The Misanthrope’s Sanctuary

The Next Generation

2006-09-12T19:10:00.000-04:00

I'm back again, this is two days in a row now. Maybe I'll get back into regular blogging again? Maybe. I'm glad to see my usual readership was still right there when I did post again. Thanks guys!

I read an article today in MSNBC that discussed a British study that was done on childhood development. Essentially the research concluded that the current "Junk Culture" was destroying childhood. There were several elements that combined to make this so-called junk culture. Processed foods, video games, and high-pressure education were the main factors.

The article only briefly touched on food and games, basically repeating the usual mantra of how they contribute to a sedentary lifestyle. Nothing that bears discussion here. The education argument is what I found to be interesting, though.

Essentially the study blasted the kind of high pressure education system that is employed in Britain and here in the U.S. as well. They argued that academic pressure was killing childhood and that children needed more space and time to grow and develop. They called for an immediate conference to discuss "childrearing in the 21st century." They do have a point, we do place a tremendous amount of pressure on our children to do well academically. We pressure them with just massive amounts of tests, we drive it in their heads from the time they can comprehend language that they need to do well, to get ahead. All true.

The group behind this study would have us change all that. They would have us make education less competitive, less results oriented. I agree with them. But unfortunately they, and therefore I, couldn't be more wrong.

They want us to allow our kids to learn and grow at their own pace free from all the pressure that we currently put on them. Yeah, right. And how exactly is that possible? The world we live in simply doesn't allow for that. We live in a hyper-competitive world. Super fast paced, everyone is expendable, all that matters is the bottom line. That is where we live. Our children must be prepared for that.

Look at our world. Remember when people worked 9-5? Remember when family time and work time were completely separate things? Remember when people would often retire from the same company they started working at right out of high school? When things weren't so cutthroat and competitive? When it was a given that as long as you were loyal to your employer that employer would take care of you in retirement through the form of a pension?

Remember how things started changing? When 9-5 slowly gave way to 9-6 (you need to work that full 8 hours, the hour you get for lunch doesn't count!). Now days your normal work shift is just the minimum you are required to do to keep from being fired, but if you want to get ahead you have to be willing to do more. I remember many times when working in sales were I to try to leave at the end of my shift I would hear it form the boss: "Why are you leaving now? Just put in a few more hours, make some more dials. In order to win you have to be willing to outwork everybody else!" It's the competition, you have to be willing to do more than the other guy at all times. We've mixed our work life with our home life, it's the rare person these days who is not connected to the office in one way or another while they are not in work. Because you have to be. In order to get ahead that is what is required.

Remember France a few months ago? Remember the workers protesting to hold onto their guaranteed employment? That started an analysis of the French labor practice as a whole. The international business community mocked France for their guaranteed employment, for their short work hours, for all the vacation time they gave. To compete in the global economy you must give up those things was the message of the international business community.

To compete you have to work harder, longer, faster. And the penalty for failure has grown steeper. The wage gap between the rich and the poor continues to do nothing but increase. So if you compete successfully your rewards will be greater, but if you fail to keep up you have more to lose.

We all want our kids to be on the right side of that success/failure line. All new parents want to hear those magic words from the pediatrician: "Your child is advanced." We push our kids hard to succeed; to be better than their peers. MSNBC had another article today talking about how doctors are reporting a dramatic increase in the number of parents who are asking for prescriptions for ADHD drugs for their kids who do not have ADHD just to give them an academic edge. I am not immune. I look at my 11 month old daughter and wonder why she isn't walking yet, or why she only says two words. I wonder how long I'll have to wait before I can start to teach her calculus (no, that is not a joke). Why? Because I want her to succeed of course! I don't want her to be like her father, having to work 70 hours a week just to make ends meet. We all want our kids to do better than us and we are willing to go to sometimes extreme lengths to make that happen.

So, yes, the study is correct. There is an unnatural and probably unhealthy amount of competitive pressure put on our kids. And yes, that is something that should stop. But given the way our economy is set up it is necessary. We cannot stop pressuring our kids to out perform their peers so long as the business world has that same kind of hypercompetitive mentality. If Britain goes along with the study recommendations and eases back on the competition in their education system they will wind up with children ill suited to compete in the global marketplace.

I hate competition. I hate the way business works these days. I don't like knowing that I can never get ahead in business unless I am willing to work those extra hours, to sacrifice more of my already non-existent family time. Business is too fast paced, too competitive. It is hurting families and as the British study pointed out it is hurting our children.

But it is the way it is. It is the nature of capitalism in the modern world. It is a horrible thing modern capitalism. I fully support legislation to restrict capitalism, something similar to the legislation almost a hundred years ago that mandated OT for hours worked over a certain number, outlawed child labor, etc. We need the modern version of that turn of the century labor legislation in order to put the brakes on capitalism before our society is completely torn apart by it.

Rebirth

2006-09-11T18:01:00.000-04:00

Hello to anyone who still reads this. I haven't written a post in a while, I haven't written anything in a while. For whatever reason I just haven't had anything I wanted to talk about. But today I'll talk about what everyone else is talking about, September 11th. For the first time since 9/11 there is actually something positive to report and here it is:

This is the design for the complete WTC with the newly redesigned Freedom Tower (Tower 1) along with the designs for Towers 2-4 which were just unveiled on September 7th. Everything that came before this was simply an embarrassment. Remember the previous Freedom Tower design? 1776 feet tall but only half of that was actual usable space. Only the bottom half was actual office space, the top half was nothing but a giant spire.

For five years we have had a hole in the ground where two proud buildings once stood. For five years we have been shown redevelopment plans that emphasized tall spires, fancy designs, everything but people.

The World Trade Center was more then a collection of buildings, it was the people who occupied those buildings. I remember living in that area; I knew many people who went to work every day in those towers. Hell, I almost took a job there myself back in 1999. All those people had something in common, they were damn proud of where they worked. There was something special about going off to work in the WTC. The World Trade Center symbolized something, it symbolized American strength and determination. Building those towers in the 70s was a huge risk. The tallest buildings ever, built using construction techniques that were revolutionary and never before attempted. There were plenty of skeptics of the time period who said it just wouldn't work. But it did work. The towers were built and in doing so a new symbol was created to showcase American drive and ingenuity.

That hole in the ground that took our tower's place also served as symbol. It was the symbol of the new American weakness and fear. It served as a sign to the terrorists that they had won, we had lost. We may have drove the Taliban from Afghanistan, we may have overthrown Saddam, but no show of military might could erase the shame that was represented by that hole in the ground.

The tower designs that were proposed between then and now just added insult to injury. A tall and elegant tower.... only half occupied by humans. It was like a skeleton, a very accurate description given it's skeletal lattice structure that occupied the top half of the tower. Those designs were a disgrace to the memory of those proud men and women who lost their lives that day. Those skeletal tower designs were a very appropriate symbol for the new America, a country that has become so afraid of taking any risks that we have given away our lead in essentially every major area from automobiles, to education, to space exploration, tallest building, etc.

I remember being there, I worked at 50 Hudson St in Jersey City. 50 Hudson was the evacuation point for people fleeing downtown Manhattan into Jersey. Later 50 Hudson became the command center for the recovery operations on the Jersey side. I remember coming into work for days and weeks afterward, standing on the waterfront in front of our building, and watching smoke continue to rise off the wreckage. It was weeks before the smoke finally stopped. I remember visiting the site a few months later after the wreckage had been cleared away, and standing against the fence that was up around the site looking down into the hole. It was like a physical wound in the country.

I said then that we would rebuild, I figured in about a year we would start building, that we would come back with something bigger and better than before. That we would send a message to our enemies loud and clear: you can knock us down but we will get right back up again stronger than ever! Because this is fuckin America and that's what American's do! America would never let the terrorists win!

That was five years ago today. In that time we've gone to war, we've shown the power of our armed forces, we've toppled countries, but we still have lost. The terrorists goal was to create fear, to wound us, to scare us into changing our lifestyle. In that respect that have won. We let the terrorists win, we gave into our fear. And that fear is represented by that hole in the ground, a pathetic and insulting tribute to those who have lost their lives.

Now, with the new designs, maybe things are changing. Maybe we are finally moving past our fear. If the developers, contractors, and politicians have the courage to go ahead and finish the WTC as designed it will be a great day for America. The wound in the heart of America will have been healed. What our government doesn't seem to understand is that the war on terror is not fought with tanks and bombs, the war on terror is fought with the hearts and minds of the people. Rebuilding the WTC with tall real towers, to bring life and commerce back to that site, will go a long way to healing those hearts and minds.

Doing Something

2006-07-24T15:21:00.000-04:00

Here's a switch for today, a post about me. No politics or religion today.

Come to think about it there has been no politics or religion from me in a while, my posting has become extremely sporadic. It's not due to a lack of writing, though. I have several half written posts saved as drafts including the still MIA "Why I am an Atheist Part III." I've also got pieces on Stem Cells, Iran, and other such typical stuff just sitting incomplete.

So why aren't they finished and posted? Now that's a damn good question. Something just isn't right. That one piece I did about Israel and diplomacy, that piece took me almost four days to write. I started it on the first day of the attacks, it was day four when I finally posted it. Four days to write a fairly simple and short piece, the kind that I've pumped out in thirty minutes many many times in the past.

So what the hell is wrong with me? I feel like I've lost something but I cannot explain it. Now when I write I am never satisfied, I feel like my writing ability has suffered a major downturn. I don't feel like I'm explaining myself properly or well, I don't feel like I'm making my point or being persuasive enough. It's all crap. Even this, I have no idea where I'm going with this, it reads like shit, but I gonna keep writing this one anyways.

Ben says I'm more focused these days on work and family so I've lost some focus on my writing. Well that can't be right. I've lived in this place for nearly a year now working six days a week all day so my focus at work is what it's always been. I hardly see my family so my focus on them is no way near what it should be, but that too is as it's always been. So I don't think there's been any change in my focus.

The never seeing the family part just gets harder and harder to deal with. Especially with Allie growing older, learning how to do so many new things, she'll be walking soon, probably saying her first words not too long after that. And I'm gonna miss it all. I'll be too busy sitting in a chair answering phone calls. Providing for my family comes first, of course, my wife and child need to eat, need to have a roof over their heads, so this is what I need to do, I never expected it to be this freakin hard though.

What sucks is that there is no end in sight. I got lucky this year with overtime availability continuing past the end of tax season. I do not expect that to continue. Which means I will fall into a pattern of working myself to death during tax season to survive non-tax season and then repeating that process over and over again year after year. Something needs to change, but I don't know how and I don't know what.

I've been feeling unhappy lately with the direction my life is going in. Now don't get me wrong, I love my wife and I love my daughter and I wouldn't trade either of them for anything, but I hate not being there for them, absolutely hate it. My wife has an insanely hard job taking care of Allie more or less by herself ever day. Without a doubt her job is harder then mine. But at least she gets to see my daughter for more then a few minutes in the morning as I'm getting ready and on Saturday.

Something needs to change. I know and understand (though hate) that I can't be there. I have to support my family. But by the same token I don't want my daughter to ever say "My daddy's not here because he has to answer phones." How the hell does that sound? If I can't be there then at the very least I want to be doing something that will make my family proud.

What to do? What do I have time for? What do I have money for? I don't even have the time to properly take care of myself. I weight is up to 240, 80 pounds over my college weight of 160. No surprise there, I spend 13 hours a day sitting on my ass. I don't exercise at all, I feel like crap all the time. Again, no surprise there. Tina is extremely concerned about how I eat, I live on Spagetti-Os, Ramen noodles, and a multivitamin. Tina wants me to eat healthier, and I can understand that. But that's a long term concern, right now I'm too busy trying to make sure our family survives the short term to worry about stuff like that right now. I need to find some kind of time to exercise though, that's critical, I hate feeling like this all the time.

I have ideas. I'm hoping they pan out. I don't know. See, this is what I'm talking about with my writing. This took me two days to write, I got completely off topic, I have no idea what point I was trying to make. It's crap. I read through what I wrote and it's like a huge bitch session. I'm doing nothing but bitching and complain about how I feel about shit. That's not me, I hardly ever talk like this. "Oh this is so hard! Oh I hate this! Oh Blah Blah Whine Whine!" Man, shut the fuck up and pull yourself together! Oh, well. I'll post this anyway so my regular readers can get a good laugh as to how dumb I sound.

Cry Havoc! And Let Slip the Dogs of War!

2006-07-13T20:45:00.000-04:00

Here's another reference for you all. Everyone should get this one with no problem.

Today I'm talking about Israel's war with Lebanon and Palestine. This war (let's be honest here, there's really no other word for it) will probably not stop at Lebanon as Israel has clearly said that it feels Syria and Iran are the real driving forces behind this conflict. With the Bush administration supporting the actions of Israel it seems there's a pretty good chance that Israel is going to plunge the entire region into a full scale war.

About damn time!

Andrea will disagree. She will talk about the need for diplomacy. This is an unfortunate characteristic of most people on the Left, the belief that all problems can be solved through negotiation. Anyone who's read my blog knows I am squarely on the Left as well, but this is one position of the ideology that I just cannot agree with. The Left believes in diplomacy at all costs, peaceful resolution of conflicts no matter what. This shows clearly in the foreign policy of Democrat presidents and in the Left's absurd attitude toward personal defense.

For once I will say that the Left is wrong.

How long has the "peace process" been going on between Israel and it's neighbors? Pretty much since Jewish Settlers first started arriving in what came to be called Palestine in the early 1920s. In 1923 the Zionists wrote a book called the "Iron Wall" where it was claimed that reaching an agreement with the Arabs was impossible. Even back 83 years ago people were saying that diplomacy would never work. When Britain decided to pull out of the region in 1948 the UN drafted the UN Partition Plan which gave the Palestinians their own state! They've been fighting for their own state for decades when it had been offered to them nearly 60 years ago! The Jews supported this plan but the Arab League did not. The day after this agreement was signed the Arabs attacked in what became the first of many wars between Israel and their Arab neighbors. We had the six-day war in 1967, the war of attrition between 68 and 72. Egypt and Syria's invasion in 73, the invasion of Lebanon in 82, the increasing amount of terrorist attacks Israel was subject to in the 90s and continuing until this day. And in between each of these wars and battles there were the negotiators trying hard to forge a peace. Deal after deal was struck and broken, several treaties were signed and ignored. And yet here we are screaming for more diplomacy!

