The Price of Freedom

We have paid with blood before, but it would be nice if rich people would invest in us a little more. They could take that money they've been holding on to and just start hiring more people to do things. I mean, the infrastructure needs help, our city sewers could use an upgrade, schools and public areas need upkeep, and millions need simply put their skills to good use by doing something.

Oh, I forgot - only government does those things... I guess, then, that we need to figure out how to increase the revenue of the government. The best way to do this is to remove the tax break they got during the bubble that isn't doing shit to create jobs right now.

Warren Buffet and Bill Gates want to be taxed more. They know that the best charity out there is the US Federal Government. Only that body can reach all needy people because it is required to. Grow up, teatards. Stop demanding that people that make thousands of times more than you do get to keep more money than you make in a decade. They get to do this each damn year, while you get nothing.

We lowered taxes on the rich so they would create jobs, but they aren't creating jobs. They're waiting for housing prices to go up first, but those won't go up until the unemployment rate is cut down from 10%. So, are we just expecting a mass die-off of the unemployed? Why not just create some damn jobs???!

Seriously? Spending cuts? That's the policy you think is vitally necessary for economic growth? Spending cuts? Because — what? Unemployment is too low for your taste? God save us.

It is time we grow up and take responsibility for our country. We need governance, not politics.

I Guess it's Not That Bad

Oscar Grant is scheduled to come back to life in two years anyway.

Update: It isn't even two years, Mehserle gets to count the time served, so he will be out in seven months! Apparently, justice only has compassion for someone if that person is a police officer who killed someone. All I know is that guy better never show his face in the East Bay again.

Choices

I just saw the last part of Off and Running from POV. Avery is an African American teenager who was adopted by a Jewish lesbian couple. She and her boyfriend are track athletes. In the course of the show, she wrote a letter to her birth mother and received a response that set her into an identity crisis and may or may not have been a trigger for fights she had been having with her parents.

When I started watching, Avery was having trouble with her running. Her boyfriend was concerned about her because of all the things she was worried about. She was not living at home and was skipping school. The next set of scenes involved her taking a pregnancy test, then going to Planned Parenthood in Manhattan. Her comment was that she did not want to give up any of her children for adoption. She later ran in the Empire State Games and got the bronze. After acing the GED and studying for the SAT, she got a track scholarship to Delaware State. In the end, it seems like she made peace with her struggles and decided to hold off on contacting her birth mother until she finished college.

My Own Stupid Fears

I heard yesterday morning that Juan Williams had been fired, but I had to go into the office before NPR covered the story. It wasn't until I got home and opened up Pandagon that I learned the basics of what had transpired. Juan indicated that he is fearful of people in "Muslim garb" because he thinks that they are all terrorists. There may be more to the story - that he actually implicated that Muslims are to blame for his fear - but I am not usually the type to look things up.

Officially, I'm deciding not to have an opinion on the events, positive or negative, cuz the guy is going to be financially ok. The events have made me think about the times when I have been nervous when seeing a young brown guy with or without typical Muslim clothing in an airport/plane setting. It's a knee jerk fear that I significantly dislike. The vast majority of brown guys I see are either like me - citizens going about their day - or people from other countries who work here and are also going about their day. I work with brown guys all the time. I've even dated brown guys. One told me a story about the reaction that some of his friends in London got on the subway right after the subway bombing. His friends were just going about their business that day, sitting on the train with their backpacks. They noticed that on one else was sitting near them on the crowded train. There was nothing for anyone to fear - the guys had laptops, work papers, and their lunches in their bags - but the people were nervous anyway, and the guys understood it completely.

Every time I have an episode of fear around a brown guy in an airport, I realize a) that if something were to happen to me, it is going to happen, and being nervous isn't going to change anything, and b) that the guy is just going about his business, just like me.

Of course, there was one episode in my life where I assumed that the guy walking down the street was just going about his business too, then he crossed the street and mugged me. There were other factors at play in that situation, and I saw it as mainly a $35 learning experience. I became a little more paranoid, but that has probably been for the better for me, since I was rather naive. However, I know that most people walking around in my neighborhood are just going home or going to a friends' place, even if for "nefarious" reasons. They don't give a crap about me beyond the five seconds when we are passing on the street.

