And the idiots abound... - 05/29/2007

Here's a story from the Yahoo News service:

LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga. - The adventures of boy wizard Harry Potter can stay in Gwinnett County school libraries, despite a mother's objections, a judge ruled Tuesday.

Laura Mallory, who argued the popular fiction series is an attempt to indoctrinate children in witchcraft, said she still wants the best-selling books removed and may take her case to federal court.

"I maybe need a whole new case from the ground up," said Mallory, who was not represented by an attorney at the hearing.

Superior Court Judge Ronnie Batchelor's ruling upheld a decision by the Georgia Board of Education, which had supported local school officials.

County school board members have said the books are good tools to encourage children to read and to spark creativity and imagination.

J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books, published by London-based Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, tell stories of children with magic powers. They have been challenged numerous times since 2000, making them the most challenged texts of the 21st century, according to the American Library Association.

At Tuesday's hearing, Mallory argued in part that witchcraft is a religion practiced by some people and, therefore, the books should be banned because reading them in school violates the constitutional separation of church and state.

"I have a dream that God will be welcomed back in our schools again," Mallory said. "I think we need him."

Alright, let's break this down a bit and show Ms. Mallory the error of her thinking.

First of all Harry Potter isn't 'witchcraft' in the religious sense. Harry Potter's Witchcraft is to Wicca (the 'witchcraft religion') as Fairy Tales are to reality. Another angle is that Harry Potter is to Wicca as "The DaVinci Code" is to real Christianity.

They're stories. They are meant to entertain. If she's reading more into it than that, she needs to up her medication.

Now, let's look at the argument, in part, that Harry Potter books promote witchcraft (as a religion) and therefore shouldn't be in schools. She then goes on to say, "I have a dream that God will be welcomed back in our schools again. I think we need him."

You can't have it both ways, lady. If you argue that a book you think messes with your reality doesn't belong in a school then you can't have a religion that DOES mess with people's reality back in schools. Perhaps because you think, wrongly, that everyone loves Christianity, no one will object to your desire to remove a children's book from the public school library. Keep your bigotry to yourself, please.

Tell you what. If you don't like the way public school runs, pull your kid out, home school them, teach them to be intolerant of other ideas, thoughts, religions and customs and then send them out into the world to be good, little, mindless terrorists for Christ. After all, that's what most Islamic nations do (although there, they have their idea of God IN the schools, so there's no need to home-school them). Yes, lady, it's attitudes like yours that cause incidents like the World Trade Center attack and the War on Iraq. If you could keep it to yourself, and they could, too, the world would be a lot more peaceful.

But until you see how attempting to spread your idea of the 'good religious world' to others fucks with the rest of the world, we will always have terrorism - and idiots like you.

Is it just me, or is it getting hotter? - 05/21/2007

Being the kind of person I am, I have to look at things pretty closely to decide if it's real or hype. I've spent a lot of time looking at the data, and the sources of that data, and decided that global warming is real, and that mankind plays a significant role in it. Global warming is one of those wonderful subjects that raises the hackles of our government, who insist that humans play little or no part in increasing the average temperature of the planet. They cite past examples when the planet was hotter and point out that humanity hadn't evolved then. They point to sunspot activity, geologic cycles and other such examples as evidence humanity has no role in the process.

But what the government doesn't tell you is that they have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. And when I say vested, I mean oil money. Politicians get a lot of it. And the oil and other energy companies like coal spend a lot of money funding scientific studies to prove that the burning of their product has little or no impact on the world's temperature.

Now, when you pay a scientist to prove one thing, generally speaking, they can find something they call proof. It's not what you'd call good science. It's more like good propaganda. But what convinced me about global warming and humanity's impact on it were two studies. Both of these studies were done by independent groups of respected scientists decades apart and if I find the specific ones again, I'll post the links.

The first study was on on the cycles of ice ages. According to the regular meteorological cycles of weather on Earth, we should be heading toward another ice age. This was all the talk in the early 1970's - along with how limited the earth's oil reserves were. According to leading NOAA scientists at the time, the Earth was supposed to start cooling down over the next few centuries.

