheist Day, as I have ruffled many atheist feathers and would not make a great "mainsteam" or spokesperson atheist. As an atheist, I run with scissors; I do not always play well with others. I want the government to stay the hell out of my atheism, and I cannot fathom why any believer would not similarly demand the right, and the freedom, to be left alone.

What are we when we are alone? Some, when they are alone, cease to exist. - Eric Hoffer

UPDATED: Besides, considering the crap that the right wing has said about Barack Obama (he's the Antichrist, he's the "Messiah" which means the same thing, he's a foreigner not constitutionally our President, he's a Muslim), you'd think that the right wing would be relieved that he is no longer federally mandated to call us to pray, maybe (being a Muslim and all) to Allah, or maybe (being the Antichrist and all) to him! Am I right? Am I right? Come on people, you cannot have it both ways: either Obama is completely untrustworthy to act as President in this fashion, in which case you should be celebrating this ruling, or he is, in which case, cut out all the fearmongering. Make up your minds!

SECOND UPDATE: This is interesting - Franklin Graham was disinvited from the National Day of Prayer (which, I add, is now voluntary rather than mandatory for the President to declare. The ruling did not declare the NDoP itself unconstitutional, just the federal law requiring the President to declare it, as it was essentially a religious test for the President to "prove" that he was not a "communist").

Evolution Boffo Boo; ID Floppo Poo!

2010-04-02T09:51:00.007-05:00

With apologies to Mad Magazine for the above, it's been another year...another anniversary...and therefore, another reminder to everyone about intelligent design's one and only testable hypothesis, care of William Dembski.

The links to Dembski's "prediction" about the death of evolution (and to his corollary, the "death of molecular evolution" by 2011) keep disappearing - in fact, all references to his rather rash prediction are beginning to resemble the extinct branches in an evolutionary tree:

Evolution theory on last legs, says seminary teacher

By Dylan T. Lovan
ASSOCIATED PRESS

LOUISVILLE - To William Dembski, all the debate in this country over evolution won't matter in a decade.
By then, he says, the theory of evolution put forth by Charles Darwin 150 years ago will be dead.
The mathematician turned Darwin critic says there is much to be learned about how life evolved on this planet. And he thinks the model of evolution accepted by the scientific community won't be able to supply the answers.
"I see this all disintegrating very quickly," he said."

Well, something sure has been disintegrating quickly, especially since Kitzmiller, but it has not been evolution. However, never fear, that has not been all our boy in banana was up to:

Prediction: Within the next two years work on certain enzymes will demonstrate overwhelmingly that they are extremely isolated functionally, making it effectively impossible for Darwinian and other gradualistic pathways to evolve into or out of them. This will provide convincing evidence for specified complexity as a principled way to detect design and not merely as a cloak for ignorance.

Well, that was back in 2008 when this was supposed to have been confirmed. No dice.

Even more hilarious is this one:

I predict that in the next five years [by 2003] intelligent design will be sufficiently developed to deserve funding from the National Science Foundation (Dembski, Mere Creation, 1998, p. 29).

It's enough to make one want to drink a whole bottle of single-malt scotch. Oh, wait -!

I'll wager a bottle of single-malt scotch, should it ever go to trial whether ID may legitimately be taught in public school science curricula, that ID will pass all constitutional hurdles.

Of course, he said that he would wager, not that he did. Get it? *Sparkle*

The Documentary that Needs to Be Made about Higher Education (and the Workplace)

2010-04-01T13:23:00.014-05:00

UPDATED: More on the lingering pain that bullying causes.

Bullying. It happened to me, too - at school and at work. It does not necessarily stop when you become an adult.

If you are a victim, it is the bullies who have the problem, not you.

I know that, if you're like me, it is difficult to understand that bullying is not personal. It is based upon what you represent - namely, a threat to the bully. Sometimes, particularly among girls, it happens because of this (to me, completely alien) "I hate my best friend" syndrome - people in love with drama, with games, who may not intend harm and who are truly clueless about the misery that they cause others. Others, however, intend to cause harm and know that bullying is a "soft" crime to commit. Some people seem to have a Jekyll/Hyde syndrome, with Jekyll shown to their parents, to school administrators and teachers, to supervisors and upper management, and Hyde committing crimes in secret. Bullying is largely not recognized for the abuse that it is.

This is not "survival of the fittest" (a phrase that I hate). No one who is secure within him- or herself commits bullying. The bully is terrified of his or her own perceived incompetence. He or she is often afraid that the victim, usually an independent worker, or an offbeat or creative student, with a distinctive personality, and a nonaggressive style, will expose or show up the bully in some way.

It happened to me. By the time I got to high school I had developed such a thick skin (I have my own Clark Kent/Superman dual personality) that I invited some of the bullying to protect another girl in my gym class who was more vulnerable than I was. Frankly, I did the same at work. In fact, because I worked with someone who got off on "correcting" me in front of others in an attempt to humiliate me, I deliberately said a few clueless/stupid things in meetings just to get her to take the bait - and she always did!

(Hahahaha! What did she think others were thinking? "Oh, Kristine said a stupid thing - she must be a stupid person"? No, they were thinking, "God, XXXX is such a bitch to jump on Kristine like that! What is her problem?" And what do you think I was thinking? "Geez, I'm so dumb," or "Thanks for the attention! I'm glad my life isn't boring, and by the way, if you weren't such a bitch I'd probably pay even less attention to you than I already do!")

Yes, there are things you can do in the moment to protect yourself, and satisfying phrases that you can toss at your bully: "What's the matter, isn't anyone paying any attention to you?" "Are you afraid that if you don't pick on me, your friends are going to turn around and pick on you?" "Thanks for the attention - it's always a compliment." "Bored with yourself? Me, too."

But I think the time has come for us to ask why we secretly think that bullying will "toughen up" victims, when in fact it is the victims who are strong and the bullies who have the problem. The fact is, school administrators, teachers, supervisors, and management are often either intimidated by (yes, even by kids) and/or admiring of bullies for their perceived strength and "assertiveness," when this is total BS. There is nothing "strong" about bullying behavior: it is a coping mechanism for the bully's low self esteem and pent-up frustration. They are rigid, externally-focused (clothes, status, popularity, "right" behavior - yes, ironic, isn't it?), perpetually insecure people who need help now.

I had a talk with the right person about my bully at work, and what I said was: "When this woman stops being so hard on herself and judging herself so harshly, she will realize that I never judged her by her standards either." Her behavior pissed me off, but I didn't want to just lay into her, since I could tell what a big burden of shame she was carrying around - this shame was the real issue, not her "faults" (you're supposed to have faults). I'm too fucking busy thinking about nerdy things like evolution and programming languages to give a shit about people's faults - as I said earlier, the more mistakes you make, the merrier life will be. But it just didn't seem as if anything in life was much fun for her.

I really don't have the answers about what to do about bullying, but I do know that no one can solve their own problems by trying to dictate the lives of everyone else around them. However, controlling behavior seems to be an epidemic in our society.

Young people model what they see and experience, and if they experience relentless pressure to "perform," or absurd zero-tolerance rules that punish honor students for having Advil in their purses or butter knives in their cars, or are not allowed to make a mistake (which is a part of learning and growing), they are likely to develop rigid, maladaptive behaviors that can contribute to bullying, or to suicide.

I'm sure the "mean girls" in Massachusetts are shocked, even hurt, by their classmate's suicide. I doubt that they were truly evil. They knew what they were doing was wrong, but likely they didn't think it was serious. They probably actually liked their victim very much. (I cannot tell you how shocked I was to learn from some of my own tormentors how much they really did like me! But I was and am a woman who means what she says and says what she means, so I did not understand the "game.") They were definitely jealous of her. However, this does not excuse their cruel and unladylike behavior, which like any group behavior spiraled out of control, as unchecked, unpunished bullying seems to do.

My experience with bullies is that they were either 1. delinquents from bad homes who were abused by family and who did poorly in school, exhibiting disturbed personality behaviors, or 2. economically well-off kids in the "popular" crowd, highly functioning, but secretly terrorized at home, held to unreasonable standards, and inwardly wounded, frightened, and confused. Often, this latter group exhibits the really annoying behavior of never being satisfied with anything and throwing drama-queen hissy fits in public.

The parents of these "mean girls" need to stop making excuses for them, because who they really want to exonerate is themselves. These parents need to ask themselves how they produced such angry, hurting girls in the first place. Are they controlling? Are they shallow, placing emphasis over clothes, looks, and popularity over character and creativity? Are they angry, hurting people themselves? Have they been abusing their "mean girls," or instilling in them a sense of entitlement, an inability to take personal responsibility, and a low tolerance for frustration?

All indications point to "yes."

What a shame that no one did anything to redirect these girls before they engaged in behavior that was truly beneath them, and contributed to a classmate's suicide. What a waste, when it would have taken so much less effort, to see and to talk to these girls, and to give them boundaries, instead of seeing the victim as exclusively having the "problem." Now she is dead and they are charged - and I think that they should be charged for a crime, but whose job was it to step in and prevent all of this? I feel responsible for this, too. I feel that we are all responsible.

What do we do about it?

The Documentary that Ben Stein Could Have Made about Higher Education

2010-03-18T18:15:00.038-05:00

A flood of ideas washes over me as I investigate the quirks of higher education, scholarly publishing, and peer review: namely, what the problems are, and what should be done about it.

More and more I am convinced that the distraction that is intelligent design has given self-styled gadflies something to talk, primarily (and self-righteously) to themselves about - and a means of leaving themselves out of the real conversations that are beginning to take place, and which should take place. Given their religious-political agenda, perhaps that's a good thing; but the unfortunate thing is that they're wasting time and money (not Jerry Falwell's money, but Ahmanson, Jr.'s money) on worthless "debates" and unethical pursuits. And that's tragic.

It's all the more tragic because there are a lot of problems with higher education, scholarly publishing, and scientific/historical/humanities peer review. Below is a list of my concerns, which are more than worthy of a documentary featuring a high-brow celebrity. Think of the honorable, gadfly reputation that Ben Stein could have received - a reputation that he, a mediocre actor, faux economist, and would-be religious leader, apparently now craves with all the zeal of a former-calypso-performer-turned-evangelist.

(I'm sorry, I can't resist another dig at the late Jerry Falwell - mostly for the "former" label, and also because Ben Stein in Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed deliberately asked about funding of the Discovery Institute from Falwell in order to avoid asking about the funding of the Discovery Institute by Christian Reconstructionists. Clever feint, that.)

-Scholarly publication is the main vehicle for disseminating research results outside of specialized conferences, but the publishers have consolidated into a powerful few holding sway over a captive audience.

-Scientists and researchers, far from being the domineering bloc that Stein portrayed in Expelled, in order to publish (which builds reputations and is a requirement for tenure) are forced to sell one-time rights to their writings to scholarly journal publishers, and then purchase their own writings from these increasingly expensive journals.

-Almost every scientist and researcher has a horror story to tell about peer review - almost every single one. Legitimate scientists and researchers just don't whine and go drama-queen about it the way that the poseurs in Expelled did. (What a bunch of theatrics!) There is much to be fixed in peer review, although Stein's Final Solution would be (paradoxically, or appropriately) to commit genocide against the entire process. It would seem that the only person who should not complain is Richard Sternberg, who after all did get published because his article was rammed through to publication without any peer review!

-The price of scholarly journals have grown faster than the rate of inflation, imposing a heavy burden on libraries, colleges, and universities. (This is called the "crisis" in scholarly publishing.)

-If libraries, with straining budgets, turn to electronic subscriptions instead of print journals via databases, the publisher has at any time the right to bundle this expensive subscription with unwanted, irrelevant journals/databases (think of the bundling of toxic subprime mortgages with legitimate stocks), or to discontinue a journal subscription, in which case, whoops! all of the library's past journal copies go away. So if the library, college, or university has also gotten rid of its own print copies for the sake of freeing up space, as is increasingly being done, the readers of that journal are truly screwed.

-The textbook racket is truly a scam. It is in publishers' interest to issue a "revision" every year or every few years. When I worked on collection development at Books for Africa, I could not believe my eyes: truckloads of "old" textbooks taken out of the public schools, who are forced to purchase "new" ones, are dumped at the dock. What is really changed from edition to edition? A word here, a phrase there - and parents and teachers bear the brunt of it.

-The textbook industry has responded to the crisis in textbook prices, which have also grown in price faster than the rate of inflation (and also enjoys a captive audience) with scam "added value" nonsense such as printing fees, eBooks with a limited shelf-life (in other words, your book that you think you bought expires like rotten pears on a shelf - isn't that nice?), session time-outs (you have to log in and log out of a session to print your book, probably ten pages at a time, etc.), "supplementary" crap like included CDs (a big fat help, aren't they?), etc., etc.

-Publishers have howled at the prospect of open access journals and etextbooks, despite the fact that most of the research is done by and many of the students are attending land-grant institutions and that the public deserves to see this research and access this information.

-In other words, the publishing industry is pushing the wrong e-model with e-textbooks that, while discounted compared to the print version, have some or all of the dubious features above, and, unlike print, cannot be resold as used. (What are you buying when you buy an e-textbook? Do you even own the thing? I love my Kindle, but I almost always have the wireless off, and I don't use it for ebooks.)

Students like me, who are first-generation college graduates, who did not go to Cancun during our Spring Breaks, who maybe even worked during our Spring Breaks (because we were working our way through school or supplementing student loans with our earned incomes), do not appreciate being screwed like this.

That is why, if you're a first-generation, rural student suddenly in over your head, you go to the library to talk to other students about how to save money on textbooks. That is why publishers are increasingly scared about the fact that books are now being traded via torrent - and while I don't advocate that, I'm not surprised that it's happening.

-Tuition has become prohibitively expensive, even as state colleges and universities, who are less and less likely to be financed through state taxes. I don't hear Ben Stein talking about this; I hear him making excuses for (and bragging about?) his spoilt son and hanging out at Liberty University, acting like a big child himself.

-The publishing industry reaps the benefits of ridiculously draconian copyright laws, which now protect corporations rather than the creator of the work (because the creator of the work likely sold it to a corporation in order to get it published, from which he or she now earns a token royalty, if any), stifling new creations via online mashups and electronic collages.

Who do you think holds the rights to "Happy Birthday to You?" that now must be purchased any time some character in a movie sings even a line of it? Hint: it's not the deceased writer of the song, nor his estate. Why couldn't you watch the excellent documentary about the Civil Rights Movement Eyes on the Prize for nearly a decade? Hint: it's was not "Darwinists" who censored that series. (That's why I, despite myself, cheered when Yoko Ono lost her lawsuit against Expelled.)

-So we're all stampeding to online education. Well and good: a lot of my own education has had an online component. But there is no cause to think that writing an online curriculum takes any less work than writing a traditional curriculum, or that teaching an online class takes any less effort than teaching classes in person, or that or that, in fact, preparing and administering an online college or university is any "easier" than preparing and administering a traditional university! But that is the message that we're being given.

It's a lie. Behind every online resource is at least one person, and probably teams of people, who had to create that online resource. Computers do not program themselves; web-based tutorials do not write themselves; and for the most part, student do not teach themselves. The way that "online learning" is being crammed down the throats of the working-class poor particularly is setting them up for failure.

Ben Stein in his piece of crap defamed the world's scientists and educators as racist, Holocaust-enabling, selfish, and evil conspirators out to brainwash the world's young. What I see are professional scientists, professors, librarians, high school teachers, and college/university administrators deeply concerned about their students' education, and frustrated by the Kafkaesque red tape, greed, and entrenchment of the power-seeking, feudalistic corporations that we allowed to take over our schools, in the same way (and perhaps for the same purpose?) that we allowed them to take over our health care and our prisons.

We have a creativity death panel: it's called corporate socialism. It consists of corporate cartels, insurance company entrenchment, a monolithic news/entertainment media, and the bureaucratic, ridiculous laws that protect the three. Is that really news?

Below is a video of the foremost advocate for open access and the culture of user-generated content (or "read-write" culture), Lawrence Lessig. (There is an amusing allusion to evolution in this lecture from a quote by John Phillip Sousa. Of course in my opinion it is evolution that is the "read-write" alternative to creationism, being that it is the "trespasser" upon species or biblical kinds, and upon authoritarian religious beliefs.)

And lest anyone come here and make the same old tired claim that creationism/intelligent design represents the "youth culture" taking on the old farts of evolution, let me remind you that creationism and ID are nothing more than a repackaging of the Dr. Pepper version of phony rebellion: "Be an original! Drink Dr. Pepper! [Like everyone else.]" The homeschooled children of controlling parents who don't let their captives watch "The Simpsons" are not going to be prolific creators of electronic content themselves. Repeating those deceptive "10 Questions to ask your biology teacher" at your child's biology teacher when it's clear that you have no clue what the questions even mean is not "youthful rebellion" but lock-step conformism.

To drive this point home, I would love to see the "open-minded, youthful, rebellious" response of Mark Mathis and Ben Stein et al to a remixed, mashed-up version of Expelled. (How about restoring the lost footage, correcting that expurgated "quote by Charles Darwin," placing subtitles in the film to denote that those "students of Pepperdine University" are really movie extras, and calling this project Crossroads? Hmmmm?)

I Shouldn't Laugh

2010-02-19T11:53:00.013-06:00

It's not funny - actually it's really, really sad - but Schadenfreude is a powerful thing. I have cause.

The guy who stalked me and made me change colleges, delaying the completion of my Bachelor's is in prison in another state. A non-neighboring one - a really boring one. We're talking worse than Wisconsin. There is justice in the world sometimes.

After sixteen years of marriage, his wife divorced him because she said he had become abusive. *Bites tongue*

He violated two restraining orders, and told his kids that he was the "Antichrist." Trust me - he's too boring to be the Antichrist. Abusive bullies are usually great snorefests. I think the unspoken reason for bullying, which never appears on any of these "How to Deal with Difficult People" websites, is that the target is invariably more interesting, and often more attractive, and definitely more popular, than the bully.

Then he left weird voice messages (hasn't learned a damn thing since me!) and wrote her and her children a creepy postcard, started speaking in tongues (again), and told his ex-wife that God was on his side (of course) and that she was under evil influences (of course!) and needed to remarry him. During visitation he would just waltz into their house and start taking things, and trying to prevent his wife and kids from leaving (again, hasn't learned a damn thing).

He appealed his conviction on some idiotic basis that the postcard and the voice mails were not evidence, and his conviction was affirmed. Oh, and there's no evidence that the "combination of sounds that he was making" constituted "speaking in tongues," just another language besides English or Hebrew (this after he bragged that he was speaking Hebrew), and anyway, speaking in tongues is "normal behavior in some religions." But I thought you weren't speaking in tongues, man. So, which is it? Jesus is watching you tell a lie, HAHAHAHA! Mr. Tower of Babel is now sitting in the slammer with a roommate (nudge, nudge, wink, winkie!) 22 hours out of every day. He gets let out for exercise and a movie. I wonder if they will show Paris, Texas. (He liked that movie.)

I can't believe that it took sixteen years for this to happen. This asshole was stalking me even after he was married to her! (His mother, a total Jesus-head, who thinks that the Jewish people should be angry at their parents for raising them in the "wrong" religion, told me at the time that it was impossible for him to be stalking me, as he was married! Marriage fixes everything! What a clueless twit, making excuses for him, which is part of the problem.)

After that, he had a friend call and try to dig up information on me, and admitted it later. Even after I moved out of my apartment and had an unlisted phone number, he was calling my former roommate and hanging up. She raked him over the coals for it (thanks, Alice!) and he ran away like the coward he is. Yeah, have your friends and your brother call me now, Mr. Christian! (His brother is a piece of work, too.)

It's too bad I learned about this now; I could have given the prosecutor some interesting information about the criminal confinement and the speaking in tongues routine. Oh well, it's all over now. This man told me that I was a "princess" (yeah, princesses always help pay for their college by cocktail waitressing 50-60 hours a week during the summer and Spring Breaks, because princesses love being verbally abused and grabbed by drunk princes). He said that I would fail at writing and "never live" because I rejected him, and would never amount to anything. Yes, I'm a total loser. (But I thought I was a "princess"? Am I a princess loser?)

This from somebody living on government handouts at that point. It's okay to accept "socialism" when you're such a wonderful Christian, I guess. Actually, I should thank him for saying that - I got a good laugh out of it! (When I knew him, he wanted to be an artist. He was also punk and wore makeup. However, eventually he did more drinking than drawing. That's when the glossolalia started flowing like wine.)

The prison system that he's in has a system to notify victims and other interested parties about any change in the prisoner's status. You bet that I signed up! Hot diggity dog. Times sure have changed since when I could not get a restraining order against him.

Enjoy your cage, Antichrist. Nobody deserves it more than you! Hi from Paris.

P.S. My other harasser is also in prison, for assaulting his girlfriend. Again.

In Memoriam: Jean Simmons

2010-01-23T20:03:00.006-06:00

One of the most beautiful and talented Hollywood actresses is gone. Jean Simmons, who starred opposite Laurence Oliver in Hamlet and Kirk Douglas (and Olivier, again) in Spartacus, has died of cancer at age 80.

She was one of my heroes, and remained lovely throughout her life. I never heard or read one complaint about her; my understanding was that she was a very sweet and professional actress who was a delight to work with.

Of course, being a very beautiful woman, her deft craft as an actress sometimes was overlooked (also because she was such a natural). She will be missed!

Why "Atheism is a Relgion," Reason One

2010-01-13T21:51:00.006-06:00

Because atheists and nutjobs like Pat Robertson both have "beliefs," right? Pat Robertson blames the recent earthquake in Haiti on "Haiti's deal with the Devil," whereas atheists blame the earthquake on plate tectonics.

Well, the two are both "beliefs," right? They're equal but different "opinions," correct? Therefore, that's one example of how "atheists have their own belief system," right? Therefore, we atheists not being stupid is as much of a "religious practice" as Pat Robertson's ritual of not thinking is a form of science, right? Not bringing God into the earthquake makes the science of plate tectonics a religion, just as not bringing God into the classroom "makes the science of evolution" a violation of the separation of church and state, isn't that right, people?

