Seven... nine

Something I would totally do. Sadly it would be on my list before killing Hitler just because of the difficulty curve. I like those gradual.

Judicial Reactions for Dummies

In case you aren't sure about your reaction to the recent (as in the last few months) judicial rulings, SMBC has provided us with this handy flow chart:

My Second Major

I hope it doesn't come to this, but I fear it might.




This is why I am a double major. They can't ban me if I am engineering AND philosophy! Bwa ha ha ha ha!!!

Christmas with Ninjas

Not really sure who wrote the invisible book...

My favorite Sims 3 review ever!

Fight Malaria!!

A great organization devoted to fighting Malaria. Please donate! April 25th is Malaria Awareness Day. What better way to show your awareness than to donate!

Harlen Ellison Press-Release

Just watch the video.

International Year of Astronomy

2009 is the IYA to commemorate Galileo's first gaze into his telescope!

http://www.astronomy2009.org

My Eventful Monday

So it is 4:43 on Monday morning and I have managed to trap myself at my house. It started with a great night of insomnia. I managed to mentally write two books/movies and a short story before I gave up and decided to go to work at 3:00. (I play out stories in my mind to get myself to go to sleep. They are usually romances since those make me sleepiest.) I was all ready to go and at 3:26 I was heading down Watkins Street when i hit the Loosahatchie bridge. Literally. Well not literally but not quite figuratively either. The bridge's concrete and the street's asphalt are evidently not on good terms and have a wide degree of seperation. I managed to hit it just right and blow a tire. Luckily my husband had just gone to bed so he wasn't asleep yet. I got him to come and get me and change the tire, but low and behold the spare was flat. So after a 15mph parade home, I said goodbye yet again and set off for work. It was 4:19 and I was like yeah still early! But no, Dame Fortuna had a trick up her sleeve and it is called running out of gas. So here I am. I can't sleep so I am typing this and thinking of all the great things coming today. I have already dusted all of the ceiling fans I can get to (the last one is over the bed where my husband is sleeping, no short jokes) and am now going to read either James "The Amazing" Randi's Flim Flam or Terry Pratchett's Thud. That is the start of my day so if anything else cool happens I will post again. (I will believe in some divine power if either my work place blows up or everyone comes down with monkey pox or something. Damn probability chance and coincidence that's just too much!!)

Merry Xmas!

Just to spread some cheer thanks to Weird Al!

No Atheists Allowed

So I have been thinking about going into politics rather than just sitting back and lettig things happen. Sadly after reviewing local laws I found out that I can't serve in the county with job protection. The county charter Article VI, Section 6.09 covers "race, creed, color, sex, national origin, or political opinions or affiliations." This quite obviously does not cover religion under descrimination that is not allowed. This jibes with the state that has only 3 articles in its constitution about descrimination and Article IX, Sec. 2, of the Tennessee constitution ("No Atheist shall hold a civil office") states: "No person who denies the being of God, or a future state of rewards and punishments shall hold any office in the civil department of this state." So my political career was cut so short it didn't exist. The only place I can serve is the city of Memphis which I might still do, but I'd set my goals a little higher towards the state level. I have contacted the Tn state chapter of the ACLU, but since I am not currently running for an office I don't know what will happen with it. Either way it's descrimination. Even if the people in the state don't want atheists to run, they can just not vote for them, but a person cannot say, "I don't like what you believe so I say that you can't work to better the state." Oh, well. I will see what comes of it.

Joe the Ploy that's getting old

So with the Joe the Plumber thing going absolutely crazy, along with almost 90% of the electorate, I thought I would add my opinion on the whole thing. I was fairly surprised that it lasted so long after they found out that he lied about his income, intention to buy, company profits, and job. He was worried about taxes which he doesn’t pay and was already a right-wing radio star and poster boy. Since the cost of Sara the Candidate’s-Number-Two’s maintenance came out and was reveled to be $27,000 more expensive than Joe’s house, I figured John the Candidate would drop the subject. But alas he is on a Joe the Plumber tour and driving me up the wall.

I don’t understand why Joe the lying-not-really-a-plumber is such a big deal. He is taken as an example of very American by the McPain-in-the-neck campaign. I don’t think most American’s would make a spectacle of themselves by lying to a national candidate and then not listening to his response to the lie, because, well, it was a lie. A white man in the middle class who does a job is not the quintessential voter anymore. This has long sense passed and doesn’t make McLame seem more in touch at all. In fact, it makes it look like he is even more sheltered than anyone would have thought.

