SCUMBAG BUSHITES HIT NEW LOWS

These are real actions that threaten to undermine freedom and democracy. When justice is aimed to help or hinder one’s political enemies and friends, then justice is as dead as a Nazi or Communist doornail. How does this differ from what’s happening in Zimbabwe except for murder? Or communist Russia or Nazi Germany? And if this perversion of justice can happen in a Republican government, how long before neocons decide that political murders are justified? The scary thing is that neocon Bushmen don’t even see what and how bad they are.

Here's one of the scumbags now>>>>>>>>>>>

[SNIP]
By Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 24, 2008; 11:50 AM

Justice Department officials improperly used political and ideological factors to screen applicants for the agency's prestigious honors and summer intern programs, sometimes rejecting otherwise qualified candidates because of their ties to Democrats, internal auditors said in a report issued this morning.

The long awaited review faulted Bush administration officials for violating Justice Department policy and civil service rules beginning in 2002, when they tried to fill career posts with rookie lawyers whose political affiliations mirrored their own.

Investigators for the Justice Department's Inspector General and the Office of Professional Responsibility, which oversees legal ethics, reviewed thousands of e-mail messages and conducted interviews with current and former officials, concluding that the hiring efforts "undermined confidence in the integrity of the department's hiring processes."
[PASTE]

SOME SCIENCE FROM CBS SOURCES

The noose keeps getting tighter around the neck of the Bible literalist. The only trouble is that he doesn’t know his neck is in the noose. He thinks it is an imaginary noose that god put there to trick the rest of us. But, “my goodness sakes alive” (as my Grandmother used to say), it seems that his god is tricking him. I can clearly see the noose around his fundamentalist neck. I certainly know my senses tell me it’s not around mine. I trust my senses pretty much and don’t go in much for his non-sense. (But, I also know that I can't always trust my senses either. They do trick us sometimes. But then, pity the poor believer—he's twice tricked!)

[SNIP]
(AP) Scientists unearthed a skull of the most primitive four-legged creature in Earth's history, which should help them better understand the evolution of fish to advanced animals that walk on land.

The 365 million-year-old fossil skull, shoulders and part of the pelvis of the water-dweller, Ventastega curonica, were found in Latvia, researchers report in a study published in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/06/26/tech/main4210989.shtml
[PASTE]

[SNIP]
Fossil studies have long suggested modern birds were descended from T. rex, based in similarities in their skeletons.

Now, bits of protein obtained from connective tissues in a T. rex fossil shows a relationship to birds including chickens and ostriches, according to a report in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

"These results match predictions made from skeletal anatomy, providing the first molecular evidence for the evolutionary relationships of a non-avian dinosaur," Chris Organ, a postdoctoral researcher in biology at Harvard University said in a statement.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/04/24/tech/main4044053.shtml?source=related_story
[PASTE]

LANGUAGE BARRIERS

Not too many months back (or years or weeks—sometimes the years fly like months these days and the weeks drag like years) I mentioned coming across the idea (I don’t know where) that the British and American peoples will no longer be able to understand one another’s languages in 200 years. Then, in order to join a book group, I recently read The Curious Incident of the Dog In the Night by a British author Mark Haddon. I know... I also mentioned that very recently. Anyhow, recalling what I’d said about language differences, I started to jot down some British idioms and words in that novel which might be beginning to stretch the bounds of an illiterate American’s understanding of the Brits. Most of the list I’m about to enter into this blog I still understand but only because I watch and have watched many British films in my life and also still read British literature, classic as well as modern, and, of course, I had the context of each of the following words and phrases. I added two final examples Sunday night that I don’t understand… from a Masterpiece Theater presentation.

The list with my interpretations… (or not):

shift it = get moving
hop it = get moving
“I’m not having you scarping….” = something about stealing
“…go for another wee…” = go take a piss
invigilator = someone who monitors a student’s test
cooker = an outdoor grill
“end of a skip” = this is something (?) parked at a curb a boy was hiding behind
boot = trunk of a car (this, of course, is an old one)
carriageway = a highway (it’s obvious but quaint to our ears)
“get a place to live of our own” = can see a shift in prepositional usage
“got a job on the till” = work as a cash register, also note use of preposition
a plaster = band aid, I think, from its usage
knock you up = come knock on your door, very old
“Hooray Harrys for a knees up” = first half pretty clear, but second …?
curb crawling = cruising for prostitutes

Of course, I think I mentioned that I can still read Shakespeare (500 years ago) and, even, with the help of a dictionary, Chaucer (700 years), but no farther back than that. I took one quarter or two of Old English around 1980, and Old English is very much like a foreign language to modern usage. So perhaps whoever suggested that we’ll soon not understand the Brits was rushing it a bit, but when one realizes that so many young Americans no longer read… well, who knows? Of course young people the world over are developing a chat room language (you know… LOL and OMG?) that I can’t understand at all. Maybe they’ll develop a worldwide language out of that which will be the first truly global language. You know, we elders of the tribe are always seeing the end of the world in every little cultural tremor when, usually, it really is no more than a tremor which workarounds can fix.

WHAT IS IT?



