Year: 2007
Crisis in Confidence
Posted on September 11, 2007 in Occupation of Iraq
It is said here better than I could have said it. Stolen from Sally.
A Remarkable Site
Posted on September 10, 2007 in Blogging Pointers
Off of PC Magazine’s Top 100 Undiscovered Websites, I found this: Copyblogger.
Also try Verbotomy.
And check out the article on bipolar disorder at Uncyclopedia.
Julian the Apostate
Posted on September 9, 2007 in Biography Myths & Mysticism Reading
From A History of Pagan Europe by Prudence Jones and Nigel Pennick:
….Constantius died on 3 November 361, naming Julian as his successor, and the new emperor marched into Constantinople on 11 December, 361. He did not institute a massacre of the Christians, which led them to complain that they had been cheated of martyrdom. He reduced corruption in the administration, repealed the laws of religious persecution, but prevented Christians from serving in the army (because their law forbade killing), from receiving grants and gifts (because their religion preached poverty) and from using Pagan texts in schoolbooks (because Pagan myths demonstrated Pagan ethics, which could only mislead Christian children). It is unclear whether these rulings were superbly cynical or naively sincere. (pp. 70-71)
I think I would have liked this guy. We could use him here and now, don’t you think?
[tags]paganism,roman history,history,spirituality,christianity[/tags]
Ems and Dubyas
Posted on September 9, 2007 in Culture Wars Fact-Dropping Liberals & Progressives
A new brain study suggests that liberals have a better grasp on the truth than conservatives:
Each participant was wired to an electroencephalograph that recorded activity in their anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that detects conflicts between a habitual tendency (pressing a key) and a more appropriate response (not pressing the key). Liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw a W, researchers said. Liberals and conservatives were equally accurate in recognizing M.
Researchers got the same results when they repeated the experiment in reverse, asking another set of participants to tap when they saw W.
Could it be that in the first case, the conservatives linked M to Money and were after it so intently that they hit the keyboard in kneejerk fashion? And in the second case, they saw the W as Bush?
Now for the conclusion:
Frank J. Sulloway, a researcher at UC Berkeley’s Institute of Personality and Social Research who was not connected to the study, said results “provided an elegant demonstration that individual differences on a conservative-liberal dimension are strongly related to brain activity.”
Analyzing the data, Sulloway said liberals were 4.9 times more likely than conservatives to show activity in the brain circuits that deal with conflicts and were 2.2 times more likely to score in the top half of the distribution for accuracy.
Sulloway said the results could explain why President Bush demonstrates a single-minded commitment to the Iraq war and Sen. John F. Kerry, the liberal Massachusetts Democrat who opposed Bush in the 2004 presidential race, was accused of being a flip-flopper for changing his mind about the conflict.
Based on the results, he said, liberals could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas.
So we can expect that conservatives will have a hard time seeing that they are WRONG. No matter what, they blithely go forth, wreaking destruction.
Perhaps, as a service to humanity, conservatives could train themselves to distinguish the dubyas from the ems? We’ll all be thankful.
[tags]liberals,conservatives,facts,brain,neurology[/tags]
You’re Not Sticking Me with One of Those Things
Posted on September 9, 2007 in Privacy
There’s a movement to implant RFID chips in Alzheimer’s patients. I’ve decided to include a line in my [[advance directive]] to the effect that I will not take part in any such program. This stems from my stand that I will not have one of the electronic rice grains put in my arm. I’d like to explain my reasons.
The argument for RFID technology up the arm is convenience. Instead of having paper ID and running the risk that you will go unidentified in the event of accident or death, doctors or coroners can just run a scanner over your body and get the information they need. Theoretically, I could put all the details of the drugs I need on the widget, a job that is now performed by the non-electronic pendant I wear around my neck. But the pendant does not announce itself where ever it goes as could be the case with the chip. Pass me through an elecronic field and my little bit of information technology would shout out who I am. I would lose the privacy that I enjoy now.
My wife’s uncle, the [[futurist]] Burnham Beckwith, would have loved RFID. TThe chips were good, he would have said, because they made crime impossible. I would retort that they would make a very different kind of crime and corruption facile. Currently many of us (including myself) have joined supermarket “clubs” which, whenever we choose to run our card through the checkout, tells the Great Computer in the Store what we have bought. With an implantation, the store could set up sensors that would tell us — without our having made any kind of choice at all — where we happened to wander while visiting. “Mr. Sax stopped in front of the pickled onions. We’ll assume that he was considering buying them.” Or “Mr. Sax came in and left without buying anything. Shoplifter?”
Imagine what could happen if, while shopping in a gardening store, you paused to tie your shoes in front of the nitrate fertilizers and then went to a gas station.
It gets worse when you consider how law enforcement might use the chips. They could make you be in places that you weren’t. Enemies of the state could be tagged as having been near terrorist attacks. When given such “hard evidence” against the testimony of others who could vouch for your being elsewhere, it is likely that more than a few jurors would vote for conviction. Being an enemy of the state does not necessitate violence: it could mean that you speak out against governmental policies such as oppression or wars in distant countries where we have no business being.
Regardless of what the Supreme Court says, the Constitution guarantees us the right to privacy insofar as this: we may not be searched without probable cause or a warrant. [[RFID]] technology amounts to an infringement by making our whereabouts known at all times and make our absence from a web of sensors cause for suspicion.
