Category: General

Does anyone else have the same reaction? Or am I letting my inner idealist run away with me?

Sagan and Hawking sing a duet to the Cosmos.

Or, rather, are made to sing a duet, mixed and re-mixed by melodysheep.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc&border=1&color1=0x2b405b&color2=0x6b8ab6&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]

Beautifully strange, just like the universe itself.

(hat tip to Dale at Faith in Honest Doubt)

From today’s “Since You Asked” letter, by Cary mother-fuckin’ Tennis, he writes to a girl who is tired of dating and ready for something more long-term:

Give away what you have been withholding and withhold what you’ve been giving away. That doesn’t mean follow “The Rules.” It means get real. Tell him you want a man to fall in love with and stay with, and if that’s a problem for him then OK there are plenty of chicks. Plenty. Next. Not to be crass. But you have to come from a place of complete honesty and vulnerability and pain. Because if you want a lifetime relationship that is what it will be full of: honesty and vulnerability and pain.

Man, I am so ready. He may be writing for a woman, but the general advice still holds true.

I want to figure out what I’m holding back, and what I’m giving away, and reverse it. I’m ready to be honest and vulnerable and hurt and yet still with someone I love.

Bring it, world.

Even though I’ve gotten rid of my cable TV, and even though I don’t have a digital converter box for other-the-air broadcast TV, I’m still watching quite a bit of television. I just watch downloaded and streaming television on my ‘net connection.

Between Hulu, which handles ABC, NBC, Fox and their associated lesser channels, and TV.com which as near as I can tell pretty much just handles CBS, I’ve got most of what I need. The rest I can get by having “friends” (on the internet) record them and convert them to a downloadable form for me.

Here’s what I’ve got in my queue right now:

• Fringe – Walter Bishop, the drug-taking, clinically insane, sweet old scientist, is as amusing as ever. Olivia Dunn, with her strangely-swallowed deep voice and hunched shoulders, is attractive enough but kinda boring, even as a paranormally-powered super agent. Still, this show is goopy fun.
• Mad Men – I’m caught up and now watching Season 3. Damn, but that bastard Don Draper is one fascinating motherfucker. After the Drapers marriage troubles of last season, I’m looking forward to seeing how the merger of Sterling Cooper and PP&L causes friction.
• The Office – Pam and Jim are expecting! I hope that now that they’re together, the tension doesn’t drain out of the show. But the writers and ensemble cast have kept things going for the last 5 seasons. I trust that Michael Scott and the rest will continue making me cringe and laugh (often at the same time).
• Dollhouse – Rather than funny/scary like Buffy, or funny/action like Firefly (*sob* – I so miss that show), Dollhouse is funny/creepy. The programmable humans are blatant social commentary, wrapped up in a action-adventure format. Who among us isn’t just as programmed as the Dolls? Who’s really in charge?
• Community – I watched the pilot of this, and I laughed a couple of times. Not sure how it will work over the course of a season, though – the premise seems thin. An ethically-challenged lawyer has to go back to get an actual law degree, and chooses a community college. He recruits a Spanish “study group” in order to sleep with a cute blonde girl and by the end of the pilot, everyone is being all warm and fuzzy in spite of having been used to get a date? I’ll queue this up if I’ve got nothing else to watch; maybe it’ll grow on me.

I’m also looking forward to the return of Better Off Ted, LOST Season 6 (the final one), How I Met Your Mother, and The Simpsons.

Did I leave anything out?

Just typing that out, I’m struck by how many of these shows (by which I mean all but Dollhouse) are essentially about a strong, ethically- or socially-challenged male character. That’s not to say that progressive feminist values aren’t apparent in at least some of them. For example, for all of the blatant sexism, racism and homophobia of the 1960s in Mad Men, check out Amanda Marcotte’s review of Mad Men Season 2 (needless to say, spoilers abound), told from a feminist perspective. The women on the show may be dismissed and treated by the male characters as less than human, but the ladies also exert a fair amount of social power in their own way. And watching the show made me realize just how little has changed in 40+ years; many of the same attitudes are on display, even in progressive Portland, OR. It’s made me much more aware of how I think and what I do and say to others.

And, of course, Dollhouse rests on the twin pillars of the acting talents and star power of Eliza Dushku and the writing and vision of Joss Whedon. Whedon comes by his feminist credentials honestly, having explored female empowerment in the context of a typically male-dominated genre (action-adventure and sci-fi) for his entire career.