Fears exist for so many reasons. Mine exist because of being brought up in white America in the late 20th century and picking up on so many negative messages. They are also borne of embarrassing and scary experiences of my own. I force myself to see just how rare those experiences have been, and how the vast majority of the time, the people around me couldn't care less about doing harm to me. It might not be how I feel, but it is a fact. Those feelings are not important to anyone but me.

Love at First Sight is Not

One cannot love anyone or anything based on the evidence gained from sight and sexual reaction. The only thing that really does is encourage us to learn more, which can lead to learning good or bad things. Sometimes, the one you might overlook at first becomes more and more interesting and then you see them differently. Many times, you will meet someone, talk for a little while, exchange numbers, then talk later and realize that you don't need to call that person.

If the person ends up being undesirable to you in this way, odds are that the other person can tell. You do the person a disservice (not to mention yourself) to continue to pursue when a fundamental incompatibility surfaces, despite coming from an attractive frame. Love must be based on as many senses as possible, including the things like ability to communicate, agreement on fundamental issues, and physical compatibility, among many others. Anything less should not be considered love.

Oh! You've blinded me!

Can my dear sciency friends read this article and tell me what is not true? I am finding this article wonderfully genderless:

Incidentally, these cues work because they derive from the basic mammalian infant-caregiver attachment behaviors that enable us to fall in love with our parents and kids. Only in rare pair bonders like humans can adult mates use similar subconscious cues to sustain their romances indefinitely.

I kept waiting for some hunter-gatherer, evo-psych bs to pop up, and if it did, I didn't catch it.

Thoughtfullness

A Westboro Baptist Church wannabe out in Florida wants to make a stink. Why not hold a cook-out and use some old books as kindling? Distasteful, indeed, but we are assured that the books are copies of other books, and contain no new information.

But once word gets out to a medieval society torn by war, warped by patriarchal traditions and often deadly misogyny that someone, somewhere, is burning a ream of bound paper that contains a copy of information they have readily available to them... Once that word gets out, the backwards society decides to flip the fuck out.

I don't like the idea of kowtowing to the kind of person that would relegate me to shrouded breeding stock had I been born in their country and not mine. Violent reactions to peaceful demonstrations, even if carried out by brain-dead morons, demonstrate significant insecurity.

Huh

I found this link buried in my drafts, from two years ago.

Queen's bloomers sell for £4,500

That's Why I Don't Read Movie Reviews

I saw Inception last night, and apart from some bright spots, I was mostly bored with the movie during the second half. Its about these spies that go into people's dreams - an implausible thing in reality, but I buy it for the movie - to collect secrets or plant ideas. In the dream state, you can still feel pain, but if you are killed you just wake up - that is until the characters are in the first stage of the main dream state of the movie when we get the "oh, wait, we need more suspense" addition to the movie where people killed in the dream now just enter a limbo state as their real brains melt. At that point, I rolled my eyes and started eying the time.

Like most action/heist movies, this one starred mostly men, which is part of the reason that I don't like such movies (the other part is that the typical heist plot bores me). A couple of the things I did like about this movie were the addition of a female character playing a role in the team on the heist who never becomes romantically attracted to any of her co-workers and the Cobb's realization that he can't create an accurate representation of his dead wife because no one's perception of anyone can match the complexity of an actual human being.

Andrew O'Hehir's review review of Inception mostly mirrors my own take on the movie, except for one detail. He never mentions the second thing I liked about the movie, and that being such a tiny, unimportant scene, I don't care about that. He does, however, refer to Ellen Page's character as "genderless" and refer to the dead wife character as "all the female, erotic energy" that is missing from a universe of professionals. Apparently, Andrew must be reminded that women are different from men and only exist in a sexual space lest he forget to be attracted to them. He never refers to DiCaprio's character as genderless, even though he has all the sexual masculinity of a cardboard box throughout the film - just like most male movie characters. This is just another reminder of how most movie reviewers can't see women as people. When one is presented not as window dressing, but as an average woman, they claim she is androgynous. It's as if Andrew never met a woman in real life.

