Hijackers and Body Scanners

Whenever some goober gets the itch to blow up an airplane there is a small flare of public interest in keeping the public safe without much thought to the consequences.

After the attempted blowing up of a plane by a moron over Christmas via an explosive banana hammock, the news stations were all abuzz over ways to thwart terrorists in our planes. Nevermind that most of our security enhancements added to airport security amounted to little more than feel-good measures that added a ton of hassle for innocent people and very little actual effectiveness (ask Bruce Schneier) in preventing attacks.

The latest push I've seen in the news is for the deployment of full-body scanners. A quick Google turns up a number of articles on them, but this was the first time I heard our "local news" covering the idea in one of their typical short-attention-span-friendly broadcasts.

They seem like a wonderful solution. Basically using backscatter X-ray technology you can see through someone's clothes, highlighting hidden objects. They also let the TSA agents see breast and penis implants, your genitalia, and essentially remove anything that before resembled modesty or personal privacy.

More effective than pat-downs? Yes, probably they are.

Preferred over pat-downs? That's probably a personal question. Would you rather have a "freedom grope" or a minimum wage barely trained McGoober staring at your nubbins?

The TSA swears that the images aren't kept; they're erased in a short amount of time. Oddly enough, nipple slips and upskirt glances aren't visible after a short amount of time as well, but there's nonetheless a thrill from those who get to see these passing slips of modesty and for most of those who were on the slip-per side of the equation the embarrassment doesn't get conveniently erased so quickly.

Does the TSA promise that leering glances and/or smirks are going to be suppressed?  Does the TSA mind a nice fat lawsuit when some monkey behind the controls snaps a quick picture with a camera phone and circulates the picture online of the MILF that just went through the line? Or if another passenger gets the image on their camera? And what protection is there for the passenger's privacy? My doctor has seen my gross nudity (lose a lot of weight, you'll know what I mean). My wife's had doctors see her give birth, and she has doctors that explore her nether regions on a scheduled basis with a duck-billed device that I won't pretend to understand. But the doctors and nurses we rely on for care are trusted not to abuse their positions. I don't get that feeling from TSA agents that are hardly considered elite law enforcement personnel. I often worry they're one step above mall security guards in terms of training and professionalism or are recruited from Craigs List.

My parting thought to the news story...my daughter is underage and nearly legal. My son is DEFINITELY underage. What's to keep some pervert from leering at her nether regions as one of my kids go through security? It's that tantamount to child porn? Sounds to me like they're saying child pornography is okay for the government to produce but for everyone else it's wrong. I'd like to know how they're keeping perverts from going through their McTraining program just to get their jollies staring at young T&A in the airport, seeing as they have such fulfilling and upwardly mobile professional options working in those positions.

Hearing these arguments the government entities swore that they would be putting some software graphic-scrambling magic in so that you don't have your junk or nethers necessarily clear in the images. So...doesn't that defeat the purpose of the scan? Shove some of your magic exploding powder up the canal or tape it to your love stick and it'll just be part of a blurred algorithm on the screen (assuming this is actually done, or is actually effective).

I'm not entirely comfortable with this crap anymore. Air travel is becoming a bigger and bigger hassle, and now I have some half-trained halfwits staring at my wiener just to prove that I am allowed to get on a plane. I'm not innocent until proven guilty. I'm a cog at the mercy of a group of ineffectual thugs who get their jollies showing they have power over people who really are trying to get from point A to point B. The vast majority of people are innocent, but thanks to a few goobers that committed a heinous act, the innocent must suffer at the hands of knee-jerk reactions on behalf of the government trying to pretend they're actually making a difference with feel-good measures. The real question is how much more of this are we, the traveling public, going to accept before we give up on the idea that we are a country that values freedoms and privacy?

Reason for the Season

My wife and I, in a measure to help appease one (both?) of the traditions of the parents, make a trip to my parent's church one week near Christmas. Usually it's the week before the Christmas Eve service, but this year we went the year after.

I am not religious. This may shock you. As such, I don't normally dress up very fancy (clean clothes are fine, thank you...if a church has standards about who they let in, then they're not very Christian, are they?) and I usually keep to myself so as to not be driven nuts by the habits of other people around me and by listening to what I have concluded tend to be propaganda more than an educational sermon.

Yes, other people's habits. Chomping gum like a valley girl drives me nuts too. It's a wiring thing in my head.

The thing that really compelled me to write this was that the minister went over "what is the real reason for the season." Churches really lucked out on having "reason" and "season" rhyme. It helps make ignorance sound clever.

I refrained from saying anything, but Christ is not the "reason for the season". It's the reason for Christmas, but Christmas itself has other origins.

I have run into this time and time again, and every time the people spouting this stuff listen only to what they want to hear. Christmas is not the day Christ was born. Christmas, miraculously, happened to be placed in a pagan holiday to usurp the non-Christians.

Excerpted from Wikipedia: 
Dies Natalis Solis Invicti

Main article: Sol Invictus

Dies Natalis Solis Invicti means "the birthday of the unconquered Sun." The use of the title Sol Invictus allowed several solar deities to be worshipped collectively, including Elah-Gabal, a Syrian sun god; Sol, the god of Emperor Aurelian; and Mithras, a soldiers' god of Persian origin.^[53] Emperor Elagabalus (218–222^[ambiguous]) introduced the festival, and it reached the height of its popularity under Aurelian, who promoted it as an empire-wide holiday.^[54] This day had previously been dedicated to Bacchus, in the Brumalia festival. Bruma being Latin for "shortest day."^[55]
The festival was placed on the date of the solstice because this was on this day that the Sun reversed its southward retreat and proved itself to be "unconquered." Several early Christian writers connected the rebirth of the sun to the birth of Jesus.^[6] "O, how wonderfully acted Providence that on that day on which that Sun was born...Christ should be born", Cyprian wrote.^[6] John Chrysostom also commented on the connection: "They call it the 'Birthday of the Unconquered'. Who indeed is so unconquered as Our Lord . . .?"^[6] 
Winter festivals

Main article: List of winter festivals

A winter festival was the most popular festival of the year in many cultures. Reasons included the fact that less agricultural work needs to be done during the winter, as well as an expectation of better weather as spring approached.^[56] Modern Christmas customs include: gift-giving and merrymaking from Roman Saturnalia; greenery, lights, and charity from the Roman New Year; and Yule logs and various foods from Germanic feasts.^[57] Pagan Scandinavia celebrated a winter festival called Yule, held in the late December to early January period. As Northern Europe was the last part to Christianize, its pagan traditions had a major influence on Christmas. Scandinavians still call Christmas Jul. In English, the word Yule is synonymous with Christmas,^[58] a usage first recorded in 900.

In other words, Christmas was placed in a time when people had a winter celebration of Winter Solstice.

The "reason for the season" was to usurp popular pagan holidays into a Christian holiday.

And it'll happen again, now, too. Regardless of what people will spout about to (and in) the pews and on family specials on television, the custom of giving gifts is as strong as ever. Our US economy is based on you spending money, whether you need to or not. We get things that are sometimes useful, whimsical, wasteful, and/or sentimental for people otherwise may not even think to spend more than ten dollars on for their birthday. You get a gift from Aunt Janice and feel compelled to return the favor. Coworkers spend time and money baking and purchasing trinkets for other coworkers that otherwise they spend their time griping and bitching about (at least in our case it's true). Our retailers depend on the "season" to turn about a nice profit as kids get their shot at receiving usually undeserved uber-expensive toys that they'll play with for month or two before breaking it or losing the pieces.

Once you have stores involved, you get advertisers involved. You get advertisers involved, you get media involved. You get media involved, you get generations of kids slowly growing into teens and adults that will nod their heads at the whole religious side of the holiday and begrudgingly go to services and whatever else it takes...as long as they get the presents under the tree the next morning.

Which is highly ironic. I hear the same people giving holiday plays in churches about the shopping and greedy attitudes being the problem, needing to celebrate Jesus', the warm feeling of helping others...but then these people go home and indulge in an orgy of consumerism. Somewhere the doublethink eludes them.

Now, I'm not against this. I don't have a lot of loose money to throw around, and I'd love to have the spare coin to do these wonderfully generous things like tossing money off the balcony at the mall to watch people claw each other fist into foreheads to grab the money and I will have the fuzzy feeling of knowing I brightened someone's day. I certainly won't turn down free gift cards to bookstores. I enjoy the consumer habits. What I wish is that people knew and acknowledged that today's "season" is NOT a Christian holiday.

It's a celebration of consumerism for stores.

It's a celebration of greed and selfishness for kids, often. We see acts of kindness and selflessness, but when it comes right down to it, I still see the majority of kids looking out for numero uno.

It's a holiday meant to ingrain Christianity into the culture by removing the pagan holiday and inserting a Christian holiday.

It's a conglomeration of secular and non-secular myths and traditions (do you really think Frosty is religious? Rudolph? Yule logs? Even Santa has a mixed origin; the current image of the "jolly elf" is very much an American invention, and apparently America as America is very post-Christian in origin. There are strands of the origin story that go back further, but please, I'm talking about what your average celebrant of Christmas knows and thinks they know about the holiday they're celebrating. If you're going to get worked up about "atheists stilling Christ from Christmas, at least know what you're arguing about.)