When are we going to get it through our heads that diplomacy is not the answer to this situation? Negotiation only works when all parties are reasonable and willing to work toward a mutually beneficial compromise. What part of Hamas and Hezbollah saying that they will not rest until Israel is destroyed indicates that these are people who are reasonable and willing to work toward a mutually beneficial compromise? Decades upon decades of broken deals and dead bodies should be proof enough for anybody that diplomacy is not going to solve this issue.

So where does that leave Israel? A country surrounded on all sides by people committed to its destruction; a country that finds itself under constant attack by terrorists, where a family can't go to the market without worrying about being blown up? Diplomacy has been tried and it has failed. They have no choice but to respond with overwhelming force, to dismantle though any means necessary the myriad of forces that stand against it. Their actions in Lebanon are fundamentally no different from our actions in Afghanistan. We toppled the government of a country for harboring a terrorist organization that attacked us. Lebanon is harboring a terrorist organization that has attacked Israel. What hypocrisy would say that we had the right to attack Afghanistan but Israel does not have the right to attack Lebanon?

Diplomacy is a good and important thing and should always be the first thing tried to resolve a conflict. But we must also accept that diplomacy does not always work. Look at N. Korea. In 1994 N. Korea reached a deal with Clinton Administration to suspend plutonium production. In 2002 they removed the UN seals from their reactors, restarted production, and withdrew from the Non-proliferation treaty. Our solution is more diplomacy. What? More diplomacy? Of what value is diplomacy here? N. Korea has clearly shown that treaties and agreements mean nothing to them. Reaching a deal with them is meaningless if we cannot trust them to keep that deal.

Iran is the same situation. They signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and now they say they will pull out of it. Their word means nothing, their signature on a treaty means nothing. If you cannot trust the word of those you are negotiating with then those negotiations are worthless.

Prime Minister Saniora of Lebanon, in response to the devastating attacks on his country, says "Is this the price we pay for aspiring to build our democratic institutions?" No you fool, this is the price you failing to comply with a UN directive to remove Hezbollah forces from your southern border! Had you complied with the directive that your government agreed to your country would not lie in ruins. If you were unable to comply you should have sought assistance from the UN. You didn't hold up your end of the agreement and now you pay the price. It's that simple.

Diplomacy should always be attempted first with the clear understanding of all parties involved that any violation of the deal, arrangement, treaty that is reached will be met with immediate and overwhelming force. We need to say clearly that we are negotiating with you on good faith, if you break that faith there will be serious and extreme repercussions. It's essentially Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine: "Speaking softly but carrying a big stick." Talk first, but don't hesitate to back that talk up with force.

Instead our talk is backed up with more talk. When N. Korea restarted plutonium production we talked, when they introduced and tested the Taepodong 1 missile we talked, when they tested Taepodong 2 we talked. Does anyone see the pattern here? They are progressively developing more and more sophisticated weapons technology and all we do is keep talking. When are we going to realize that talking isn't going to work? When nuclear tipped Taepodong 4s are raining down on Washington?

Negotiation is the first solution to any conflict but it doesn't always work and we must be willing to acknowledge this and back up our negotiations with force. Otherwise our enemies will use our habit of always returning to diplomacy to buy time to further develop their weapons systems, just like we see N. Korea and Iran doing now.

"We Can Rebuild Him . . . We Have the Technology"

2006-06-30T18:49:00.000-04:00

I wonder how many of my readers will catch the reference in my title?

I read a great article today in the UK Times. Entitled "Scientists playing God? We should rejoice" the article described a wonderful new medical technology. A new genetic screening technology for embryos can detect over 6,000 diseases and conditions prior to embryo implantation! That's versus current screening techniques that can only pick up 200. That's 6,000 genetic based disorders that we now have the tools to eradicate! The article states: "What it means is that thousands of parents who are at known risk of passing on terrible disabilities and diseases will now be able to have only healthy babies. This is the best news I have heard for years. "

That is some amazing news! This is a wondrous accomplishment by our scientists. The first paragraph of this article pretty much sums it up perfectly:

"What a piece of work is a man!" as Hamlet says. "How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! . . . In apprehension how like a god!" Usually I think rather less enthusiastically than that about humankind, but sometimes I am reminded of the nobility of man and of woman and it is often by scientists. "

And a later quote: "Nature is astonishingly cruel. Science, by contrast, has the power of mercy." How true is that! Imagine the hope we can bring to people with technology like this, the idea that our children don't have to suffer from horrible diseases like muscular dystrophy. There is another article on the UK Times site that can be found here that describes the first baby ever that was designed to be cancer free. A British woman used genetic screening technology to ensure that she does not pass a hereditary form of eye cancer that she suffers from to her child. The University College Hospital in Britain has begun to employ pre-implantation genetic screening to screen out inherited cancers for mother's who want the procedure.

Think of all the good we can do, all the inherited diseases we can stamp out. This truly is an amazing thing. The announcement of this technology is great news for everyone. The scientists who worked on this technology deserve nothing less then to be honored as the heroes they are. So once this technology reaches mainstream acceptance and you look upon you new baby, knowing that she will be forever free of inherited and genetic disorders, remember to thank a scientist.

Of course the news is not all good. Upon announcement of this new screening method all the usual suspects were quick to condemn it. Conservative religious groups immediately attacked the technology saying it was humans playing god. The articles response to this attack is classic: "But what on earth is wrong with humans playing God? I am all for it, especially as God doesn’t seem to be doing it." Brilliant! The author of this article, Minette Marrin, is my new idol!

First and foremost what is wrong with "playing god?" God apparently doesn't want the job anymore! Is he doing anything to wipe out inherited disease? No! Who is? The scientists! What is wrong with working to improve the human condition? What is wrong with trying to increase quality of life for our children?

The religious people who argue that we should not "play god" are hypocrites. Nothing but hypocrites. Humanity already plays god. Every time doctors resuscitate someone they have played god. Every time modern medicine saves someone from a heart attack we have played god. These are people who would have died were it not for the intervention of medical technology. That is playing god. All of modern medicine is an exercise in humans playing god. So unless these religious freaks reject the entirety of modern medicine they are nothing but hypocrites when they say that we should not play god. We have always played god! That is what the unique human ability to learn and reason allows us to do! We have been playing god since the dawn of civilization. In historic times when the first people learned how to irrigate crops they were playing god. God did not run a river there; these were human beings who taught themselves how to make water flow where god never intended! Reshaping the environment to serve human needs? That sounds like playing god to me! Nothing wrong with it, nothing at all.

Your god does not help you. Your god does not lift a finger to stop the spread of disease. Your god does nothing to improve the human condition. You talk about miracles? The ability to eradicate hereditary disease, that's a miracle. Only it wasn't god who performed it. It was humans; it was scientists. So the next time you or someone you love survives a heart attack or a stroke or some other medical condition instead of thanking god perhaps you should give things to the people that truly deserve it: the scientists who developed the treatments and the doctors who know how to implement it.

Now let's get out there and play god!

A Simple Solution

2006-06-16T22:11:00.000-04:00

I had an idea today.

Looking back through by blog I spend a ton of time and energy attacking conservatives, fundamentalists, etc. Those on the other side of the isle spend just as much time attacking liberals, secularists.... there are those who are between the two sides attack both as being extreme. Then there are people who are further to the left then me and people further to the right then Ann Coulter (if you can believe that!).

In our government almost every time a new piece of legislation is introduced one side is always strongly for it and the other is strongly against it. Democrats are miserable living in a society run by Republicans just as 15 years ago the Republicans were miserable living in a society run by Democrats. When legislation is passed one side gets what they believe in and the other side doesn't. Or, they will introduce "compromise" legislation which is just another way of saying that nobody gets what they want.

It's all basic competition. Someone wins, someone loses. And the losers then have to live under a system or under laws that they find completely objectionable. It's not right for either side. It's no more fair for a democrat to live under a system that is heavily pro-business/pro-rich then it is for a republican to live under a system that spends tons of tax money on social services for the poor or middle classes. Why should anyone have to live under a system of laws that they find socially or morally offensive?

Because that's the nature of democracy. Majority rules and all that. The best we can do under this system is to try to keep one group from imposing their belief systems on another group. Well that's just not good enough.

Our United States of America is hardly united... we are deeply divided along religious and political lines held together by a system that ultimately doesn't give any group what they want because it is to busy trying to find compromise.

So if our United States is more accurately described as the Divided States then perhaps that's the solution.

We break apart the United States of America.

We split it up so that all like-minded ideologies can have their own sovereign territory. If the fundamentalists want to have their theocracy they can within their own country, same goes for the liberals, the conservative businessmen, etc. Each country will have a single party system that reflects the viewpoints of its citizens. Immigration/Emigration between the countries will be made easy so that if a child born into the new Christian Federation of America grows up to be a liberal atheist he can easily move north to the American Commonwealth of Secular Liberals. Those conservative businessmen can head west to the Confederation of American Industrialists.

If we do this then no one has to live under a system that doesn't represent their beliefs. Granted the system will not be perfect, not every democrat agrees 100% with the democratic party platform. There are still divisions within each party of course. However, overall the government of the American Commonwealth of Secular Liberals will be much more representative of the average democrat then the current United States of America. The same holds true of the Religious Right living in the Christian Federation of America and so on. If everyone is in agreement on the major issues then the minor issues can be easily resolved through political compromise.

Our founding fathers set up the constitution and our system of government "in order to form a more perfect union." That worked great back when the U.S. was a much smaller place with a population that much smaller and less diversified. However two hundred years of expansion, immigration, and social change has produced a massive and extremely diverse population... the system that the founding fathers set up doesn't work as well anymore, the population and the issues are simply too diverse. So it is time once again to make some changes "in order to form a more perfect union." We do that by breaking our current union up into smaller more homogenous unions.

Everybody wins 'cause everyone gets to live under a system they agree with. It's the ideal solution! Everyone gets what they want!

So what are we waiting for? Let's start dividing!!

I Never Knew Pigs Could Fly

2006-06-11T12:51:00.000-04:00

Here's a very short follow up to my HSA post from the other day. I overheard a group of Christians today saying something about Hell having frozen over. It seems that, for what is probably the first time ever, the majority of Americans agree with me.

CNN has an article, read it here, discussing the results of a study commissioned by a bipartisan effort between Republican and Democrat lawmakers. Together they established the Citizens' Health Care Working Group, a committee tasked with surveying the American people to find out what they wanted as far as solutions for health care. It's funny how this report came out just a few days after my post on the Republican's horrible idea to pass more health care costs onto the worker.

The results were surprising. The majority of Americans want to resurrect and implement an early Clinton-era proposal: Universal Healthcare. "Assuring health care is a shared social responsibility" says the report and "The federal government should guarantee that all Americans have basic health insurance coverage." Americans, when asked, reject the Republican sponsored concept of shifting more responsibility for medical costs to the consumer.

Now to be fair I will point out that the report does not go into how Universal Healthcare should be funded. That is, of course, a major issue that needs to be addressed before lawmakers can even begin to propose Universal Healthcare legislation. It's something we should start talking about and quickly. We need to do something to combat even escalating health care costs and the even bigger problem of the uninsured. Making those who cannot afford basic insurance pay more for that insurance through the HSA/HDHP system isn't the answer, Universal Healthcare is.

And for once the majority of Americans agree with me.

Weddings, Bloggers, and Sex

2006-06-07T21:30:00.000-04:00

This past weekend I was at Andrea's wedding. What an experience, it was absolutely amazing to be there. That got me reflecting on how far we've all come. I met Andrea 10 years ago while I was in college and dating her then boyfriend's sister. Things were so much different then. Andrea was strongly anti-marriage and violently anti-children. She used to swear she would never get married. Me on the other hand was looking to settle down but finding nothing but one incredible horrible relationship after another (Andrea can tell some interesting stories about some of my ex's). At the time I lived in New Jersey and was desperate to get out.

Now here we are ten years later, Andrea's gotten married, I've moved to Kentucky and finally found a non-psychotic woman who I quickly married. Ten years ago I don't think either of us would have believed you if you had told us our lives were going to turn out this way. It's amazing to think how far we've come. It's been a long road, sometimes it seems that thinks would never work out, nothing turned out the way I thought it would, but in the end I think life turned out pretty well.

So enough reflection, that's not what you all come here to read! In other news my blog has been released in my company. One of my co-workers discovered this blog while googling my name and passed it around the office. That produced a moment of worry for me, we've all read stories of people getting fired from their jobs for talking about work on their blog. But since I have never named, and never will name, the company that I work for and I never discuss in any kind of detail what I do or give any kind of investment advice I don't think I have anything to worry about on that score.

What I want to talk about is the reaction to my blog. Obviously most everyone disagreed with it, I expect that. However a few people came up to me to tell me that they agree with the things I write. What's interesting is that these people insisted that I not tell anybody that they agree with me. I'll respect that and those people will always remain nameless but I just find it funny. The right leaning conservative population and the religious population do not hesitate to declare their conservatism or the religion. However liberals and non-religious people tend to hide their beliefs... they discuss them in hushed tones while first making sure they can't be overheard. That's sad. We should not hide our political or religious viewpoints. We need to change the perception that "liberal" is in some way a bad word. I've never hid from my beliefs. I attach my name to my blog, I don't moderate comments, I stand by every word I write. I wish more people who shared by beliefs would do the same.

Speaking of comments all the new world people who are reading my blog comment on it! If you disagree with me let me know, if you think my ideas are the most dangerous ridiculous things you have ever read let me know. Post anonymously if you want to. I welcome all feedback and will never moderate a single word said.

Lastly I read an article on MSNBC tonight entitled "Many teenage girls feel presured into sex." The article says that 41% of teenage girls between 14 and 17 have had unwanted sex with their boyfriends. The main reason is they don't want their boyfriends to be mad at them if they don't. That's insane! This goes back to what I was talking about in the Abstinence post. It is so important that we raise our daughters with the self-esteem and self-confidence to say "no" to something they don't want. To not let their boyfriends manipulate them or pressure them into something that they don't want to do. Women should be free from, or at the very least be able to resist, pressure to have sex and also pressure to not have sex whether that pressure comes from boyfriends, parents, or society itself. Make your own decision, do what you want to do when you feel ready for it, let no one pressure you otherwise.

That's all for today. I am still working on Part III of "Why I am an Atheist." I was expecting to get that done by the end of the week but my parents are coming into town tomorrow so I'm not sure I'm going to get the chance to.

I Don't Want Your HSA!

