So what? I still haven’t upgraded the Ol Shifty Wordpress to 2.5… Why do they have to keep bugging me about it? As someone whose computer is elderly and getting worse, I have a natural inclination to avoid upgrading anything. But I have already upgraded two of my blogs, so where do I turn off this “Please update now” message?

But more to the point. I finally finished “Christians and the Fall of Rome”. It is another in the wonderful “Great Ideas” series of pamphlets from Penguin Books. It is just a 90 page excerpt from Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It may be the piece that finally gets me to read the entire work. It is a witty and scathing attack on faith and religion, but phrased in a way that it doesn’t come across so much as an attack as just a rational report on how people behave.

It is filled with great lines, such as:

A state of scepticism and suspense may amuse a few inquisitive minds. But the practice of superstition is so congenial to the multitude, that if they are forcibly awakened, they will regret the loss of their pleasing vision.”

and then

So urgent on the vulgar is the necessity of believing, that the fall of any system of mythology will most probably be superseded by the introduction of some other mode of superstition.”

Anyway as someone who, well… I’m somewhat opposed to the usage of the word atheist, as I think that religious folks should be the ones who are singled out with a label, but whatever, anyway.

I’ve never once understood religion or faith, except and something to make naive people feel better… comforted or something (the same way that druggies like to think that their lame delusions are “reality”)… And as such I’ve never felt the urge to read any Atheist literature. And I still don’t, as a general rule… But/so the recent readings of Robert Ingersoll (read about them here at penguindevil) and Edward Gibbon have seemed wonderfully refreshing.

Though I haven’t really settled one way or another between Obama and Clinton (not that it matters, I’ll vote for whichever gets the nod), the tide keeps turning me more towards supporting Obama. This newest dumb flap about the “behind closed doors” comments he made about “bitter voters” really just takes the cake. The eternal facade about politicians understanding “middle America” is so tiring. I doubt that any national career politician (except for Jimmy Carter) has really had much understanding of, or at least respect for and interest in “middle America”. For McCain and Clinton to come down on Obama  for being honest is  lame irritating and  quite telling. It really does point out that, at least for the present, Obama  actually is an outside voice. Someone who is willing (or more willing, at least) to express and stand by the honest truth.

Clinton and McCain both know darned well that his comments are true. People are bitter and feel a loss of control and people do flock towards more localized and personal concepts (recreation, entertainment, religion), when they feel disconnect or at the whim of bigger issues.

And I realize that it is standard politics to through anything back at someone that might be harmful to them, even if it makes one a hypocrite, but it is still annoying and I think that this issue puts me firmly into the Obama camp.

It’s rare that something makes me take the side of big business, especially take the side of the music business, as I don’t support the merger of many business into just a few conglomerates and I don’t support the homogenization of the music business into just a few mainstream artists. But one things that always lends my support to just about any business and their profits is hearing tales of that great America destroyer, Wal-Mart. Ever since watching that documentary from a few years ago that showed how Wal-Mart, in their drive for their own personal success uses their market position to force manufacturers to lower their prices so much that they can lose money and even go out of business, I have felt the hope that something would be done.

At this stage in Wal-Mart’s success (and how half of the US population seems to have sold their souls and communities to them), it seems that the only way Ito save American culture, businesses and business communities from this blight is for the major industries to band together and refuse to do business with Wal-Mart! What brings this on? Well today good ol Slashdot directed my attention to an article at Rolling Stone called Wal-Mart Wants $10 CD’s. This article describes how Wal-Mart is pressuring labels to lower the price on their CD’s to them. While this sounds like a good thing, it is a great example to point out the problems of Wal-Mart… The ones that stick out from this issues seem to be:

1) The cheaper that Wal-Mart drives their own costs down, the harder it will be for other retailers to compete, hence continuing the drive toward eliminating small businesses and lessening the variety of our culture.

2) The article states that while the average Tower stocked 60,000 different titles, Wal-Mart stocks 5,000. With Wal-Mart becoming the place that most people go for music, this is a terrible blow to musicians, fans, creativity, art and the future evolution of music… Not to say the terrible effect it could have on our culture

3) If the label’s need to lower their prices, they will need to lower their costs, which will affect the American economy. Whatever manufacturing and design that still takes place here will be driven overseas and, of course, the artists themselves will be the first to see their royalties diminished.

