So I’ve reached the point where I do deny the existence of the biblical God because there is no reason not to. The Bible is mythology, it’s inconsistent, contradictory, vague and largely incorrect on many issues. There is no reason whatsoever to use the Bible as the basis for faith. You may as well use any mythology. They are all equally valid in their invalidity.

Now I do acknowledge (and have written about) the fact that science cannot answer where this universe came from or why. We don’t know where the energy came from. We don’t know why we are here. I don’t think science will ever be able to answer those questions. But neither can religion. Religion brings us no closer to understanding these questions. God did it? Why? So he could love us? Why? Who created God? Why did they? Religion does not get us any closer to understanding this, the biggest mystery of our existence.

Atheism, as I view it, is not about claiming there are no answers to these questions. We came from somewhere for some reason! Atheists are people who have decided that worship of a mythological deity is a shallow and fanciful answer to these questions. Fear of such a deity is silly, pandering to them is silly and believing they care who wins a football game, gets a raise or decides arbitrarily who lives and dies is silly.

So, yes, religious folks are silly. I suspect that many of you know this and are in denial about it. I also know that many of you really believe, in your heart, that Jesus, God, Allah or whomever is there, loves you, and cares deeply for you. You think somehow this gives your life hope and meaning. I completely respect your right to do this. I do question it, though.

Atheism is not about losing hope, it’s about rejecting your parent’s dogma, it’s about being open to other possibilities, it’s about accepting the mystery of our existence instead of clinging to the mythology of our ancient ancestors.

Not scary at all.

Sam Harris, in this book is talking mainly to hardcore Christians who are anti-choice, anti-gay, anti-separation of church and state, etc. but there is a message for religious moderates too. You are not being honest with yourself if you don’t face head on some of the major and detrimental inconsistencies of virtually all religious views. For example, it is deeply evil that Catholics would rather doom people to die from HIV/AIDS than cooperate with the distribution of condoms. Most Catholics I know oppose this view of the church and yet call themselves Catholics. They are complicit in that travesty.

It’s worth a read even if you disagree with him because it really gets the wheels turning.

The Right Wing pushed us too far. They are good folks and they mean well but they go too far when left unchecked. The lack of meaningful compromise has not served us well. You don’t have to change parties or make long term commitments, you just have to cast a vote that you think will lead to a better, yet sustainable, United States of America.

The message we are going to send to Bush is that, yes, we are paying attention and talking the talk isn’t good enough, you have to walk the walk. It’s not politics when you are a leader, it’s policy. We are not cool with fiscal irresponsibility. We are not OK with less constitutional rights. We think it is fucking insane to send the world the message that we would weaken the Geneva Conventions in regards to POWs. Dot, dot, dot.

So vote for balance. A Bush White House, in partnership with a Democratic congress, may be a recipe for healthy compromise. Americans, when asked, believe that we are best off when there is a balance of power. Let’s vote for that. Today. Go vote, right now, for balance.

I was recently engaged in a discussion with a man when the topic turned to evolution. He stated that he was a Christian and therefore did not believe in evolution. I attempted to explain my belief that Christian beliefs and evolution are easily reconcilable. He indicated his belief that the story of creation as set forth in the bible was the literal truth and that anyone who didn’t believe in the word of God could not be a Christian. As I didn’t want to be dispatched with the jawbone of an ass, I left the conversation at that.
I believe that the man I was speaking with could be accurately described as a “Fundamentalist Christian”.

Here’s my message to all you religious fundamentalists (Christian or otherwise) out there regarding science and religion. Religions should not attempt to alter scientific theory to fit belief systems. My position is supported by the absolute folly of past attempts to stymie science by religious organizations. For example, back in the day, the church threatened Copernicus for theorizing that earth orbited the sun because such a theory was at odds with the position of the church. Copernicus’s works were not published until after his death in 1543 because he was afraid of being tried for heresy. The church officially forbade publication of Copernicus’s work until 1822. Can you say stupid?

Scientific methodology is designed to accurately describe our physical world. The fact that a particular scientific theory does not fit perfectly within a belief system does not make the theory wrong, it simply requires adherents to that belief system to exercise a bit of mental flexibility. For example, just because the bible says that the world was created in seven days does not disprove evolution. Maybe the creation story in the bible is not meant to be taken literally, or maybe the passage of seven days took a lot longer fifteen billion years ago.

Here’s the logic. If you believe in a “just God”, you must believe that God wants us to know the truth about our world because falsity is at odds with justice. The truth about our physical world is revealed through scientific study. It follows that a “just God” would want us to engage in critical thought processes inherent in the scientific method. Therefore, it is the duty of God’s followers to pursue reason. Fundamentalism belies reason and is therefore counter to God’s will.

I would submit that people who can’t reconcile scientific fact with their religious beliefs are either intellectually lazy or irrational. Unfortunately, I have yet to meet a fundamentalist who is capable of rational thought when their belief system is threatened.

p.s. I apologize for the self-righteous tone of this piece. It’s just that ………. I’m right.

First of all, on bias. On the editorial side, I agree that the NY Times leans decidedly left. I also believe that is their right. I do not believe they bias their news reporting. Fox does try to be fair at times but there are many shows that are a weird mix of editorial and news and that is super dangerous. I don’t mind if Fox leans right on editorial stuff but when you present news with an editorial bias, it is lame. I do not believe any (credible) news organization does this to the degree that Fox does. I also don’t think CNN leans left at all. Amy Goodman at Democracy Now! has a great video about how CNN and all the others were great big cheerleaders for the Bush administration during the combat phases of the recent wars. There was virtually no anti-war voice on any national media.

On the war. What you and Bush miss, in my opinion, is the fact that most of the people who are hurt by our actions are not terrorists. Bush doesn’t get that. 99.9% of the people hurt by the “war” in Iraq are not terrorists and they are not necessarily anti-American. Now throw in the context of Zionism and colonialism and Arabs are super duper sensitive to having US/UK boots on the ground. This is understandable. What do you say to this? If we were only hurting terrorists we wouldn’t be having this argument.

Finally, when Bush got elected I said to myself “Let’s have a little faith in all of these smart and well-meaning Right wingers and see how they do.” I was not hoping for failure by any means. One of the first things he did was renege on his promise to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. He told us one thing and did another. It didn’t exactly bolster my faith. Then with 9/11 came a pseudo-fascist agenda of spying on American citizens, trying to undermine the Geneva conventions, secret prisons, a ridiculously expensive war based on false pretenses (whether known or unknown), a campaign against same-sex couples, a statement that we should teach creationism in schools, a repeated agenda to drill in Alaska, something few Americans support, a belligerent attitude towards our allies such as France…the list goes on. I gave Bush a chance to prove that he represented me and he told me in no uncertain terms that he does not.

So, yes, at this point, Bush does virtually nothing I approve of. He chose that, I didn’t.

Although it may seem otherwise, I AM loyal to the US and my hardline opposition to this administration is an attempt to nudge them to the Left. Bush was elected by a slim minority yet he turned his back on the 48% on this side. He could have been a uniter and had he tried we would have a lot less to bitch about. Instead we hear about the “political capital” he earned and his intention to spend it. Fuck him. Bush is loyal only to his constituency, something that is unbecoming of a President. I can’t even attend one of his appearances because I won’t sign a freaking loyalty oath or whatever.

You are a smart guy and I respect your point of view. I can’t share it.

In my opinion, killing animals for food is not evil. The domestication of animals was very important in the development of civilization. Taking wild game and raising animals for slaughter is natural and necessary. (I know there are some who argue with the “necessary” part of that statement.)

But something has changed recently in human history and it has moral implications. This is the factory farm. Until recently, animals were raised by family farms and the care of the animals was something near and dear to the hearts of the farmers. Even with large herds, there was a direct and personal involvement in the well-being of the animals by those who tended them.

