Preview: Anomalous Data - Philosophical
Anomalous Data - PhilosophicalFolding, spindeling, and mutilating lauguage for fun since Aug, 2004Last Build Date: Thu, 30 Oct 2008 16:49:41 GMT Copyright: Teresa Lhotka
Finished The Big Sort Thu, 30 Oct 2008 16:49:41 GMT OK, I finished The Big Sort, and I have to say that while I agree with the observations of the author and his collegues, and I understand their point, I think that in the scope of their exploration they have missed an important factor. Far be it from me to nit-pick people much smarter than myself, but they have thoroughly explored the results of insulating yourself from the "sanity check"...you and your little group become progressivly more extreme. (Sanity check: compareing your perceptions of the world to those of others as a way to moderate your opinions). But they don't seem to address at all the power of the reality check. Granted, the reality check takes longer, because the conflict of an erroneous position with reality generally has to build up consequences to the point where you can no longer ignore them. However, we have been here before. There was a time when the world-view of most people was one completely inconsistant with reality...and eventually people began to depart from the demon-haunted view of the world, and turn toward a more reasoned approach. Some people require a much more strenuous thump-on-the-head than others...but eventually, most people come around. I'm not sure how much off the track our society has to become before we reach that tipping-point when we return to sense...but I'd like to think we are approaching it right now. I guess we'll find out soon. (image)
Housekeeping details Fri, 09 May 2008 13:26:33 GMT I'd like to call your attention to a few new blogs in the blogroll. I've added some religious blogs, as examples of who I am NOT talking about in my "wacky fundies" posts. Erudite Redneck - wacky (in a good way) not fundie. God & Life - Fundie - not wacky Monastic Mumbligs - Not fundie, not wacky (yet strangely, still interesting) The Watering Hole -also not fundie, and not wacky (image)
If you're not a Christian... Tue, 15 Apr 2008 19:49:46 GMT Or not a Real Christian (TM) with a brain all abuzz with "Sound Doctrine" (TM)... ...but you've always thought that Jesus fellow would be someone you could get behind and root for... (Hat Tip: The Yurica Report) (image)
Not Politically Correct Sat, 22 Dec 2007 04:46:47 GMT There's going to be a hue and cry about this, and you're probably all going to see it, so you might as well see it here:
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It's not going to quite make the "nameing a Teddy-Bear Mohammad" level of outcry...mobs will not be calling for blood because of it, at least not on anything more than a metaphorical level. On the other hand, you can bet that it WILL create outcry. I've heard Conservative Christians proudly proclaim that the Gospel is offensive. They declare it to be "not politically correct". They use this to justify their condemnation of others. But even more offensive is the idea that we are called by their gospel to be servants to one another, to minister to one another, and to forgive one another, and yes, to turn the other cheek. This picture of the concept of Christ as an emblem of humilty and healing in the face of great wrong will, of course, be deeply offensive...probably even mocked as the perversion "Gandhi Christ", and appelation I have heard on more than one occasion. And that offense will serve the very ordinary purpose of covering a very ordinary condition of being unable to transcend our humaness. No matter how many platitudes and pontifications are made about "foundations of morality" or having been "made a new creature"... You're still just a human being. But. You are a human being who can IMAGINE a condition where a man could bend down and act as a servant to his enemies, giving them comfort, healing their wounds, and dissapating their wrath. This picture is a challenge, and an offensive, uncomfortable one at that. By that measure, which of us can succeed? Fortunately, for the more non-dogmatic among us, falling short is not a death sentance. It is merely a continuation of the challenge, to cultivate a person who can approach this ideal. For those of us who HAVE no religion, it is not necessary to believe that Jesus was God, or even if he was a flesh-and-blood man. The mere fact that we can conceive of a person so humble, so inoffensive, and yet so noble that he can dispell the aggression and hate of his enemies is a challenge, for us to take up or ignore as we are so inspired. Must the same as our friends and neighbors who DO have religion. The good news is, that's you are SUPPOSED to be human. So get to work being the best one you can make of your self in the time you have. And stop counting on someone else to do it for you. (Double hat tip to: Monk-in-Training and Random Reflections) (image)
Namby-pamby liberal theology Fri, 21 Dec 2007 13:58:32 GMT Monk-in-Training has a take on the "Doubting Thomas" story that I have never heard before. It makes a lot more sense than anything I've ever heard on the subject before. That probably means it's horribly, horribly, wrong and will lead us all down the feel-good primrose path to hell. :-) I'd be really worried if I believed in hell. (image)
Guest blogger - Sue Sun, 29 Jul 2007 05:05:32 GMT I'm involved in a discussion group about a book called "Jim and Casper Go to Church" - written by Jim Henderson, a pastor/housepainter and Matt Casper, an atheist hired by Jim to accompany him to various Christian churches. Disclaimer: Our discussion group is not unbiased- it is held in a United Methodist church, and most attendees are members. However- it has proven so far (on week 4) to at least be a healthy discussion, and not a debate. I'm honestly not a real fan of debate- or the whole "I'm right, you're wrong, and I could prove it if only you weren't so narrow-minded." The opinions expressed in our class range from socially moderate to socially liberal, but don't cover extremes. As a rule, legalistic Christians view our church as anything from slightly misguided (not enough focus on sin) to blasphemous (preaching the untruth) and therefore steer clear. OTOH- I would say our church doesn't really appeal to the unchurched, atheists, or extremist liberals because it is difficult for some to believe the motto posted on our door "Open Hearts, Open Doors, and Open Minds", could apply to any Christian, no matter how well-meaning they may be. Jim the Christian, recruited Casper the Atheist from an Off the Map blog contest to find an atheist willing to attend churches and speak openly about his experiences (The site is: http://www.off-the-map.org/atheist/. Don't look for the same commitment to open-mindedness here-the threads too often are dominated by people with an agenda-though they are generally polite about it.) ANYHOO- these two guys, who become good friends, travel all over the country to visit many different types and sizes of churches, and this book documents the experience. In our group of about 20, questions based on the book are posed to us and we are invited to share our perspectives. Some of Casper's observations demand a response. In one example, at Willow Creek- a mega-church outside Chicago, Casper is astounded to hear the preacher thank people for their prayers to help him land an interview with Bono. Casper says, "People are being killed needlessly in every corner of the world, kids are starving, and people are praying for their pastor to meet a rock star? That's ludicrous." This does not resemble our church prayer experience- in fact Pastor Bill once got a complaint that his prayers for peace, and to help us to do as Jesus taught- to feed the poor, visit the sick and imprisoned, have compassion for the mentally ill, and to love our neighbors, etc. were too depressing. Yet I think it helps us to understand the perspective of non-Christians who think that at best we are largely failing in our call to help those in need, and at worst, whipping up a frenzy against "sinners" (which means everyone NOT like them), praying for personal wealth while we ignore the cries of the poor (clearly they are poor because they are "sinners") and praying for our pastors to win famous friends and influence people. When you look at sheer numbers, Willow Creek has 20,0000 attendees each week, so its influence can't be ignored. It is obvious that these megachurches are as good at marketing as the more legalistic churches are at lobbying for political influence (If that point isn't obvious, just search "those wacky fundies" on Teresa's blog, and grab a coffee- cuz' you'll be reading a while.) A large chunk of the questions from Casper in this book ask "If Jesus did X, why aren't you focused on X?", based on his experience visiting these churches. It is fair to say that this was his take-away more often than not. There were also a couple of times Casper felt genuinely moved (not moved in the God-sense, but in a way he describes as "the humans' need for expression taking over"), and a couple instances where he was blown away by the positive impact a church had individuals or their community- hard-core criminals who authentically turned their lives around, and one c[...]
People Change Sat, 21 Jul 2007 12:20:28 GMT Ben at Eclecticsanonymous has an entry up about Prussian Blue again. For me, the relevant quote in the video he referanced is: "People change". To me that is the most important thing in the whole clip. I have watched the twins casually since they first came to my attention on Jason Bock's blog a while ago. All along, I have told myself that kids grow up and that people change. Maybe these unfortunate girls will triumph over their upbringing and learn that you can love who you are. and that it isn't a choice between being proud to be white, or ashamed to be white..."white" is a description, and idea, a shorthand. It carries fragments of an identity, but only fragments. Just look at the white supremicists sometimes. Watch them talk to each other. They can't even decide definativly what "white" is. "Race" is a powerful part of a peson's identity...but try to define what it means...it's part of you, but what part? To what extent? What is there about your race that you can plant a flag in and say "This is what my race makes of me?" When you try to do that, you realize how slippery the idea really is, and how futile and unnatural it is to try to define everything you are and everything you think and feel and do by your race. Just as it is futile and unnatural to do so with anyone else. (image)
How hard-hearted do we have to be for something like this to happen? Thu, 19 Jul 2007 14:37:40 GMT An upsetting article about a woman who died in police custody.
I don't recall the exact quote, but I recall Paine writing about how brutality in punishment and treatment of prisoners leads to a general harness of heart and general brutality of spirit in a society, such that it cheapens life, humanity, and human dignity generally in society and lessens the ability of the people to excersise compassion. How do we think it will effect the other people held in that jail, that they watched one of their fellow prisoners die without care, comfort, or help? Will we be able to expect compassion and decency from them? Only if they themselves triumph over the experience. They certainly have nothing useful along that lines from this experience. When someone says something about Iraqi civillians unable to count on medical care, or hurt as "collateral damage" in the war, people shrug and say 3000 of our own people died on 9/11. We watched people who became representatives of a whole society murder our countrymen right before our eyes, and many of us reacted by having a brutal and callous attitude to an entire culture. Brutality and callousness beget brutality and callousness. If you watched someone die right before your eyes while representatives empowered by your society simply watched and did nothing, would you feel obligated to care about that society or any of its members? Would you feel motivated to re-join that society as a useful and productive member? Would you trust any social compact offered by that society? (image)
Let me explain this to you so you will understand. Fri, 13 Jul 2007 12:11:24 GMT
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Much is being made of this video. Some people think that it is a bunch of rude, obnoxious, theocratic extremeists trying to silence a religious blessing upon our government from a holy man from a significant minority group who contributes greatly to the richness of our society.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is that our Deist founders who didn't believe in organized religion, nevertheless decreed that the United States was a Christian nation. Sure, natural law was a good enough way for them to live THIER lives, but for the country, they thought that bronze age morality was the cure and they said no other religion could be practiced publicly. And don't quote me Jefferson's letter to the Baptist convention about the "Wall of Seperation" malarky. That was just a ruse to lull the non-Christians into a false sense of security. Anyway. What's going on here is that the Christians are exersising both their RIGHT to use their free speech to silence other religions, and their SACRED OBLIGATION to harass non-Christian in the country. And by non Christians, I mean non- Protestants.