HAPPY FISCAL NEW YEAR

My Travels So Far

visited 14 states (6.22%)
Create your own visited map of The World

Basically, if I had a layover there, I was there. I've had a couple of 16 hour layovers in Frankfurt, where I got to go out and enjoy the city or nap in a hotel room. The layover in Heathrow was during the day, so I got to hang out in their mall. I was only in Argentina overnight. I leave for Peru today.


visited 16 states (32%)
Create your own visited map of The United States

I tried to include only the states where I have spent a night, but I've spent enough time in Covington, KY to consider it for the map. I also did visit the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, so I include that one.

MicroBlogging on the Subject of the Television Series Lost

I do not care about this show.

Heydays of the Adirondacks

by M. DeSormo

Mother's in the kitchen
Washing out the jugs,
Judy's in the pantry
Bottling the suds.
Father's in the cellar
Mixing up the hops,
Johnny's on the front porch
Watching for the cops

The Giant #&$%up is Revealed!

Yes, in day two of testimony before the publicly elected leaders of our government, the leaders of huge private companies - and indeed the rest of the world - learned more about the platform explosion that will significantly* #&$% up our Gulf Coast.

This morning, I heard that yesterday, the executives played a little game. Transocean said that this was actually caused by the bad cement job done by Halliburton, and Haliburton puts this right back in the hands of the main company at hand, BP. BP, of course, goes back to Transocean, since it was their equipment.

Apparently, it was shoddy workmanship all around. Someone cut corners, several someones cut corners, and the world pays. The executives didn't have many mea culpas, which is really in their best interest, and they may be equally to blame, after all.

Today, Transocean said that if a certain battery was dead (which it was), their sensors would have told them, but [oops] they were lost in the wreck.

One of our publicly elected leaders responded with

"The American people expect you to have a response comparable to the Apollo project, not 'Project Runway,'" -- Washington Post article by Steven Mufson and David A. Fahrenthold

My take is that we reached the limit of our ability to drill for oil under the ocean. Setting the record ain't all its cracked up to be.

*Well, depending on which state governor you hear. Crist and Jindal are shitting their pants, but, the Mississippi state governor isn't worried at all.

Little Things

Driving down 880 - well, I was going North, so up, but whatever - reminds me that Oakland is not just a place with a bunch of houses and facilities named after famous African Americans, it is often a big craphole.

Driving my Taurus makes me feel like a little old lady, and reminds me of how well we normalize bad situations. After being in my shiny new toy that runs on sunshine and farts, the green car is just that much worse.

I also cannot figure out magnets yet, cuz the only people that ever tell me about them are scientists, and those m^$*@%#&%*ers make me pissed.

Government is Us

I like the meaning of the statements I am reading and hearing. I do wish that the great quotes were grammatically better, or, at least not passive sentences. Short, simple words, spoken in an active tone make for amazing lines.

... the only thing we have to fear is fear itself...

... ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country.

Still, many of Obama's lines inspired me, as I hope they can inspire the rest of my fellow citizens.

"We can't expect to solve our problems by tearing each other down."

"...this kind of vilification and over-the-top rhetoric closes the door to the possibility of compromise."

"It may make your blood boil. Your mind may not be changed. But the practice of listening to opposing views is essential for effective citizenship."

"When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it ignores the fact that in our democracy, government is us."

-AP News Story via Yahoo

This is our country, and in our country, we elect representatives to use our collective ability to make our country a great place to be.

Nothing Not to Like

After a nice dinner at the Green Papaya, we saw this:

I may swing by after hiking to see if I really can earn $20 AND protest with kitties. I guess my participation will depend on what they are protesting.

My Saint

My Saint, Saint Ursula, is really awesome. She isn't even a saint, there was just a cult that developed around her and she didn't exist [so they say].