Okay, here's a photo from a blog I sometimes visit, a blog that originates in Estonia. Now the young lady who takes these photos can be a bit unusual at times, and I was thrown off by the photo myself. At first I thought it was one very dangerous photo, then, I thought I saw what it really is. Maybe you'll maybe have to ask her what it is. I think she was trying to be suggestive and clever which she most always is... clever, that is.
]
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JESUS WAS A REVOLUTIONARY WHO BETRAYED HIS CAUSE

So here’s the story on Jesus, according to Michael Baigent in The Jesus Papers. He also co-wrote Holy Blood, Holy Grail. The Jesus Paper’s is an addition to the latter book and further explains Jesus’s mission (which changed in mid stream according to Baigent) his marriage to Mary Magdalene and their disappearance into France with the help of Roman authorities after a faked crucifixion.

Let me admit, however, that Michael Baigent writes in a very circuitous manner, in such a way that one wonders why his narrative does not travel in a straight line. It leaps back and forth in time. Is this a fault in his method? Is this the only way he can work his thesis in a satisfactory manner, or is it that a more straightforward methodology would make his case appear weaker? Frankly, I think the case for Jesus being a revolutionary rather than the son of God, as the Catholic Church claimed and passed on to the Protestants, is very strong. After that, I don’t know, but if those two letters (read on) are true, wow, what a smack to the senses of anyone raised in our modern world so much dominated by the “People of the Book” (Muslims, Christians and Jews). Another point, after reading this book and several others, I and no objective person can believe in the facts as presented in the Bible, the Koran or anywhere else. Baigent and others have clearly revealed just how much empty supposition goes into every line of the Bible and its interpretations. When you finish reading The Jesus Papers, you should realize that everything is a chimera, created by people who had a political motive to interpret everything just as they did rather than a spiritual one.

According to Baigent, Jesus (because he descended from the house of David) was chosen at an early age by Zealots to fulfill the Old Testament mission of a promised Messiah who would lead them on a political war against the Roman authorities. Thus Jesus consciously fulfilled the many prophecies of the Old Testament, but he had spent part of his undiscovered youth in Egypt where he came across the sort of mysticism which informed early Greek and Egyptian religions. He became an initiate of those mysteries by which people learn to have visionary experiences in caves and dark underground places in Egypt. The Greeks called this inward journey visiting the Netherworld, the Egyptians called the underground journey going to the “Far-world”, and Christians called it, and still do, the “Kingdom of Heaven within”. As Jesus said, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” Not out there >>>. We modern people, of course, understand that people from everywhere have always sought these transcendent moments through the use of drugs or sensory deprivation in deep caves or in modern chambers that are much like wombs or in groups full of music and shouting. We recognize them as self-induced psychological experiences rather than spiritual experiences. Baigent points out the many passages in the New Testament and in the scrolls from Nag Hammadi and in the Dead Sea scrolls where it is clear that the mystics of those days, one of which Jesus became, believed they could journey to these places of death and return by initiations that only the initiate knew how perform.

Baigent further claims that there is a written message that Paul took for his own purposes that split the Jewish tradition between the political Zealots and James, Jesus’s brother, and the messianic Jews who eventually became the Christianity of the Roman Church which is based on the unsubstantiated claim that Jesus arose from the dead and is, essentially, God. The Vatican to this day is trying to suppress and hide the fact that there is much evidence that shows that Jesus never claimed to be God and, of course, never was God, that all he spoke of were these mystical moments when an initiate could think he had personally experienced the realms of the gods. Baigent claims that Jesus revealed his changed course when he was asked if the Jews of Jerusalem ought to pay their taxes to the Roman Emperor. The Zealots felt double-crossed when Jesus said that they should pay those taxes. That’s why Judas Iscariot (sicarii = knife bearer and, thus, Zealot) betrayed him to the Roman authorities. Jesus was no longer useful to the Zealots.

Of course you must read this book for yourself because Baigent must work long and hard to tie all the loose ends together. The kicker to the book, coming at the very end, is that Baigent saw with his own eyes two letters (circa 32CE that he could not translate to read) which were in the hands of a wealthy private Jewish collector of antiquities. He believed they were authentic and written by a “bani meshiha—the Messiah of the Children of Israel”. The letter writer is defending himself to the Sanhedrin against charges that he had called himself the “son of God”. He explains that he did not mean that he was physically the son of God but only that he is spiritually adopted as a son of God, and that anyone who is filled with a similar spirit can also, in that sense, call himself a son of God. Thus, Jesus is not God and never was. As you can see, if these letters are authentic, they can change the course of history, but, as of yet, in the murky world of antiquities, they have not yet been surfaced by this collector or by anyone he sold them to, if he did sell them, if they are, indeed, letters written by Jesus in his own defense. Interesting, eh? Much more interesting than that hanger in dry dusty Southwestern America.

SIGNS FROM ANCIENT/MODERN DAYS

Today, passing by a church on Minnehaha Street in Vancouver which likes to load down its curbside reader board with pithy (well, maybe pissy) conundrums for the passing parade, I read the sign, WHEN YOU'RE DOWN TO NOTHING, GOD'S UP TO SOMETHING. Actually, from personal experience and a lifetime of reading and study, and as revealed in that old movie with Joanne Woodward, "Rachel, Rachel", I think the sign, if it were honest, should read, WHEN YOU'RE DOWN TO NOTHING, WE'RE OUT TO GET YOU, for that's when the Christian brotherhood comes for you—when you're weak and vulnerable.