Another thing that bothers me is the continued refrain of the Christian being under attack during the holidays. The minister went on to say that it's considered wrong for you to say Merry Christmas and instead have to say Happy Holidays. Personally I don't care. Christmas gets me gift cards. I'm happy as a clam. But there are some people who think it's rather silly to tell someone who is Jewish that they should have a merry Christmas. And now we have Kwanzaa, another made up holiday that will in another few years probably get a decent number of Hallmark cards on the shelf for it.

As consumerism and other holidays and hopefully recognition that our melting pot of a country has people that don't care one way or the other about Christmas (or celebrate it as a means to an end consisting of toys, money, and an excuse to gossip about family at buffet dinners), advertisers are growing wise to the idea of just saying Happy Holidays so they don't tick off their customers. Apparently if you make customers happy, they buy more crap. In the end a lot of people just aren't pissed off at the change from Merry Christmas to Happy Holidays, as long as they're getting a bargain in the electronics department.

You're not under attack. You're simply getting a number of apathetic people who don't care, and a small but growing number of people who prefer not hearing about Christmas every ten minutes while not in their home. Probably it's a side effect of being exposed to Christmas lights and Christmas ornaments and Christmas movies and Christmas specials and Christmas displays starting a week before Thanksgiving! We're tired of it before it gets here! And we have more important things to worry about than whether some dillhole tells us Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas while assaulting us with ringing bells, like what in the !@#$ we're going to find to give Grandma Bessie and whether the cards were mailed on time and whether we remembered everyone on the list and oh crap Aunt Mimi just got us a gift (why? Don't know! Haven't heard from her in ages but now we need to find a cocoa set for her at the ConsumoMart...)

Next time you want to push the "reason for the season", just don't ask me about it. The reason is that it was meant to push a religion on to the masses by stealing their food orgy to the Solstice gods.

I'll leave you with this note, also from the same Wikipedia article:
There is no evidence scripturally or secularly that early Christians in the first century commemorated the birth of Jesus Christ. In fact, in keeping with early Jewish law and tradition, it is likely that birthdays were not commemorated at all. According to The World Book Encyclopedia: "early Christians considered the celebration of anyone's birth to be a pagan custom." (Vol. 3, page 416) Rather than commemorating his birth, the only command Jesus gave concerning any sort of commemoration of his life actually had only to do with his death (Luke 22:19). It was not until several hundred years after the death of Jesus Christ that the first instances of the celebration of Christmas begin to appear in the historical record. According to the new Encyclopedia Britannica, some who later claimed to be Christian likely "wished the date to coincide with the pagan Roman festival marking the 'birthday of the unconquered sun'." The festival was celebrated with similar customs (gift giving, feasting) that are done to celebrate Christmas today.

Are there any holiday irks that get to you? Feel free to share...

Teen Marriage

I had written about my daughter's friend, Sara. She is the pregnant teen that is going to get married ("sometime")...I wrote more about it here. Read that to get a better idea of the person I'm referring to.

My household of course has people on Facebook. If you're unfamiliar with Facebook then you must not have been using the Internet for more than a month...I'm not saying you need an account on Facebook or actively use it, since I've found it to be useful only in that I've found people I lost track of years ago thanks to Facebook, only to lose them again in a deluge of worthless invites to play some farming game or joining a mafia group and spammed with happy messages that filled time I'll never get back. But I digress.

The point is that Sara has a Facebook account and apparently has her status updates posted online that members of this household see. She recently postponed (cancelled?) her wedding plans. Her mother, also apparently online with Facebook, said that the wedding was being postponed indefinitely (I got this all second-hand, so I'm paraphrasing). They got into some argument and called it off.

That was a few days ago. I asked yesterday whatever became of their canceled wedding plans, wondering what could possibly have caused Mr. and Mrs. All-You-Need-Is-Love to call off their plans.

"Oh, they're getting married now. They think near Valentine's day."
"Huh?"
"Yeah. They made up and they're going to get married again."

Quick time for slow thinkers...if your idea of resolving an argument with your fiance' is to threaten to call off your wedding for a reason short of finding him or her hammering another person in a clear act of infidelity or discovering that he or she will be out of the country or in jail for a stretch of time, and perhaps a few other extenuating circumstances that lead you to a revelation that this person is not the person you thought they were at a deep and fundamental level, you're probably about as emotionally mature as a ten year old and should not be getting married in the first place.

Threatening to call off the marriage because of a spat is pretty much the equivalent to the playground "I won't be your friend anymore!" ploy.

I shudder to think how common this type of idiocy is in our society. It makes me more depressed than I already am having to face the holiday stress.

Teen Pregnancy and Idiots: A Plea for Understanding

I need some help.

I probably don't have enough readers who follow this to give some advice, but hey, doesn't hurt to ask. If you have friends or followers that might be able to offer (constructive) thoughts, please do direct them here to leave a comment.

I need some guidance on a social issue that probably doesn't have a direct "right" answer but I have definite opinions about and I need to find a way to reconcile these ideas. Since you probably read the title, you should have no problem figuring that out.

My daughter has a friend who is a complete moron. I'll call her Sara. And when I say she's a moron, I mean she really is an idiot...ignorant, lacking common sense, and worst of all proud of her ignorance.

She is a senior in high school. I'm not sure she didn't fail a year and have to repeat; she's 18 now. Her boyfriend is in his early 20's. Sara is a sweet girl, kind, and comes off as being a total bubblehead if you met her. She's one of the kinds of people that hangs around and leaves you scratching your head wondering where her head is half the time, but otherwise seems innocent and harmless enough.

Her boyfriend was supposedly going into the military. Her mother works a job that doesn't bring in a lot of cash, and I guess her father is more or less not in the picture (I never hear anything about her father, I think they may be divorced).

The problem is that before her senior year started, she decided to get pregnant. So she did.

Her mother is overjoyed. Sara gave her a granddaughter! Yay! She also was letting her daughter "live" with the boyfriend all summer. She reported that the daughter lived with her so she'd be in the "correct" school district while she was...is?...living with her boyfriend in a neighboring school district.

Did I mention that she's a senior in high school still?

I have a few problems with this. First, it encouraged my daughter to be an idiot. They're friends, and I can't very well just ban her from hanging out with people because they're idiots or she'd have no friends. My daughter saw no problem with her being pregnant because "they're in love". I suppose this partially fits with the theory I have that part of the Twilight appeal to tweens and teens is that it gives some idealized teenager ideal of romantic love, the idea that a true relationship means finding someone that you physically and emotionally cannot live without to the point where you pine away and die because they decide that they, like, want to, like, hang out with someone else, like, ya'know? Be typical teenagers with so much melodrama in your life that every minor blip in your life is a, like, major life-altering catalyst for altering your entire, like, world?

Where was I? Oh, yes, idiot. They're in love. That makes it okay to intentionally get pregnant at 17/18. That is so not the message I want my teenage daughter to get, which I thought she'd know better since she had to live with the consequences of being the daughter of someone who was a teenage mom. It made life hard for them. It seems she forgot about the first 10 years of her life.

Okay. That brought me to the second reason I really dislike this. Their lives.

Sara has no job. No job skills. No prospects. Not even married yet.

I'm not a big believer in marriage for the sake of children or for any religious reasons (imagine that). I'm look at it practically. Supposedly the father is in the military...my daughter thought he was, but for some reason he came home on leave over the summer and simply never went back, and my daughter is too focused on herself to ever wonder why. She thought that he might kind of sorta work at a factory now. In his twenties with a factory job. Okay. It's something.

The teenage mother? Sara apparently got pregnant, got all the back slaps and smiles from her mother, then decided she was afraid of the stigma of being on of "those" statistics at school and decided to take home schooling or online schooling through her school district so she didn't have to face her classmates with the baby bump.

They're not married yet. "They're planning on getting married," my daughter says. "They love each other." Sorry...statistically speaking, this is sooo common a refrain, yet it means jack until it's really done. And until then you lost the primary practical reasons to get married...namely legal benefits. Something happens to mommy or daddy, there's no money or support available to the kid and remaining parent. I know it's common to believe you won't be "one of those people", that "our situation is different." Of course there's a chance things will work out. In families with more wealth, financial issues never figure into the equation.

But this isn't a family of means. Grandma-Mommy makes minimal income. I guess Grandpa-Daddy is barely in the picture. Daddy works at a factory. Mommy is a student with no marketable skills and hasn't even held a summer job. Which brings me to my next problem...

My taxes will be supporting them. It's one thing when someone is raped. Or hits bad times. Has a rough patch in life, etc. etc...I'm all for the government helping. When someone does something that at the time is reasonable, then the situation changes, that's forgivable. But for the life of me I cannot find any situation where you're making minimal amount of money, have no real skills, and it's justifiable to have a child at an age that stigmatizes you and the child. She intentionally did this. She set out to have a baby, and now that child will be most likely raised at or very close to the poverty line, thus statistically speaking creating the same problem when this kid hits reproductive years all over again. What happens when you have someone in that situation? Typically they're on financial support.