Animals do feel pain and they can be made to suffer in many ways. They can express this suffering so they are obviously self-aware enough to know they are suffering. As a moral society I believe we absolutely have a duty to treat animals humanely. I vote with my dollars when I can on this issue. I, as a consumer, will pay more for products that treat animals better, such as free-range chicken. But the market doesn’t always reward moral imperatives. It’s the role of government to get things done, especially in those instances where the market fails.

I’m not a vegetarian but I sympathize with many of their ideals. We should demand the benign treatment of animals both as consumers and as citizens. We should not let our food production descend into a nightmare of billions of tortured creatures so we can pay a few cents less per pound. This should be self-evident.

Here is what is funny. First she seems logical and says:

The issue in the Kansas controversy was not intelligent design and certainly not creationism. The current Kansas standards state: “To promote good science, good pedagogy and a curriculum that is secular, neutral and non-ideological, school districts are urged to follow the advice provided by the House and Senate Conferees in enacting the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.”

Sounds good, right? No one is trying to shove creationism down anyone’s throats, we just want secular, science-based teaching, right?

But scroll down and she reveals her true agenda:

Intelligent judges are beginning to reject the intolerant demands of the evolutionists.

Who..the…what…the? A minute ago we all agreed but now all of a sudden we advocates of secular, science-based science are intolerant, demanding evolutionists?

This woman, with no scientific training and a religious view that “[we] were created in the image of God” has just decided that the overwhelming consensus of virtually all biological scientists is intolerance in action!

W.T.F. These people just can’t seem to grasp that we do not have an agenda of evolution, we have a body of scientific evidence that supports evolution. We are not anti-religious or anti-creationism except in that there is no evidence for creationism. These morons want to “teach the controversy” where none exists!

Yes, let’s fill in the gaps of evolution and see where that leads us. Maybe it will lead us to creationism. But to claim that there is any scientific basis for creationism at this point is a complete, utter and premeditated lie.

This should not be a political issue. It’s morons like Phyllis Schlafly that make it one.

It’s really cool that blogs have become discussion areas. It’s publishing and its community all at once and it is fantastically successful at it. It’s almost what I envisioned the Nets to be in the Ender’s Game world — a virtual, chaotic debate forum where issues of the day are decided. Personalities are born and have influence and gain power solely through their participation, perhaps anonymously, in the discussion. The discussion is now largely online and largely in the blogsphere.

Attention is doled out meagerly. Very few people read most blogs. Yet in an instant someone can link to an obscure blog post on slashdot or digg or the dialykos and, boom, a zillion visits a day and a possible revenue stream.

A revenue stream. This is probably music to most of our ears. Financial independence from blogging is certainly compelling for most and possible for some. But selling ads is not necessarily the business many of us want to be in.

But even without zillions of visitors, many blogs make an impact. Local impact that isn’t local. The interconnections are like neurons, making the connections themselves just as important as what they are connecting. This is a chorus.

Where will that lead…? I don’t know. This discussion has started in a deeper way than could be achieved prior to the present day Internet. As the capabilities expand, I suspect the discussion taking place “online” will be virtually the only discussion taking place. I don’t mean, of course, to say that people won’t meet in person or engage in normal daily intercourse, but the debates of the future, on policy, and politics, will occur in what the blogsphere will become, whatever that is. There will always be big media companies but their influence will be muted. We have people on the ground now.

So I think we do this to change the fucking world. You talking about your cat and me getting mad at creationists or talking about astronomy is going to change the world. The game is on. Slowly, painfully, with many steps backward along the way, we have a real forum for ideas now.

Someday we will have a President of the United States who gained their influence solely through their interactions with the public network.

We blog to change the world.

The surrounding Arab countries have never been happy with this. Israel has had to repeatedly defend itself from attacks by Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon. It has maintained its independence, frankly, though the use of superior military power.

The Arab governments have, over the years, made peace with Israel, perhaps most notably Egypt in the late 70′s. This unfortunately lead to the assassination of Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president, by his own people.

This is all to say that this is a very, very tricky situation. In a nutshell, some Arabs feel, and will always feel, that Israel unfairly occupied their territory and then defended it only through the help of the UK and the US. Thus, in their minds, these three military powers, the UK, the US and Israel have unfairly used military might to create and defend Israel at the expense of the Arabs who had lived there under the Ottoman Empire for 600 years.

Israel, on the other hand, has been a recognized sovereign entity for 58 years. Regardless of the complexities of unraveling thousands of years of history and animosities, Israel should not have to repeatedly defend its right to exist. It does exist. Period. No amount of war will make it un-exist. Any modifications to borders or ownership of lands will need to happen via diplomatic negotiations. Like it or not, the US, the UK and Israel will not let it happen any other way.

So what’s the answer? What’s fair? What’s rational and what will address the humanitarian and political issues that this situation continues to create?

I’m idealistic, I know, but with irreconcilable differences, the only hope is compromise. That, unfortunately, means no one is happy. Everyone gives a little. I think the rest of the world is just aghast that extreme views on both sides continue to doom innocent people to die. How many more people have to die? How much more suffering needs to be inflicted? It’s not helping. The death and the suffering are not getting anyone any closer to their goals. It is time for both sides to compromise.

This is why Bush’s arrogant idiocy in invading Iraq was so stupid. This was already a super tricky situation and he sent the bull into the china shop. Now those Republicans idiots are using the latest conflicts between Israel and Lebanon to start their war with Iran. Meanwhile Israel, because it had tens of people die from renegade attacks by Hamas and Hezbollah, is killing thousand of people in return. They are invading another country.

Let’s face it: Hamas and Hezbollah are terrorist assholes with their heads so far up their ass they can’t breathe. They continue to work against their own best interest at every step of the way. They get further and further from their goals and more and more of their people suffer and die.

But the other side of the story is just as bleak: the US and Israel have their heads so far up their ass they can’t breathe. They continue to work against their own best interest at every step of the way. They get further and further from their goals and more and more of their people suffer and die.

The crux of the whole thing is the fact that Israel has the Palestinians under their thumb. A two-state solution has to be figured out. It should have been figured out a long time ago. Bush has not only not tried to get such a process going, he has worked against it by inflaming anti-American and anti-Israel sentiments in the Middle East. I personally think that Bush wants this all to happen so we can continue to occupy more and more of the Middle East and, in his fucked up mind, continued to kill Muslims. They think this is a war that must be fought. They are wrong: it is a war that should never be fought.

So to recap:

1. Arab countries have to recognize Israel’s right to exist and must eliminate violent dissent from any internal organizations.
2. Israel, the US and the UK need to make a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict an utmost priority.
3. The Palestinians need to negotiate and agree to a two-state solution in good-faith.

It can be done. Some day it will be done. We need to work on making that day soon. Yes, it is very, very hard. It can be done.

But we can set aside the afterlife question and go one deeper, the question we all ask: why are we here? Yes, Big Bang nucleosynthesis and accretion disks and all this can explain it from the Big Bang forward, but why a Big Bang? Or better — whence a Big Bang? Where the fuck did all of this come from?

I agree with the likes of Carl Sagan who said something to the effect of, saying God did it but we don’t know where God came from is rather the same as saying we don’t know where the universe came from in the first place. You’ve only pushed the unknown one step further out. Maybe God did do it, no one knows for sure. But saying God did it does not advance our understanding, it’s just made-up words.

But still — how the fuck did we get here? I write, you read, we are fucking here, dammit, and I want to know why! Science cannot answer this. NO ONE can answer this, as far as we know. It is unanswerable.

So although I agree with the atheists, I say “pretty much an atheist” because to me, acknowledgment that we can’t explain why we are here or what created the matter/energy that started it all, means to me that those answers could be profound, profound in ways that we can’t conceive of. Imagine knowing where it all came from? What does that answer look like?

Does dying provide answers? That’s hard for me to believe. Can I say it is impossible? No. Can anyone? No. Yes, improbable as all fuck, but impossible, no.

We came from somewhere.

Now look — Hamas is not friendly to Israel. They are quite hostile and they basically if not actually have declared war on Israel. I believe that Hamas is part of the problem in a big way. But I also believe that the Palestinians voted for Hamas for the same reason that people in the USA voted for Bush — to greedily protect their interests, with a heavy hand if necessary.