Fast forward 30 years to today. Satellite photographs and other space-based instrumentation show that the ice at the poles is thinning at a rate that is unexplainable by 'cycles' in the Earth's weather patterns. All over the earth, glaciers are shrinking (except in a few isolates spots, and that's mostly because the disruptive weather patters have changed snowfall levels in different areas of the world), average temperatures are increasing (of the hottest years on record, 7 of them have happened in the last 10 years), species migrations are taking place where animal life and vegetation from the tropics and sub-tropics are increasingly being found in more northerly latitudes.

This does not sound like a planet that's cooling off.

Let's add to this heat-up a semi-linear increase in the relationship between the earth's average temperature and the amount of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere by human activity. That was the second study.

Now, while few past instances of global warming were human-caused, there's no doubt that THIS instance of global warming IS.

So, why the debate? 95% of the scientists who study the matter and are qualified to draw any conclusions agree that our current situation is primarily human caused. The only reason we have a debate at all is because a multi-trillion dollar industry has invested a lot of time, money and effort in building an infrastructure that directly contributes to the current cause of global warming and they don't want to lose that investment.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen and all of the ships at sea, money makes the world go round and as long as those who have a vested interest in denying the cause of global warming have the money, there will be a debate. Even while their grandkids are starving in a world unable to cope with the weather changes.

Corporations live from quarter to quarter, requiring a profit in each in order to better their standing in the corporate world and please their investors and survive. This means, they must maintain the status quo until the status quo is unsustainable. Look at Chrysler Corporation. They kept building vehicles that were not in demand and now can't sell enough to offset the costs of staying in business. They will have to invest billions to revamp their product lines and are still only going to be playing catch-up with the companies who have already gone to leading edge trends to sell their cars. Unless they do something radically different from their past business model, Chrysler will probably fold within the next five years. Just my opinion. They can't sustain $2 billion a year losses.

The oil companies are flush with funds now because they have an infrastructure that deliberately limits the amount of gas that can be produced, thus, with the supply of gas as controlled as it is, they can set whatever prices they want. This is a quarter-to-quarter mentality to maintain high (and obscenely high, if you ask me) profits. Do they use these profits to fund research into alternative, eco-friendly, renewable and non-polluting fuel and energy sources? Of course not. Capital investment in such things is extremely high and that will eat into their profits.

This means they have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo - look for more oil in deeper, harder to find locations and develop the technology to get at it. It's easier to fund development of better drilling and extrication techniques than it is to fund research into new ways of making a car go, then building the infrastructure to get that to the masses. Doing so would, "Ruin the economy."

To this, I say, "Bullshit".

The oil and coal and energy industry is dominant in American politics, and since what America does (besides use 24% of the world's energy for less than 5% of the world's population) tends to influence the other countries, while the oil and energy companies of America hold sway, nothing substantive will be done by the US government to demand cleaner burning fuels. In fact, Bush has recently signed an executive order deferring the EPA from acting on requests by the states to allow them to require cleaner emissions standards than the federal guidelines state until 2008 - near the end of his current term.

And the Bush family has long, deep and lucrative ties with the Saudi's and Texas Oil. After all, it took a Presidential order to allow the Saudi's to fly out of the country on September 12th, 2001 when no other civilian aircraft were allowed to fly.

So global warming isn't so much an environmental issue as it is a political issue to these companies and especially to the current administration. We know it's happening. We know we're causing it. We know what we need to do about it to help lessen the impact (The general consensus is that the process can't be reversed, but it can be lessened). But the government, suckling at the teat of big oil, doesn't want to give up that source of funding, so it denies it, defers it, refuses to discuss it, lies about it.

So, in 30 or 50 years, when we're all looking at the flooded gulf coast, after evacuating Miami and most of Florida, and after 250 million or more people have died due to starvation and disease and when a billion people are living in temporary shelters because the land they used to occupy is under water and people are dying at the rate of a million a day, we can thank the oil and coal companies, George W. Bush and the short-sightedness of Corporate America's business practices for the problems.

The really sad part is that for those with vision and a little intestinal fortitude, entirely new, and very profitable, energy industries can replace oil, coal and natural gas. All it takes is the investment of funds and a government willing to back them. People will do the rest. We know our government isn't going to in the reasonably near future. It's up to the rest of us to act.