I work a job that is literally stressing my health at times. My wife works hard at her job. We forced our daughter to get a job and she's done a halfway decent job of sticking with that McJob. And it pisses me off to have a third of my income docked to go towards people who are in financial straits and decide it's wise to turn around and have another child in that situation on purpose. Not an accident. Have a child that will in turn be put into a disadvantaged situation with the expectation that they're entitled to a wonderful life at the expense of taxpayers because Mommy and Daddy think it's cool to have a kid.

I've been struggling with my feelings on this because before, I didn't mind her being around. She was sweet. A nice kid. Just...stupid as a rock at times. Ignorant of just about anything going on around her. She was bubbleheaded but harmless for the most part...maybe a slight danger to herself, since she had once stuck a lollipop in her eye thinking she was holding her contact lens (which was actually on the finger on the other hand). Yes, that actually happened, and isn't unexpected from her.

Now I don't want her in our house. Ever.

I can't help but see her as a bad example, and I'm overwhelmed with disappointment at the road she's setting down. I know there are exceptions. My wife was someone who led a life where quite frankly she should be probably dead. From her stories she was far more promiscuous than average in her teenage years. She did things she now regrets. What first drew me to her was that she was determined to make up for those things after she got pregnant and finally realized that she was bringing an innocent life into the world that relied on her to be responsible enough to take are of her. She isn't the nurturing type...she'll admit that...but when she got pregnant her senior year in high school, she stuck with school to graduate. Then she moved out of her parents home, got married to the father (another mistake, she concedes, as he was too lazy to hold a job and she was working whenever she could to make the bills), and then went to college over the next 10 years to get a degree with career potential. Ten years of working nights and part time. She beat the odds, and while she'll always be the statistic of being a teen mom, she's also a statistic in that she beat the overwhelming majority that ends up without an education and living in the poverty level as a single parent. She worked to have her kid have a better life, and that struck me as being someone to really admire.

Sara shows no sign of this. There is absolutely no way, in her shoes, I could see what she's done as being a good idea from anyone with a lick of common sense. It wasn't an accident. It wasn't her being a victim. It was her being selfish and self centered and now I have to pay for it. I'm having a lot of trouble seeing through this obstacle.

I was thinking of this because apparently she asked my daughter to go to Twilight tomorrow with her and her boyfriend and some other friend. Ironic. Twilight is supposed to be all about the romance-without-screwing and chastity, but Sara is going to see it. My wife and I just said that as long as she had money to pay her bills (yes, my daughter incurs bills for her driving and cell phone) as well as paying for her trip to the movie then fine. I don't like her hanging out with Sara as I see her as a bad example and influence now, but like I said...don't wan to block her from being friends with people who are idiots or she'd really have no one to hang around with.

I just need...strike that. I want to find a way to justify liking Sara again as that good kid that didn't cross the line from harmless to a tax burden. As it stands I see her as a financial burden, bad example to society and quite frankly I feel a need to punish her for her idiocy. I feel a need to tell her that she's not welcome in our home, around us or our kids. I want her to understand the immense stupidity in her decisions and understand that her actions are bringing an innocent into the world that doesn't have a choice in dealing with her idiot life decisions, and there will be a point where statistically she will repeat those mistakes for others to have to deal with.

The most difficult keyword there is feel. I could find logical fallacies and justifications to appease the rational side of either end of the arguments. But something about this...maybe it was her being judged a harmless but ditzy person previously...makes me feel anger at her disappointing my wife and I. It's not my place to punish her. I've not even spoken to her since she was dancing around with her joyful news, and I don't think my wife has spoken to her either.

Maybe that's it. I'm utterly disappointed and angry that we misjudged her so much. I have an irrational need to make her understand her foolishness and I want her to get her ass on track to becoming a productive member of society, but she's not my kid. And I'm realistic. She has enjoyed her ignorance and stupidity, and she has no aspirations to do anything in life to be productive. I guess that lifestyle works when the Daddy pulls in cash by the fistful, but when Daddy is a military dropout landing a minimum wage job, I'm thinking that is an indication that Daddy couldn't hack the responsibility and discipline of the military's basic training, Mommy already shows she lacks this, and Sara's own family lacks the means to support the children as well.

I've simply seen this pattern play out too often. My wife's sister has kids out of wedlock and lives with her parents, partially supported by them. Technically I guess it is in wedlock since she never divorced her husband, but the children weren't his. Oh boy. That life would take three posts to explain in itself.

The area in which we live is rife with poverty-level income, with a huge population of underprivileged kids according to the government. Now Sara has added another one. Each of these kids is an opportunity to change and live better and do better in life. Sara has effectively flushed her chance down the toilet.

I hope desperately that she will turn this around and beat the odds. I don't see her as being someone for whom it will happen. My wife happened to be too stubborn to not beat those odds once she actually came to her senses and decided that maybe her lifestyle choices were really stupid. Sara is too stupid to come to her senses.

Can someone give ideas on how to "come to grips" with this? How to forgive when I can't get past the idea of punishing her for her utter stupidity? I can't do that, of course, so right now I simply don't want her around at all. My wife can't offer insight on how to do this because she, too, is apparently too angry and disappointed in Sara to endorse her coming to the home as well. I guess that despite my Aspergian need for rational discourse and her irrational emotion-based decision process we both agree that we don't want Sara around.

Consequences of Using Facebook

It's funny how teenagers, and adults, have so many "duh" moments with technology. Working in technology, I tend to be aware of the issues that crop up with lack of privacy and forethought when using said technology as a medium to advertise yourself (on purpose or inadvertently).

That's not to say that I'm not going to be guilty of skirting the line once in awhile. I've posted my religious views on this blog and know that no matter what, most communities in the US will frown upon you being an atheist and it could potentially affect your job. I've posted stories that draw parallels to my work life in my tech blog and if I didn't change certain details I could risk pissing off the wrong person over something silly. These are reasons that I don't use my full name and precisely why I chance details to mask such things and in using services like Twitter and Facebook I have to ask myself whether or not my mother seeing what I'm posting would get me in trouble.

Apparently most teens fail to think about the Mommy Test when using social services. In the news today (CBC News, actually) is a woman that got into trouble with something that I would have thought would have passed the Mommy Test.

Nathalie Blanchard was diagnosed with depression and was on leave from her employer. While on leave she had apparently gone on a vacation and had a birthday party and even a bit of fun watching Chippendales dance around. Then her insurance company stopped paying benefits.

Calling them up the agent described photos of her fun that she posted on Facebook.

Apparently the insurance company decided she was no longer depressed because she was pictured having fun. She's confused because her facebook profile is locked to allow only approved people to see the pictures. In addition (this isn't in the story but rather my own take on it, hoping that Canadian common sense is at least on par with American) diagnosis for a disorder like this is usually left up to a psychiatrist or therapist to determine, not some dillhole spying on your online social web site activities, isn't it?

While on one hand this is an example of consequences to sharing your life online and the need to exercise caution in advertising your activities, I also see this as a rather creepy invasion of privacy by a corporation into your private life. I'm hoping that one of her "friends" ratted her out because if not then the alternative is rather chilling.

If she's careful with her choice of allowed friends and who is allowed to view her social media activities then I wouldn't think the things she posted were an issue. If I were diagnosed with depression (whoops...I was...) and the therapist tells me that I need to take a break, and my insurance company/employer are covering a leave of absence, why in the name of Purgatory would I need to sit around at home for a month to recover when I should be doing something to reinvigorate my life and find a reason to get out of bed in the morning? It's not like the woman was out of work for having a wounded back and then photographed carrying heavy boxes. She was on vacation and trying to have a good time. Oddly enough I would think that this is showing recovery in progress, not a tip off that the insurance company should just cancel her coverage.

I would like to think they would tell her they need updates from a mandatory visit to a therapist who in turn would share his or her evaluation of her status and whether she's fit to work again, not turn around and make an armchair analysis of her status from pictures online.

I have no idea why people would hate insurance companies...

Killing Albinos in Africa for Profit

On one hand, reading this story was shocking. On the other I suppose I shouldn't have been all too surprised given the fact that African nations tend to be rife with superstition, have no currency in science and lack basic education.

The story was about a woman whose daughter, an albino, was murdered in the middle of the night for her legs. Some men broke into the bedroom and held a large machete to her husband's throat telling them to keep quiet and not look at him while in the next room another man slit their 14 year old daughter's throat and hack off her legs while their other two daughters were told to stay quiet or be killed as well.

The husband was later taken into custody for selling their daughter out.

Why? Because witch doctors make potions from albinos for their "magical properties". And it's profitable for the people that get the body parts, whether from graves or people who happen to be unfortunate enough to, you know, not be able to defend themselves from these backwards superstitious animals.

I vaguely recalled that the Sun (a UK new source) wasn't necessarily very reliable. No problem. Quick Google for "africa albino murder" still yielded a bunch of hits, one of which was this one from the BBC.

The initial shock wore away, though, as I remembered that for these people having an epileptic attack was grounds for burning you alive for practicing witchcraft, raping lesbians cures homosexuality, and believe that HIV can be cured by raping kids.

These people are an extreme example of societies that lack science education (or education in general). It's disturbing that the mob mentality is capable of justifying such things but hey...what harm is it to let people hold superstitious beliefs? Just because your neighbor believes that is grounds for hating those people, or that vaccinations cause , or any other belief that flies in the face of facts doesn't mean that it does any harm, right?