Can you tell I like social commentary? So what am I missing out there? What recommendations for new shows do y’all have?

I haven’t been blogging much lately.

Sorry.

Here’s a cat with what appears to be a hangover.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KswnjMa-MQ&color1=0x6699&color2=0x54abd6&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]

At least that’s what I do when I’m hungover.

Enjoy your weekend. I probably will, too!

I really wish that there was some kind of nutritional food bar or packet that I could eat in one serving, such that three of these packets a day would provide me with all the calories, carbs, protein, fat and miscellaneous nutritional value that I needed for that day.

What would happen if, for example, I ate nothing but green salads and Cliff Bars for every meal? Would I be denying myself some important anti-oxidant or enzyme or amino acid that, over time, would cause me to become ill, weak or stupid?

I’m kinda fed up with my having to select and prepare (or just select and pay for, if I eat out) something from my surroundings each and every day. There are too many choices, and, if left to my own devices, I select for deliciousness and (I’ll admit it) sweetness, and not for the overall balanced calories and nutrition that my body and brain need.

If I could just go to the store and select a box of 21 “food bars” for a week, maybe supplement it with a vitamin and some occasional green veggies and water, that would be so easy. I could just add up the numbers on the bars and see exactly how much I’m taking in of the essential minerals and vitamins and carbo-do-hickeys.

Yeah. That’d be great.

(And sums up my opinion of said critics, as well. Who the hell doesn’t want people to have health care?)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHJbSvidohg&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]

In response to Lindsey’s comment on my earlier post, the parallel between what the woman believed happened and torture seems pretty clear in my head. From her words, it seems to me that she was thanking God for having the power to deflect the arrow just enough to prevent it from causing the death of the little girl. The power to do this, though, comes in some invisible, insubstantial form. The God Who did this is also the same God who created the world and everything in it, including the person who shot the arrow.

The woman was offering her thanks to God for sparing the life of this little girl – the same God Who (the woman believes) created the little girl in the first place.

My first question, looking at these assumptions (a God Who wields both the immense power to bring into creation an entire universe, and the subtle power to nearly deflect an arrow in its path), is: why wouldn’t this God use his immense power in this case, rather than his subtle power?

And just asking that question, I can already hear the apologists begin their rationalizations. But I’ll leave that argument for others to make, and I’ll simply ask this: if a human being had both of those levels of power, and chose the subtle one – wouldn’t we consider that person a monster? Wouldn’t we view a person who could have completely prevented the accident in the first place, but instead chose to physically injure a little girl, cause her the emotional trauma of, y’know, being hit in the neck with a freakin’ arrow, and cause the financial and emotional burden to her and her family… wouldn’t we view that as a form of torture?

But somehow, when it’s God, people just assume that “He works in mysterious ways”. We give God, Who is supposed to be the source of our morality, a pass when it comes to actually applying our ideas of morality to Him.

And this leads in to why I am so strongly motivated to exposing the delusion (for I see it as such) of belief in such a God: because that same mindset affects me in a very real, direct way, and my hope is that by explaining it, I can show you how it affects you and everyone around you, as well.

The mindset that sees this way is one I have trouble understanding, and I see it in the way a certain sizable number of my fellow citizens do not wish to see our leaders held to the same standard of lawfulness that everyday Americans are held to – of which the most horrific example I can think of are our flagrant violations of the civilized laws against torture and indefinite imprisonment of people without formal charges. I don’t understand how presidents, regardless of their political party, are allowed to blatantly violate laws that specifically apply to them in regards to collecting intelligence on American citizens on American soil, or to ignore laws and treaties (not to mention simple human decency and the moral high ground) that ban torture and require known acts of torture to be prosecuted, to choose just two examples out of the many that come to mind.

The conservative movement has been building their power over the last 40 years. They’ve steadily built a constituency out of the same folk who believe in the same kind of God Who has the ability to have created us in a perfect state, but chose instead to doom some of us to eternal torture. And the conservative movement, who have collected primarily in the Republican Party (much like a pus collects in an untreated wound) but who also infect the Democratic Party to a degree (or at least their leadership), have wooed and inflamed those beliefs and transfered that moral blindness and obeisance to authority to themselves.