2006-05-26T20:43:00.000-04:00

Tina has requested smaller more frequent posts in between my major posts. I can understand that, it's been about a month since I've started the "Why I am an Atheist" series and there's usually a week or more in between parts. So, here's a small post for you to read while you're waiting for "Why I am an Atheist Part III." If you are a new visitor to The Misanthrope's Sanctuary who came here looking for the "Why I am an Atheist" series, welcome, please scroll down to read it.

You know, I typically a very laid back and calm person. It normally takes an Act of Congress just to get any kind of emotional reaction out of me. Tina can tell you how hard it is to get me angry. Things that will have her flying off the handle in rage (such as our next door neighbors) will produce a shrug and a "What's the big deal?" from me. That being said recently I have noticed myself getting increasingly angry more frequently and much more easily. Perhaps the constant 70+ hour work weeks are finally getting to me, or perhaps I'm not getting enough nicotine in my diet. I don't know, but it certainly is strange.

I read an interesting article a few minutes ago that had me flying off the handle. It is titled "It's time to start shopping for your health." This article talks about the rise of the "high deductible" insurance plans and their counterpart, the Health Savings Account (HSA). For those who haven't heard of the high deductible plans yet essentially the idea is you pay a lower premium each month for it but each year you are personally responsible for the first $1-2k of your medical care. Only after you've paid this money out of pocket does the actual insurance start kicking in. To make it a little easier for you to make those out of pocket payments we now have HSA accounts which essentially work like a 401(k) for your medical care. You get to have pretax money deducted from your paycheck each week to go into these plans. When you need to go to the doctor you pull money out of your HSA to cover it.

The article talks about how the government is trying to create "consumer driven" health care. They envision a system where people shop around for the best cost for medical care. Since we are paying so much out of pocket we are going to be inclined to go after the best deal. Actual medical costs are supposed to become more transparent so that we as consumers know what the average person is paying for a particular procedure and then we go and shop doctors trying to negotiate for the best deal.

What the fuck? Under this system we have to negotiate for our health care? As I wrote the above paragraph the first thing that came to mind was a used car salesman. That's essentially the system we're talking about. Pretty soon we'll be hearing doctors say "So what can I do to earn your business today?" This is insanity!

The Bush administration feels that this will save people money in the long run. They argue that since some people don't go to the doctor as much as others (those with chronic conditions for example) then they shouldn't have to pay as much. The HSAs, they argue, will allow people to set aside just what they need without paying high insurance premiums for insurance that they may not need to use.

That is logical I suppose but the keyword here is "may." I never go to the doctor so the argument here is it would make more sense for me to put a minimal amount of money in an HSA and pay lower premiums for the high deductable insurance. In the long run I stand to save a lot of money because I'm not shelling out tons of cash to insurance that I don't use. But medical conditions, for the most part, are not predictable. Suppose on the way home I am in a car accident? I've now have to pay $2k or more out of pocket for medical expenses. As I was one of those people who never go to the doctor and therefore wasn't putting a lot into my HSA I now owe a significant amount of money that I gotta come up with somehow.

Great. This high deductible/HSA combination makes perfect sense for someone who has a high level of disposable income. But in typical republican conservative fashion no thought is given to the average middle class person. If the average middle class person, the person who is working hard to pay the bills, has very little savings, lives paycheck to paycheck, gets into an accident and now needs more then is in his HSA what the fuck is this person supposed to do?

The average middle class person has enough to worry about financially without having to worry if they've got enough in their fucking HSA to cover them and their family should something happen! This idea that there is a huge difference in premiums between normal insurance and high deductable plans is simply wrong. My company offers both (thankfully they have not gone with just the high deductable plan) and the difference in premium for them is minimal!

This is a great idea for companies and insurers. Companies pay less to insure their employees and insurance companies pay less in claims. What a great idea to further line the pockets of the rich bastards!! (no offence Onanite!). Let's make the middle and working class people struggle harder so the rich can make more money! That's republican think if I've ever seen it!

I don't want to negotiate with my doctor for medical care like she was a used car salesperson! This system will reward those people with very strong negotiating skills and those people who don't care about constantly going to different doctors or hospitals. The article that I referenced discussed how a person who wants to stick with one doctor or hospital is going to be at a disadvantage under this plan; they are more liable to pay higher costs out of pocket.

This plan is bullshit for doctors as well. Doctors should worry about treating their patients, about giving them appropriate care. That is their focus. Under this plan now they also have to worry about marketing, about undercutting the competition. Soon we'll be seeing advertisements: "This week only save 50% on all hip replacement surgeries! If you act now we'll also throw in local anesthesia absolutely free!!" Poorer consumers, they one's who can barely (if at all) contribute to their 401(k)s, will be crushed by this. How can they be expected to also start contributing to an HSA as well? This system will just create what I call the "uninsured-insured." People who have insurance but cannot afford to use it because they can't afford the out of pocket deductible.

Again, this is just a scheme to help the rich and powerful enjoy ever increasing profits at the expense of the regular working guy.

We should be moving toward socialized medicine, not away from it you fucking republican assholes!

Why I am an Atheist Part II-2

2006-05-07T13:04:00.000-04:00

(note - this post was originally supposed to be part III, my final post in this series. However several people have asked me to continue it to expand on topics I've already brought up. So in response I give you the sequel to Part II - Part II-2 (creative title, isn't it?) This post was started on 5/7. )

Andrea pointed out that I have been talking about Christianity when attacking organized religion and have said nothing about other religions. To be an effective argument against organized religion I need to address other major religions, not just the Christians. She's right, of course. These days I consider all organized religion to be an evil. At the time period in my life that's covered in Part II I was only thinking in terms of Christianity. That is why I didn't address other organized religions. I will rectify that now.

I have issue with all organized religion. I feel that on the whole organized religion has done considerably more harm to humanity then anything else. Organized religion is responsible for more death, more war, more suffering then anything in history. Now note that I am using the term "organized religion" instead of just "religion." There are many religions that are not organized and many of these I have no problem with (aside from not believing their doctrines, of course). So before we continue let's define exactly what I mean by organized religion.

An organized religion is one that has a centralized power structure and a well established infrastructure to maintain churches, train and pay priests, establish and transmit doctrine, discipline priests who break religious law, in some cases discipline believers who break religious law, perform public relations, etc. An organized religion is in effect no different from a corporation with CEOs, VPs, regional managers, public relation directors, etc. The same kind of mechanisms for management and the flow of information are in place. Examples are Christianity, Islam, Judaism.

Compare this to a non-organized religion. These are religions that have no centralized power structure, no set infrastructure, priests are not paid employees of the organization. They are held together by nothing more then common belief rather then a rigidly established and enforced doctrine that is recited by paid employees. Examples of non-organized religions include neo-paganism, old tribal or indigenous religions, traditional African religions.

So what difference does it make if a religion is organized or not? A pretty big one actually. Power is what it all boils down to. See an organized religion has a clearly defined power structure. Organized religions exist to maintain and expand on their power.

Case in point, you never see a Wiccan lobbying congress to pass legislation favorable to the Wiccan religion. Yet several Christian organizations did just that when they campaigned for the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. You never see a practitioner of a traditional Chinese religion attempting to have their religion run the government. Yet this is exactly what Islam attempts to do/has done in many countries. You don't see a non-denominational spiritual person calling for a separate sovereign country for all spiritual people. Yet this is exactly what the Jewish Zionists have done in the creation of the state of Israel.

This is what organized religion is, organizations of power and control. They act as though they are above the law, above government. They work tirelessly to impose their viewpoints, their moral systems, on everybody through any means necessary. They will fight for laws that give them special treatment, they will attempt to control the government directly; when all else fails they will try to create their own separate country. They try to tell us what we should watch, what we should read, who we should vote for. Organized religion is, at best, a special interest group fighting to legislate their worldview. At worst it's a brutal dictatorship that crushes all who do not follow its beliefs.

Under Sharia, which is Islamic law, anyone who turns away from Islam or engages in blasphemy can be put to death. Here is an example of law in Pakistan: "Penal Code 295-C: Use of derogatory remarks, etc., in respect of the Holy Prophet: whoever by words, either spoken or written, or by visible representations, or by any imputation, innuendo, or insinuation, directly or indirectly, defiles the sacred name of the Holy Prophet, shall be punished with death, or imprisonment for life, and shall also be liable to fine." This a country's law! A country! And they can put people to death for speaking out against Islam. That's Pakistan, how about something a little closer to home? How about a little Sharia in Canada? The province of Ontario has just allowed Muslims to bypass civil court and try their civil differences under Sharia. How scary is this, a government is allowing certain citizens to bypass secular Canadian law and use their religious law instead! Islam believes they are above the law. I laugh at those who try to say that Islam is the religion of peace. Let's all keep in mind that Islam translates into "submission." Islam is the religion of peace if and only if you submit to it and it's law. The Muslim philosophy states that once Muslims become a majority in any country that country must implement Sharia. They've taken the first step toward that in Canada (and they're not even the majority yet!). Is anyone else scared yet?

What about Zionism? Let's move to an area that is already inhabited by the Palestinians and set up camp! We'll slowly build or population until we drive them out and declare ourselves an independent Jewish country! As more and more Jews moved into the Palestine region tensions increased with the Arab population. During this time the region was controlled by the British; in 1936 massive Arab riots broke out. The British tried to calm the situation by holding a conference (the St. James Conference). The result of that conference was for the British to restrict further immigration into Palestine by the Jews. The Jews responded by organizing a three part standing army that began to attack, not only Arab targets, but British ones as well! In 1947 the British withdrew from Palestine and shortly thereafter the Jews declared themselves an independent country. Yeah, so let's move to an area that is currently inhabited by someone else because, after all, we were there first.... 3000 years ago that is. I don't know, I think the whole "But I was there first!" argument kind of loses effectiveness after you're five. I mean seriously, Jewish Zionists really did act like spoiled little kids. Only spoiled little kids typically don't start killing people. So when the Arabs get pissed off because we're trying to push them off their land let's shoot at them, and when the legitimate government of the region tries to resolve the issue let's shoot at them too! That's how you handle things when you're an organized religion (or five years old, really what's the difference?)

The Hindus do not have the world's best track record when it comes to human rights. They have historically had a very strict caste system comprised of four main castes (later expanded into many sub-castes) and a sub-caste of outcasts called (in English) "untouchables." The untouchables were people who worked the low-end jobs, the waste collectors, people who worked with dead animals, basically any job that brought the worker into contact with anything considered by mainstream society to be "disgusting." The untouchables dealt with some pretty extreme social restrictions, they couldn't enter temple, were not allowed to speak to anyone from a higher caste, if even so much as their shadow fell upon a higher class person that person was then considered to be unclean and had to subject themselves to lengthy purification rituals to remove the stain of the untouchable. Modern India still implements this caste system though not to the same unbelievable degree that it had been in the past. Everyone's caste is recorded through census and most of the old prejudices between castes still exist to this day. Wonderful place to live India is, as long as you don't work in anything "disgusting" that is.

This is what organized religion is. A system of organized belief that considers itself to be above everything else. Organized religion in countries will try to push for special legislation that benefits them (such as RLPA/RFRA here in the U.S) at best and at worst will simply take over the entire country (most of the middle east, Pakistan, India, etc). They tell us that they know what god wants; they know how we should live. And they will do everything in their power to subject us all to their worldview. After all what is the secular law of man worth when compared to the divine law of god?

There's a certain logic to that I suppose, if you know exactly what it is that god wants us to do that surely the will of god would take precedence over the will of man. That does make sense... but a) how do you know exactly what god wants and b) how do you know god really exists in the first place? I'll tackle (b) in Part III so for right now let's focus on the first question: How do you know exactly what god wants?

So what does God want? God wants us to follow his commandments to get into heaven, or perhaps it was repent our sins to get into heaven, maybe we just have to believe in him? The only way to God is through Jesus his son! Or is it Jesus the prophet? Jesus the nice guy? Or perhaps the only way to god is by removing all negative karma over the course of several lives? Does Jesus remove negative karma? When we die unbaptized we will go to hell, or was that purgatory? When I die I can look forward to being reincarnated, or maybe go to heaven, maybe I'll go to heaven after being reincarnated several times. You know, like three strikes your out or something?

Oh, I'm so confused! And therein lies the problem. Organized religion does the things they do on the assumption that they are right. But how do they know that? There are so many religions, both organized and not, in the world and so many divisions within those religions. Everyone thinks that they are ultimately right but many views are incompatible with each other. That leaves us with four options: 1) one of them is right everyone else is wrong. In which case how do we know which one is the right one? 2) everyone is right in one way or another (i.e. - Islam is right about how we should pray, Christianity is right about the nature of Jesus, Hinduism is right about life after death). In which case no one religion has any claim to being right, they each have elements of truth. 3) everyone is wrong - god, the afterlife, god's preferred moral code are nothing like anything preached by a religion, or 4) everyone is wrong because god simply does not exist in the first place. I, of course, support choice #4.

How do we know what god wants? When pressed religions will admit that god is ultimately unknowable, or that god works in mysterious ways, or that he has an unknown plan for us, etc. Well then if god is ultimately unknowable then how can religion claim to know what god wants?! This is the fundamental flaw in organized religion. The justification for all atrocities committed by religion is that they are only doing what god wants. But god, and therefore by extension what god wants, is unknowable! Organized religion has slaughtered people based on their best guess as to what god wants!

The idea that religion knows what god wants, that they know what will get us into the best afterlife, that they know how god wants us to live our lives, is wrong! Religion doesn't know any better then anybody else what god wants because god, by religion's own admission, is inherently unknowable. Organized religion is nothing but a centuries old fraud designed to manipulate and control. Their claim to power and authority, a knowledge of god's will, is a lie.

Organized religion throughout history has committed countless atrocities, taken so many innocent lives, been responsible for so many wars, all based on the assumption that they were right.

Liars!

Frauds!

Murders!

It is completely unfathomable to me that anyone with the slightest modicum of intelligence can support an organized religion. Yet I know so many otherwise intelligent people who do. It's completely puzzling, it's like these people just shut off their brains and all capacity for rational thought when presented with their religion of choice. Unbelievable.

For all it's talk of morality organized religion is an institution of evil. And like any other evil institution they must be opposed, they must be fought, and they must be destroyed.