4) Wal-Mart is also know for having a specific and rigid moral standards. Their reputation for censoring the movies and music that they sell, and their unwillingness to sell music that they don’t approve of, may work fine for the corner christian music shop, but on this kind of national scale it is unacceptable.

On the bright side though, maybe a good portion of the population will continue to ignore Wal-Mart and to buy what they want where they want and will realize that sometimes, it is better to spend a bit more money to have a richer reality and a strong community. But with how much Wal-Mart keeps getting bigger and with seeing first hand communities who have had their small businesses shut down by their neighbors who would rather saving a little money than support their community, I don’t know how much hope I have for the population to do their part. It seems like some people have an obsessive drive for cultural homogenization.

There sometimes seems to be a desperate need for Creationists to support their beliefs, regardless of reality. I never thought much about the why of it, but I got a nice little glimpse today. Watching a mocumentary on the south winning the civil war, C.S.A: the Confederate States of America, something occurred to me. If one is not a creationist, one has really no argument for racism or racial purity. If people weren’t just created out of the blue as pure as they are now, then they all must have come from somewhere and as they are too similar to have just coincidentally appeared around the world at about the same time, that leads to the idea that they maybe came from the same place. This pointing to some common origin doesn’t say much for any kind of “god created whitey to rule the world” ideas.

I guess that part of the clinging to these old “creation” myths and lies is that these people get so much strength and security from their racial superiority that any kind of notion that the whole idea of “races” is just a bunch of B.S. would leave them with nothing but their own thoughts and actions to judge themselves on… Which we know how much these folks dislike that.

Not to get snippy, it seems as if a philosophy that is terrible and unsavory on its own (creationism), is also being used specifically to advance even more terrible philosophies (racism). The bad begets the badder, I suppose.

After watching crap like what they showed on the news today, I can’t help but think mean thoughts. They showed some, um “Super-creationists” as they toured through some kind of natural history museum. These folks are the completely dumb style of creationist. Saying things like: the world was created in 7 regular days, 6000 years ago and the humans walked around with the dinosaurs, and Adam and Eve and all that crap. I feel sorry for those kids, as their parents are engaging in what can best be called intentional mental retardation and when they grow up, a good chunk of them are going to be wrecked trying to fit the crap they were raised to swallow into some kind of actual reality.

I find it a bit disturbing that they would even go to a museum. Museums are warehouses for science, which is using mental ability, observation and experimentation to build on past experience and learn more about the universe around us. This kind of religion is to take some totally ridiculous story made up thousands of years ago by people who had next to no knowledge of the universe (and who have since made habit of killing and silencing people who actually tried to learn how things really were) and were trying to find rules to give them control over their peoples behavior. As people expand their knowledge through logical means, these folks do the opposite. Scientifically, people try to learn more and more about the universe while these kinds of religious folks try to learn nothing new and continually reinterpret their same old wrong information to make allowances for what we are learning through science… Futilely, in my humble opinion. The notion that humans have existed for 6000 years is ludicrous (especially, I would imagine, to all of the people who existed before then) and trying to maintain that delusion as reality infringed upon it is sad. I find it mortifying that some of them claim that humans and dinosaurs co-existed, even though they admit (at least in this show they did), that the lack of evidence of that is something that they are aware of.

I find it terribly insulting that they would even go to a museum to spew their crap. It would be like having a bunch of scientists coming into a church and making an study of the information in the bible. Never the twine shall meet, and hopefully, they will stay far, far apart… The most troublesome aspect of these people isn’t just their nutty beliefs. But that they seem to feel like they study it and know it all, but if they were to study their biblical crap in the context of anything other than the bible, then it would be so obviously naive that they wouldn’t even be able to claim it anymore… And to make matters worse, one of the Super-creationist-intelligent-designers-whatever was shown stating that “Jesus created everything”… Jesus? So he wasn’t born to Mary during the time of Rome? I thought that “god” had created it all, not his son. Man, do I need a biblical history lesson or what? For those timelines don’t seem to make sense. Especially for people who seem to take timelines so literally as to date the world by some paragraphs of genealogy in the Old Testament…

The most frustrating component of this kind of faith is that while science is of the “we believe what the evidence shows us and what we can attempt to prove” some of these religious folks say that all this contrary evidence is planted by god to test their faith. Is is a horrible thing (and makes me question my excessively wide faith in humanity) that people can be so intentionally obtuse. To say that we believe something that, by intention, cannot be proven… That is a very dangerous notion that, in all honestly, gives people the “freedom” to believe anything that isn’t true. I wonder where they draw the line between determining which unevidenced and unprovable things are to be believed?