This morning on NPR they were discussing race and who Joe-Sixpack was. Those who support McSame all said he was a regular guy like them, but that is not how I see it. Joe-Sixpack is a worthless, gutless wife-beater who can’t hold a job and lays about the house threatening to beat his children while chugging cheap domestic brews that taste, quite frankly, of piss. Where the idea that he is what every American is is ridiculous and it sticks to the white-man is everyone idea of the electorate. Others who talked on the idea said redneck and hillbilly and country music fan. that is more what I see and I have found that, at least among my friends (college-age, black and white, bipartisan students) this is what they got too.

The idea that in this vast society the entirety or even the majority of the electorate can be summed up in one person is ridiculous. Even a single family can have people of all creeds, races, socioeconomic levels, and ideas. Picking a single person as a representative, especially when he (it is always a he even though there are more female voters) is made up. Barak the Front-Runner has not chosen a person to be a representative because he understands the vast multicultural society that makes up the country he wants to lead. The point is that John the Coot needs to straighten up and stop playing this crazy idea of all people being Joe. I am not a Joe and never want to be.

FYI- Women’s “health” *smug smirk* is an issue and making fun f it is really not a good idea.

The Move to Primates

Primates (this includes Apes which includes Humans, Homo Sapian Sapian)- This is a gill-less, organic, RNA, DNA, protein based metabolic, metazoic, nucleic, diploid, bilaterally symmetrical, endothermic, digestive, tripoblastic piscatant, duderostone, collimate with a spinal cord and 12 cranial nerves connecting to a limbic system with a large cerebral cortex with a reduced olfactory region inside of a jawed skull with specialized teeth including canines and premolars, forward oriented, fully enclosed optical orbits in a single temporal fenestrate attached to a vertebrate, hind-leg dominant, tetrapodal skeleton with a sacral pelvis, clavicle, and wrist and ankle bones and having lungs, tear ducts, body-wide hair follicles, lacteal mammories, opposable thumbs, and keratinized dermas and kitinous nails on all five nails on all four extremities in addition to an embryonic development in amniotic fluid leading to a placental birth and a highly social lifestyle. -AronRa

Just a point for those who don't understand evolution. Each of these steps had its own inividual step in the evolutionary process.

McCain-Palin

Oh boy. I am not sure whether I am offended, apathetic, angry, or all of the above. Alright, I can see the political motivations for this: fighting his anti-women votes, countering Obama's historic aspect, supporting the current political problems in Alaska, and getting those stray Hillary voters. Some new developments about her interferance in police jobs and getting a person fired as well as all of the pork she brought to places in Alaska show that she goes against McCain's maverick show. She falls on the strict conservative party line and is very, very socially conservative. Some people have said that it is bad that she isn't home with her 5 kids (and she does have a 17 year old pregnant daughter, which they use as evidence that she should stay home). It makes me kinda mad that McCain would pick her (an unknown and not all that helpful Governor who has not worked outside of the state) instead of many other women who are in or were in the House or Senate with more Washington experiance. It makes me madder that he then dares to claim that Obama has less experience than Palin! He record goes against just about everything I take a side on and she seems like a political puppet who will be put behind a desk or in front of cameras and really do nothing so McCain can say he is a maverick and follow the blazed trail. That's all I can think of now. It really bugs me. (By the way, what is with McCain and beauty queens with big eyes who are blonde and kinda scary?)

The Internet and Obama is a Muslim

I can’t believe how much dumber the internet has made people. I guess not dumber, maybe it just plays to people’s gullibility. I have seen usually smart people claim absolutely backwards things because they did “research” on the internet. When I ask for the “research,” all I get are websites that are... of... dubious origin. It’s never the Harvard Research Department or the national archives. Saying that you found it on fox.com does not make it true. The latest, and most annoying, argument that I had was about whether or not Obama is a Muslim. They had research they did on-line, but they didn’t site archives or registration or show me anything at all. It was just a yes-no argument.

I don’t even see why it matters if he is a Muslim or not or was a Muslim even matters. The problem with something like this is that people could be raised one way or be something at one time and change in the meantime. People jump to say that Bush is a Christian, but he is a “Born-again” Christian. This means at one point he wasn’t or was not a good one. The fear of Muslims is ridiculous when there are so many different types of Muslims on the planet and each local has different beliefs and traditions, the same is true of all different religions including Christians. I was raised, at least in the later part of my childhood Christian, but am an agnostic secularist now. It doesn’t matter. None of that matters. So Obama was/is a Muslim, John McCain doesn’t believe in women’s rights or Separation of Powers, or the Geneva Convention! Wake-up!