Saint Ursula ("little female bear" in Latin) is a British Christian saint. Her feast day in the Catholic Church is October 21. Because of the lack of sure information about the anonymous group of holy virgins who on some uncertain date were killed at Cologne, their commemoration was omitted from the Catholic calendar of saints for universal liturgical celebration, when this was revised in 1969, but they have been kept in the Roman Martyrology, the official, though incomplete, list of saints of the Catholic Church.*

Her legend, probably unhistorical, is that she was a Romano-British princess who, at the request of her father King Donaut of Dumnonia in south-west England, set sail to join her future husband, the pagan Governor Conan Meriadoc of Armorica (Brittany), along with 11,000 virginal handmaidens. However, a miraculous storm brought them over the sea in a single day to a Gaulish port, where Ursula declared that before her marriage she would undertake a pan-European pilgrimage. She headed for Rome, with her followers, and persuaded the Pope, Cyriacus (unknown in the pontifical records), and Sulpicius, Bishop of Ravenna, to join them. After setting out for Cologne, which was being besieged by Huns, all the virgins were beheaded in a dreadful massacre. The Huns' leader shot Ursula dead, supposedly in 383 (the date varies).**

-Wikipedia, accessed April 3, 2010

*This is a horrible paragraph, here is a revision that makes sense.

Saint Ursula is a British Christian saint. Her feast day in the Catholic Church is October 21.

The information about St. Ursula, whose name means little female bear in Latin, is not well supported. The virgins that accompanied her were never identified and the exact dates of events are completely unknown. When the Catholic Church revised their calendar of saints for universal liturgical celebration in 1969, Ursula was left off. She has remained in the Roman Martyrology, which is the official, though incomplete, list of saints of the Catholic Church.

**This less horrible paragraph could use some work too. There are too many passive sentences up in here.

Her story has become more like an unhistorical legend. She is said to be a Romano-British princess who, at the request of her father King Donaut of Dumnonia in south-west England, set sail to join her future husband in Armorica (Brittany). The legend indicates that she was accompanied by 11,000 virginal handmaidens.

Before she could arrive to marry the pagan Governor Conan Meriadoc, a storm caused the ship to land at a Gaulish port. This storm is dubbed miraculous because it transported Ursula and her handmaidens incredibly far in one day and saved her and the virgins. At the Gaulish port, Ursula declared that she would undertake a pan-European pilgrimage before marriage. She headed for Rome, with her followers, and persuaded Pope Cyriacus (unknown in the pontifical records), and Sulpicius, Bishop of Ravenna, to join them. After setting out for Cologne, which was being besieged by Huns, all the virgins were beheaded in a dreadful massacre. The Huns' leader shot Ursula dead, supposedly in 383 (the date varies).

Brave New World

Huxley vs. Orwell

What the $&@% are You Talking About?

I forgot my new Alternet password, so you will start to be treated to the comments I may or may not make over there. I finally posted a comment that I would like to send to Sister Lauren, but I can't figure out how to contact her. And today, I was reading about characterizing the American right wing like the characters in Animal House [a move that I don't really care to see]. The article was ok until I got to this part:

Such people are on the fringes. But those fringes are growing. In any case, it only takes one angry person with a gun to make the difference.

No, it does not take one person with a gun to stir the American public. It does not take one person with a &^$%ing plane to stir the American public.

I will be [very pleasantly] surprised if it gets any better before it begins getting worse, maybe much worse.

To Sister Lauren

On an otherwise stupid post about "New Atheists", filled with comments pointing out the flaws in the article, was a comment from Sister Lauren about the abuse she suffered from many of us "New Atheists". Her emotional trauma sounds real, and although she is a religionist, I recognize her as a generally compassionate and good person.

I wondered why, when I set out to start a new religion based on freedom, "new atheists" regularly made the argument that I was insane and should be locked up in a mental institution. That is not a lame threat, that is a very serious threat. I found it well enforced and positively life threatening.
-Sister Lauren

Some of what she says sounds, without me having additional evidence, paranoid. However, what most people fail to grasp is that many paranoid people would have their fears eased greatly if someone sat them down, listened to them, then explained why their fears are unjustified with facts.

I may think Sister Lauren is misguided in her attempts to find reason and meaning in the universe or in her religious beliefs, but she's a human being. I'm really sick of the internet atheists who think any good is done by calling otherwise good people who have God delusions "stupid" or "crazy". It represents a massive lack of maturity on their part and it is not what atheists should want to project. It just shows that atheists, just like religionists, can be d-bags too.