Lewis Wolpert certainly has it right with that sentiment, which I pulled form an interesting article at arstechnica regarding the difficulties of teaching science in a world were people are so focus by their personal beliefs… Titled “Communicating good science to a polarized US public”, it objectively looks at multiple opinions, from both the secular and The Others, of the relation between science and ones personal beliefs.

There are some very good points made, as in the following criteria which, while it may make people feel better, is a bit ridiculous as a way to determine reality

This discrepancy, Miller suggested, is the result of a deep discomfort with the fact that evolution is grounded in the random occurrence of mutations. Fundamentally, people don’t want to think they were the product of a chain of accidents. Miller also played a video clip of former senator Rick Santorum, who argued that this randomness made no moral demands of people, suggesting that evolution could allow them to take an “anything goes” approach to social contracts.

And another good example is the following:

The “New Atheists,” such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, have claimed to apply scientific standards such as objective empirical evidence to religious issues and, using this as a standard for reason, have found religious beliefs to be unreasonable. Whether this is an appropriate use of scientific logic is irrelevant to Nisbet; instead, he focuses on the fact that the new atheists aren’t going along with non-conflict framing, and he argues they are harming science in the process

As the author states, “So long as speakers distinguish their beliefs from the scientific process, nobody should be discouraged from discussing a topic because it conflicts with a public relations agenda.”. This is, I think, the key. Yes, desperate people may argue the “science as religion” complaint. But it is generally quite invalid as something like religion can’t really be compared to something that is developed through trial, error and experimentation.

I also strongly support this notion “the anthropologist Barbara King argued for a simpler approach: keep personal beliefs personal. From her perspective, religious beliefs are about as relevant to scientific data and models as are political leanings and sexual orientation. Given that they shouldn’t influence the science, they’re best kept out of any presentation of scientific knowledge”

Communicating Science

In a conversation at work today, I had to get into my “the US wants Israel there because they want to start a war, since they’re waiting/hoping for Armageddon” mode. Of course, one of my favorite subjects for loathing/complaints, for many reasons. I remember reading some quote from GHW Bush once that I thought implied that he believed such crap. Once again, yet another reason why religion is a plague that must be removed! Okay, maybe it’s a bit excessive to blame this stuff on all religion. But if you, like me, don’t at all comprehend religious tolerance or sects that are not orthodox, then we may as well just lump them all together. While I couldn’t find whatever quote is was that I was thinking of, I did find some interesting stuff… Looking around online, there are some interesting websites These are both quite uplifting…

A story on Alternet called Lobbying for Armageddon and from there I connected to a story about some evil/crazy/nut/lunatic/moron named John Hagee in the fittingly titled TV Evangelist John Hagee Wants War With Iran, and He Wants It Now!

Read them and weep, and know thine enemy. As Nomeansno say, “If every fourth animal in the world is a beetle, maybe every fourth person is a DUMB FUCK”.

Yes, another cop-out headline from our local daily, the always vapid “Oregonian”. This time it was “Al Qaeda trains kids to Kidnap, Kill”! Well, yes, all governments (and similar groups) train young people to kidnap and kill. That’s what foreign affairs and national security are all about. Threatening others with death. It is so prevalent throughout our history that I would assume that everyone knows that “everyone does it” and would stop thinking that you could judge the enemy for it. Yes, a lot of forces use people younger than we would, but using the young and ignorant as cannon fodder is wrong regardless of how young they are. But the three great plagues that feed off of us: Nationalism, religion, and business, don’t care about age. In fact, they all try to start indoctrinating us as young as possible. Religion has always enlisted the young and now that they are prey to business by way of advertisements and products aimed at them at young and younger ages, well, why not have them suffer and inflict the horrors of nationalism?