Of course, the upshot of pouncing on the vulnerable and lost is Christian or Moslem or Jewish houses of worship full of the mentally ill or, at best, the neurotic many who are trying to get well but not always achieving that goal. Which further means, it's in those sanctuaries where you'll find weak-minded authoritarian figures who like to dominate others (as part of that, they are manipulators, prevaricators, passive-aggressives, child molesters and rapists too) all mixed in with the weak and vulnerable who are open to that sort of molestation of body and psyche, quite often children and women. Witness that Texas mess! Would anyone but a wimpy sort of male want a women chosen from that brainwashed bunch? Of course, to be honest, sex is an interesting sort of animal, and women (men too) can be a lot more interesting in bed when that evolutionary adaptation sets the synapses to firing than you or I may imagine them to be. Sex has a lot to do with imagination and less to do with pure chemistry.

DID YOU HEAR THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS AND HUMANISM?

In reading The Jesus Papers, by Michael Baigent, I came across an interesting quote by the disciple Thomas as revealed in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Thomas said (no, that's not me, but it could be) "When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living Father."

When I was more of a believer than I am now, I used to understand that Jesus was calling me brother and telling me that we shared the same father and, therefore, I was as much a god as Jesus was. How the Catholic Church corrupted the historical Jesus into a triune clusterfuck, I'll never know.

Self knowledge. Ah, yes! Later in the morning after reading that passage, as I was strolling through the Vancouver Mall for exercise and window shopping, I pictured a teeshirt conundrum that read: HUMANISM—THE ETHICAL LIFE.

Then I imagined the dedicated dogmatist challenging me, saying, "Yeah, but who anchors your ethics? What unimpeachable source underlies your philosophical musings?"

My only answer could be "Me and what can still be called my human nature. And yours too!"

I went on rambling in my head while my body rambled too, meandering between the aisles of the goods and services in Sears, Macy's, Penny's, etcetera. Each of us carries the basis of moral behavior in our own bodies, I thought. We all know what it is to "feel" we've been treated unjustly. It hurts. By extension we can surmise that each of us, sharing the same biological feeling structure or moral mechanism in our own bodies, can recognize and share this feeling mechanism. In fact, humans are so certain of this moral mechanism in the human animal that we recognize those who don't have this universal mechanism are a real danger to us. We call them sociopaths and the criminally insane. From that simple fact of shared biology (some have called it the golden rule)(some have announced it in the saying "all men are created equal"), we can build a humanwide ethical structure when, and if, we mature as a species a little more than we are now matured.

The flaw in religious people is that they want to cheat on this biological mechanism. Instead of referring to their own feelings as a source of ethics, they try to buttress their personal feelings by calling in a higher authority. They want to trick us into giving their feelings a little more concern than we give our own feelings. Specially guilty of this hedging of bets are the preachers and other church leaders like mullahs and rabbis who use their power positions to wheedle money and even more power out of the weaker and less skeptical among us. Specially nasty and irrational of these religious folk, leaders and followers alike, is the belief, which the gullible among them accept unquestioningly, that this higher authority who justifies their human feelings about life can also reward and punish humans with eternal punishments and rewards. Now there's a real stretch of the imagination and also of the unbounded ego of religious people and their leaders in their attempt to get the rest of us to give more importance to their "ethical feeling mechanism" than we give to our own ethical mechanisms.

GETTING PRIDE OUT OF THE WAY

While I was our trip to Ohio and back, I bought a science magazine, called TOP 75 QUESTIONS OF SCIENCE, as I think I’ve mentioned more than once here. I thought it would fill my airport and flight time pretty easily without asking me to devote much mental energy to following long complex lines of evidence and reasoning. It admirably filled my need. Below, I’m quoting two questions and answers from the text. What I like about these answers is the way they deflate human egos, reducing us to chemical processes doomed to inevitable extinction. And hasn’t that been the aim of so much good science—to get the human ego out of the equation and put the truth into its place? That’s why I wonder why religious folk, dedicated to humility and truth as they are, are so opposed to ego-reducing and truth-telling science.

WHAT IS LIFE?

Answer: George Whitesides, chemist, Harvard University: Life in a certain sense is a sack of chemical reactions. That's one way to look at it. Another is to say that it's an entity that is compartmentalized, energy dissipating, adaptive, and self-replicating. A third way of looking at it is to say it's a network of catalytic reactions, and amazingly, it replicates itself. But I haven't said anything yet. I've just given names to things I don't understand.

WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO EARTH'S CLIMATE OVER THE LONGER RUN?

Answer: Ken Caldeira: The sun, which is 30 percent brighter than it was early in Earth's history, will continue to get hotter and hotter. At first, carbon dioxide levels will drop and compensate for the brighter sun. Within a billion years there will be virtually no carbon dioxide left in the atmosphere. From then on, Earth will start heating. The oceans will evaporate more quickly, sending more water into the upper atmosphere, where it will be bombarded by cosmic radiation and split into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen will escape into space, so we will eventually lose our oceans. At that point Earth will be uninhabitable.