Protestants are the REAL church...no matter what the Pope says.
I mean, who does this Hindu holy man think he is anyway? What makes him think that we WANT to ask to be guided by the supreme deity who created and runs the universe, and have our deliberations and decisions and actions subject to his laws? What makes him think that we have any obligation to remember that we are part of a country that is part of a planet, that is part of a universal system whose reality we are subject to, and whithin which we are called to function with the best possible expression of our nature?
Oh. Wait. I guess this must explain something that someone has called to my attention: Some Christians think that liberal Christians are actually Hindus. LOL. Maybe we should re-think the percentage of Hindues that make up the population. Maybe we need to add more Hindu chaplains. It seems almost futile for religion to call people to humility anymore. (double Hat Tip: Eclecticsanonymous) Also, Jason Bock has commentary on this. (image)
Quote of the day Sun, 11 Mar 2007 13:06:44 GMT "How barbarous, to deny men the privilage of pursuing what they imagine to be their proper concerns and interests! Yet, in a sense, this is what you are doing when you allow your indignation to rise at their wrongdoing; for after all, they are only following their own apparent concerns and interests. You say they are mistaken? Why then, tell them so, and explain it to them, instead of being indignant." --Marcus Aurelius Book VI note 27
I realized that I had been neglecting Marcus Aurelius, and it does show in my approach to life recently. Since I found this one instructive, I thought I'd share it. (image)
More Intelligent Design stuff. Mon, 26 Feb 2007 05:36:46 GMT So here is an entry by a doctor in Texas, who innocently posted some random musings about how he doubts Darwin, and next thing he knows, he’s in an argument with Ben and I about evolution and its place in science class. He makes appeals to the fact that he has a life outside of his blogging, so it is hard for him to keep up with the conversation. Fair enough. Everyone knows that all I do is sit on my ass an eat bon-bons, right? But anyway, on to the matter at hand. Read the whole thing, but what I am going to comment on is his final point: Debates go on within science class about various aspects of the natural world. Debates also occur in philosophy class about the nature of man, the nature of god, etc. But what happens when a student asks the same question in each class and is given a different answer? This is what the current Great Debate is about. When the science class and the philosophy class disagree, who decides which is right? It would be helpful if the two classes could talk to each other to see whether the differences can be reconciled. Personally, I feel this is what the Intelligent Design movement is attempting to do. But as long as we insist upon keeping the two disciplines separate, claiming that any mixing would contaminate the other, then we'll simply keep fighting until someone gives up or until one side conquers by force, never really knowing if we were right. I believe that Religion will often give different answers than science because science and Religion have different rules (the good doctor uses the word philosophy, but I think that is not the word to use.) Whatever Intelligent Design is attempting to do, there is little that it CAN do without breaking both the rules of science and the rules of Religion. Long-time readers will recall that I originally gave Intelligent Design a fair consideration, much as the good doctor is doing, not because I doubted that Evolution and Natural Selection could make the changes shown in the fossil record from a single ancestor, but because I am a Deist. So I liked the thought that maybe there were elements to design that could be discovered in our world and nature that could indicate a creator. But further reading was very disappointing. Instead of the idea that the world functioned according to consistent and functional rules, the purveyors of Intelligent Design go on and on about how the “randomness” of creation could not give rise to the kinds of changes seen in the fossil record. What had at first appeared to be an attempt to explore the Deistic rhetorical device of “creation implies a creator” or of God being the “first cause” that started the universe spinning and expanding, turned out to be a misappropriation used to force the God of Creation back into the Bible. The God of intelligent Design did not create a universe of perfection and majesty. The Creator described by Intelligent Design threw together a hodge-podge of wacky elements that don’t work without his constant interference and adjustment. While the Intelligent Design people may begin the discussion like Deists, they inevitably end it like Medieval Priests, skulking and bowing before a capricious God who doesn’t know what he wants, muddling about in creation continuously, throwing in an eye here, and foot there and giving appendixes and taking them away at a whim without rhyme or reason. Like the God of the Bible that started out ordering genocides and eradicating the whole world in a flood (only to show regret later), but then changed in the New Testament to a God that wanted us to love our enemies and turn the other cheek; the God of Intelligent design gets his hands in and mucks about cha[...]
Observation Tue, 30 Jan 2007 17:00:25 GMT There is a traffic circle in front of Grasshopper's school. The purpose is for dropping off kids without having to park. You just drive up and stop in front of the school. Your kid gets out, you complete the circle, and leave in an orderly fashion. There are two lanes. The one on the outside is for parking, the one on the inside is for you to pull into when you want to drive out of the circle. Simple. Efficient... And a complete clusterfuck. For the several years that I've had kids in that school there's always been THOSE PEOPLE. The ones who drive past the parking lot, where they are supposed to park, pull up into the traffic circle; and park. They get out, walk their kid into the school, visit with the teacher, run into someone they know and discuss the weather, use the bathroom…whatever…and leave their damned vehicle parked in the middle of the drop-off zone. All this to avoid walking a few extra feet. They turn what should be a really sweet, efficient system into a rat's nest, as people try to drive around the parked vehicle, and nearly crash into people in the driving lane, and EVERYONE ends up in grid-lock. Worse, the chaos spreads out into the public streets, as traffic backs up and people can't even get near the school and decide not to wait. Impatient moms and dads in a rush to drop their kids and get off to work unload their children onto the sidewalk. Those kids then have to use the crossing guards to get across the intersection. The crossing guards then have to stop traffic in the streets leading to the school to get the kids across – causing traffic to back up to the intersections a block away from the school. This affects people who don't even have kids, as impatient people who have waited in line to just get to the intersection decide they won't wait their proper turn at the four-way stop, causing more grid-lock. Recently, the school posted two guys out on the traffic circle to make these assholes get back in their cars and keep driving. For about three weeks straight, they enforced proper traffic circle etiquette. Traffic not only cleared up and got more efficient, it got more polite. People at the intersection of the street and the school's traffic circle began to realize that they had to let people OUT of the traffic circle onto the street in order for there to be room for them to pull in…so they stopped pulling into the intersection (effectively blocking the path of people leaving and causing gridlock). The effect is noticeable for at least three blocks around the school during rush hour. There has been no need for any enforcement now for a month. My observation is: Enlightened Self Interest works, as long as there aren't too many selfish jerks who gum up the system. When people realize that what is good for other people is also good for them, they do what is good for everyone willingly and cheerfully. When they see that other people get to break the rules, while they themselves are expected to follow them, they stop playing, and everyone suffers. So the school did the right thing. They found the source of the problem (the few cheaters) and called them on their behavior. I didn't even require any sort of "punishment"...just having their behavior pointed out to them, and a request to correct it was enough. They didn't have to do away with the service of the traffic circle. They didn't have to reduce the number of people using it. They didn't have to pu[...]
Quote of the day Thu, 18 Jan 2007 22:25:27 GMT
RUSH
Quote of the Day Mon, 08 Jan 2007 04:19:29 GMT "When, in countries that are called civilized, we see age going to the workhouse and youth to the gallows, something must be wrong with the system of government. It would seem, by the exterior appearance of such countries, that all was happiness; but there lies hidden from the eye of common observance, a mass of wretchedness that has scarcely any other chance, than to expire in poverty or infamy. Its entrance into life is marked with the presage of its fate; and until this is remedied, it is vain to punish. Civil government does not consist in executions; but in making that provision for the instruction of youth, and the support of age, as to exclude, as much as possible, the profligacy from the one, and despair from the other. Instead of this, the resources of the country are lavished upon kings, upon courts, upon hirelings, imposters and prostitutes; and even the poor themselves, with all their wants upon them, are compelled to support the fraud that opresses them."
-- Thomas Paine, "The Rights of Man, part two" (image)
Don't blame me. Sat, 06 Jan 2007 15:57:19 GMT I came across this particular progression in Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man, Part Two”, and thought it bore quoting. It begins with an assertion of his view (a popular one at the time) of the purpose that government SHOULD have: Whatever the form or constitution of government may be, it ought to have no other object than the general happiness. When, instead of this, it operates to create and encrease wretchedness in any of the parts of society, it is on a wrong system, and reformation is necessary. He goes on to cover again a point that he hits over and over again throughout all of his writings; the idea that a man living in a condition of civilization should be no more wretched than a man living without civilization. Customary language has classed the condition of man under the two descriptions of civilized and uncivilized life. To the one it has ascribed felicity and affluence; to the other hardship and want. But, however, our imagination may be impressed by painting and comparison, it is nevertheless true, that a great portion of mankind, in what we call civilized countries, are in a state of poverty and wretchedness, far below the condition of an Indian. Paine goes on to ask why this is. He concludes that although people the world over tend to have civilized societies, where human beings find it advantageous to work together to build wealth and happiness for everyone concerned, governments operate on a different principle. They fight and are jealous, scheming, and destructive. …governments, being yet in an uncivilized state, and almost continually at war, they pervert the abundance which civilized life produces to carry on the uncivilized part to a greater extent. By thus engrafting the barbarism of government upon the internal civilization of a country, it draws upon the latter, and more especially from the poor, a great portion of those earnings, which should be applied to their own subsistence and comfort. –Apart from all reflections of morality and philosophy, it is a melancholy fact, that more than one-fourth of the labor of mankind is annually consumed by this barbarous system. Let me just inject my .02 here. What Paine is objecting to here is a proto-type of the military industrial complex. He is saying that the government spends it’s money on war so that it can justify its own existence so that it can levy taxes upon the people so that it can spend the money in war, so that it can justify its own existence. Much of this money, of course, finds its way into the pockets of those who give material support to the government. He is not objecting to paying taxes for education of children. He is not objecting to paying taxes for the maintenance of the poor or infirm. He is not objecting to paying taxes for administration of civil law, maintenance of roads, waterways, public health, minting of money, building or maintenance of public buildings, museums, cultural centers, schools, government buildings or community halls and meeting houses. He is objecting to paying taxes so that governments can go to war for the purpose of justifying their own existence and enriching their friends and supporters, thus converting the wealth generated by the working classes into spoils for the upper classes. What has served to continue this evil, is the pecuniary advantage, which all the governments of Europe have found in keeping up this state of uncivilization. It affords to them pretenses for power, and revenue, for whic[...]