Dear America,

No matter what the current state of the government is, it is still, in letter and by law, your government. In order to keep tabs on what is yours, you may want to know exactly what it is doing. I implore you to go directly to the primary source material yourself. Therefore, I have placed a direct link to the Thomas.gov entry for your Health Care Reform Bill and Thomas.gov on the top of the right navigation bar.

And pull up your pants.

Thanks,

Counter Commute

Last week, Amanda had a post on commuting, happiness, and how it relates to our current American political climate. The comment thread got too long for me to be able to read, because I have my own story that basically proves the point of the article.

• I commute 45 minutes to work one way, driving.
  
• I used to have a 3 mile, 10 minute commute before I moved here.
• I am much happier now than I was before I moved.

But wait, you say, that's the counter point? Oh, silly me, here is what makes me different.

• I often find driving at freeway speeds to be therapeutic, giving me time to sort out thoughts and practice explaining myself and my ideas.
• I live in a urban/semi-urban residential area, 3.5 blocks from a BART station. I routinely leave my car unused for entire weekends and spend the weekends with friends, shopping along Telegraph, seeing movies, planning events, and having engaging, intelligent, and fun conversations. My apartment here is not in some estate, it is one of 7 units in a building with character. I enjoy spending time by myself at home, and like making the place look good.
  
• The traffic congestion in the Bay Area is always in the opposite direction of the direction I am going [with the exception of random accidents -- 3 in 8 months].
• I work in a suburban area with strip malls, manicured lawns, and multi-million dollar homes. When I lived there, I could not walk anywhere that I wanted to be. I sometimes spent my weekends in Berkeley or San Francisco, but it required a lot of preparation and I was far from home. Other weekends were spent inside my apartment, completely alone and bored just because I didn't want to drive anywhere, even at freeway speeds. And my apartment was a stifling place, with beige carpets, oversized rooms, and no character. In short, I hated the place, and I had no desire to keep it looking nice, ever.

Not only do I not sit in traffic while I commute, I live in a real community area, validating Amanda's point about the factors that do influence happiness.

Counter Protests

One of the most heartening things for this empiricist is the prevalence of fellow empiricists speaking out against the massively mean and stupid elements of our society. One aspect is the growing effectiveness of the members of SANE at Berkeley. Another is the way more and more people are learning how to effectively counter the misinformation thrown out by certain "entertainers." But specific to this post, I have two links to videos of counter protests to the presence of the Westboro Baptist Church.

Turning the presence of the WBC into a big diversity festival

Using the opportunity to help people make donations to organizations that help LGBT populations and anti-AIDS groups in honor of Fred Phelps and the WBC.

Thank You Silent and Baby Boomer Generations*

Thank you for the work you did to popular music. You wanted something syncopated, uptempo, with back-beats, and definitely physically charged.

Your work has, so far, culminated in awesomeness. And knowing the artist in this case, we may have only seen the beginning.

Wa-wa-what did you say? Huh?; You're don't think this is awesome? [you're wrong] Sorry; I cannot hear you, I'm kinda busy

Nostalgia for the Ventura Years?

He may have really low popularity, due to the furthering the anti-tax stance of this state, but still promising utopia. The same state where a couple of the primary industries pay incredibly low wages for all of the jobs they create and most others are either office-type or low skill service jobs.

Still, I will miss the Governator.

My Atheism, Part 2

Religionists often assume that atheists must have an important text like the bible. They will often pick the Origin of Species. They ask who we worship rather than cope with the reality that atheists do not worship. Atheists are not the opposite of religion, we are completely foreign from religion. Atheists also understand the underlying concepts of religion and find it to be lacking in providing any kind of benefit.

To boil it down to a bumper sticker, atheists prefer to know the truth rather than simply believing in a story written a long time ago.

Never Learned to Read

H.R.3590: Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act

According to Jenna Wisen(ph), who owns an asphalt company with about 150 employees, interviewed at the Nevada Tea Party rally this weekend, "Nobody's read the whole [Health Care Reform] bill - could say that I can't wear brown on Tuesday. Nobody knows whats in there." It is interesting to note that Jenna also thinks that the bill will bankrupt her because now she will be "forced to" provide health insurance to her employees. She must be a GREAT boss.