NERDETTES COME OF AGE

In a Newsweek article this week, Bennett and Yabroff write about how beautiful and intelligent women are starting to come on strong, unashamed of their beauty as well as their intelligence. You'll recall that maybe a year ago, I posted two pictures (at different times) of beautiful scientists. Here's another picture of one of those two women, Lisa Randall, from a recent Discovery Magazine called, Top 75 Questions Of Science. Anyhow, you should read about this coming trend yourself (See the link above!). Lisa speaks in Discovery about the possibilities that space can have more than three dimensions. She's studying or has studied branes—yes, that's branes, not brains. What I like about Lisa is her eyes. Look at those clear, intelligent eyes, not all clouded up with unskeptical and romantic nonsense.

A little known—or well known, depending on how well-read you are—fact about intelligent women, you guys, if you're lucky enough to have one of them by your side (or you by her side), is that they are less likely to have hangups about sex and likely to be more experimental. Now, look, I didn't say "all" of them were, but studies show that the more education one has, the less-likely to be hung up about all sorts of things in whatever culture one finds himself living in. This, of course, is why I don't envy any Islamic or Mormon male with all his religiously suppressed wives. Just give me one woman with the imagination to play any number of rolls in the sack, and I'll give you all the sluggish, unimaginative women you can ever want for your wives.

Anyhow, you go, you nerdy girls. Nerd it up all you like. I'm with you, and I'm 70 years old, myself, and a victim of the oppressed and silent 50s generation. Took me a long time to become a man of the 21st century, and I'm still struggling with the little boy mentality of those times, looking for his mommy. Just ask my wife. The only growth is that I usually catch myself at it now instead of living it full out. And I certainly don't seek a little girl wife either who needs a macho man. Yet, to be fair and honest, I suppose I ought not make fun of any combination that works. Just as I would ask a macho man to understand me, I suppose, in all fairness, I should also understand his needs. Perhaps that sort of fairness is the best tack to sail one's ship along, after all in these contentious times.

GO BOSTON!!!!!!!!!!!!

What a wimp I am. I came home and settled in to watch tonight's game and saw the Celtics looking awful. Down six, then ten, then fifteen, last time I checked 22 points behind, then I couldn't watch any more of the massacre I foresaw ahead of me, so I settled for a 1941 black and white Myrna Loy/William Powell film, "Love Crazy", with my wife who I'm crazy in love with. Nineteen-forty-one and a film so naive and innocent, so my wife noticed, that I could hardly believe it was made in 1941 with war all around. But look at the junk movies today while our troops die in Iraq for a lost cause, lost not because of their failure of nerve but lost because of political ineptitude, lies and right wing naivety about human nature which imagined goals impossible to achieve.

Still, my wife and I had fun and after the movie was over, I tuned into the game channel, thinking the game was over, but what to my wondering eyes should appear but a Boston lead by 4 points with 45 seconds to go and Pierce at the foul line while sugar plums danced in my head.

Short story shorter, now I'm going to stay up from midnight to two to watch the replay and with all the excitement I could have known spoiled by the fearful Dancers and Prancers I saw in my head when the game got under way.

ATHEISM IS FOR THE BRIGHT AND THE INFORMED

That’s why old-fashioned religious people and their holy books warn their children to be dumb and godly rather than smart and ungodly. Of course, whether or not one is smart enough to understand science and also to be very reasonable is entirely up to the genes. Intelligence is completely genetic. No one can take credit for her IQ factor one way or another. Now a fundamentalist of any religion can have raw intelligence which he does not feed with knowledge (that’s ignorance), and for ignorance he can and ought to be held responsible, specially if his ignorance is holding back the progress of the entire human race.

Recently, several facts about intelligence and autism are coming together for me that make real sense:

• Raw intelligence is rising as the human animal deals with its increasingly complex culture. By the way, intelligence has nothing to do with literacy which seems to be declining.

• The rate of autism is increasing in the human species.

• There is a statistically significant correlation between those whose brains are mathematically inclined and pattern seeking, thus scientifically inclined, and the increased rate at which their children are autistic.

• Autistic children are more likely to understand the world around them through logic rather than through intuition. They have a hard time understanding metaphors, and they can’t very easily read the emotions in people’s faces. Thus, the world you and I live in is foreign and frightening to them.

• Most autistic children that I read about, being rational and less emotional rather than irrational and very emotional, are atheists.

I conclude that as the human animal’s raw intelligence increases there will be more autistic sports, that is autistic children. They are genetic accidents thrown out by the mating of ever more intelligent human animals. The question is are these sports likely to survive? Or just how logically adept and emotionally muted can an animal become and still survive? Will this be beneficial for the human species or not? Will atheism just naturally increase as raw intelligence increases? Many questions….

I am reading a book called, The Curious Incident of the Dog in The Night, by Mark Haddon, which brings all those questions into focus for me. It’s a mystery told through the eyes of a very bright, autistic teenager who is both socially inept and scientifically precocious. He understands almost everything by logical problem solving and is thrown into fits when he’s overloaded with human interaction or too much information or someone touches him. He’s also an atheist, not by choice but by nature, as you’ll see, if you read the book.