Quote of the day Sun, 10 Dec 2006 13:32:05 GMT Remember the American Revolution? Remember what we were revolting against? Allow Thomas Paine to remind you, and realize that the American Revolution needs to be refreshed. If we do it now, we can do it with our hearts and minds and votes:
"A childish set of thinkers and half-way politicians born in the last century; men who went no farther with any priciple than as it suited their purpose as a party; the nation was always left out of the question; and this has been the character of every party from that day to this. The nation sees nothing in such works, or such politics worthy its attention. A little matter will move a party, but it must be something great which moves a nation." -- Thomas Paine The Rights of Man, part II (image)
Christian Nationalism Wed, 06 Dec 2006 15:17:40 GMT Consider the extensive quote below. It is from a Christian nationalist site that tries to clarify and disseminate the Christian Nationalist world view. If you are interested in more, here is a link to this page so you can see a full statement of what they believe. The organization is Chalcedon. The creator is R.J. Rushdoony. But now for the quote (emphasis mine): Misconception 2: Political Dominion Because we believe that the Bible should apply to all of life, including the state; and because we believe that the Christian state should enforce Biblical civil law; and finally, because we believe that the responsibility of Christians is to exercise dominion in the earth for God's glory, it is sometimes assumed that we believe that capturing state apparatus and enforcing Biblical law on a pervasively unbelieving populace is one of our hidden objectives. Our critics sometimes imply or state outright that we are engaged in a subtle, covert attempt to capture conservative, right-wing politics in order to gain political power, which we will then use to "spring" Biblical law on our nation. This is flatly false. We do not believe that politics or the state are a chief sphere of dominion. It is understandable why many people assume that we do hold this position, however. We believe firmly in social change. Liberals believe firmly in social change. Liberals believe that social change is the effect almost exclusively of politics and state coercion. For example, they believe that we can change society by means of state-financed and governed "public education"; health, education, and welfare programs; and speech codes. In other words, they believe, like communists, that man is essentially a plastic being that can be fundamentally reshaped by external means — education, wealth, health, penitentiaries, and so forth. Since no later than the French Revolution, most civil governments in the West have believed that social change occurs by revolution, not by regeneration. When, therefore, liberals (and even some alleged Christians) see us supporting and working toward social change, they presume that we are interested in political power. In simpler words, because they believe in social change exclusively by means of politics, they assume that anyone who supports social change or gets involved in politics is attempting to gain state power in order to further a social agenda. This is a serious miscalculation. We believe in regeneration , not in revolution. Men are not changed fundamentally by politics, but by the power of God. Men's hearts are changed by regeneration (Jn. 3:3). They are translated from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of God 's dear Son (Col. 1:13). From that point, they progressively work to reorient their lives and every sphere they touch in terms of God's holy, infallible Word. Long-term, pervasive social change is the result of extensive regeneration and obedience by the people of God. This means, of course, that there can be no Christian society of any significance or longevity unless a large number of its members are Christians. We do encourage Christian political involvement, but not for the reason that many people suppose. In fact, we believe it is important for Christians to get involved in politics because we do not believe politics is too important. The great problem with modern politics is that it is used as an instrument of social change. We at Chalcedon passionately oppose this. The role of the state is in essence to defend and protect, in the words of the early Americ[...]
Fool me once... Mon, 04 Dec 2006 16:10:15 GMT EclecticsAnonymous has an article about how politics and the politics of money, decisions of ethics, media coverage, and the making of personal health decisions affect each other. Needless to say, he hits enough triggerpoints to start an all-out flame-war if he just had a couple thousand readers. Ben writes: Do I think stem cell research is inherently unethical? No. The unethical part of the discussion is the disingenuous arguments coming from the anti-choice, religious right trying to claim that unused embryos created during in-vitro fertilization are the moral equivalent of a 5 year old child. These people leave a slime trail. On the other hand, I have long since lost the ability to believe that scientific progress is either good or inevitable. We have, on one hand, the morally mangled far right who believe that every embryo has the right to be born and then grow up starving, impoverished, uneducated, and surveyed closely by the government with no privacy at all until it dies from lack of healthcare (but was hopefully a productive worker who generates shareholder value for most of the time it was alive, and certainly, we hope it didn’t have sex unless it managed to get married). On the other hand, there are the people promising imminent miracles from stem cells, listened to by desperately sick people who want to believe anything (Many of whom, frankly, HAVE to believe that an answer is coming soon. Look Michael J. Fox in the eyes and shoot his puppy, I dare you.), and a public who believes that scientific progress is like flipping a switch to get light. You put in money, and useful results flow out. If useful results don’t flow, then the science is “broken” and the money and time spent is “wasted”. It’s clear from history that science has lead down many dead ends. Most of those dead ends didn’t look like dead ends at the time we studied them. Generally, the study of science history emphasizes how each success lead to the next. So if we are not careful, we have this distorted perspective that leads us to think science “succeeded” when it produces something we can see and hear and touch and feel, and “failed” when it only produces information about what NOT to do in the future. Ben also talks about a story where Pfizer pulled a heart medication from clinical trials, costing them truckloads of money. The news story declares it a loss for heart patients as well as the company. Ben points out that maybe heart patients would do well to pin their hopes on lifestyle changes rather than medications, and that money is the root of what drives the medical industry…not health. So people should look to themselves first, and stop counting on a pill to come along that will solve their problems. Implied is the point that we should never forget that we live in a society where the purpose of big money is to make bigger money. I agree. 1) The purpose of corporations is to make money. When they do something that costs them truckloads of money over an ethical issue (even one that is enforced upon them that they would have to cheat to avoid) it is going to cause commentary from the media. We really expect (as a society) for corporations to do anything to make money. I was just at a dinner where a man was listening to someone describe the draconian and ethically questionable changes made to his place of employment by a company that acquired them i[...]
Quote of the Day Thu, 16 Nov 2006 18:42:47 GMT "Conduct your victory as if it were a funeral." -- Lao Tzu (image)
Losers Tue, 24 Oct 2006 15:46:25 GMT This is the message that I got from being raised a Christian. In summary, we are inadequate, and hopelessly corrupt. We have no power, no ability, no positive attributes that are in any way our own. The only thing we own is our failings, our weaknesses, and our corruptions. Even if we accidentally do something right once in a while, we can’t take any credit for it because we’re still going to hell. But through God and Christ, we get to take the short bus to the winners circle. Without a relationship with God (and it has to be the right kind) we are incapable of good, and without God our lives have no meaning and no value. I don’t believe that anymore. And I feel so much better. About my world, about myself, about my fellow man, and about God. But the message is popping up far and wide across the media, and TV and the radio. Conservative Christians are trumpeting the message that we are all in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves. I wonder why that message is considered to be suddenly so important now, at this particular time? *cough* Foley *cough* Under that theology, Foley is no worse that any of the rest of us, and we are no better than him. We’re being told to feel bad about ourselves, and think about every time we’ve ever had a dark, creepy or selfish thought or urge, and we are being asked to admit that we are just as bad as Foley. How sick is that? Foley is a pedophile, and it’s my Christian duty to feel bad about myself? Screw that. People make moral choices all the time, whether they are Christian, Atheist, Pagan or whatever. Most of them make the right ones most of the time. And when they make the wrong ones, they are responsible. See, now I believe that God gave us everything that we need. We live in the best possible creation. It’s still the seventh day, and God is still resting, thinking “Man, I did a bang-up job. Look at those Platypi (Platypuses?). I defintely topped myself when I went the Big Bang/Evolution route). We have a world that works according to consistent and reliable rules. We have a biology that ensures that our kind can meet whatever challenges it encounters. Through random mutation and natural selection we evolved to last. Through that mechanism, we were acquired the gifts of competitiveness, aversion to pain, a drive to fulfill necessary biological urges, and other traits that ensure our survival in the world. We also developed the ability to help others, to restrain ourselves from greed, avarice, gluttony, and cruelty. We have the human need to ensure our survival, and the ability to check those needs and develop moral and ethical standards that free us from being ruled by those needs. We have the ability to govern ourselves and decide to live together according to laws and rules and ideals. Sure, some people don’t. Some people get elected just so that they can start wars to make their friends richer. Some people use their political power to stalk and harass children who are under their power. Some people get guns and invade schools and kill little girls. But that isn’t because they are inherently powerless against temptation. It isn’t because they are inherently evil due to being human beings. It’s[...]
Good Luck movin' up... Thu, 28 Sep 2006 04:28:55 GMT Rocky had a teacher, I think it was in High School, that told him the most important secret of success I have ever heard. He said that after a kid graduates High School, he should put a compass point into the spot on the map where he lives, scribe a circle 200 miles scale around his home, and move outside that circle. I think that’s really good advice. I took a year and stayed in my home town for the first year of college. What a disaster THAT was. But all my friends were there, and it seemed like a good idea to hang out with them. The thing is, that growing up is about change, and if you are surrounded by people who know you, in the same context where they knew you, you won’t change. Their expectations and assumptions have a strange power. It’s a little like gravity, pulling you down, keeping you on one plane. It’s a little like inertia, holding you to rolling you along on a single-line straight course. It’s a lot like friction, slowing you down. It wasn’t until after that first year of college, when I moved away and got married, that I really began to grow as a person. In high school, I was really just doing time. I was waiting to be myself, waiting to think and do and be what I wanted to be. Even when I was living more-or-less on my own, I still had the responsibilities of school, and the care of a quadriplegic to deal with. One does not spread ones wings and become a beautiful butterfly with no spare time, and only $35/week disposable income. Not even in the early-to-mid-eighties. But I bided my time, made the most of what outlets I could (I’d say about equal parts hooliganism, meditation, and intense martial arts/weight training). I was biding my time waiting for that magic day when I would turn 18, become an adult, and be able to do and be and think and say whatever I wanted to. What I learned in that year in Bemidji post-high-school, is the true meaning of the phrase “You don’t need to put a lid on a bucket of crabs.” See, if you have a bucket full of crabs, they all lock onto each other, climb over each other, and basically hold each other down, locked in place. I don’t know if it’s actually true about crabs or not, but it is certainly true about people. That first year I had fun with my close friends, but I realize now that the sense of discontent I had was due to the fact that I was still waiting to be able to be myself. There were a million things I saw myself doing: being a physical therapist, and helping people regain their lives after tragedy strikes, being a veterinarian and helping sick and injured animals get better, becoming a biologist and a pilot and going to Alaska to study life-forms in a pristine ecology, becoming a writer and living in an efficiency apartment in New York city with no furniture except a typewriter on a desk in the middle of the livingroom surrounded by pizza boxes and old Chinese take-away cartons – writing The Great American Novel (only probably with aliens, or maybe ninjas). I even thought I might become a forensic scientist and give Quincy a run for his money. &nbs[...]