More to the point, the Oregonian seems almost thoughtless in its dull repetition of hollow news. Todays headline is one point, attempted fear-mongering with so little meat on its bones that I doubt anyone will bother to read whatever kind of one-sided hogwash they’ve thrown together (including, of course, me). But I am reminded of another recent “story”. Last year, somewhere in the midwest, a bridge collapsed. The next day, the Oregonian headline was something akin to “Are our bridges safe”. They don’t actually pay people to put such drivel on there, do they? As they use to say back when Bob Packwood was news, “if it matters to Oregonians, it’s in the Washington Post”. Plus, bar none, they have the worst newspaper website that I have ever seen. Terrible to navigate and virtually no connection to the content that is actually in the paper. But I suppose that is a minor issue.

Honestly, if one wants to read a newspaper with actual objective and relevant news, it seems that we are still stuck with naught but The Christian Science Monitor.

Even if the underdogs ran away with the handful of rings, I still don’t see this years Superbowl as all that important an event. But today though, well, this election season in general. Either Hillary or Obama are going to be the democratic presidential candidate which is rather shocking, either way. It’s a great thrill and relief to me that the people who are probably the two most likely to become our next president (barring anymore Diebold machines being used out there) include no white males. I figure after two hundred and thirty years of the White Male House, it is certainly time for a change. Though I am thrilled with both of their candidacies, as politicians, I’m not sure which I would vote for. There is something in me, after all these Bush years, who wants a clean sweep, a new spirit to get in and try to shake things up. But on the other hand, after things getting so messed up over the years, the voice of experience  also speaks to me. Since I’m not a democrat, I don’t have to choose between them, so it’s only so relevant, but I will be curious to see how it goes, being such a close race so far.

On the other side of the fence, I even consider McCain to be good news. Romney looks creepy, Gulianne is a selfish fascist and Huckabee, aside from not having a presidential name and not looking like a president,  is a crazy religious nut! Which is sort of a good thing, because he is very upfront about his “beliefs”… While some crazies down south will swoon over his creationist, pro-life, god-boy gibberish, I think that the majority of the country will be creeped out by it. As I translate the separation of church and state, only atheists should be in government. But certainly, no one who makes public statements supporting religion while in a political arena should even be able to be elected to anything but local church bingo coordinator. McCain? Sure he’s a conservative, war-pig republican, but he also seems to be a (comparatively)  honest conservative fellow, who doesn’t seem to be saddled with the fascist/baptist dogma that all those others spew about.

I feel confident that we’ll have a democrat up next, which is good. Sadly it won’t be Mike Gravel, but it’s better then the crap we’ve had for 20 of the last 28 years. What we really need to do is get rid of both those parties. A political system controlled by two parties who, with the blessing of the government,  conspire to prevent any other party from having any success is a disgrace to the notion of democracy, even such a weak one as ours.

Not that it is surprising, as people allow themselves to be robbed of experiences that reflect “real” reality, reports show that people are losing interest in being outdoors! Earthlink has a little news tidbit, Nature Giving Way to Virtual Reality from an AP release about some Nature Conservancy research that shows that outdoor recreation has been declining over the last quarter century. Now while this, of course, sounds like a good thing, as the outdoor recreation of humanity isn’t exactly good for the outdoors… I think we know that as people have less interest in going “out there” they will also have less interest in paying for “out there” to still be there.

“As people spend more time communing with their televisions and computers, the impact is not just on their health, researchers say.”

“The replacement of vigorous outdoor activities by sedentary, indoor videophilia has far-reaching consequences for physical and mental health, especially in children,” Pergams said in a statement. “Videophilia has been shown to be a cause of obesity, lack of socialization, attention disorders and poor academic performance.”

“By studying visits to national and state park and the issuance of hunting and fishing licenses the researchers documented declines of between 18 percent and 25 percent in various types of outdoor recreation.”

As always seems to happen, the one positive aspect that I imagine would be found in these news stories, never actually seems to be the case… Due to the fact that no TV show or video game can really match the visceral thrill of killing something and holding its bloody and limp corpse in your hand, the study also found that “While fishing declined, hunting held onto most of its market.”