To experience this novel is to experience what it might be like in several centuries for almost all humans to be alive, logical and not too intuitive. It all depends just how adaptive are the autistic genes. As I’ve said several times on this blog, I’m pretty sure that I’m just a robot who thinks that he thinks, in short, a functioning computer. The following passages from Haddon’s book illustrates what I’m talking about. The narrator is the autistic Christopher Boone, and, I think, if you read the entire book and if you are honest and very logical, you’ll see that your brain works pretty much like Christopher’s brain works, only a little more intuitively.


163 [Christopher’s chapters are numbered according to prime numbers.]

When I was little and I first went to school [a special school for autistic children, I think], my main teacher was called Julie, because Siobhan hadn't started working at the school then. She only started working at the school when I was twelve.

And one day Julie sat down at a desk next to me and put a tube of Smarties on the desk, and she said, "Christopher, what do you think is in here?"

And I said, "Smarties."

Then she took the top off the Smarties tube and turned it upside down and a little red pencil came out and she laughed and I said, "It's not Smarties, it's a pencil."

Then she put the little red pencil back inside the Smarties tube and put the top back on.

Then she said, "If your mummy came in now and you asked her what was inside the Smarties tube, what do you think she would say?" because I used to call Mother Mummy then, not Mother.

And I said, "A pencil."

That was because when I was little I didn't understand about other people having minds. And Julie said to Mother and Father that I would always find this very difficult. But I don't find this difficult now. Because I decided that it was a kind of puzzle, and if something is a puzzle there is always a way of solving it.

It's like computers. People think computers are different from people because they don't have minds, even though, in the Turing test, computers can have conversations with people about the weather and wine and what Italy is like, and they can even tell jokes.

But the mind is just a complicated machine.

And when we look at things we think we're just looking out of our eyes like we're looking out of little windows and there's a person inside our head, but we're not. [And there isn’t a little person in his head either.] We're looking at a screen inside our heads, like a computer screen.

And you can tell this because of an experiment which I saw on TV in a series called How the Mind Works. And in this experiment you put your head in a clamp and you look at a page of writing on a screen. And it looks like a normal page of writing and nothing is changing. But after a while, as your eye moves round the page, you realize that something is very strange because when you try to read a bit of the page you've read before it's different.

And this is because when your eye flicks from one point to another you don't see anything at all and you're blind. And the flicks are called saccades. Because if you saw everything when your eye flicked from one point to another you'd feel giddy. And in the experiment there is a sensor which tells when your eye is flicking from one place to another, and when it's doing this it changes some of the words on the page in a place where you're not looking.

But you don't notice that you're blind during saccades because your brain fills in the screen in your head to make it seem like you're looking out of the little windows in your head. And you don't notice that words have changed on another part of the page because your mind fills in a picture of things you're not looking at at that moment.

And people are different from animals because they can have pictures on the screens in their heads of things which they are not looking at. They can have pictures of someone in another room. Or they can have a picture of what is going to happen tomorrow. Or they can have pictures of themselves as an astronaut. Or they can have pictures of really big numbers. Or they can have pictures of Chains of Reasoning when they're trying to work something out.

And that is why a dog can go to the vet and have a really big operation and have metal pins sticking out of its leg but if it sees a cat it forgets that it has pins sticking out of its leg and chases after the cat. But when a person has an operation it has a picture in its head of the hurt carrying on for months and months. And it has a picture of all the stitches in its leg and the broken bone and the pins and even if it sees a bus it has to catch it doesn't run because it has a picture in its head of the bones crunching together and the stitches breaking and even more pain.

And that is why people think that computers don't have minds, and why people think that their brains are special, and different from computers. Because people can see the screen inside their head and they think there is someone in their head sitting there looking at the screen, like Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation sitting in his captain's seat looking at a big screen. And they think that this person is their special human mind, which is called a homunculus, which means a little man. And they think that computers don't have this homunculus.

But this homunculus is just another picture on the screen in their heads. And when the homunculus is on the screen in their heads (because the person is thinking about the homunculus) there is another bit of the brain watching the screen. And when the person thinks about this part of the brain (the bit that is watching the homunculus on the screen) they put this bit of the brain on the screen and there is another bit of the brain watching the screen. But the brain doesn't see this happen because it is like the eye flicking from one place to another and people are blind inside their heads when they do the changing from thinking about one thing to thinking about another.

And this is why people's brains are like computers. And it's not because they are special but because they have to keep turning off for fractions of a second while the screen changes. And because there is something they can't see people think it has to be special, because people always think there is something special about what they can't see, like the dark side of the moon, or the other side of a black hole, or in the dark when they wake up at night and they're scared.

Also people think they're not computers because they have feelings and computers don't have feelings. But feelings are just having a picture on the screen in your head of what is going to happen tomorrow or next year, or what might have happened instead of what did happen, and if it is a happy picture they smile and if it is a sad picture they cry.