Why I am an Atheist Part II

2006-05-01T10:18:00.000-04:00

(note - in case you can't tell from the title, this post is a direct continuation of the previous one. If you have not read Part I please scroll down and do so now. Part II isn't going to make much sense to you without Part I. This post was started on 5/1 - this is Part II of a three part series. This part deals with organized religion while the third part will deal with the concept of god itself. While I'm doing this note I'd like to thank Jerry Monaco over at Livejournal for posting a reference to my blog on his site… my site traffic has jumped tremendously since then. Everyone who is visiting from there thank you for coming by. I encourage all of you to drop me a comment, let me know what you think! So anyway, on with the show! Hope you all enjoy!)

So here ended any thought I had of becoming a priest. At this point, during the time between 1996 and 98, I still very much believed in the concept of god. God created us for his own (unknowable) purpose. He takes a hands off approach to running the world, essentially he got us going and then backed off. We are free here on earth to do our own thing. When we die god will judge us based on our actions during life. This is what I came to believe, I had moved into the realm of deism.

After going so long without applying inquiry or critical thinking skills to the subject of religion it was time to turn my attention to the subject. I started researching the issue as I would have any other issue. The things I started learning were very disturbing to me. I had never known that for the most part the early Christians simply took and reworked existing pagan holidays as their own. I never realized that the bible as we know it wasn't put together until 300 years after the events they reported on. The first list of New Testament Cannon was drafted by the Bishop of Alexandria in 367, it wasn't officially adopted until the Third Council of Carthage in 397 AD. And the books that were chosen to form the new testament? At the time of the Council of Carthage there were no fewer then 20 known gospels including the Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Mary, Gospel of Peter, Gospel of the Hebrews, Gospel of Judas, Sayings Gospel Q (thought to be one of two gospels used as source material for the Gospel of Matthew and Luke), and several letters such as Clement and Barnabas. None of those books made it into the final new testament. Why not?

Even bigger then the idea that there were several competing gospels, each with their own view of Jesus, there were also several competing Christian philosophies! There were many groups of Christians who each had their own Christian philosophies that were completely different and incompatible with the others. We had Arianism (Jesus was closer to god then any other man who ever existed but ultimately he was still a man), Gnosticism (the gospels should be interpreted as allegory, not literally - emphasis placed on mystical elements of the religion), Mandaeanism (worshiped John the Baptist instead of Jesus), Marcionism (the god of Christianity is incompatible with the god of Judaism, therefore the two religions are unrelated), Judaizers (Christians must continue to follow the Law of Moses - the polar opposite of the Marcionists), etc. Ummm... huh? There was no single unified view of Jesus and what he represented either in gospel or doctrine? What the hell? This is NOT what we were taught in Sunday school!!

So wait, if there were all these competing philosophies why did they all die out leaving only one to survive and become what we know today as Catholicism? Naturally, since the catholic philosophy was the only one that truly was divinely inspired and the only one that accurately represented the will of god people quickly abandoned their mis-informed philosophies and flocked to Catholicism! Since it was divinely inspired it was so clearly right as to be undeniable! That is how it happened... isn't it? No? Not so much? Oh, that's right! Catholicism spread the same way religion has always spread historically... by killing lots of people! That's the proper way to show divine inspiration, mass slaughter!

In 390 A.D. the Roman Emperor Theodosius I declared the Nicene version of Christianity (the forerunner of Catholicism) to be the official, and only, religion of the entire Roman Empire. Theodosius enacted programs designed to destroy all rival religions including all other Christian philosophies. Those who did not profess Nicene Christianity were exiled or exterminated, non-Nicene church property and material was confiscated and destroyed. Heresy against Nicene Christianity became punishable by death. Non-Nicene believers were considered to be agents of the devil and treated as such. Some historians believe that in the years following Christianity gaining a place of power in the Roman Empire that more Christians died at the hands of other Christians then died during the persecution of the Christians by the Romans in times prior.

Those early Christians, gotta love 'em! They make modern day Muslim extremists look like peace loving hippies by comparison! This is how organized religion spread, not by having the most compelling belief system, not by having the best argument, not by the gradual conversion of people who saw the wisdom of the teachings, but by killing anyone who disagreed! So of what worth is the Christian teachings? What makes the Nicene Christian teachings any more valid then the Gnostic Christian teachings or the Arianist Christian teachings or the Mandaeanist Christian teachings? Because the Nicene's had more swords? Because they had the weight of the Roman Legions behind them? We are supposed to accept, on faith no less, that the Nicene teachings are the correct teachings, that those teachings will put us on the path to heaven. Because they slaughtered the most people? Is that supposed to be what gives them their validity? Why are we supposed to accept these teachings? Because Theodosius said so? Ultimately that's what it boils down to... Christians today believe as they do because Theodosius said so seventeen hundred years ago and back up his declaration with arms. If Theodosius had sided with the Arianist Christians instead of the Nicene Christians back then Christians around the world today would believe that Jesus was a great and holy man but still just a man and not the actual son of god. Considering how Christianity has impacted the world it's amazing to think how much of that came from a single decision made by a single person almost 1700 years ago.

Christianity as it exists today exists due to a decision of a Roman Emperor and shear force of arms. So I ask what possible validity those teachings can have? How can we trust or believe that those teachings truly represent god's will? We cannot. The teachings of the church have nothing to do with following god; they have everything to do with men and power. All church actions from the slaughter of the non-Nicene Christians to the crusades to the inquisition have been about maintaining and expanding the power of the church. God is invoked to serve the interests of church leaders not the other way around. How can we accept the church as a moral and spiritual authority when their hands are stained in the blood of countless innocents throughout history? Why would we still follow the church? Why is the church deserving of forgiveness for the atrocities it has committed? It is the same institution as the one who ordered the crusades or the inquisition, the same institution that slaughtered those who did not agree with it. The same hypocritical institution preaching the same millennia old morality that it always has.

Time has not changed much. They may not openly slaughter those who do not agree with them anymore but don't think for one second that means they no longer cause harm. Just 60 years ago they stood by in silence as the holocaust took place. Interestingly enough they recently apologized for that (don't worry Vatican, your followers will forgive you... they've forgived everything else you've ever done.) Look at the AIDS crisis in Africa. Those people need help, they are dying from this disease on a massive scale. Education on condom usage would go a very long way to controlling this epidemic but the church's response is to say that birth control is a sin. Let them die just don't let them use a condom! Look through history, look at all the harm the church has caused. The slaughter of "heretics" in ancient Rome, the inquisition, the crusades, the suppression of scientific thought and knowledge in the middle ages, their response (or lack thereof) to the holocaust, their treatment of the AIDS crisis. Look at the report that I linked to in a prior post about Christian hospitals refusing emergency contraception to rape victims! This is a LAW in seven states currently with more to follow requiring all hospitals to dispense emergency contraception to rape victims and the church is trying to refuse to follow the law! A law to help rape victims of all things!!

The church feels they are above the law. If there is a law that they disagree with they will do everything they can to either ignore it or try to introduce new laws exempting them from it. Anyone remember RLPA or RFRA? "Government must show a compelling interest before burdening a religious institution with any generally applicable, neutral, civil law." These were actual laws introduced here in the U.S. that would essentially exempt religious organizations from all generally applicable laws (the laws that every one else has to follow) unless government could actually prove that those religions should be subject to the same laws that everyone else has to follow. Fortunately these acts got knocked down by the supreme court as unconstitutional but religion kept trying four times to make this happen. First the Religious Freedom Amendment, when that was declared unconstitutional they introduced the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, when that was defeated they introduced the Religious Liberty Protection Act, when that was defeated they started introducing versions of RLPA and RFRA on the state level. This is what organized religion does, they consider themselves above the law, they believe they can do whatever they want to do and it's okay because they are a religion, they believe that the "law of god" trumps the laws of man. And if the laws of god says let the people in Africa die rather then use a condom, or let's force a rape victim to carry her attacker's child rather then give her emergency contraception, or to ignore the laws that govern everybody else then so be it!

The church will argue that they are necessary for morality. But if this was a true statement then every atheist in the world would be a brutal mass murder. Since we know that's not a true statement the claim that religion is necessary for morality is clearly false. I have met plenty of atheists through previous involvement with the American Atheist Organization who were good moral people. By the same token I've met plenty of religious people who were completely immoral. Onanite keeps a nice running list on his blog about priests and ministers who are arrested for molesting kids. That is not to say that all atheists are good people and all religious people are not. There are "saints" and "sinners" on both sides which goes to show that morality, despite what the church wants us to think, is independent of religion.

So this is where I was at at this point in my life. I saw the church as an evil and oppressive regime. They are nothing but an organization of people, some good some not, who have no more claim to knowing what god really wants then you or I. They achieved their power through slaughter, they are responsible for more atrocities throughout history then any other institution, they consider themselves to be above the law; they still engage in policies and practices that hurt people, especially women. There is nothing divinely inspired, or even good, about organized religion.

It is incomprehensible to me that anybody can look at the church and consider it a source of good in this world. No amount of good that the church might have done through charity work could ever make up for the harm they have inflicted through the years. No institution that was built upon the bones of those who did not agree can ever claim to be a source of good.

The year is 1998 - at this point in my life I had rejected organized religion and moved toward deism. Soon I would begin to question the idea of god itself...

Why I am an Atheist Part I

2006-04-26T20:00:00.000-04:00

(Note - this post was started on 4/26. Due to the length I have decided to split it into two separate posts. Part II will be published shortly)

Well tax season is over but we are still very busy and I could not be happier about that. The longer we stay busy the longer overtime will last. The longer overtime lasts the greater our chances of being able to eat for the rest of the summer. Right now I have enough saved to last until the first week of July. Ideally I need to have enough to last to the end of September. Another month and a half of full OT will put me where I need to be. Of course I would prefer the OT never ends, that way I never have to touch the savings and I could pay off my debts instead of just surviving. That would be nice.

Money is an interesting thing. In my line of work I get to talk to some very affluent people. It's interesting how different your perspective is when you have money. $20,000.00 would fundamentally change my life in positive ways. I wouldn't have to work 80 hours a week to pay the bills, I would be able to pay off all debts and actually have time to spend with my family. That would be amazing. But to some of these people $20k is pocket change, one month's interest on their accounts. It's strange to see the difference in perspectives here, what to me would be phenomenally valuable and life changing is hardly anything to others. Well, with luck and lots of hard work hopefully one day I am in a position where $20k is pocket change to me.

On to the topic of the day, on MSNBC I read an article by Rabbi Gellman entitled "Trying to Understand Angry Atheists." In the article the good Rabbi states that "Perhaps their atheism was the result of the tragic death of a loved one, or an angry degrading sermon, or an insensitive eulogy, or an unfeeling castigation of lifestyle choices or perhaps something even worse." So like many theists Rabbi Gellman is of the opinion that atheism must be the result of some personality flaw or psychological damage. He asserts that we live our lives in despair and have no hope.

Well that's a depressing picture of us atheists. We're all miserable, traumatized, shells of people. And while I have no doubt that there are indeed some atheists who do fit that description. Most atheists I've met have been well adjusted, happy, highly intelligent people. In fact studies have shown a direct relationship between intelligence and atheism. In 1986 43 studies were done on the relationship between intelligence and religion, 39 shows a clear inverse relationship between intelligence and religion. The more intelligent you are the less likely it is for you to be religious. A 1998 survey of the 517 members of the United States National Academy of Sciences shows that 72% of them did not believe in the concept of a god. A study in 2000 showed that while 90% of the American population expressed belief in god only 40% of scientists with at least a B.A. did and only 10% of "eminent" scientists believed in god. Interestingly enough the Christian Bible does not dispute this: "Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong." - that's from 1 Corinthians Chapter 1 verse 26-27. So according to the bible it is the dumb and poor who get called to god's service. Interesting.....

It has been shown that the atheist is, on average, more intelligent then his religious counterpart. It is that intelligence that leads us to atheism more then any other factor. My journey to atheist was a slow process that took years; it did not involve trauma or tragedy, it was a purely intellectual process. This is my story....

Back when I was a teenager I was deeply religious. As a child I had been raised Roman Catholic but we weren't really a practicing family. My mom would drag me to church with her on major holidays but that was about it. I went to my Sunday school classes every Sunday but never really paid much attention to them. Sometime after my confirmation, I'd say around halfway through high school I slowly started becoming more and more interested in my faith. I attended a Catholic high school and would find myself hanging around after class to discuss issues of faith with the Brothers, I actually started really paying attention in religion classes, and I started looking forward to going to church. I would volunteer for religious activities in the school, I was always working at the school's chapel; I volunteered to work at the Pope's mass when he came to Jersey in the mid-nineties. At that point in time I seriously started contemplating becoming a priest. I started speaking with Rev. Jim Choma, head of the Newark Archdiocese, about that possibility. He was helping me to prepare to go to seminary when I graduated high school.

My faith and religion had become very important to me. I liked it, the idea that there was more to life then just this. I was never very popular or well liked in high school, I was your typical geek... hated sports, enjoyed math and science, didn't have a damn clue how to talk to the opposite sex (or even the same sex for that matter). So from a social perspective high school was not a very fun time. There was comfort to be found in religion; the idea that there was more to life then this social bullshit, there was more then just school followed by work followed by death. That if you just believed, just followed this moral code; you would enjoy eternal happiness in the afterlife. From a psychological standpoint religion is very compelling. Religion gives us comfort when something horrible happens; it gives us hope for the future that death is not the end. That alone is huge - death is not the end, life goes on and you will be in paradise for all of eternity. That is a hugely powerful message. When one is struggling though life, dealing with financial problems and social problems and everything else the hope and comfort that religion offers is very appealing.

The Rabbi asserts that one of the causes of atheism is trauma, the death of a loved one causes a person to reject god out of anger for taking away said loved one. Could trauma just as easily lead one to religion? The death of a loved one make you reevaluate your own mortality and run to religion for the comfort of an afterlife in paradise? Hmmm....

So there I was, about 17 years old, devout, faithful; seriously considering the priesthood when I made a critical mistake. I read the bible. Churches and religious instruction tend to focus on particular sections and passages, obviously the ones that best illustrate whatever point they want to make. I've never had anyone encourage me to read the entire thing cover to cover like a regular book. But I started thinking that if I were really going to join the priesthood it would make sense to read the book. So I read the book cover to cover Old Testament straight through the new. In the end I read it three times cover to cover over a period of a few months. When I got to the new testament I had one of those small pocket bibles that I used to carry everywhere with me. I always drew some strange looks and comments in high school when I would be sitting there reading a bible while everyone else was talking about getting drunk, high, and laid.