I think the problem with the internet is the age difference in users. When I was in school they were teaching us about what kinds of cites we can believe and how to properly research on the internet. Fact checking on-line is very different from in a book. The people I was arguing with are in their late forties and not trained in computers, much less internet fact finding. I could go right now and set up a website claiming that John McCain fathered babies in Vietnam and his Vietnamese grandchildren are trying to gain citizenship. When people start listing it on other websites, anyone could then pick it up as fact. I just don’t like my research to be discounted when I go to legitimate sites and review years of articles and speeches and votes and don’t rely on the Google top ten list for my information. The thing I guess that really bugged me about the encounter is that I was not to be believed and the research I did was to be discounted because I am young, naive, and brainwashed by Obama’s superstar power. The fact, that computers were widely used outside of scientific and government institutes before I got out of elementary school, should count for something when it comes to internet use and research.

Rant Complete.

The Race Has Begun!

Well, the election season has officially started. Both campaigns have officially started their attacks on each other. The McCain campaign had negative supporters from the start, but the campaign went dirty very quickly. The Obama ad “attacking” McCain was, I have to say, very bland. I wouldn’t even call it an attack ad, but it has been dubbed so by the talking heads on both sides. I hope they start debating soon and all of the campaign ad coverage stops. I am getting sick of watching news shows about an ad that runs during the commercial. It is even more stomach churning listening to some of the McCain apologists trying to say that McCain doesn’t speak for the McCain campaign when he makes a gaff or flip-flops. The term flip-flopping needs to be officially removed from the political vocabulary of America before people are afraid to give any opinion for fear of changing their minds eight or more years later. That’s one of the things I have noticed some McCain supporters are annoyed by with Obama. He is very good at not giving an opinion or straddling the fence but making it seem like he’s being specific and answering whatever he is charged with or asked. This annoys me too, but it is a brilliant campaign move when the flip-flops are flying (alliteration rocks).

I was not surprised that McCain claimed Obama was playing the race card. I don’t think it applied in the way he was using it and that the term race card should go the way of the flip-flop. Obama was not using his or his opponent’s race as an issue or a way of getting votes. He was pointing out, at least in the clips I have seen, that this is an expected attack from the McCain campaign. This makes it even more ironic that he used it for this statement, especially after the third time he said the same thing. I don’t know if the race argument is going to work for or against either candidate in a significant way.

I might just be immune to it living in Memphis where there is a huge move to change our local Representative because he is white and the area he represents is mostly black. The campaign against him is trying to find everything they can to say that he is racist, even thought he has the support of many black politicians from around here and has done an excellent job, especially on the Judiciary Committee. He has the voting record of a black woman and has served Memphis well. He put forth the bill where Congress denounced the slave trade and officially apologized. I was really mad when NPR interviewed a black journalist from Chicago who made fun of him. It makes a difference here in Memphis and in the south and does not need ridicule from others. The school board hasn’t funded our schools when the teachers have already headed back and there was a serious debate about the city removing all funding from its schools. It is not needed when the last mayoral election was divided around race and economic lines and the man who won held his office hostage unless they made him superintendant of the school board. We don’t need other people ragging on one of the few very good politicians we have as more of those who abused their power are brought to justice.

That side-rant aside (tee-hee), the campaigns are heating up faster than the inside of my car in the parking lot at the airport. Through the blather, it is nearly possible to piece-meal the candidates’ platforms together. I think I support Obama. (I loath to say that because I hate being lumped into a group and people misinterpreting my motives and intentions.) I will be surer of that once they have a debate or two and have better laid out their positions. I am never going to vote for McCain. At first I took it easy on him, but he has made way too many mistakes and has terrible positions when it comes to women’s rights and constitutional matters. It irks me that this election cycle has gone so Christian, but I understand it since Obama is being called a Muslim, which I don’t see as being particularly evil, and McCain needs to win the religious right to help rally the base of his party. If Obama goes through with his “Faith Based Initiative” plan, I will probably work against him in the next election if he is anything other than an excellent president. So I guess I am an Obama supporter, but just as an anti-McCain voter.

McCain and Women

Alright. I have found that I am not alone in wondering about McCain's almost indifference towards women. His voting record is terrible. He hasn't voted for a single women's issue since he has been in senate including the Equal Work, Equal Pay bill or the bill to force those who cover Viagra to cover contraceptives too. Now they found that terrible joke about a woman enjoying being beaten, raped repeatedly, and left to die by a gorilla. It makes no sense that no one is out screaming in the streets over this. I hate to bring this up again when talking about something McCain said, but if Obama had said this, he would be in more trouble than can be imagined.