Obviously, the notion that the Palestinians can wish Israel out of existence is nonsense. Any such goal should and will be crushed. The Palestinians do not get to decide if there is an Israel or not.

At the same time, I’d be pissed off if it was up to the Israelis if there was a Palestine or not. With countries and borders less than a century old, it is irrational to leave the fate of the Palestinians up to the Israelis. Israel rightly expects the world to stand up for their right to exist. I think it is time that the world stand up for Palestine’s right to exist.

You know, when people lob bombs into your neighborhoods, take hostages and kill people, you get pissed off. I can see why Israel is pissed off. But what do they do? They lob bombs, take hostages and kill people. You’ll remember from above that this pisses people off.

The military power of Israel dwarfs that of the Palestinians and this puts the impetus on the Israelis to be utterly measured in their military actions. Blowing up power plants and bridges is fighting the wrong enemy. How can they not see that? Arresting elected Hamas leaders leads away from, not towards, peace.

I’ve asked this before of both sides: do you fucking want fucking peace or not? The answer is obviously, no, you don’t.

The solution is obvious (in no particular order):

1. Palestinians stop killing Israelis.
2. Israelis stop killing Palestinians.
3. Palestine recognizes Israel as a sovereign nation.
4. Israel recognizes Palestine as a sovereign nation.
5. A multi-national, cooperative and good-faith negotiation occurs as to the logistics of #2 with neither Israel nor Palestine having veto rights. It is binding arbitration.

As long as the Palestinians are under Israel’s thumb, there will never be peace. That is the bottom line.

What is so funny about this attitude we have is that it is wrong. Thanks to Google-like entities and way-back-machine-type entities, each spontaneous quip is immortalized for all eternity. We who start our careers in the blogsphere and end up in politics and business are going to have our words read back to us at opportune times in the future.

I’m OK with that, myself. Just for fun, let’s say that I’m running for President of the United States. (This is, I’ll admit, rather unlikely.) I have eluded to drug use and sexual behavior. I have uttered profanity-ridden diatribes against politicians, writers and bloggers. I am mean sometimes, intolerant sometimes and plain ol’ wrong sometimes. All of it squirreled away on hard drives scattered throughout the globe, well beyond my means to destroy. These words would be used, in or out of context, to make me look like a looney. They have me on the record saying taxes are good, Bush is a complete moron, Republicans are hypocrites, all drugs should be legal, speed limits are too low, religion is evil, etc. ad infinitum.

But, provided I get a chance to address these issues if brought up, I have no problem with being on the record. There are really three things you can say when presented with your own words:

1. I was right and I believe that now.
2. I was wrong and I believe something else now.
3. I was right but I believe something else now.

None of these are hard to swallow. Present day coward politicians have a problem with #2 and I don’t get it. It is a sign of intelligence if you change your mind based on new information. Yes, I agree, you can’t blow with the wind but you can and should re-evaluate decisions. #2 means having to say you are sorry sometimes, as well. That’s not hard. I think people that can admit when they are wrong, say they are sorry and change their beliefs and behaviors are the very best kind of people. Nothing flips the bozo bit faster than someone who is more interested in winning than being right.

I’ll stand by my words from now until the end of time. There may be times I change my mind and disagree with my former self. There may be times I have to say I am sorry. I can handle that. I do very much enjoy the spontaneous nature of the blogsphere and it will suffer if we all get overly focused on the permanence of what we say.

Although, to be truthful, 99.9% of it will be pretty much gone like it never existed in fairly short time scales. Still, I suspect the presidential candidates for the 2032 election will have some Internet skeletons in their closet.

First of all, between 50% and 80% of you is made up of water. Good ol’ H2O. I weigh (unfortunately) about 190 lb. (or 86 kg). That means that what I refer to as “me” includes 3 water-cooler sized jugs of water (about 14 gallons at 8.33 gallon/lb.). Does 3 water-cooler sized jugs of water have a soul? I would think not.

I found a site with the elements of the periodic table sorted by their presence in the human body. It looks like we are, in decreasing order of percentage, oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sulphur, sodium and magnesium. Do any of those things have a soul? Do they have a mind?

A mind, we could argue, is a higher level brain function essentially involving close analogs to computers, with data storage, processing and interconnections. Thus a mind is explicable as a rather sophisticated “ghost in the machine” that can be fully explained by physics.

Where is the soul, though? What is a soul? Why do some believe in souls? A soul, they would say, is exactly that part of us which is not a function of the intricate arrangement of various elements. It is not physical. So people have souls and water jugs do not. Who decided that? A soul, apparently, is a special designation by God of supernatural permanence. Or, to be more objective, a soul would be some extra-dimensional aspect of human beings whose existence was not dependent on the “mortal coil” here incarnated. In this case the other dimension may not be study-able, i.e. literally beyond the capabilities of 4-D science, but if this soul thing plays any role in our dimensions, it can’t be completely beyond the realm of study.

I’m trying to be open-minded and thorough because it is an important question. As a hardcore agnostic slash light-weight atheist, it is still hard for me to completely relent to the fact that I am not special. Part of me just so wants to believe that somehow I am special. As someone decidedly non-religious, that translates to there somehow being more reality than we are able to sense. A more complex answer, really, to cosmological questions than the Big Bang/GR/Quantum ones we have discovered. In a way it seems somehow to deny my humanity if I deny the possibility that maybe there really is more than we think.

There is not the slightest shred of evidence for something like this, nor the slightest evidence for God, Heaven or Hell. While it is totally natural to speculate, the only rational answer is extreme agnosticism. Or perhaps atheism. All the rest is the wishful thinking of people that just don’t want to die.

You are going to die. That is a fact. I’m not scared of dying in the abstract. I’m not scared of being dead. My life is precious and therefore all lives are precious, regardless if, and especially if, when we die we are dead. That will not hurt. The fact that we are going where all people go, even if that is to an eternity of non-being, should give us comfort.

We don’t need souls. We are special, you and me, either way.

1. People who don’t walk on escalators. I totally don’t understand why otherwise able-bodied people stop walking the second they step on an escalator. They look so stupid standing there doing nothing. For the vast majority of us, time is something we want to conserve. In most cases, we do not need to conserve energy. When you walk on the escalator you are saving time. The moving steps makes the staircase shorter, in essence. You get up them quicker. When you stand there like an idiot, it actually takes longer than walking up normal stairs. For the love of God, people, walk up the freaking escalator!

2. People who write checks. This is something women seem to do much more than men. They go buy a $2 cup of coffee and write a check for it. W.T.F. So first they order and then they take out their checkbox, fill in the payee, fill in the amount, write out the amount, sign it, go to the ledger, write in the payee and amount, tear off the check. Then the cashier asks for ID and they get their ID out. Sometimes they are asked for their phone number. It’s insane. You can turn a 10 second transaction into a 180 second transaction for a cup of fucking coffee. I haven’t carried a checkbook around for at least 10 years. For anything less than $10 or so there is exactly one way to pay and it’s called CASH. Women manage to screw cash transaction up too, though, because they are so anal about putting their coins in their coin purse and their bills in the bills area, sorted by denomination and all orientated the same way. They have to do this while standing in front of the counter, too, they can’t step aside. (Yes, I am unfairly generalizing about women. It’s just the women that do that I’m bitching about.)

3. People who stand in line, like at McDonalds or a coffee shop, and then when they get up to the counter, they don’t know what they want. It takes me exactly 5 seconds to place by order at McDonalds’s or a coffee shop. For some reason I always get behind the person that needs to inquire about everything: “What’s in a Big Mac? Can I see the nutritional information? Is there nuts in that? Hmm….let me think.” IT’S FUCKING MCDONALD’S. YOU DON’T NEED TO THINK. JUST FUCKING ORDER. The same is true at the coffee shop. They all serve exactly the same drinks. If you’ve been to one coffee shop you’ve been to all coffee shops. Decide what you want before you get to the counter. It’s just not that hard.