The first time I read the book I took it for what I was taught it was. The revealed word of the lord; I did not question it. I have always been an intelligent person, always very inquisitive; wanting to know everything. I had been studying physics from the time I was 13 trying to understand how our universe worked. Yet I did not apply any of any analytical or reasoning skills to religion. When I came to religion I essentially shut off my brain, as a religious person is taught to do. Christianity teaches that not everything is knowable, that there are "mysteries" that cannot be understood by the human mind. The "sacred mysteries" form a core catholic belief. A religious person is taught to not apply logic and reason to their religion, that religion is beyond human understand and can only be accepted on faith. Faith, by definition, is the belief in something in the absence of evidence. Rational inquiry has no place in a faith based system that builds itself around concepts that are, according to the church, forever unknowable. So like a good catholic boy I accepted what I had read in the bible as the revealed word of god on faith. The church says it is so it therefore must be so.

Then I decided to read through that bible a second time. Only this time when I read it through I started noticing little details that threw me off. I remember reading Matthew, the gospel that was written to covert the Jews by showing exampled of fulfilled prophecy. Chapter 2 shows Jesus and his family fleeing to Egypt so that, according to 2:15, the prophecy "And out of Egypt I have called my son." could be fulfilled. When I read that line I remember reading that someplace in the Old Testament. I started flipping through the OT trying to find where that prophecy had come from. Well, I finally found it. Hosea 11:1: "When Isreal was a child I loved him and out of Egypt I have called my son." Ummm.... hold on a second here!! The author of Matthew made it sound like this was a messiah prophecy that Jesus fulfilled but when we find the actually prophecy in the OT it has nothing to do with the messiah! It was a reference to the exodus of the Jews from Egypt!

How about the genealogy of Jesus? Both Matthew and Luke list the genealogy of Jesus. Matt 1:1-17 and Luke 3:23-38. Neither list has many names in common and they both trace genealogy to Joseph. Umm... if it was a virgin birth why are they tracing to Joseph? Modern Christian Apologists try to explain away this huge discrepancy of two completely different genealogies by saying that Matthew actually traces Mary's family history while Luke traces Joseph's. That might be logically except that's not what the bible says. Matthew is clearly tracing to Joseph just like Luke is: "Eliud the father of Eleazar, Eleazar the father of Matthan, Matthan the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ." Jacob is the father of Joseph who is the husband of Mary, not Jacob is the father of Mary. The apologists will say that Matthew is showing father-in-laws. Thus Jacob is not Joseph’s father, he is actually Joseph's father-in-law. Again, the bible does not say this. These are just inventions of Christian apologists to try to explain away large and glaring contradictions in their holy book.

These are just two of the things that jumped out at me the second time I read through the bible. After I was done I was convinced that something must have been wrong with my reading. Perhaps I had misread that out of Egypt prophecy, maybe there was indeed a messiah reference in the OT using that wording that I had missed and it was pure coincidence that the Hosea entry used the same exact wording. I was sure all the apparent contradictions I had noticed had perfectly logical explanations that could be found within the book if I just read it a little more carefully. So I was off to read it a third time.

By the time I had finished it the third time (okay, I didn't completely finish it the third time... I think I got up to the Acts before I gave up) I threw the book down in disgust. There was just so many contradictions (like the genealogies) so many outright distortions of prophecy (like the out of Egypt one), and so many historical inaccuracies (the first census was commissioned by Quirinius and took place several years after the death of King Herod. The bible has the census taking place during Herod's reign. ). My opinion at this time was that the bible could stand as a nice story to illustrate various moral principals but beyond that it was worthless!

The year is 1996 and so here begins my drift away from religion.

On Abstaining From Abstinence

2006-04-16T12:28:00.000-04:00

We're a little bit slower today with tax season winding down so I've got some time to write. Unfortunately I do not have any of my research material with me so I can't work on my organized religion post right now. So instead I'll give you a short entry about something else that has been bothering me lately.

Sex.

Well, abstinence from sex more specifically.

In the area that I live over the past month or so several billboards have gone up encouraging parents to help their kids choose abstinence. I typically see three or four of these billboards on my way to and from work each day.

Ummm... no, thank you. I will not be teaching Allie to choose abstinence, I will be teaching her to choose safe sex. I worry for those parents who choose to try to go the abstinence route. Let's face facts here people, teenagers will have sex. Studies have shown upwards of 90% of all teens have had sex before they turn 18, greater then 60% by 16. Yet so many parents seem to have blinders on and insist that it would never be their little girl, all of her horrible friends perhaps, but never their little girl! Dads especially seem to get this mentality that no horny sex-crazed teenage boy will ever lay their hands on their daughter.

I harbor no such illusions. Allie will most likely be sexually active as a teenager. Just speaking statistically it is almost inevitable. Unlike most fathers this thought does not make me want to run and grab a shotgun in order to defend my daughter's "virtue" with a hail of bullets if needs be. She's going to have sex. Why wouldn't she? It's a normal and natural event for people in that age group. So instead of trying to delude myself into thinking it will never happen to my little girl I accept that it most likely will. Now instead of devoting myself to a futile quest to keep her from having sex I can focus on making sure she knows what to do if she does decide to.

Parents should take their blinders off, forget about trying to teach your kids to not have sex and teach them to be safe. By the time they get to the age where they are starting to consider sex they should know more about proper condom usage then the Trojan manufacturers. When discussing this with Tina the other day she brought up another key element. Knowing how to use protection is only part of it, a woman also needs to be taught the self-esteem and self-confidence to say to a guy "You are not getting any unless you're wearing a condom." Tina pointed out that a lot of young women just do not feel confident enough to stop the guy they are with to make him put on a condom. That is something else that needs to be addressed.

Our kids need to be taught how to properly use protection, they need to have easy access to said protection, and they need to be taught to use that protection each time every time.

Encouraging our kids to be abstinent in just asking for disaster. If we focus on that over safe sex when our kids wind up in a position where they give in to their normal and natural desires they will not know what to do. So now that kid might wind up pregnant or infected because she doesn't know how to properly use a condom - her parents were too busy telling her how wrong sex was that they never bothered to teach her proper condom usage. On top of that she probably didn't even enjoy the sex in the first place as she probably felt as though she was doing something "wrong."

That's just wrong. You want to reduce teenage pregnancy and help limit the spread of STDs? Focus on safe sex, not abstinence. Don't give mixed messages "Sex is wrong - but if you do the wrong thing use a condom." Don't teach that sex is wrong. I have known so many religious woman who, even in marriage, cannot fully enjoy sex because they had been trained to believe that sex was in some way wrong or dirty. If you want your kids to grow up to enjoy a healthy and normal sex life with the least chance of unexpected pregnancy or disease along the way then teach safe sex, promote self-esteem and positive body image, and stop teaching that sex is somehow wrong.

And in the mean time get rid of those blasted abstinence signs!

Stop Them

2006-04-13T22:38:00.000-04:00

Disgusting.

Religion is the greatest evil that the world has ever known. No madman, dictator, natural disaster, or plague has inflicted more harm on humanity then religion.

Organized religion must be opposed.

Organized religion must be destroyed.

There is no greater evil then the one that masquerades as the ultimate source of good. And no actual good that they do can ever come close to repaying the immeasurable harm they have inflicted on society.

More on this when tax season is over and I have time to write a proper entry. I am planning something huge for this topic.

On Hiatus

2006-04-07T15:36:00.000-04:00

Hey everyone. Tina suggested I make a post explained why I haven't been updating my blog. As we get closer to the end of tax season we have just become way too busy for me to get time to post. So until tax season is over I'm afraid I will be on hiatus from blogging. I'll try to post when and if I can but I wouldn't expect to see any major serious posts again until after the end of tax season. I apologize for the inconvenience.

Quick short news: Jewel, one of my favorite artists, if releasing a new CD on May 2nd entitled "Goodbye to Alice in Wonderland." I can't wait! Her previous CD, "0304," was a bit of a departure for her and not as strong as her previous CDs. From what I have read about the new CD she is returning to her usual "simple girl with a guitar writing deep and powerful poetry set to music" style that I love about her.

I'm excited!

Watch Out Before Someone Drops a House on You!

2006-03-29T17:55:00.000-05:00

I am completely amazed and very nearly speechless (nearly) at the number of comments I got on my last post where people were encouraging me to buy a house. Just two posts prior I had written about the deep financial hell I was in courtesy of MBNA, who by the way finally sent me a very nice letter saying how they lowered by limit because they were only looking for out my best interests. Thanks guys!) yet I've still got people encouraging me to buy a house. And not just here on this blog, people Tina and I know from where we live are forever telling us to buy a house.

Just today I got an email from Tina telling me that one of the couples we talk to at our apartment complex are buying a house. He works at a near minimum wage job, she works part-time as she tries to put herself to school and yet they are buying a house.

I cannot comprehend this, this is just wrong... not to mention very dangerous. There was a time when home ownership meant something. When the young married couple just starting out would never dream of having a home right away, it is something they worked toward, something that with good fiscal discipline and hard work they might be able to achieve in ten years or so. It was not easy to get a mortgage, lenders would tear apart every last detail of your financial life to make absolutely sure that you were fully prepared for the enormous financial responsibility that came with home ownership.

These days any broke kid can walk into a bank and get a variable rate interest only mortgage and become a homeowner. Lenders have gone out of their way to introduce mortgage products to allow people who are otherwise not qualified to buy a house. We've got interest only loans, variable rate loans, low-doc loans, no-doc loans, ARMS, etc.

We are just inviting disaster. While the housing market is hot and prices keep rising all these choices are great. That broke kid can get an interest only loan and sell the house in two years for a sizable profit. There are plenty of people who made a career out of flipping houses. Mortgage companies rolled out the products to allow everyone to get in on the action! Let the good times roll! It's the 90's tech bubble all over again!

What happens when the housing market turns? When interest rates rise? Now all of a sudden these people with interest only loans find themselves owing more on the house then it's worth, they now cannot afford to sell it and are stuck with it. What are the people with variable rate loans going to do when the monthly payment doubles because rates have risen? Now that young broke couple who was so excited because they were able to afford the low monthly payments of their variable rate suddenly can't afford to make their payments! Get what kids? You're out on the street!

I have spoken with people in the mortgage industry and they are scared, they see things turning. I've talked to people in the industry who have told me horror stories of people who are stuck in houses they can't sell because they owe more then its worth, who have watched their monthly payments increase to the point where they can't afford them. It's scary. I feel bad for all the people who are going to be badly hurt by this. I worry about what that's going to do to the economy as the rate of foreclosure increases as more and more people cannot afford the "easy mortgage payments" that are now anything but easy.

The mortgage industry must go back to the way it was. Eliminate these easy financing terms, eliminate these special mortgages like interest only, eliminate the easy approval process like low-doc and no-doc. Make mortgages hard to get again. Make homeownership an accomplishment attainable my only the most responsible and financially stable of people.

My rule is simple, the only type of mortgage anyone should consider is a 30 year or less fixed rate. If you cannot afford a 30 year fixed or if you cannot pass the financial scrutiny to be approved for one then you do not belong in a house. Period.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Apartments, Stores, and Dinner! Oh My!

2006-03-26T15:26:00.000-05:00

There is another new post right below this one that I had intended to post on Thursday but didn't get a chance to finish up until today so make sure you check that one out too.

Nothing political or social in this entry; just wanted to talk about my weekend a bit. For a one day weekend it was actually pretty darn good! Tina took me to a store I've never been to before "Biggs Hypermarket." This is the greatest store in the world! I've never seen such an amazing place! If you have one in your area go to it all the time, if you don't then write your city councilman and demand that they solicit Biggs to build one in your town!

First, they sell Veal!!!!! That alone makes them great! Secondly they are extremely clean and organized. Tina commented that you almost don't want to take anything off the shelf because it's so orderly you don't want to mess it up. She's not exaggerating! Their prices beat Wal-Mart. And they are extremely technologically advanced! They have a system to link your bank account to your fingerprint!!! So when you go to a register you place your finger on a reader and your bank account is automatically debited. If you've seen "Back to the Future Part II" that's the kind of payment system I'm talking about! Unbelievable! I love that place. I am convinced, if I should need to get a second job to supplement our income I want to work there!

That night I made veal parm! I am not a cook by any stretch of the imagination, the limit of my cooking ability is typically macaroni and cheese but damn did that veal come out great! I made enough for about five people and devoured it all! I haven't tasted food that good since the first time that Tina cooked for me. I need to make that again, and again, and again!

In other news Tina has discovered what I've been saying all along, Lexington (that's Kentucky for my out of state readers) is a wonderful place. While looking up apartments and houses for rent she looked at a few Lex listings and discovered that Lex is much cheaper then the area that we currently live in in Northern Kentucky. We can get a large 1200 square foot apartment with a large kitchen for the same amount we are paying now for an 800 square foot with a tiny kitchen. Unfortunately my company does not have offices in Lex so we wouldn't be moving down there. Which is sad 'cause I would love to live there. Tina likes it so much that she even said she would move down there with Allie and leave me up here! LOL

And that's all the news from my life. Read the below post for your political/social fix.

Teach Me!

2006-03-23T18:27:00.000-05:00

My posting has become a bit sporadic, I apologize for that. I typically post from work. I'll work on my entry during breaks and lunch and downtime between calls. Well as we get closer to the end of tax season we're getting busier and busier I've had less and less time to write. As an example I started writing this entry on the 23rd, it's about to get posted now on the 26th. So, that's why you've been seeing fewer entries... work comes before blogging! :)

Today's topic is education! Florida's governor, Jeb Bush, in perhaps the only good piece of legislation ever introduced by a member of the Bush family, has introduced a proposal to require high school kids to pick majors and minors and then complete a curriculum that focuses on those majors.

It's about time! I hate the American education system and one of my primary complaints is that it is so unfocused. We spend so many years in school and yet how many of those years are focused on skills and knowledge that will really help us in our careers and our life? I never finished college, a distinction I am proud to share with a significant percentage of this country's most successful people. I left college because it was pointless and I do mean that literally. I went in to study physics, it had always been my dream since about the 7th grade to get my PhD in physics and become a researcher. So I finally go to college for it, to a school that has a great reputation for science, ready to finally learn! Instead I spent my days reading English literature, studying renaissance art, and hearing about the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. Where was the physics I went there to learn? I got frustrated, bored, and eventually left.

I tried a little bit later to go back to school for computers. Same thing again, lots of philosophy, English, all those things that are completely unrelated to what I was trying to do. After about two semesters of that it dawned on me that I was sitting in a room, spending thousands of dollars, giving of a few years of my life, to learn something that I can teach myself in 6 months or less with a twenty dollar book from Barnes and Noble. College, in its current form, is a completely pointless waste of time and money.

