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