I view the rise of authoritarianism, and the rise of the Christianist Right, as linked (because they are, in myriad documented ways) and as a danger that must be fought. The election committee of our 43rd president for his second term campaigned in (among other places) the mammoth corporate churches, the ones with million-dollar facilities and CEOs and flashy media networks, in spite of the laws against separation of church and state. The Republican presidential campaign used enlisted men, in uniform, to speak in those churches to collect votes, another violation of tradition and prohibitions against the politicization of our armed forces. They were able to get away with this because authoritarian, evangelical Christians already accept the idea that “these laws are for you, but not for God”. Our 43rd president described his war of choice against Iraq as a “crusade”, a word with obvious and heavy-handed religious connotations.

That’s why I get so worked up about this. It’s not an abstract, philosophical point to me. Fundamentalism has brought about policies of torture, oppression, and death, for Americans and foreigners. So the least I can do is try to draw people’s attention to it. Sadly, yes, I realize, writing on my little blog isn’t a great effort, but it’s a small start.

And finally, you’re right, I’m never going to disprove God’s existence. That’s actually not possible, for several reasons, not least of which is that one can’t prove a negative. Likewise, God as He is worshiped in the real world, by real people, has been defined in such a way that it is nearly impossible to prove or disprove His existence. Of course, to me, that’s because the real world gives no evidence, positive or negative, of God’s existence or intervention; if all someone has to show me that says God exists is that a little girl didn’t die of an arrow wound in the neck, can I show them a story about a little girl who died when she crawled into a washing machine?

In both cases, a theist will see the hand of God. To me, if God did both of those things, He’s a sadist. The more likely explanation, though, is that both of those events, and the millions and billions of others that happen in the world, are the result of people’s misluck, carelessness, stupidity, and greed.

In other words, random events. In that, I think Lindsey and I agree, I think.

How about you?

Jason Kottke waxes philosophical on the Apple user’s upgrade experience:

The upgrade process in each case was painless. To set up the MBP, I just connected it to my Time Machine drive and was up and running about an hour later with all my apps and preferences intact. The iPhone took even less time than that and everything from my old phone was magically there. Snow Leopard took 45 minutes and, aside from a couple of Mail.app and Safari plug-ins I use, everything was just as before.1 Past upgrades of Apple computers and iPods have gone similarly well.

Which is where the potential difficulty for Apple comes in. From a superficial perspective, my old MBP and new MBP felt exactly the same…same OS, same desktop wallpaper, same Dock, all my same files in their same folders, etc. Same deal with the iPhone except moreso…the iPhone is almost entirely software and that was nearly identical. And re: Snow Leopard, I haven’t noticed any changes at all aside from the aforementioned absent plug-ins.

So, just having paid thousands of dollars for new hardware and software, I have what feels like my same old stuff.

I’ve experienced the same, seamless transition: going from my old iBook G3 to my new sexy MacBook Pro, and going from my first-generation iPhone to my iPhone 3GS, and upgrading the OS from Jaguar to Panther to Leopard – once I ran the update process, my wallpaper, applications, settings, and files were all right where I had left them. But I’ve always considered that a feature, a plus, not a negative, because in each case, I could see my stuff running faster and with fewer glitches or errors.

Taking away the jarring transition from one piece of kit to another, and dropping all the files and customizations I had been collecting and making for years prior, forced me to pay attention to the one thing (or several things) that had really changed: the underlying hardware was faster, or the operating system itself was more efficient and powerful.

Hearing someone praise God for his power on the evidence of a little girl surviving being hit in the throat near the carotid artery only makes me think:

If God was so powerful, couldn’t he have simply prevented the arrow from hitting her?

There’s just something not right about the logic: this little girl was struck by a deadly object in a horrific fashion but it’s OK because God allowed it happen just enough to wound her, but not kill her?

This must be the same reasoning that says torture and indefinite imprisonment of non-combatants is OK as long as there’s no permanent organ failure.

I guess that means rape is fine as long as the mom survives and has the resulting child because, hey, everyone loves babies! They’re so innocent.

Sorry to go off on a tangent. I saw the initial comment that sparked my posting on Facebook, otherwise I’d link to it. I get that the mother is relieved her child survived the arrow, but attributing just one small part of her surviving to God and using it to state that “God is powerful” is simply horseshit and doesn’t stand up to any kind of thinking at all.

But the writers of the various books of the Bible, and all the men who have spent centuries interpreting it, don’t really like thinking and reason, do they? It got in their way. Better to discourage reason and logic in favor of convoluted worship of authority; that’s how a cult is built, after all.