But what happens when those beliefs become more and more popular?

I know this is a slippery slope argument. At the same time I can't help but see how easily it could move from, "today it's not believing in your sky wizard that keeps me from winning a school board election or makes me unpopular at the office Xmas party and tomorrow it's a breakout of a disease in some town that kills several kids because these jackarses are too superstitious to get vaccinated." Is it really all that hard to imagine when the nation that prides itself as being superior to any other on the planet is also proud to advocate willful ignorance?

More Drivel Published As Fact-Going Rogue with Sarah Palin

Apparently the AP checked out some of the claims in Sarah Palin's new book, "Going Rogue", only to find that much like her ability to think critically the book is full of crap.

Harsh, I know, but seems according to the AP to be true. It fits with all the other facts that had been discovered about the woman's behavior patterns before and after the elections that it's hard to write this off as confirmation bias.

The article is found here.

From the sounds of it, this is a pre-campaign rally cry and platform builder, laced with distortions and lies. For people who are already pro-neo-conservatives or don't care about little things like facts the book is preaching to the choir. For those who didn't trust her the first time around and prefer facts over rhetoric the book is yet another example of what is wrong with the current Republican party.

(Thought for the day: while skepticism isn't inherently liberal or conservative, I do think that there are certain things that attract like minded individuals, much like you don't find many Amish doing system administration...)

Giving Kids a Leg Up from Your Own Experiences

One of the "near universals" you gain when you become a parent...if you like your kids, anyway...is the desire to give your kid the things you didn't have growing up. If you grew up wishing that your parents had given you more books, you shower your kids with Barnes and Noble gift cards at the first sign that they're interested in flipping pages. If you grew up with parents you felt were oh so restrictive then you try to give your kids more freedoms.

We want to give our kids the benefits of our experiences. We feel we knew what sucked from our childhood and don't want our kids to have to endure the things we did, or make the same stupid decisions we made.

But there's a problem with that thinking.

I thought about this after arguing with someone about the latest fads in education making the rounds in the public schools in the area. I lamented that the politicians dictating and mandating rules for schools to follow had little to no experience dealing with kids (or parents) in the classroom. The mandates are impossible to follow.

I was thinking about this recently when I was pondering what I'd do if I won the lottery (who hasn't dreamed about that?). I thought that one thing I would do is sponsor a deserving student in paying for college. I'd have slight stipulations, small conditions that if they broke the rules they would be on their own in paying for the courses, but if they stayed within the rules they'd get a free education. It would be a marvelous opportunity in a time when four years of college cost as much as my house.

Then I thought about the kids that have everything given to them. Kids that had a free Mercedes or Corvette, and if they wrecked it, Daddy would pay for another. The kids that have cell phones and treat them as if they're disposable...drop it in the toilet? Mommy will pay for another one tomorrow. Hell, if they don't like their phone for some reason, some have intentionally destroyed it so they'd get a new one.

These are kids that treat other people as property because, hey, if they're not of any use to you, why bother talking to them?

These are kids that have all the benefits I lacked growing up (and then some). And because they didn't know what it was like to have to experience some of the suckitude of the world they didn't realize just how good they have it.

I didn't have a bad childhood by any measure. Humans are hardwired to find the shortcomings in their lives and make that the "thing" that would make them happy; my family wasn't poor, but we didn't own a boat. I'd really love a boat. We never ended up homeless, but I wanted a treehouse. Things like that.

So if I made sure my kids eventually had a boat and treehouse, I'm pretty sure my kids would be impressed for all of an hour before wishing we had a bigger boat and a treehouse with outlets.

I extended this thinking to the kids that I had in mind for giving the opportunity for a college education. If I won the lottery. That part is important.

Unless they were kids that truly came from families struggling to meet the middle-class level of life, and truly wanted to have that college education and knew, truly knew that they were on the brink of not getting it, they'd never realize the opportunity they had.

Moreover, part of who I am today came from making stupid mistakes and lacking some of the things I wanted. So by depriving kids of some deprivation, I might not be doing them a favor. They'll end up lacking life lessons from their failures because I handed a success to them, rather than letting them fail and having them pick themselves back up.

I can tell my daughter about the things I ended up regretting in life. I can tell her and warn her and she'll still be the "typical teen". She blinks and stares without comprehension. She ignores what I'm saying, focusing instead on excuses for why XYZ happened rather than listening to the point.

She doesn't even bother reading the blog as far as I can tell. And this is full of lessons and ideas I've pondered and observed. If she wanted to know more about me, I'm pretty open on this website about my ideas. Not everything, of course. Some things are best left to discretion. But there's still a pretty honest baring of who I am here in this blog. She could not care less.

So maybe it's best if you have the means to simply spend that inheritance on yourself. The kids will simply squander it, and if you truly care for your kids you'll dole out the benefit of your wisdom in moderation. Let them make mistakes rather than give them the means to bypass what you recalled as a pain. Give them enough that they can stay out of jail, but not so much that they treat computers and game consoles and cell phones as if they were as disposable as paper towels.

I Don't Need God to Be Amazed At Nature

I've been reading a book called Death From the Skies! by Phil Plait, also known as The Bad Astronomer.

I am only halfway through the book and already all I can say is...wow.

Phil uses his wit and knowledge of science to spread the truth about astronomy the way Bill Nye inspired...inspires...science enthusiasts of all ages. Or Mr. Wizard. And his descriptions of how stars go supernova or condense into black holes leaves me staring at the night sky and wondering just how insignificant we as humans really are.

Can you imagine pressure and heat and gravity so great that electrons are literally ripped away from atoms?

Or having a tidal force so great from a black hole that the difference in pull from your head to your toes will turn you into organic spaghetti? Not that you'd be alive long enough to feel it...

He describes in detail what would happen if a bit of mass the size of Earth were condensed into black hole and then started on a collision course with Earth (hint: it's not pleasant, but you'll be dead long before it briefly orbits the center of Earth for a little bit and continues on its' way).

The power of stars to create through fusion various elements; a sphere of iron thousands of miles in diameter at the heart of a star, the possibility that the iron in your blood came from a star millions or billions of years ago...that you're made up of the stuff of stars. How can that not spark your imagination or your sense of wonder?

Just...wow.

The language is easy to understand. The ideas simplified enough to instill wonder and not get you bogged down in the details of how Hawking Radiation works. It even explains the most likely candidate for the origin of Gamma Ray Bursts (and why they'll kill 1/2 the planet immediately if we're hit by one). Gamma Ray Bursts are being detected BILLIONS of light-years from our planet from all over the universe.

Wow. Grab the book. Read it. Learn about the night sky in a whole new light.

Internet as a Valid Source

I have a kid in school. This child is old enough to do research papers. Said child has had many teachers say that she cannot use Internet resources as sources for papers and projects; she must cite "paper" sources, like newspapers and magazine articles. Sometimes there are particular web sites that they're allowed to use that are "valid" due to being subscription based or have parent companies that are based in the paper world (Time magazine's website, or the New York Times).

Why? Because any moron can put information on the Internet. Supposedly.

I think that teachers that use this line of reasoning clearly don't understand the nature of the Internet. Or their own chosen "Valid Citation" sources, for that matter.

They still think Wikipedia is inaccurate. There was a study done that compared Wikipedia with Britannica; the results were startlingly close. More importantly, if you are researching anything having to do with fringe or pop culture, Britannica was about as useful as a knife at a gunfight. I searched for the name Optimus Prime on Britannica's website and got a nonsense result (with offers to buy one on eBay...huh?). Wikipedia? Full character history, voice actor information, incarnations in various series...the whole shebang.

Wikipedia has also been making changes to help ensure accuracy in their articles as well.

Most sites that have information seem to draw a particular crowd; as such, the users gain a form of currency in reputation. Sites like StackOverflow and Serverfault have created entire communities based on reputation; the more you participate, the more reputation other users will give you as a reward for correct answers, the higher your reputation, the more authority you have.

There's a tacit acknowledgement in this when these luddites allow for "certain" online articles to be cited in research but not others; authority is the currency that matters. Popular sites on the Internet are popular because large numbers of people continue to visit them and use their information. Incorrect information can be separated out by the community.

But these teachers insist that printed sources carry authority because of their oversight; they have editors, while the webbertubes are governed like the wild west!

Hmm...that doesn't take into account incidents like the sheepskin pulled over Oprah's eyes by Mr. James Frey? Or reporters that make their information up completely? Including for big name news media like USA Today? Where was their oversight then?

The Fake Steve Jobs had an interesting article reviewing why mainstream media is dying. He outlines a story on TechCrunch examining a company called Zynga that was selling scam ads online with those stupid games like "FarmVille". The blog basically heavily slammed the company with proof of their scum tactics including a video clip when Pincus, the CEO of Zynga, told an audience of developers all about the things he did to generate revenue through those games.

The New York Times had a story about Zynga that completely neglected to mention any word about the ad revenue and scam tactics being used by them. It was all sunshine and rainbows being blown up Zynga's arse, and it gave Zynga positive press at a point when people should have been alerted that they're being ripped off.

Here, the online resources were more accurate and arguably more relevant than the "authoritative" New York Times.