4. People who don’t concentrate on driving when they are driving. This is just obvious. When you are participating in the most dangerous activity you will ever participate in, pay fucking attention. I was behind a guy once who was driving while practicing the trumpet. I’ve seen people smoke, eat and talk on the phone at the same time while driving. I’ve seen people turned complete around shouting at their kids. I’ve seen old people who can’t see, can’t hear and can’t turn their heads. No wonder your most likely cause of death is a traffic accident. If you are one of these people, quit it, now.

5. People who don’t know how to stand in line. Either they stand right behind you, practically touching you, because somehow they think they’ll get up to the front quicker if they press against you. Or they leave huge gaps in the line, as if they are so cool they needn’t be bothered with normal line standing behavior. This makes the line overflow its normal path and just pisses us all off. When you stand in line you should stand between 2.5 and 3.5 feet away.

Ok, your turn.

But if we were to do it again, we could abandon the moon but we couldn’t abandon the sun. The seasons are an annual cycle thanks to our orbit around the sun and no calendar makes sense that does not acknowledge the utility of that. The New Year actually starts at a fairly logical time, as our orbit reaches an extreme. Months are the only thing you could really argue about. A year divided into 10 or so parts makes sense, and the moon does orbit the earth roughly 12 times per solar year. So really, the system we have is not so bad. Those ancients knew what they were doing!

Whenever you say the word “Thursday” you are really in touch with our ancient forebearers.

There is one way in which I am not a feminist — I am a man. By that specifically I mean that part of the problem that feminists have with men is based on the way we are wired, deep in some genetic code. We can all argue about the relative effects of nurture vs. nature but the nature of men has been evident across all cultures. In the context of sexual relations, men are, at least to some extent, animals. (Women are too but someone else can write that blog post.) The reason that the porn and prostitution industries exist is because of this particular nature of men. Both of these industries relate to men’s desire (and, believe me, I don’t mean all men nor all men all of the time) to have sex without attachment, negotiation or compromise. I would say virtually all men, even if they don’t use porn or prostitution, understand the desire to have sex on demand, without attachment, negotiation or compromise.

This is kind of an ugly reality, I admit. It is one of the baser drives in men. It absolutely treats women as sex objects. The only real defense I make for this is that men truly wish for consensual, willing female partners in this. Men like being objectified, too. The drive is not to degrade or demean women, it is to live out fantasies with them.

Now again, I admit, that the way the porn and prostitution industries operate, they are hellish and prey upon vulnerable and abused people. They are industries of despair and addiction, in many cases. It is not my aim to defend these industries whatsoever. Yet I believe they are indicative of a reality of the nature of men, one that men can try to control but they cannot change. I think feminists look at these qualities in men and assume they are the result of a brainwashing by society and/or an intense selfishness. In a way, they think these impulses in men to focus on women as sexual objects should be eliminated. They see it as a direct assault on the feminist movement.

I think they are correct to a large extent. Where I draw the line, and I hope they agree, is that consenting adults should be able to do whatever the hell they want. I can’t explain why some women freely engage in porn or prostitution. Men in similar desperate situations may not have those options and probably turn to equally degrading professions, such as crime. Is that so much better? Can there be any expectation that men will change and lose their desire to treat women as sexual objects? I think not, anymore that we can expect people will stop smoking, drinking or eating at McDonalds. Things that prey to the most base impulses of people are hard to change.

What is important in my opinion is that the treating of women as sexual objects, if it happens at all, is happening to women who want it to happen, whether personally or professionally, or better yet, in the privacy of our own homes where consenting adults have all sort of consensual fun in ways that is not our business. It should not happen in the work place, in school or in the other many areas where women have historically been treated as second class citizens. Women have no duty whatsoever to play to men’s baser desires. But they always have and they always will. This is not a double-standard, as men are pretty damn willing to play to any base desire of women whatsoever.

Because the bottom line on all of this is that porn and prostitution are simply the extremes of what happens in magazines, movies and TV all day every day — the general worship of female beauty and portrayal of women as sex objects. I’d guess that a majority of the time, this portrayal is by women for women. Porn and prostitution are the tail of the bell curve in the systematic exploitation of women. The center is big media that caters largely to women.

These things have value and we can go get it, all we want, by supporting research. These things are the fruits of research. While you do see T-Mobile or Medtronic leveraging the latest technology, you don’t see the thousands of labs on colleges and universities around the world where students and faculty invented it. This is where the rubber truly meets the road. iPods and AIDS drugs are built directly on the backs of graduate students and faculty at universities.

I point this out because there are major economic and public safety reasons why it is in our best interest to create an academic environment which promotes research. The US government has been very good about funding science but that support is faltering. I fear we will make the mistake of micromanaging research funding, where bureaucrats are overly concerned with the practicality of research. Researching the atom did not seem practical 100 years ago. It turns out to be pretty practical. We need to fund the higher education system, fund scientific research and allow these students and professors to literally invent our future.

(We also need young people to choose to be one of them, too!)

A quick roll-call: Iraq is a mess. The debt and the deficit are at an all-time high. Oil prices are at an all-time high. People with health insurance are at an all-time low. The rich are much richer and the poor far worse off. Science is under attack in our schools by people who think that divine intervention is a more appropriate explanation than the results of rigorous scientific research. Many states have modified their constitutions to encode prejudice against same-sex couples. The globe is heating up, perhaps to an uncorrectable degree and the bulldozers are heading up to pave the last great wilderness in America so you can save $0.10/gallon when you fill your SUV.

The bottom line here, folks, is that if the Right is correct and the Left is wrong, it should be obvious by now. They’ve had all the power, they had their way on everything — where is the success? Where are the crowds of cheering people?

There are none. Even their own base is trying to keep down a gag reflex. The Republican agenda is not, apparently, about good policy, it’s about politics and power. What they do with the power is further a dogmatic agenda of class warfare and religious intolerance. Face it folks, they suck at this.

Over the next 3 years we need to show them the door and try to elect leaders who are results oriented instead of moronic ideologues. We can do better. We must do better. We will do better.

Her latest missive, Once same-sex marriage is OK, polygamy’s next, is yet another example. There are many problems with her logic here. First of all, anti-gay people like her know that no law can be passed that will strengthen (or weaken) their marriage. They claim that anything but “one man one woman” hurts marriage but they can never say exactly how. Take, for example, her closing paragraph:

What’s the likely endpoint? Marriage may be redefined out of existence, and replaced by a flexible, contract-based system of government-registered relationships. So get ready. Today gay marriage supporters’ mantra is, “How does my same-sex marriage harm your marriage?” Down the road it may be, “How does my marriage of two men and a woman harm your marriage?” If we don’t answer the first question with resolve — making clear that “one man-one woman” is at the heart of marriage in Minnesota — we may not have a chance to answer the second.

What is clear is that Kersten has no idea how same-sex marriage harms marriages. She just knows she doesn’t like it. This is true of most anti-gay folks. They just don’t like it and their solution is government prejudice. Do the fucking math, folks, you are wrong on this one.

Now on to polygamy. First of all, polygamy as it is practiced is not a victimless crime. Particularly in the case of Mormons, women are brainwashed into utter subservience and polygamy is a tactic in the systematic abuse of women by people who think the Bible says that women are second class citizens. Our government has a responsibility to protect women against this abuse. By contrast, the government has no duty to protect one person from being in a committed and long-term relationship with another person of the same sex. Polygamy is not a victimless crime, same-sex marriage has no victims.

Now throwing away the evil Bible-thumping bastards who want to enslave women, is there a reason why the state can’t sanction polygamy? I think there are quite a few reasons why it would never make sense. First of all, contracts between 3 parties are much more complicated than between 2. What responsibilities does husband #1 have to husband #2? What about paternity? Are their parental rights for the “partner” which is not directly a parent? How is property and child custody handled in divorce? The complications go on and on. Unlike Kersten, I don’t have some Biblical rational for attacking polygamy. Unlike Right Wingers, I don’t think the government should invade my home and my privacy because the neighbor down the street disagrees with my lifestyle. I think government should have little oversight over my personal relationships.