Thomas Paine's take on social justice. Tue, 05 Sep 2006 02:56:19 GMT I recently read Thomas Paine’s essay “Agrarian Justice”, and I think it’s important that we bring it up in today’s climate. Every day, it seems, I hear or read people say things that imply that they believe that liberalism originated with The New Deal, that any government social justice programs are inherently derived from Communism or Socialism (when they see the difference), that our country was founded as a Capitalist, Christian nation, and that liberalism is somehow an innovation upon, a reversal of, or a rejection of, the foundational ideals of our government. Even many “liberals” seem to accept the assumption that the founding fathers laid a foundation of capitalism and Christianity. Hence the seeming need of some to denigrate and defile their memories. My position, after reading many of the original works of these men, and other great Americans who came after them, is that they knew they were laying a foundation. They knew there was only so much work they could do, and that other work would be the task of future generations. For instance, they proudly proclaimed that each and every man should be his own master, though some of them owned slaves because they recognized that dismantling in international economy built on human trafficking was the work of many generations. They correctly assessed that their time was the time to undermine the assumption of the Devine right of Kings, and to elevate Natural Philosophy above superstition as the means of lighting the path for future innovations. That is a great enough task for any generation, I would say. The founding fathers were liberals. Most of them used the word “liberal” to describe themselves, and at least three of the greatest minds and eloquent spokesmen for the American Revolution were not Christians, but were deists (Men who, though they believed in God, cast aside the mental shackles of religious superstition to embrace the idea of natural laws as being the supreme expression of God). One was Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence. Another was James Madison, primary author of the United States Constitution, and a third was Thomas Paine, author of “Common Sense” and the “American Crisis” series of essays (among others) that galvanized and propelled the American Revolution (as well as the French Revolution) with his clear, elegant, well-reasoned prose and sheer virtuosity with the English language. To be liberal is to be American, but lets take a moment to define liberal. Conservative pundits would have you believe that “Liberal” means taking drugs, having meaningless kinky sex with many anonymous partners, destroying families, having many abortions, and loving trees and animals more than human beings. Some people who call themselves liberals might do some of these things, but none of these are “liberal values”. “Liberals”, in the traditional American sense, are people who believe in the principles of the Enlightenment. Liberals believe that reality is the ultimate test of any ideology. They rely on[...]
"Blame America First?" Oh please. Mon, 04 Sep 2006 14:59:34 GMT “How come you always say everything is my fault?” I used to hear this a lot from my kids when they were younger and not as mature as they are now. Whenever there was an incident of some kind, either at school, or at home between my kids, or between my kids and one of their friends, or whatever, I would start the guidance by finding out what happened. A chronological order from the beginning of the incident, to the end. Of course, my kids always wanted to start the history at the point where someone did something wrong to them. Child: So-and-so hit me, knocked me down and called me a stupid-head. Me: What did you do before that? Child: Nothing! Me: So this kid just came up to you, hit you, knocked you down, and called you a stupid head for no reason? Child: Yes! Me: You couldn’t have been doing nothing. Were you standing, sitting? Talking to someone? Child: I was standing and talking to What’s-His-Name. Me: In the classroom? Child: Yes! Me: Isn’t Whats-his-name’s desk right next to So-and-so’s desk? Child: Yes. Me: Did so-and-so say anything before he hit you and knocked you down and called you a stupid head? Child: He said, “Move it, you’re in my way.” Me: Did you move? Child: He could have gone around the other way to get to his desk. Me: Did you move? Child: I was going to move when I was done talking. Me: Did you tell him that, or did you just keep talking like you didn’t hear him? Child: How come you always say everything is my fault? What my children are in the process of learning, is that everyone does things that are wrong, or rude, or inconsiderate, or mean. Everyone has choices in any given situation. But the only person whose behavior you can control is your own. In the example above, So-and-so was rude. He was impatient, and he was violent. He was by far the most wrong person in the situation, but by merely making a couple of small adjustments in behavior and communication, my child might have avoided all of that unpleasantness. Even if the other child wasn’t being fair and considerate, my child could have been. What they are starting to learn is that, in any given situation, they have some ability to affect the outcome. Usually the time that they have the most impact is BEFORE the situation [...]
The face of hunger Wed, 30 Aug 2006 11:51:11 GMT Last week, Rocky and I finally made it to the Emergency Food Shelf Networks Donor Appreciation event. We have been regular contributors for years now…I think about seven years or so. We have wanted to go to this event for years, but something always seemed to come up. This year, we were going to make it. Not even torrential rains could stop us. We made arrangements for our nine-year-old, and allowed our thirteen-year-old to stay home alone, and took off. The weather had been cloudy and ominous for most of the day. We’d heard the news about major storms on the radar, moving toward us even as the weather seemed mild if not entirely pleasant. As we drove, though, it got worse. We started to worry that it had been a mistake, worried that the severe weather that was supposed to pass to the south of our home would swing north, worried that the weather north of us would swing south. Worried that flooding might cut us off from an easy route home. But we persevered, and eventually broke through into a pocket of mild weather. We were greeted warmly, and given name tags, a ten-pound bag of groceries, and pointed at the hospitality table and wine bar. We were introduced to the staff and the board, and then asked to introduce ourselves and tell how we came to be contributors to the EFN. I thought about growing up in rural Minnesota . A lot of the kids I knew came from working poor families. Their parents worked a couple of part-time jobs, or worked odd hours in the evenings and weekends in service jobs. Everything in their lives appeared to be cobbled together. Their families were often cobbled together, with a mom and a live-in boyfriend and kids, or a Dad and a stepmom and kids with foster children taken in to help out with the money situation. Their cars were cobbled together, with body parts from other cars, multi-colored one-eyed monsters with quirks of functionality that only their owners could understand and deal with. Their livelihood was cobbled together from odd jobs, part-time jobs, public assistance, government commodity foodstuffs, and private assistance. They were proud, hardworking people, and most of the time they were able to do everything necessary to meet the needs of their family. There was rarely any time when they had more than enough of anything…but most of the time they had enough. It was just that sometimes, when the car broke down and dad couldn’t fix it with a part cannibalized from a junkyard, or when someone had to go to the doctor, or when there was a fire or some other mishap, or when there was a lay-off, they needed help. Kind of like our trip to the event, there was a continuous background air of worry occasionally interrupted by moments of true danger that they had to preserver through to get to the other side. Minnesota ’s food shelves are an important part of what makes their lives work. The stresses of being among the working poor take their toll on mental and physical health, on marriage and family life, on every aspect of existence. Yet it is the working poor of this country that our relative prosperity is built upon. Just tune in to any discussion about the plight of the working poor in this country a[...]
The view from here. Tue, 29 Aug 2006 15:05:55 GMT I’ve been around long enough to notice a few patterns to life. Here’s some repeating patterns that I’ve noticed: When the economy is taking a dive: 1) There is some sort of scandal about high-level white-collar fraud that has a wide-ranging effect on the economy. 2) The government declares “war” on some overwhelming threat to our way of life (internal or external). 3) Gas/power becomes expensive and sometimes difficult to get. 4) You start to see the commercial with the pruney old lady telling you to buy gold. 5) Illegal immigration becomes an urgent, hot-button political issue. 6) The television newsmedia start trashing on the American worker. A couple of weeks ago , I saw a smirking Fox News anchor talking about how the Productivity of the American Worker had fallen, but the average American Worker’s wage had gone up. Both statistics were small percentage points, something like two or three percent…and as I don’t know exactly how the productivity is computed, that statistic was pretty meaningless to me. I mean, I KNOW that it’s done using man-hours and production units…but what exactly IS a production unit? A customer served? A hamburger cooked? An appliance delivered? A car assembled? I don’t know. Anyway, the smirking info-wench on the tube didn’t go into it, because the exact technical meaning of those numbers was unimportant. She just dropped the numbers showing a slight decrease in productivity, and put a wry twist into her mouth and cocked her head ironically and delivered the stat about the miniscule wage increase. As if to imply that SOMEBODY was getting a free ride. The other day I saw a CNN blurb where some financial pundit was beaming happily and talking about how workers can expect smaller and fewer wage increases going forward, and how employers are now going to emphasize bonuses. The reason for this is that bonuses can be more directly tied to the profitability of the company, and only have to be given out once, whereas raises are expected to be permanent. This will inspire employees to get off their lazy asses and work harder, and be more productive, she implied. And I would be OK with that if most of the salaried people I knew were lazy slug-a-butts out to gyp their employers. But they’re not. Most of the salaried people I know work and excess of forty hours per week. I have friends that average fifty hours or more per week, and I even know people who work sixty or seventy hours per week. Average. It is not unusual for me to hear about someone pulling the occasional eighty-hour week. There are a lot of reasons that people do this: 1) Sometimes they care about their job, and are passionate about accomplishing something they feel is important. 2) Sometimes they love their job, view it as a calling, and there is really little else they would rather be doing. 3) Sometimes their managers are really crappy, and are constantly changing [...]
Fair, AND Balanced Tue, 08 Aug 2006 18:48:00 GMT Conservative Fascists: Link to a website offering you the opportunity to view a ½ hour long video that will inform you that there is no Constitutional basis for Judges to interpret law, that gay people can change if they get hit with enough doses of Jesus, and that if gays are allowed to marry, your grandchildren will one day demand to know how you let the world become such a terrible place. Liberal Fascists: Link to Wikipedia’s entry about Linda Hirshman, who I just saw on the Colbert report last night, saying that women have a duty to other women and society to stay in the workforce, no matter how much they might like to stay home for a few years and raise their children, they don’t have the right to choose what they want. To summarize that she said, being a full-time mom is such an odious and onerous job (children are burdensome and distasteful apparently), that it is wrong for one woman to do it, because then all women will have to do it, so we should make the men do it instead. Instead, women should use their intelligence and abilities to do complex, rewarding jobs that fulfill them as people, and where they will be appreciated. Um. I’ve held a LOT of jobs. None of them have been as interesting, complex, and utilized as many of my capacities at once as trying to be the best mom possible. Also, while my co-workers seemed to appreciate me, none were half so appreciative as my kids are. Of the projects I’ve worked on, my kids are the only ones that are still “in play”. All of the others have been abandoned by the management, or ruled obsolete and replaced. Of all the projects I will work on in the future, my kids are the only ones I can expect to outlive me. Also, where would the working moms who rely on me for emergency child care be if I had a job in an office? Or the occasional friend (or husband) who gets in over their head and needs to sub-contract work in order to get their jobs done and make time for their families? And by "subcontract" I mean show up and stuff envelopes for free, proofread, decorate offices for office parties, fill in teaching for classes while they attend marriage classes or recover from surgery, be an actor in silly benefit dinners so they can fund their NGO, etc.) :-) Although someone recently paid me a generous hourly wage, so there's that too... My life, my mind, my family, my choice. ‘nuff said. So, looking at the two, though…Even though Linda actually pushes rhetoric that denies my right to do as I like with my life and my capacities…I’m more scared of the homophobes. Linda is a has-been relic, a retiree trying to recapture her glory days when it looked like she could actually re-create the world in her own ideological image. Nobody important is going to listen to her. (I’ve only known one other person who uses her rhetoric in real life…and he’s a socio-path who eventually harms and alienates everyone in his life) The Homophobes are an actual, well-funded political movement, and they are just as much a threat to every normal, thinking person as they are to those gays and lesbians they are going on about. [...]
