Another 2 weeks have passed-I’m busy, so no time to do this. Leaving for Cleveland tomorrow for a fast weekend-25th high school reunion.
OK, what’s happened in my exciting life? Like anyone cares but meeee…Blew off the Ren Fair, Erika got a fake Louis Vuitton bag, we walked to a thing at the local park, went to the UUFLB service auction, went to church, hung out with the kids in Long Beach while the women went to lunch, went to a memorial service at UUCLB, worked on a logo and 2 screen designs, fixed Erika’s computer, went to a pain doc and he thinks I have a ruptured lumbar disk. Ouch. Getting ready for the Cleveland trip, visited parents-they’re going on a trip to Africa and are having the Neptune Society handle things if one of them die. I also went to Fry’s and Guitar Center. I started getting the Christmas stuff packed up-Erika’s parents are coming over while I’m gone. Matt had an evaluation-totally normal. Goddamned doctors. Some chick crashed into a light pole outside our complex-she didn’t even try to stop-no skid marks, and the top of her car was like a V-not injured either. Erika said that the cops were looking at each other like, “what’s up with HER…”
I started writing down the news events I wanted to talk about-I was missing things that happened…So, here goes: It looks like the Scopes Monkey trial is back-only in Kansas this time. I just finished reading a book of essays by Stephen Jay Gould, and evolution figures prominently. I read another interesting critique this morning, basically saying that stating that intelligent design/creationism is a hypothesis, evolution is a theory and as such trumps. If the ID folks can provide tests and such that support and predict the evidence, submit their findings to rigorous impartial review over a period of time, then they might be taken seriously by the scientific community. Absent that, and providing unprovable and unsupportable assertions doesn’t even get them in the door. Given the current political and social climate in middle America, all of this is moot. ID and creationism will hoodwink an entire generation of students into thinking that religion is scientific. And they would be wrong. And the people who rammed this down our throats would be culpable for producing students who will go to college and fail biology.
Well, Tony Blair got reelected, by a huge margin. Well, only in his dreams. It was actually a significant loss of seats for Labour, and a minority of people actually voted for Labour. Looks like he will be out sooner rather than later…People were pissed about Iraq, but upbeat about the economy. And there was that nasty smoking gun memo. And the Daily Show was showing clips of people just laying into him. Just a matter of time before a no-confidence vote comes his way.
The FDA has put a policy in place that gays can’t donate sperm anonymously. This is ostensibly because they have a higher rate if HIV infection. Pshaw. Makes no sense-talk to hetero women in equatorial and southern Africa about that. And their HIV infected children. And all their dead friends and relatives. HIV is a scourge that doesn’t respect sexual orientation. It makes more sense to ask about IV drug use and unprotected sexual activity than it is to ask about what gender you like to have sex with. Besides, the people who are most likely to carry HIV are probably going to lie anyways. Seems more like a thinly veiled attempt to start the ostracisation of “unacceptable” groups of people. Just like the gay marriage ban would.
The whole runaway bride story has generated a lot of ink and hot air. Poor girl. The pressure got too much, and the pressure is more now. It’s silly to ask her to repay the search costs-she’s culpable for making a false report in New Mexico, but it’s not like the search was necessary to save her life. I suppose there’s a civil suit there, but not a criminal one… She’s also been the butt of endless jokes and skits. I really feel sorry for her. One of the problems with our media machine-once something like this gets latched onto, it goes into this otherworldly hall of mirrors. The only thing that breaks the mirrors is another story. I suppose there’s an interesting master’s thesis on pop culture or media studies in here somewhere.
On to science. Paleontologists have found a new transitional form dinosaur-one that was a meat eater but was moving towards vegetarianism. This is interesting, especially because I’ve been reading Gould. These sorts of fossils are pretty rare, primarily because the populations involved are pretty small until the new form gets established. Look at the frequency of human transitionals on the way to H.S.S.-we can barely piece the history together, and it only happened in the last 5 million years-these fossils go back 125 M years! The fossil had running legs that meat eaters need, but also has the start of the big plant cooker belly and grinding teeth of plant eaters. Fascinating stuff-especially in contrast to the anti-evolutionary bent of Kansan educators. How do ID proponents explain transitional forms? And the looong timescales?
I was listening to NPR 2 weeks ago-they had an article about recorded eyewitness accounts of the Shoah. I got upset listening to it, and I get upset writing about it now. A British journalist recorded soldier’s recollections of liberating the camps. I don’t know how anyone, anyone can deny the reality of this. Just the tattoos, fer chrissake! The shoes, the skulls, the ruins of the ovens! We can never, never, ever allow this to happen again. The problem is that the genie is out of the bottle. We notice genocide more now. Darfur, Rwanda, Armenia, Bosnia, Russia, Cambodia, on and on and on. But none of these, none, can compare to the methodological, coldly calculated, systematic industrial extermination of Nazi Germany. And it was not just against Jewry. Gays, gypsies, communists, the mentally and physically ill. Anyone who was deemed unfit to be part of the Third Reich was eliminated. I wonder what I would have done if I were there. I pray, pray that I would’ve helped people get out, as I am in the Aryan genotype and probably safe. God and goddess help us all. Yom HaShoah. Go here, too.
Even though it’s SOP in the Congress-this one is pretty irksome. Dickheads put in an amendment in the supplemental budget for Iraq (which should be a main budget line to boot) for federally mandated driver’s license rules. First off, it doesn’t belong there-they put it in because they knew no one would put up a fight. Second, the Feds shouldn’t be involved in this-it’s a states rights thing. Thirdly, it can be viewed as a precursor to a national ID, which is the most troubling aspect of all. Just a matter of time-what with the sunsetting Patriot act stuff coming up-I wonder what will be the trigger this time?
Google was offline for 15 minutes last week. Ouch. Looks like a DNS cache poisoning hack. Could also be their new accelerator product overloaded the system. And they got overshadowed by Tiger’s debut as well.
OK-one last one-save the rest for next week. A Baptist pastor threw out 9 Democrats for being Democrats and voting for Kerry-he’d been preaching this anti-liberal hate-spew for months, and it finally came to a head. Forty other parishioners quit in sympathy. This was going over the line, and a few days later he was forced out too. Thank Goddess for small miracles. The real issue here is much, much bigger than one bitty church in North Carolina. It’s the infiltration of political intolerance into the fabric of mainstream Christian religion. And by extension into the fabric of our culture. Not sure if this is an early salvo, but it really didn’t go well for the zealots. We’ll see-this may take some doing for them-they’ve gotten into the GOP machine, and the halls of power, but there are enough people on the other side that the next step may be difficult unless something bad happens to make the screws tighten. As always, it’s the Martin Niemoller poem that comes to mind:
First they came for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.
Now we should add gays, Muslims, Democrats, etc…