Polygamy, though, is an unpopular practice embraced almost solely by religious fanatics and using it to attack the civil rights of homosexuals is a red herring and a symptom of the weak constitutional argument against gay marriage.

That’s why I am proud that George Clooney, unlike so many Hollywood cowards, has come out. In his article I Am a Liberal. There, I Said It! Clooney states the obvious that has somehow remained hidden in the last 6 years of the Republican police state. Dissent is patriotic. The Right Wing should be ashamed of themselves for constantly characterizing liberals as traitors. How is it that a party that claims they want less government can actively lobby against civil liberties? They actively lobby to put the police in your bedroom?

Republicans are just liberals who haven’t seen the light yet.

Can you guess my opinion on this one? I think this is so fucking lame. I have the perfect solution for this. If you are a pharmacist and you don’t want to dispense the prescriptions that doctors issue quit your fucking job! You are not qualified! Your job is not to impose your morals on your customers, it is to dispense the medication that a medical doctor has prescribed, period. If you don’t like it, do us all a favor and go join the clergy somewhere.

Allowing pharmacists to decide which drugs they feel morally willing to dispense is super fucking stupid and is just one more lame tactic in the war against women.

Mark is arguing that even if you want abortion to be legal, implementing it by attacking the right to privacy hurts you. It hurts all of us and it hurts the Right by breaking one of their prime ideals — no more government than necessary. Mind you: I’m not talking about abortion. I’m talking about the other rights, as Mark outlines, that we lose in the deal. The right to privacy is fundamentally a limit on what government can impose on us. It’s a good thing and Republicans want it to. They are just so fixated on abortion that they are willing to give up anything to get it criminalized.

Listen up, you pro-Lifers, let’s keep fighting but you have to find a better tactic than attacking the right to privacy. You want privacy, too. It’s the wrong place to fight abortion.

—

Is there a right to privacy guaranteed by our constitution? This is a question that has come up again lately, largely due to President Bush’s Supreme Court nominations and the recent South Dakota law effectively banning abortion in that state. The reason the answer to this question is important is because the right to privacy forms the basis for the Court’s decision in Roe and the cases preceding that decision.

In Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court expanded on a string of prior decisions which found a right to privacy emanating from the protections afforded by the 4th and 5th amendments. The right of a woman to have an abortion stems from the privacy right to do as she wishes with her body. By the way, abortion is not the only privacy right the Court has found to be protected by the “Constitutionally implied right to privacy”. The right to make choices regarding contraception is based on the right to privacy as is the right of consenting adults to marry outside of their own race and the right of married persons to make love in the way they see fit.

The anti-abortion folks often take the position that the Roe vs Wade decision is fundamentally flawed because there is no right to privacy specifically enumerated in the constitution. They are right. The right to privacy has been implied by the Court in light of other enumerated rights and protections. The Supreme Court has taken the position that to hold that a right to privacy is not constitutionally protected would be inconsistent with the rights and protections that are specifically guaranteed in the 4th and 5th amendments. (self incrimination and unreasonable search and seizure)

Now, I can understand that abortion is a very contentious and emotional issue to many people. That said, I think that undermining the right to privacy established by existing legal precedent as a means of outlawing abortion is misguided. I have to assume that people who advocate for that position have not fully considered the implications. I seriously doubt that any rational person wants the state or federal government to have the right to make laws dictating what they can or can’t do in their bedroom. For those of you that still hold to the argument that the constitution should be interpreted literally, following is a partial list of other rights not mentioned in the constitution but still guaranteed by our courts:

1. The right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty
2. The right to vote
3. The right to travel
4. The right to a jury “of your peers”
5. The right to get married
6. The right to have children
7. The separation of church and state

If we follow the logic of the anti-abortion crew, these rights have also been “invented” by the “activist judiciary” and should not be constitutionally protected. I think anyone who believes this approach is acceptable is simply not looking at the whole picture. Think about it. Do you want to give the government more control over individual behavior or less? Personally, and with very few exceptions, I will argue for less control every time. The point I’m trying to make is that just because a right is not specifically mentioned in the constitution does not mean it should not be protected by the constitution.

Contrary to the assertions of many religious political conservatives of this country, judicial interpretation of the constitution is not a bad thing for the Supreme Court to engage in, in fact, it’s their job. To the extent that the Court interprets the constitution to provide us with more freedom and protection from governmental intervention in our private lives, such interpretations should be applauded.

For those individuals who sincerely feel that abortion is wrong, I whole-heartedly support your right to protest and air your views publicly in an effort to garner support for your position. However, I don’t support your efforts to attain your goal by advocating for a constitutional interpretation which will likely have the effect of limiting privacy rights far beyond the scope of abortion. I am not asking that you change your moral position on abortion. I am simply asking that you re-examine the implications of the means by which you are attempting to achieve your goal.

To sum up….the right to privacy is not specifically guaranteed to us in the constitution. Neither are a number of other rights. The protection of these rights stems from either a long history of judge-made common law or from judicial interpretation of the constitution. This is not a bad thing. People who are trying to ban abortion by curtailing the right to privacy are hurting everyone, including themselves. Try to keep in mind that the constitution is not so much about what we can do as individuals as it is about what our government can do to us. The more power we give the government to legislate our behavior, the less freedom we have. A constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy provides us all with protection against unjustified and unwanted governmental intervention in our personal lives. Just think about it.

Now if someone blogs about how their boss is stupid and the company they work for sucks and such, they need to know that what they are saying will be heard as if said, in person, to the boss. Word gets around, people Google and poof, a little rant on your blog is being discussed by the boss. So that’s just stupid.

But other examples are not. Being gay, for example, or an atheist or even, perhaps, a born again Christian. Being interested in Harleys or stamps or group sex should not be things, even if discoverable on the Internet, that influence your employment.

Yes, there are grey lines here. If an employee agrees to some code of conduct prior to accepting a job, an employer can reasonably expect them to uphold it. In most cases, there is no such pre-agreement.

As someone who is very opinionated, I expect some potential clients for my company may Google me and disagree with me when they find this site. That’s fine. If they choose not to work with us because of my views, they are idiots. I can easily separate my work from my life and I would never not work with a company because I disagreed with an individual’s politics or views.

I hope you agree.

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.

This hits the nail on the head in regards to how wrong the Right can be. They see the inconveniences of “too much liberty” and they seek to minimize them by taking away our liberties. There are many examples but to use a dumb one: flag burning. I’d rather live in a society where freedom of expression includes rather idiotic acts such as burning a flag than live in a society with less liberty where you can be arrested and jailed for such behavior. The inconvenience of watching someone disrespect our national flag is, to me, more tolerable than the inconvenience of jailing people for expressing ideas, even unpopular or idiotic ones.

To me, this is self-evident.

The same is true for this torture debate. I’ve heard that Bush may veto the McCain bill which would ban torture as a tactic of our government or armed forces

I can handle the inconveniences of living in a world where bad people do bad things. I can’t handle living in a world where supposedly good people do bad things. That we hold ourselves to a higher standard than the bad guys is something we should be proud of, even though it does create inconveniences. We shouldn’t even be debating torture — it should be so fucking obvious that we could never condone such tactics.

Let me point out, too, whenever our service men and women are captured by the enemy we go on and on about how they better not be tortured and the Geneva convention should be applied, etc. I agree with this. Why on earth do we think this shouldn’t be the case when we capture foreign nationals? Double-standards don’t work.

The Republican party is in many ways the party of anti-liberty, as evidenced by their hatred of the ACLU, an organization whose sole mission is to protect our liberties.

Jefferson was right, the Right is wrong (again).

My comment is:

It still just stuns me that you are willing to call ALL MUSLIMS the enemy. That is factually incorrect. There are Muslims in our armed forces helping fight this war that you believe is going so very well. As I mentioned before, are we at war with Protestants because of Timothy McVeigh? It is the actions of terrorists that make them terrorists, not their religious beliefs. Agreed?