167

DIRTY REFS, BUT I LIKE BOSTON

I used to root for Boston way back in the days of Bob Cousy, so I’m enjoying the series with LA. With Cleveland, from Ohio, my birthplace, I was torn about their series with Boston. Too bad the Celtics got edged out tonight, but they didn’t get blown out on LA's court, and that fact, alone, does not bode well for LA and its basketball star/rapist Koby Bryant. Speaking of Bryant—it just goes to show that if you have enough money, you can get away with anything. (Goshdarn it, I just don’t feel too friendly tonight toward most things.) Also, now being so near Portland and their Blazers, with Ohio State star, Odom, joining them for real this year after sitting out last year with knee surgery, I don’t know how I’ll feel if Portland begins to show their oats and get to some playoff match up with Boston. Boston beat them here in Portland last year, and I was in attendance for that game. Pierce went on a rampage and shot the hell out of the basket. Where was he tonight, I wonder?

[SNAP CRACKLE]
Tim Donaghy, Disgraced Former NBA Referee, Claims Officials Fixed Playoff Series

reported by TOM HAYS | June 10, 2008 09:13 PM EST | AP

In one of several allegations of corrupt refereeing, Donaghy said he learned in May 2002 that two referees known as "company men" were working a best-of-seven series in which "Team 5" was leading 3-2. In the sixth game, he alleged the referees purposely ignored personal fouls and called "made-up fouls on Team 5 in order to give additional free throw opportunities for Team 6."

"Team 6" won the game and came back to win the series, the letter said.

Only the Los Angeles Lakers-Sacramento Kings series went to seven games during the 2002 playoffs. And the Lakers went on to win the championship.

At the time, consumer advocate Ralph Nader and the League of Fans, a sports industry watchdog group, sent a letter to Stern complaining about the officiating in Game 6 of the Western Conference finals.

The Lakers, who beat Sacramento 106-102 in that game in Los Angeles, shot 27 free throws in the final quarter and scored 16 of their last 18 points at the line.
[POP IT BACK IN]

What interests me here, is the stuff about the “watchdog group” noticing this bad referring long before Donaghy was convicted of criminal behavior. Of course, some people think most officiating of anything is criminal, still this game really stood out and so Donaghy’s claim seems to bear some weight, I don’t care who was bought to say that it wasn’t. (Boy, I’m mad about something. I wonder what?)

TODAY'S HAIKU: The topic is "revolution"

Modern China —
Mao is turning
in his grave.

BUSH GOVERNMENT, ASHAMED OF ITS OWN RECORD,
WITHDRAWS FROM UNITED NATIONS HUMAN RIGHTS TRIBUNE

Quoting from a story appearing on the Huffington Post:

[SNIP]
According the the Human Rights Tribune, the news of the U.S.'s withdrawal drew a note of concern from Human Rights Watch's Sebastien Gillioz, who said: "The message is worrying...Ever since September 11, 2001, the US has constantly interpreted international standards in an 'a la carte' manner that has eroded human rights. Its behaviour has served as an example to a stream of states, including Pakistan, Egypt and other, who are not embarrassed to review human rights standards on homosexuality, abortion, capital punishment. It is a step backwards."
[PASTE]

O'REALLY(!?) FOP CAUGHT DOING AMBUSH JOURNALISM

[SNIPPET]
At the National Conference for Media Reform 2008, a producer for FOX's The O'Reilly Factor, Porter Barry, ambushes PBS's Bill Moyers and peppers him with questions regarding his political affiliations and his "refusal" to appear on O'Reilly's show. Moyers disputes FOX's "facts" for the record and asks to interview someone at The O'Reilly Factor about Rupert Murdoch and the show's coverage during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. The journalist crowd then reacts, chasing down Barry and intentionally giving him a dose of FOX-style bullying reportage.
[PASTED IN]

A MODERN DESERT TRIBE

I hate to sound so inhospitable, but modern believers in religious superstition sound like tribal people who don't fit into the modern world. At least they do to me. When my mind envisions the modern Universe and I see myself as a creation of star dust or when I study the human brain as an adapted recorder of the modern Universe and see myself afoot in this modern ecosphere between the atmosphere and the oceans' bottoms, I am filled with wonder and awe at the grandeur of what we know about the Big Bang and evolution and the human animal's place in this grand and nearly incomprehensible Cosmos.

To descend from those visionary heights to talk to a Bible literalist is very much like parachuting into a jungle to encounter a tribe of people who have not read a newspaper, have not been in contact with a TV, know nothing of written history, have not walked the streets of a modern city nor jet-boated up the Snake River, in fact, know nothing about flight except to worship those strange, silvery birds in the heavens that leave their slime trails across the top of their jungle clearings. Truly, I mean that. Talking to modern fundamentalists about their god is like talking to tribal peoples about their imaginings about gods.

To speak with people who still believe Bible creation myths and the musings of Genesis is truly like meeting uneducated jungle tribes. Not to blame tribal people who cannot be blamed for not knowing about evolution and other facts of nature. In fact, I suppose it is an insult to tribal people to compare them to Bible literalists who ought to know better but don't. I apologize to any as yet undiscovered tribal people for comparing them to modern day Bible literalists. I just want to be ahead of the game when we do meet such people.

Again, I must admit, I have failed to fully explain my mental state when I try to imagine those beings who, as yet, don't know enough about science to understand the nature and reality of the world that evolution and physics have given us. It boggles my imagination to attempt it. Yet I keep trying.

