BunkBlog

This has been a good week for idiots claiming God wants towns destroyed.

Pat Robertson warned Dover Pennsylvania that they shouldn’t turn to $DEITY in any emergency, because they rejected Him when they voted the idiots out of the school board. Of course, Intelligent Design has nothing at all to do with religion, isn’t that right, Reverend?

Bill O’Reilly told citizens of San Francicso that he’d be happy to invite al Qaeda to blow up the Coit Tower, because the SF voters decided they didn’t like the military hanging around high schools trying to recruit their kids.

John 13:34 and 35

A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.
By this shall all [men] know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.

That doesn’t seem ambiguous to me, but I’m a simple-minded fellow it seems. Apparently what Jesus really said was, “Love one another, unless you disagree about something, and then hope that person dies in a horrible and painful way.”

Seriously, is Veteran’s Day really a good time to attack your political rivals? I know, every day is campaign day in modern politics, but give it a rest already! I spent twelve years in the Army, and I’m proud of that service. I’m also happy to live in a country where I can disagree with a policy decision or pretty much anything else, and do so in public without fear of arrest or other bad things.

Here in San Angelo, the local school district finally decided to recognize Veteran’s Day. This is something which has been a long time coming, and is really bizarre considering how much the local population actually likes the military (not something I was used to at other postings in the Army). So, the Boy and I went to the parade again. Last year, it was cold and we had hot cocoa while sitting on a bench beside the Federal Building, watching the relatively small parade go by. This year, it was nice out, we stood in the street near the Federal Building (until he got tired and needed to take a break on the lawn), and the parade was much larger. It’s not quite as large as the parade for Rodeo Day, but you take what you can get in West Texas. I’m sure if we had a High School Football Day, the parade would be astounding in its scope. Anyway, a few new pictures up at the gallery of the Boy and the Cat. We built a gingerbread house that looks less impressive now than it did while we were decorating it. The Cat didn’t help.

Unsurprisingly, the “I hate gays” amendment passed overwhelmingly here in Red Neck Texas. If something is already illegal, why bother with amending the state constitution? Is it just a way to say, “no, really – we hate gays?” Of course, the way the Texas constitution is written, an insane number of things require amendments rather than laws – we’re up to 437 amendments, I believe.

California – what the hell is wrong with you people? You rejected every proposition, even the reasonable ones, just because Arnold liked them all? And, um…San Francisco banned all gun ownership? Damn, even the SFPD thought that was stupid. I realize that nobody needs a gun to go hunting on Fisherman’s Wharf, but that doesn’t mean the Second Amendment is irrelevant. What part of “shall not be infringed” is unclear?

If people don’t like a particular part of our legal framework, they’re perfectly welcome to attempt changing it. Just don’t circumvent it, eh? BTW, this applies equally to people finding legal loopholes to allow torture and indiscriminate imprisonment as it does to people who hate gays or guns. Some days, it’s hard to think of people as a group having anything like brains (Kansas, I’m looking at you!).

Apple came out with the latest iPod (with video, but not part of the name so nobody who isn’t in the know can possibly tell if it’s a “video” iPod or not on the shelf – WTF?) a few weeks ago. They accompanied the launch with a new offering in the iTunes Music Store – downloadable television shows. That’s right, instead of setting your VCR or TiVo, you can pay two bucks to get a 320×240 video of Lost or Desperate Housewives on your two-inch screen. Why?

This week, NBC announced a deal with DirecTV to offer commercial-free television shows for a buck an episode, delivered to the DirecTV Digital Video Recorder. You know, the box you can use to record the shows when they are played on television for free? Yeah. Why?

And, finally, CBS announced a deal to deliver television shows via the pay-per-view channel on Comcast cable systems, for a buck an episode. They won’t delete the commercials when they send you your copy, though. Um…Why?

I understand that television studios need to find new ways to generate revenue in the age of TiVo and the internet. Their standard commercial-supported model is going to have a hard time staying viable when people can easily skip the commercials. But, can’t they find some way to add value to their offerings, rather than removing the value that was already there?