Do I have that down pat, Michael Ruse?

UPDATED: Well, we'll see what happens - I asked a Muslim online who also asserted that "atheism is a religion" if women walking around naked was a form of hijab.

Here's a turnabout - and oddly enough, I've thought this, too: a review of the Creation Museum pronounces it "soulless."

I spent a lot of time in the Eden picnic area, trying to wrest some sort of spiritual buzz, a sense of the majesty and the mystery, but it’s conspicuously absent. Literally beaten to death. This is Ripley’s Believe-It. It is irredeemably kitsch. In fact, it may be the biggest collection of kitsch in God’s entire world. This is the profound represented by the banal, a divine irony. (The penchant for kitsch is something that gay men and born-again Christians share.) This tacky, risible, and rational tableau defies belief, beggars faith. Compare it to the creation story in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, Masaccio’s expulsion from Eden, or any of the thousands of flickering images, icons, and installations based on faith rather than literalist realism. It truly makes you wonder, Is all this righteous ire, all this money, all this Pentecostal flame-throwing the best they can come up with? This cheap county-fair sideshow—this is their best shot? It may be more replete with proof than a Soviet show trial, but this creation is bereft of any soul.

I once, in a film review, called a tediously religion-thumping (if not Bible-banging) film "faithless." (A kid's mother gets killed by an errant baseball, and all this annoyingly righteous little twit can say is, "There are no accidents" and "I am God's instrument"? Are you kidding me? The protagonist cares more about the mother's death than her own child does? What a pompous little brat! The film became one distasteful justification of her death after another from that point on.) This is what really pisses me off: that those who engage in the knee-jerk argument that "atheism is a religion" do not address the essential nihilism - the lack of wonder, the hankering after certainties - in what is often called "faith."

I have no delusion that science, or life, is going to hand me many certainties. (Remember, I'm studying statistics.) Does it not occur to these folks that the more they pound the "atheism as a religion" gavel too hard, the more they make atheism sound like one of the few, or perhaps the only, "religion" that does not molest children en mass, or condemn victims for their misfortunes, or set fire to churches/mosques/temples, or rake in the kind of dough that televangelists regularly do? With apologies to Nietzsche, supposing atheism is the only "religion" that actually fulfills religion's ostensible goals of uniting humanity in peace, what then? Is that an argument that anti-atheists really want to [unwittingly] make?

Mistakes, Damned Mistakes, and Statistics

2010-01-12T22:12:00.005-06:00

I'm working through The Cartoon Guide to Statistics by Larry Gonick with the goal of then getting through a more comprehensive book, then taking a research methods class so that I can do my own sampling. I highly recommend Gonick's The Cartoon Guide as an introduction to the subject.

There are various instructional videos on You Tube regarding statistics, but the most interesting is one presented by Oxford mathematician Peter Donnelly on how juries (and the rest of us) are easily confused and swayed by unsound mathematical arguments involving randomness and uncertainty.

Rather horrifying thought, isn't it - being convicted of a crime you did not commit by unsound statistical inference!

However, before the criminal case, Donnelly references what is called the False Positive Paradox: how a test that is 99% accurate can result in so many false test results indicating that well people have a serious disease.

Gonick references the same paradox. Assume that one person in one thousand has this serious illness, the test is 99% accurate, and the probability of a false positive test result is only 2%. Then supposed that you test positive. What is the probability that you actually have this disease?

Using Bayes' Theorem, we ultimately calculate that the percentage is .0472; that is, that out of all those who test positive for the disease, less than 5% actually have it! In other words, out of the 21 people in 1000 who would test positive, only 1 in 1000 would have the disease. Actually, this is not as bad as it initially looks: it's better, after all, to have a false positive than a false negative, as the false positive can be detected in further tests, whereas a false negative mandates no further tests. Also, the test does increase each of the 21 people's chances of having the disease from 1 in 1000 to 1 in 21.

At least, I'm 99.9999999999999% sure of that!

Ding-Dong! Verily I Try... (or Christmas and Hunter-Gatherers)

2009-12-19T14:07:00.021-06:00

I just read a rather amusing article that gave me one of those "lightbulb" moments, about miscommunication and miscues. I've just figured out (for the umpteenth time) another variation on How Much I am Out of Step with Other Women:

“One Christmas, I received a tub of Porcelana Fade Cream from my husband’s great aunt,” says Ryan-Sigler, a 46-year-old teacher from Lynchburg, Va. “I was at the tender age of 36 and the cream was supposed to ‘fade brown spots.’ I have to say that was the worst Christmas gift I’ve ever received.”

From body shapers to Botox, nose hair trimmers to the dreaded Thigh Toner, there are some gifts it’s better to neither give nor receive. Out-of-the-blue self-improvement gifts often relay a not-so-merry message. Happy holidays — you look old! Merry Christmas, you’re getting fat!Or season’s greetings, isn’t it about time you took care of that lady ’stache?

As I read this, I had one of those *gasp* moments, realizing that my reaction to such a present would have been very different. Porcelana Fade Cream, the "worst Christmas gift" ever? Why? I'd use the face cream (which I would never buy for myself, preferring to mix witch hazel with potting soil and cucumbers, or to use real oatmeal with a low-price facial scrub). I'd probably thank the woman and, if I liked the cream, hint at another jar for next year! What's the big deal? It's a free skin product! So what if it's for age spots and I don't have any? I have moles - would it work on them? Would using it prevent age spots? Let's find out!

Sooner or later, we'll all have to deal with that lady 'stache or our weight gain (weight accumulates around the organs as one ages, which is why even former stick-figures like me have to start watching their weight after forty) or the Thunder Thigh syndrome. So if someone gave me one of those cheesy Thighmaster contraptions, I'd probably laugh and give a demonstration. Can I use it while shimmying?

With than in mind, I now certainly hope that nothing that I gave anyone insulted them. (I doubt it, though. Paradoxically, I am pretty attuned moms' needs when it comes to finding them weirdly appropriate gifts - the hand-held LED message fan was a big hit at the Secret Santa exchange with the mother who promptly signaled "Ice cream in freezer" at her husband behind her kids' backs! I was rather proud of myself for finding that one!)

What do we Americans have to give to each other, anyway? Goofy presents can be fun. I would just assume that the Thighmaster was a joke present. Lady 'stache - okay, not the most diplomatic present, but useful. I would, however, draw the line at nose hair clippers. LOL!

Also, the plastic surgeon who gave a friend's wife a discount for breast augmentation because the friend said "she really wants one" fell for one of the oldest ploys since the beginning of the Twentieth Century. Sorry, you set yourself up for that one, Doc. He goes on to say:

I tell this story as a cautionary tale now. When people talk about defects in their body, they’re often not asking for an operation. They’re asking for a hug and a kiss and reassurance they’re OK.

As I read this article, which is informative but also hilarious, I realized that I'm discovering more and more scenarios in which my reactions just don't gibe with the reactions of other women. For example, this howler finally expressed everything I was afraid to say about women's obsession with shopping:

The idea for Kruger's new study arose from a personal experience. He and his now-wife were traveling with friends through Czechoslovakia. When they arrived in Prague, the women immediately wanted to go shopping, an impulse that the men did not understand.

"We thought, 'Why do you want to go shopping? You can go shopping anywhere. There's a thousand years of culture here,'" he said. "They were adamant. They put their foots down. They took the credit cards and left."

That wasn't the end of it. When the women returned, Kruger said, they were full of joy and pride as they showed off their loot, even though many of their purchases came from a chain store that had outlets in other countries.

"For them," he said, "It was just the thrill of the chase."

Yes, I could never figure out What the hell gives? with buying the same old crap you can buy anywhere else. Normally, I look askance at "evolutionary psychology" - much of it strikes me as ad hoc justifying of sexist stereotypes, with about as much content as "Marxist criticism" (something exists, "Marx predicted it," "this is what he really said," repeat ad nauseum) which in my opinion is not too far from "Nostradamus predicted it." (As Eric Hoffer said, "Marx was not a Marxist.") However, this explanation seems to make sense:

The results fell into the gendered trends that Kruger was expecting to find: Overall women tended to behave like foragers, and men acted like hunters. To him, that made sense.

When groups of hunter-gatherers arrived in a new place, he said, the women were eager to scope out the landscape for patches of food that they would return to again and again. Foraging was a daily and social activity, and kids often came along.

To determine whether a plant was perfectly ripe, women developed a fine attention to colors, shapes, sizes, textures and smells. All of those senses come into play when trying to find shoes that match a new dress or clothes to buy as gifts.

Well, it could be confirmation bias, but it dovetails with so much of my anecdotal experience that I can't help falling for it. And thanks for the "(most)" MSNBC! Thank you!

My method of shopping is to whip through the store with the idea that "I'll know if if I see it." (Notice I did not say, "when." I have walked out of plenty of stores without buying anything. If I say this in front of other women, they express the same shock that they'll invariably express when I say things like, "I'd rather chop wood than do the dishes," or "I think I could have majored in military history.") I practically run past the racks and shelves, until one or two items make me stop and examine them further.

No one can riffle through a rack of clothes faster than me - most of it I don't like and won't buy, so there's no point in looking at it. My goal is to get as much as I need as possible while spending as little as possible, with the fewest trips to the dressing room as possible, since I'm usually dragging with me a large bag containing a heavy book (because I feel insecure without one - don't ask me why, I even brought a book to the casino once).

So, in an earlier age, I would have been a hunter rather than a forager/gatherer? Or is this really a false dichotomy? It's something that fascinates me. I don't think human beings change so fundamentally that there could not have been "tomboy cavewomen" who preferred running around the savannah to digging for grubs and roots with the kids, while certain sensitive men preferred to tend fires or look after children. After all, Native American tribes accepted that there were "lucky charm" gay people, and men who preferred to dress and act as women, and the occasional woman who struck out on her own. I am willing to bet that our recent ancestors and even Neanderthalensis, Homo habilis, and the Australopithecines displayed much more individual diversity than we give them credit for. I'll bet that back then there were, as there are today, loners and jabberers (once speech had been invented), laid-back types and control freaks, drama queens and eye-rollers, honest ones and smarmy used-carcass salemen (or women), and those who later would become the bookworm type, like me.

Jared Diamond expresses doubts about The Hunter stereotype in this unforgettable passage, one of my favorites, from The Third Chimpanzee:

What food did our early ancestors get with those crude tools, and how did they get it? At this point, anthropology books usually insert a long chapter entitled something like "Man the Hunter." The point here is that baboons, chimps, and some other primtes occasionally prey on small vertebrates, but recently surviving Stone Age people (like Bushmen) did a lot of big-game hunting. So did Cro-Magnons, according to abundant archaeological evidence. There's no doubt that our early ancestors also ate some meat, as shown by marks of their stone tools on animal bones and by wear marks on their stone tools caused by cutting meat. The real question is: how much big-game hunting did our early ancestors do?... The mystique of Man the Hunter is now so rooted in us that it's hard to abandon our belief in its long-standing importance. Today, shooting a big animal is regarded as an ultimate expression of macho masculinity.* Trapped in this mystique, male anthropologists like to stress the key role of big-game hunting in human evolution....

As an example of the purple prose spawned by this men's locker-room mentality, consider the following account of human evolution by Robert Ardrey in his book African Genesis: "In some scrawny troop of beleaguered not-yet-men on some scrawny forgotten plain a radian particle from an unknown source fractured a never-to-be-forgotten gene, and a primate carnivore was born. For better or for worse, for tragedy or for triumph, for ultimate glory and ultimate damnation, intelligence made alliance with the way of the killer, and Cain with his sticks and his stones and his quickly running feet emerged on the high savannah." What pure fantasy! [Yeesh, that was pretty bad!]

Western male writers and anthropologists aren't the only men with an exaggerated view of hunting. In New Guinea I've lived with real hunters, men who recently emerged from the Stone Age. Conversations at campfires go on for hours over each species of game animal, its habits, and how best to hunt it. To listen to my New Guinea friends, you would think that they eat fresh kangaroo for dinner every night and do little each day except hunt. In fact, when pressed for details, most New Guinea admit that they have bagged only a few kangaroos in their whole lives.

I still recall my first morning in the New Guinea highlands, when I set out with a group of a dozen men armed with bows and arrows. As we passed a fallen tree, there was suddenly much excited shouting, men surrounded the tree, some spanned their bows, and others pressed forward into the brush pile. Convinced that an enraged boar or kangaroo was about to come out fighting, I looked for a tree that I could climb to a perch of safety. Then I heard triumphant shrieks, and out of the brush pile came two mighty hunters holding aloft their prey: two baby wrens, not quite able to fly, weighting about one-third of an ounce each, and promptly plucked, roasted, and eaten. [Awwwww!] The rest of that day's catch consisted of a few frogs and many mushrooms... For most of our history we were not mighty hunters but skilled chimps, using stone tools to acquire and prepared plant food and small animals. Occasionally, men did bag a large animal, and then retold the story of that rare event incessantly.

I'm feeling more and more like a woman as I read this! LOL, men bragging and making something appear more difficult than it really is - girls, ain't it the truth?

*I wish to add, however, that the overwhelming majority of hunters in Minnesota also consider this to be an enormous responsibility, and feel a great respect for and kinship with the big animal. Most hunters in this state are extremely careful with their guns, respectful of people's private farms, and support local conservation efforts. The recent poaching of an eight-point buck known in this state by a jerk who wanted to act out his own Man the Hunter stereotype caused hurt and anger among hunters, who respect nature and the law, and expect others to do so.

My Kindle Confront[s] Kent Hovind's Dissertation

2009-12-09T12:50:00.008-06:00

UPDATED: Note the post name correction. *Uggghhh* Excuse me, I marvelously cannot type lately. (How I aced a recent typing test with 98 percent accuracy is beyond me.)
---
Kent Hovind's diss--um, er, ertation, if you want to call it that, is now online. I loaded it onto my Kindle, which has new PDF-reading ability, and began the Text-to-Speech function.

When I read, "As an evangelist, God has given me..." (was God the evangelist?) I knew I was in for the long haul. My Kindle, in fact, started reading aloud in two ways: first in its normal voice, and then, in a silly high pitched whine.

Rather like that. Then, it let out a gasp and refused to read further unless I gave it some chocolate. Nobody else touches my chocolate!

I looked at the page (74) and read for myself (otherwise, I would never have believed it):

Bring back a Mars rock or a Jupiter rock, I'll eat it or lick it.

The best. Line. In a "dissertation." Ever! Bwahaha! My Kindle now demands pop-rocks.

Where can I find pop-rocks? I haven't seen those things in years. I offered to go to the Science Museum and pick up some freeze-dried ice cream, but Kindle won't hear of it.

Shimmies to Pharyngula

LATER: It just gets better and better:

page 87: "God created the plants on day three before he created the sun on day four. If you think plants are going to survive billions of years without the sun, you need to study more biology." Now, how can you argue with that? Bwahaha!

Mistakes are Marvelous!

2009-11-19T22:05:00.012-06:00

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change. - ~~Charles Darwin~~ Clarence Darrow*

Let us not mince words: the marvelous is always beautiful. Anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful. - Andre Breton

At last, at long last, we may be seeing the death of the Helicopter Parent!

His own revelation came while listening to the feedback about his son in kindergarten. It was fine, but nothing stellar — until he got to the art room and the teacher began raving about how creative his son was, pointing out his sketches that she'd displayed as models for other students. Then, Honoré recalls, "she dropped the G-bomb: 'He's a gifted artist,' she told us, and it was one of those moments when you don't hear anything else. I just saw the word gifted in neon with my son's name ..." So he hurried home and Googled the names of art tutors and eagerly told his son all about the special person who would help him draw even better. "He looks at me like I'm from outer space," Honoré says. "'I just wanna draw,' he tells me. 'Why do grownups have to take over everything?'"

At age twenty-nine, I was a second-shift supervisor of data entry clerks. My style was quite hands-off, although I had one strict rule: No backbiting. Anyone who had a problem with another employee either respectfully told that employee, or came to me. Except for one problem employee, chronically late and insubordinate, who required a lot of "talks" with me and my supervisor (and who eventually walked off the job), I had no bitchy behavior.

Then, I had the experience of being supervised by a better educated person who was quite a bit younger than me. Despite having had every advantage and privilege, this unfortunate person was a chronic complainer, whiner, control freak, and back-stabber. This person was intolerant of mistakes - even small mistakes - in anyone, and would get upset about them. I lost respect for this person when I learned that the target of the back-stabbing was me, a subordinate who had done nothing to harm anyone.

As far as I'm concerned, bitchiness is always going to exist in the workplace, but those who are in a position of power and who bad-mouth people beneath them occupy a unique category of wicked. Behavior like that is a tacit confession made by this type of person that he or she cannot compete honestly in a meritocracy, and lacks integrity as well.

My goodness gracious, I'm a big girl; I humored this youngster and would rather that the bullying happen to me, as opposed to someone younger and much more vulnerable than I was. But what creates such a bully? In my opinion, it is overparenting - refusing to allow your child to make mistakes. What folly. Mistakes, in my mind, are possibly heroic gestures - only those who dare, who take risks, make mistakes. Only those who imagine what cannot be and yet try to find out if it could be true - like Kepler with his polyhedra and Newton with his alchemy - make mistakes. The real mistake is in not admitting, at last, that they are mistakes! Kepler finally admitted that he could not reconcile his Platonic solids with the orbits of the planets, and instead bequeathed to us his exquisite laws of planetary motion. Newton, convinced in his certitude, went on to send several men to the gallows for forgery and died a virgin.

Every teacher can tell the story of a student who needed to fail in order to be reassured that the world wouldn't come to an end. Yet teachers now face a climate in which parents ghostwrite students' homework, airbrush their lab reports — then lobby like a K Street hired gun for their child to be assigned to certain classes. Principal Karen Faucher instituted a "no rescue" policy at Belinder Elementary in Prairie Village, Kans., when she noticed the front-office table covered each day with forgotten lunch boxes and notebooks, all brought in by parents. The tipping point was the day a mom rushed in with a necklace meant to complete her daughter's coordinated outfit. "I'm lucky — I deal with intelligent parents here," Faucher says. "But you saw very intelligent parents doing very stupid things. It was almost like a virus. The parents knew that was not what they intended to do, but they couldn't help themselves." A guidance counselor at a Washington prep school urges parents to find a mentor of a certain disposition. "Make friends with parents," she advises, "who don't think their kids are perfect." Or with parents who are willing to exert some peer pressure of their own: when schools debate whether to drop recess to free up more test-prep time, parents need to let a school know if they think that's a trade-off worth making.

Well, I admire Newton's knowledge, but consider him to have been an incomplete person, bitter and vindictive in his old age. My personal belief, if you want to call it that, is that each person must make his or her unique mistakes in order to be a complete person. If one is not brave enough to be wrong, one can never quite be right about anything - no matter how hard one tries. Expect too much, and you'll always be disappointed. Mistakes are dares; being "right" is mere coloring-by-the-numbers. Mistakes are creative; being "correct" is being redundant. Mistakes exist in all their obscene glory; being "right" is merely the absence of mistakes.

I have spent my life seeking to make my own unique mistakes. Quite frankly, I've become good at it, too. It's easy: just figure out 1) what scares you the most, and 2) if it scares you because you secretly want to do it, and 3) do it! Simple.

Needless to say, I'm good at being scared, too! In fact, I'm so good at being scared, that it's starting to feel like fun. (In other words, while other people are reading What Color is Your Parachute, I'm watching the ground come rushing up to me with startling calm and wondering, "...Parachute...?")

No wonder I have a strong stomach for the back-stabbing and "hate stares" people sometimes like to torment others with at work! I won't say that I'm not still angry about it, or that I am not still shocked and outraged by it. In a supposedly professional person who has higher ambitions, this behavior is shocking and remains shocking. However, it almost seems epidemic today; we have become a nation of control freaks. You may as well get angry about the weather as about how crappy people treat each other.

(Besides, life is too short. I never understood the "he's her best friend and they're both not talking to her" crap at the office, anyway. Who can keep track of the stupid politics, when Jupiter appears next to the full moon, or there is so much interesting stuff to read, or when I've come up with a great scene for my novel while listening to movie soundtracks while on the treadmill? Don't these people know that while they're freaking out over petty things, I'm thinking about my next writing project or adventure?)

Freakonomics authors Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt analyzed a Department of Education study tracking the progress of kids through fifth grade and found that things like how much parents read to their kids, how much TV kids watch and whether Mom works make little difference. "Frequent museum visits would seem to be no more productive than trips to the grocery store," they argued in USA Today. "By the time most parents pick up a book on parenting technique, it's too late. Many of the things that matter most were decided long ago — what kind of education a parent got, what kind of spouse he wound up with and how long they waited to have children."

If you embrace this rather humbling reality, it will be easier to follow the advice D.H. Lawrence offered back in 1918: "How to begin to educate a child. First rule: leave him alone. Second rule: leave him alone. Third rule: leave him alone. That is the whole beginning."

Not only do I think that children do not get outside for unstructured play enough these days, adults don't do it, either. Yet, unstructured play is key to building imagination, problem solving skills, negotiation, creativity, and values. As the surrealists knew, boredom was important:

Corsair Sanglot was bored! Boredom had become his cause. He let it grow in silence, while he marveled every day that it was still increasing.

VMartin often commented at After the Bar Closes that he was puzzled by my being an atheist and also being attracted to surrealism. He should not have puzzled over it. First of all, the surrealists were atheists (with the exception of Artaud and a few others), but secondly, and more importantly, the surrealists believed in the Marvelous. The Marvelous is not perfection - far from it. The Marvelous is the revelation of inner life to the willing surrealist. I am not interested in being perfect; I am interested in living life while I am alive. I do not believe that anything or anyone is ordinary. However, the sad thing is that, in their pursuit of "perfection," so many people make themselves ordinary, because they're trying to be everyone and everything else but who they are.

Who are you? You are the sum total of your decisions. Your life becomes the decisions that you make. However, if you make no mistakes, you really never made any decisions. That is truly tragic.