But, what is truth? - 05/19/2007

This isn't a rehash of my "The Simple Truth" post. This is an examination of the concept of truth and it's application in today's world.

Truth is that which is. I think everyone can agree on that. History is the most truthful of all things in that what happened before can often be deciphered based on physical evidence. This isn't always the case - especially when writings are involved and someone's interpretation of the evidence differs from others.

This highlights the issue of what is truth nicely, though. Each person lives in a slightly different world than everyone else. They have their own perceptions, their own concepts and their own expectations of what their world is like. Sometimes these are based on reality - that upon which everyone agrees. Sometimes, they're based on no more than wishful thinking, fantasy and/or denial. But they each interpret the evidence of reality around themselves as individuals.

I'm not saying there should be universal agreement about what the truth is. But when folks start talking about the truth, one must remember that what they say is truth may not be a truth to another.

For example, President Bush's wife Laura Bush once said that she doesn't believe the polls that say her husband's popularity is in the toilet. As evidence, she reportedly said something to the effect of, Everywhere I go, people are always cheering for him. This is her reality. And it's the truth. Everywhere she goes, people cheer Bush. This is because if you are not an ardent, hard-core Bush supporter, you can't get anywhere near a Bush-based function. Ever noticed that lately Bush's outdoors appearances have been almost exclusively on military bases? This is because there are too many people wanting to show up to protest his policies to have a more publicly accessible venue.

So the reality is that Laura Bush sees the polls as lies because all she's ever allowed to face are Bush-friendly crowds. That doesn't mean the polls are lying or wrong or slanted. It means that the whole situation isn't apparent to Mrs. Bush.

So this highlights why there are many truths for many people. A lack of data. People base their realities only on what they learn. If they refuse to learn something, that part of reality is not available for them to decide what's truth and what isn't. Most call this daily living. I call it living in half truths. And a half truth isn't truth. It's deception. Whether deliberate deception to keep people from knowing the truth by the manipulation of the media or a refusal on the part of the individual to entertain notions that make them uncomfortable, a half truth proves nothing except the ignorance of the speaker who states their truth as the ONLY truth. It may be their reality. But, as has been shown, it ain't necessarily the truth.

Let's look at some examples of truth:

Religion. Obviously here are a boundless number of examples of people deluding themselves. That part I don't really care about. It's when they insist on foisting their notion of truth on other people who already have their own notion of truth that the conflict arises. I once asked a door-to-door religion peddler, "Why are you assuming your god's truth is better than my truth?"

Because he was told to, by his god, he replied.

Prove it, I told him. He couldn't. I kept him talking for three hours. In the end, he went away empty handed and I asked, "Do you know why I talked with you?"

He admitted he didn't.

"By my keeping you here, talking to someone who would never be converted to your faith," I told him with a certain amount of malice, "I have kept you from inflicting your point of view on my neighbors and disrupting their lives as you have disrupted mine. But I figure it's better to keep you here pounding your head against an unyielding wall than for you to convert one more fanatic who will then go out and disrupt the lives of other people who want nothing more than to be left alone with their own truths."

I'm not a nice person with people who want to infringe on my reality.

But again, it highlights the point - there are many truths. Those who think outside their comfort zone tend to get a much wider, and inclusive, perspective than those who define their reality by very narrow-minded guidelines. It doesn't make them any more able to grasp the 'ultimate truth' than the next person, but it brings them a bit closer to seeing behind the facade of their own reality and admitting they don't always have all the answers.

Look at former speaker of the house Newt Gingrich. He spoke at Liberty University during graduation ceremonies and told the graduates to combat 'radical secularism'. He's thinking that because there's a backlash against the religious rights' attempt to dominate politics in America for the last six years that it's radical secularism. He thinks that because the unconstitutional, religiously-based endorsements by the US government are under attack, it's radical. Inasmuch as there is a wave of secularism sweeping the country (and there is) there is an equal amplitude wave of the religious-based agenda trying to do the same thing. But the religious wave came first. A fact Newt conveniently forgot. So he classifies the natural reaction of people to combat imposing a radical religious agenda on the American people as 'radical secularism'.

Let's not also forget that he's a politician and is there to keep his name in the spotlight, even if he's not wielding power directly.