It can also be argued that our media outlets are too biased to be taken seriously without a heavy dose of skepticism. Even searching for "media bias" on Google comes up with a site near the top of the rankings that "exposes the liberal bias of the media." The entire site is geared towards not giving you facts to interpret, but rather convince you that the media is run by evil liberals out to poison the minds of conservatives.

None of this addresses the real weakness of my daughter's teacher's view in using online resources; in research papers, you're supposed to use reason and research to back up your claims. You can't just cite one source for any fact and expect it to be taken as a given; you need multiple sources that verify the fact, or a line of reasoning that can lead you to reasonably conclude what the researcher concludes. Any idiot can parrot one thing they heard.

Hell...many of the "published" authorities do. How often do you run across the same articles nearly word for word, then realize they're all from the Associated Press? Five sources all using the same Associated Press as their source isn't five sources for your paper.

Even then, there are times when a clearly satirical news story was re-reported by "valid sources" as being true. Where was their authoritative oversight then?

The fact is that when properly researched (i.e., by applying cross-checking and reason to the topic at hand) the source of information is less important than the brains analyzing it. All the news being reported is coming from people and as such is going to be filtered (read: biased) in some way. Straight information is of little use to an audience; it must be interpreted to make sense, and that is part of the job of the researcher doing the paper. By encouraging students to only refer to and lay their unquestioning belief in certain news authorities these teachers are doing a grave disservice. They teach that there are definite authorities who should not be questioned rather than encouraging students to think and analyze information for themselves, and this is in my opinion yet another reason our students in the US are lacking in critical thinking skills.

Cheerleader Dystonia Update

Another update from Steven Novella's blog on the cheerleader with supposed dystonia. Check it out here...the plot has not only thickened, I think it started to spoil.

Movies Sway the Masses?

I was listening to back episodes of the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe when they had a news blurb about UFO sightings in the UK that surge when alien-centric movies are released. I did a quick Google and found this story that basically corroborated what they said; example: Independence Day was released, and that year there were 609 sightings when the year before there were 117.

While at my followup for bariatric surgery I read a mini-magazine published by the hospital with various news reports. It said that a study found that teen smoking is finally going down. One of the reasons attributed? Movies aren't depicting smoking as cool anymore.

Of course, correlation does not imply causation. That doesn't mean there isn't a link. Just that it isn't definitive. You can't see that all the accidents in a small town involved a Ford and from that correlation assume that Ford vehicles are more accident prone.

But there is a trend in society that seems to bear out that people are really @#% stupid, or at least too stupid to think for themselves. I think we have some kind of wiring in our brains that likes to outsource stuff we don't like to think about and gradually it worms into our behaviors and attitudes. And it's scary.

Want people to stop smoking? Remove them from popular movies long enough, kids won't try it (fiercely independent, "You don't know me", etc. etc...kids, you're individuals with your own minds who apparently choose to do what everyone else does.)

Want them to see UFO's? Apparently all you need is a good sci fi movie in the box office.

Television has slowly started making science more "cool". Shows like Mythbusters, CSI, NCIS, Numb3rs, and Big Bang Theory make the geek the hero (finally) so it's okay to be the geek. Gradually...very gradually...like, ice age wall of ice creeping south gradually...is making the geek in school someone to regard with more respect than dirt. I don't see them being more popular than the jock but hey it's better than the old-school science nerd stereotype.

I don't know how to regard this. On one hand it's a great illustration of just how intellectually lazy people can be that they are manipulated by television and movies so overtly and yet they'll deny it when it's pointed out to them. On the other, I wonder if it isn't something with the way we're socially wired in the brain, that we need at some level acceptance of the flock, so when it's popular in a big movie and the people at the water cooler think it's great then maybe it's in our best interest to go along with the crowd as a social survival strategy.

Or maybe it's a good lesson to file away for use as a Future Dark Overlord (you listening to that, Mr. Scott Sigler?? Oh, yeah, I'm talking to you...)

What do you think of this? Social phenomena? Or is it just someone noticing that Fords are causing accidents in the home town?

Making Your Own Luck

I stumbled upon this Telegraph article reviewing making your own luck. Basically it said that people can make their own skill and it was a matter of skill.

Being lucky is a skill?

That's counterintuitive...working at being lucky? And I'm not talking about the skill of being dirty-lucky. Get your mind out of the gutter. Plus everyone already knew that was a skill.

I'm talking about the lucky you get when you find money laying on the ground or winning a contest.

According to the article the study found that people who were "unlucky" tended to be more tense and focused on details. Basically, the people who weren't tense noticed other things around them. Unlucky people were focused on the walk so they didn't notice the pothole. They didn't notice the money laying along the path. They looked for a specific job listing in the paper and didn't notice the unrelated job listing that happened to be a far better opportunity.

The story goes on to say that lucky people are lucky using four principles; they notice and create chance opportunities, they listen to their intuition, they use positive expectations, and they adopt a resilient attitude.

Which doesn't bode well for me.

I tend to be very focused and stuck on my expectations and routine. I am not an intuitive person; I reason things out and follow logic when all else fails. I tend to be more of a realist and cynic than a positive person. And for the resilient attitude...I'm still here and I'm still working on my novel despite my fears, so maybe I might have a slight bit of a resilient attitude, if that can be counted.

The article is actually very interesting. It's older but if true it might be something worth filing away for future use. I might have to return to it and study it some more too...maybe try integrating it into my life in some fashion. There have been a number of times lately where I really need something like this to fall back on.

The Dystonia Cheerleader: a Followup

Steven Novella posted a followup to his blog entry about the cheerleader that supposedly suffered from Dystonia as a side effect of getting a flu shot. Anti-vax groups appear to be starting to back off as Dystonia advocates are coming forward to enlighten them with how much crap the anti-vaccination groups are full of.

I had pointed to Steve's blog post here a few days ago. It's sad how quickly she was foisted up as a poster child for the anti-vax people, just long enough to get five minutes of fame for their cause, then back off just as the media is no longer paying any attention to the story and so the truth will probably never get advertised. The stigma for getting flu shots will stay in the public awareness while never hearing the followup...basically, "whoops, we screwed up!"

The fact is that she needs help and hopefully she'll get it. The anti-vax'ers aren't the ones to give it, though.

Why Believe in God?

It's my birthday so I thought I'd post something that was kind of personal. Unfortunately this tends to tick other people off. At least it does in real life if I were to bring it up. I learned a long time ago that religion and politics are two things that people would rather not rationally discuss so I avoid it and pretty much assume it's topica non-grata. I don't get much feedback from the blog on the topic, so I didn't think it would hurt that much to bring it up here. This is kind of an off-the-cuff rant (I think it's called stream of consciousness, or something similar to it) so if the lack of structure is something else that bothers you that's another reason to move on to another day's topic.

I don't believe in a god.

And I don't understand why other people do.

It's a copout to say that perhaps my atheism stems in part from my tendency to value reason over emotion, or the quirk where if I see an inconsistency in reasoning it is something I cannot unsee. I was raised as a methodist but from a very young age I simply couldn't accept Christianity as the answer to all the questions I had.

I have come to believe that people believe in gods because it is simple. If you don't understand it, God did it. And people who profess to believe in a neverending spirit living for eternity will blindly follow whatever religion they feel comfortable with...I don't see them thinking critically about this, they just do it. And it perplexes me. You're gambling on your eternal soul without critically evaluating your religion?

I think this is in part to how complicated things really are and how we're wired to handle complicated things.

People by default use stereotypes as a shortcut for evaluating situations. We assume the guy in a police uniform is a cop. He might be. He might not be. There are stories of women being pulled over by cars with dash lights and a man in a uniform who then proceed to rape them. There are numerous advice columns I've read that say if anything seems suspicious, you should proceed to a well-lit public area to pull over (indicating you are going to pull over and acknowledge the officer) or keep the door locked and window up and demand to see a badge and have them call for another officer to come as well.

We assume things about certain races, situations, uniformed people, and while not true, they often turn out to be somewhat accurate, or accurate enough that we can free our mental processing space for other tasks. People simply aren't willing to ask questions about the universe or take time to understand the scientific method. Unfortunately, our country (the US) is largely scientifically illiterate.

I have heard people say that there's no way for us to know about extrasolar planets (they don't use those terms, though). I don't pretend to know every detail. But I do know that there's multiple ways scientists have verified it. Even if I did, the person that says that probably wouldn't understand lensing, gravity's effects on light, how a large mass moving in front of a star affects the perception of the star from Earth over time, or even how the planetary object of sufficient mass affects light from a star when the object is behind the star. We can even get an idea of the makeup of the atmosphere with very sensitive light receptors and seeing what an analysis of the spectrum of light hitting Earth shows as the planet moves in front of the light source.

See, these are things that scientists cannot make up. they cannot on a whim declare that there's another planet out there. They are using methods and reasoning that can be duplicated by other people. And as of this writing there are over 370 extrasolar planets confirmed using these methods.

Intuitively I cannot follow the religious teachings I have been given. I ask questions and never get satisfactory answers that cannot be rephrased, basically, "Because I said so."