I have had many people, upon hearing my views on the education system, argue that kids need a "well rounded" education. That is the catch phrase of our system, "well rounded." I have yet to hear a single compelling argument as to why this a good thing. There are some classes in college that I completely enjoyed, such as my philosophy, psychology, and history classes. But did they in any way prepare me for the future I was trying to reach? Not in the slightest. If I'm interested in learning about philosophy and history I can study that myself, I can go to the library and pick up a book on my own time, I can attend a class at my own discretion. While I'm at college, spending money to prepare for my future, I should be fully focused on what I am there to learn. My college history professor, a brilliant historian who also hated the concept of the "well rounded" education summed it up perfectly: "A well rounded education will make you more interesting at parties and separate you from more of your hard earned dollars." That's all there is to it. If you are going after a career in physics learning English lit will not benefit you in the slightest, math and science will. If you are going after a career as an English professor learning chemistry will not help you, you need more lit and writing classes.

A "well rounded" education just extends the amount of time, and therefore the amount of money, you spend in college. If you check a college's course catalog for a particular major you will find that out of four years perhaps one and a half are devoted to classes that directly relate to your major, the rest are unnecessary fluff. You don't start really focusing on what you are there to learn until you get to grad school. Think of all the time you waste with all those pointless classes.

But what about the kids who do not know what they want? Statistics show that most college kids these days switch their majors about two times during the college career. I have heard that statistic quoted at me time and time again as a justification for the well rounded approach. Kids don't know what they want to do so we need to spend a few years exposing them to a bit of everything.

Our kids are unfocused is essentially what's being said here. Our kids are unfocused and the solution is to cater to that lack of focus with an all encompassing educational approach. That's what the "well rounded" proponents are really saying. Ummm.... no. If our kids are unfocused the solution is to help get them focused. You do that by teaching them focus at a young age.

I fully support the Jebb plan. If we implement that for high schools plus a fully focused curriculum in college I think we'll have a much better education system. Here's what school will look like:

Grammar school: Unfocused - teach kids all the basics in all areas/teach good study habits/try to encourage a love of learning

Middle School: Slight Focus - start guiding children toward areas they show a particular aptitude for.

High School: Moderate Focus - make children choose a major/minor and focus more classes in that area, increasing focus as they move through grades (similar to the current college approach)/help children start planning for a career though increased emphasis on career planning tools (such as job fairs, personality assessment tests, counseling - essentially what is already done just more of it and started earlier).

College: Full Focus - all classes are directly related to chosen career.

This approach makes sense to me, we increase their focus as the child gets older all the time providing support to help make the child more focused and decide what it is they really want. Right now our education system looks like this:

Grammar School: Unfocused

Middle School: Unfocused

High School: Unfocused

College (First 2 years): Unfocused

College (Last 2 years): Moderately focused

No wonder our kids are unfocused and can't make up their mind what they want! We don't even start encouraging them to focus on anything until they are about 20 years old! By that time a lack of focus is so ingrained in them of course they have difficulty settling on the one thing they want to do. My approach makes sense, we slowly and gradually ramp up the focus - get kids used to it so when they get to the college level they are comfortable with being focused, they have been given the tools and the guidance to know what it is they want. With full focus our colleges can award bachelors degrees in two years and masters in four. The end result will be more highly focused better educated workers and a long overdue improvement to our woefully inadequate education system.

Screw MBNA

2006-03-19T18:17:00.000-05:00

I'm skipping politics today and taking this opportunity to rant about some personal issues. So if you're not interested in reading about me and my life then please navigate away and come back tomorrow for more of your regularly scheduled political commentary.

So MBNA just completely fucked over me and my wife. How very nice of them. So my wife and I are in financial hell right now. Prior to Allie it was just me and Tina, both of us with jobs. We had plenty of money coming in between the two of us, our credit card balances were on the decline; we didn't have a financial care in the world. Then we got pregnant. We weren't trying to get pregnant, we didn't plan on it, we were using birth control, it just happened (Andrea let this serve as a warning for you that the pill doesn't always work!). Within a few months Tina had to leave her job working retail. Now we are down to just my income. That was tough, our credit card balances stopped their nice decline and started creeping back up again. When Allie came everything just got more expensive. Earlier this year the major credit card companies switched from a 2% of principal formula for calculated minimum payments to a 4% formula so our credit card payments doubled, our electric bill increased with Tina being home all the time. Not good. Fortunately I was working a job that offered fairly unlimited OT. So I started working 13 hour shifts five days a week. That brought in enough money to keep us going, but still for a family of three even that didn't leave much money left over once all the bills were paid. We weren't able to save a lot.

The problem was the unlimited OT typically only lasts until the end of tax season (April 15th). After that it tends to be minimal to none. So how do we survive the summer became a huge concern (as in a keep you up at night with fear concern). We had managed to save about $2,500, not a lot by any stretch of the imagination, but enough to keep us going for a month, month and a half, after the end of OT. Long enough to keep us going while I found a part time job to supplement our income. That would have sucked but we would have been okay most likely.
And now we get to the part where MBNA screwed us. See, when you are saving money the very first thing you should always do is pay down high interest credit cards. That is a financial principal that I teach to clients every day, it is the subject of numerous financial articles. Always pay down the credit cards first! It does you no good to have $10k in a bank making 2% when you have $10k in credit card debt at 12%. The smart thing to do is always pay down the credit card debt first.

So I did the smart thing and paid down my MBNA card. I reduced my balance on it by about $2,500. That way we have reduced our balance which results in a lower monthly payment, my credit utilization percentage decreases which makes my credit report look better, and we would have an available balance if it was needed. Without a doubt the smart thing to do.

So on Thursday I checked my MBNA card again, which I do regularly just because I enjoy seeing how much that balance has come down. And I noticed with shock that my available balance, instead of being around $3k was now about 300 bucks!! MBNA had dropped by credit limit by about the same amount I had reduced it by!!!!

Just like that all the money I had worked to put away was gone. We no longer had a cushion to keep us going between the time the OT ended and when I found a part-time job!! This is a complete disaster! And of course MBNA doesn't care that they just seriously screwed with someone's life.

So now Tina and I are in a horrible situation where we will not have enough money coming in to survive once the OT ends. There is only one other solution that I have, work more OT! Now instead of working five 13 hour shifts a week I will be working six. Each week of an extra day OT will give me enough money to put on the side to survive one week when the OT dies. We have about a month to go before the OT starts to die so that will allow me to put aside enough to last us a month. That should give us enough time for me to find a part-time job.

So this problem is survivable, we can and will make do. But I would just like to take this opportunity to thank MBNA for putting me into a position where the only way for us to survive is for me to spend even less time with my wife and child! To have less time to relax and do the things that I would like to do. Thank you very much for that.

In case you can't tell, I'm angry and just a touch bitter. I love my wife and my daughter; I wouldn't change a thing in my life if I were given the opportunity. I've got a great wife and a beautiful little girl, both of which I am very thankful for. I just really wish I had more time to devote to them and I hate that as time goes on I have less and less time to spend with them. Things shouldn't have to be this hard.

So that's my rant. Come back tomorrow for some politics!

Hands off my GTA

2006-03-09T15:50:00.000-05:00

The Republicans are in the hands of Fundamentalists.

The Democrats are social conservatives.

The average European looks at American politics and says that, democrat or republican, there are no left leaning politicians in America; there is only Right and Far Right. Compared to the Social Democrats that are popular in Europe even a Massachusetts Senator is on the Right by comparison.

I see their point. I can't think of any politician who is both economically and socially liberal (after all in this country Liberal is a bad word!). 2008 is going to be interesting, I would never vote republican but I also can't vote for a social conservative. Social issues are what is most important to me, much more so then economic or foreign policy issues and I can't identify a single social liberal, or even a social moderate for that matter, among likely presidential candidates.

On the social adjenda today we have Video Games! Interesting how I get to combine two of my favorite subjects, politics and games, in one post. Over the past few years states have tried again and again to ban the sale of violent games. Some states have wanted something simple like penalties for retailers who sold "M" rated games to minors, other states have wanted outright bans on selling M rated games in retail stores. In every case these state act have been declared unconstitutional on two grounds. One, it was seen as an infringement to free speech and two, the court pointed out time and time again that there was no conclusive evidence what so ever that there was a direct causal relationship between violence in video games and violent behavior. The court has hinted that it is willing to ignore the free speech issue if a direct link between violent media and violent behavior can be conclusively shown. Problem is that many studies have been done, all with different results. Some have shown no link at all, other's have shown a link but were unable to determine whether it was violent content that led to the test subjects violent tendencies or whether they had those violent tendencies to begin with. Numerous other studies have shown positive benefits to games, everything from increased hand-eye coordination to increased problem solving abilities. So the supreme court is right in saying there is no demonstrable link between violent games and violent behavior.

But watch out! Here come the democrats to the rescue! Senators Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman have introduced legislation, which recently passed, that mandates the Federal government to being a study into the effects of all forms of violent entertainment have on children. So now the government is compelled to create a massive commission to do a study on the effects of all media, be it games, movies, music, etc., on children.

Pure insanity by the democrats who are obsessed with gathering support from the social conservatives. You know ten years ago people with the current democrat's position would have been called republicans and people with the current republican's position would have been called fanatics. Is there nothing better we could be doing with tax payer money? Like social security perhaps? Health care? Education? Anything? Do we really need to be spending our money so the government can play the role of parent?

The social conservatives have become over the years extremely anti-game. They see it as nothing but a corrupting influence on today's youth. These are the same people who through the years have protested television and movies, music, and every other facet of entertainment. They are the descendants of the people who protested music in the 50's as being Satan's music as they hunted down and destroyed their kid's Elvis records. For decades these social conservatives have attacked whatever the current popular form of entertainment was. Now their target is video games. The problem is we are talking about people who know nothing about games! They see games as just a toy for kids and therefore cannot comprehend games with more mature content. They don't understand that the industry has evolved and grown up along with their client base. The average age for a gamer is now 24, not 14. Hell, a full 20 percent of adults over 50 play games these days. It has become a broad entertainment medium just like movies which requires media to suit a large variety of tastes. They are like this mother that I met in a Kmart back when the Gamecube had just launched. She was standing there on line buying one from her 12 year old son and she complains to me: "I can't wait until he outgrows video games!" I tried to explain to her that games had grown up to move beyond the prepubescent demographic but she just could not grasp it. "What self respecting adult would spend their money to play with kid's toys?" was her reply. This is exactly what our politicians are like. They don't understand the industry and view their job as protecting our kids.

Speaking of which, why do we need the government to play the role of parent? Isn't that the job of... oh, I don't know... the parent? Not all kids at the same, what is appropriate for one kid may not be appropriate for another. For the government to make a blanket statement that M rated games are bad for all kids and should not be allowed to be sold in retail outlets (as some anti-game legislation has called for) is wrong. We have a voluntary rating system in place on games very similar to the one on movies. Recent surveys have shown that that game ratings are roughly as effective as movie ratings, that is the system isn't perfect but it works reasonably well.

The problem lies completely and solely with the parents. It is entirely their job to decide what is and isn't appropriate for their child. If a mentally disturbed child plays some Grand Theft Auto and then gets the idea to out steal a car and shoot some cops the fault does not lie with Grand Theft, the fault lies with the parents. I remember after Columbine everyone was very quick to blame video games, seems the killer kids loved playing Doom, the "murder simulator," as Lieberman called it. Therefore they must have been influenced by the violent game to go out and commit violent acts. Everyone was so quick to blame the games that they ignored other important facts that did not come out until later... the killer kids were fairly disturbed individuals. They were paranoid, depressed, anti-social... warning signs to any responsible parents that perhaps my child needs help. But these particular parents ignored all the signs and when their violent anti-social tendencies manifested themselves as violent acts they were quick to blame the games! No. The problem wasn't the games your kids were playing, the problem was your kids were fucked up in the head and you, as the parents, ignored it.

Games, fictional movies, television drama... they all have one thing in common. They are all fantasy, entertainment pure and simple. A good parent teaches their child the difference between fantasy and reality. A good parents teaches their kid that what they see in a game or movie or hear in a song is not necessarily appropriate behavior in real life. A good parent is involved. The excuse I hear so often is "Well I don't know what my kid is playing! How am I supposed to know weather it is appropriate for him or not?" Well why don't you know? You don't have the time? You're too busy? Modern games are too complex for you to understand? Oh go cry me a river, shut up, and be a parent!

A well adjusted kid with no behavioral problems, who is responsible and understands the difference between reality and fantasy would have no problems as a result of picking up some Grand Theft Auto whereas a child with behavioral issues who can't tell the difference between reality and fantasy would be undoubtedly damaged by such a game. It is your job as the parent to know which category your child falls into. If you have been a good parent and have yourself the former child, then give yourself a pat on the back, you've done your job as a parent well so let them play whatever the hell they want to play. If you are a bad parent and have the latter kid then perhaps it's time to take a look at your own parenting style and figure out where you have gone wrong before you blame the games for your kid's shooting spree.

Notice my theme here. It's all about the parents. Unfortunately there are a lot of bad parents out there and they draw media attention quicker then the good parents. The social conservatives need to realize that the problem with kids is not violent games or movies or music, the problem with kids is their parents, nothing else.

Instead of focusing on the real problems, the parents, the social conservatives focus on games and movies and music. Let's play parent and restrict entertainment options for everyone because some parents aren't doing their job properly!! That's their philosophy and it's wrong. We need to instead focus on making parents better, on getting them more involved with their kids. How we go about doing that, I don't know. But parents are the problem that need to be addressed, not games.

Where's the Veal?

2006-03-06T21:08:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the long delay in posting. We've been very busy at work so I haven't had much time to write. I also wanted to leave "Apathy and the Death of America" up as the first post for a few days to see what kind of commentary it drew. Surprisingly it only drew three comments. That puzzles me. "Slash and Burn" which was something I banged out in about 20 minutes on a random topic that for whatever reason I had been thinking about that day drew 17 comments in two days. Yet "Apathy and The Death of America" which I thought was a much more relevant and important piece that I had spent days researching and thinking about only drew 3 comments. That gets me thinking about authors in general, be they book, TV, or movie writers. How hard must it be for those people to try to figure out exactly what it is that their audience wants and will respond well to.

No politics for today, instead I want to talk about veal.