His handlers just shrugged it off. I guess this is what really makes me mad. They just said that this shows McCain being McCain. Yeah. That is what I want for president. What is he going to do next? His sad attempts at rumor never seem to get more than half-hearted chuckles from those around him. When he said that the cigarettes we export to Iran might be to kill people, that was bad enough. I could already guess from things he has said that he would be tasteless when it came to his xenophobia, but now he is turning more and more chauvinistic and increasingly xenophobic. I am just waiting for him to call Obama "Boy" next so we can all add bigoted to the list of his characteristics which are pure McCain and reasons for us to make him president. Oh yeah, and he's OLD!!

Freedom of Speech vs Scientific Inquiry

As part of the Bill of Rights, we, as citizens of America are given a right to freedom of speech in circumstances where it doesn't infringe on the rights, or safety, of others. The problem we have now is that people are trying to make scientific debates democratic and free-for-all. This is most obvious in contraceptives, evolution, and stem cell research.

The framing of no argument and insertion of no facts after very loudly and forcefully complaining that something is "unproven," a "theory," or just claiming that it is "ridiculous" has somehow given credence to people whose ideas are based on a personal belief supported by a "strict interpretation" of a controversial document with questionable origins and history. This acceptance of these arguments completely baffles me. After studying the arguments I have found that I can almost cut and paste words into their arguments and disprove anything, even their arguments. The problem we have now is that they are claiming to be unheard and ignored when trying to talk to scientists, because they are not worth engaging. If a scientist does confront someone, they are given the win not matter what they do in the argument. I think some of the debates come down to a scientist and someone just standing there saying "God" and "Jesus" and "Bible" over and over.

Scientific Inquiry works off of the presentation of facts and studies and a review of the material presented. The biggest problems with most of these controversies is that when they are criticised, even in a professional manner, the response to the criticism is either to ignore it, insult the person giving it, or the argumentative equivalent of sticking their fingers in their ears and going, "La, la,la,la,la. La, la, la, la, la." This would not be an issue if they didn't then go crying to people that they are being suppressed by the evil scientists. It is ludicrous.

I just wanted to point this out right now as it has been driving me up the wall for a few days.

The Faith in America

America truly is a nation of faith. I am not talking about any religious faith, though there are many. People in America have faith in more than they think. The monetary system is based on faith. It was taken off the gold standard in 1971 by president Nixon. There is no basis for our currency and with the new computer abilities. We must have faith that the money in our account and that which is direct deposited into our account is really there and really exists. Money trading on the stock market in futures is based on the faith that there will be product in the future. Terry Pratchett has this most graphically shown when he introduces the "pork futures warehouse" where pork-to-be goes backwards in time to the present when it is removed from the warehouse. Often the trading in futures actually shapes the future.

We hold faith that our electoral process works. Even though it is rife with mistakes and fraud, vote caging, and some voter discrimination. We are encouraged to believe that our individual votes count. We are told that it doesn't matter how much money a person has, he or she can become president (supposing they qualify per the constitution). All of this is true for a given value of true. Yes it is possible that each person's vote counts the same or that each of us could become president, but it is fairly unsound. If we were in a political vacuum where ideas were weighed against the constitution and there were no lobbyists then perhaps this would be true, but it really seems to be fluff to keep people content. The greatest example of all of this is the 2000 election where there is evidence that former vice-president Al Gore actually won the election.

The faith in law is a really important one. For the laws to actually regulate anyone and the police to be effective, people have to have a mental check in place to stop them from stepping over the line and breaking the law. This is one place where religion is useful as it has people pre-programmed for this type of thinking with the commands and punishments they teach. I am in no way saying that without religion people would break the law or not follow it. I am simply agreeing, I think it is with Marx, that religion is a way of keeping people docile and happy where they are ("the meek shall inherit the earth" IE keep your head down and don't make trouble). My point is that without mentally accepting the laws, people have no reason to follow them. The number of policemen in areas where people don't hold the laws as a barrier has to be greater than the overall average of policemen in the country. This is why there are problems with some laws and controversy surrounding them. If a law is considered unjust and doesn't fit into peoples mental image of where the boundaries are between law and preference, then we get riots and revolution (tea, anyone?). The faith in the laws and justice system in the country is tantamount to its survival. If people really started questioning the laws and fighting the police, there is no way the police would win, especially when they are outnumbered by their family and friends as well as the country.

In short America is a country of faith.

Beware the Tectonites!!!

It is my solumn duty to warn everyone whose belief systems are challenged by plate tectonics. Hitler believed in plate tectonic!!! He was a Newtonian as well. Stop the theories!!



A thank you to DonExodus2... is vids rock.

http://www.youtube.com/user/DonExodus2