For a change of pace, lets look at television advertisements. SUV's and pickups and sports vehicles are almost always shown with a 'professional driver on a closed course - do not attempt' notice in tiny letters somewhere you're not looking. Instead what you see is a vehicle zipping along at what seems to be 100 miles an hour, swerving past obstacles with cat-like reflexes all to a driving bass back-beat while a gravely-voiced announcer caters to the viewer's alleged lack of testosterone by implying you, too, can do this kind of thing if only you buy the vehicle.

What they never show is you sitting at a stand-still in traffic sucking up a gallon every fifteen minutes. They don't show you laying upside down in an over-turned vehicle because you didn't know the center of gravity was so high and you're really not a professional driver on a closed course. They never show you trying to squeeze into a parking space that says "Compact Car Only". And they sure as hell don't show you the gas bill or the cost of liability insurance for a vehicle that outweighs most others on the road by a factor of two.

They sell you the fantasy. You live with the reality.

So, remember, that every time someone speaks to you of anything concrete, it is almost certainly a half truth. And if it depends on a point of view, then it is definitely a half-truth. Find your own truth, and then look beyond it. You'll be surprised at how different reality actually is.

The separation of marriage and state - 5/14/07

Over the last several years, gay rights advocates have been pushing states to recognize homosexual marriages or for the right to marry in that state. Many states recognize civil unions for gay and lesbian couples, but gay rights advocates say it isn't enough. At the same time, many in the federal government have been advocating for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

Inasmuch as I'm all for equal rights, I think someone is missing the point. Marriages are religiously based. The definition of a marriage as being between a man and a woman (as opposed to a man and a man or a man and several women, or a woman and several men, etc.) is based on the biblical accounts of Adam and Eve. Other cultures see polygamous marriages as the norm, as supported by their religious beliefs.

Let me say this again: MARRIAGES ARE RELIGIOUSLY BASED.

Alright, having established that, let's go back to the whole gay marriage issue. States should not be issuing marriage licenses in the first place. That is an advocacy of a religious point of view and is expressly forbidden by the first amendment.

Here's the amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

An establishment of religion IS defining a marriage based on Christian concepts of marriage. It doesn't matter WHO or WHAT is being married. If one is a man and the other is a woman and that's all you define marriage as, then it's religiously based and unconstitutional.

But a marriage brings with it certain civil rights and responsibilities. Fine. Let the government call them civil unions. Once both parties sign the contract, they're contracted. They have all the civil rights and responsibilities awarded to anyone in such a position. Doesn't matter if they're man and man, woman and woman or whatever. The state's involvement in it is strictly on the civil side and no state official can perform a marriage ceremony for anyone.

The old justice of the peace "marriage" is out of the question. That's a state-sponsored, state-endorsed advocacy of a religious point of view. The state should be utterly out of the marriage business. It doesn't matter if the state will allow anyone to contract with anyone else. The whole concept of marriage is religiously based. The state's responsibility ends with the issuing of a civil contract.

Once a couple (or group, etc.) have been contracted according to civil authorities, they can then go to a house of worship or religious leader and have a marriage ceremony performed - if that religion endorses their kind of 'marriage'. Religions are free to be as narrow or open-minded as they want to be. That's the hallmark of a religion. But the state should be blind to the desire of anyone who wishes the same civil rights and responsibilities a civil union would grant them. As long as the individuals involved are legally able to enter into a civil contract (eg. of age, consenting, mentally competent, informed, etc.), then the state has to issue one on demand for whatever fee it deems necessary.

Hell, given the over 50% failure rate of marriages, throw in a pre-contract agreement for an extra fee stipulating who gets what in case of breech of contract. Like a prenuptial agreement, only without the marriage overtones. It would save a lot of time and energy in the breaking of the contract. Or better yet, put a time limit on the contract with a renew option. It would give everyone an extra incentive to remember their contract anniversary. If they don't renew within a certain time after the contract expires, the union is dissolved. In that case, the pre-contractual agreement decides how things are split up. No more long, bitter divorces. No more religious 'annulments like it never happened' bullshit. Given the complexities of the legal language today, it may make eager couples rethink their positions BEFORE they get married rather than after.