MORE SCIENCE

The following is excerpted from a Discovery Magazine issue called Top 75 Questions of Science (Spring 2008). I wanted to add a corrective to our human animal assumption that we are the favored species on this blue ball called Earth. I bought the magazine in an airport during I and my wife's recent trip back to Ohio.

Q HOW SIMILAR ARE WE TO CHIMPANZEES?

A Jane Goodall, primatologist, Jane Goodall Institute:

Chimpanzees kiss, embrace, hold hands, pat one another on the back, swagger, shake their fists. and throw rocks in the same context that we do these things. There are strong bonds of affection and support between family members. They help each other. And they have violent and brutal aggression, even a kind of primitive war. In all these ways, they're very like us.

Chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans have been living for hundreds of thousands of years in their forest, living fantastic lives, never overpopulating, never destroying the forest. I would say that they have been in a way more successful than us as far as being in harmony with the environment.

Thank you, Jane, but I think you're prejudiced.

WHAT THE CRAP IS THIS?

In Sharon Begley’s science column for Newsweek this week, “Praise The Humble Dung Beetle” (June 9, 2008), she was giving us some of the arguments why more than our mammalian cousins need to be saved and put on endangered species lists. Beings like the dung beetle are often neglected because the powers that be think them beneath respect. So Sharon lists a few ways that crawly, creepy things are worth saving:

“Since the lesser beasts of the field can't just muscle their way to survival, they tend to have talents that higher ones—with more brains as well as brawn to draw on—don't. As a result, they're loaded with gizmos that human engineers are tapping for inspiration. The Namibian beetle, for instance, has tips on the bumpy scales of its wings that pull water from fog, a design that has inspired a fog-harvesting net (it's used in cooling towers, industrial condensers and dry farming regions). The spiral in mollusk shells, which fluids flow through especially smoothly and efficiently, has inspired a rotor that draws up to 85 percent less energy than standard fans and is finding its way into computers and air conditioners. Biologists are cloning mussel proteins to produce an epoxy, mimicking the bivalves' ability to stick to rocks, that is expected to rival any superglue on the market. . . .

“. . . as freshwater mussels have declined (70 percent of their species are threatened or endangered), taking with them their filtration services, water quality in streams, rivers and lakes has deteriorated badly. In the Chesapeake Bay, each adult oyster once filtered 60 gallons of water a day, packaging sediment and pollutants into blobs that fell harmlessly to the bay floor. Before the population crashed in the 1990s, oysters filtered 19 trillion gallons—an entire bay's worth—once a week. The survivors struggle to do that in a year. The result is cloudy, more polluted water, and a loss of fisheries and baymen's livelihoods."

Thank you, Sharon.

And here’s my haiku for this time at bat
based on a recent haiku hotel topic, SCENT:

Silly dung beetle —
he fails to understand
why I love pears.

Please to understand that scent and taste buds are intimately connected in humans. Think about—when one is chewing, what is she smelling?

OF MONKEYS AND MEN









If a monkey can use pure synaptical power to move an artificial arm, so can men and women, and that ability is also a part of Kurzweils' futuristic view of humankind's robotic future. You know the other day, I was watching TV, and I wanted to know just how unconsciously I can move my arm, so I started extending and retracting my arm in front of me, repetitiously, then I stopped thinking about my arm and resumed my conscious attention to the TV program while my arm kept extending out and back without any conscious command by myself except my noticing that my arm was still moving as if being controlled by a robot rather than myself. I recall saying to myself, "Well, see that arm is moving and I'm certainly no longer telling it to move," and I wasn't either. Now. . . I do acknowledge that I had to give my arm its initial command, yet it did keep working without any conscious attention after that, and I could observe and mentally comment on my arm's behavior without acknowledging the original movement command. What can I make of that. . . okay—so I'm crazy—but other than that, what can I make of the whole exercise in unconscious, robot-like control of an arm movement?

LAZING AROUND THE UNIVERSE

I had a successful day staying home and saving gas yesterday. Read a lot, watched "The China Syndrome" with Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas. He sure looks funny in that hippie beard, and how I long for another glimpse of Barbarella! I miss the Jane Fonda (and the Holly Hunter, for that matter) before they got saved, but we atheists always have managed to make out okay even when others go crazy with their needs and fall by the wayside into the mental aberration that is the god concept.

Took a walk in the park out behind the apartment complex, up and down its steep hill two times, then into the hot tub followed by a shower (while in the hot tub it rained and what fun to get out of the tub and let the cold rain drench me before leaping back into the hot water), then more reading, then watching the election results come in and listening to Obama's acceptance speech.

What's with Hillary, anyway? It's always interesting to get emails from her campaign which thank me for my support when, long ago, I went over to the Obama camp and informed Hillary's website that I was an Obama voter. This only goes to prove that no politician or politician's representative ever reads an email directed to them. Unless one is a lobbyist with oodles of do re mi to spread around, no one gets in to see his representative or to speak to him/her personally on the phone. I suggest that every politician spend at least an hour or two a week randomly calling and/or accepting calls from the average people he/she represents.