----

*Sigh* Excuse me while I strike out this "marvelous" mistake:You probably haven't heard that quote, have you? Well, Charles Darwin said it, and all the "documentaries" by Ben Stein or all the Origin of Species introductions by Ray Comfort cannot change it. Hell, both Ben Stein and Ray Comfort made mistakes - big ones. Let's see if either of them will be adaptable to admit it.
Wah, wah, wah, waaaaaaaah! *Raspberry*

Are Four Legs Better than Two?

2009-11-04T20:42:00.013-06:00

This commentary cracked me up: "Animals make the perfect humans."

In case there are a few on two legs who aren't convinced, allow me to present my case.

Your dog is a great food tester. If she won't eat it, you'd better not either.

No cat snores as loudly as a human.

Your cat, dog, horse or bird doesn't care if you're young or old, rich or poor, fat or thin. She loves you just as you are.

No animal has ever tortured himself by trying to be perfect.

No herd of horses or pack of hounds will ever ask you to clap your hands in unison. Nor will any animal -- even in front of a TV camera -- introduce another as "the lovely and talented ..."

Humans routinely breed past the food supply. Most animals are too smart to do this.

Some animals are monogamous. Some are not. They accept their fundamental natures. When it comes to humans, the kindest way to approach this is to understand that monogamy is contrary to nature but necessary for the greater social good.

Animals do not pay for sex.

Animals cannot damage the water table. Humans are doing this all over the world even as you read this.

No animal is ever a hypocrite.

A cat doesn't care if another cat is black or white, so along as she catches mice.

A dog may steal from you but will never lie to you.

And so on.

With all due respect to the valid points that she makes, she is wrong on a couple of points:

Animals do pay for sex. Many animals exchange gifts of food, for example, for sex. Others just force the female. Nature isn't always pretty.

No animal is a hypocrite? Tell that to my cat. After having a moderate-to-severe urinating problem (he didn't want to go inside the box), we had both of them neutered and I, who had lavished praise on little Newton for any box-doody, began rewarding him with food if he used the box. Well, I'm happy to say that Newton has had a complete attitude change - if anything, he's turned into the happiest little puppy that a cat could be - running at my heels with his face upturned, wagging his tail, and "barking" - but he also learned to scratch in the box whenever he wants a treat (which is constantly now). Actually, random rewards are best - I did try that, but you know how cute they can be when they want something!

What a little shit! Plus, I cannot eat cheerios without both of these characters (they're tuxedo cats, but I think they more resemble killer whales) in my face, running over my feet, jumping on the counter, meowing, etc. These little twinks get breakfast, then also get a taste of my cheerios before I have any breakfast. And since I loathe eating in the morning, cheerios or oatmeal is about all I can stomach. (Yes, they have to lick my oatmeal bowl, too!) I admit it; I let them manipulate me.

Animals aren't "too smart" to overbreed - any animal can and will overbreed. That's why we get our little darlings fixed. (If you own a female cat, you know the routine: "Meeeeoooaauur! I want to have a million kitty-brats!")

Do I need to mention that, even if your dog will eat it, you'd better not? (Cats, too. Loki throws up on the floor, and there's Newton, running over to see what's tasty. He'll even eat his own barf. Eeeaaauuugh!)

But for the most part, this article is true. Animals don't care if you're ugly or pretty, fat or thin. Animals work well with disabled people, and people with autism or brain damage respond positively to them. They love without condition, without reservation; I never felt judged by an animal, or alone in nature. Also, it goes without saying that animals have a sense of humor; every single cat I ever owned sure did. They were all sweeties, and I swear they were laughing at me, and playing tricks on me! Animals are happy "just because," and this year, I resolved to do just that.

One of the reasons we made a social contract with domesticated animals years ago was to "borrow" their power, speed, senses. In return, we feed them, care for them. We have broken this contract. They have not.

Man, that's the truth.

This New-Fangled Halloween

2009-10-23T20:01:00.016-05:00

Halloween is coming - and you know what that means. It's the time of year for book burnings. So, what's going up in flames this year? Harry Potter? Porn? The Ultimate Sudoku Challenge? Nope - this year, it's Bibles.

Come to our Halloween book burning. We are burning Satan's bibles like the NIV, RSV, NKJV, TLB, NASB, NEV, NRSV, ASV, NWT, Good News for Modern Man, The Evidence Bible, The Message Bible, The Green Bible, ect.

These are perversions of God's Word, the King James Bible...

We will also be burning Satan's popular books written by heretics like Westcott & Hort, Bruce Metzger, Billy Graham Rick Warren Bill Hybels , John McArthur, James Dobson, Charles Swindoll John Piper, Chuck Colson, Tony Evans, Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swagart, Mark Driskol, Franklin Graham, Bill Bright, Tim Lahaye, Paula White, T.D. Jakes, Benny Hinn, Joyce Myers, Brian McLaren, Robert Schuller, Mother Teresa, The Pope...

Man. It sure is confusing, trying to keep up with the book-burners these days. But that's not all - if you want to see a true Halloween horror, check out this ministry's website, via this page (scroll down for the link - I'm not linking directly to these nuts). It looks like they licked a piece of candy-corn and wrote it on a puddle of melted crayons.

Since the author freely admits that he cannot read Hebrew, Greek, or Latin, how does he know that the King James Version is the only faithful English rendering of the Bible? Easy! The KJV tells him so! Wow. Such logic makes me weak in the knees.

Speaking of weak knees, apparently they don't make ghosts like they used to.

Ouch! That's awkward. I can see this Halloween shaping up to be just peachy. Therefore, I thought I'd rent The Shining again just to revisit a classic piece of horror by my favorite director. Wow! Was I disappointed!

Give me a break. This movie wasn't really that scary at all! What a rip-off. I don't remember it being so...so heartwarming. So now how is one supposed to have a scary Halloween?

Good old Mary Poppins! Yes, as I recall, it was this movie (and not Alien) that made me jump high enough to stand straight up on my theatre seat backrest.

But seriously folks, you can have a great and spooky Halloween without any television. Just go to hulu.com and check out their huluween specials, or my favorite classic shows: "Night Gallery," "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," and "Outer Limits." (They also have "Dark Shadows," but it's the 1990s remake, not the original series, which I love - but I have parts of that on DVD.)

When I was very small, I saw part of a TV show that scared the living crap out of me so badly that I had to leave the room - it was worse than the famous third story from "Trilogy of Terror," which I actually could sit through. ("Trilogy of Terror" is not at Hulu, but you can watch it on YouTube.)

This particular program, I remember, had something to do with red, glowing eyes following a man on the street in the dark before attacking him. Then, there was a scene in which a man trapped in a basement watches in helpless terror as a creature with two glowing red eyes reaches its hairy paws into the window to pull the bars open and come in. I remember that, knowing that the show was about to end, I waited outside the room until all the scary noises had died down, then ran in to see the very last scene: a dark puddle of something on the floor, out of which, suddenly, two red eyes opened and glowed.

Not having any idea what the title of this show was, or if it was a TV movie or part of a series, I searched IMDb and Google and YouTube for this show that had terrified me, without any luck, until a few weeks ago I stumbled upon it by pure chance at Hulu! I could not believe that I had finally found that silly show that had made me scream bloody murder! (And no, it didn't have the same effect on me now.)

It was a "Night Gallery" episode, "There Aren't Any More MacBanes," starring a very young and weird Joel Gray, and (coincidence upon coincidence) including a walk-on role by a young Mark Hamill, who was later to cause me so much adolescent-girl-puppy-love-trauma as Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. Too funny! It's a small Hollywoorld!

This year, the ghosts are not on the television - the ghost is our television! Television is dead. We can rebuild it; we have the technology. The average ghoul who wants more control over her Halloween viewing now has more choices than ever before. Between Netflix, Hulu, and LikeTelevision, along with all the online world news/entertainment channels to be had, and online mp3s of Old Time Radio shows, this promises to shape up to be a happy (and cheap) Halloween after all.

(What's that, you say? "Twilight Zone"? I didn't forget TZ - I have the entire collection on DVD. I don't even need an internet connection - I can watch it whenever I want! Bwahahahahaha! *evil laughter*)

Shimmies to Ed Brayton at Dispatches, and Book Patrol at Seattlepi, and all my ghosts and ghoulies out there.

P.S. Any "Twin Peaks" fans out there? You can watch seasons one and two for free at IMDb.

My Sweat Lodge Experience

2009-10-19T12:16:00.009-05:00

UPDATED: I thought this guru was just misguided, but the story has gotten worse. "People were not physically forced to stay inside but chided by Ray if they wanted to leave as he told them they were stronger than their bodies and weakness could be overcome." Oh, man - just as I said, this is just more stupid, Judeo-Christian compete with nature/transcend your body/look-at-me, I'm ascendant above the others shaming bullshit! That is not the Lakota way. That is not the Choctaw or the Crow way [these are the tribes I've been exposed to], to "prove" something. Why do white people continue to think that they're participating in a "Native American ritual" when everything essential (community, trust, mental preparation) has already been taken out of it?

I mean, how would Christians feel if a bunch of Hindus merely served coffee and doughnuts after praying to Shiva, and said, "Now I know what it's like to go to a Christian church"?
---
In light of the horrendous story of the people who have sickened and died as a result of paying $9000 - $10,000 to participate in what they thought was a "sweat lodge," I recall my own experience at the Rainbow Gathering in 1990.

I rode up to northern Minnesota with some people that I met through a notice I placed on the bulletin board at the Seward Cafe. After we parked, we had to trek about five miles with our gear to the actual camping site. After about three miles, I became tired and needed to rest - and I lost track of the people I had ridden with.

Several other people caught up with me and helped me repack my pack so that the walking was easier. We walked along talking until we encountered some Lakota guy who was stirring rice in a huge pot. He did not say a word, but simply offered us rice sweetened with honey and apples. One member of our group tried to engage the man in a conversation about crystals and the Tarot (groan!). I cringed, but the Native American just shook his head and said, "No, man."

"You've never heard of the Tarot?"

"Nope." And that ended the conversation. I grinned at him over my rice, but he was too busy cooking.

The food that he gave us perked me right up so that I could complete that long, hard trek to the campground; talk of crystals doesn't cook rice. And that is a big key to understanding so-called "Native American spirituality" right there. Hold that thought.

Upon reaching camp, I befriended and joined a group of strangers, then set out to find the people I rode in with - yeah, great idea, since there were only 10,000 people distributed among this expansive state park! I was feeling anxious and alone, wandering around in the growing dark among all these people, when another guy took my arm and said, "Hey, you seem to be searching for something." Doesn't that sound spiritual? But he didn't mean it that way. Leo listened sympathetically when I explained that this was my first Gathering, I was here alone, had lost my travel companions, and wasn't really having much fun.

"Let's hang out," he said. "Come with me and we'll get some food. Quit worrying about finding your friends, we're going to be here a week and someone else will give you a lift back to the Cities, if it comes to that. I'm looking for a good sweat somewhere. Besides, I'm Choctaw and I can find anybody." He said it humorously, as if the opposite was true. He didn't sound profound or "spiritual," he sounded like some friendly man with a sense of humor. If anything, he looked at this crowd of earnest idealists with a jaundiced eye. "One thing about these things, there's always good food," he said, "even if a lot of the people are stupid."

We did find something to eat; and we even found a "sweat lodge." It was small, intimate, and dark. (No light bulbs in a northern Minnesota forest!) With only the fire outside for illumination, we undressed and sat in the hot half-darkness. Everyone was extremely polite, offering each other water and counseling against the symptoms of overheating: light-headedness, agitation, etc. The one exception was this one obnoxious man who cajoled (almost ordered) us to stand in a circle, hold hands, and recite "this powerful prayer," which included statements like "Let Christ return to earth," and such. When the voices dropped off, he berated us for not showing enough enthusiasm. "Wow, this is really powerful," I muttered as we sat down again. "Some people should shut the fuck up," Leo agreed in my ear. We left not long after that.

So there you have my "sweat lodge experience" - mostly disappointing, pretty much a spiritual bust, and yet what I remember is the taste of good food made even better by the long walk in, and the companionship of a humorous guy who laughed about it afterward and gave me a backrub. "We had a good sweat, and that's all I care about!" he chuckled. "You need a good hot fire."

I groused about the "Christ return to earth" bit.

"Oh, well, lots of us combine our rituals with Christianity these days." He shrugged. "It doesn't mean what the die-hards think it means. Different tribes got together in the old times and combined their stories and dances and shit. What matters is what you do, not what you talk about. If you don't like something, just walk away. We don't fight about religion - we're not religious like that. It's not a ritual like that. A real sweat is supposed to last three days, anyway, and you smack each other with pine branches, but I usually don't do the whole routine."

What did I learn? What profound knowledge did I take away from my time with Leo? For something that didn't cost me a cent, I learned that I don't necessarily like sweat lodges - I can't take the sauna even for more than a few minutes. Leo laughed when I told him this. "Lots of people don't like them." I also learned that Native Americans chafe at the sight of their ritual and beliefs - which for them is a practice inseparable from belonging to a community of people that they know and love - being appropriated by these "gurus" for commercial purposes.

I learned that whatever "Native American religion" is, it's something done rather than talked about, and not done with strangers unless that person is taken under someone's wing, as I had been by Leo. It's not evangelistic, like that bossy kid in the lodge. Ideally, it's not puritanical or judgmental. You're not supposed to compete with others or "last the longest" in the sweat lodge.

Eat when you're hungry, sleep when you're tired, pay attention to your own damn business, expect disappointments in life, and treat the earth with respect - that's basically what I got out of my "sweat lodge experience."

Nevertheless, I did have fun at the Rainbow Gathering. I met a lot of hippies - real ones, poor, poor, poor - who spent the whole time cooking and feeding people, because they wanted to. I met a lot of Native Americans, who are more interested in talking about life, their friends, their families, their careers, and hunting than about their "religion." I swam and ate and danced to great drumming (if I have a "spirituality" it is dancing to a drumbeat), and even hung around the Hare Krishnas - for a while. (They have great food, but when they get out the tamborines, you beat it!)

Nothing profound - or maybe it was, depending on your point of view. If I say that there was something Zen about it all, I'm going to sound like I'm saying the opposite of what I really mean, aren't I? I'm going to sound all woo and I hate woo (and Leo hated it, too). Maybe that mangled ideal, "spirituality," is all about living without, you know, spirituality, and just accepting things as they are, because you're not longing for things that don't exist.

The New Yorker Nails It on President Obama's Nobel

2009-10-17T20:49:00.004-05:00

How does someone who loves the Prez to pieces but naturally has a "yes, but - " attitude toward the surprise awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to him navigate between the twin shoals of gushy worship and cynical tut-tutting? The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg, always a dry wit, throws this struggling captain a line:

If President Obama really had to get a gift postmarked Scandinavia this month, he would probably, on the whole, have preferred the Olympics. At least at the Olympics the judges wait till after the race to give you the gold medal. They don't force it on you while you're still waiting for the bus to take you in anticipation of possible future feats of glory, like a signing bonus or an athletic scholarship. They don't award it as a form of gentle encouragement, like a parent calling "Good job!" to a toddler who's made it to the top rung of the monkey bars.

Ha ha ha! Isn't it the truth? After watching the defensive response of Thorbjørn Jagland to questions about this choice, I began to suspect that this was really the "Congratulations for not being George W. Bush" award - which means, for pity's sakes, that any of the rest of us could have won the thing.

It's not a plastic, made-in-China "participation" trophy handed out to everyone in the class as part of a program to boost self-esteem. It's not a door prize or a goody bag or a bowl of V.I.P. fruit courtesy of the hotel management. It's not a gold star. It's a gold medal.

I'm hip to that. However, we must remember that even the gold medal itself is not always the Seal of Good Sportsmanship that it is meant to be. Let's not forget that ridiculous spectacle at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City:

Or a pensive Nancy Kerrigan pouting and stomping her foot after losing the gold - which she deserved to lose - to Oksana Bayul. (On second thought, let's forget that whole Tonya-Nancy-Oksana thing. Yes, please!)

Of course, in response to the awarding of another gold to Sale and Pelletier, the scoring and judging of figure skating was changed to make it more "fair" - so fair, in fact, that I cannot make heads or tails of it, and judging from the comments of others who watch this sport on YouTube, neither can they.

So fair, in fact, that we find ourselves looking up the good old days by watching old performances by Kristi Yamaguchi and Midori Ito*, and even the pre-1993 performances of Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan (but man, did Kerrigan choke a lot - it's painful to see) rather than watch many of the skaters today, what with their "flutzes" (failed lutz - either falling off the takeoff edge, which makes it a flip, or under-rotating the jump so that the skater completes the last revolution on the ice) and "slips" (under-rotated flips). The new scoring system is supposed to award attempts at jumps but deduct for an incorrect takeoff edge, incomplete jump, and any landing that is not clean, and yet it seems to me that women's figure skating in particular went downhill after 2002.

(A few exceptions: the fiery Irina Slutskaya, who eats triple jumps for breakfast, and the lovely Shizuka Arakawa, the 2006 gold medalist, who I think could work on building more speed in her spins but completes her jumps with a confident back edge and a beautiful line. And despite her strong jumps I was never a fan of Michelle Kwan.)

Well, there it is. The award was not given, as I had hoped, to the Iranian student protestors. For better or for worse, the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to President Barack Obama, who looked "abashed, even a little uncomfortable" according to Hertzberg, who adds, "the prize is won, but the peace, as always, is elusive." So it is. I don't think this honor has done much to help the current President step out of the He's-not-W shadow - that achievement, too, remains to be seen. But step out of that shadow, I believe, he will.

In other news, John McCain has requested that President Obama pardon Jake Johnson. I hope that he will.

*Both Kristi and Midori fell; Kristi won the gold. Uncharacteristically struggling to complete her jumps in the 1992 Olympics, Midori rallied, fought for the silver, and made skating history by throwing into her program a second triple axel. I love them both.

Dear Ben, Is There Really a Sanity Claus?

2009-10-11T12:54:00.005-05:00

Wow, I really can't get over the generosity of some people who work for a certain company - which shall remain unnamed, since I've added ads to my bloggity-blog. Follow the linkity-link to this Emerald City, Dorothy and gents.

The phone rang just as we were sitting down to dinner, so I was already predisposed to be irritated and only half-listening.

“Hi, this is John from C**cast. I’m just calling to see if you’d like to make a payment free of charge.”

Say what? I know I wasn’t really paying attention, but what did he say? “Make a payment free of charge?” What the heck does that mean?

If I only had a brain! Dorothy, though, caught by the tornado, follows the yellow brick road through a veritable poppy field:

I punched the C**cast number into the phone and was greeted by both Shaquille O’Neal and Ben Stein, thanking me for calling C**cast. Hmmm…that’s nice, I thought. I like Shaq and Ben. Nice to hear from them. I figured neither of them would be available to answer my questions, though, and I pressed on, hitting the correct prompt for billing inquiries...

The woman who answered greeted me politely and asked what she could do for me. “Well,” I said, “I received a phone call from someone last night who offered to let us make a payment to C**cast for no charge, which implies that sometimes, C**cast charges customers to take the customer’s money. Is that correct?”

“That is correct,” she responded.

“Okay, wait. I want to get this right. How does this work?” I asked.

“You can pay your bill on the internet or in person at a C**cast office for no charge, or you can use our automated phone system for a $2.00 convenience fee. You can also speak to a customer service representative and pay your bill for a $4.95 service charge,” she said.

“So what you’re telling me is that C**cast will charge me to take my money depending on how I want to pay the bill?” I asked.

“That is correct,” she said.

“Can you explain to me why they charge customers an additional fee to take the customer’s money?”

“I’m sorry; I can’t explain that. It’s company policy,” she responded.

Well, guess who's our internet provider, too. I wonder what Ben Stein would say? "Evolution can't explain why Con-cast would do such a thing, therefore it's..." [fill in the blank]. Hmmmmm. Maybe Ben Stein should write a column about it. ;-)

But of course he's been too busy, since his employers have been suing an anonymous blogger. However, they recently dropped the lawsuit, having located (they think) their man. It's none other than the Wicked Witch of the federal pen, but according to the irrepressible Felix Salmon, there is no ruby-slipper bling to be had:

Franklin Seegers, as a minute’s Googling will reveal, is an inmate of Butner Federal Correctional Complex in North Carolina, having been given a 40-year sentence in 2006 for his role in a violent drug gang known as Murder Inc. I don’t know who “flâneur de fraude” is, but I’m quite sure that it’s not Seegers. Still, I hope that Adaptive spend lots of time and money trying to serve a lawsuit on Seegers claiming defamation. This could be very funny indeed.

Shimmies to Felix, to the (defunct, but not defunct) Ben Stein Watch, and to Mary Fran Bontempo, who apparently never was in Kansas.

How About A Compromise on Roman Polanski?

2009-09-28T20:30:00.012-05:00

UPDATED: More reaction: nuance, schmuance! But how come no one ever prosecuted Ted Nugent, then?
---
Hey, I just had an idea: how about Polanski agreeing to come to the United States and face this charge, on one condition. And that condition is...

That the members of the press (if you can call them that) any anyone else who publicly blamed Sharon Tate for her own murder in 1969, calling her a "drug fiend," a "Satanist," a cannibal, a wild party girl, and a promiscuous whore while she was carrying her child (according to all witnesses, she wouldn't even drink wine while pregnant), apologize publicly to her memory and to her surviving family, something that these vulgar ambulance chasers never did before they went panting after exclusive interviews with that loser Charles Manson.

Since we're talking about a crime that happened thirty-two years ago, why not face the injustice that happened after another famous crime, forty years ago?

Arguably, those so-called journalists who spat out headlines attacking Sharon without any evidence whatsoever profited more from her death than anyone in the Manson family, despite all their born-again blather in books.

How about it? Let's hear an apology from those smug, self-righteous hacks who coined the blame-the-victim phrase, "Live freaky, die freaky." You know who you are.

Let's hear them express sorrow for heaping pain upon pain at the expense of the Tate family.