Yes, veal as in the meat. Why is it so freakin hard to find some veal parmesan in this state?! Back in Jersey there is not a single Italian restaurant, diner, or pizza place that does not serve what is without a doubt the greatest food ever created! Here even the fast food of fake Italian, Olive Garden, has stopped serving it. I can't even find it in a grocery store! Tina asked the meat department of Sam's Club about it today and they actually had the audacity to spew a line of bullshit about veal being banned because it was cruel to animals. Though there is some veal legislation in a few states, mostly concerning the treatment of veal calves, there is no overall (or even state specific) ban on veal. A five second Google search would confirm this. So why would the employees of a major national chain spew such obvious bullshit? And where can I find veal?! To any of my readership for is familiar with restaurant an/or grocery stores in the Greater Cincinnati area I ask do any of you know a good restaurant that serves veal parmesan or any grocery store where I can buy it to make myself?

In other news, I FINALY got an Xbox 360. My parents had given me the money for it back in November as a Christmas present and I was finally this past weekend able to find one. I am completely blown away by it! It is so amazing it borders on ridiculous. I am typically of the opinion that good graphics are not necessary to a great game. Some of my favorite games from the current generation of consoles are not the best looking of games. But the graphics that the 360 is pumping out definitely adds tremendously to the experience. The shear intensity of Condemned and Quake 4 is unlike anything I've played on the current generation of consoles. I've even got Tina playing!! I picked up Project Gotham Racing for her and she is loving it. I just wish I had more time to devote to it.

And lastly, Allie had her first cold this weekend!! That was an experience. She picked the worst possible timing to get sick, just as me and Tina were preparing for a nice romantic night to celebrate our one year anniversary she wakes up to let us know just how crappy she was feeling. I swear she had that timed. Fortunately she is starting to feel better now. What's interesting is that while she was sick, aside from her sleepiness and bouts of coughing, overall she was in a very good mood. Check out the picture of her over on Tina's website with her in the bed, it is adorable.

Apathy and the Death of America

2006-02-27T17:43:00.000-05:00

Sorry about the delay in post. I am responding directly to Ben's comment in my previous entry. So if anyone has yet to read the comments there please do so now.

In his response Ben considers my alarmist position to be unfounded. He feels that a wait-and-see approach is best as the wheels are already in motion on the abortion issue and we do not yet know what the outcome will be.

Ben is wrong. Completely and utterly wrong.

An alarmist stance is completely justified and necessary for us to have any chance at change; though perhaps even now it is simply too late. For the past few entries I have been screaming out against the fundamentalists of this country, calling for people to recognize and address the danger they represent to all Americans. Ben's response demonstrates the danger. The problem does not come from what the fundamentalists are trying to do; the problem comes from the fact that we are letting them do it.

The fundamentalists have existed as a political force since 1979 when Paul Weyrich, a republican strategist, created the term "Moral Majority" to describe a group whose job it was to politicize members of fundamentalist and charismatic churches. Up until that point the fundamentalist segment of society had stayed mostly out of politics. Over the next twenty years we've seen the Religious Right rise in power. From the beginnings as the Moral Majority they have grown and expanded. In the 80's we saw the creation of the "Family Research Council," the "Council for National Policy," the "Concerned Woman for American," the "American Coalition for Traditional Values," the "Christian Coalition," etc. When I first started writing this post back on Saturday I wrote a huge entry detailing the rise of the religious rights. I listed out major names, dates, events, elections, tactics used, etc. I had a stack of research material printed out sitting next to me that I was using for reference. I eventually scrapped that entry, you guys are intelligent enough to do your own research and don't need a boring history lesson from me. There are two points though from that history lesson I think is very important to share though:

In the 1986 Iowa Republican Caucus Pat Robertson handed out a flyer entitled "How to Participate in a Political Party." That flyer said the following:

"Rule the world for God.
Give the impression that you are there to work for the party, not push an ideology.
Hide your strength.
Don't flaunt your Christianity.
Christians need to take leadership positions. Party officers control political parties and so it is very important that mature Christians have a majority of leadership positions whenever possible, God willing."

Fundamentalists were essentially being trained to misrepresent themselves. Hide the fact that they are fundamentalists there to push their conservative Christian agenda as they work to take leadership positions. This was the start of the Religious Right strategy to dominate the party precinct by precinct. They didn't have to control everyone, they didn't even have to be the majority, they just had to get their people into key leadership positions. Here are two quotes from Republicans who were blindsided by the Religious Right takeover:

"What the Christian right spends a lot of time doing," says Marc Wolin, a moderate Republican who ran unsuccessfully for Congress from San Francisco last year, "is going after obscure party posts. They try to control the party apparatus in each county. We have a lot to fear from these people. They want to set up a theocracy in America."

According to Craig Berkman, former chairman of the Republican Party in Oregon:"They have acquired a very detailed and accurate understanding of how political parties are organized. Parties are very susceptible to being taken over by ideologues because lower party offices have no appeal to the vast majority of our citizenry. Many precincts are represented by no one. If you decide all of a sudden because it's your Christian duty to become a precinct representative, you only need a few votes to get elected. Increasingly, they have the key say-so on who will be a delegate at the national convention, and who will write the party platform and nominate the presidential candidate."

This is how they takeover, this is a method they've been working on for the past 25 years. Hide who and what they are and slowly take over key leadership positions precinct by precinct, state by state. It is the religious right who are credited with the republican's victory in 1994. And they succeeded by using these methods.

It is something that Pat Robertson said back in 1990 that really shows the danger they represent. "With the apathy that exists today, a well organized minority can influence the selection of candidates to an astonishing degree."

This is what it is all about. The religious right will admit that they are the minority, yet they work tirelessly to ensure that it is their agenda that dominates our political landscape. Our political system, democracy itself, exists so that the majority will rule. Democracy is nothing but a majority rule system. At least that's how it's supposed to be. Unfortunately it is not. The system has been subverted by a minority group. As the former president of the Alamo City Republican Women's club said when she resigned in 1993. "The so-called Christian activists have finally gained control," she explained in her resignation letter, "and the Grand Old Party is more religious cult than political organization."

They work to subvert our political system to turn this country into a theocracy. But the blame really doesn't lie with them. It lies with the rest of us. Robertson called it when he said that our apathy is what allows his minority to take over. We do not organize, we do not fight, we do not care. Or, even worse, we say we care but then do nothing to help.

Ben is wrong because his statement illustrates this kind of pervasive apathy that is destroying this country. Wait and see, he says. The wheels are already in motion, now we just have to wait to see what the outcome is. Wait and see, the ball is already rolling, let's see what happens.... do nothing in other words but cross your fingers and hope for the best.

Our enemy is not taking a wait and see approach. They are taking action. They are doing everything they can to make sure that their people control party apparatus. They are doing everything they can to make sure that their people go out to vote. In 2000 the Religious Right sent out over 75 million "voter guides" to get conservative Christians out to vote. They mine church directories for their "get out the vote" calling lists. They never, ever, say "let's wait and see." As you've seen, they are not above fighting dirty, of manipulating the system to get what they want. They are winning. They are winning because way too many of us say "let's wait and see what happens!" And then people like Pat Robertson laugh at our apathy. Ben's attitude echoes that of most American's. And that is why the fundamentalists are winning.

So yes, I have an alarmist attitude. I feel it is completely justified and necessary. They have been preparing for over 25 years, getting their people into key positions, taking over party apparatus at local levels, perfecting their methods for recruiting their people to go to the polls. We've been doing nothing. So yes, I am alarmist. We need to wake up! We need to fight! If Ben is right and the wheels are already in motion on the abortion issue and there is nothing more we can do about that then we need to start preparing to strike back, to reverse any adverse decisions that are made, to be prepared for the next battle. But even if he is right and it is too late we wouldn't know that until we try to fight! We cannot give up and take the path of apathy. If we do then they have already won. With the subversion of our system by a small and vocal minority we are truly witnessing the death of America unless we do something about it now.

Moving on, Ben asked for my own personal opinion on abortion. I'll add that here instead of making a separate entry for it because my opinion is very simple. Are you ready? My opinion on abortion is that...

I don't have one.

Yes, you read that correctly. I have no opinion on the subject of abortion itself. Now let me explain why. I am a man. I can never be pregnant. I can never truly understand what that is like. I cannot understand what it feels like for a woman to realize she is pregnant. I cannot understand what it feels like to have an unwanted pregnancy. I will never truly comprehend what it is like to find yourself in that situation and be faced with that choice as to whether to keep it or not. I can rationalize and philosophize all day long and never be any closer to knowing what it is like to be in that situation. No one knows what it is truly like until they have experienced it. As an example, many years ago my ex's best friend got pregnant and decided not to keep it. My ex was very much pro-life, she thought abortion was wrong and evil. She attacked her friend for her choice, told her how wrong she was, told her how she would never do such a thing in the same situation. Then a few years later guess what? My ex is pregnant! Now all of a sudden she finds herself in that situation. And, surprise, she decides to go for the abortion. Her perspective was completely difference once it was her, once she truly understood what it was like.

As someone who can never get pregnant, never be in that situation, and therefore never truly understand what it is like what right do I have to take that choice away from a woman? No right at all. No man, nor any woman who has never been pregnant, has the right to pass judgment on something that cannot and do not understand. For that reason I am pro-choice. I believe in free and unrestricted access to abortion for all who want it because I do not have any right to say otherwise.

So it Begins

2006-02-23T21:27:00.000-05:00

The first state bill to ban abortion, created by our good friends in South Dakota, has been passed by the state house and Senate and now awaits the governor’s signature. And of course he has indicated that he will sign it. The South Dakota legislature is eager for the bill to reach the Supreme Court so they can directly challenge Roe v. Wade.

I feel fucking sick.

What the fuck happened to this country? Onanite had a great blog up the other day, read it here, where he recounts a conversation between Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson two days after 9/11. In it they assert that 9/11 happened because god stopped protecting America because he was angry with us for our immoral ways. They claim that everything happened as a direct result of us "throwing god out of the public square, throwing god out of schools." Onanite then makes the very insightful comment: “There idea of a perfect America resembles a Christian Iran. No dissent, just the Bible and preachers like them to tell every American what to do."

Fundamentalists must be fought and they must be stopped at any and all cost!

If They Want a War...

2006-02-21T18:02:00.000-05:00

We have a problem. That problem is the religious fundamentalists. Now usually I always have an idea on what we can or should do to solve things. I am very opinionated that way. But in this particular case I have no clue what the best way would be to solve this problem. I am coming to the conclusion that my take on religion and religious differences is wrong and now I'm trying to figure out if my way is wrong, what is the right way?

See I, like most decent rational people I would think, have always taken a live and let live approach to religion. I spoke in my previous blog about what a great thing it is that we live in a country that lets everyone believe as they wish. If you want to be a Christian fundamentalist then by all means go for it, believe as you wish just don't try to push your beliefs on me. That the stance I've always taken and I believe most people would share that stance.

The Fundamentalists do not. They exist to spread their belief systems against all reason. They live to attack our way of life; to make us change at all costs. In the news every day we see them launching attack after attack on our education system, on a woman's right to choose, on our popular entertainment. Hell, they'll even attack Harry Potter! The Fundamentalist movement is devoid of all reason and rational thinking. They do not subscribe to any kind of live and let live philosophy. They wage war against our culture, never giving up no matter how many defeats they suffer.

The problem is they get away with it. The rational majority in this country (which includes more moderate religious organizations such as Catholicism) fights hard to defend the line, to preserve our education system, to not let our choices be taken away from us. But that is all we do, we defend. Rational people are always on the defensive, always being subject to one attack after another. No sooner then the courts defeat one fundamentalist measure then the same measure is reintroduced! How many times this year alone have we seen fundamentalists attack our science education? And every time they've been defeated yet a week later they are trying again! They never stop, they never give up. They are fanatics who just fling themselves at our defenses time and time again trying to break through. So far we have managed to hold them off, but for how much longer? To steal a line from Deep Space 9: "You can't defend yourself to victory!" Sooner or later they will find a way to breach our defenses and the next thing you know science education in this country will have been gutted in favor of biblical teachings. Even the teachers conference that I mentioned yesterday was designed to give educators more tools to defend themselves from fundamentalists. Even the group I was with, American Atheists, never tried to promote atheism. We just tried to maintain a separation of church and state. Live and let live just don't push it on me.

Live and let live only works if all sides are playing by those rules. This is the conclusion I have come to. Constantly being on the defensive, having to fight court battle after court battle to preserve our way of life, is no way to live. We cannot defend ourselves to victory! Sooner or later we must take the fight to the fundamentalists! We must put them on the defensive for a change. This is a war people, we are fighting a war for our culture. It's time to start fighting back!

The question is how do we do that? How do we fight a war against a group that is irrational? That we cannot reason with? How can you come up with a non-violent solution to an irrational group? If you have to resort to violence how do you physically fight a group that will just make martyrs of the dead? I have no answers here. Which isn't the norm for me. Usually I will outline the problem as I see it and then give what I feel to be the best solution. Here I can clearly see the problem but am completely clueless as to how to deal with it.

I was wrong. Live and let live doesn't work; we must fight. But how?

They Just Never Stop

2006-02-20T17:28:00.000-05:00

By "they" I am of course referring to the religious right. You would think that failure after failure in having their "Intelligent Design" theory taught in Science class they would learn their lesson and give it up, but no. A national teacher's convention has been called in St. Louis to prepare educators for future challenges to evolution. One of the biggest concerns to come up at the conference is an expansion of the Religious Right's assault on scientific education. Eugenie Scott, executive director for the National Center for Science Education, said that "in the months ahead she expected religious-inspired challenges not only to evolutionary theory but also to theories in astronomy, biology, geology and the historical sciences that went against the view that the cosmos was created mere thousands or tens of thousands of years ago." And James Murray of the University of Central Arkansas, "said neuroscience is also facing a particularly strong challenge because it focuses on human mental activity as the product of biochemical brain activity rather than a reflection of the soul."

This just makes me sick. We live in a country where everyone is entitled to his or her own religious belief. It is one of the things that makes this a great country. I am free to be an atheist, Tina is free to be Wiccan, my parents are free to be Catholic, James Dobson is free to be a nutjob. I think that's great. I have argued many times that it is wrong for the Religious Right to try to push their religion on the rest of the country through legislation. It would be equally wrong for an atheist to try to push his view on the religious. Freedom of religion (which I would argue also implies Freedom FROM religion) is one of the most important freedoms we have.