But the bottom line is that states, and the US Government for that matter, should not be in the marriage business. It should only issue civil union licenses. Religions should decide their stand on the definition of marriages (most already have and many are much more progressive than most state laws) and perform marriage ceremonies as their tenets dictate.

I don't see the state getting out of the business of civil unions altogether, though, which is another option. There are certain safeguards that have to be placed upon such things - like age, mental fitness, a lack of coercion, etc. Religions have hardly been proven the guardians of such niceties, so the state should still ensure that all parties in the contract are at least legally able to enter into such a contract. But beyond that, the state has no business saying who should enter into a civil union contract with whom.

So why aren't people seeing this?

So much for the 'Free' Market - 05/06/2007

Imagine, if you will, you're the CEO of a company that does manufacturing. You produce widgets. There are several other companies who produce widgets as well, but we'll get to them later.

Your profits are good, but you want them better. The last thing you'd do is call your factories and tell them, "Stop making widgets." After all, in a free market economy, what one company fails to produce, another will produce more and reap more profit. The company which fails to make enough loses business and profits. The natural thing to do, when wanting more profits, is to make more widgets. Lower the per-unit cost of manufacturing the widgets. Or make a better widget that everyone has to have.

Now, take that philosophy and add one thing to it: Collusion.

You and all the other Widget makers get together and they say, "Look, we have our boy in the White House now, so we can pretty much do what we want, but we have to make it look good to sell it to the public. So, we'll be sure to have breakdowns, 'routine maintenance' and other interruptions in the overall market supply of widgets, and we can all raise our prices on the widgets and make a ton of money."

"Wait a minute, " you ask, "won't people just stop buying widgets?"

"That's the beauty of the plan," you're told. "Everyone has to have widgets. And we're locking out everything else that can replace widgets. If we act together, we can control the widget prices for the whole country."

"Isn't that illegal?" you wonder.

"Sure!" you're told. "But with our boy in the oval office, and controlling the widget policies, who's going to stop us?"

Now, while the above scenario is fictitious, one can't help but wonder about the way gas and oil prices are manipulated. Instead of one company increasing production, or stockpiling gas, or helping people find a way to use less gas (as IF!), the gas companies are spending billions of dollars trying to find more gas. If one tenth the amount invested in finding more oil is instead spent on finding and developing alternative energy sources, the dependency of the people all over the world on gas would be cut by 20% every five years.

But this assumes a long-term plan and philanthropic (or at the very least ethical) motives on the part of the oil companies. Unfortunately, all companies in America operate with a quarterly profit mentality. That is, if it's not going to make a profit this quarter, fuck it. If it will make a profit this quarter, do it. Ethics and, in many cases legalities, be damned. This, by the way, sums up the whole Harvard Business School course.

So, with this mentality, of course, everything will be done to boost profits without regard for the consequences.

How to combat this egregious raping of the world's resources?

Two ways: First of all, nationalize the entire energy production industry in the US. With America as wired and dependent on energy as we are, it's a matter of national security that the energy flows properly. Next, set the prices at wholesale plus 10%. Prices will continue to fluxuate, but not to the extremes we've seen during the Bush administration. Finally take that 10% and use it to finance research and development of alternate energy sources, starting with decentralizing energy production.

Let's face it, if an entire town can be darkened by snipping two wires, we are way too vulnerable to terrorist attack. But if every house and business was independent of the energy grid through the use of fuel cells and solar/wind/hydrogen, etc, then it would be utterly impossible to take down a power grid. With energy of that nature available, electric cars become economically viable, and the pollution and lust for oil - especially foreign oil the profits of which still are the number one contributor of terrorist acts and states in the world - will whither and die.

If no one wants widgets, the prices will fall regardless of how many widgets are or aren't being made. If the demand for oil drops, so does the flow of money to fund terrorism. And if the power grids go away, even replacing the oil production with solar energy production won't alleviate the hemorrhage of profit from oil sales.

The only thing free about the 'free market' is the reign the oil companies have in screwing the rest of the world. And it isn't going to stop until they're made to stop.