Let's hear them apologize for dissing not only poor, generous, beautiful Sharon, but Abigail Folger, who spent her fortune working as an amateur social worker; Steven Parent, a teen-aged hi fi enthusiast who was merely visiting the caretaker at the Tate residence; Jay Sebring, an internationally-known hair stylist and Sharon's ex-boyfriend who kept an eye on her while Roman was gone (oh, there was plenty of yellow journalism surrounding that--"what was he doing there, they must have had an affair, was it even Polanski's kid," etc., when Jay was a friend of Polanski's, too); and Woyciech Frykowski, who yes, did have a drug problem.

None of these people were cannibals or Satanists, but I'm not so sure about the press. Their sad charges -- screaming "It's her fault! All her fault!" as if they were rejects from an audition for The Handmaid's Tale--forced Roman Polanski to deny them (!) at a press conference.

Here is the link. Unfortunately, embedding has been disabled. A clip from the press conference begins at 1:08; however, the beginning gives background.

It just blows my mind. They called her a bimbo and said that she had no acting talent. (Sharon had wonderful comic timing.) They accused her of carrying someone else's child, or of taking drugs while pregnant. They called her a Satanist (and ironically, it was the thankfully deceased Susan Atkins, Sharon's killer, who briefly flirted with that), and they backed it up with "a photograph showing Sharon in a devil cult" that was in fact taken from one of her films. Come on, that was deliberate.

And then, to add insult to injury, the phony "psychic" Peter Hurkos visited the crime scene, "borrowed" some polaroids taken by a Life photographer to spew more slander about "three men who killed Sharon" and LSD and black magic at the house, and then pocketed the polaroids so that he could sell them later to the press. What a slime bucket!

Well, since we're already talking about something that happened thirty-two years ago, why not talk about something else that happened forty years ago?

(Unlike O.J. Simpson, Roman Polanski did search for the real killers--to the point of confronting someone he was sure had committed the crime.)

How about it, surviving paparazzi? How about it, Hollywood? How about it, newspaper and new agencies that were involved? If we're so concerned about one victim, how about your actions toward another?

Since we're so concerned about crime and morality in this country, why don't you do the right thing?

Shimmies to Swallowing the Camel

Free Roman

2009-09-27T11:51:00.008-05:00

I can hardly believe the news that Roman Polanski has been arrested in Switzerland "at the request of the United States." Three decades ago, he pleaded guilty to raping a 13-year-old girl who had passed herself off as a legal adult in order to become a model. The judge in the case (now deceased) reneged on the agreed-upon plea agreement, instead imposing more jail time and deportation. Polanski fled the United States.

The victim won a settlement against Polanski and wants the case dropped. Nevertheless, the Justice Department renewed its efforts to pursue Polanski in 2005 (why?) and finally got its man - incarcerating a 76-year-old survivor of the Krakow ghetto for a thirty-year-old statutory rape. If he fights extradition - and I think he has every right to do so - he could sit in jail for months.

(Come on, people, this "girl" was and is my age. I don't take rape lightly. But why the hysteria? Do people think that she's still thirteen? Is this a case of "always a child" in the minds of those who are fanatical about "pedophiles"? Has Polanski really left a trail of raped children across Europe? I don't think so. This smells like a witch hunt.)

Why did the judge change his mind? And why has the U.S. pursued Polanski for so long, while allowing murderous former dictators to live in luxury in the United States (in Hawaii, yet)?

This is absurd. This smacks of the smear campaign against Fatty Arbuckle - who, despite being acquitted after three bogus trials was personally and financially ruined by a bunch of anti-Hollywood moralistic prudes who ultimately instituted the Hayes Office. (And we know what a boon that was for the aesthetic quality of films.) Someone is out to make an example of Roman Polanski.

It's also reminiscent of the chasing and cornering of Jack Johnson, the first black world heavyweight champion who was twice arrested for violating the Mann Act, because he crossed the state line with his white girlfriend (later his second wife). It didn't matter that this woman was an adult; she was white, he was black, and therefore he was committing the crime of "white slavery." However, what really motivated the vendetta against Johnson was the fact that he had just kicked the tar out of the undefeated (and white) James Jeffries, who had come out of retirement "for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a Negro."*

What really motivates the vendetta against Polanski remains to be seen. (Head on over to YouTube to see the hideously racist, anti-Semitic, repugnant comments regarding Polanski, equating him with O.J. Simpson and the like.) Ironically, the message to rape victims in this case seems to be: once a victim, always a victim. Get "raped" by a celebrity, and you don't have the right to move on, not as long as someone can milk the story or use the perpetrator for political ends. You're going to still be that "thirteen-year-old" the rest of your life.

Well, that does not make me feel safe.
---
*Incidentally, was "Darwinism" or creationism the standard curriculum for public schools in 1910?
---
UPDATED: Oh my, now the California prison system is facing budget cuts and releasing as many as 40,000 inmates. What a great time to go after Roman Polanski. What a wonderful use of California's tax funds, second only to keeping that asshole Charles Manson, and his harem of born-again gooney birds, alive. It's nice to see that the state of California and our Justice Department has its priorities straight.

(On the other hand, maybe they'll end up releasing all the harmless potheads that they locked up in this bogus War on Drugs. Holy crap, this country is mixed up.)

SECOND UPDATE: More of the story of the original plea bargain is coming out: it seems that Polanski objected to having his trial televised. For pity's sake, this wasn't even a jury trial! Televised? People certainly wanted to make a name for themselves at Polanski's expense.

The case is now an international incident (no surprise there). And this is all for the good of the victim, right?

This Says it All

2009-09-06T12:00:00.000-05:00

So Now PZ Was Never Expelled from "Expelled"?

2009-09-05T12:17:00.007-05:00

This is what I received in reply to a comment I made about PZ being expelled from the preview of Expelled last year. It from some nutjob in Sweden called talitha00cumi.

Amused Child [my YouTube moniker], you're lying through your false teeth, bro. NO ONE was thrown out. Not PZ, not anyone!

Do you need to lie to get attention? Were you neglected as a child and now crave any sort of attention you can get?

PZ was one of the childish, irresponsible ones, and he was warned that he'd be throw out if he didn't behave, but he was never thrown out.

Stop lying.

WTF? I told this creepy piece of work that I considered these comments defamation and that I wanted an apology. Holy shit, I'm totally going to hire a lawyer if that's what it takes! This person does seem to be confused between the preview of Expelled and the visit to the Creation Museum - except that this ding-dong has been corrected on that account several times! Nevertheless this person wrote back:

Not false [his/her statements]; true. Totally.

Offensive, perhaps, but true. This silliness NEVER HAPPENED! One person who filmed a private conversation was asked to stop. He wouldn't. He was asked to leave. PZ was warned many times for his bad behavior, and spread the rumor that he was "expelled." He wasn't.

The truth hurts - but only if you prefer lies.

Again, WTF? No one can be this confused. It seems to be the work of a Lone Stranger rather than any coordinated effort, but it certainly sets a new standard for revisionism. It's really surprising because this person is all over the internet and while s/he is religiously fanatical ("Catholics aren't Christians" and all that - I hate that shit), s/he doesn't get vicious, until s/he replied to me. And it pisses me off! I've called twice for an apology - I think that's the least I should get for being called a liar.

UPDATED: In your face, Talith00cumi. You've been caught.

"wow. Funny. The guy must be a total jerk and was expected to disrupt the film. Dickie Dawkins can be a total jerk, but he's dignified enough to keep silent during a film, I'm sure.

Did anyone find out why the guy wasn't allowed in? Or are you all just guessing based on... knee-jerk reactions and empty heads?

Just a lil question."

I have a lil question, too. Where's my apology, you hypocritical wonder?

Ask Questions! Ask Questions! And then...

2009-08-29T08:38:00.010-05:00

Glenn Beck is going to tell you exactly how to think for yourself, and then he's going to tell you exactly what to do with your new independence!

Okay, Preacher Glenn, I'll ask a fucking question: where the hell is the letter 'C'? 'C,' you know, as in conspiracy?

This is beyond hilarious, and beyond pathetic. "I don't know if we're going to turn into an oligarchy or what we're going to turn into, but unless you ask questions, we're going to turn into something." Yeah, no shit.

Later on (in the longer version of the video) he says he's tired of being a vitim! Bwahaha. Was the set rew smothering their giggles, or were they (more likely) hyponotized like bunnies by the harisma given off by this guru, who looks like he's trying to strangle the air with his hands? (Something he obviously learned from Dick heney.)

Faux News: They report, you de_ide!

These worthless fucks get paid for this rap!

(P.S. That should be "hoking"!)

Oh, and don't forget to head on over to Pharyngula for your Friday ephalopod. They've got mother-effing ephalopods, man!

UPDATED: Oh, oh, oh! Glenn Be_k says that I am on fire! My goodness, we liberal bloggers "can just stick around, because I think you can help America learn some more things." Oh, yeah, baby. There are lots of things to learn, Glenn. Spelling is just the beginning.

"You can't have an oligarchy without the czars!" Yeah, and you can't be a communist, either.

And you couldn't talk about Americorp Brown Shirts, Obama concentration camps, and whether Barack Hussein Obama was circumcized, now could you? (Okay, can you right-wing nuts decide whether or not it is patriotic to be circumcized? Because apparently Limbaugh thinks it's another fascist takeover.)

Dumb fuck.Anagrams for "oligarchy":
cigar holy
larch yogi
a richly go
a lyric hog
archly go I
hag cry oil
gaol cry hi
ha coy girl
rah icy log
ya rich log

SECOND UPDATE: Glenn Beck, modern day Savonarola.

"Death Panel" Twit Yells "Heil Hitler!" at Israeli Jew

2009-08-20T13:33:00.013-05:00

This is the depths to which the health care "discussion" by the right-wing has sunk. Unbelievable.

What a disgrace! Then this ding-dong tries to justify herself:

Yeah. After fake crying and yelling "Heil Hitler!" at the Jewish guy who paid $8000 for two hours in the emergency room, she whines about her uninsured husband having three jobs.
If there are legitimate concerns regarding health care reform, why are people stooping to this level?

And by the way, if "nobody is obligated to give you health care," then what are Sarah Palin et al talking about in the first place? Their "death panel" fearmongering is obviously based on the assumption that doctors are obligated to give everyone health care, or they wouldn't be invoking the spectre of revoked care, now would they?

If "nobody is obligated to give you health care," unless you're one of the insured, or you're rich, how is that any different from the Nazis? How is that not "Darwinian," another scare-tactic from the right?

UPDATED: Her name is Pam Pilg er.

She tweets as "Disernment" [sic]. Yeah, English only, toots. Great spelling.

It looks like she's made the news in Israel.

Oh, and now the weirdos are claiming that this was faked by Democrats. Uh-huh. Pam Pilger is a Democratic plant? Show me the evidence.

(All the protesters are "plants" now, it seems. I guess the whole tea-bagging snore-fest was orchestrated by Democrats, too? Oh sure, and we selected Sarah Palin for John McCain. Didn't you know that? Maybe George W. Bush was a plant by us? You can't handle the truth!) Give me a break. If Pilger is a Democratic plant, then Obama is a Republican plant!

But, of course, you can't trust me, for I'm part of the "Obama Youth" Brown Shirts, because I'm--I'm--I'm helping an Americorps volunteer teach recent immigrants and elderly people how to use the computer! I've been indoctrinated, just like Michelle Bachmann's son! And you know what that means - next stop, we'll be joining the Manson family next!

Sad. Sad, sad, sad.

Republicans were for end-of-life counseling before they were against it.

The GOP has become a party of nihilists.

(I hope all these people in the photo don't mind being defamed as "Democratic plants" by their fellow conservative Republicans.)

No Pubic Socialism!

2009-08-17T21:10:00.004-05:00

Hahaha! This pretty much sums up them durn teabaggers/Nobamas, don't it?

No pubic option? What are we going to have then, blondie - a pubic requirement?

One is tempted to say, "Get a brain, morans!"

You anti-health care, "death panel" people are killing me! Oh - sorry.

Sour Grapes, Again

2009-08-13T18:59:00.007-05:00

Josh Rosenau has an excellent dissection (if you'll pardon me) of teh Ben Stein affair. But I can't let this go:

Everyone used to love my column until Expelled, and then people were mean on the internet and got me fired from a job I didn't want anyway [emphasis mine].

Point 1: Stein, not "everyone" loved your column. Felix Salmon didn't. And I certainly did not, though half the time I didn't know what the hell you were talking about! (Hence my reference to "glossolalia.")

Point 2: You "didn't want it anyway"? Isn't that what you said about your upcoming (but not anymore) commencement speech at Vermont? Man, I totally call phony-baloney on this. Have you ever been disinvited/fired from something that you did want?

Ben Stein, actor - in a one-man stand-up routine of Aesop's Fables. Too bad that, alone there on the world's stage, he's the straight man in a larger cosmic joke, mostly on him. But hey, if there's a buffoon, there must be a buffoonator. Right?

UPDATED: The Wall Street Journal blog sums up FreeScore.com, and gives information on how to receive your truly free credit report.

FreeBore.com

2009-08-12T20:29:00.008-05:00

UPDATED: Advertisers are fleeing Glenn Beck's clown routine. I guess when they say "Kill Grandma"* they didn't realize it was being used like "kill the people," i.e. make them laugh.

Did you know that even a great scientist like Stephen Hawking would not stand a chance in the British health care system?

Stephen Hawking: a Briton. And not dead. But probably dying of laughter - if this crap were funny.
----
The most boring person in the world (sounding more slurred than usual here) just lost his gig at the New York Times. And all because he advertised a scam which offered a free credit report that wasn't.

He claims that it was because... because... because atheists wrote hate mail to the Times!

The sad thing is, no we didn't. At least, I didn't. I had forgotten all about Ben Stein. And his train-wreck of a column.

(It's not hard to do, frankly.)

I'm in Texas attending a conference and eating food that I haven't been able to get my grubby hands on since 2006, when I visited Georgia. (Blackened catfish! Country fried steak! No, I won't touch it in the north!) I have too much to do these days to write any more than the one letter I fired off to the Times asking when they were going to tire of the snake-handling. Felix Salmon dropped his "Ben Stein Watch" and I did not pick it up. Ho-hum. But if Stein wants to claim that "the atheists" somehow created this pre-existing policy at the Times about conflict of interest, that's fine. I'm flattered. We all should be. (It take more evidence to believe that the Times already had this policy, than to believe that we went back and changed the past to put it there! Uh-huh. Maybe we planted all those fossils, too? Of course!)

Then he said it was because he starred in Expelled. Yeah, right. That was only over a year ago. (I guess you lose track of time when you, uh, have the ability to transcend it. Gee, if only we could go back in our time machine and change the past again so that Ben Stein was never bor - I am a genius!)

I guess all the financial blogs have been take over by teh atheists, because they're pretty much nodding
their
heads
in approval
at his firing.

(Also here. And here. Boy, I need a drink after going back in time and writing all these posts! *Twinkle*)

Compared to the liability for intelligent design that Stein has proved himself to be (I'm beginning to feel sorry for the Disco Boys), he's making atheists sound like they have supernatural powers. That's not the way to convince the American public to buy into supernaturalism. They might start thinking that naturalism is, well, super. It sure beats being a crybaby.

One more thing: "Americans in Financial Hole." Why did that just give me the creeps?
---
*Note how the "Kill Grandma" right wing clown routine is begetting an unholy "survival of the fittest" phenomenon. Ironic, huh? (Not really.) You see, it's okay when creationists do it.

Oh, by the way, Stephen Hawking is still alive. And still British.

The Shimmying Cowboy

2009-08-07T15:49:00.003-05:00

And, ladies and gents, to continue our celebration of Revisionist History Month, did you also know that cowboys of the old west were individually tutored by older cowboys in dance and choreography?

Next up: Stamp collecting intelligent design advocates - finally out of the closet!

A Note on the Blogging of the Writing of the Peer-Reviewed Paper

2009-07-28T18:31:00.015-05:00

Three series on this blog I need to finish: The Galapagos Diary, The Extended Phenotype, and The Blogging of the Writing of the Peer Reviewed Paper. I intend to complete all three, but a note on that last one:

My intent was to blog about my research, while posting, and eventually making available, drafts of my work. To say that the first few drafts were gawd-awful is probably not surprising - and neither is the fact that I have not made the doggerel available yet. (I will, though!)

However, the real issue became for me the rapid succession, once I had my pen passionately inked, of drafts that were successful, and which followed each other so quickly that they almost tripped over themselves. Once I knew where I was going, my writing sprinted - and that, and my rapidly approaching deadline, made the orderly blogging and posting of drafts fall off.

This made me think about the nature of change, and brought me back to that august, time-worn, so-called dichotomy, "gradual" versus "sudden" change. Being that my paper ultimately questioned another false dichotomy - the apparent conflict between preservation and conservation in both the archival and the natural* environments - it is appropriate that my experience reiterated for me that both types of change coexist, and in fact, support each other to the point of being each other.

During my period of rapid revision I was writing as "gradually" as I normally did, one word at a time, yet the ideas were coming more quickly. I was still producing drafts one after another, but the time period in which I produced them had become compressed. Part of this was due to my intention to get my assignment done by the deadline, but most of it was unplanned, because in my effort to find a way to say exactly what I meant, I found that I needed to do more, not less, writing, and more, not less, experimenting. It took me by surprise.

What I ultimately produced was not my magnum opus - I'm going to be working on that - but a trimmed down version of only twenty pages (the assignment's limit). Yet in this period of "punctuated equilibrium," as it were, I did not save every draft and thus what is preserved in my fossil record is, well, a series of gaps.

Much change is not visible. As Antonin Artaud stated, "Inspiration certainly exists." However, he did not view it as the literally sudden flash of knowledge from the blue, and neither do I. During the times when I experienced excruciating "writer's block," which also exists (and which is romanticized and used as an excuse too much by too many writers), I nevertheless knew that my brain was working on the problem the whole time. What religious people often refer to as "giving it to God" or others as "sleeping on it" is something that I call "letting my unconscious do the heavy lifting for a while." Therefore, when the ideas finally came, they were not "sudden" at all, but the product of long, sometimes terrified, wandering and thrashing about that I did - both consciously, and not. Artaud hated it when the Surrealists defined inspiration as the passive receiving of messages from the Marvelous (and as Jean Cocteau, not formally a Surrealist, portrayed it in his film Orpheus) - for him, as for me, the Marvelous was the unseen shaping of an idea, gradual until it reached a boiling point, then constructing itself quickly as if time had sped up.

And yet, this rapid output would not have been possible without the gradual, painstaking assembly that occurred earlier. I suspect that the two cannot exist without each other, because the two actually are each other.
---
*The natural and the human, "artificial" environment being, of course, another false dichotomy.

Real Pirates

2009-07-15T11:32:00.009-05:00

Ahoy, there! T'is been three months at sea, and I thought ye'd like to know where I'd been gadding.

(Among other places.)

I counted me coins, quit me job, and sailed off for Chicago - that land o' riches - to hang out with a bunch of cutthroats and brigands. (Well, this is from last year, but I liked it.)

Then, turning me ship to the uncharted waters (well, totally charted), I boarded - single-handed! - the Museum of Science and Industry, the Adler Planetarium, and the Field Museum.

Among me spoils are a suitcase full of vendor literature and several fabulous meals.

Friendly ports for a starved and partched pirate:
Eleven City Diner
Italian Village
Cafe Society
Lockwood Restaurant and Bar
Chinatown

I had lobster for the first time, sauteed in ginger with noodles, arrrg!

But seriously, mates...

After visiting the "Real Pirates" exhibition at the Field, I have a renewed respect for these men. Not that they were boy scouts - they were violent and often bloodthirsty to be sure, but this was a time when a man could be kidnapped and forced to serve on a ship, which offered miserable toil with little or no pay, mistreatment, even beatings, and starvation rations. Going "on the account," that is, joining the pirates, offered a man - any man, and in two cases, women - a leisurely distribution of work (because so many people joined up) and an equal share in the loot, as well as the freedom to sail the world, and drink a lot of rum.

Many pirates were black, escaped or liberated slaves (the pirates boarded many slave ships and converted them to pirate ships), or free men of color unable to ply an honest trade in a prejudiced world. Even a regular, free black seaman could at any time be kidnapped and sold into slavery whenever his ship was in port! Why not, then, join the pirates? Two pirate ships had an all-black crew. Any man, regardless of the color of his skin, could ascend to any position as long as he was qualified for it. Most pirates were in fact experienced sailors. African warriors were especially respected for their fighting skills and alarming presence.

Any pirate, black, white, or native american, was treated as an equal and respected for his skills and courage. This is what is meant by a "motley crew" - it was multicultural. The loyalty among shipmates was strong.

The pirates elected their captain, who had no real power except in battle. In an unjustly hierarchical world at the height of the slave trade, this was a democracy.

Pirates did not kidnap women and tie them to the mainmast - they considered women aboard their ships to be bad luck. Some raped, but most paid prostitutes while put in at a safe harbor. Whole towns came to depend on the economy of piracy to employ their blacksmiths, their innkeepers, their cobblers, and their ladies of the evening - and for protection from raiding ships (often with Her Majesty's blessing). Some, like the tragic pirate legend Sam Bellamy, who as captain of the former slave ship Whydah (which he boarded) is profiled in the exhibit, fell in love with a respectable lady and, being a poor sailor, turned pirate in order to make enough gold to impress her family.

They did not bury their treasure - they spent and gambled it.

They did not batter and burn ships unless the crew put up a struggle, because the pirates wanted the ships. Marauding pirates would fire a warning shot, after which most captains simply surrendered. Once the ship was boarded, some men were forced to go "on the account," but many crew members willingly joined the pirates.

The pirates, after capturing a ship, would ask the crew its opinion of its captain. If he had been a cruel man, he was flogged and even killed. (No walking the plank; they just tied you up and threw you overboard.) But if he had been a kind leader, he was spared and even given a little gold. The former captain of the Whydah was allowed by Bellamy to sail away on another ship with the men who chose to remain loyal to him.

The course of a pirate ship was voted upon by its crew. The crew would also collectively repair the ship after putting in at a safe harbor. To fool passing ships, the pirates would hide and pretend that their huge crew was smaller than it was; some of them even dressed as women. Many of them dressed as dandies, in clothes that they had looted or had won from their shipmates through gambling. Others preferred a simpler garb.