• Why did God create us?
• What does Satan get from an eternity of picking on God by playing with people?
• Wouldn't Satan have something better to do? Or God, for that matter?
• Why do you have faith in a book that has been retranslated many many times over a centuries and is still having some translations in dispute?
• Why should I believe the interpretation of the Bible from someone who may not even know that Jesus' native tongue wasn't English?
• How can the Bible preach love and understanding (which Jesus does, from the versions I have read) be used to justify hate crimes?
• Have you stopped to think about where all the water in the great flood came from, or where it went? (Into the Earth really isn't possible. Do some math to find out why.)
• If there were one small family on the ark, doesn't that mean that everyone on Earth now would be inbred?
• Where is historical evidence of Jesus outside the Bible?
• Why does God have His followers interpret (and according to each other, misinterpret) His word and intentions rather than just make a really big planetwide broadcast of His will?
• Why did God apparently spend a lot of time a couple thousand years ago performing astounding feats and personally interceding in disputes and society affairs, then disappear entirely?
• Why is the Catholic church currently banning sharing a chalice for ceremonies out of fear of H1N1, if they believe that God will protect them in their one true faith?
• Why is it that the Bible is held to be the sacred word of God, but there is still so much "wiggle room" for interpretation, or worse, followers cherry pick what they want or don't want and follow their own version of religion, still believing that everyone else is wrong?
• If God does not want certain behaviors, why does He allow for them to exist?
• If we are allowed to sin because of free will, why would he punish us with eternal pain and torment after spending our entirely lives playing "it was all a test" with my life?
• I hear people say "I have nothing to lose by believing in God and everything to gain." Wouldn't it suck to be a careful practicing Methodist to find out the Catholics were right all along? Take your pick...there's only a couple hundred possible religions to follow here.
• If the only thing getting me into Heaven is knowledge of Jesus, what happens to the mentally retarded, or those that are raised in a situation where they are never exposed to religion? Do they go to Hell because of ignorance?
• If ignorance is allowed...like babies who die young, the mentally retarded, etc...why are you condemning me to Hell by telling me about your religion?
• If we cannot possibly understand the nature of God or his will, at what level of understanding are we deemed fit to enter Heaven? On a scale of ignorance, I mean...
• If there was no physical union with Mary, was Jesus a clone? How could a male have conceived from the DNA material of a lone woman?
• If God loves me, why would he torture me when He won't come down and have a personal chat with me? He surely knows what it would take to have me believe in Him. He can create the universe but not spare ten minutes to say hello without some mediary showing up at my door spouting his interpretation of what He wants?
  

Those are just some of the questions I've had. I think they're legitimate. Other people think I'm apparently just being snarky. but after not having answers to these things for so long, I gave up listening.

Science doesn't know everything. But I've rarely encountered a rabid follower of a major religion who has tried to understand the nature of the conclusions of science. Their eyes glaze over and they start ignoring the evidence...they never understand that what science does explain cannot be simply written off as a miracle or pulled from a hat. And there are things that it explains that contradict what's in the Bible.

"Well, the stories are meant to guide us, they're not literally true," some say.

I'm pretty sure the Bible was meant to be taken at face value. Over time it has morphed into some morpheous blob that is okay to interpret when convenient for many people, probably to try to reconcile those things that contradict in the Bible and real life experiences while still using it as a handy mental putty for filling in gaps of intellectual knowledge or sense.

Besides, if you can interpret the stories as not really happening or being modified or changed over time, what can you believe as being true versus just stories? Why are parts something to gamble your soul on for eternity while other parts are just myths for illustrating points?

When I was younger I decided to follow religion based on the idea that if I were born in a village with no established religion, how would I know what to believe?

Surely a Christian God wouldn't only base his country club membership policy on who has read his book. Otherwise people who were innocent would suffer.

I look around and see a wonderous world of complicated machinations. And there may be a time where I would have thought of sky wizards creating balls of light, or stories to explain the stars.

But science analyzes how these things work. Based on evidence and sound theories (and there's a definition for the word theory as used in science that does NOT MEAN some untested idea I pulled out of my arse...otherwise you couldn't be able to take a course in college on music theory). Based on evidence science sets out to explain the natural world. We learned the nature of stars. We have math and simulations that explain fusion energy, spectral analysis to verify what our star is made of, and the math to predict how long the sun will last. We have dopplar shift to show how stars are moving away (or towards) our position in the universe.

That's the major difference between religion and science. What science establishes must be based on sound reasoning and logic. Religions can say the planet is held up on the backs of turtles, and if you ask where the turtles came from there is little more than dismissive hand waving.

I can't live with that.

Maybe others can. My priorities lay in finding or understanding truths. I may not get those answers in my lifetime, but I know there is a quest to find them. Religion settles for "good enough", with threats of torture if you question too much.

I wonder if other people are simply content with prioritizing comfort over knowing. It's easy to just say God did it. It's hard to understand fancy things like relativity.

I don't know and the more I think about it the more I think I'm wired to not understand why people do this. As long as it's not affecting me, that's okay. You can believe whatever you want. I only have a problem with it when religious folks start legislating their beliefs on me. I hate laws that make no rational sense or are inconsistent. I mean, sodomy laws? I don't care what you do in your home. As long as I don't have to participate and I don't have to deal with it and if others are involved they are doing so voluntarily, I don't have an issue with it. So why do you have to burden our already overburdened and archaic sets of laws with more idiotic paperwork?

In the end, science works. Religion...I've found no evidence of it. Science gives us microwave ovens, CD's, and cell phones with more computing power than the systems that put men on the moon. The same people that denounce the scientific evidence for evolution and all things contrary to their beliefs have no trouble driving cars with laser-welded frames and watching televisions getting images and data from plain old wires in the ground or satellites held up in the sky by more than magic.

In the end it doesn't matter. I'm one voice in the confusion and chaos and I'll eventually die having left little if any footprint in the world. I'm certainly not going to convert anyone into taking more of a reasonable approach to life or existence. But I will still vent on occasion in forums like this. For better or worse. Anyone else have thoughts on this?

It's probably time for me to go out and not have birthday cake...

God...didn't create the Earth?

Happy Halloween everyone! I thought I'd celebrate our favorite "evil pagan holiday" by ticking off some of the more pious out there in the blogosphere. This is actually older news from near the beginning of the month, but it was still an interesting read.

Here's the story.

Apparently some academic who studies the Old Testament...she's a scholar and all...is saying that the Bible was mistranslated.

In studying the original Hebrew text and given the proper context, she claims that the actual wording of "in the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth" should actually be "in the beginning God separated the Heaven and the Earth".

In other words, God created animals and people and plants...life...but not the Earth. The Earth was already there.

Now I don't personally believe either of those for my own reasons. My take on this is that it won't make any difference whatsoever.

People believe what they want to believe. Unless you were forced to face a contradiction in such a way that there was absolutely no way on Earth you could continue to believe what you want to believe, you will find a reason, no matter how absurd, to cling to that which you hold true. There are people who claim to be good Christians who also believe in killing medical doctors. All life is sacred unless it tastes good on the dinner plate. Love thy neighbor as long as he isn't gay. And plenty of others hold the opposite view while claiming to be good Christians, and both sides will use the Bible to justify and rationalize their beliefs.

When there's that much leeway with interpretation, especially using a document that has been translated and retranslated and edited so many times in hundreds of years that the abstractions allow you to justify just about whatever you want to do, I'm thinking it's not quite so useful.

Now this scholar is claiming something that should gain attention from any Bible-loving community. This is something questioning the very foundation of the interpretation of the Bible, and it's not coming from a rabid atheist like Richard Dawkins. This is from one of the flock. An educated academic.

Outside of this Telegraph article I've heard nothing about this.

Which is a real shame. I've often questioned things like, outside the Bible, what third-party proof is there of Jesus and the miracles he performed? Or any of the miracles in the Old Testament? The Romans weren't slouches in keeping records during the Empire. Surely a guy going around creating wine from water and performing healing ceremonies with magic, especially when it was using a deity other than those blessed by the Emperor, would have third-party accounts recorded. So why do most of my questions end up being referred back to the Bible?

Anyway, I thought this was an interesting tidbit in the news that will no doubt flutter away with nary a blip on the radar. I'm willing to bet that asking the local preachers in my area if they've heard about it a few weeks from now, any little blurb, will elicit blank looks. If you're a news junkie or trivia buff, or interested in such matters at all, maybe my small readership could try it out as an experiment in their area! I'd love to hear the results!

Until next time, Happy Samhain!

The Flu Shot and the Dystonia Cheerleader

It seems that everyone has heard "something" about the cheerleader that had a flu shot then developed a case of dystonia, where her walk and speech patterns are totally screwed up but are normal while running or walking backwards.

It's screwy. It's tragic. It's fascinating. And it's perfect fodder for a group of zealots looking for poster child candidates, namely the antivaxxer's.

I had certainly heard about it. "One in a million reaction." "Something about having the flu shot and getting it." "The flu shot apparently triggered it."

I haven't made it part of my own agenda to follow up on the story; it was just another tidbit that floated by my consciousness and the collective consciousness of just about everyone I know in the area.