It is an unwinnable war, of course, if our enemy is all Muslims. It’s an unwinnable war even now, where the net number of “terrorists” is increasing every day. The real solution is a bitter pill for the Right: a foreign policy in the Mid East that is fair and rational.

Look — I have no sympathy for actual terrorists. The problem is, we are starting to define “terrorist” as those that oppose the US. That is not a valid definition. I oppose the US viewpoint on many issues. I am not a terrorist. We are allowing the right to define the enemy as anyone who opposes us and that is a foreign policy that is guaranteed to fail.

“These are perilous times for people of faith,” she said, “not in the sense that we are going to lose our lives, but in the sense that it will cost you something if you are a person of faith who stands up for what you believe in and say those things out loud.”

Ms. Brown is confused. Religious people can and do say whatever the fuck they want whenever and wherever they want. I will fight and die for their right to do so. The real war here is people like Ms. Brown who think that people who insist on the separation of church and state are a threat to religious people. We are not. In fact, secularists are a group made up largely of religious people!

Secularists have no problem with people of faith. The people we have a problem with are those that would inject their faith into our government. Judge Brown clearly confuses her personal faith with her duties as a judge and for that, the Democrats are completely correct to oppose her nomination to the federal judiciary.

Santorum is clearly, obviously and blatantly siding with a small special interest group rather than with the people that elected him. I wish the people of Pennsylvania would fire that dumb fuck.

The people most “hurt” by the estate tax are the ultra wealthy, i.e. those people with generational wealth who inherited their fortune and want every child and grandchild and descendent to be wealthy until the end of time. First of all, I personally think generational wealth is bad for America. The rich love to talk about a meritocracy. If they truly believe that they should be for an ungodly high estate tax rate, because people that inherit money did not earn it. There is no “merit” there. Second, if you inherit millions or billions of dollars, it is a no brainer that you can make it into even more millions and billions. In terms of equal opportunity in this country, no question people that inherit ungodly fortunes have a huge advantage.

Make no question about it — the estate tax still leaves plenty of room for rich cry babies to remain rich cry babies. If you are worth a shit load of money when you die, your children will still have a shit load of money. What we are saying with the estate tax is that your wealth was not created in a vacuum and you have a responsibility to share some portion of your wealth with the country that made it possible after you are dead and don’t need it anymore.

As a side note, people that leave huge fortunes to their children are idiots anyway. I can’t think of a more efficient way to turn people into white trash than give them millions of dollars for no reason. As Warren Buffet says, you should leave your kids enough money that they feel they can do anything but not so much they can do nothing.

The estate tax is fair, it effects very few people, it helps support the very society that makes extreme wealth possible, it is consistent with a philosophy of a meritocracy, it can be tweaked to protect farmers and small business owners, and we absolutely need it.

Why the hell are Republicans so stupid that even in times of war and soaring debt they still want to eliminate taxes? These people are fiscally irresponsible.

In regards to the filibuster, don’t you think it a rather odd double-standard to accuse the Democrats of being uncooperative with regards to judicial nominees when the Republicans used the very same tactics against the Clinton administration? I believe it will damage the credibility of the Congress if you rubber stamp Bush nominees. I also believe that any weakening of the filibuster is a direct attack on the history and integrity of the Congress. I’d also remind you that this sword cuts both ways.

Please do not support weakening of the filibuster. It is un-American.

Michael Koppelman

To say the earth is 6000 years old is completely nuts and ignornant and stupid and crazy and idiotic. There are about a dozen entire branches of science that a 6000 year old earth is at odds with. These include geology, biology, astrophysics and archeology.

The thing that PZ sums up really well is the following:

You know, creationists who have almost no education in the relevant fields…are perfectly comfortable with accusing virtually every biologist in the world of being incompetent, of knowing nothing, of fraud, of practicing a religion rather than science, etc., etc., etc. It’s kind of appalling, actually; most of us would be embarrassed if we were caught lecturing crazily on some subject of which we know nothing by someone who had dedicated years of their life to studying that subject. But not creationists.

To all the creationists I would say, go get a PhD in evolutionary biology and then tell us about your crazy theory. For those that think the earth is 6000 years old, go get a PhD in geology and then tell us about your crazy theory. If you are not an expert on these subjects you have no business coming up with crazy theories.

As an astronomer of sorts, I can tell you that we would not see all the things we see in the sky if the universe was 6000 years old. Certainly we wouldn’t see the Andromeda Galaxy, which is no less than 2,000,000 light-years away, not to mention the kazillion of galaxies we see in the Hubble Deep Field.

The Bible is not a science book. That should be obvious to everyone.

If my quality of life has disappeared to nothing and I’m unresponsive and in a vegetative state, I would be appalled if the religious right kept me alive because of their beliefs. They would let me continue to suffer for years because of what they want? FUCK THEM. I don’t give a rats ass what mother fucking Tom Delay wants when it comes to my goddamn life.

Clearly, we want close controls over these issues. We aren’t going to let people kill people just because they are disabled. This case has had many such controls. It has been scrutinized profusely. This is not a case of some cruel husband that wants to kill his wife.

That the House, Senate and our dumb-ass President think that their beliefs should keep this poor woman in a suffering state perpetually is insane and cruel. I believe her husband and thus I believe that her wishes are not being taken into account and that is criminal.

If your senator voted Nay on this vote you should call him up and ream his ass and then make damn sure he/she never wins an election again.

This is a disgrace.

I must tip my hat to Norm Coleman R-Minnesota for doing the right thing on this vote. If the Yea’s had one more vote I’m sure the GOP wouldn’t have lent him his balls back for this one…

Tom and I agree on a great deal of things. (I’m sure we disagree on some as well). What surprised me most was a recent conservation with Tom about homosexuality. There is a well known Bible quote that the Right-Wingers use to prove that God hates fags. I mentioned this to Tom and he said a lot of wise things. First, he said, you can’t take the Bible out of context. Everything you read in the Bible was written from a certain perspective and in a certain context. The example he used was divorice. Jesus said you shouldn’t divorice your woman. Tom pointed out that in those times a divoriced woman had virtually no rights and lived on the streets in poverty. Jesus was protecting women from this when he said that about divorice. This is the Jesus I wish Christians focused on — the one who always put love and compassion before anything else.

Tom also pointed out that homosexuality was in ways a practice abusive of young boys in the days of the Bible. Again, the point of the verse was to protect people from abuse. It was about compassion, not about condemning people.

I wish I knew the word that Tom used but his point was that you cannot pull a snippet out of the Bible and use it as proof of a particular point of view. It must be taken with the totality of the faith. This from a guy that probably knows as much about the Bible as any person on earth.

I am waiting for the true Christians of the world to take the faith back from the Religious Right. These so-called Christians who think Jesus would be for the death penalty and the war in Iraq do not deserve to call themselves Christians. Jesus spoke and lived a life about love and compassion. I don’t believe in Hell but if I did I would bet that these evil bastards who hate and kill in Jesus’s name have an especially uncomfortable place waiting for them.

One small stipulation

Richard Luka, Maple Grove.

Right on, Richard!

“Do you believe that it is an idea better off ignored, or is it too dangerous of an idea to leave untouched? I can’t help but think that we are feeding into the movement by validating their right to a position in the evolution debate.”

If this were a philosophical debate, I would agree. Just like we don’t argue with white supremacists, we needn’t argue with people that think science should look to the Bible for answers to the questions of biology or cosmology. In a philosophic debate we could easily just write them off as people so clueless as to be ignored.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a philosophical debate, it’s a debate over curricula — what we teach in schools. When the ID folks manipulate their agenda to more closely masquerade as science, we need to take the offensive lest people confuse their philosophy with actual science. We need to soundly crush the notion that you can introduce supernatural beings into science and still call it science.