Lynn Goes to Court
Posted on September 9, 2007 in Justice
Check out my wife’s adventures in the criminal justice system:
Agave Jihad
Posted on September 8, 2007 in Hatred Spirituality and Being
Yes, it is true that I have toasted a particular sector of atheists lately for their cherry-picking arguments with Christians, but here’s an account of two Christians with atheists for neighbors who have received a revelation that the neighbors — as epitomized in their [[agave|agaves]] — are manifestations of the [[antichrist]]. Let’s subtitle this “cactus torture“.
Also read this.
You don’t do stuff like this to an agave even if you are making [[tequila]].
The Meds They Do Good
Posted on September 8, 2007 in Suicide
If anything is a bad advertisement for the virtues of Scientology, it is this:
After a decade of decline, the suicide rate for 10- to 14-year-old girls jumped by 76% in 2004, and their method of choice changed from firearms to suffocation and hanging, federal officials said Thursday.
The rate among older boys and girls also increased substantially, driving the overall suicide rate among 10- to 24-year-olds to an 8% increase in 2004, the largest jump in 15 years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s latest Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The rate had declined 28% between 1990 and 2003 before the unexpected jump to 4,599 suicides in 2004….
“It seemed like something was working,” said Ileana Arias, director of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. “What’s concerning is that it is changing for these groups.”
Arias said she did not know what caused the increase, but she noted that the declines in the 1990s may have been part of a general trend toward less violence.
Other experts attributed the increase to a drop in the number of prescriptions for antidepressants following widespread publicity in 2003 linking the drugs to increases in suicidal thoughts in young people. The Food and Drug Administration responded by requiring the drugs to carry a black-box warning, the strongest possible advisory. The debate about the impact of the warning has been simmering for more than a year.
Dr. Julio Licinio, chairman of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Miami, said that the decline in suicide rates during the 1990s coincided with the 1988 introduction of a family of drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, including Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil.
After the flurry of warnings about the drugs, prescriptions for them dropped by 22%, according to a report in this month’s American Journal of Psychiatry by researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
It should be amusing to watch Tom Cruise try to explain this one away.
Not Another One
Posted on September 8, 2007 in Blogging The InterNet
Yet another conference, featuring another expert who hates the Internet, especially blogging:
[[Andrew Keen]], in his recent book ‘The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting our Economy’, argues that whilst blogs, podcasts, amateur videos and music may be harmless or sometimes even enriching forms of media, they are destroying mainstream newspapers, record companies and film-makers. Wikipedia, the popular free online encyclopedia, he describes as ‘dumb’.
He will go head-to-head with leading authority on innovation and creativity, [[Charles Leadbeater]], author of the forthcoming book ‘We-think: the power of mass creativity’. This aims to understand the new culture in which people do not just want services and goods delivered to them, but also ‘tools so that they can take part, and places in which to play, share, debate with others’.
Charles Leadbetter disagrees that people are being duped. The more sources of information available, the more critical they can be, he has argued.
Get this: people are writing to one another again. Does Keen believe that illiteracy and addiction to visual media is a good thing? As Bugs Bunny used to say “What a Maroon!”
All for the One Individual Me
Posted on September 7, 2007 in Commons Theft Reading
From Ed Sikov’s Mr Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers:
Carol for another Christmas was a relatively low-budget, made-for-television, post-atomic holocaust parable with good intentions and a (mostly) reputable cast: [[Sterling Hayden]], [[Eva Marie Saint]], [[Ben Gazzara]], [[Richard Harris]], [[Peter Fonda]], and [[Steve Lawrence]] (who played the Ghost of Christmas Past). The script was by [[The Twilight Zone|The Twilight Zone’s]] [[Rod Serling]], who provided even more arch irony than usual —
so much so that it verged on clairvoyance. [[Peter Sellers|Peter]] played the head of a band of fanatical individualists. “The Individual Me’s” have survived a devastating atomic bomb blast only to devote their lives to eliminating everyone else — except, of course, for the perfect Me, who would be allowed to live. Clad in a gaudy Wild West show outfit complete with a ten-gallon hat emblazoned with the word “Me” in sequins, Peter’s charismatic character addresses his cult: “If we let them seep in here from down yonder and cross river — if we let these do-gooders, these bleeding hearts, propagate their insidious doctrine of involvement among us — then, my dear friends, my beloved Me’s” [dramatic pause] “we’s in trouble.” His eyes glistening with the thrill of control, the greatest Me continues: “We must carry our glorious philosophy through to its glorious culmination! So that in the end, with enterprise and determination, the world and everything in it will belong to one individual Me. And will be the ultimate! The absolute ultimate! (pp. 228-9)
Did Dick Cheney used to listen to this under hypnosis?
When Will They Start Bombing Us?
Posted on September 7, 2007 in Atrocity Journalists & Pundits War
Here’s a tidbit from a FAIR commentary on arch-pundit and pseudo-liberal Thomas Friedman:
If the idea of civilians trying to continue with normal daily life while their government committed lethal crimes was “outrageous” enough to justify inflicting “a merciless air war” — as Friedman urged later in the same column — would someone have been justified in bombing the United States during its slaughter of countless innocents in Southeast Asia? Or during its active support for dictators and death squads in Latin America? For that matter, Friedman could hardly be unaware that for several weeks already American firepower had been maiming and killing Serb civilians, children included, with weaponry including cluster bombs. Today, Iraqi civilians keep dying from the U.S. war effort and other violence catalyzed by the occupation; meanwhile, of course, not a single concert or merry-go-round has stopped in the USA.
Friday Xenartha Blogging – Hoover Hogs
Posted on September 7, 2007 in Xenartha
Did you know that armadillos were called “Hoover hogs” by the desperate people who ate them during the Great Depression? That’s just one of the tidbits you’ll pick up from Joshua Nixon’s Armadillo FAQ.