I can rent a movie for a buck (three for a new release); paying two bucks for the episode of Lost that aired ten minutes ago seems kind of retarded to me. If you notice, none of these three networks is using the same system as any other. If you want to watch ABC shows, you have to use an iPod and iTMS. If you want to watch NBC shows, you have to subscribe to DirecTV satellite service. If you prefer CBS shows, move to a city that offers Comcast cable. Fox? Nope, not playing yet. And, the networks aren’t offering all of their shows on-demand – just a select few.

I don’t see anything here that I can’t do better with existing tools (TiVo, MythTV, ReplayTV, VHS tape) and without paying per episode. Damn, I already pay an insane amount for cable television – I’m not about to pony up another hundred bucks a month to watch the shows on a 2-inch screen.

Am I missing something vital here? Apple has sold one million downloaded videos, so someone must be watching them. More money than brains, as the saying goes.

You would think Kansas would wait until after the Dover case was settled before trying this, but the Kansas educational system seems to like showing off its ignorance.

Next on the hit list, Germ Theory and the Theory of Gravity. It’s all deus ex machina, man!

If you haven’t been following the Google Print controversy, here’s the pinnacle of absurdity so far. A children’s hospital in England has a completely unique and unprecedented perpetual copyright (in the UK) on the sales and performance of Peter Pan in the UK. They are claiming that Google Print’s service will rob them of millions of pounds of income every year. Think of the children!

I wonder why they haven’t previously gone after the public domain work? You did know that the book is actually in the public domain everywhere but the United Kingdom, didn’t you? So, exactly what does the American site Google do that the American site Gutenberg Project doesn’t already do? Is it just a question of convenience?

(Via BoingBoing)

Obviously, the government cares about the opinions of its citizens. We’re going to have RFID tags in American passports starting in about 12 months. When this was proposed, the State Department asked for comments from the public.

Out of the 2,335 comments on the plan that were received by the State Department this year, 98.5 percent were negative.

Damn. It’s hard to think of 1.5% as a mandate from the masses, but then…oh, yeah.

Another article has this to say:

U.S. government efforts to make passports harder to forge began in response to the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001.

Now, I’m not 100% certain, but weren’t all of the hijackers on 9/11 here on legal passports, not forged ones? So…what does this do, exactly?

It reminds me of the ban on lighters, which was partially justified by saying that Reed was trying to bomb a plane with his exploding shoes, those shoes which he was trying to light with (wait for it) matches. Matches remain legal on airplanes. Just let it sink in for a minute. I’ll wait.

Kristol is on the Daily Show. It’s nice to see Jon Stewart actually harassing someone for a change – when he had Bill O’Reilly on, it seemed like he was over solicitious, which the audience didn’t appreciate. C’mon, you got a conservative to come on the Daily Show – hit him!

Anyway, Bill Kristol seems like a thoughtful man, but he kept saying the phrase which drives me crazy when discussing Iraq: Weapons of Mass Destruction. Look, chemical weapons are bad; biological weapons are bad. But neither of those categories are weapons of mass destruction – that would be a nuke or a firebomb or napalm, you know: things which destroy stuff. Chem/Bio weapons are weapons of mass denial or weapons of mass casualties. To keep calling chem and bio WMDs is to make people confuse what Saddam didn’t actually have (but wanted to have again someday soon, admittedly) with the towers falling. It seems so transparent, to make people associate our own domestic mass destruction with Saddam’s regime in every possible way.

OK, rant off.

I went grocery shopping this morning, as I usually do on Sundays. I thought I’d go ahead and pick up a six-pack of 1554, but then I realized that when I moved to San Angelo I’d moved to the 18th Century as well. Can’t buy alcohol until noon on Sundays. I have this good-looking cake recipe I want to try this week, which requires raspberry liquer in the mix. Not only can’t I buy that until afternoon, I can’t buy it in the grocery store. Although they’ve recently made it legal to sell hard liquor within the city limits, nobody is doing so as yet (licenses not issued I’m guessing). OK, fine. I know I’m stuck in Bibleland (thank you, Poppy Brite, for that term), but at least the liquor stores outside the city limits are available, right?