As an ex-Catholic, it would be like me going into church every day and publicly arguing with the priest that he did not, in fact, turn that piece of bread into the body of Christ. Science has no business introducing itself into the mystical faith of Catholics. Nor do Christians have any right to introduce their faith into science textbooks.

To conclude, I don’t have any problem with people believing in creation as an explanation for matters biological or cosmological. I have a serious problem when they try to introduce it into science curricula.

Right-wingers bitching about the ACLU is nothing new but I am still stumped by it. The ACLU’s mission, according to their web site, is as follows:

The ACLU is our nation’s guardian of liberty. We work daily in courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States. Our job is to conserve America’s original civic values – the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Raise your hand if you are against that mission. Raise your hand if you are annoyed that people are out there defending the civil liberties of the American people.

What. The. Fuck.

We’ve all heard of the ACLU defending some stuff that stretches our sensibilities, let’s say. They are pretty ballsey in that they do not avoid issues that will be unpopular. Al Franken, on his show, mentioned that the ACLU sued on behalf of some neo-Nazis that wanted to have a parade or something. It sounds nuts until you think about it: do you want the government to decide which points of view are allowed parades and which points of view are not? We, the American people, decided on this funny thing called the First Amendment that protects our right to express even the most looney and wildly unpopular ideas. This is the same amendment that lets Bill O’Reilly say all the stupid and often untrue shit he says. It’s the same ones that lets Christians preach everyday on the campus where I take classes.

When Bill O’Reilly says insanely stupid shit like I quote above he is saying that the government should not grant rights to people he disagrees with. Bill O’Reilly is against liberty! How else can you interpret that statement?

I really encourage you to read about the ACLU’s mission. It is a necessary and honorable one.

The right is wrong, as usual.

So, shockingly, let me agree with the ID folks on this one thing: I agree that science should not exclude design as a possible explanation.

If I could, though, I want their agreement on something in return: design should be the very last thing that science ever considers. As soon as science turns to design as an explanation it is basically saying that you can’t explain the phenomena naturally. This in turn implies that the “designer” who is normally called God in every other context, broke the laws of physics at various points in the evolution of the earth and its creatures.

I can illustrate why it is imperative that design is the very last explanation that should ever be relied on from an example from a talk I was at recently by Eugenie C. Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education, entitled “Intelligent Design and the Creation/Evolution Controversy”.

There are things called faerie rings which are perfectly circular mushroom patches that appear overnight. You’ll go out in the forest one day and where there was nothing the day before is a perfect circular ring of mushrooms. These are called faerie rings because in the olden days people thought that the faeries had a party there the night before and created and danced around in this ring.

When the speaker showed a picture of a faerie ring the very first thing that popped into my head was design: this did not look like something created naturally. My suspicion was that someone had planted whatever you plant to create mushrooms years or aeons ago and occasionally they spring up overnight, which mushrooms can easily do.

The truth is much more simple. The particular kind of fungus grows underground concentrically, like the roots of a tree. The circular pattern seems immediately very natural when you thing about it this way. The fungus grows out from the center and when conditions are right all of the “roots” of equal age (i.e. equal distance from the center) bloom at once.

If one were to focus on the explanation which involves design (this had to be people who created this) you would completely miss the more simple and natural explanation. The science stops the second you invoke design and instead of looking for a natural explanation the quest turns to a search for the designer.

Thus, if we are to practice good science, we can never invoke design as an explanation unless there is overwhelming proof of such design. I suspect that such proof can never exist because even if we watched some unexplainable magic happen right before our eyes, scientists would still seek a natural explanation. This is because that is what science is — natural explanations of natural phenomena.

Look — there might be a God and he might do magical stuff every now and then. I don’t exclude that possibility. From the vast, deep, broad and thorough body of science we have, there is no proof of this. This does not in any way mean that science says there is no God, it means that God, if he exists, works through science and not outside of science.

This is the inexplicable core of ID that we science types just don’t get. The ID and creationist folks want to live in a world where you can prove the existence of God. They want science to go: wow, look, this must mean there is a God. Science ain’t ever gonna do that. Science says: wow, look, something we don’t understand, let’s try understand it. Scientists would love to get their hands on the water Jesus walked on, do tests on Lazerus or get Jesus to turn water into wine in the laboratory. There would be some fascinating science there. That’s our job — look for the science and exclude the magical.

So as the ID folks desperately try to craft their agenda as science it just can’t be. As soon as you introduce the supernatural, by definition, it ain’t science anymore. If God exists and there is scientific proof that God exists, science will look for the science behind God. They will never just say: oh well, looks like God did it. I don’t get why the ID folks want them to say that.

Yet I do have a serious problem with the war that (many) rich people wage against taxes. I can see how if you make a lot of money and you pay a lot of money in taxes and you look around and see a lot of people paying far less taxes that you wonder if that is fair. I have paid a lot of taxes in my day, too, and it sucks.

Or it would if I didn’t believe we live in a great country that has a great government that does a lot of great things. (Note I am saying this proudly even though I think the current administration is appallingly lame.) I love my country. I am a patriot, a capitalist and a small “D” democrat. All of this, to me, means that I should see the money I pay in taxes as a good and necessary thing.

I believe we have a struggle in this country between the haves and the have-nots. The haves want a small government because they know that they have to pay for it. Yet they want a large military because they have the most to protect. The have-nots want a big government so that concentrated wealth does not concentrate into a plutocracy. The haves see anything remotely socialist as a threat to their wealth and the have-nots see laissez-faire capitalism as a road that ultimately leads to plutocracy.

This is a struggle that really always has been and always will be. The fundamental test of fairness is when you walk a mile in the other guy’s shoes. If we all can do this we can find the right balance between these two seemingly opposing ideologies. Rich people should not want a plutocracy. Not-rich people should not want a government to strip wealth from individuals. There is a proper balance but we don’t get there by tending towards the extremes. We get there with a willingness to compromise.

We all do better when we all do better.
  –Paul Wellstone

(A tip o’ the hat to Ben for the “grain of sand”…)

In other words, the top 10 percent of tax filers were responsible for two of every three dollars paid in income taxes in 1999, while the bottom half of all those who file tax returns paid essentially no income taxes.

Many Americans would see the present system of federal income taxes to be unfair if they knew the facts. These facts, however, are almost never reported in the mainstream media. The so-called progressivity of the federal income tax system is both fundamentally unfair and inconsistent with the principle of equal rights that underlies the Constitution.

I.E. more rich people complaining about the fact that it is not effective to tax poor people, as I write in my essay Progressive Taxation, from which I quote:

Bottom line: we should tax progressively because it is fair. It puts most of the cost on those who have benefited most and who will be impacted by it least. It is a tactic to fuel economic growth by turning people who are tax burdens into people who are tax payers. Any strategy which puts more of the tax burden on the poor ultimately hurts the rich, too, because we hobble our biggest potential of economic growth.

I agree with their facts — the rich pay more of the taxes than the not-rich. I personally don’t think this is at all unfair. But even if you agree with them that it is unfair, what is the solution? They do not prescribe a solution, but the math is pretty straightforward — to make the system “fair” you’d have to significantly raise taxes on everyone but the rich. The alternative is, of course, slashing spending to the point that we have a burnt out shell of a government.

Why are people who have better lifestyles than 99.999% of the people that have ever lived always bitching about paying taxes? They should be proud of their additional contribution and instead they bitch. Shut up you rich bastards. There is nothing wrong here.

So, on to some good things then.

1. Single Malt Scotch. I am an Islay guy. I like the really smokey scotches. My favorites are Lagavulin and Ardbeg. I also like Bowmore and Laphroaig. It’s a bit of an acquired taste, but once so acquired, the shit rocks.

2. I am a bit of a gamer. Currently I’m playing World of Warcraft. I also have Far Cry and Half-Life 2 going right now. It’s kind of funny that a guy who is a father and studies astrophysics plays video games, but I do and I like it. It’s what I do when my wife zones out in front of the TV.

I’ll just mention those two for now since I should probably pepper something positive in here every now and then lest you all think I am an ever cursing ogre.