At first, pirates attacked the ships of enemy nations; later, pirates recognized no allegiance to their home nation or any other country. As such, the bounty on them was high, and justice was swift and merciless. They were often hung, but sometimes lashed to the side of the rising Thames until they slowly drowned.

After the end of the "Golden Age of Piracy," slavery would remain legal until 1865, around another 140 years.

Did pirate Sam Bellamy reunite with his true love? Did he finally impress her family with his piles of loot? Legend has it that after his successful raids he was on his way to Cape Cod to meet with her again. Most pirates came to an early, violent end. The only real buried pirate treasure are the ships that went down into the sea. The recovery of the wreck of the Whydah, 300 years after it sank (you'll have to find out on your own what happened to Sam and his friends) began in a library.

A shiver me shimmies to Learning to Ride in the Bluegrass

UPDATED: Scotius brought up Sir Francis Drake, one of those blessed by Her Majesty to go out and act like a pirate on Her Behalf. It reminded me of this charming song, from the only muppet movie that I can stand to watch (mostly because of that snarky knave, Tim Curry, who is a hawt scoundrel in this scene).

New Addition to the Blogroll

2009-04-14T21:22:00.000-05:00

Leftist Grandpa. Check him out.

Creationist Fan of VenomFangX Videos Kills Woman, Himself

2009-04-14T13:26:00.004-05:00

Do people remember this exchange in the comments of my apparently most anguish-inducing post, "Ken Ham's Petting Zoo Opens to Shut Minds."

Kristine said...
Rene, here's the kind of ugly, smug, ignoramous mentality you and your Creation Museum are turning out: Satan Created Evolution.Proud of yourself?

[The link is now broken - for reasons I'll give below - but it was to a video by VenomFangX entitled "Satan Created Evolution."]

Rene' said...
All, If you had no vitriol in your heart for religion or Christianity in particular, you would have reported only that --in your opinion Mr. ham is wrong -- and not used such harsh terms that make you the intolerant crowd. You know the type, the ones who ridiculed Mr. Darwin for his theory. Apparently, Mr. Ham is in the same boat as Darwin, he has committed sacrilege against your god -- you. There is not and never will be any conclusive proof that would prove evolution it is nothing more than a theory, requiring faith. Conversely, I will never convince you that God is real and He sent His Son to die on the cross for our sins so that we may spend eternity with Him. God would never use categorical proof, for there would be no faith, God, for whatever reason, needs us to be faithful not convinced. I envy you --- in my opinion -- yours is the greater faith. To believe that life sprang from nothing -- without the help of the Creator, that requires more faith than I could ever possess. I know that your god, you, should be very pleased with yourselves. Rene

And blah, blah, blah. Well, good old VenomFangX has apparently yanked some of his videos because a fan of his named Anthony Powell - who also posted his anti-atheist, anti-evolution rants on You Tube, calling atheists "non-human" and such - recently killed a female student and himself. She reportedly was not his girlfriend and rebuffed his repeated sexual advances.

Her name was Asia McGowan and she was an aspiring dancer and actress.

Anthony Powell was a bully who posted videos on You Tube about how "evolution is a lie" and "women should be submissive to their man."

Then there is the Sunday School teacher who killed Sandra Cantu (her grandfather had the nerve to bitch about what the investigation was doing to the "image" of his church, and now she's up for a rape charge, too - yuck!).

The creationist who stabbed to death a man who argued for evolutionary theory, and the plethora of parents lately who either killed their kids through "exorcism" or by praying over them instead of taking them to a doctor.

Rene, anything to say? Michael Ruse, do you have something to add? Being ignorant is romantic - right? Salt of the earth. Kind of like how being poor is "exciting."

Ken Ham is not only wrong, he is dangerous. VenomFangX is not only wrong, he is dangerous. Anthony Powell was not only wrong - he was tragically dangerous, because he didn't have to take an innocent woman along with him - and he is also living proof that a belief in hell doesn't prevent anyone from committing evil.

That's why Jerry Falwell was dangerous. And why Pat Robertson is dangerous. And why Peter Popoff - who James Randi unmasked nearly three decades ago - is back (as Randi resignedly admitted in his speech at the CFI World Conference) on the BET Channel doing fake healings, causing people to avoid medical treatment en masse, and he is still dangerous. Michael Ruse, are you paying attention?

As for "me, my god, me," I simply don't believe in something that does not exist. So I don't believe in "my god, me," but just in me. The way that you should simply believe in yourself. Each person should.

Blogging the Writing of the Peer-Reviewed Paper, Part 4

2009-04-11T23:47:00.001-05:00

It's up at the Triumvirate.

Wherein Michael Ruse Avoids My Questions

2009-04-09T21:46:00.013-05:00

Michael Ruse gave a presentation tonight at the CFI World Congress on “Darwinism [sic] and Christianity: Do They Conflict and Does It Matter?” that I mostly could accept. He made some good points that there are some simliarities in the claims of Dawkins and the claims of intelligent design theorists that science and religion are apparently irreconcilable, but then ended with this question:

If Darwinism [sic] implies atheism, does teaching it [evolution] in school become unconstitutional?

In other words, Ruse is saying that if a parent objects to what a child is being taught in science class, even if the teacher does not make a specific religious claim, that scientific claim thus becomes a religious claim and becomes unconstitutional.

I stood up and asked the following:

“If evolution implies atheism, or is being made to imply atheism by Dawkins as you claim, and is therefore unconstitutional to teach in school, 1) what about all the other sciences that underpin evolution, in particular geology, which caused great anguish among people that I knew, 2) isn’t science going to have implications for anyone who pre-emptively makes a cosmic claim without evidence, and 3) hasn’t Dawkins in particular repeatedly made the point that the essential conflict is between evidence versus credulity, or faith, rather than just evolution versus Christianity?”

That is a question. I asked him a question. Michael Ruse waved it off and said, “We’ll put that in the ‘comment’ section.” Then he went on to accuse Eddie Tabash of “lacking integrity” because Tabash pointed out that science in the public schools is not taught to attack anyone’s religion but to present knowledge backed by evidence that people need to have to be educated.

Then, Michael Ruse drew the analogy that a science teacher who taught evolution without mentioning the Bible or God, but nevertheless caused a conflict within a student who was indoctrinated by creationism, was attacking that student’s beliefs (actually that student’s parents’ beliefs) and therefore violating the Constitution!

Using this argument, Michael Ruse then compared the above science teacher to a teacher who taught the students that “some animals with certain genitals are inferior to other animals with different genitals,” and then claimed, “Oh, I said nothing about men and women! I didn’t teach one was inferior to another!” Now, I ask you, is that analogy apt? Considering I was the only woman who asked a question, and it didn’t get answered?

Well, a man asked him if a teacher taught that the value of pi was 3.14 but a parent believes that it is three (as it is in the Bible), if the teacher was, according to Ruse, violating the Constitution. Ruse said yes! (Then he attempted to spin it and accused Tabash again of being dishonest.)

Then he said, “I agree with Eddie Tabash! I don’t want The Flood taught in schools!” ignoring the obvious fact that, by what he claimed above, any teacher teaching geology would, according to Ruse, be attacking theology, rendering the teaching of geology “unconstitutional” and allowing that parent to block the subject or remove the child.

Wha—?

Michael Ruse then went on and on about how “basic Christianity doesn’t require people to literally believe in the Bible.” Hell, I’d like to know who these “basic Christians” are. As a teen-ager I had to explain to someone in my life that the earth was round and orbited the sun. I got into arguments with the other kids about how my agate, which I found when I was nine, was formed. I argued and argued against “creation science” in the 1980s. One coworker, when she learned that I was an atheist (I was nineteen and waitressing in Maplewood), gasped, flung herself across the room away from me, then recovered a bit and asked, “So you believe in evolution?” No DUH!

As we were walking out, Ruse opined, "Well, I suppose there still could be people who use the Bible to justify slavery," and I called out, "Yes, there are!" Geez, hello Ruse! In fact, the ID folks are arguing that Darwin's anti-slavery conscience enslaved people all the more!

How the hell can Michael Ruse compare a teacher teaching evolution in class and not adding “and this is why the Bible is not true” to a teacher teaching that females are inferior to males?

What is wrong with this man? Why does he pick this fight, when in fact the denizens of the Discovery Institute are taking all religious language out of their literature anyway, in their efforts to shoe-horn intelligent design in schools? (“Teach the controversy…” “Strengths and weaknesses…” “Critical analysis…”) Ruse must really be out of touch!

This is a class issue. This is about social class, and how can Ruse understand that? He probably never missed a spring break in Florida or Cancun. (I waitressed, or just stayed home, over my spring breaks.) Education is about providing greater class mobility, whether or not the graduate goes on to make gobs of money. People are not just geocentrists and flat-earthers because they're fundamentalists - they can also be Democrats, union workers, generally liberals, yet geocentrists and flat-earthers because they're uneducated.

Being hampered by unnecessary, superstitious fear, or guilt, or repulsion of certain ideas (such as being related to apes) limits a person’s ability to view evidence. As Orwell said, whoever controls the past controls the future. Creationism is a nice little pastime for those who are well off (and I would add that Ruse’s question is also a nice little elitist paradox for him to enjoy because he never had to waitron his way through college), but it has real consequences for people less fortunate.

Creationism doesn't make people feel "special," it scares them to death.

Yet what I'm hearing (because Ruse's "teaching" has implications too) is that it doesn't matter to him whether or not I was educated at all.

I wouldn't be surprised if the Discovery Institute actually took up his argument, and start using it as well.

Belated Anniversary

2009-04-07T12:00:00.006-05:00

Why, how remiss of me. I've missed the anniversary. (Getting an education will do that to you.) Happy "Death of Evolution Day," William Dembski. How the years do fly by.

Seven years to make my own scholarly paper invalid.

Madonna on Toast? That's Nothing...

2009-03-28T10:29:00.026-05:00

Chewbacca lives in this guy's cabinet!

Chewie's trying to send a message to the world: Please, my children! Please! No more Vader cakes! Eeeeaaaaggghhh!

The Vader-cake cult may seem like harmless fun, but it causes a great disturbance in the Force.

The next thing you know, the FAIL demon will take root in your life, causing epic FAILS even in the games you play to pass the time.

And causing you to think you can see, ahem, Russia (or someplace) from here:

Or causing all kinds of inappropriate Star Wars allusions...

(That's Jodee, not Yodee, right? Ha ha.)

...and causing a brave young ID Jedi to fall on his, er, lightsaber.

Nice job, Luke. Way to "battle the Emperor." By the way, what look are you going for? You look like the Emperor. I thought that intelligent design was "young and rebellious"?

Oh, dear. (Chuck Colson on the left; Jonathan Wells on the right.)

Well, anyway. Here's a photo of the Darwinist stormtroopers with their helmets off.

I was going somewhere with this, but now I have no idea. We'll just end it here, okay? ;-)

UPDATED: Well, even if your whimsical blog post is undirected, trust an intelligent design advocate to supply the closure. Dembski's traipsing toward another EPIC FAIL. Forward and dorkward, Mr. Isaac Newton of Information Theory. *Sheesh*.

But let’s grant that the evolutionary process, as governed by the Darwinian selection mechanism, is not goal directed, i.e., that it is not seeking targets (which, of course, leads to the question how a non-directed process is, nonetheless, finding targets in nature). In that case, it makes sense to think of Darwinian mechanism as a grammar-checker — living things must pass the grammar-checker if they get to survive and reproduce.

see more pwn and owned pictures

No. Dembski still thinks that natural selection is a centralized force, like gravity*. It's not. Natural selection is the term we use to describe the outcome that we see arising from billions of changes and interactions in the environment. I wrote about this in my paper:

To imagine an “animal in its environment” is to imagine a static environment and an objectified animal, and by analogy an inert record in a passive archives, and consequently a Platonic view in which “true knowledge must remain fixed” (Mortensen, 1999, 6). In contrast, Moore argues for the dynamic overlap of object and context. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins argued the same when he wrote that animals and insects do not merely live in, but effect, shape, and become their environment, which in turn shapes their descendents and competitors:

It is legitimate to speak of adaptations as being “for the benefit of” something, but that something is best not seen as the individual organism. It is a smaller unit which I call the active, germ-line replicator. The most important kind of replicator is the “gene” or small genetic fragment. Replicators are not, of course, selected directly, but by proxy; they are judged by their phenotypic effects. Although for some purposes it is convenient to think of these phenotypic effects as being packaged together in discrete “vehicles” such as individual organisms, this is not fundamentally necessary. Rather, the replicator should be thought of as having extended phenotypic effects, consisting of all its effects on the world at large, not just if effects on the individual body in which it happens to be sitting [emphasis mine] (1982, 4).

Dawkins is not saying that birds and nests do not have natures; he is saying that genes replicate themselves by living in birds which, in response to finding themselves in one environment, die or develop a new strategy by building nests, thus changing that environment, thereby improving their chances of reproduction, which increases the chance of the gene’s replication. Bird, nest, behavior, gene, and environment do not collide like billiard balls, but overlap and combine. They exist as objects in themselves and also as functions and relationships across these objects. Yet both preservationists and conservationists in ecology envision “a bird” that “builds” a “nest,” and in archives, “a creator” that “creates” a “collection.” This is not exactly incorrect—it is our experience—but it is naïve, mechanistic, Newtonian. This is where [Mark] Greene et al perhaps meant to place their condemnation of “absolutes,” because given sufficient time the nature of anything changes.

Because we as human beings are accustomed to viewing our creations as artificial (even destructive) and ourselves as uniquely technology-dependent, weak and silly beside our animal cousins, we ignore how animals also change and even pollute the environment for themselves and other animals through their own constructions. Dawkins is saying, and Moore is implying, that the bird’s nest or the archives is a behavior as well as a structure, and that successive generations of birds are no less dependent on their increasingly sophisticated nests than we are upon our structures. Birds too are silly and weak without evolution’s technologies—the nest, the hard-shell egg, the beak. Beavers cut down trees to build dens, flooding a field to create a pond, chasing away some animals and inviting others, drowning plants to be replaced by others. Who, then, is polluting? What, then, is “natural?” Is a beaver’s dam natural, therefore eternal, but an archives artificial and thus infinitely plastic, and Greene seems to claim? Building nests, dams, houses, and archives are all behaviors that recreate context—is it really impossible to say, without appealing to naïve neo-Platonism, that nests, dams, houses, and archives indeed each have a nature? This author argues that they do, and that the nature of archives evolves. Archives change, but archives remain distinct from, say, orchestras, or dance performances, as traffic noise is distinct from tubas (Herbert, 1985, 135). Is it not then reasonable to say that archives are what we archive, whatever that may be and however we may go about archiving it (Kaplan, 2000), and however that may change?

This is the tragedy, that the discussion of a comprehensive and universal archival theory gets bogged down in retrograde dualism: record versus archives, natural versus artificial, and eternal first principles or naïve postmodernist relativism. It is a trap. Dualities usually are, and are worthy of suspicion if not outright avoidance because the mind so readily falls into them. In theory, Eastwood and Duranti hope for a place of stasis, of security, a Promised Land, whereas Greene and his colleagues evidently fear a reissuing of the Ten Commandments that would forcibly unite distant tribes (Greene et al, 10). Neither path leads to a legitimate theory, and all of these brilliant thinkers who each have a part of the answer tragically miss the point.

*Which, of course, is really a curvature in space-time, anyway.

Don't Lose Weight! Because...

2009-03-21T17:50:00.006-05:00

...you might rewrite the laws of gravity and make everything fly apart! Because, you see, William Dembski, still having a problem with a computer program that Richard Dawkins wrote back in the 1980s, in Apple BASIC no less, makes yet another claim that Dawkins is perpetuating a fraud *yawn* on the public (and naturally I had a problem with that).

*Gasp*

WilliamD: Gentlemen: If Dawkins is tuning the parameters differently for the program as described in the book and for it as exhibited in the BBC documentary, isn’t he in effect using a different program?

Me: Uh, duh, no! Great job, Mr. Isaac Newton of Information Theory.

This man is a mathematician? Would he like a secretary/quasi-librarian/archivist and belly dancer to explain programming principles to him? He and his followers still have a problem understanding how an algorithm in a program that was, yes, programmed by Dawkins is an analogy for natural selection?

Of course, Dr. Dr. "I'm not jealous of Dawkins at all" has been verrrry quiet since making that gaffe.

I have news for you Dr. Dr. Dembski - April is fast upon us. You can run but you can't hide (or add, it appears).

UPDATED: Wesley has a post up about how long it's taken Dembski to "reproduce" Dawkins' code, and so does Ian Musgrave. Of course PZ has weighed in. I don't have time for this - I'm writing a paper about how archival theory could be informed by anthropology, evolutionary theory, ecology, and information theory, and I've already wasted too much time trying to get Joe G. to answer me about what he really knows about information theory.

SECOND UPDATE: I love this sarcastic riposte by "CS." Remarks by wags like that convince me that even if intelligent design belonged in schools, only an anti-IDist would be qualified to teach it.

DaveScot Banned from Uncommon Descent (Again)

2009-03-15T22:28:00.006-05:00

Oh, the irony (but not really): Stalinist Behavior at Creationist Blogs. Shimmies to Open Parachute.

We were having a good old time at AtBC - writing poetry to avoid writing our papers - when I remembered that I needed an article out of a book that was not available at my school's library, but was available at another library in the network. So I strapped on my earphones (oh, hush. Those little ear-things don't fit in my ears) and went for a walk.

And meanwhile, all hell breaks loose.

The news breaks here, about halfway down the page.

Barry, pram, toys, throws, out, there of:

Note to UD ContributorsBarry ArringtonThe moderation policy does not apply to you; you are held to a higher standard. I expect your posts to have at least some tangential relationship to Darwinism, ID, or the metaphysical or moral implications of each. The purpose of this site is not to provide a place for you to jump up and rant on one of your pet peeves.

Well. I must say I have mixed feelings. It looks like UD's original moderation policy (delete everything that you don't agree with/makes you look stupid) is being enforced by a new generation upon the old. Ungrateful little punks. (I'm being sarcastic.) But DaveScot was making a point about the racism of the Christian Identity Movement. That gets him banned? I wonder about UD's sympathy for Christian Identity, when they've been trashing Darwin as a "racist" during this entire episode.

(Because trashing the abolitionist Charles Darwin as a "racist" certain seems to have a "relationship to Darwinism, ID, or the metaphysical or moral implications of each" - but pointing out racism elsewhere, such as among creationists, doesn't, you see.)

As another commenter noted, there could be a(nother) resurrection of DaveScot after three days. A testable hypothesis, I'd say.

P.S. - I have been named AtBC Poet Laureate. ;-)

When I consider how his snark was spent,
Ere half his days, in this dark U and D,
And that one poster which is UD marquee
Lodged with them useless, though his pride misspent
To serve therewith their Maker, and present
no true account, lest Dembski chide,
"Doth Design exact day-labor, evidence denied?"
I fondly ask. But Pretense, to prevent
That comment, soon replies: "Designer doth not need
Either man's labs or his own brains; who trains
the credulous to the yoke, they serve him best. His logic
Is ringly: thousands at his fallacies speed,
And post o'er sanity and reason without rest;
They also serve who only bloviate.

Should Dedicated Fishermen Go Jump in the Lake?

2009-03-08T16:48:00.005-05:00

High dingbat quotient today. I just can't let this one go: Someone named Tom Frame has written in the Sydney Morning Herald that Darwinists should be "honest" with everyone:

The problem I face is weariness with science-based dialogue partners like Richard Dawkins. It surprises me he is not chided for his innate scientific conservatism and metaphysical complacency. He won't take his depiction of Darwinism to logical conclusions. A dedicated Darwinian would welcome imperialism, genocide, mass deportation, ethnic cleansing, eugenics, euthanasia, forced sterilisations and infanticide. Publicly, he advocates none of them.

Okay, I'll give in and also admit that, as a dedicated Newtonian (I even named my cat after him), I also advocate everyone jumping off of a cliff! But Tom Frame first.

Honestly, how stupid can a person be? There is nothing that is not evolution. You can't "violate" evolution with your socio-political views any more than you can "violate" gravity. Does Frame think that airplane pilots are violating gravity by flying planes? (Sadly, he probably does. He's probably that confused.) If you care for the sick and the weak, you create an environment in which they get better and stronger. Duh. For pity's sake, the Neanderthals cared for and fed their elderly and infirm. Evolution tends toward ecological coexistence and equilibrium, not savagery. (Remember the Galapagos.)

Should beavers also embrace genocide, because after thousands of years of building beaver dams they are incapable of surviving without their structures, and have thus become soft and lazy and "unfit"? Should deer own up to the fact that, well, they've become dependent on their antlers, and are letting into the gene pool "unfit" members would could not have survived without those pointed, technologically advanced weapons? Should bees admit that they've become pansies, toiling on a hive all day instead of being wild and free like the badass, biker drones? I mean, how ridiculous!

If I were to own up to the fact that I do consider some people to be "superior" to others, I think creationists would be surprised to find people with autism spectrum and mental retardation - who are also avid library users - at the top of my hierarchy, and "normal" spoiled brats with fast cars, early acne prevention/nose jobs/breast augmentation, princessy attitudes, spray-on tans, nonexistent belly fat, and daily tantrums due to entitlement syndrome decidedly on my "unfit" list.

(Bwahaha! My one and only car was blue! Of course, it was a 1976 Buick station wagon.)

It's my personal belief that social "Darwinism" sprang up to hold back the implications of evolutionary theory, precisely because it suggested that the poor and the nonwhite had better survival skills than the fragile elite of the Victorian Age, and rich throwaways like our little MacKenzie above. But anyway.

More idiot news: Alan Keyes has a blog. Yes, that Alan Keyes.

*Suppresses major nacho urge*

In fact, Jesus Christ wouldn't even create Barack Obama! Because he's the anti-Christ, you know. *groan*

I'm not linking to Keyes's blaahhhg - you can get there via Ed's site. Just be aware - viewing Alan Keyes' literary glossolalia is painful for more reasons than one. The seizure-inducing colors alone might actually make you want to jump off a cliff.