Thankfully I outsourced such critical followup to Steve Novella of the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. He had a blog post that as I read through it I found myself stopping to realize that, yes, he has some really good points...such as, nowhere has it every actually been shown that there was a link between the shot and the dystonia. The illness she suffered that was believed to trigger the dystonia was never proven to even be the flu, and even if it was, was it the strain that she was injected with for her shot? For that matter, was the dystonia actually a verified diagnosis?

In fact, in Steve's blog post he points out evidence that she doesn't actually have dystonia but rather a psychological affliction.

In other words this woman had a very bad thing happen to her and now she's being used to exploit another group's cause through half-truths and distortions. At this point in the game she may have no choice but to rationalize the possible truth away and it's in her best interest to not reveal whether there exists the possibility that the condition isn't flu-vaccine-induced.

H1N1 Flu Vaccine Nonsense

I work in a place with a large population of people who have the opportunity-for free-to get the H1N1 flu shot. I was saddened and downright appalled at the amount of ignorance and sheer stupidity being spread about getting the shot.

Like the stupid email scams that keep showing up every few months in my inbox as forwards, these rumors and mistruths are still being spread by the legions of ignorati. The CDC recommends that 80% of our population get vaccinated from the flu. A whopping 40% actually do. (citation)

"The flu shot can make me sick!"
No, the flu shot is a dead virus. It stimulates an immune reaction from the body, but it's dead. It won't make you sick.

"There's mercury in the shot! It'll poison you! It causes Autism!"
No, that ingredient was removed decades ago. And yet autism rates continued to climb. There no mercury in the shot.

The definition of Autism has been expanded so more people are now being diagnosed with Autism (you have any idea how recently Aspergers, part of the spectrum of Autism, was officially made a disorder? Not long ago at all...1992!

Not that a little thing like facts will ever shut some idiot with a platform from decrying the same bull@#$ over and over, the same lies and distortions that will end up killing people. If people actually looked into the background on that flake they might not be so ready to believe what she's spouting.

Worse, there's a concept of herd immunity. Basically there are some people that can't get the shot because of allergy or health reasons. So they rely on you not getting the disease to keep them healthy. People in the US buying the anti-vax rhetoric end up acting as carriers to spread the disease to others.

And it's silly to think that there are children who could die from this simply because you can't be bothered to get a simple shot.

Anyway there are plenty of intelligent skeptics that are rallying to debunk the crap that anti-vaccination nuts are spreading.

http://www.immunizenc.com/FluFactsMyths.htm

http://richarddawkins.net/article,4465,An-Open-Letter-to-Bill-Maher-on-Vaccinations,Michael-Shermer

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=2116

http://www.antivaxxers.com/

http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=444

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=851

Check those links out. No doubt there's always going to be reasons that the fringe will feel justified in perpetuating their anti-science theories, no matter what they're told, but if you're an otherwise reasonable person sitting on the fence after hearing some nonsense about how the shot will end up killing mankind, read those links. They should address your questions nicely. There's no reason to stand by and let others end up suffering because you couldn't be bothered to do something relatively simple.

On Religion: Questions and Doublethink

I apologize in advance that this is a rather rambling bit. This chronicles a line of thought I was having one morning as I was pondering an idea. I think it's a fair question. Some might find it offensive. Others may think they have an answer. I've yet to hear an answer that truly answers the questions posed. But if you'd like you can leave comments. Maybe it'll give you something to think about. Maybe you believe in something contrary and are comfortable with what I perceive to be holes in reasoning. This isn't meant to change minds.

It was just something I was thinking about in the car one morning. Stuck in construction. So here it is.
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I was listening to a podcast that tends to be a bit on the offensive side when a question occurred to me. See, this particular podcast has a bit where the host has a conversation with Satan. The host was talking to him this time because in real life his father was in the hospital and he wanted to make sure there wasn't going to be any funny business by the Prince of Darkness. One comment made by Satan was that the host of the podcast didn't have a soul, so there wasn't really anything he had to offer.

That's when I began to wonder, why is it that Satan is portrayed as doing what he does?

Why does he take souls to Hell? I mean, is it like currency or something?

Is this supposed to be like spitting at God?

But...if God is almighty, he could wash it all away on a whim. I don't get it. It's not raising a fist of defiance at God since He's allowing it to happen. He coudl stop it at any time. It's not an annoyance.

And why would Satan keep doing this for eternity? Doesn't it get repetitive?

It seems as if Satan is providing quite a service, actually, as a boogeyman in stories told to children by religious parents. Behave, or you'll go to Hell! Behave, or Satan will take your soul!

It occurred to me that if Satan wanted to really get more souls, he should make some kind of resort down there in the underworld. Grant wishes. Let me win the lottery. I'll have more than a little loyalty for someone that makes my every financial stress evaporate. I mean, what's with the torture thing? I have never run across any explanation for why Satan has this infatuation with pain and misery. Especially for eternity. What's the deal with that?

It's not like he's trapped in Hell if he keeps supposedly coming to Earth to mess with humans. He could really just chill out for awhile at the Mall of America. I hear it's a fun place to visit.

I guess I don't understand what motivates him to do the whole taking souls thing.

Some had told me before that his motivations can't be discerned, like God's motivations and behaviors can't be understood by mere humans. I don't buy it. It's too convenient to say that; it's a brushoff. Why should humans love or swear loyalty to a being they can't hope to understand.

Also, if you can't hope to understand the motivations behind the behavior, that implies to me that the behavior doesn't follow any rules. It does what it does just...because. That means it's not intrinsically good or bad. It just is. So why is Satan evil, or God good, for that matter? Just because we define it that way? God is good simply because by definition what He does is good.

Why?

Under explanations that follow a rational way of living the act of murder is wrong, bad, because it acts in a way that does not respect an individual. It harms a collective group or community. It makes someone dangerous, and their behavior could mean that if Peter killed Bob without justification then Peter may kill me next. It's not because murder itself is intrinsically bad. We kill living beings all the time, telling ourselves that in that case it's okay because they're lower on the food chain, or it was an accident, or any of a number of reasons. There's always a reason that it's okay to eat that cheeseburger and it doesn't count as ending a life, or we can live with ourselves after we walk away from an accident that claimed someone else's life.

Under religion, it's just bad. There is no reason why other than we arbitrarily say so.

I find this to be a form of confusing doublethink. Maybe others don't. It's just one of a number of questions I've had that I think are quite reasonable but most Christians tend to eventually write off as "it's just the way it is," unable to provide a logical, reasoned answer. Something about that just doesn't sit right with me.

Would You Wear a Murderer's Sweater?

There's a number of oddball weird things that are just kind of "neat" about people. Things like, have you ever stood in a doorway and tried raising your arms against the doorjambs? You stand there, holding your arms upwards against the frame, knowing that it won't work. Keep trying and keep trying for about a minute to move your arms upwards against these immovable objects. Then relax, and your arms will rise on their own. Weird, huh?

Or the phenomena for amputees where they feel "phantom limbs" in place of their lost limbs, feeling sensations and pain where there's obviously nothing there.

I was listening to an old podcast of the Skeptics Guide to the Universe and they interviewed author Bruce Hood about his book Supersense. I of course haven't read the book, I put it into my Amazon list of things I'd like to read, but this was about some points he brought up that got me to thinking about some odd phenomena about people.

I might be paraphrasing a bit here, but the gist was thus: he said that one of the things he does is go in to a lecture with an old secondhand sweater. He asks the people who would be willing to wear it. Most people raise their hand. He offers them twenty bucks to put it on and even more are willing. Then he says that the sweater belonged to a serial killer, like Dahmer. Instantly hands all shoot down. Why?

He said the fascinating part to him was that it happened almost immediately, before there was any rational thought behind it. We seem to be hard-wired to think that we'll become "tainted" by association, as if somehow that sweater will impart some essence of a murder or dysfunction into us by just touching it.

Would you be willing to have an organ implanted in you if it came from a murderer? There are many people who seem to think that this will impart some part of the donor's personality. There are people who will freak out at the thought of a heart from a murderer being put into them, despite the fact that it's just a heart. No neurological tissue whatsoever, no rational reason to not do it, especially when you are in the market for a heart.

Why do we have these reactions? Or more interesting to me, what happens when you don't do the "norm"?

My wife has accused me of playing the Asperger's card too often, but I think that rewiring in the head does have some interesting side effects such as the fact that when he was talking about the sweater experiment I never thought that I wouldn't do it. Especially for twenty bucks. No second thoughts that I detected in my flow of thoughts; he did say that sometimes people will profess to still go with the "rational" reasoning but brain scans show that there's still a conflict, however momentary.

I'm not entirely off the scale though. I looked online at the table of contents. One of the bits from the book asked the question, to paraphrase, "If I offered to switch your ring or childhood toy still in your possession with an exact duplicate, would you do it?" There's no reason, rationally, not to do it if it is a precise duplicate. The thing is we have some kind of emotional attachment to sentimentality. It's not the same thing that was with us at the ceremony or during our childhood memories. We always know it's a duplicate.

But then I think this has already been philosophically dealt with when talking about the fictitious Star Trek transporter; you're broken down into an energy stream and reconstructed on the other side, your destination. Is that a duplicate of yourself? Or is it the actual you? You ceased to exist for a few moments; are you dead? In between? Is a frequent transporter traveler a copy of a copy of a copy, with the previous versions being killed?