I heard this on NPR this morning, and Ina Jaffe's comment after Jenna's tirade, "But most of the people at the rally were pretty sure that whats in there could destroy the health care system and put an end to freedom in America," is quite brilliant. I do, however, really wish that she had taken it further, asking Jenna if she had bothered to find and read the bill, since it is public record and Jenna has a vested interest in knowing what is in there. My guess is that they would have said "I don't have the time." Ina could have then asked, "how do you then find the time to go to Tea Party rallies?" A punch to the Ina's face might have followed.

Tea Party people are, quite clearly, know-nothings about how our government actually works. They can not and should not be taken any more seriously than the random homeless person shouting insults on the street. Not only are they too dumb to go and look for the bill before shouting nonsense about it, they don't have enough shame to realize how horribly dumb they look to the rest of us. These are people who have been told for years that they don't need to listen to experts because their own "common sense" was good enough. Now these people are coming unhinged, and it would be funny if I was the kind of person that could laugh at stupid people.

I don't think of myself as someone who is significantly more intelligent than the average person. I have had more opportunity to learn than most people, true, but most, if not all, of the information that I know is stuff that anyone can learn. Some of it takes a while to learn, but some of it just takes the ability to remember a website, like thomas.gov.

President Clinton helped make this a reality, so the know-nothings are probably proud to not know about this, but it allows anyone, anywhere, access to the full text of legislative branch documents from our government, including bills just signed into law. Unfortunately, our worthless mass media doesn't mention this, or give us the tools to find the bill - like the bill number or the official name. I only learned about thomas.gov because I used to work as a government document reference librarian. So it took a little sleuthing on my part this time, but now you have it with no effort at all: H.R.3590: Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act

You can also go to thomas.gov and search for bill number H.R.3590, in case that link doesn't work and if you're not a complete idiot.

My Atheism, Part 1

Even in the worst of times, knowing the truth of the situation was always better, and the sooner I knew it, the better. For instance, my recovery from my brain injury was actually an enjoyable experience because I understood what was happening, thanks to science. This, my brain injury did not affect my worldview, like many assumed that it did.

I knew three things when I was recovering from my brain injury. I knew that I was a vegetarian, I knew what I was going to school to do, and I knew that I was an atheist. I recovered very well from my brain injury, which caused some "survivor guilt", for lack of a better term. I wondered why I was recovering so well and considered that it might be something supernatural. When I explored my thoughts and what I knew about my accident, I realized that there were natural factors to my recovery, the most significant being that my injury simply was not bad enough to cause permanent harm.

This did nothing to support my ego, like thinking that I was better than other people or that something mysterious had an affect, but I was proud to be able to apply reason to my situation and find an explanation that can be tested*.

Two atheists I know have chronic illnesses that will eventually kill them, one possibly in the next couple of decades (24 year-old). The other one (20 year-old) may have more time. These are two people around whom I feel comfortable stating my actual atheist viewpoints, like that the bible is just another [damned] book, written by people. I'm comfortable stating that there is no afterlife around these people, knowing full well that their lives are likely to end much sooner than my own. These are atheists in foxholes.

* Imagine you were able to create a brain injury in others in increasing intensity and monitor their recovery. Conducting this experiment, however, would be painful and occasionally deadly. The loss of life for some and the loss of mental capacity for pretty much all the other people in the study is unacceptable to me because I assume that there is no afterlife, which is an important thought in my own atheist cannon.

Evidence Based Tax Philosophy

We Haz It

Really Good Thread

I'm almost done reading a great thread on Pandagon. This is just one of the comments that I'd like to share. I would post others, but there are so many.

I am a climate scientist in the US. Over the last several months I’ve watched colleagues and friends get slandered, have their private communications completely misinterpreted, and been variously called a hack and a fraud. Already most of my colleagues have decided not to participate in the next IPCC assessment report, since all it does is make us targets for the most vicious personal attacks. We’re expected now to respond to the most assinine, ill formed, and usually wrong criticisms from bloggers. And, except for a few people stepping up to help, we’re largely being thrown to the wolves by the media, public, and politicians.