Dear GOD Ben Stein Has Lost It

2009-03-08T15:14:00.008-05:00

Yes, I used the word "God." Pretend that it means "Going Out for Dinner," which also may as well not exist these days. I must admit that in this instance, the expression has a certain ring to it. Dear GOD that man is an idiot. Dear GOD I didn't need to read that when I'm trying to suppress my nacho/buttered popcorn habit.

Dear God, Ben Stein is an idiot!

First he goes on CBS to blame "Mr. Obama" (it's President Obama, just say it once) for scaring us into wrecking the economy, because we're not buying stock (I am),

What we need, as Bill Clinton aptly pointed out recently, is more cheerleading and less fear-mongering. We elected Mr. Obama to be National Spirit Leader, not National Scary Storyteller.

If Mr. Obama and Mr. Geithner, his Treasury Secretary, and Mr. Volcker, his well-respected advisor, and some real superstars like Warren Buffett and Jack Welch all came out and said, "The recession will end within 12 months. We are sure of it," the recession WOULD end within 12 months.

and then he's writing in the New York Times that he's so scared because the barfing economy is all the fault of short sellers.

Can it be that as recently as 2006, financial firms accounted for almost one-third of all the corporate profits in the United States? Or that money was so free-flowing that a single bat mitzvah party could be estimated to cost $10 million?

That era is gone with the wind. Now we face a severe recession, frightening jumps in unemployment, a breathtaking collapse of equity and real estate prices. Now we face a major discontinuity with what has gone before — a real, grinding, 3 a.m. fear, replete with nightmares of bread lines.

Geez, bread lines. Way to inspire confidence, Ben. His solution? End mark-to-market accounting, because short sellers selling securities as the securities plunge are driving securities down. Yeah. They're making money hand over fist [all five of them] dumping collapsing securities, whose value was obviously inflated if they're continuing to fall.

Right. And if people would just stop wearing parachutes, no airplanes would ever crash. They're driving the planes down.

*Briefly leans forward into hand*

Okay, I'm not knowledgeable enough to take on his suggestion to bring back the "uptick" rule because I don't know much about it, and as for credit-default swaps - hell, I'm just a civilian. I'm not into that level of investment yet, and I don't think I'd go for a scheme like that. I don't think I'd ever go for a scheme like short selling.

But, MY GOD, what an imbecile! I'm beginning to think that there's another reason, other than cowardice and belated embarrassment for his appearance in a snake-handler movie, why he cancelled his commencement address at the University of Vermont. He was asked, after all, if he would confine his remarks to his so-called expertise: economics. It sounds like his ability to articulate coherently any position in his own alleged field is severely compromised.

Ben Stein Runs Out of Ideas

Oh. And did I mention that a few weeks ago Stein made a rambling argument in favor of automaker CEOs hopping around the planet in private planes? (Can Al Gore be forgiven now?)

The executive of an important company has immense responsibilities. His or her time is precious. To waste that time in an airport security line or dealing with flight delays is, quite frankly, a sin against the stockholders. Flying on a private plane is not a decadent act -- it is just a way to move a very valuable asset around to maximize its productivity. To keep executives from using these planes is as foolish as not allowing them to use cell phones or computers.

And I certainly never see the president, his cabinet members, or key members of Congress flying commercial jets.

Well, apparently no forgiveness for Al Gore - not from someone who expects the President of the United States to fly a commercial airliner (and probably without a parachute to boot).

Idiot!

Ben Stein's Headintushitis

Are there any restaurants around here that serve late-night nachos? How about a $10 million bat mitzvah in Highland Park?

A final word re stocks: Do what you have to do, but save. I'm still buying stock, but I diversified my portfolio and may do so again. I've been hit hard, but I didn't expect to use this money any time soon, anyway. I'm sticking to my previous course, because I don't see the disadvantage in buying stock on the way down when, eventually, the market will go back up. By the time you've figured out where the bottom is stocks will have risen to at least the point they were when you stopped buying them, anyway - or even higher - and you won't have as many shares as you could have. This is not financial advice, just how I'm approaching things.

Back in the Day

2009-03-01T13:01:00.004-06:00

Joe the unlicensed Plumber on what used to happen to traitors and libruhls 'n such "back in the day":

Yeah, well, let me tell you something.

Back in the day, plumbers didn't write wussie books and give femmy book-signings (such as they are). Back in the day, kids that grew up to be the people that the Joe the Plumbers of the world are trying to portray wouldn't go near books. Back in the day, these kids knocked the books out of my arms in the school hallway, then skipped class to avoid detention and smoked pot in the bordering woods.

Back in the day, these people talked more about sports than about being a father. They were more likely to say that "Jesus paid his taxes" because, guess what, when they were in their twenties and finally had to resign themselves to getting a job, they joined a union. Back in the day, they laughed at the military guys who had their mullets shaved off for the button-down, spit-shine look. But all this was, as you know, "back in the day." Things have changed, now. The Republican Party has managed to feminize and sanitize men beyond all the supposed dreams and aims of the feminist movement.

(Back in the day, they just told you not to have sex - nobody went so far as to tell you to actually have sex, which is tantamount to telling you how to do it, with whom, and why. Just think, your pastor knows what you're doing all the time now! And later, he may issue, er, other commands. How convenient! What a control freak's paradise!)

Oh, and Joe - I wouldn't trumpet my supposed military service if I were you. Yeah, Joe, be scared, very scared of all the accolades and compliments you'd receive if you were pressured to join up.

UPDATED: Another case in point about feminized men: creationism sure has changed. Boy, cry me a river, Egnor. If we're "not careful, 'creationists' (80% of America) might notice the irony." Great - no more funding for volcano watching from Louisiana, although I'm not sure what funds Bobby Jindahl is going to withhold after he's done rejecting the stimulus package!

Watch Joe go work for the Discovery Isn't-stitute next. (BTW, what ever happened to David Horowitz? Not a peep from him lately.)

"Someday a Place for Us" - the History of Creationism

2009-02-12T13:16:00.011-06:00

Happy Darwin Day! In the interests of inclusiveness, let's give a history of the "controversy," shall we?

The effectiveness of a doctrine does not come from its meaning but from its certitude. No doctrine however profound and sublime will be effective unless it is presented as the embodiment of the one and only truth…
If a doctrine is not unintelligible, it has to be vague; and if neither unintelligible nor vague, it has to be unverifiable. One has to get to heaven or the distant future to determine the truth of an effective doctrine. When some part of a doctrine is relatively simple, there is a tendency among the faithful to complicate and obscure it. Simple words are made pregnant with meaning and made to look like symbols in a secret message. There is thus an illiterate air about the most literate true believer. He seems to use words as if he were ignorant of their true meaning. Hence, too, his taste for quibbling, hair-splitting and scholastic tortuousness.
-Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, pp. 80-81, 1951

The Long History of the Demise of Evolution
1825: We are going to overthrow physical philosophy and the old earth concept. (Granville Penn)
1840: We are going to overthrow physical philosophy and the old earth concept. (John Murray)

22 November 1859: Origin of Species goes on sale and is a best-seller

1860: Charles Darwin’s book will be forgotten in a few years. (Richard Owen)

1866: Gregor Mendel’s seminal paper on heredity, “Experiments on Plant Hybridization,” is published in Proceedings of the Natural History Society of Brünn. Unfortunately, Darwin never sees this paper and despairs of finding the actual mechanism of heredity and natural selection. Mendel’s work languishes largely unknown, cited only three times in the next 35 years.

1871: We will overthrow astronomy, evolution, and the old earth concept. (Patrick M’Farlane)
1878: We will overthrow evolution once it “whimsically” concludes that man was actually descended from a dog. (Thomas Cooper)

1882: Charles Darwin dies.
1884: Gregor Mendel dies.

1894: Evolution’s influence is “ebbing.” (J. William Dawson)
1895: We will overthrow “flippancy” about the Flood. (F. R. Wegg-Prosser)

1900: Mendel’s work is rediscovered and the ensuing new field of genetics finally yields genotypic insights into natural selection

1903: “[T]he beginning of the end [of evolution] is at hand.” (Prof. Zockler)
1904: We will overthrow evolution. (Eberhard Dennert and Luther Tracy Townsend)
1912: We will overthrow “flippancy” about the Flood. (George Frederick Wright)
1924: We will overthrow evolution, the old earth concept, and this “flippancy” about the Flood. (George McCready Price)
1929 We will overthrow evolution. (Harold W. Clark)

1935: We will overthrow evolution and all the evidence for it. (Harry Rimmer)
1940: Evolution and all “false science” is in decline. We will overthrow evolution, the old earth concept, and this “flippancy” about the Flood. (L. Allen Higley)

1936–1947: Formulation of the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis of Darwin’s and Mendel’s approaches

1961: “I concede micro-evolution, of course.” (Evan Shute)
1963: We will overthrow the Modern Synthesis, the old earth concept, and this “flippancy” about the Flood. (Henry Morris)

1968: Epperson v. Arkansas – the prohibition against teaching of evolution in Arkansas schools violates the Fourteenth Amendment

1971: Niles Eldridge and Stephen Jay Gould present their paper on evolution via Punctuated Equilibrium (P.E.) at the Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America. Creationists attempt to seize on P.E. as “proof against evolution”

1975: “There are many and varied theories of evolution today, but scientists who reject divine creation are beset with serious problems and these are being increasingly recognized.” (Clifford Wilson)
1976: We will overthrow the Modern Synthesis, the old earth concept, and this “flippancy” about the Flood. (Duane T. Gish)

1977: Stephen Jay Gould summarizes P.E. in Natural History magazine

1980: We will overthrow the Modern Synthesis. (Scott M. Huse)

1982: McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education – “equal time” for “creation science” is an attempt by a small group to “foist its religious beliefs on others” in violation of the the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

See also Creationism on Trial

1984: We will overthrow the Modern Synthesis, the old earth concept, and this “flippancy” about the Flood. (Henry M. Morris)
1987: “Every major pillar of Evolution has crumbled in the decade of the ‘80’s. (D. James Kennedy)

1987: Unfortunately for Mr. Kennedy, Edward v. Aguillard put the last nail in the coffin of “creation science” in schools – Louisiana’s “Balanced Treatment for Creation-Science and Evolution-Science in Public School Instruction” violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

1988: More and more scientists are flocking to “abandon” evolution! (Luther D. Sunderland)
1989: More and more scientists are flocking to “abandon” the Modern Synthesis, geology (the old earth concept), and this “flippancy” about the Flood! (Henry M. Morris, not to be outdone)

1990: More and more scientists are flocking to “abandon” evolution! (Mark Looy)
1991: We will overthrow the Big Bang Theory, the Modern Synthesis, the old earth concept, and this “flippancy” about the Flood. (Duane T. Gish)
1993: Intelligent Design will replace natural selection. But “[t]his not an argument against Darwinian evolution.” (Percival Davis and Dean H. Kenyon)
1993: “Evolution theory itself has now collapsed under scientific scrutiny!” (T. V. Varughese)
1994: We will overthrow the Modern Synthesis and the old earth concept. (John D. Morris)
1994: We will overthrow the Big Bang Theory, the Modern Synthesis, the old earth concept, and this “flippancy” about the Flood. (Don Boys)
1995: We will overthrow the Big Bang Theory, the Modern Synthesis, the old earth concept, and this “flippancy” about the Flood. (Henry M. Morris)
1995: We will overthrow “Darwinism.” (Philip E. Johnson (not the architect))
1996: We will scientifically prove God’s ability to transcend science (Hugh Ross)
1996: Behe’s works will overthrow “Darwinism.” (Philip E. Johnson)

December 20, 1996: Carl Sagan dies.

1997: “In the not-so-distant future, when someone of the stature of a Stephen Jay Gould or the late Carl Sagan holds a press conference to announce he has finally reached the conclusion that evolution is scientifically bankrupt, other scientists will quickly follow suit. It’ll resemble rats deserting a sinking ship.” (David Buckna)

1997: We will overthrow the Big Bang Theory, the Modern Synthesis, geology (the old earth concept), and this “flippancy” about the Flood. (poor Henry Morris again)

1998: “Darwin gave us a creation story, one in which God was absent and undirected natural processes did all the work. That creation story has held sway for more than a hundred years. It is now on the way out. When it goes, so will all the edifices that have been built on its foundation.” (William A. Dembski)

1998: Evolution, once “impregnable,” is “sinking.”. (Philip Johnson, apparently unaware that he’s setting a bad precedent by affirming, as no other creationist did (as you can see from the above), the enduring strength of evolutionary theory)

1999: “’Yes,’ their teachers will be obliged to inform them, ‘a lot of people back in those unfortunate days had gotten it into their silly heads that the whole world and everything in it had somehow evolved by accident, you see. It was all rather strange.’” (The silly head of Patrick Henry Reardon)

1999: The Discovery Institute’s Wedge Document is leaked and reveals the DI’s five-year strategy, which includes various publicity campaigns but no scientific research.

2000: More and more scientists are flocking to “abandon” evolution! (Ray Bohlin)
2001: Shifting the emphasis from the evidence in the fossil record to the evidence in DNA and genetics shows that more and more scientists are flocking to “abandon” evolution! (the tragic Henry Morris, trying to keep up)
2001: The Discovery Institute initiates its “Scientific Dissent from Darwin” petition to gather signatures of legitimate scientists who oppose evolution
2001: “Intellectual honesty will soon force many scientists to abandon Darwin’s theory of the evolution of species in exchange for intelligent design or outright Biblical creation.” (Gregory J. Brewer)

2002: “Creation scientists may be in the minority so far [emphasis mine], but their number is growing, and most of them (like this writer) were evolutionists at one time, having changed to creationism at least in part because of what they decided was the weight of scientific evidence.” (Henry Morris, conceding a previous acceptance of evolutionary theory which he had heretofore not claimed)
2002: More and more scientists are flocking to “abandon” evolution! (Ralph O. Muncaster)
2002: “Here’s a prediction. Universal CD [common descent] will be gasping for breath in two or three years, if not sooner.” (Paul Nelson, setting a bad precedent in departing from vagueness and unverifiability)

2002: Stephen Jay Gould dies

2003: “In fact, the common presupposition that evolution is right may soon be behind us.” (Ralph O. Muncaster)
2003: I think there is some probability that the entire paradigm may come crashing down at some time in the future [emphasis mine].” (Henry F. Schaefer)
2003: “The only thing holding the tattered theory of evolution together is the powerful desire of millions of people to hold on to the notion of evolution regardless of its scientific weakness, because the alternative is unthinkable to its practitioners.” (Grant R. Jeffrey)

February 16, 2003 - “Project Steve” is launched as a tongue-in-cheek parody of the creationist petition, and gathers more than 700 scientists named “Steve” in support of teaching evolution in science classes

(Newly appointed Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu is among these “Steves”)

2004: “In the next five years, molecular Darwinism – the idea that Darwinian processes can produce complex molecular structures at the subcellular level – will be dead [emphasis mine].” (William A. Dembski, stupidly making a specific prediction and in the process, contradicting his previous claim that he is not anti-evolution)

2004: Michael Zimmerman initiates the Clergy Letter Project rejecting creationism and intelligent design. As of September 26, 2008, the Clergy Letter Project had collected 11,685 signatures of U.S. Christian clergy.

2004: Tiktaalik roseae discovered

2005: “Darwin’s going down the tube. ... No question about it.” (Richard Thompson)

October 2005: Archaeologist R. Joe Brandon initiates the Scientific Support for Darwinism and nets 7733 signatures in four days

December 21, 2005: In Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School Board, Judge John E. Jones III rules: “The overwhelming evidence is that Intelligent Design is a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism and not a scientific theory. It is an extension of the Fundamentalists’ view that one must either accept the literal interpretation of Genesis or else believe in the godless system of evolution.”

The court case is hereafter known as “Kitzmass!”

“Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.”

2006: Phyllis Schlafly lambasts Judge Jones for refusing to “hit one for our team.” Jones also receives death threats.
2006: Dembski predicts: “Evolution will be dead in ten years.” His foolhardiness garners a shimmy.
As of July 2007, the Discovery Institute’s list of “Scientific Dissent from Darwin” gathers eight “Steves” and as of August 2008, garners 761 names, many of whom are not active scientists, with some who have never worked as scientists. Also, visiting scholars at prestigious institutions are listed as affiliated with that institution rather than their true affiliation.

2008: Ben Stein makes and promotes the film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.
Stein redefines intelligent design as “the fact that God made everything” and “Darwinism” as everything from evolution to the Big Bang to galaxy formation to plate tectonics to chaos theory to abiogenesis to a conspiracy by “Darwinists” to stifle dissent. In essence, Stein went even farther than Henry Morris ever did and claimed: We’re going to overthrow evolution, geology, astronomy, paleontology, chemistry, physics, ecology, climate science, the university application process, the scholarly peer-review process, public relations, and who knows, even economics itself. Good luck with that.

The Discovery Institute tries to contain the damage done to intelligent design by Ben Stein.

2009: Creationism, as it was in 1988, is in disarray: Ben Stein won’t join Michael Moore as an Oscar nominee, the ID advocates quarrel on their own blog about their FAQ page (I call it their FAUX or FAUQ page), and try to redefine so-called “intelligent agency” as non-supernatural. Yeah, right. Here’s what I had to say about an Intelligent Designer who is not supernatural. Then I had a change of heart and admitted that animal agency could be supernatural. However, I don't think the Judeo-Christian intelligent design advocates would be too thrilled to have animals as gods.

(By the way, does that appeal to anyone who believes in God? That the Intelligent Designer is not supernatural? Just asking.)

Such is the bizarre, twisted evolution of creationism: from a story of a 6-day creation of a Creator God to an Intelligent Agent who sometimes “acts stupidly” and is not supernatural. Gee, you may as well accept unguided natural selection. At least it doesn't act stupidly.

Stupid design? What’s next? Senior Moment design? Unconscious design by an unconscious agency? Brahman born from the cosmic egg and dreaming our reality? Well, at least that would be more palatable than religious fundamentalism; after all, the Hindus hold many creation myths simultaneously and take none literally.

So why do I pay so much attention to creationists? Well, why does anybody watch any soap opera? ;-) It's fun.

Blogging the Writing of the Peer-Reviewed Paper

2009-02-09T17:48:00.010-06:00

I'm going to try an experiment.

The Triumvirate has been in mothballs because of me being just too gosh darn busy - and now, as an assignment I must write a paper that is of sufficient quality to be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal. Naturally, I'm a little stressed out. Also, being that my undergraduate degree was in English, I'm still an English nerd enough to be concerned about the lack of literary drafts and ephemera accessible to scholars who are studying contemporary writers - drafts and notes and diary pages that we have from previous great writers - because of the rise of the personal computer and the internet.

Therefore, I'm going to attempt to solve all three of these concerns at once by blogging the iterative process of writing my paper.

I'm going to journal my process in blog posts at the Triumvirate, along with my questions, false starts, revisions, and frustrations, and attach successive drafts of the paper. However I will not make these drafts visible to anyone but me for the time being. Only after my paper is written, submitted, and judged/graded, will I make the drafts public. This is due to the fact that I don't, at this time, want comments or help. Please, I need to do this alone!

Another reason is that this is really an attempt to archive drafts, and as such, each individual blog post will not really make sense out of context, but only as a part of the whole. Because the whole will be more than the sum of its parts, I considered making the posts private as well, to be unveiled when the drafts are made accessible, but ultimately I decided against that. This is part journal, part archive - and it's also an experiment in a new area of archival theory, the idea that the archivist in our digital age is involved in record-creation, not just in record-keeping, and must manage not only the end of the record's life-cycle, but its beginning.

With personal computers and the internet I hope to recapture what we have largely lost of what the writer creates while working, and hopefully to provide something valuable about the scholarly communication process as well.

Maybe if I get my act together (I want to write another paper for publication, as well as enter as student paper contest through IMLS), I can finish blogging The Extended Phenotype and my Galapagos Diary.

The first post.
The second post.
The third post.

"I'm Pro-Life and I Need My Abortion"

2009-01-21T22:53:00.006-06:00

UPDATED: Man tries to plow SUV into Planned Parenthood in St. Paul.

At Pharyngula, PZ Myers posted a video of anti-choice protestors who believe that abortion should be illegal, because it is "murder," the "taking of a life." Yet when they are asked what should happen to women who have an illegal abortion should these activists get their wish and abortion is outlawed, these people have no answer. (Sorry, there seems to be no embedding allowed for this video.)

One dip in the video says, "Well, pray for the woman to never have any more abortions." Others say that the abortion is "between her and her God" or "on her conscience." What is the point of outlawing something if there is no punishment for breaking the law? They still have no answer.

Are these people serious about outlawing abortion - or is that effort merely a recruiting effort by the religious right, and a "goal" that would cease to unify people were it to ever be accomplished?

Or, are they carefully guarding the secret that they do believe women should be imprisoned, or even put to death, perhaps stoned, for having an abortion which they claim, after all, is "murder"?

I stated in my comment that some of the protestors, like certain high profile anti-choice fanatics, had probably had abortions and wanted to keep it legal and available for them, and I received a reply with a link to the most astonishing article you'll ever read.

"The Only Moral Abortion is My Abortion: When the Anti-Choice Choose"

Many anti-choice women are convinced that their need for abortion is unique -- not like those "other" women -- even though they have abortions for the same sorts of reasons. Anti-choice women often expect special treatment from clinic staff. Some demand an abortion immediately, wanting to skip important preliminaries such as taking a history or waiting for blood test results. Frequently, anti-abortion women will refuse counseling (such women are generally turned away or referred to an outside counselor because counseling at clinics is mandatory). Some women insist on sneaking in the back door and hiding in a room away from other patients. Others refuse to sit in the waiting room with women they call "sluts" and "trash." Or if they do, they get angry when other patients in the waiting room talk or laugh, because it proves to them that women get abortions casually, for "convenience".

A few behave in a very hostile manner, such as calling clinic staff "murderers." Years ago, a clinic counselor in British Columbia told me that one of her patients went into the procedure room apparently fine with her decision to have an abortion. During the abortion, at a stage when it was too late to stop the procedure, the woman started screaming "You murderers!" and other invectives at everyone in the room.

