Cut & Run

Alberto Gonzales' resignation speech was quick and out the door.

And The Winner Is?

If first place is a $50,000 scholarship to Liberty University, is second place a $100,000 scholarship there?

It's the same old crap. Creationists saying that evolution is the root of all evil. That notion comes from the religious superstition that if you don't believe in god you are evil and brutal and a thief and a liar etc.. I've heard more than one preacher claim that they would be a thief a liar a cheat and worse if it were not for their belief in jeebus. They are dangerous people spreading dangerous thinking. Those who make the claims that evil arises from non-belief are guilty of one of the most horrid forms of intimidation meant to cause others to fear them and to hope for their own safety. It is a despicable way of threatening others. They are broadcasting that they are murderous people and if you do not believe in their myth, they will destroy you. They are not subtle or civil.

Fear & Denial

The President's aids do not want him to see dissenters. Could it be that he is not allowed to see anything they don't want him to? I can think of another 50 questions about who is controlling him and what are they up too. None of which are comforting and the answers would probably be terrifying.

Then there are conservative congress persons who seem to be behind the same kind of firewall.

Science Fiction, Fantasy

I've long had disdain for science fiction, fantasy and most special FX not just for reasons being discussed here but also because it sets people up for bad thinking and acceptance of lots of dangerous crap and protects faith based fantasies from even ordinary scrutiny that we should freely do among ourselves every day.

The Endarkenment

The Kind Of People They Are

Intolerance is a beautiful thing…There are people that are politically correct that want to say the cardinal sin of the hour is intolerance and I think that is a bunch of junk.

[Randall Terry, Operation Rescue]

Santa Clause, Peter Pan, Astrology, Woo

Neil Spencer, a so-called "Astrologer", is complaining about Richard Dawkins because he thinks Dawkins unfairly lumps astrology with religion in his many books and writtings. Of course Spencer winds up making the connection even stronger and more obvious when he writes:

Few things arouse the indignation of science's hard hats like non-conventional approaches to healing. Homeopathy and acupuncture are particularly repellent since they work through mechanisms unknown to the laws of physics.

They do not "work", none of them. One of countless examples of their horrid ignorance is that even the almighty Abrahamic God didn't know that simply boiling bad water saves countless lives. After many paragraphs of mumbo-jumbo in the article, Spencer remains so dense that he is oblivious to the core truth and that is that astrology (and it's fellow mythes) know nothing and they have proven over and over again to be unable to affect anything, describe anything or predict anything that turns out to be real. They make their claims but have no proof and only require that the followers suspend the requirement of results and "believe". Anyone can become an astrologer by just claiming to be one. According to Peter Pan we can all fly by just thinking we can. Santa is child abuse... All superstitions are deadly for the same reason. Promoting them should be a capital crime. They in turn say that atheism is a religion. That is like saying everyone not infected with leprosy has a disease.

Founding Father

During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution.

James Madison

Crime, What Crime?

I think this article by Glenn C. Loury misses some very important points and skews some others but we have a Big problem with crime. That problem is that our prison systems are becoming the biggest source of criminals.

We should remember this the next time we think we should have more cops or think it is a good idea when a politician says we need more jails.

...the United States—with five percent of the world’s population—houses 25 percent of the world’s inmates. Our incarceration rate (714 per 100,000 residents) is almost 40 percent greater than those of our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). Other industrial democracies, even those with significant crime problems of their own, are much less punitive: our incarceration rate is 6.2 times that of Canada, 7.8 times that of France, and 12.3 times that of Japan. We have a corrections sector that employs more Americans than the combined work forces of General Motors, Ford, and Wal-Mart, the three largest corporate employers in the country, and we are spending some $200 billion annually on law enforcement and corrections at all levels of government, a fourfold increase (in constant dollars) over the past quarter century.

Estimates of the share of the 1990s reduction in violent crime that can be attributed to the prison boom range from five percent to 25 percent. Whatever the number, analysts of all political stripes now agree that we have long ago entered the zone of diminishing returns. The conservative scholar John DiIulio, who coined the term “super-predator” in the early 1990s, was by the end of that decade declaring in The Wall Street Journal that “Two Million Prisoners Are Enough.” But there was no political movement for getting America out of the mass-incarceration business. The throttle was stuck. There's much more here>>>

But Loury, when he looks at reasons for the decline in crime instead of the bloodbath he and others predicted, conveniently avoids mentioning the link between legalized abortion and the fall of crime rates after the nineties. The key thing we should come away with from this article is that we, as a society, will have an even bigger crime rate when the coming wave of prison releases happen unless we drastically change the way we treat people in prison, treat them when they get out and the way we hold the big business of prison/politics responsible and accountable.

With the recent revelations of abuse and horror perpetrated in the Texas Youth Commission prisons, [lots more that Fox like news will never mention here] we should see that many of the so called corrections people we have today spend some time in their own soup. We must address the reasons for crime. It is much harder than just putting everyone behind bars and requires attention spans longer than this blog. But if we don't do it and keep doing it, the biggest terror threat by far to you, me and this nation will come from our very own training camps run by our very own cops.

In Just One Spec Of Sky: Countless Galaxies

What I Said

Ethanol is a feel-good word used by lots of people to ward off having to think about the oil problem. It has been about a generation since we drove 55 and tried to make our trips count to save gas. Some even bought cars based at least in part on fuel economy. It was patriotic. Blind consumption now seems to be the predominant mind set that is considered patriotic. After all, Jebus is going to come back and save us all so we can all live big. Well it ain't so and here's the best article I've seen in a long while about the mess and particularly how we are being swindled by the e word.

The story goes:

Midwest farmers will get rich, the air will be cleaner, the planet will be cooler, and, best of all, we can tell those greedy sheiks to fuck off. As the king of ethanol hype, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, put it recently, "Everything about ethanol is good, good, good."

This is not just hype -- it's dangerous, delusional bullshit. Ethanol doesn't burn cleaner than gasoline, nor is it cheaper. Our current ethanol production represents only 3.5 percent of our gasoline consumption -- yet it consumes twenty percent of the entire U.S. corn crop, causing the price of corn to double in the last two years and raising the threat of hunger in the Third World. And the increasing acreage devoted to corn for ethanol means less land for other staple crops, giving farmers in South America an incentive to carve fields out of tropical forests that help to cool the planet and stave off global warming.

Go read then cut back on everything>>>