Here is my prediction. In fifty years time, when climate change is real and apparent right before everyones eyes, there will be all sorts of hand wringing and concerned comments from people on the tv. And everyone will soberly talk about how nobody could have predicted what was happening (much like the levee comment after Katrina).

And I’m gonna have a really, really hard time caring at all.
Comment #70: TransientEddy on 03/12 at 12:31 AM

This post is illuminating so many things about me, my life, my family, former friends, acquaintances, frustrations that I have had. It is about, on the surface, climate change denialists, but the thread gets into the basic motivations of the denialists themselves. Pandagon is a both/and blog, so as long as arguments are in logically and rationally sound, they're an awesome add. Unsound arguments are shut down at one comment so far. I'm actually looking forward to a response just to see what angle they go down this time. It reminds me of the report I gave and the book on which I gave it back on the 2nd. I found this book on Feb. 28th after shopping all day with a friend. I skimmed it that night and bought it the next day.

Friday, I talked with protestant evangelical teenagers about science and religion. The arguments were all either cruel (maiming and death are adequate punishment for not wanting to be pregnant was one), stupid applications of science (an anti-gay marriage argument from the standpoint that same sex couples cannot reproduce), or unsuccessful attempts to find holes in scientific explanations. It was a great experience to have, and also very draining. Rational claims are pretty awesome. The Pandagon thread is rife with these.

We Can Haz Progressive Tax Structure?

The top marginal tax rate for income over $400,000 in the 1950's wonderland that conservatives try to emulate was about 91%. These days, the top rate for income over about $310,000 is 35%.

Colorado Springs is turning off a third of the streetlights, trash services in parks, and other services because they don't have the budget.

And tonight, I heard about another idea some states are pushing - a 4-day school week. Now, I don't have kids myself, but I both was one once and know people that have them (shocking, I know), and my instant reaction to this idea was a bunch of swear words. Like it or not, working parents rely on school to watch their kids while they are at their jobs, making the money to feed those kids. I can't tell you the numbers, but my guess is that about at least half of families need to have two incomes, most of which are earned during the traditional work week.

The school districts that stand to "gain" the most from this idea are those that have large transportation costs. I use the quotes around gain because the only members of the school districts that gain are the ones pushing the paper around. Parents not only gain nothing, but may lose a significant amount of money from lost wages or extra childcare costs. Furthermore, areas where transportation is needed are often the rural areas, where the houses are far apart, and it isn't as easy to just "drop a kid off with the neighbor".

The radio program focuses on the lost learning time with this 4-day week, but that, to me, is a non-issue compared with the insult to working parents that this idea presents.

But, schools are hurting, just like the rest of our public sector. California students and other residents took to the streets highway on Thursday to protest the state's cuts to education. They walked right out onto 880 during rush hour, which made me really glad that I never, ever have to take that highway to get where I need to be. Just like the takeover of Wheeler Hall last year, nothing much will come of this - or, at least if we say that, anything that does happen will be a pleasant surprise - because the state is bleeding money. Of course, if we heeded Glen Beck's advice and seceded from the Union, we would have all that Federal tax money back to, but that's neither here nor there.

What we need to do, in reality, is stop being greedy hoarders and pay for our society already. We have ample evidence that giving rich people money does not work because they just use it to make more money for themselves. We know that raising the minimum wage allows people on the low end of the economic scale to spend more and live better, and we know that spending on public programs makes our towns better places to live. I'm hoping that we can some day act on evidence rather than ideology, but with the stupid Quiverfulls pumping out more idiots to be brainwashed with young earth creationism, I don't know how optimistic I get to be.

You Are What You Eat

Literally, what you eat is digested and used to energize and re-build your body as your cells live and die, as you gain fat or build muscle, or when your broken hand heals after participating in a very bizarre riot on the streets of Berkeley at 2AM. If you eat like shit, you're not going to be healthy, and you're never going to be an Olympian, despite what McDonald's and Coca-Cola tell you. You can also become very very irrational. These maps make an interesting illustration. The most interesting maps are broken down within the states.