"How's Qigong going?" Part IV Sat, 05 Aug 2006 17:07:24 GMT I started doing Qigong because it is part of Kung Fu training. It isn’t required, but the more I learned about Kung Fu, the more I learned that historically, serious practitioners have done Qigong. Some of you may know, that there are internal and external aspects to all martial arts training. Most schools in the US have focused on the external aspects, building strength and speed, focusing impacts – scoring points and breaking boards. There are ancillary internal pay-offs described as confidence, focus, mental discipline, etc. Many parents start their children in martial arts for these pay-offs, and there is little doubt that people get those results from the training. The external training has internal pay-offs Qigong is supposed to focus on these “internal” aspects as the primary product of Qigong training, with ancillary external results. If you have ever seen a Tai Chi practitioner, you will know what I’m talking about when I refer to external results. They seem to flow like water, the coil and snap like a whip. They seem very graceful and soft and fluid, but then there is that moment when you see the end of one movement, just before it blurrs into another, and you realize how much force was generated by that move, and how it was redirected into the next move, and how only perfect balance makes it seems so effortless. Well, maybe you do and maybe you don’t. I was sitting with one of my fellow students at a competition a couple of years ago, watching this woman who comes to almost all of the local competitions. She studies in China , though she lives here. She is amazing. I’ve learned enough Tai Chi to know how completely hopeless I am at it right now. Some day, I hope to have a tenth the skill this woman has. My friend and I were commenting on the tremendous power that her technique had. “No she doesn’t”, said a lady next to us, who I had seen as a judge at Diamond Nationals. “She doesn’t have any power at all.” We could hear the incredulity in her voice that we could say any such thing. My friend and I just looked at each other. WE saw it. It was obvious to us, who had been working so hard to attain that skill of “flowing like water”, and being “soft as cotton, hard as steel”. I myself was feeling somewhat discouraged…but now I felt better as I realized that at least I had learned what it is supposed to LOOK like, and even got shadow sensations in my muscles of what it would FEEL like when I finally did it correctly. Coming from externally focused Karate myself, I had just heard an echo of my own voice and biases from years ago, where upper body strength, expelling breath noisily, and yelling were the ultimate ways to project “power” and I realized how much I had actually learned. I remember that was the beginning of my break-through with tornado kicks…the moment that I knew what it would feel like to do a correct tornado kick. After months of fruitless practice, I finally had fruitful practice, and my progress (though not instantaneous) was encouraging. Anyway, Qigong is supposed to help you develop th[...]
"How's Qigong Going?" Part II Fri, 04 Aug 2006 14:55:23 GMT One thing that makes Qigong different from any other kind of meditation I’ve ever done, is the active component. Qigong is often taught in conjunction with Tai Chi because Tai Chi is also active meditation. The Qigong active meditation exercises are very similar to Tai Chi. They are slow and focus on flow and balance through breathing. Sometimes, you begin to feel as though your breath is causing the movements. The proper stances, balance, and synchronization of your muscles and breath generate an amazing amount of power. And an amazing amount of heat and sweat. I’m not kidding. The amount of body heat I sometimes generate makes me think of the popular stories of spontaneous combustion told to me by those weird kids who carried around magazines dealing with cryptozoology and comic books about ghost ships from WWII haunting the Bermuda Triangle. (OK, I admit it, the only reason I didn’t have those materials myself is because my mom would have burned them). I’m not a sweater. When I got to the gym on non-running days and hit the elliptical, I usually do a calorie burn of between 800 and 1100 calories in a 60 minute work-out and five-minute cool-down. I don’t usually break a noticeable sweat until about 40 minutes into the workout. Twenty minutes of focused Qigong, and I’m often getting running trickles of sweat. It’s disgusting. On days when my focus is impaired for some reason, I generate little to no heat, and no sweat to speak of. This is still most days for me, probably six out of ten. Don’t get me wrong, there is often SOMETHING happening, but not enough to write home about, as they say. As I understand it (I may be mistaken) the mystical purpose of these exercises is to “open your energy channels” and remove “energy blockages” from your body. You are supposed to “feel the energy” when you have been doing the exercises for a while. I have, indeed, felt an electrical tingle running up the sides of my fingers, through my hands and arms. This is not the same as the “Pins and needles” sensation you get from having your arms “go to sleep”. I’ve also felt the “tingling” from hyperventilating. This is nothing like that, either. It is different, weird, and a little unsettling, but cool as hell. I have been given reason to believe that eventually this effect will happen through all the “energy channels” of the body. Presumably, I will then disappear in a flash of white light and leave behind only a faint whiff of ozone, because I can’t imagine the heat that will generate. Days where I have had an effective active meditation are almost always characterized by a more relaxed attitude, loose muscles, easy stretches, increased appetite, and effortless workouts. I’ve had a couple of days, though, where the opposite happened: I was wiped out, cranky, had unexplained stiffness and pain, nothing tasted right, and I just wanted to lay down in a dark room. Whatever the results, they are quite dramatic. My impression is that the concentration and repetitive movements have a self-hypnot[...]
"How's Qigong going?" Part I Fri, 04 Aug 2006 04:07:06 GMT The other day, my friend Conrad Zero asked a loaded question: “How’s Qigong going?” I said, “It’s complicated.” My friend and fellow Kung Fu-er, Blake, who understands my aversion to mystical frufery, chimed in something along the lines of: “Yeah, are you getting all your channels cleared out, and those blockages eliminated?” I said, “Shut Up.” See, I really believe that there is something to the whole Qigong thing. I’m with Han Solo in believing that “There’s no mystical energy field that controls MY destiny.” On the other hand, though I’ve not “flown from one end of the galaxy to the other”…I HAVE seen some “strange stuff”…so I’m willing to give most things a chance. I DO believe that the mind can cure any problem the mind creates or can improve any condition it contributes to, and that seems to be a LOT of stuff. I think that time spent focusing, and disciplining the mind, listening to your subconscious, taking time to listen to your intuition and reconnect to your senses is useful and important. Certainly, the active meditation exercises contribute to flexibility, physical relaxation, and coordination much the way that yoga does. So, yeah, I think Qigong can lower your blood pressure, mitigate your anxiety disorder, or reduce your dependence on an inhaler for stress-induced asthma. It’s not beyond my imagining that it can help with sleep disorders or stress disorders, or ADD or any one of a number of other conditions. After all, I was trained in bio-feedback at our local hospital to control panic attacks, and Qigong is no that different. It just uses different language to describe what's going on. I used those techniques to lower my heart rate, lower my blood pressure, manage panic attacks, and strangely enough, a chronic skin disorder that I’d had for ten years cleared up during that time (No kidding, the Dermatologist called it a “stress rash”.) Do I think it can cure infections, or fix a faulty heart valve, or cure a brain tumor? No. Do I think I’ll gain super natural powers? Nope. I don't want 'em. I've got enough power right here in this ordinary human sack of skin as it is, thank you. I'll find it a triumph of a worthy life just to learn to master what I have effectivly and ethically. Do I think I’ll be able to heal other people? Not really. I do the healing meditations though because I think that it is a natural and healthy human function to spend time thinking about others, wishing them well, and dedicating our thoughts to their well-being. Do I really think that if I do a healing meditation for another human being that they will directly benefit from “energy” beaming from the universe, through me, to them? I have no reason to believe that, any more than I have any rea[...]
"The Good Son" Sun, 30 Jul 2006 17:02:41 GMT Jesus told a parable about two sons. Their father asked them to go and work in the field one day. One son said he would do what his father commanded. The other son said he didn’t want to. Later, when it was time to show up in the field, the first son who had agreed to be obedient was nowhere to be seen. He went off and did his own thing…what he wanted to do. The second son, however, showed up in the field despite the fact that he had said he didn’t want to, and wouldn’t. Jesus asked the crowd who was the best son. Pretty obviously, it is the son who followed the father’s wishes rather than his own, and not the one who spoke respectful words, and then went and did his own thing. Message: God respects action rather than pretty words. Of course, it goes without saying that the BEST son would be one that said he would do what his father wanted, and then did it, but it’s pretty clear that we can’t have everything. And it is especially difficult to have everything desired by a religious patriarchy, but that’s an entry for another time. So here we have the story of two communities. Both claim to serve God. This one is dominated by people who want to impose their beliefs on others, and who say they follow Jesus, and yet act against his teachings. (New York Times story about a Jewish family run out of town by their “Christian” neighbors for asking if it would be too much if they could simply broaden the scope of religious prayer and invocation at school functions so as not to exclude Jews, and if they could possibly talk to some of the kids about ceasing to use the words “Jew-boy” to describe their son.) This one is a mega church lead by a conservative evangelical pastor who lost roughly 1/5 of his congregation for saying that America was founded with a secular government, and that the current attempts to co-mingle religion with government hurts both religion and government. (New York Times article, quoted below, because I just can’t pass up these four paragraphs.) Quote: The requests came from church members and visitors alike: Would he please announce a rally against gay marriage during services? Would he introduce a politician from the pulpit? Could members set up a table in the lobby promoting their anti-abortion work? Would the church distribute “voters’ guides” that all but endorsed Republican candidates? And with the country at war, please couldn’t the church hang an American flag in the sanctuary? After refusing each time, Mr. Boyd finally became fed up, he said. Before the last presidential election, he preached six sermons called “The Cross and the Sword” in which he said the church should steer clear of politics, give up moralizing on sexual issues, stop claiming the United States as a “Christian nation” and stop glorifying American military campaigns. “When the church wins the culture wars, it inevitably loses,” Mr. Bo[...]