Not on Sundays. I don’t know whether it’s a law that they be closed or just that nobody goes to the sinful liquor vendors on church days, but they’re all closed until tomorrow. Guess I’ll make that cake another day.

Our own local fishwrap, the SubStandard Times, has a brief article about the Intelligent Design debacle debate. One person quoted is a biology professor at Abilene Christian University:

”I see good evidence for evolution, but on the other hand, I see my body works almost perfectly. It seems to be a tremendous leap of faith to say this body is the result of total randomness.”

It’s not total randomness! To conflate evolution with purely random chance mutations is to deliberately mislead people. How is this guy a college professor? It’s not like you have just as good a chance to evolve something bad as something good – that’s the point; the bad mutations tend to die and the good mutations tend to out-compete the nonmutated organisms. Evolution is the only theory on speciation (not the origin of life – another common confusion thrown in) that has withstood the test of time and research. There has not been any serious debunking of evolution since Darwin’s time; it looks increasingly unlikely that there will ever be a legitimate failure found in the basic tenets of the theory.

Two other professors, from a non-religious university, say the same thing that every actual working scientist has said: ID isn’t science, it’s faith. If you want to believe in a deity or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, good for you. Just don’t try to use that belief to bring down science.

They also quote a Catholic Bishop, as the “other side of the debate” – there is no debate. If you want to have a theologian discuss his views on a subject that is not in his area of study, why stop there? How about if we use expert opinions on automobile maintenance from a grocery clerk? Why not take a biologist’s opinion about quantum physics as a legitimate counterpoint to an actual physicist’s research? Some things are not opinion – they are observed reality.

A parochial school teacher was fired for his beliefs. He believed in the religious doctrine he was teaching, just not in the jingoism that was supposed to accompany it. He was fired for not displaying an American flag in his classroom. Here’s a bit of his own explanation:

bq. The whole notion that loyalty to country is connected to one’s religious faith is totally bizarre and unjustified.

Is it possible to even comprehend, on a personal level, what 30,000 dead means? Thirty thousand human beings, gone.

When I was 7, the town I lived in had 1000 residents – 30 of those towns are now erased from existence. When I was 12, the town I lived in had 300 residents – 100 of those towns are now gone.

When I went to see The Monsters of Rock in 1988, there were about 30,000 spectators in the stands – that entire stadium could be gone now, assuming that they were all from Kashmir.

Something which strikes me on occasion is how, when I speak to my coworkers or others with any brains at all, and the topic drifts to politics or economics, there is a sameness. Almost everyone I converse with is generally reasonable, with a few blind spots (we all have them). Almost nobody claims that Tom DeLay is a good example, and almost nobody claims that Mike Moore is anything but a self-aggrandizing propagandist. Nearly everyone agrees that the unfettered capitalism of the late 19th century which led to the Robber Barons was a bad idea, and almost everyone also agrees that the total socialism practiced in Cuba is not exactly an economic boom.

Yet, all these reasonable people go to the polls every two to four years and vote for people who are anything but reasonable. How in the world do we get ideologues and idiots in office, when most people are basically decent human beings, with the minor difference in opinion about things like the proper role of government in our lives? It’s astounding, especially when you consider that the American governmental process is remarkably transparent compared to many other countries. If this is the best of all possible systems, I’m glad to be living in it.

Of course, another issue which recurs is a growing lack of personal responsibility among individuals. Blaming the government for the failures of the past month is easy. Now, what is that pesky phrase in the Constitution? Oh, right – We the People. We, the people, are considered to be the sovereign rulers of the United States. We, the people, should not be waiting for the government to Do Something when things go awry. We, the people, comprise the country and if our elected representatives aren’t doing something, we need to. This lack of personal responsibility spreads through the public school system as well, with the consequence that parents seem too willing to abdicate all requirements that they raise their own darned kids, preferring the strangers of a major institution to take care of that rather personal issue. Mystifying.

