Yes, I too am sicker than sick of all these folks who’ve moved into my hometown and, rather than embrace it for what it was, have forcibly molded it into a strange, sickening and unnatural creature. Filled with condos, boutiques, arm dogs, and arrogant snooties that were never a real part of this quiet and poor little town. Under the umbrella of anything is good as long as it: looks hip, wastes government money and slowly wears down whatever positive regulations and ways we had established. People are chomping at the bit to get rid of the urban growth boundary, they obviously don’t understand what a “deposit” bottle is, and they think that buses are for the dregs of society so if they can’t have infrastructure sapping lightrail/streetcar lines all over the place, then they’ll just drive their cars (drive like complete a-holes, I might add), and ride bicycles in a fashion that almost makes me embarrassed to have been a full-time cyclist around here for 15 years… And I just feel that one of these days some of these jerks are going to start thinking that they should be able to privately own the beaches.

Of course, when our wonderfully cheap abodes started going up at 20%+ a year (due to people realizing how horrid they had made California so they thought they would buy out the naive locals and spread the sprawl up here), the easy living withered away and it was obvious that something horrible was about to happen. But now, fifteen years later? I never would have imagined houses costing four times as much (or more, much, much more), than they did then, all the nice old apartments being converted into condos, the wasteland of sterile and shallow pretension that is the Pearl district. And the population booming to such an extent that native Portlanders are less than half of the population. As this wears away our old ways, it has some bad effects. Yes, aside from having to put up with these people everywhere and not being able to easily afford to live anywhere anymore… The thing that first got people starting to talk about Portland was building the bus mall downtown and banning cars from most of it. Such a anti-car and pro-mass transit and pedestrian development was widely hailed. Now, after all those years and all that effort, they are spending vast sums of money to add lightrail to the buses on the mall (as most of the “new Portlander’s are too fancy for the bus) and cars! It really ticks me off and it a terrible step back to the bad, pro-car (pro-pollution, pro-traffic and anti-people) planning of the sixties. Then this week I’ve been noticing that (downtown even) they are adding “pedestrian crossing buttons” to the streetlights downtown. So now we won’t even have the right to cross the street unless we get there before the cars going in our direction start moving so that we can hit the button. No more “a greenlight brings a walk signal that means that all traffic going that direction can move”. Now a green light means cars can go. People can go, if they happen to get there in time to hit the button.

It’s a terribly anti-pedestrian (and anti-people, as all of us are pedestrians sometimes, though only a lucky few of us are pedestrians all of the time), and I find it all to be a rude insult and a slap in the face to Portland. Honestly, I know there is no stopping this deluge now (short of my long wished for complete recession), so all I want to do is get the hell out of here and never come back (going to some quiet little place that I won’t change anything about), and have these people change the name of this damned city!

I blame most of it on Vera Katz, and her “hollow out the coffers and strip the services if we can spend the money on something that looks good in magazines instead” policies. But too late to worry about that. And yes, I say to hell with progress. Sure it generates more money, but all that does is require more money and it’s a dumb worldview that just spirals to everything costing more and making more and producing more and it just makes everything worse, drives people into debt and filled the world with landfills filled with garbage that no one needed anyway.

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But I just can’t get behind Obama. Well, I haven’t tried too, either. I am still stuck on Nader or or Gravel or maybe even Kucinich (except that apartment by mine with the stupid “Kuchinich, the eyes that see through the lies” poster in the window irritates me to no end).

Certainly, I would rather have Obama than Mccain or some other blatant fascists, as I would rather have had Clinton. But both parties are uninterested in presenting an actually meaningful candidate. Yes, both Clinton and Obama are meaningful in the sense of what they imply about the improving lot of women and minorities in this country, but politically? Certainly not. Dean was the only decent candidate who both would have made a serious impact and who also had a chance of getting the nomination since Jimmy Carter first rolled on the scene. I could hardly believe that the Republicrat machine put Kerry and Gore up as candidates… Gore especially, the democrats Quayle.

Luckily the candidate that they put up on the other side was such an obvious bad choice that he hadn’t a chance in hell of winning… Sad that Justice and the Democrats opted to let the Republicans get away with the theft of office… Twice! Another sign that the Demo’s don’t want to do anything that might challenge our little two-party system.

No matter how much the Democrat’s and Republican’s spar at each other, they are two halves of the same coin. Their attempts of them to ridicule and sideline third parties (and to get the media and public too also) are because they are a political version of the christian god and satan ideas. Godboys love to gripe about satan, and satan folks love to gripe about god, but most of them don’t want to be involved in discussions about other beliefs. Why? Because belief systems like that are based on being the only game in town and once people start looking at other systems, the fallacies become too apparent for any thinking adherent to stomach. It’s the same with politics. it’s a mindlessly easy comparison to look at the “good” Democrats and the “bad” Republican’s, but there aren’t that many differences to them, and those differences are more of degree than of content. They are both power oriented, capitalist organs who, while in power, continue to permit corporations to exist in a fashion that was illegal here not that long ago, keep a military supremacy over the world, dictate the policies of foreign nations, maintain profits for the rich, maintain the IRS and the fed’s ability to tax any and everything, maintain the corrupt system of lobbyists, and repressive “justice and education” systems that make things worse, work to support and spread the mentally and culturally sapping powers of the mass media, etc.

If the press or public started to give more attention to socialism, or greens or libertarians or whomever, then they people would be able to actually judge these politicians objectively rather than by standards that they have created themselves, and some might actually start to say. Hey politicians, why don’t you actually pull our military out of all the countries of the world, why don’t you actually throw out the tax system and reinvent it in a way that is clear and sensible, not garbled by talk and weighed down by mass designed to ensure that only the government can really translate, instead of continually making it more obtuse and manipulated by special interest groups?

Anyway, Democrat/Republican and god/satan. In a country as obsessed with “freedom” as this one, it is shocking how little freedom there is if you want to exist outside of these two control obsessed autocratic systems, who instill fear and ignorance in the people so as to ensure their continued survival and power.

I know that most people out there can’t stand Nader, mainly due to the terribly inaccurate misrepresentation of him by the media and the government, especially around the 2000 election. One statistic that people don’t like to point out is that way more Democrats in Florida voted for Bush than voted for Nader. I don’t see how that puts the blame for Bush’s preidency on Nader… Bush’s victory was just plain fraud, or if you don’t believe those kind of theories, then it was becuase the Democrat’s couldn’t get their own voters behind their chosen candidate. Either way, it certainly has nothing to do with Nader. but both parties will stop at little to demean and misrepresent third party or independent candidates, as they are a threat to the two party powershare of the Democrat and Republican machines.

The more votes Nader gets, the better. The two party system has to go. Anyone who has the moxie to watch “An Unreasonable Man”, will learn a lot about how the republicrats aren’t just the two biggest parties, this country’s government is set up to have those as the only viable parties, and their joint control of the “Official” Presidential debates is just the tip of the problem. There is a lot at stake in keeping it that way. Especially for the corporate interests who are the backbone of the big parties.

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.