Emotional Punching Bags...cheap hourly rate. Thu, 29 Jun 2006 05:01:12 GMT Conrad Zero learns what I learned as a college student: a large segment of the population think that service industry workers are their own personal emotional punching bags. I’ve been told that I’m “too nice” and I’ve been told on occasion that I “tip too much”. That’s because I worked several service positions as a college student, and I know how it is. It’s true, you’ve got at least one dick-head per shift. Usually more. Sometimes they just have to tell you that you look like a fat, stupid cow in that uniform. Sometimes they want to give you sage advice about how you should have paid more attention to your education, and you wouldn’t be such a pathetic loser. Sometimes they just yell and scream and swear, and you never do figure out what they wanted. Sometimes they snap their fingers in your face, as if that will make the register work faster to clear out all the people waiting in line in front of them so they can get on with their life; which is so much more important than the lives of all the other people in the store. (anyone want to imagine the pictures of mangled finger-flesh that went through my head when that happened?) Sometimes they are there to steal from the store and if you don’t let them walk out with what they want, they will most likely hurt or kill you. It’s annoying, dehumanizing, and embarrassing. But like all things I came to realize that some of those people were people who had their “enough button” punched several times too many that day. Which is no excuse…but doesn’t change the fact that we’re all in this together and we’re all only human. Which I guess is my way of making it around to; “If you CAN take a deep breath and put other people’s dickheadedness into perspective, just fucking do it. Even if you shouldn’t have to.” I didn’t always succeed in employing the higher angels of my nature. In fact, more often than not, I responded by stonewalling the offender, or smarting back, or dumping them on my manager. But at least three times, I marshaled the forces of light within, and here’s what happened: Story the first: Sir Saysnotalot There was a guy who came in to a restaurant where I was hostess every weekday morning. He would order oatmeal and a cup of coffee. He was gruff and cranky, and never tipped. He would say no more than was necessary to get his coffee and his oatmeal. He outright ignored pleasantries on a good day, and responded to them rudely on a bad day. I finally ended up being the one to get him his breakfast every day, as the waitresses refused to wait on him. Since talking to me was such an odious chore, I decided that he wouldn’t have to talk at all. He’d come in, and I’d say “Right this way”, and lead him to the same booth every day. Not the usual cramped half-booth we were supposed to give people who came in alone. Those were cramped, and cheerless, tucked into a dent in the wall like an after-thought. Nope, I’d give him a booth by the window.[...]
A shot in the arm. Mon, 26 Jun 2006 17:58:04 GMT Rocky writes about Warren Buffet giving most of his fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. What I find most interesting about the actions of Bill Gates and Warren Buffet is this: What will it reveal about the short-comings of both philanthropy and the concept of “running charity as if it were a business”. Most of the commentary I’ve seen about how public concerns like charity or government being run as businesses focus on the managerial models (how managers are compensated, how the power structure is organized, how workers are treated/compensated/cared for. What the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has a chance to do is to come up with a focused, coherent, organized plan of action, instantly marshal all of the resources for concerted, orchestrated, organized, and focused foundation to build from. Where most charities seem to be primarily concerned with getting more money (and have to be in order to keep the wheels turning), and then with meeting immediate short-term (emergency) needs, the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation have the opportunity to actually work to get to the root of the problems. So many of the truly effective solutions for the world’s problems are long-term, high-cost, and slow to take effect. And the costs of those problems right now are so terrible, that charities cannot bring themselves to ignore the current desperate situations of those effected and focus on the long-term and more subtle efforts required to solve the root problem. Take AIDS, for instance. A lot of focus has been on education, but it is next to impossible to educate the world’s population about what causes the spread of HIV, and healthy ways to prevent that spread. Just eradicating ignorance in a world population of 6 billion people alone is a daunting and expensive task. Add to that the fact that those education efforts are actively resisted and sabotaged around the world by regressive governments, religious groups, and cultural organizations; and the effort becomes more difficult and more expensive as each regressive influence in each locality must be countered on an individual basis. Add to that the fact that in many areas of the world; economic and social realities cause people to enter the sex trade, or cause women to be trapped in situations where they have little or no control over their sexuality, where children can be sold into slavery, or a woman cannot refuse to have unprotected sex with an infected husband, where lawlessness makes rape a daily fear, and there is another bag of bricks atop a seemingly insurmountable pile of obstacles to actually solving the problem of AIDS. Many charities work to chip away at one aspect of the problem or another. It’s a hodge-podge patchwork of efforts, and they do some good. Education helps some, efforts to employ people with living wage jobs helps some. Harm reduction such as condom and needle distributions help some, and charities that provide anti-retroviral drugs and other health care needs of infected persons help some… …but n[...]
Your Morning Devotional Sat, 24 Jun 2006 13:26:59 GMT Penn and Teller did a Bullshit! On the Bible. I really enjoyed it, although I was uncomfortable with Penn constantly referring to it as “The Damned Bible”…but that’s just my hang-up. It was pure and simple button pushing for no reason other than its own sake, and that makes me uncomfortable…which I believe was the point. Anyway, at the end, Penn urges everyone to read the Bible from cover-to-cover. He says this is because “we need more atheists”. And it got me thinking about how I came to reject the idea of the infallibility of the Bible and the general usefulness of the revealed religions. Well, I’m not an atheist, but I come pretty close. I guess the best description might be “Deist.”, although that just might be because I haven’t spent enough time really digging into Deism yet to find out where I disagree with them. But we were talking about my long, slow fall from the state of grace that is Theism (general lumping of the revealed religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam…or the “Abrahamic traditions”) It started with “Christian” behavior. With judgment and hypocrisy and outright religious abuse where the abused were supposed to bear that abuse as a testament of their faith. Even a child should be able to see that is sick. So, confused; I went to the source. I figured I’d had enough of people handing me little slices out of the Bible and telling me what they meant (and sometimes telling me that they meant the opposite of what they appeared to mean, as if it was “profound”.) I have read the Bible from cover to cover several times in the course of my life. OK, so I skimmed the begats (you know, Bob begat Joe, who begat Fred, who married Latisha and begat Leonardo, who was the Father of the Nation of Whogivesashit) and lists of Israel ’s rulers and judges and stuff…but I’m pretty sure I didn’t miss anything. My eyes physically traveled over all the words, and my brain woke up for the important parts, like the genocides, suicides, the idol worship, prostitution, mutilation of corpses, and conditions under which God wants you to stone your children to death, or when it’s OK to sell your daughter into slavery and such. What I learned, is that there is a reason why we have devotionals and sermons and a liturgical calendar. It’s because the Bible is at its best with a sober, semi-sane, fairly modern editor who can sift out all the stuff that is self-contradictory, warped, sick, irrelevant, confusing, and in direct contradiction of what Christians believe their religion is. Christians have a very solid system of filters in place to make the Bible a coherent, cohesive moral guide. The different denominations each have a separate system of interpretive fil[...]
Just Wondering... Fri, 26 May 2006 14:34:49 GMT Later today, or possibly on Tuesday, I'm going to watch the movie "The Smartest Men in the Room". I can't help but wonder...what is the appropriate punishment for being instrumental in severly damaging the economy of your country? I know, they'll probably get 12 or so years of prison...but what does that do? What will it teach them? Nothing, most likely. My friend Karen thinks they should have to do menial labor for minimum wage. That's an idea. Make them work at McDonalds and pay rent and buy food and send their children to school in the clothes you can buy on minimum wage. Make them stand in line at public offices looking for assistance. Have them sit with their child in the emergency room for hours and hours and hours because the child has an ear infection and the emergency room is the only place you can go that has to treat you with or without insurance. Let them get to know bright young kids with big dreams working two 15-hour a week jobs so they can go to a public college and maybe someday make 30-50 thousand dollars a year. Let them work with the fry-cook who builds computers in his garage and sells them on the side...or the retiree who mans the cash register because some corporate brass-hole stole his pension. Nah...it'll never work. They can't learn compassion. Just clap 'em in irons and put them in a real prison. Something drab, and dull and common. Make them eat in a mess hall with hundreds of other men that they would normally not even bother to look at. I don't know what you could possibly do to wring some remorse and contrition out of their hearts. I can't think of a thing that would help all those people who lost their pensions and their livelihoods in the scandal. There's not really anything that can "make it right". I guess that's life... But at the very least, we get to say "They're guilty". And that's a start. (image)
Qigong and AI Wed, 24 May 2006 04:26:02 GMT I know a guy who is obsessed with Psychology, Artificial Intelligence, Decision Making, and Logic. He wants to learn how to make computers make decisions the way humans do. Let’s call him “Fred”. Fred wants to do this so that he can prove that he understands humans. Thing is, Fred will never understand humans because he tries to understand them by standing off to the side and ping-ponging between studying with detached curiosity, making snide, sarcastic comments, and performing the occasional (disastrous and destructive) social engineering experiment on their lives. But I don’t think this is going to work for him. See, he IS a human. You wouldn’t know it to listen to him or interact with him. In fact, you would swear, if you didn’t know better, that he was an alien anthropologist from the planet Mysanthropia doomed to conduct research on some back-water planet because he committed an unforgivable social gaff at his supervisor’s Christmas party…or whatever the Mysanthropia equivalent is. But he’s a flesh and blood human. What gives him away is that anthropologists are really good at blending in to the population they are studying. You hardly know they’re there, and they really experience what it is like to live as one of their objects of study. Fred, not so much. Oh, Fred is alright with the concept of human brains. He likes those. Yep, brains are the shining light of Fred’s dismal little world. Hearts are OK…to him they are just the muddy parts of the brain which we can’t seem to get rid of but maybe someday, when we figure out how the brain works, we can iron out that whole heart thing…you know, fix it up so it works according to sensible rules and without hurting so damn much. But the body part of the human is a huge bug-aboo to Fred. Bodies are bad. Bodies do bad, scary things that make your brain not work right. Especially when members of the opposite sex are around. They have to go. Especially women’s bodies, because jeeze, the human race would be so much better off without them. Bodies are impulsive, and have instincts and urges and do yucky things like poop and have sex. Bodies make otherwise pleasant people sleep around on their spouses, and otherwise peaceful people panic and hit other people if they feel they are in danger. Nope, the bodies can hang around in the capacity of car driving and pizza eating…but they have to be taken out of the decision-making process, because they are chaotic. Or they must be quantified and explained so that they are no longer chaotic, and we can manage them. I realized that this was the case when Fred said that every man should be allowed to have three wives. He described wife number one as a[...]