SPEAKING OF OBAMA

I've been thinking a lot about Obama, and he represents, for me, a truly modern man whereas Hillary and McCain represent the past. Funny thing is that I don't want to explain what I mean by a modern man because it'll get him in trouble with those Americans who are still stuck in the last century—for religious folk, it's the 1st Century and before, they're stuck in. So, I'll just say Barack Obama has the look and feel of a modern man suited to deal with the issues of the 21st century.

GASOLINE FIRED RESOLUTION

Every day, I drive somewhere even though I'm retired and seldom "need" to be anywhere. So, I'm trying to resolve to stay home at least one day every 5 weekdays and, thus, cut my gasoline consumption by 20% each five day period. Weekends are a different matter, but on weekends, my wife and I usually drive together in one car and, thus, use less gasoline too. Add to that the fact that my wife and I both drive 4 cylinder autos and have always driven 4 cylinder (sometimes 3 cylinder) autos, and anyone can see that we've been doing our patriotic best to free America from foreign oil for a long time. For me, the elder of we two, I've been gasoline conscious since 1964 when I bought my first VW or People's Wagon, as I used to call it. I know... I know... I've mentioned this early on VW purchase I don't know how many times on this blog. OK! So slap me silly!

THE NEOCON FUNDAMENTALIST CHICKENHAWK CHRISTIAN REPUBLICAN PARTY: AT IT AGAIN

Dahlia Lithwick's recent article in Newsweek (June 2, 2008/Page 45) is the second article I've come across recently that shows how the Republican Christian Fundamentalist Neocon Chickenhawk Party is trying to disenfranchise American voters. These Christian Fundamentalist Neocon Chickenhawks used to be in the Democratic Party but have long since been driven out of that Party by liberal patriots and true Americans and have adopted the newly reorganized Republican Christian Fundamentalist Neocon Chickenhawk Party. . . .

Okay, so I'm just having fun, exaggerating the situation the Republican Party has created for itself, but one must admit that whereas it was the Democrat Party in the South which once upon a time found ways (poll taxes, threats and impossible quizzes) to disenfranchise Black voters, it is now the Republican Party that is spearheading voter disenfranchisement of the poor all over America by instituting new sorts of restrictions on the Constitutionally-protected right to vote. And it is Bushite Supreme Court appointees who support the disenfranchisement. (See Supreme's decision to support voter IDs in Indiana.) Can a reasonable man (or woman) assume that it is the shift of Bible Belt Southerners from the Democrat Party to the Republican Party that has caused this tactic of disenfranchisement to also move from the Democrat to the Republican Party?

Lithwick points out that the firings of U.S. attorneys by the Bushites were politically motivated by their frustration with attorneys who failed to find widespread voter fraud. But instead of letting their fruitless attempts lapse, the Republican Party is using the fear label, "voter fraud", as a way of disenfranchising America's poor. They are attempting to disenfranchise poorer voters by requiring them to purchase voter IDs (a new kind of poll tax) if they do not happen to have purchased driver's licenses or passports for foreign travel. How many poor people travel to Europe for summer vacations? How many rich people are without passports or, at the least, driver's licenses? You see how skewed this requirement is? As Lithwick writes: ". . . the circle is complete, and the crusade to end imaginary vote fraud will result in real vote suppression."

Of course if all voter IDs are furnished free of charge and sent through the mail, then, they cannot be interpreted as a new poll tax. Getting voter IDs does impose an extra burden not imposed on others if the handicapped and the non-driver (elderly and poor) and those who don't travel abroad are required to travel to county court houses to get them.

WHY THE SUPPRESSION OF LESS WELL OFF VOTERS IS DAMAGING

I'm going to admit a prejudice I caught myself harboring in the dusty closet of my brain. For most of my life, I thought that poorer and, thus, uneducated and therefore "ignorant" Americans supported the Vietnam War while we college-educated folk did not. Part of my prejudice was probably because my earliest attempts at higher education in the '60s occurred in the midst of a growing campus-oriented Vietnam protest. I was surrounded by protesters and joined in myself. Also, I recall clearly the New York construction workers who leaped into a protest march and beat the crap out of the marchers.

Lo and behold, I'm the ignorant one! In Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen on pages 297-299 (1995 edition) are some charts which slap me in the puss with the truth. According to a 1971 poll, only 60 percent of the college-educated wanted our troops brought home from Vietnam while 80 percent of the grade school-educated wanted them brought home.

But what's really revealing about this chapter in Loewen's book is that in another survey, the college-, high school- and grade school-educated all thought that the college-elite were more likely to oppose the war, whereas college-educated, specially doctors and lawyers, were more likely to support it. Granted, by 1971 things were changing rapidly in the nation and the surveys that Loewen cites might have come out differently in an earlier time. By 1971, the nation had pretty well been brought around to a different point of view. Also, the media's heated coverage of campus protests certainly gave the impression that all the anti-war sentiment was being generated on campuses around the country. Still, the view by poorer off, grade school-educated Americans that college people were more likely to be more able to sift through information, evaluate evidence and to know the score and, thus, oppose the war sure gives me an insight into how America's less well off tend to dismiss their own opinions and to look to others to lead them.

I've mentioned Loewen's book before, and I still recommend it. Try to get the most recent edition, if you can. The pages I reference in this blog entry might be different.