I, too, have heard these stories, of local anti-choice leaders who head straight back to the picket line after getting their abortions, or procuring them for their privileged daughters. A co-worker even told me about a doctor who threatened--at the probable cost of his own career for violating confidentiality--to expose a local anti-abortion nut whose daughter "couldn't have a baby ruining her college career" if he ever caught that activist protesting outside his clinic again.

Amazing, isn't it?

Animals Are More Sensitive to These Things

2009-01-20T21:55:00.006-06:00

Richard Dawkins shares a funny story with Pharyngula about the inauguration:

Make of this what you will. We were watching the ceremony on BBC TV. Our two little Coton de Tulear dogs, Pamba and Tycho, were being quiet and good. But as soon as Rick Warren came on, they leapt up and started barking. Shoulder to shoulder they stood, and barked and barked and barked their little heads off, directly at the TV screen. As a result, we couldn't hear a word of what Warren said. As soon as Warren stopped speaking, these two splendid little dogs stopped barking, quietly settled down, and we were able to enjoy the rest the inauguration. Afterwards, we drank a grateful toast -- to Pamba and Tycho and President Obama.

I guess animals are just more sensitive to certain things than humans are. When I played Rick Warren's speech on my laptop, our kitties Loki and Newton, who were joyfully (and naughtily) playing with the cord of the blinds, suddenly disappeared from the room. ;-)

Shimmies to Pharyngula and to President Obama

A Lightning Bolt Struck a Housing Bubble...

2009-01-03T17:29:00.011-06:00

...and created financial dinosaurs.

Who believed this would happen? Me, for one, and Peter Schiff. (However, if Schiff envisioned a time frame for the collapse, I had no clue about such a steep slide happening so quickly. However, by the time that I received the news that my hours were to be cut, I was not surprised at all.)

Who didn't believe it? Ben Stein, naturally (or supernaturally), and his conservative friends at Faux News. Ben Stein was and is as wrong on the economy as he is on evolution and science. My evidence? This video from August 2006-2007. It's an amazing document:

Ben Stein: "The financials, as I keep saying, are just super-bargains [unintelligible] I predict with Merril Lynch, which is an astonishingly well-run company..." Holy crap, can you believe that he said that?

Also: "Subprime is a tiny, tiny, blip [in the market]." Look at these weasles laugh at Schiff! Who's crying now, Stein?

Did you follow Ben Stein's and Charles Payne's advice and eschewed Canadian for "patriotic" American stocks? Then I'm sorry for you. Maybe you should sue.

But make it fast. It looks like the financial "guru" Ben Stein has lost a significant amount of money since 2006.

If you had $100 million or $100,000 a year ago and now you have a lot less [yeah, it's rough losing $100 million or $100,000 in overvalued stocks, isn't it, my fellow Americans? Most people have investments like that, right?], you are still the same person. You are not a balance sheet, at least not one denominated in money, as was explained to me recently.

Losing and making money are not moral issues so long as you are being honest. [emphasis mine - we'll get to Stein's honesty in a moment] You may have a lot less money as this year ends than you did two years ago. But you are just as good or bad a person as you were then. It is a myth that money determines who you are, and if you have gotten over that myth by now, then 2008 will have been a very good year.

Awww, isn't that sweet, America? Money doesn't determine how good a person you are! Aren't you so glad that a privileged, whiny rich guy told you that?

That's a fine and dandy sentiment, Ben, but whoever your intended audience is, they sure as hell don't bill themselves as financial geniuses/prophets and dispense terrible financial advice just before a crash, and just after accusing the scientific and academic communities of this nation of trying to gas en masse Jewish babies. Yes, I'm sure the average Joe or Jane really appreciates believing your shitty advice above, Stein, and losing his or her life's savings only to see you patronize them that just because you're a fucking failure, they're not bad people!

And as for the rest of this pompous and self-stroking little column in the New York Times, well, I'm sorry, but I don't believe one word of your story, Ben Stein! I think this is a ridiculous tale:

ABOUT two years ago, a little delegation from a major investment bank arrived at my home in Beverly Hills. These nice young people were from the bank’s “wealth management division.” I told them straight away that I didn’t have anywhere near enough wealth to make their trip worth their time, but they smilingly insisted that we could help each other.

They told me that if I invested a certain sum with them, they would make sure that a large chunk of it was managed by a money manager of stupendous acumen. This genius, so they said, never lost money. He did better in up markets than in down markets, but even in down markets he did well. They said he used a strategy of buying stocks and hedging with options.

I protested that a perfect hedge would not allow making any money, because money made on the one side would be lost on the other. They assured me that this genius had found a way to spot market inefficiencies and, indeed, to make money off a perfect hedge.

I thanked them for their time and promptly looked up Bernard Madoff online. Nothing I saw was even a bit convincing that he had made a breakthrough in financial theory. Besides, this large financial firm was going to charge me roughly 2 percent to put my money with Mr. Madoff’s firm. I could invest my few shekels with Warren Buffett for no management fee at all.

I checked with my investment gurus, Phil DeMuth, Raymond J. Lucia and Kevin Hanley. None of us could see how Mr. Madoff could do what his friends said he could do. I politely passed and went on my way, finding my own inventive ways to lose money on a colossal scale during these last 15 months.

My point is not that I was so smart. I am not and I was not. Mistakes are a big part of my life. [No shit.] My point is that, as humans, we seem unable to learn from our mistakes very well.

Speak for yourself about mistakes. (And no, Ben Stein, I don't think your racism* is very cute.) But I call bullshit.

For one thing, no major investment bank - such as Goldman Sachs, which Stein defamed last year - has been touched by the Madoff scandal. This is the first anyone is hearing of that - but Stein's not naming names. Why not name this "investment bank?" (UBS? Nomura? Even they wouldn't make sense.)

Secondly, why would this unnamed "delegation" go to Ben Stein's house - his residence, mind you - and pitch essentially an Amway scam to him when surely they knew Stein is an author of economic books (such as they are), and a celebrity (of sorts)?

Then, even more unbelievably, Stein invites them in, listens to their pitch, and then researches it - the West's Greatest Champion of the Triumph of Puppy Dogs over the Evil Darwinists allegedly takes this crap seriously enough to look online and consult friends about a metaphorical piece of swampland managed for only a 2 percent annual fee. Sure! And I'm the Wizard of Oz.

Why, I didn't even research another blatant plea from Chase to make zero-interest cash withdrawals on my paid-off credit cards before throwing the checks into the fireplace and laughing this weekend - and those deals are much, much more honest than the one Stein recounts! A true financial guru would have slammed the door in the faces of this supposed "delegation from a major investment bank." But I don't think they ever came to his door.

Finally, of course, Stein expects us to believe that he kept his "I-turned-down-Bernie-Madoff" story secret (and stories like his are whipping around Wall Street like pasties on an aging stripper desperate for tips from an indifferent crowd) for two years.

Two years. That drama queen, keeping his mouth shut for two years? Not likely. The man is so desperate for attention, he even wrote an autobiography in which he hinted at an open marriage with his wife** and claimed to spend more time with "a variety of pubescent assistants and his beloved trio of dogs" than with her.*** This is a man who, before he suspiciously "got creationism," bragged about such things.

Incidentally, the reviewer of said autobiography described Ben Stein as "thick in a bout of self-delusion."***

Open the book of Ben Stein's life to almost any page and try not to hate or envy the things that drive him nuts. His catalog of constant complaints includes a Porsche 928, a thing of beauty perpetually in need of repair; the stupidity of pretty teen-age girls whose attention he covets [ick!]; and the illogical business dealings of studio executives, whose favor he finds it impossible to curry and maintain.

More recently, in a vomitingly self-important commentary in Newsweek entitled "Clinton on the Couch" (thanks for that image, BTW), Ben Stein is quoted thus: "He is remedying an early deficit in female attention. Like all childhood deficits, it can never be filled."

I laughed aloud at such a transparent example of Ben Stein's neurotic projection, describing himself while taking an envious jab at diagnosing Clinton (the true problem with William Jefferson Clinton is that the sleek, self-satisfied cat has never been without female companionship, a problem with which Ben Stein cannot and never will empathize) whereas columnist Peter Carlson**** exploded:

Who was this psychological savant? Alter identified him as "Ben Stein, the writer-actor-armchair shrink." Good Lord, I thought, he means Ben Stein, the guy who played the soporific teacher in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," the guy who hosts a game show called "Win Ben Stein's Money," the guy who writes a hideously narcissistic column for the American Spectator. Who died and made him Freud?

Two which I posit: Well, who died and make him God? Because that's what Expelled was really all about. In his nihilistic pretense of bestowing a sense of "purpose" upon the world that he himself does not have, Ben Stein tries on identities the way some dandies try on suits - one day he's a sex god, gallivanting around with young beauties (who, it seems, still rejected him sexually), next he's an outraged father (he claimed that Monica Lewinsky was "barely legal"), then he's a financial wizard tossing out advice like gold coins to the proles, then he's a sad sack, weeping that What Really Matters is how nice we are to each other as we cut back on dinners at Spago's and buy fewer rolodexes. (As I said, I cannot imagine who the hell Ben Stein writes his column for.) But I digress.

I recommend that everyone save whatever he or she can and invest it, not put it into Treasury notes or money market funds as Ben Stein is now doing. Now is the time to buy stocks - August 2007 wasn't, although you should contribute to a 401k/Roth IRA no matter how the economy is doing. Everyone should have some investments to leave alone until the economy improves, as it eventually will, probably years from now. If you have Treasury notes and/or money market funds, fine - just put something into indexes. But don't listen to Ben Stein. Listen to this guy. He's next on my reading list, along with Michael Shermer's The Mind of the Market.

And just remember - much of what I know about finances I learned from evolution. And evolution "is the result of accumulated small change." Ben Stein told America that so-called microevolution cannot lead to speciation - ironically undermining his one valid message that pennies turn into dollars. You're right, Ben: honesty much more than money determines who we are - but too bad you didn't take your own advice.

UPDATED: "On the subject of his personal life, Stein makes the most of his middle-aged Angst. He hangs out with the kids at Birmingham High School in the San Fernando Valley. While he deplores the materialism of students, he can't get enough of their youth and innocence."***

Do the parents of these teen-age girls know that Ben Stein "hangs out" with them? The more I think about it, the more that it creeps me out.
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*"'Should I be worried about the Crips and the Bloods up here?' These were the first words out of the mouth of Ben Stein as he entered my office at Skeptic magazine, located in the racially mixed neighborhood of Altadena, Calif. I cringed and hoped that the two African-American women in my employ were out of earshot..."
**Stein, Ben. Hollywood Days, Hollywood Nights: The Diary of a Mad Screenwriter. Bantam.
***Russell, Candice. "Screenwriter's Whining Mars Otherwise Insightful Memoir. Sun Sentinel. October 30, 1988: 8.F.
****Carlson, Peter. "Monthly Cure for a Scandal Overdose." The Washington Post. Feb. 3, 1998: B.02.

Klaatu Barada Stinko

2008-12-15T12:22:00.001-06:00

In the poetic justice department:

On my last Friday at work, Santa gives a sci-fi fan the best present ever: The remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still has jumped the snark.

Klaatu barada stinko

If you’re looking for chuckles this holiday season, bypass the miserably unfunny “Four Christmases” and go where the real comedy is — “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” a clumsy, moronic remake of Robert Wise’s brilliant 1951 classic about an alien invader trying to save the human race from its own self-destructive impulses.

What did poor Wise do, incidentally, to deserve such treatment? His chilling horror masterpiece “The Haunting” was already put through the meat-grinder with an effects-heavy 1999 remake, and his thriller “The Andromeda Strain” was revisited with ill results in a SciFi Channel re-do earlier this year. What next — a hip-hop reinterpretation of “The Sound of Music”? (Granted, Queen Latifah could totally tear up “Climb Ev’ry Mountain,” but still…)

The new “Day” can’t be bothered to include the thought-provoking dialogue of the original, choosing instead to bury the audience with special effects that are visually impressive but no substitute for an actual script. And what words do remain are so exquisitely awful that they provide some of the season’s biggest laughs.

My personal favorite? Astro-biologist Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly) takes alien Klaatu (Keanu Reeves) to see a Nobel Prize–winning scientist and notes that her colleague was honored “for his work in biological altruism.” What would that entail, exactly? Helping frogs cross the street? [guffaws mine]

Yes, Hollywood, that is an excellent question—what did Robert Wise ever do to you? Why do you keep picking on his work? He’s one of my favorite directors of all time! Hands off of West Side Story! You just keep your grubby little committee red-tape we-gotta-update-it-for-the-youngsters, Far And Away-will-be-a-hit paws off of The Hindenburg and Blood on the Moon and Run Silent, Run Deep!

If you’re going to remake his films, why don’t you pick on his least admirable Star Trek: The Motionless Picture*?

Try this on for size: Star Trek: The Emo[tion] Picture

Kirk: George, I mean, Sulu, I wish you’d shut up about being gay. Just shut up about being gay, all right? For five seconds?
Sulu: Even if I’m referring to your jacket? Oh, excuse me—robe.
Kirk: Jacket.
Sulu: Robe, captain. [Said so that it sounds like “Rogue captain.”] The belt is tied around your waist.
Kirk: That the particular cut of this jacket. It suits me better.
Sulu: Better get a bucket before you throw up!
Kirk: George, I’m just sick and tired of hearing about your sexuality all the time!
Sulu: Ohhhhh. You know what, Bill? It’s called having fans. Because I’m not the one [Kirk: That’s what I’m talking about! …Oh—hey, I have fans, too!] talking about my sexuality. They talk about my sexuality. I can help it if they talk about my sexuality. I don’t talk about my sexuality at all.
Kirk: Yes, and you don’t talk to me at all! You didn’t even invite me to your wedding. We [Sulu: I sent you that fucking invitation via FED EX! What, can’t see the ground over your beer-gut robe?] don’t communicate anymore! What do you have against me? Why don’t we talk anymore?
Sulu [giving up]: You don’t send me flowers, Randy Sally. [aside] He has fans, too.
Kirk: Because you didn’t invite me to your wedding!

Heh. I envision some spectacular special effects coming up after that.

*credit to Lenny Flank for the pun.

"It's the End of the World...

2008-12-01T22:00:00.001-06:00

...As We Know It - and I Feel Fine." Remember that one?

I listened to it long ago when I was in college and employed part-time.

Now I'm in grad school, and - heh - well, listening to this song again.

It feels fine.

So did drinking all that wine while bopping to this song.

I Believe She Was Actually Called Glenda

2008-11-28T00:39:00.003-06:00

The good news is that COSAD, the organization that my Collection Development class is partnering with to help build a library in Bukoba, Tanzania, has raised all the funds needed to ship the container of 22,000 books.

They want to build a collection concentrating on agriculture, health, children's books, business, and education, with particular emphasis on HIV-AIDS information and small business entrepreneurship. However, working with what gets donated to Books for Africa (a directory of Humanities faculty at some college filed under "Humanities," The Vitamin Bible filed under "religion," children's books with racial epitaphs written in the margins, etc.), I made an effort to find some good art books with a global emphasis and quality color reproductions, books on world history and other social sciences, reading and writing skills, teacher's guides, and basic sciences.

The bad news is, that means we need to get this project finished, or somewhere near finished, very soon, and we only have two pallets of books selected so far.

So I'll be busy tomorrow, at the Books for Africa warehouse and at the Textile Center, working on my other final project for Archival Services class, and this weekend, writing up my final presentations and papers, before going back to another busy work week.

Yes, I'm busy. But I'm sure people have noticed that despite my being tired and fighting an illness the last two months, I the "Wicked Witch of the North" as someone calls me (and I just noticed that tonight), don't get "too tired" to give you my honest opinion to a question, whether it be on common descent or whatnot. So feel free to drop in. Bye now!
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Well, it's a good think I'm not the wicked witch, because I would have melted. I enjoyed selecting books for the library but it was also a very frustrating experience. It's a big responsibility made all the more difficult because it's not a public library in the U.S., but a library aimed at educating people in Africa. At times I was so overwhelmed, and even frightened a little, by this responsibility that I was almost in tears.

I think that it's very important to give library patrons the opportunity to browse a library's collection in a nonstructured manner, so that they can discover their interests and talents. This community wants medical, business, and agricultural texts and childrens' book so that they can train in careers that are important to them, but I want to round out the collection with art and humanities, literature and the social sciences. It's important for people to have an education, not just training, and in selecting books I remembered my own experiences of browsing the library and coming upon authors and subjects for which I would not have consciously searched, but which turned out to be crucial for the cultural literacy that gives context and depth to one's chosen career path.

So there I was in the literature section (remember, my degree is in English Literature), agonizing over whether or not there were sufficient cultural common ground between me and our intended audience for me to include books such as Moby Dick, The Canterbury Tales (a lovely translation into modern standard English), Profiles in Courage, and Dante's Paradiso, while contemplating a table nearly full of Sydney Sheldon, V.C. Andrews, Michael Crichton, and Robin Cook.

Don't get me wrong - I love Dean Koontz, had a good schmaltzy cry at V.C. Andrews' Flowers in the Attic series in my senior year in high school, and devoured many an Agatha Christie book. But I also didn't include excellent works by Ursula Le Guin, Arthur C. Clarke, and Norah Labiner because I didn't think people in Bukoba who didn't have electricity would appreciate science fiction or an experimental style. (So many Norah Labiner books, too, obviously just unloaded. I was saddened. She's a local writer that I reviewed - really a great talent.)

But is that arrogant of me, to assume that people in Bukoba won't like science fiction, say? Or romance novels? I don't know. If this were, as I said, a public library in the States I wouldn't be worrying so. Should I have included what I included? We have made an effort to include world children's literature, picture books with African-American faces, not just whites - and I do think it's terribly important for people to be exposed to the classical canon, however elitist and western-oriented it is.

But should I have chosen Paradiso when there was no copy of Inferno to be found? Does it make sense to include Dante and Chaucer when I didn't find any Milton or Shakespeare? I don't know. Moreover, it is okay that I included a book on space flight (large, full color photos, very attractive) and adventure stories (conquering Everest and Antarctica) and tornadoes? I'm not sure.

Another frustration was that the book's physical condition also drove my selection: I would have included The Scarlet Letter had it not been so trashed. Many of the books are in rotten condition, because people obviously just emptied their attics and cellars, and I dug for gems in this pile with the sinking feeling that while I was dissatisfied with the spotty literary collection I was building, the people on the receiving end will probably be grateful for whatever we gave them. They deserve better.

All I can say is, when I was young I read all these stories from Africa, Asia, and South America - folk tales, myths, adventures, tales of exploration, encyclopedia entries - as well as American stories, and I became fascinated with the world. I want to give someone else the chance to have that experience. It's important to learn how to work, but it's also important to learn to dream and to enjoy, and to develop intellectual curiosity about a subject not only because it is practical, but because it is a pleasure, like fine wine or cuisine - and because the overwhelming coincidence of where you happen to be born shouldn't prevent you from accessing the world's knowledge and discovering your talents and dreams.

Halloween Spoiler Shirley Nagel Actually Gave Me an Idea

2008-11-03T21:43:00.001-06:00

Though I love Halloween, I've never been big on handing out the candy to the kiddies, but I love to decorate and think of new ideas to celebrate.

One year I had the brainstorm to go to Goodwill, buy a bunch of kids' books (coloring books, science books, picture books, and dinosaurs) that were in good condition, wipe them with a mild bleach solution, put them in a caldron-type pan and slip a note in a scary font in each book ("We thought your kids would enjoy a book this year, from your neighbors at blah, blah"), add a bunch of dracula pencils, pumpkin bubble-blowers, and black cat erasers, and let the kids dig for what they wanted.

Well, don't let anyone tell you that reading is dead (arh, arh) because the little tykes loved it! They didn't need my help. Every kid took one book. The parents thanked us profusely. I got to light candles, eat popcorn, and watch all the Vincent Price movies I could stand. It was a success.
Well, I've been majorly sick this year, for months actually, and was finally put on antibiotics just before this Halloween, so all I could do this year was unscrew the outside bulb and lie down until my headache subsided and I could keep some food down. Ugh. It sucked. (I want to dress as the undead, not feel like them.)

But it didn't suck as much as the Halloween in Grosse Pointe Farms, where some fanatical McCain delegate to the RNC named Shirley Nagel is in real need of an intervention:

Shirley, Sugar (what else can I call you?), you are taking this election wayyyyy too seriously! Holy crap. Then there's the footage of her being interviewed by Triumph the Insult Comic Dog after she denied her fellow delegates their turn at the cabernet trough.

Would this Renaissance woman be able to tell Amantillado from sherry? Somehow I doubt it.

But at least when she gave blood (50 proof?) earlier this year, as she claims, she didn't designate whether it should go to a McCain or an Obama supporter, and all those red-state corpuscles probably contained both cabernet and all the candy corns she saved for herself from the Halloween jar. Ooh! Cab 'n candy! Vampire's delight. Somebody keep Lestat from this mortal.

But her idiocy (not to mention sheer meanness) gave me an idea. Why not teach the kiddies to vote on Halloween?

Voting is one of the things you'd think they'd learn in school, but don't - along with compound interest and how to balance a checkbook. (We had a mock stock exchange in junior high - talk about bedlam. Fun.)

Next year, make up ballots for the kids and tell them to circle their choice and place their ballot in the witches cauldron you have in the yard:

Who would make the best President of Halloween?
a) The Great Pumpkin (Do kids know who this is anymore?)
b) Santa Claus
c) Spiderman
d) Dora the Explorer
e) Frankenstein
f) [Write in your candidate here]

Or whoever/whatever. Then keep a running tally throughout the evening and post the updates on the sign held by the ghost hanging from your tree in the front yard.

If you hand out candy in addition to this, give out candy to everyone (duh!) but hand out "I voted really scary" stickers to those who fill out a ballot. Glow-in-the-dark ones. That'll get the stragglers to register.

That would be fun! That would be a kick. Unlike the brainstorm of Shirley Nagel, who just won an all-expenses-paid, bipartisan house toilet-papering, egg-throwing, and flaming-dog-poop-on-the-stoop party for the entire next year. And well deserved, I must say.