Quote of the day Mon, 08 May 2006 12:10:45 GMT Some Writers have so confounded society with government as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last is a punisher. Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without a government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform, and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish a means for the protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him, out of two evils, to choose the least. Wherefore security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows that whatever form therefore appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others. --Thomas Paine "Common Sense" [...]
New word. It's MINE. Sat, 06 May 2006 15:27:57 GMT New Word: Oblivioiropocracy. Derived from: oblivious, irony, hypocrisy. Definition: v. The act of complete unawareness that you are demonstrating the very traits that you criticize in others. n. A form of government first introduced in North America in the early 21st century. There’s a little-known Weird Al Yankovich song out there, entitled “The White Stuff”. It extols the “virtues” of “the white stuff” in the middle of an Oreo. One of the lines is “I think my pancreas just went into shock”, implying that the sugar-saturated lard of the white stuff was too much for his body’s ability to handle all the crap he’s taken in. My brain knows how his pancreas feels. I’ve had the intellectual equivalent of way to much White Stuff. Whatever gland is responsible for processing and neutralizing exposure to Oblivioiropocracy has seized up, begun smoking, and given me the double bird as a response to any suggestions that it get back to work. As you might have guessed, this involves the Agape Press. They have an article detailing how there is a growing trend for people to rely on “recieved knowledge” rather than their own sense of reason. This, combined with the tendency of the press to be vapid, insipid and biased, is a dangerous combination. OK, I’m all over that….but a little confused. After all, the Agape press has historically demanded strict and unwavering reliance on the “received knowledge” of the Bible at the same time it has repeatedly demeaned the powers of the human mind to figure anything out on its own. It’s a tenant of the fundamentalist mindset that people should not rely on their own reasoning, but on the word of God (as received from the Bible, which was written by men who received it from God). But, you know, there’s no reason that people can’t change their minds. To quote the article: "The result of this has been, ultimately, that more and more people rely on received knowledge," LeGault says. They take their information and conclusions "from news media primarily," he asserts, or in any case, "from other people, rather than doing thinking on their own or asking questions -- hard questions." The author of Th!nk says this reliance on media for more and more information has caused the facts to be increasingly filtered through various biases. "Behind each one of these as it's presented in the media," he contends, "are other information and other sides to the story that are often not presented, and our general tendency is to believe these wholesale, without question." Also, LeGault notes, this phenomenon has resulted in what he calls a "greatest hits" mentality, where news media outlets exploit hot-butt[...]
Monkeys Tue, 31 Jan 2006 15:43:08 GMT Many thanks to Ben, who e-mailed me the link to this wonderful entertaining video. http://www.ernestcline.com/dmd >> It's a little funny, a little horrifying, and a little heartbreaking...but mostly it's just true. (image)
Veil of Tears Tue, 24 Jan 2006 13:31:48 GMT Conversation between Rocky and I yesterday: Me: What I don’t understand about Buddhism is that all the great leaders who were enlightened and came back…some of them over and over again. If enlightenment means being completely free of attachment…what brings them back? I mean, they MUST be attached to something. I mean, if you are enlightened, why would you feel any need to come back and help others? And it’s not as though it’s necessary. I mean, THESE people got enlightened, right? People will get enlightened with or without them. Rocky: So they’re not enlightened? Me: Well, they can’t be, can they, if they have a false sense of their own importance that keeps bringing them back when they’re supposedly ready to go on. And if they’re not ready to go on…how can they help us? Rocky: So, they need to take a lesson from Jesus, die, come back once, and move on? Me: Well…yeah. I mean, Jesus is the REAL gangsta, man. He rules from the INSIDE. Rocky: You are going to hell in so many different religions. [...]
Ignorance may not be bliss...but it sure as hell is more comfortable Mon, 12 Dec 2005 16:29:18 GMT Some people might remember a little entry I did a while back entitled “It’s OK, don’t think about it too much and it will be OK”. I described a little anecdote that I observed at curriculum night at my child’s school. It created a minor stir in certain waters…and I followed some of the links to hear what people were saying. I just followed another link that I hadn’t seen before…more of the same comments. Liberals talking about how this “proves” how stupid conservatives are. Conservatives ennumerating the myriad ways I failed to make the point that I was obviously trying to make about how conservatives are stupid. Various other people making comments about what I was trying to say, and how it proves what they’ve said all along… And I laugh. Because I started out merely describing something I saw…and in the end came around to trying to make the point that people see what they want to see, and if something happens that challenges their views they feel more comfortable if they can find a way to wiggle off the hook and get back to the comfort of their unchallenged views. I do it. You do it…we all do it. Recognizing that fact is the first step in learning how to learn. [...]
"People do what people do... Thu, 08 Dec 2005 16:02:14 GMT The other day, a friend of mine was minding his own business in the gas station. He was holding a magazine (not a dirty one) featuring a cute, young actress that he likes a lot, and he was waiting to buy it. A young lady in front of him, for no other reason than apparently, lack of food and the heady effects of wearing too much Gucci, made a few rude comments regarding his weight, and implied that he was bringing the magazine home for less-than-honorable purposes. His response was not composed by the higher angels of his nature. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it was wrong, and he lowered himself by making it. His response amounted to a verbal sexual assault…but then again, her initial instigation was a verbal sexual assault. But she’s young and cute, and somehow has enough money to dress in the latest and most expensive fashions…and he’s overweight and "old" (not 20-29) and male. So he’s accountable for his actions, and she’s not in the minds of society…and he’d better be careful of what he says. Bullshit. There is such a thing as an enough point. And if you callously, gratuitously, and maliciously invade another person’s life and give them a good shove just because you think you can get away with it…and then you find out that you were the final mover that put them over the enough point… …well, I’m not going to say you “deserved it”, because that’s not true. But I am going to say that there is a certain level of responsibility that you have to accept. I’ve been in my friend’s position before. 5’7”, 245 lbs. We were at the Renaissance festival and a couple of guys in their early twenties came rampaging out of a crowd and trampled Adventure Boy, who was four. I yelled at them, while trying to carry my newborn Grasshopper over to see if Adventure Boy was OK. They yelled “Oh shut up ya fat cow, he’s OK”, without missing a beat. Adventure Boy was bruised, shaken, and crying. Had I not been holding my new-born and trying to care for an injured pre-schooler I probably would have done something a lot more permanent, damaging, evil, and clever than yell “fuck you” at their backs as they achieved their goal…the line for the beer tent. Had I not had defenseless small children that that I was solely responsible for at that moment, I would have been calling around for bail money that night…assuming they allowed me bail. My anger at their treatment of my child was dismissed easily because of my weight. In fact, t[...]
Beliefnet on ID Thu, 17 Nov 2005 16:05:23 GMT This is the problem with people who don’t understand basic science concepts trying to talk about standards in science curriculum. In his Beliefnet article Tony Campolo (quotes highlighted in red) asserts that: 1) The theory of Natural Selection has no empirical validation. So the fact that all the following branches of science work, despite their reliance on the Theory of Natural Selection as a foundational concept, is not empirical validation? (Biology, genetics, gene therapy, genetic engineering, paternity testing, how we explain bacteria gaining resistance to anti-bacterial drugs, etc.) 2) “It’s just a theory”. So is gravity. Get a dictionary. Look it up. Read, absorb, learn, think. Then, if you still have something to say, talk. ID is NOT a theory. Natural Selection IS. So, one is taught in science class, and the other...well, Sunday School would be an excellent venue for that. If you really must put it in a public school, I’d be open to it being discussed in a comparative religion class, theology, philosophy, history of science, debate, creative writing, something like that. 3) “As a matter of fact, statisticians have figured that the belief that adaptations of organisms to changed environmental conditions can be explained by accident alone is nearly impossible.” I just had to quote this chunk from the article. “By accident alone?” I think that there are a number of geneticists who would be able to give this guy several hours of lecture on how what we know of genetics accounts for why there is little random “chance” to mutations being functional. For instance, most of them aren’t. Did you know that somewhere near half of all pregnancies end in miscarriage? Know why? Because the fetus stops developing. Know why? Often because the genes don’t work. The vast majority of organisms conceived die before reproducing. In utero, in infancy, in youth…in part because of maladaptive mutations and/or maladaptive random genetic combinations. Yes, the chance that a particular mutation will be adaptive is so small as to be improbable. Doesn’t mean that’s not the way it happens. Only the organisms with traits that enable them to live until they can reproduce pass on their genes and possible mutations. Hence the term “Natural Selection”. The mutations might be “random”, but the selection is not. It very clearly follows natural processes as described by science. Think of the process of going down the beach to find the perfect skipping stone. The shaping of the stones is due to “random” factors, the selection of the stone[...]
Why do Christian Evangelicals hate traditional community values so much? Tue, 01 Nov 2005 16:33:12 GMT I always thought my mom was weird. She didn’t like Halloween. We didn’t really get to do things up big for Halloween…but even my mom knew that a certain level of Halloween-y festivity was required. I loved Halloween. I never got candy as a kid, but on Halloween there was so much candy flying around that some of it made it through the chinks in the healthy armor my mom kept locked in place around us. My over-active imagination felt starved year around in the sea of staunchly stoic and placid Nordic Lutheran practicality in which I was stranded…but on Halloween, even the most pedestrian mentalities seemed to loosen up. Even more, the dark, scary unseen things that we secretly feared walked openly and sometimes arrayed themselves in extravagant detail…and revealed themselves as by turns beautiful, cute, funny, and even slightly ridiculous. When we lived in North St. Paul, we dressed up Adventure Boy in his little costumes, and took to the crowded streets, trying desperately to figure out which of the teeming masses were which of our friends and neighbors. We’d exclaim over the cuteness of the children, their ability to act out the characters and look the parts, oooh and ahhh over the workmanship and detail or creativity of home-made costumes… I seem to remember Halloween as a time when the rules were reversed, and kids got to enjoy the experience of just once a year, living in a world of magic, danger, and being able to engage in extortion while pretending to be someone completely different from ourselves, and surfing a seemingly unending sugar high. We understood it was just one night. We knew we had to eat our vegetables and clean our plates, and say “please and thank you”, and not ask for anything that we might want because it’s rude the other 364 days out of the year. But that one night we got a nod and a wink and even chuckles and pats on the head while the rules went out the window. We understood that this was one night when just about anything could happen, and the rest of the community (ie, those cranky adults who grumbled and bitched about us all the rest of the year) made it happen for us. I don’t know about the rest of you…but it was a special time for me, and one that my life would have been infinitely poorer without. It connected me to my community the way civics lessons and scout meetings and church-youth-group public service projects never could. It was the connection of conspiracy. Of sharing a secret. It was the connection of t[...]