Smiles, people, smiles!

You know what, Mom and Dad? Your kid may grow up someday and have different values than you. That’s called good parenting. Brain washing your children to believe exactly what you believe is bad parenting. Admire your kids for thinking on their own and be proud of them for their willingness to disagree with you. You have succeeded.

(Addendum — Oh no! It looks like this is closer to home than I thought! Check out this at Pharyngula.)

This is not a statement about conservatives or Christians, it’s a statement about people who are so close minded that they can’t even leave open the possibility of loving someone with a different political ideology. We are lame and getting lamer and apparently we are proud of it.

I’ll say it again, a Liberals-only singles site would be just as lame. A pagan-only web hosting provider would be lame. It is disrespectful, discriminatory and, I’ll say it again, lame.

There is not a big enough shitter in the world for me to barf into.

Fewer than one-third of conceptions culminate in live births. The rest end prematurely, either in early gestation or by miscarriage. Nature appears to be an avid abortionist, which ought to trouble Christians who believe in both original sin and the doctrine that a human being equipped with a soul comes into existence at conception. Souls bearing the stain of original sin, we are told, do not merit salvation. That is why, according to traditional theology, unbaptized babies have to languish in limbo for all eternity. Owing to faulty reproductive design, it would seem that the population of limbo must be at least twice that of heaven and hell combined.

As I’ve written about rather often, intelligent design isn’t science by a long shot. Scientists don’t usually have theories that include supernatural all-powerful beings. I have nothing against supernatural all-powerful beings. They are pretty cool. It falls outside of what we call science.

This new law that Bush just signed may not be the worst thing in the world. We want smart courts and it is possible that there are loopholes that don’t make sense. I don’t know that class action law suits are one of them, but I concede it is possible. There are lawyers whose best interest involves enticing people to join class actions. To me this is similar to something like the ACLU — a necessary but sometimes annoying check and balance.

What is worrisome to me about this new law that Bush signed is it is clearly the tip of the iceberg in terms of the intentions of this president and congress. The right wingers want to erode your ability to seek remedy in the courts. That is a bad thing. It is clearly the big money special interests that are pulling the strings here. There is no benefit to your average everyday American and yet they are silent. Big corporations just got it a little easier at your expense. This particular one just moves things from state to federal court — the cases with undeniable merit will still be heard. But this is the first of what looks to be a series of maneuvers to erode your access to remedy via the courts and that is not in your best interest. Even if you work for or own a big corporation, it is not in your interest. These cases aren’t all greedy lawyers and it is irresponsible to create legislation as if they are.

While being lied to and spun until we barf is nothing new for this administration, I can’t believe that fucking idiots like Tim Graham can possible think that we will believe his bullshit.

In pondering this one thing that came to mind is: intelligent people get more information out of less data. They realize the implications of things and can “read between the lines”. Another way to think of this is that they “get it”. This implies there is a certain aspect of awareness to this sort of intelligence. Intelligent people are ultra-aware. In fact, when people are unaware it generally makes me think they are unintelligent. Even simple examples — when someone is standing talking in a hallway in a place where they are an obstacle and people are having to jostle around them. Or when people are talking on the phone and are walking or driving inattentively. I always think “wake up, stupid!”. You can’t be intelligent if you are unaware.

So what impresses me about intelligent people is they are very aware of what is going on, they are getting as much information as is possible out of the amount of data they have, and they put it all together quickly and in a way that emphasizes what is important. Some people are smart but they get caught up in the unimportant details of things.

As someone who is a great admirer of intelligence, the thing that scares me most is a culture that does not embrace it. Like, in school when being considered “a brain” was a bad thing. Or people who scoff at intellectuals. Or the “tall poppy” syndrome where being smart makes you get cut down. I hate the very thought of these things. I’m not some elitist who thinks that smart people are somehow “better” than less smart people. I am an elitist, though, who thinks that people who do not strive to be as smart and as educated as possible are missing out. I can’t think of anything dumber than embracing dumbness.

Human beings are marvelous creatures and 99.99% of what makes us different from the other animals on this planet are our brains. You are reading these words over a global public network using technology created by people who were smart and put that intelligence to use. We are surrounded by the fruits of the labor of centuries of smart people. Be one of them. Use your head. Think. It’s why you are here.

Atheism and children By Natalie Angier.

Of particular interest is the distinction she makes between being an atheist and an agnostic. She says something to the effect that given the Gods that current relgions let us choose from, she is undoubtedly an atheist. Yet she doesn’t shy from the possibility that there may be a lot we don’t know or can’t know about the true nature of the universe. I think that is a pretty fair way to put it.

As a father, I’ve wondered how to raise my child(ren) in light of my non-religious nature. People always say things like “You need to give them a foundation in faith from which they can explore, etc.” I wonder if it is not better to give a child a foundation of rationality with a wide open sense of what may be possible. I think regligious dogma is not a particularly great foundation for children to start from. The purpose of life, in my opinion, is to forever search to answer these questions. Once you think you know the answer you stop looking and that is a sort of death.

I’m not scared of the word atheist but I still don’t think it adequately says what I am. I don’t want to put limits on what may be possible. I am leaving myself open to anything. It’s just that the mythological religions of this world are, to me, among the least probable explanations.

First a little background on the problem: if we did nothing to SS in 40 years or so we would need to cut benefits by 30% or so. That is the worst case scenario right now if we do nothing. So when Bush says it will be “broke” in 40 years what he means is that the existing payroll taxes 40 years from now will only pay for 70% of the current benefits. That ain’t bankrupt, folks. Raise your hand if you’d rather get $0.70 than $0.00.

A very important point about SS is that it is not a charity program. Everyone gets it regardless of need and that is a Good Thing. This means the Right can’t prattle on about how it is wealth distribution. It is not. In fact, rich people pay a much smaller percent of their income into SS than non-rich people because you only pay in on something like the first $80k you make. So if you make $250k/yr you are paying very, very little into SS. So please, Rush, don’t give us this shit about this is some wealth redistribution scheme ’cause it ain’t.

In terms of the privatization scheme, there are a few problems with it. It’s not that it is an entirely insane idea, but there are problems. Problem one is, it is much more expensive. Administration of the SS system is very cheap compared to the average cost of managing, for example, a mutual fund or a stock portfolio. That’s because Wall Street manages the latter and everyone knows that the 11th Commandment is that Wall Street people must be rich. Financial managers are in the business of their own enrichment. Your average government worker is not.

Second, the financial markets are risky. Yes, you can get a higher return but it is at the cost of higher risk. When the dot com bubble burst some of my mutual funds went back to balances I had 10 years earlier. I lost 10 years of growth in some of these funds. What do we do with retirees whose nest egg evaporates a few months before they retire? Cat food? That defeats the whole point of SS. If we need a safety net to catch people who can’t live on their privatized SS income, we have gained nothing.

Privatization is a major change in philosophy. Instead of existing young workers helping to support the elders of our community, you have to save enough money to take care of yourself. While this doesn’t sound so bad the implication is clear: in the first case we take care of our old folks no matter what and in the latter case if they fail to take care of themselves, they eat cat food in their latter years.

I should probably write a separate post about it, but the problem with ideological initiatives is that they are not necessarily based on reality. Either privatization of SS will or will not improve our care of retirees. Whether it does or not is something that can be proven one way or the other. Ideologues base their solutions on a philosophy that is based on their abstract ideas of what is good and what is bad — it doesn’t take the proof into account. That is why the “cutting taxes solves all problems” philosophy of the Right is so annoying. This shit is measurable and whether you like it or not, the USA needs tax revenue. The no taxes ever approach is completely wrong but you’d never know it talking to one of these ideologues.

So, in summary, Bush is lying again. It’s not about avoiding an impending crisis it’s about eliminating an entitlement that has been very successful. I also think it is ideologically sound — I’ll take care of you when you are old and I am young and when I am old the young people will take care of me. Makes perfect sense to me.

Don’t be fooled, Bush is hurting America again.