Good night.

America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You’ve gotta want it bad, ’cause it’s gonna put up a fight. It’s gonna say, “You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who’s standing center-stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Now show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then, you can stand up and sing about the land of the free. – Aaron Sorkin

Dover teachers must read this to their students:

Because Darwin’s theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The theory is not a fact. Gaps in the theory exist for which there is no evidence. A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations.

Yeah, evolution is a theory. Gravity is another theory. You may have heard of germ theory.

Theories in science are treated as fact, as the best available explanation of how things are. They aren’t just good guesses – that would be a hypothesis. If you don’t know the difference, you shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a science advisory board.

The central tenet of intelligent design is that any mysteries in nature that we can’t explain today are the result of manipulations by some intelligent designer. This designer doesn’t fall under any of the rules of nature or science that we understand, and so is by definition “supernatural.” The very idea of teaching a science which is based on something that is inherently unexplainable by science must make your head ache, if you can wrap your mind around the basic absurdity of the whole enterprise.

Besides the silliness involved in invoking a magical invisible being to explain anything we don’t currently know, it is dangerous. If you decide that some things are just unknowable, scientific research stops. When research stops, progress in the sciences stops. When progress stops, society stops. See Dark Ages, a period where scientists were told that all which was knowable was known – 400 years of utter societal and political stagnation resulted.

Deus ex machina is no basis for a science program.

A pro-war rally got less than a thousand participants, days after the 100,000 anti-war rally nearby. That’s gotta hurt. There seems to be a real lack of logic on the part of many people, though. This woman, for instance:

“Our troops are over there fighting for our rights, and if she was in one of those countries she would not be able to do that,” Vigna said.

Yeah, exactly why it’s ok for Cindy Sheehan to be able to say any damned thing she wants to. She can claim to be the reincarnation of Frank Sinatra – it doesn’t matter. The fantastic thing about our country is that people are allowed to be stupid or controversial or anything they want.

I don’t agree with everything that Cindy Sheehan says, but I spent 12 years in the Army defending her right to say whatever pops into her head. Good for her. And good for Rush Limbaugh the drug user, and good for G Gordon Liddy the convicted felon. Good for Dr Laura, the therapist with no credentials in psychiatry. Good for Mike Moore, who conflates opinions and facts and hopes nobody notices. Good for Jonny Depp for bashing the country that pays his salary.

Good for all of them – they can all be as stupid as they want to, and that is what makes America great. To tell any one of those Americans that they shouldn’t say what they are saying is the treasonous thing. That attitude of restricting speech with which you don’t agree is Unamerican. If you don’t like it, stop listening!

“Today Christians stand at the head of [our country] … I pledge that I never will tie myself to parties who want to destroy Christianity .. We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit … We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theater, and in the press – in short, we want to burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of liberal excess during the past years.”

Who would say such a thing? Is it Swaggart? Is it Robertson? Bush? Maybe it’s Tom DeLay?

Give up?

Think Germany, late 30s, short Austrian man. Yeah.

What is with this family and substance abuse? They’re like a Republican version of the Kennedys.

I love the fact that Jeb Jr. was busted not just for public intoxication but resisting arrest. Oh, yeah, that’s smart – when you’re a high-profile person, resisting arrest will definitely be a wise move.

If you do a search for “I voted for the moron” on Google, you now get my post about the button and bumpersticker design I made. I wonder how frequently that particular search is made. hehe

Remember that New Design I posted two weeks ago? One of my coworkers is proud of her “Blame Me – I voted for the moron” button. She feels that he’s not a moron, but she considers it a “buck stops here” statement. Although she and I have vastly different views on the proper role of government, we do agree on one thing – there’s been a whole lot of stupid to spread around on all layers of government lately.

By the way, the buttons don’t refer to any particular political candidate or official, so you can give them to anyone who you think has voted badly, for any race. Cheers.