Some things have neat scientific explanations, like the arms rising on their own experiment. Others aren't quite explained, like people's seemingly hardwired reaction towards wearing the murderer's sweater (or reaction to people who would still do it). Still other "neat" things are thought experiments that may not have a straightforward answer outside of philosophy like the transporter question.

Any thoughts on these phenomena? Or do you have some random curiosities that you puzzle over?

Atheism and the Banana

One of the stupidest anti-atheism bits I had run across in my years came from Kirk Cameron and his buddy Ray Comfort and their viral video about the Atheist's Nightmare: THE BANANA!

They give such wonderful tidbits about the pulltab God placed so conveniently on the banana, as well as the fact that the shape happens to fit so well into our hands and it has it's own packaging.

For me it's funny because it's so hilariously ignorant. In case you didn't know, the Cavendish banana (the kind you normally find in the grocery store) is absolutely nothing like the wild banana. It was genetically engineered the old fashioned way by humans: selective breeding. Check it out here.

Of course it didn't take long for atheists to reply with those pesky facts. There's a YouTube video highlighting their ignorance on the topic.

I'll also point out that if you do research on the Cavendish, they're genetically all the same. There's a disease spreading that threatens the existence of that type of banana and those bugnuts may soon get a lesson in evolution since the Cavendish can't evolve a resistance to the disease...the solution seems to involve creating a slightly different hybrid banana with a slightly different taste and texture. Enjoy the atheist's nightmare while you can, folks...

Lesson: if you're going to take on a controversial topic, make sure you do your homework. Especially if you're going to look as stupid as these two clowns when talking about God's creation: a fruit that has a documented history of domestication by humans.

Water on the Moon!

Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, has a wonderful writeup on the discovery of water on the moon! Take a look here!

What I loved about the post is that he went into detail about how it was found so that non-scientists can understand it. So many laypersons assume that because we don't have someone up there walking around with a sponge that it's impossible to find something like water on another body in space. They don't actually want to do any of the mental legwork to understand what's happening, but they're often quick to denounce it.

Well the post from Phil explains how it's found.

Science is a wonderful tool. Through empirical evidence we're finding more and more understanding of our universe and the wonders within it, from Gamma Ray Bursts that could fry life on the planet to the background radiation from the birth of our universe to the theory that we're actually comprised of tiny loops of energy.

Thanks Phil!

Is the Bible Outdated? Asperger Observations

This was interesting to me...and it may piss off some others who read it and happen to be religious. If you are religious and prone to getting bent out of shape by someone's opinion, skip to tomorrow's post or yesterday's. If you decide you're curious enough for this post then do us both a favor and read it the entire way through. If you want to respond, go ahead with the comments, as long as they're constructive and preferably have some reasoning to back up and support your view. I'd rather not close comments on the blog because someone wants to be an arse-head.

I mentioned previously that I had a wonderful time reading Look Me In the Eye by John Elder Robison. I really recommend it. I was about to put the book into my sacred storage area where I could have it for reference in the future...a bit of clutter programming in my head, I suppose, wherein I stash things I think I might want later because I really liked them...but instead I passed the copy on to my mother in law (and perhaps father in law) to read in hopes that they may understand me a little better. I believed that while I would love to put it into my storage area the book will be useful only if the words carry on in other people's minds, and the only way to do that is pass it along. So I did.

Moving on...I also mentioned in that blog post that John Elder has a blog. Well, he posted an interesting observation regarding religion. The question seemed to have been posted innocently, but it is one that I've often pondered in my own head and made observations regarding. It's a really touchy subject though. Big surprise. Usually when I've tried to explore it with other people...and I don't personally know other Aspies in realspace, since I'm rather isolated socially (and most Aspies aren't social butterflies anyway, another big surprise) I end up offending people which I find out after the fact. Or right to my face when they get really huffy and start getting petulant or just flat out angry or insulted, thinking I'm calling them stupid. It makes it really difficult to puzzle things out when other people from whom you're trying to get information and understanding aren't cooperative.

He (John Elder) stated that he's spiritual, but not in an organized religion of sorts. He was asked by a researcher why Aspergians tend to not follow religious organizations. On reflection it seemed that other Aspies he's met weren't religious either, and this researcher was actually collecting (or had collected) data regarding this topic and found that apparently most aren't religious. Coincidence?

Here's what I can say:
Aspergers seems to create a predisposition towards reason and logic. We prefer working for results, not warm fuzzy feelings. We prefer working with people we deem effective, not "nice".

I've been told by someone neurotypical and close to me that they have seen the trend where the more educated people tend to be liberal in their beliefs, and the less educated tend to be neo-Republican. The Republican party in the US is famous for their family value platform, Bible values platform, as well as their willingness to murder thousands of foreigners in war (as long as the guys in suits don't have to go and get shot at) and the all too common scandal of yet another affair from Republican figureheads. It's not limited to them, but they're the ones generally telling their supporters they'll burn in Hell on the pulpit...er, campaign platform...before retiring to their office for some alone time with their cute senate page. Have to make it a quickie though...they have to get to the floor in time to vote on the laws they proposed that make what they just did more illegal.

The poor tend to be more religious. Could that be part of the reason that the generally more impoverished live along the Bible Belt in the US?

Religion (speaking of Christian religion in Northeastern USA, since that is the kind I'm personally exposed to) is full of fallacies and contradictions. The Bible is wonderful in that it can justify everything from kindness to strangers and justifying banning abortions for the sanctity of life to killing homosexuals. If you have a view of something, chances are you and someone who disagrees with you will find some way the Bible supports your view.

But Barry! You said religion has fallacies and contradictions, but you talk about the Bible! The above mentioned the Bible in particular, but religion is worse, as it is basically an interpretation of the Bible by people. Many religions are based on the Bible yet there are how many sects you can join? There are the big ones, of course, like the Catholics and Baptists and Methodists. The major religions take potshots at groups like the Mormons for being a cult. But the even The Family is based on the Bible as well. Check them out if you want to see how wild things get.

Hypocrisy is rampant in various organized religions. I've known Mormons swigging caffeinated beverages and downing chocolate. Priests are in the news for turning altar boys into altar men. I know regular church attendees who hate particular people for their features or actions or traits...where's the Christian love Jesus was so fond of? I roomed with a guy in college who refused to utter a single swear word (even though I don't see the difference it made when he simply substituted another word for the curse...other than it annoyed the hell out of me. Frick this, frick that, gosh darnit...I wanted to punch him square in the mouth). This same guy was heard thumpin' the ceiling over the living room area of the common room of the college apartment when his girlfriend visited, and since she lived on campus, it was every, @#%-ing, night. I asked him how he could profess to be so religious when getting more tail than most prostitutes.

"I'm human and have failings. I ask for forgiveness for them."

So it's not religion that has the failings, it's the people...

I've also observed that the religious tend to not understand much of what they're talking about with issues related to their religion. I don't think most have any idea that Jesus, if he existed, didn't speak English. We still have people who every Christmastime insist that "Xmas" is trying to remove the Christ from Christmas. Makes a good headline and riles up the followers, but it's wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. Yet even when shown the proof I've had people insist their view was correct.

These are just some of the issues I had with religion while growing up.

If anything, I became a full atheist when I finally realized that with all the hypocrisy, contradictions, and ignorance I was encountering I simply couldn't live with what I felt were too many inconsistencies in the stories. I couldn't live with the idea that I would be living a lie. It came down to basically a question of would you rather be ignorant of what is happening and be happy, or know the truth and be miserable? It turns out that I'd rather know the truth.

I'm beginning to think this may be partially due to the Asperger's. There may also be a correlation between people being of liberal bias and having higher education, and true atheism and education (true atheism since I wouldn't count the people who have a "falling out" with God and thus say they're an atheist for it; they're just being pissy about something that happened to them, not seeking a higher truth). This correlation does not imply causation, but it does give one pause to scratch one's head a moment for some reflection.

This sounds arrogant. I'm simply stating what I've come to believe after a couple decades of observation and my own studies. Of course there's much more to it than I state here, but this is one facet of my understanding. And it pisses people off.

I don't know how to sugar coat it.

Even reactions to this give me a bit of a curiosity since in some cases it incites a lot of vitriol...when in most Christian sects, I'm supposed to be considered a wayward sheep in need of finding my way back with compassion. Another case of hypocrisy? I don't worry about it any more.

I don't know what the answers are with absolute certainty. But I do know what I've observed, and I know I've had many questions of religions that fail to have adequate answers. In the end people don't want to entertain the idea that they're wrong. They are happy with their beliefs. And I don't care what you believe as long as I don't suffer for what you believe. Myths, sky wizards, doublethink, whatever floats your boat. Just don't bother me unless you're willing to have an actual reasoned discussion. I have enough legislated morality to swim through in my world already.

I'll be interested to see what comments John Elder's blog post receives. I worry that some people will dismiss my opinions more then they already do if they associate my atheism with being "brain damaged" with Asperger's when perhaps it should give some pause to the fact that if there is a strong correlation, maybe they should wonder why people who are wired to see things through a nonemotional filter see religion as a sham, in general. But on the other hand maybe it's another reason to just leave my brain-damaged self alone.