Other than the iceberg, how was the cruise, Captain? - 05/06/2007

As President Bush and the Democrat-controlled congress exchange words over restrictions on the President's power, I'm reminded of the Captain of the Titanic. This is a man who, despite several warnings of icebergs, continued 'full steam ahead' in an effort to break the trans-Atlantic steamship crossing record. He was in search of a legacy, a hallmark, a place in history.

He got one and went down with his ship.

Bush seems determined to do the same thing.

From there, the analogy breaks down. Approximately 1442 people died when the Titanic went down and it only took about 2 1/2 hours for the whole tragedy to play out. By the end of the day, all survivors had been found.

In contrast, Bush has lead the United States into an ill-considered (at BEST) war in an unstable region of the world which has been going on for almost four years, at the cost of 3372 + American lives and between 150,000 and 700,000 civilian lives (Depending on who you talk to). If you throw in the WOUNDED, the numbers soar to well over a million regardless of source.

All this because a former C student at Yale surrounded himself with egregious yes-men who had as much chance of thinking beyond their own narrowly defined world as a blind man had in accurately describing the shape of a cloud. Bush saw in 9/11 the opportunity to create his own lasting legacy by bringing a tyrant's rule to an end. The same tyrant who threatened Bush's father when Bush's father occupied the oval office. It was an unfinished, personal matter.

Four years, a pack of lies and a million or more casualties later, Bush is stubbornly clinging to some minuscule ray of hope that it will somehow be alright if they only "stay the course". His vision of a free Iraq remains intact somewhere in his utterly out-of-touch-with-reality mind despite the violence, bloodshed, instability, inherent distrust and cultural differences that plague the whole region. He still wants his legacy, failing to realize that it has already been written in the blood of Americans who have died so that Bush and his cronies could go down in history as effective leaders.

Let's roll the clock back to September 10th, 2001.

Bush was not a popular president. He was seen by many as having stolen the election (indeed, an unofficial recount of the Florida ballots in 2003 showed Al Gore won), and was not a leader elected by the majority of Americans - he LOST the popular vote, but won by the narrowest of margins in the states that gave him the electoral college votes he needed. There were demonstrations outside of the White House calling on him to resign. His energy policies were being seen to benefit the oil companies to the detriment of the American people and the environment and his leadership skills being questioned by pundits across America. He was already being seen as a one-term president.

Let's fast-forward to the 2004 elections. Bush, Cheney and the recently formed Homeland Security department created a 'terror alert' system to keep the country informed of threats to Americans. This system was adjusted, seemingly on a daily basis, higher and lower as the situation in Iraq and other places deteriorated. All the while, Bush was saying that if Republicans weren't elected, the country would be at the mercy of terrorists and liberals. Later investigations proved that the terror threat levels were DELIBERATELY MANIPULATED to invoke fear in Americans. Despite this, the President was re-elected only on the slimmest of margins, and there are still unanswered questions about the validity of the electronic voting machines used in key states. Electronic voting machines of the same type used in 2004 have fallen largely out of favor since then and when was the last time anyone heard of the Terrorist Threat Level System?

Bush stated that he now had a 'mandate from the people' and proceeded to try to initiate one of the most repressive governments the US has seen since the Civil War.

Fast forward to 2006.

In just 2 years, the greatest reversal of political power in the history of the United States occurred. The Republicans were overwhelmingly voted out of office - a clear and unequivocal shout from the American people that they had had enough of George W. Bush's nonsense. Instead of hearing a "mandate from the people", Bush, our President, continues to follow his own policies regarding Iraq. Apparently, if a majority agree with him, it's a mandate. When the majority disagree with him, it's cowardice, treason, or worse. Obviously, it's to be ignored by our elected civil servants at best. With an approval rating of 28%, this puts Bush's lowest approval rating just above Trueman (23%), Nixon (24%) and ties with Jimmy Carter (28%) He's actually below is father (29%).

Bush's legacy will not be his vision. Like the Captain of the Titanic, who wanted a positive place in history, Bush has failed to win his goal, but instead has been handed a less honorable, less noble place in history - as one of the, if not THE worst, Presidents in US history. It is a distinction, to be sure. But one which carries with it the same notoriety as Hitler, Stalin, Saddam and other single-minded, uncompromising dictators the world over - the vilification of their names and the sincere regret that so many were fooled and died because of a fool.