I just don't know how anyone could work compound interest/balancing the checkbook into Halloween, though. Next year, we'll probably just go to a party, as we did last year.

Maybe I'll go as Shirley Nagel.

(Listen, though - If I eventually manage to convince kids to "straighten up your room for Halloween," I expect someone to nominate me for the Nobel Peace Prize. Got that?)

Ugh! Let's Get Away from the Campaign for A While

2008-10-24T15:13:00.006-05:00

Let's take some time to think of more pleasant things, shall we? Like, er, true crime and murder.

Four new websites for you to peruse:

The case of Georgette Bauerdorf, a crime which still haunts me.

And of course, more websites on the Black Dahlia:

The Black Dahlia in Hollywood.

Black Dahlia Info, a great resource.

Los Angeles reporter Larry Harnisch has the most plausible hypothesis yet about the identity of the murderer (though I still have my questions about the suspect's ability to actually carry out the murder, pose the body, then send Elizabeth Short's possessions, after the grilling of Red Manley, to the Examiner). His key clue is downright creepy!

Click on his "multimedia" page to see the beautiful, eerie, and tastefully done "wordless documentary" of the Black Dahlia murder and its aftermath (around 21 minutes).

I'll be in class tonight, so be good, all!

Dead Bear Cub Covered with Obama Posters

2008-10-21T09:38:00.000-05:00

This is cetainly not getting news coverage in the United States.

A dead bear cub draped in Barack Obama posters has been found at the entrance to a university in North Carolina, police said today.

Police and wildlife officials are investigating the incident at the Western Carolina University.

Maintenance workers found the 34kg (75lb) bear cub in front of the administration building at the entrance to the campus.

It had been shot, and Obama posters were stapled together and placed over its head.

"Someone evidently was wanting to draw attention to the election," Tom Johnson, the chief of university police, told the Asheveille Citizen's Times newspaper.

"If we find out who they are, we'll make sure they'll get some attention themselves."

Leila Tvedt, a spokeswoman for the university, said the institution "deplores the inappropriate behaviour that has led to this troubling incident".

"We cannot speculate on the motives of the people involved [oh, really?], nor who those people might be," she added.

"Campus police are cooperating fully with authorities to investigate this matter."

University police asked state wildlife officials to remove the dead cub and help in the investigation.

The bear hunting season in North Carolina began last week.

I can speculate as to the motivation:

The motivation seems pretty clear to me.

Hi, I was just calling to let you all know that Barack Obama needs to get hung. He's a fucking nigger, and he's a piece of shit. You guys are fraudulent, and you need to go to hell. All the niggers on oak trees. They're gonna get all hung honeys, they're gonna get assassinated, they're gonna get killed."

"You liberal idiots. Dumb shits. Welfare bums. You guys just fucking come to our country, consume every natural resource there is, and make a lot of babies. That's all you guys do. And then suck up the welfare and expect everyone else to pay for your hospital bills for your kids. I just say let your kids die. That's the best move. Just let your children die. Forget about paying for hospital bills for them. I'm not gonna do it. You guys are lowlifes. And I hope you all die."

Wow, way to fight eugenics from the "Darwinists," you assholes. Way to fight the next "Holocaust" that a bunch of science teachers are going to foist on our society. Right.

I volunteered for ACORN way back in the 1990s. Do your worst. (Shrug.)

Conservatives for Obama!

2008-10-15T09:45:00.003-05:00

Christopher Buckley has endorsed Barack Obama for President, precipitating his resignation from National Review. (I like to call him "William F. Buckley Jr.")

This comes on the heels of Kathleen Parker's commentary calling Sarah Palin "a national embarrassment" and requesting that she step down as a candidate for Veeper for the good of the nation.

Get a load of the hate mail they're getting:

I had gone out of my way in my Beast endorsement to say that I was not doing it in the pages of National Review, where I write the back-page column, because of the experience of my colleague, the lovely Kathleen Parker. Kathleen had written in NRO that she felt Sarah Palin was an embarrassment. (Hardly an alarmist view.) This brought 12,000 livid emails, among them a real charmer suggesting that Kathleen's mother ought to have aborted her and tossed the fetus into a dumpster. I didn't want to put NR in an awkward position.

I just love how the anti-choice crowd invokes the right to choose when it suits them (because they really don't want to lose their annual sob-story emotional blackmail fundraisers, oh excuse me, to end abortion at all).

Christopher, or Bill Buckley Jr. (sorry!), demonstrates the same wit and devil-may-care attitude that made me a longtime reader of a publication with which I had almost no agreement whatsoever.

Since my Obama endorsement, Kathleen and I have become BFFs and now trade incoming hate-mails. No one has yet suggested my dear old Mum should have aborted me, but it's pretty darned angry out there in Right Wing Land. One editor at National Review--a friend of 30 years--emailed me that he thought my opinions "cretinous." One thoughtful correspondent, who feels that I have "betrayed"--the b-word has been much used in all this--my father and the conservative movement generally, said he plans to devote the rest of his life to getting people to cancel their subscriptions to National Review. But there was one bright spot: To those who wrote me to demand, "Cancel my subscription," I was able to quote the title of my father's last book, a delicious compendium of his NR "Notes and Asides": Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription.

Grab the popcorn. We're going to see a lot of Stalinesque purges of dissenters from the Republican Party. "Expelled," indeed!
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UPDATED: Well, by now you've certainly heard the news.

It's about time someone called the Republibots on this crap.

The Source of the Obama E-mail Hoaxes

2008-10-14T13:05:00.001-05:00

Meet Andy Martin.

He's an anti-Semite.

Among other things.

(From the New York Times - requires subscription)

"The Man Behind the Whispers About Obama"
By JIM RUTENBERG
Published: October 12, 2008

The most persistent falsehood about Senator Barack Obama’s background first hit in 2004 just two weeks after the Democratic convention speech that helped set him on the path to his presidential candidacy: “Obama is a Muslim who has concealed his religion.”

That statement, contained in a press release, spun a complex tale about the ancestry of Mr. Obama, who is Christian.

The press release was picked up by a conservative Web site, FreeRepublic.com, and spread steadily as others elaborated on its claims over the years in e-mail messages, Web sites and books. It continues to drive other false rumors about Mr. Obama’s background.
Just last Friday, a woman told Senator John McCain at a town-hall-style meeting, “I have read about him,” and “he’s an Arab.” Mr. McCain corrected her.

Until this month, the man who is widely credited with starting the cyberwhisper campaign that still dogs Mr. Obama was a secondary character in news reports, with deep explorations of his background largely confined to liberal blogs.

But an appearance in a documentary-style program on the Fox News Channel watched by three million people last week thrust the man, Andy Martin, and his past into the foreground. The program allowed Mr. Martin to assert falsely and without challenge that Mr. Obama had once trained to overthrow the government.

An examination of legal documents and election filings, along with interviews with his acquaintances, revealed Mr. Martin, 62, to be a man with a history of scintillating if not always factual claims. He has left a trail of animosity — some of it provoked by anti-Jewish comments — among political leaders, lawyers and judges in three states over more than 30 years.

Racist Morons Boo John McCain in Lakeville

2008-10-13T23:58:00.004-05:00

John McCain tries to do the right thing and set some people straight about Barak Obama:

1. Barak Obama is not a terrorist, and does not "consort with terrorists." (If these dipshits from Lakeville think Ayres is a terrorist, call the FBI! Come on, people, think! It won't hurt for long.)

2. Barak Obama is not a Arab. He is not a Muslim.

Incidentally, most Arabs in America are Christians, not Muslims. (And a fair number of them are atheists.) And one can simultaneously be an Arab and a "decent human being," their invention of algebra notwitstanding. I wish McCain could have brought that out as well, but he was dealing with a barely sentient ding-dong in a fright wig.

I have sincere respect for John McCain's love for this country and his wartime experiences (but he's not getting my vote). I doubt that all the members of this audience do. They're not voting for John McCain - they're voting against an e-mail hoax that got bundled, like toxic derivatives, into this campaign.

Regarding this recent, shameful confirmation of every cornfed yokel stereotype of Minnesota so much of us have worked to counter, all I can say is: Don't blame me! I live in the Twin Cities!

John McCain pandered to the right wing - and he got what he asked for.

UPDATED: Pastor giving invocation before McCain event proclaims: If Obama wins, God's reputation will suffer. Religion is a fucking joke.

Shimmies to Dispatches.

SECOND UPDATE: Then, on the left there's the walking-comatose Whoopi Goldberg, who in her ding-dong universe is worried about the prospect of "slavery" under a McCain presidency:

Right. Way to forget the Emacipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment, Whoopi. I'd better not see you at any Juneteenth celebrations if you cannot remember that neither of those were Supreme Court decisions.

(Whoopi Goldberg should have no fear of being a slave, anyway. A slave is supposed to actually accomplish things. Who would want her?)

Being John Maverickish

2008-10-03T00:02:00.000-05:00

Hey, remember this little gem, Being John Malkovich, in which John Malkovich goes through his own consciousness portal after everyone else has been there?

Well, it occurs to me that this is what must have happened to John McCain.

"I'm a maverick! Maverick! Maverick!"

In fact, after watching the debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, I think that Palin went through John's portal with McCain.

"MAVERICK! MAVERICK! MAVERICK! MAVERICK! MAVERICK! MAVERICK! MAVERICK! MAVERICK!"

Yeah, enough already, Walnuts. There I was trying to play Palin Bingo while your Veeper wannabee was going off onstage. I should have just made my own bingo card entirely consisting of the word "maverick" and awarded myself a macrame wall hanging, and called it a night.

This Lady's Not for Burning!

2008-09-25T12:33:00.007-05:00

NEWS FLASH: The undecider has undecided his being undecided about the debate and will debate tonight. Well, I'll be in class until 10:00 p.m. - learning about witchcraft and pornography and that kind of stuff, of course - but no crystal balls are allowed (think about it), so I won't be able to watch. It's too bad, too. Have fun.
---
Hey, witch-hunters and purity police - burn this!

In the late 1990s I was reading about a drive by newly-converted African Christians coming to America to "convert" whites who were not sufficiently Christian, because we largely don't believe in spirts, demons, angels, and fairies but instead put our trust in godless intellectualism. I kid you not. Unfortunately it's still a story largely overlooked by the media.

One of these tinfoil-hat The-End-Is-Near "bishops," Thomas Muthee, blessed Sarah Palin's candidacy for governor and invoked protection against "witchcraft" in front of a congregation full of allegedly sentient beings. (Video and story at link.)

The church where Palin was "saved" is one of the most extreme in the nation. Palin herself tried to get a book by a (relatively) moderate pastor in a nearby town banned. (Real advocates for "teach the 'controversy'" aren't they?) She has fond memories of Thomas Muthee, not of Rev. Howard Bess.

Transcript of part of this lunatic's "blessing" of Palin:

Number three, or number four [NOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUISITION!], it’s the area of education. We need believers who are educationists. [And "I'm the educationaler"...nice one.] If we had them, today we would not be talking about the Ten Commandments being kicked out of the church, I mean out of our schools. [You know, that's a pretty bad slip.] They would still be there. One of the things that you, you know, I would love you to know, I’m a child of revival of the Seventies, and that revival swept through the schools. They are open to preaching, you know, open. Open. Wide open. You go to any school, there is what we call Christian Union. Christian Union is nothing more but a bunch of kids that are born again, spirit-filled, tongue-talking, devil-casting. Is anybody hearing me? All over the country! Is anybody hearing me?

We need God taking over our education system! Otherwise, we, if we have God in our schools, we will not have kids being taught, you know, how to worship Buddha, how to worship Mohammed, we will not have in the curriculum witchcraft and sorcery. Is anybody hearing me? [emphasis mine]

Hey, Thomas Muthee - fuck you. Don't attempt speak for this nation or its educational system. Of course you have no flipping idea that Wiccans (and Muslims, and Buddhists, and atheists) are protected under the First Amendment - since when have you been in the thinking business?

Thomas Muthee, you're a murderer. You achieved your political power by accusing helpless people of "witchcraft." As a result of your fear-mongering eleven elderly people were accused as "witches" and burned to death by your frenzied, superstitious followers.

Plus you drove another woman out of town on fear on stoning, and you still brag about it! Get the hell out of my country and take your ignoramus "missionaries" with you!

Oh, sorry, I was also speaking to Sarah Palin. Hey, foreign policy/energy expert - can you see Russia from where you stand? Well, I can see the stars at night, so I guess that makes me an expert on the universe. So get out and find a cosmos you like better, and let those of us who care about what the Constitution actually says have our country back.

Dear John - I'll say it again: you should have chosen Elizabeth Dole.

Raymond Queneau News of the Day Segment - Inaugural

2008-09-24T16:41:00.003-05:00

Reported this day, Wednesday, September 24, 2008:

Look, let’s just cut through the brass tacks and get down to red tape, shallweeee? (If I mention this guy’s name once more, people are going to think I’m raising his secret hate child.)

Give it to me straight. Will the economy improve if we stick our money into all these “fungible commodities” I’ve heard so much about, and if so where do I do that? Nasdaq, Dow, or Pillsbury? Is fudge a commodity, and if so, is trading in it fungible or fudgeable (or possibly both)? And what about fungi?

If we “flag the molecules” the way we did with those Kuwaiti oil tankers, how long is it before we start doing it for quarks (being that Palin’s electrons apparently don’t stay in their orbitals), and is this woman charmed or just strange?

And how can we know where the oil and coal are going anyway if the electrons in the atoms that comprise it are either 1) everywhere at once, or 2) only there (i.e., in the U.S.) when we observe them (e.g. in the U.S.)?

The conclusion is inescapable: we must build more colliders in the United States to observe petroleum molecules! They’re larger than subatomic particles, and so easier to “see,” and besides, McCain (inventor of the dingleberry) will love that.

And incidentally, Palin opened her mouth and five days later the Large Hadron Collider went offline until spring. Coincidence? Obviously she went back to work too early; she should be there, being a mother to Schroedinger’s cat (litter, and litter – is that weird? I just noticed) instead of shaking her pom-poms because a body kissed a body coming thro’ the rye. (Yes, another working uterus, who would have thought it possible. If there’s one thing this world doesn’t see often, it’s women getting preggers! “Life happens,” now isn’t that a blessing? When men get pregnant, and it’s not Tom Cruise, I’ll put down my latte. Until then, I have a paper to write. Oh, and the word “precious” signals the start of a drinking game. Just so you know.)

Just don’t get me started on Joe Biden.

(Nice one, Joe. I see where the misnomer “Joe Blow” should have came from, just not how it was never invented for you, and I see why they didn’t add the suffix “hard,” since you do it so effortlessly.)

Or how much I shamefacedly admire this dastardly female criminal – and how much I hope, for the sake of poetic justice, that she also works at Galactic Pizza. Because that would rock.

The debates are off, the gloves are on! Nay, you say?

Well, the advantage of being a man running with a woman is that he can always change her mind. Right?

Well anyway, according to the WSJ (the Farmer’s Almanac for snarky people), what happened is that Eliot Spitzer turned wonks into rats fleeing the ship where they, like Cassandra, then turned into hedge fund traders, but did anyone listen to them? No! Who got blamed?

And so we're back to where we started. Silly Ben. In fact, that should be a TV show. (No! No! Bad idea, bad idea!)

Keepin' It Surreal

2008-08-07T16:52:00.000-05:00

I came across the one and only preacher whose gospel touched me. Oh, it touched me. In the funnybone!

Has this man who inserted his own dialogue been reading Robert Desnos or something...?

"A Mussolini Presidency"

2008-07-28T18:51:00.006-05:00

I previously said that I would not post any more about Ben Stein, so this is submitted without comment.

"Ego deficit problems." I'm holding my tongue on this comment.

Oh, and by the way, the economy continues to be hunky dory.

Incidentally, I just became debt-free. It certainly wasn't by following the words of Benjamin Stein.

UPDATED: Not all debt is bad debt. You need a credit history, after all.

UPDATED: Charles Krauthammer - until now I had respect for you. Have you lost your mind?

Am I the only person who thinks we are rather fortunate in this election to have two candidates who at least have some class? Granted, McCain is a big disappointment to me for embracing Bush, plodding down Baghdad streets with armored soldiers while asserting that all is peace, and pandering to the "agents of intolerance" he once had the balls to challenge - but he is still head and shoulders above the rabid dogs like James Dobson who can't accept him, and insist upon embarrasing him. Is it too much to ask that the talking heads in the media can the "terrorist/too old/African mumus/black love child/missing thesis" BS and focus on the issues?
---
SUFFALUPAGUSDATED: I'm Ben Stein, and I've Erred Financially.

But I have some consolation! Yes, I lost money. But I didn't lose billions the way the top dogs at some banks did.

And neither did most Americans, you twit. (Boy, that's real consolation.)

I didn't borrow tens of billions from my depositors and lose it in subprime mortgages.

Dude, I thought you said there was no subprime mortgage crisis? When did it suddenly become real to you?

I didn't make my stockholders pay me bonuses and options worth hundreds of millions - only to lead my stockholders to ruin.

You didn't ruin any of your financiers? What are the numbers for Expelled again?

How could I have made so many idiotic mistakes? [Um...] How am I ever going to explain myself to my son that his inheritance disappeared?

"Inheritance"? Ben, I thought you said in your book to make your kids pay their way through college and to not give them anything?

How will I ever pay for my livelihood when I'm older and grayer?

I think that's a question a lot of people who didn't grow up with the toys and the privileges that you did are asking, Ben. Are we supposed to feel sorry for you?

This Article Scared the Hell out of Me

2008-07-17T22:59:00.000-05:00

"Not a Moment Too Soon, I Thought of Tim Russert" by Michael Bicks of the New York Times. (July 8, 2008)

Christopher Hitchens, naturally, has a take-down of those who would lionize a dead man and heap sentiment on the fact of his death. (E-mails entitled "The Russert Miracles" and plaintive whimpers of "Is anyone still an atheist now?" after playing "Over the Rainbow" at his funeral are just too much. Bleh.) But this article, which I want you to read, is decidedly not maudlin. It is terrifying.

Most Saturday mornings, I bicycle with a group of men, mostly in their 50s, whom I affectionately call the Cheat Death group. We are all in pretty good shape, competitive but supportive, and convinced that hard-core exercise is our ticket to postponing the inevitable.

The ride a few Saturdays back was a tough one. At 6:30 a.m., the pack took off fast and immediately headed for the hills near Durham, N.H. The first few climbs felt pretty good, but by the third hill I started to feel nauseated.

Figuring that was probably a result of the four beers and large Chinese dinner the night before, I kept going. Twenty-five miles into the ride, I had fallen to the back of the pack. I was short of breath and wondering how I was going to make it much farther.

Bicks felt so bad that he fell back, stopped riding, and called his wife to get a ride home. After showering, and still feeling awful, he lay down and started thinking about Tim Russert.

Though I am a 50-year-old guy with a stressful job and a little too much around the middle, I had a clean bill of health. I had good cholesterol numbers and a great doctor, and recently I had passed a cardiac stress test.

That’s when Tim Russert popped into my head. In the last couple of weeks, like almost every middle-age man, I had taken a very personal interest in every detail of his story. Yes, he was overweight. But hadn’t he just passed a stress test?

That’s when the light went on. I bolted out of bed, went to the computer and Googled “How do you know you are having a heart attack?” The first Web site that popped up was a list of warning signs from the American Heart Association. As I read on, I started to sweat.

“Nausea.” Check.

“Shortness of breath.” Check.

“Chest discomfort.” Perhaps, though it really didn’t feel like much [emphasis mine].

Ignoring the Web site’s advice to call 911 (I was too vain to have an ambulance pull up to my house), I drove to the hospital.

Of course, macho man. Ugh! Men.

The man gives the admissions nurse his age - fifty. The nation's emergency rooms, as it turns out, has seen a significant uptick in men reporting mild chest pains.

A doctor attached some wires to my body and conducted a quick EKG. “Mr. Bicks,” he said minutes later, “you are suffering a heart attack.”

Fifty years old, healthy, athletic, good cholesterol, and suffering a heart attack.

As in Tim Russert’s case, there were no warning signs. No sign I was suffering from coronary artery disease. A piece of plaque in one of my arteries just broke off and created a massive blood clot. When it did, I suffered a severe heart attack. If I had not gone to the hospital, I might very well have died.

It doesn't matter how young you feel or how healthy you are. You can have a heart attack. I wish I could say that I didn't know relatively young people - athletes themselves - who died in their sleep from a heart attack, but I do.

A piece of plaque is all it takes. A blood clot. Some ignored symptoms (or being a macho man/minimizing woman about it). Don't ignore them. Get help right away, even if you think it's embarrassing, or exaggerating. Think of Tim Russert and be safe rather than sorry.

Well, that's probably the way that Tim Russert would want us to remember him. I certainly will (and Michael Bicks, too).

Shimmies to Michael Bicks and Jason Rosenhouse at EvolutionBlog.

Husband Gets Wife Fired Over Threat to PZ Myers

2008-07-16T08:47:00.001-05:00

Well, I must say that this is a sad story.

I feel sorry for her, but in retrospect, her husband obviously was not to be trusted with her personal laptop and/or work e-mail address. You don't let anyone have access to a work account, ever.

What a coward.

UPDATED: Well, wife Melanie has shown up, and made a whole bunch of rationalizations for her husband's actions, and...well, I feel less sorry for her now. Unbelievable.

Via Pharyngula and Greg Laden

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I Shouldn't Laugh

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Mistakes are Marvelous!

Are Four Legs Better than Two?

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My Sweat Lodge Experience

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Free Roman

This Says it All

So Now PZ Was Never Expelled from "Expelled"?

Ask Questions! Ask Questions! And then...

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A Note on the Blogging of the Writing of the Peer-Reviewed Paper

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Should Dedicated Fishermen Go Jump in the Lake?

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"A Mussolini Presidency"

This Article Scared the Hell out of Me

Husband Gets Wife Fired Over Threat to PZ Myers

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ASSOCIATED PRESS

By Dylan T. Lovan
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