Anomalous Data, Rum, and Boy Trouble. Tue, 27 Sep 2005 15:46:26 GMT A while back I was out with a couple of friends to see Jess and Zeb. They’re a swell couple of kids. Go check out their website, and go see them at one of their venues if you get the chance. And no, despite their on-stage chemistry they are not dating. At least, that’s what they say. Anyway, we were at Keegan’s Irish Pub (Irish pubs are a thing with us, esp. if they show rugby games), and visiting between sets. I’d missed dinner, and I’d had a few strong drinks, as I am wont to do now that I have cut my unhealthy habits down to alcohol, coffee and endorphins. Oh, and the occasional bout of passive-aggressive whining…but that’s cultural, so it’s OK. As I was saying, I’d had a couple of strong drinks, so when one of the women, lets call her Jenny, made some obsessive comment about the meaning of some isolated action or statement made by some guy I was not exactly in a position to be brain-to-mouth-filter girl. I said something like “Don’t you read my blog? Anomalous Data? Hello? Know what it means? It means…one data point all by itself…no meaning. You can’t draw conclusions from it. You can’t predict future behavior with it. You can’t correlate it to anything. It just exists with no context and therefore no meaning.” Blank stares. Maybe a hint of panic…liberally salted with confusion. Either that, or it was the look of rats who have just realized they are about to the trapped in a bombastic and drunken lecture about elementary statistical analysis. Hard to say. I grabbed for a lifeline, and came up with a handful of paper napkin and a pen. Good enough. “Look”, I said, closing one eye and making a precise stab at the napkin with the pen, “One point, or one event, if you will. Means nothing.” (note to self using the phrase “if you will” when slurring drunk sounds even more pretentious and than it does when you’re stone sober). I make another careful stab at the napkin, and then draw a line between somewhere fairly close to the first point to somewhere understandably divergent from the second point. It’s meant to go from one to the other, and I think they see that. “Two points. There’s a line.” I declare triumphantly. They give me the encouraging looks one usually reserves [...]
The three but rule. Mon, 26 Sep 2005 17:52:50 GMT I’ve recently been given cause to think about something I’ve learned over the years. I have come to call it “The three but rule”. Let me explain. In any given situation, there is a decision-maker. Whether it be in a family, work, school, situation or whatever. Sometimes the decision maker is one person, sometimes it’s a multi-person team, or sometimes it’s a Democratic process…but whatever the form…there is a certain process whereby decisions get made for multiple people. And sometimes the people the decisions are made for don’t like the decisions, and they want to express their objections. A good decision-maker will give them a reasonable opportunity to do so. For instance, a salesman might not like having to wear a suit. So he might say to the person who made the suit rule; “But, I sell farm equipment. Farmers see a suit coming and they lose all respect for the person. They think of them as a city-slicker who has no idea what farmers need. It would be better if I wore something more casual”. If the boss doesn’t buy it, he might go on with; “But suits only look good when they are clean and tidy looking. My suit ends up looking dusty and gets animal hair on it, and I end up looking scruffier than if I was just in regular clothes that can be washed every day.” The boss still likes his salesmen to wear suits. “But I can’t afford to keep the suit clean looking. Dry cleaning is expensive.” Now, in general, and with some notable exceptions that I don’t want to get into right now; If the boss still persists in making him wear a suit, at this point the salesman should either: 1) Drop it and move ahead with the suit decision, making the best of it that he can. 2) Leave this employer and find a job he can work with. 3) Found his own equipment sales business and run it the way he wants. I believe in the three but rule as a general rule of thumb. If I object to something, I try to lead with my strongest three reasons…and when they are exhausted, I try to remember to look at my other options rather than wasting my time and energy, and the time and energy of everyone around [...]
Double think: The new national pastime Thu, 08 Sep 2005 15:33:20 GMT Article describing how 3 people were expelled from a Social Security event because they arrived in a car sporting a “No blood for Oil” bumper sticker. They were expelled despite claims that they had not been in anyway disruptive…claims the White House does not dispute. What I found interesting was this quote: "If someone is coming to an event to disrupt it, they are going to be asked to leave," McClellan said. So, to summarize the argument of the White House and it’s supporters: You should be able to hold a rally or whatever with like-minded people and promote your ideas of what is good and right in the world without disruptive, intrusive, rude people coming in and getting in your face with bumper stickers and tee-shirts that disagree with you and are offensive to you…right? You should be able to evict anyone from an event you’ve planned for you and your kind just because they have come there to disagree with you…right? Presumably…and stop me if I’m way off base in this assumption…the religious right agrees that the president should be able to throw dissenters out of public events because they came there just to demonstrate their disagreement with the purpose of the event…and further, that it’s not over the top to threaten them with arrest and criminal charges as happened at this event and others like it around the country. Let me make this clear. These people were threatened with arrest if they didn’t leave the event because a bumper sticker on their car, which was parked outside the event, was interpreted as being against the president…on a topic that wasn’t even under discussion at the event in question. So. Here we have an article complaining about how wrong it is to single out “Christians” for “persecution” just because they want to charge into the center of a crowd at a public event being held to assert gay rights. All they wanted to do was go into the middle of this crowd of people with signs depicting the flames of hell and bullhorns to scream about how they are all going to hell. Beyond that, they are indignant that these “Christians” were arrested, charged and tried with incitement to riot and other civil disturbance charges just because they went into a crowd of people from a persecuted minority and deliberately confronted them with messages that were insulting, hateful, condemning and intolerant. Imagine that. Now, you may wonder why I bother with this. And that is a good question. The reason I point this out is that this is emblematic of the fatal flaw of the current state of the conservative mindset. The ability to tolerate vast swaths of contradiction and d[...]
Quote of the Day Sat, 25 Jun 2005 02:44:21 GMT “Shall we then say, like Newton, that all such truths are made arbitrarily by God? Shall we seek such truths in th occult? For if God has laid these rules down arbitrarily, then they are occult by nature. To me, this notion is offensive; it seems to cast God in the role of a capricious despot who desires to hide the truth from us...I like to believe he would have chosen wisely and according to some coherant plan that our minds-insofar as they are in God's image-are capable of understanding. Unlike the Alchemists, who see angels, demons,miracles, and divine essences everywhere, I recognize nothing in the world but bodies and minds...” -- Dr. Leibniz, as portrayed by Neal Stephanson in _Quicksilver_ See? A fictional protrayal of a Natural Philosopher who died sometime shortly after the Age of Elightenment understands me. (image)
We're all stupendous badasses Tue, 14 Jun 2005 16:52:52 GMT Seems to me that a lot of trouble has been caused by defining basic human urges as “bad”. The way I see it, they are inherently neither “bad” nor “good”. They are powerful, and can be expressed in constructive or destructive ways…but they are not inherently good or evil. But because they are powerful and potentially dangerous, some people have neurotic and irrational responses to that power. Fear, denial, repression, avoidance, etc. Others make rational, considered, and thoughtful decisions based on their unique physiological hard-wiring, life experience, and training. Let’s take the predatory urge. As far as I know, most people have it somewhere. For some it is strong, and for some it’s barely perceptible. Some people are hunters, and some are more the gatherer type…but most of us eat meat. For most of us, meat tastes good. It provides essential nourishment. Americans tend to eat prodigious amounts of it…because we can. It’s cheap, it’s easy, and it’s clean and the gatherers can just pick it up from where it’s laying around in the meat department of your local grocery. They don’t have to see the stockyards and smell the blood and fear and hear the noise, and see the animals die. It’s just like picking fruit or digging up roots. Calm, clean, peaceful. Hey, good for them. They get all the benefits of predation without the muss and fuss. For some, that’s not good enough. They make the decision to not be responsible for the deaths of animals…and/or are appalled by the slaughter and mistreatment of animals in the huge factory farms. So they go vegan and animal-product free. Once again, good for them. They have assessed their values and made a moral choice for themselves, as is their God-given right as expressed by the constitution. Some people feel that, if you’re going to be responsible for the death of another creature, it’s preferable to kill it yourself. So they hunt the animals, where the odds are a little more even (talk all you want about guns making it unfair…most of the time, the deer see/hear/smell the hunters before the hunters even know the deer are there…beyond that, shooting a deer on the run is not easy at all. I don’t even attempt it.) A good hunter takes comfort in the animal’s quality of life before they are killed for food, and does not risk causing undue suffering. They als[...]
Callin' 'em as I see 'em. Tue, 31 May 2005 23:35:55 GMT Everyone lives a different life from everyone else. Everyone learns different lessons different ways, and interprets those lessons through a filter that is partly formed of genetic hard-wiring and environmental programming. Therefore, everyone looks at things and thinks of things differently…sees them in a slightly different way. They literally live in their own world of sensory input and interpretive process. This is the basis for “everyone is entitled to their own opinion” and “everyone’s viewpoint is equally valid”. And these statements are true…to a point. The point they stop being true is when a person’s opinion or viewpoint or model of the world is demonstrably not working. Does it pass the reality test? Can that person apply their model of the world to their problems and come out with a favorable result? If not, does their model of the world have rules for how it can be changed to accommodate new information and the need to practically apply it to the world and get favorable results? There are people for whom that answer is simply…”no”. And yet, they persist in forging ahead with their blinders firmly attached, and a chip on their shoulder that the whole world is so damned unreasonable. If you point out to them the things they think and do that are the root of their difficulties, they will snarl about you being “intolerant”, and “ignorant” or “being elitist” or whatever. They may even form a cultural glory around stories of persecution and subjugation they suffer on behalf of their ideas…setting themselves up as martyrs for a lost but true and noble cause. No, dude, your doing stuff that just simply doesn’t work. And you keep doing it and expect a different result. That’s crazy. It’s not elitist to learn from your mistakes. One way to test if you suffer from this problem is to look and see if your life repeats the same unpleasant patterns over and over again. Is there a theme to the stuff that happens to you? Do you find yourself consistently thinking that the whole world has to change in order for you to exist in it harmoniously? There might be a hint there. Let’s take fundamentalists for an example. I like the Christian kind myself, but any fundamentalist will do. The persistent theme of fundamentalism is that there was a time[...] |
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