Dumbing of the Citizenry

I am watching - and, I guess, part of - a Q and A with the director of The Most Dangerous Man in America. My friend and I were going to see the new Leo DiCaprio film, but it sold out while we were in line. I picked this from the choices, citing my past as a history major.

More later...

Standards

The blogosphere was awash with fervor a couple of weeks ago over a recent poll published on DailyKos. The poll, conducted by Research 2000, asked self-identified Republicans a few questions about their beliefs. I've also been thinking a lot recently about the concepts of being entitled to an opinion and the fallacy of debate style reporting. One of the members of SANE was going to present on being entitled to one's opinion back on the 2nd, but he was sick, so he's presenting it on the 23rd. It should be interesting.

The poll demonstrated that the Republicans polled believe a lot of things that plain ain't true. Some things that are just fabricated falsehoods, and other things that are clearly proven with real evidence.This gives additional evidence to the case for reducing the number of falsehoods that are allowed to filter through society. I found this comment on Ginandtacos.com to be a great description of why we are in this predicament.

You might think vanilla cake is better, I might think chocolate cake is better, but we'll never settle on one to order for the party if you scream that every option I bring up is poisonous and will kill children and I'm only trying to order it because I hate freedom.

And if we take those positions in present America, the media just reports "X says vanilla cake is nice, Y says it kills children" and they don't bother sending it to a lab to test… and even if they did that, they wouldn't hold the person screaming "poison" responsible for trying to create irrational fear and panic.

And so our political debate is poisoned with lies and madness. And people like Corey who come in trying to pretend otherwise are not helping, they're feeding an unhealthy fiction that is derailing the country's ability to function on even a basic level.

-a response to Corey [and Trevor - ok, not really]

About a week ago, a friend defined himself as a free speech purist. I am certainly not, at least, not to the extent that he was indicating. I think that speech coming from authoritative sources must be well reasoned and supported by evidence. If it does not do that, it should cease to be regarded as authoritative. Non-authoritative information can and should be disregarded in public discourse. This doesn't make it illegal, and that is all free speech really concerns.

Amanda and others at Pandagon frequently call out people that think that free speech is infringed by the actions of individuals in the marketplace. For instance, many might call my continued boycotting of Whole Foods due to the health insurance op-ed the CEO gave last year an assault on that CEO's free speech. The 1st amendment is about the government infringing on speech, not about an individual deciding to patronize a business based on how they use their position in society. I don't think the guy's opinion should be illegal, or censored. I disagree with what he said and I decided not to shop at Whole Foods anymore. Private citizens are not obligated to continue listening to people that they do not want to listen to, for whatever reason.

I can't stand the loss of citizens to the lot of hucksters selling them bizarre conspiracy theories to explain away facts that disrupt their insular, patriarchal, entitled, bitter worldview. I refuse to listen to these people and it frustrates me that they are allowed to masquerade as authoritative when they cannot meet the qualifications. I think the time has come to hold ourselves to higher standards - with, of course, constant review of the standards to ensure that all well reasoned opinions supported by evidence are considered.

Consistency

One of the member's of SANE has amateur expertise regarding the medical sciences due to his having spent roughly half his life (IIRC) in hospitals and researching this stuff. He's only 20. He said that his identification with atheism comes more out of his focus on dismantling bogus medical practices. So yes, he does not "believe in god", but that seems to be a by-product of this skepticism.

My identification is similarly different from the common definition of atheism. Unlike this member, my identification involves the myth of the afterlife, which is another vestige of religion. But that is the subject for a longer post.

PZ Meyers, who spoke at UC Berkeley on Friday, posted a poll on a homeopathy site and the Pharyngulites swarmed it. Those that posted the poll and were even in it reacted just like the other poll that was Pharyngulated earlier this week.

I Do Love 'The Nostradamus Effect'

A while back, the SciFi Channel changed to the [utterly idiotically named] SyFy channel because they didn't think Science Fiction was the right term for their programming (it is fiction alright, not so sure on the science part, at least not anymore).

In the same way, I propose that the History Channel become, simply, Hztry.

Thread of the Year

In the genre MST3k