Yet time and time again the conservative religious attack our education system. As evolution is directly opposed to most fundamentalist views that is where most attacks are concentrated. They argue that they want to be "fair" and "balanced" by teaching "alternate theories" alongside evolution. Yet what they never seem to understand is that their alternate theories are NOT science! They are religion. Science does not make any allowances for the supernatural, science does not make any allowances for theories without any evidence to support it. Scientific theories are based on a detailed and regimented process of inquiry and investigation. Nothing is an actual theory unless there is at least some independently verifiable evidence to back it (an idea that explains something without any evidence to back it up is called a postulate). Creationism and Intelligent Design do not meet any of the criteria of a scientific theory and therefore DO NOT BELONG in a science classroom.

Which is NOT to say that creationism and Intelligent Design are invalid, all I am saying here is that they are not science and do not belong in a science classroom. They are religion, they belong in churches, in religious homes, in religious classes of private schools. Again back to the free country thing. I obviously do not accept Intelligent Design or creationism, but if that's what you believe great! You go right on believing that! What is wrong with keeping science in science classes and religion in religious institutions? If in your religion there is a conflict between science and religion well then just analyze the two viewpoints and decide which one you believe to be the correct one. Teach your children to do the same.

Oh, but wait... teaching your children to analyze the arguments and come to a decision... we can't have that, they might decide to support science! I keep forgetting that analysis, questioning, logic, are not part of the fundamentalist's vocabulary! Stupid me.

I am so scared for this country.

Frack Me!

2006-02-19T10:31:00.000-05:00

I haven't posted since Tuesday! That's not good, I am slipping.

I had an excellent weekend. I finally got Tina to watch Galactica!! She had never been able to watch that show because the handheld camera style they use would give her motion sickness. But lately she had been expressing increased interest in it (listening in to episodes as I watched them, asking me questions about what was going on). So since I've really wanted her to be able to watch this show with me (because it's just so freakin good that everyone should be watching it! It, in and of itself, is worth the price of cable!) I went out and picked up the first season on DVD and some Dramamine! :) The Dramamine did the trick and Tina is now able to sit and watch Galactica!

If you are not watching this show yet, why the hell aren't you? You will not find a more intelligent show on television anywhere, or a show more willing to tackle the big issues. For example in the most recent episode Abortion was the theme. Abortion had always been legal in the colonies, but now the situation has changed. There are only 47,000 people total left. The president herself said it in the beginning of the show: "The only way humanity is going to survive is if we run away and start having babies!" So given that there are so few people left, do you still allow abortion? At what point does the needs of society take precedence over the individual freedoms that people have historically enjoyed?

Those are the kinds of issues that this show tackles and there are never any easy answers. It's not like a network TV show where they will present a major issue but then find a good politically correct solution to it by the end of the hour. The people on Galactica regularly have to make the hard choices and sometimes they fuck it up and have to live with the consequences. You don't find this kind of shit on network TV!

Watch this show!!

That is all!

No Baby For You!

2006-02-14T12:47:00.000-05:00

Hello all. Sorry for the lack of post yesterday, my office had a meeting during our lunch hour so I didn't get a chance to write.

I am amazed at the amount of responses I got to "Slash and Burn." 17 comments in two days! That was awesome. Without a doubt that was my most successful blog entry ever, I doubt I'll ever be able to replicate that kind of success. Thank you to everyone who took the time to comment and comment repeatedly, I really enjoyed reading all the different perspectives. Tina who supports nature conservation because of her love of nature, Andrea who supports nature conservation because of her distrust of politicians and the perceived gamble of betting on new technology to solve our problems, and Ben who takes a middle of the road position between myself and everyone else. Special thanks goes to Ogre who came in at the tail end of the debate with a very insightful comment about the contradiction in how I view humanity. Excellent call Ogre! I hope my reply to that makes sense to you.

So moving right along to the topic of the day. I was struggling trying to find something blogworthy to write about. There's not much going on right now, Cheney shot a hunting partner... which I think way too much is being made out of that. It was a simple hunting accident, could have happened to anybody. That's one thing I always hated, when people make such a huge deal out of normal things just because the person involved is a politician or a celebrity or something. I mean, regardless of their status they are still people who fuck up from time to time. Attack them because you disagree with their policies, leave them the fuck alone when they make normal human mistakes.

With nothing really blogworthy in the news I turned to Andrea's blog for some inspiration and as always her blog came through! Over on Andrea's blog she talks about some people she knows who are in financially horrible shape, no insurance and such, who are actively trying to get pregnant. She talks about what a mistake she feels that is and how she is not planning on throwing out the Orthotricyclen any time soon. Now I'm gonna take that a step farther (don't I always?) and say holding onto the birth control isn't just a good idea; it should be the law.

Having a child is an awesome responsibility. To raise a child properly (properly = a well adjusted individual with no major emotional or physical trauma resulting from their upbringing) required a tremendous investment of time and financial resources, a lot of love, patience, and understand. A certain emotional maturity is required in order to be a successful parent. And if you fail, if you are not prepared for all that parenthood entails you will cause sever damage to that child. If you fail in your responsibility it is the child who will suffer.

It is amazing to me that, given the amount of responsibility involved and the consequences of acting irresponsibly, that anyone who wants to can have a child. In order to be able to drive I had to pass a test showing I can do so responsibly because if I cannot I can harm other people. To get my license to carry a concealed weapon I had to pass a training course to prove that I can be trusted to carry responsibly because, again, if I cannot I can harm other people. Yet to have a child I don't have to prove anything, I can knock up anyone I choose. It makes no sense!

So I propose a new law. Anyone wishing to have a child must apply to do so. They would be subject to extensive psychological and financial examinations to prove that they have the maturity, that they are responsible enough, and they can financially handle the monetary burden of having a child. Now my financial rules would not be overly tough, I would not prevent poor people from having a child. I say it should work like this: if you cannot provide for your child's basic needs (food, clothing, shelter, health care, etc) without government assistance or going into bankruptcy they you are not financially capable of having a child. If you pass the tests then congratulations, you have the capacity to be a responsible parent. If you fail, then no children for you! Get your act together and take the test again in a year! If you have a felony criminal record you are disqualified, if you are a drug or alcohol abuser you are disqualified, if you cannot provide proper health care due to lack of insurance you are disqualified, if you are mentally unstable you are disqualified.

I believe this is extremely important. A bad parent hurts everyone. First and foremost it hurts the child, that in and of itself is unforgivable, but beyond that it hurts every American. When a crack addict mom has their baby taken away from them by the state who pays for that? The taxpayer. When a child turns to a life a crime due to a bad upbringing who pays for that? The victim of the crime. When an impoverished family pumps out five kids who pays for their welfare, their foodstamps, their WIC? We do. When a family without insurance has to declare bankruptcy because of massive medical bills, who pays for that? We do! That shouldn't be, it's not fair to the child and it's not fair to all the mature, responsible, hardworking parents of America.

Parental licensing tests. It sounds harsh, I know, but the benefits to society when all children born are loved and raised by parents who are prepared to do the job properly are immeasurable!

Slash and Burn

2006-02-09T11:01:00.000-05:00

The world is coming to an end.

There is no other explanation.

I find myself, a heavily left-leaning atheist... someone who used to be the Youth Outreach Director for the American Atheist Organization, in complete agreement with a right-wing evangelical Christian! Yup, the world must be coming to an end. On or about the 8th of this month a large group of evangelical Christians banded together to create a document to send to the Bush administration called the "Evangelical Call to Action." Signed by 86 prominent evangelicals this document called on the administration to act urgently on climate change. However the evangelicals are not presenting a unified front on this matter, several of the largest and most prominent evangelicals have refused to sign. People like James Dobson, Richard Land, Chuck Coleson, Franklin Graham, have all refused to sign. Land, Dobson, and Coleson wrote a letter in response to the "Evangelical Call to Action" to illustrate that not all evangelicals agree. According to Land "primacy must be given to human beings and for human betterment. If that means that other parts of nature take a back seat, well, then they take a back seat."

Now I know Tina does not agree with me here, Onanite would not agree with me, hell I doubt any of my readership would agree with me on this but I completely and totally agree with Richard Land on this one. Humans and Human interests must come first at all times, period.

It always drives me crazy when I see human beings putting the interests of a spotted owl or other such useless creatures over their own interests. For example, the proposed drilling in the ANWR. We need to reduce our dependency on foreign oil, the ANWR has some. environmental groups have been up in arms ever since drilling there was proposed several years back. Now they quite correctly point out that it will take many years after drilling begins until we are able to actually extract, ship, and refine oil from the ANWR and that the oil we produce will not reduce our imports by very much. They are quite correct on those points. But as the old adage goes, every little bit helps. Anything we can do to reduce our dependency on foreign oil, even if only by a small amount, is worthwhile. So the environmental groups scream that the ANWR is a wildlife refuge, we'd be taking away part of their land for our drilling! The environmental impact on the poor defenseless animals who make ANWR their home could be devastating! They argue that the small benefit we will see from drilling the ANWR is not enough to justify tearing up the poor defenseless animal's homes.

Umm... yeah it is! First off the area we want to drill is a tiny, tiny fraction of the overall ANWR. It is completely insignificant compared to the size of the place. But you know what, even if we wanted to drill every last inch of the ANWR and drive all the animals there into the sea it would still be worth it! Why? Because, though small, there is a benefit to humans for doing so. And that is all that matters. Think of all the extra land we would recover for our own uses if we destroyed the blasted rainforests, the oil if we tore up the ANWR, the resources we could accumulate if we had free reign to take and exploit and develop what we needed without regard for who's natural habitat it is. Humans come first!

Now, I recognize that most people like animals and plants and such. Believe it or not, so do I. I do not hate animals or trees or nature in general. I enjoy living in an area where I have trees all around. I enjoy being able to go to the zoo and see all sorts of interesting animals. But nature needs to serve us, not the other way around. Animals and forests and such belong in parks and zoos where humans can go and enjoy them, not out in the "wild." Out in the wild nature serves no function except to take up land that could otherwise be used for the benefit of man. Zoos and parks, that's the way to go. That way people who enjoy nature can still be exposed to it while humanity itself has more room to expand and more resources to exploit. Everybody wins!

But if I start slashing rainforests and building condos in the African plains and turning the ANWR into a huge refinery what about the environment? What about it? I do not believe there is a single environmental problem that cannot be overcome by technology, by science, by human beings, not this balance of nature thing! Look at our progress... as our technology improves it naturally becomes more and more efficient. Engines today run a lot cleaner then engines from ten years ago which in turn run cleaner then engines from twenty years ago. Our factories today pollute a hell of a lot less then a factory from the 1950s. We have the technology now to burn coal much more cleanly then we did back when coal was a popular fuel source. We have technology to desalinate water, to scrub CO2 from the air. Our cars these days regularly earn designations such as ULEV (Ultra Low Emission Vehicle) that cars makers from 20 years ago couldn't even dream of. Progress and technology are the key to solving environmental concerns. Imagine how clean our cars and factories and power plants can be twenty years from now! Technology grows more efficient the more it evolves. More efficiency = less waste. It is just the natural progression of technological advancement. I can easily see a time in the not too distant future when we have zero emission cars and zero emission factories, clean sources of power, large scale atmospheric scrubbers that can keep our air clean (which we'll need as in my world there will be no more rainforests to generate oxygen).

Forward is always the answer! Progress, advancement, those are they key! Fanatic environmentalists would have us move backwards, cut back on production, use of cars, exploitation of natural resources. Less of everything in order to protect the natural balance of the environment. Forget that I say! Move forward!! Develop the technology to regulate the environment! Why should we be at the mercy of the environment? The environment should be at the mercy of us!! And most importantly do not, do not, put the interests of nature over the interests of a human being!! Humans first, now and always!!!

Not Politics

2006-02-08T18:23:00.000-05:00

Hmmm... so on a comment in my blog entry from yesterday Tina asked me to not talk about politics today. Instead she asked me to talk about clothes or jewelry or something cool. As I'm always up for making my wife happy here is my non-political clothes and jewelry post for today:

Clothes... I own some. I'm very bad at buying them so I just let Tina pick out what she thinks looks good. I could care less what I wear so I may as well wear something that my wife will like. Washing them sucks. But overall I guess they are pretty useful; I mean you wouldn't want to go to work naked, unless you were a stripper. So they're good to have, unless you're trying to have sex, then they kind of just get in the way. ::shrug::

Jewelry... I really don't get the point of jewelry. What purpose does it serve? It costs a lot of money and doesn't seem to have a use. It just sits there on your hand or neck or whatever being expensive and not actually doing anything but sitting there. Perhaps it should be used as a way to judge the relative wealth of a person at a glance? Of course wearing a lot of jewelry will indeed show off your wealth but it was also make you more attractive to a mugger. So I just don't get the appeal of it. Now wedding rings, those have purpose. They send a message to people that says "Don't bother hitting on me, I'm married!" Of course in this day and age most people ignore that message and will hit on you anyways. Oh, well.

So there is my non-political blog entry. Tune in tomorrow when we return to our regularly scheduled commentary.

America: Land of the Free; Home of the Whiny Weak Pathetic Wimp

2006-02-07T17:47:00.000-05:00

No major news today, violence over the cartoons continues and has escalated some more. Now there are at least four confirmed dead in the multi-country rioting. Iran still wants nukes. America's still worrying about the price of gas. All in all a fairly quiet day. So let's talk about something that has been bothering me for a while about this country.

Two years ago Michael Moore asked "Dude, where's my country?" And that's what I would like to know. All through school when you're growing up you sit in on American History classes and hear all these amazing things. How the first American's fought back against the supposed tyranny of the British. How we marched across the land brining it all under our control. The huge cities we built. The amazing technology we invented. American's were the captain's of industry, we always were the strongest and the best. No one could match us for innovation, no country could touch the quality of our products. Our buildings were always the tallest. We build the atomic bomb, we landed on the moon, we invented the internet. America was a source of pride; a land of people with pioneering spirit; people who were not afraid to get things done. Does anyone remember reading about that America? The kind of place you were proud to be apart of?

I remember reading about it, but I've sure never seen it. Wish I knew where this America of the history books was, I would love to live there. We started falling apart in 60's. Companies became more and more unwilling to take chances with research and development. It was deemed to be too risky and expensive to take chances on projects that didn't have much chance of success. The government wanted a communications system that was distributed so that if the Russians nuked us first enough of our command and control infrastructure would remain so we could fire back and make sure they were just as dead as we were. No company was willing to take the project, too risky, too far fetched. So the government had to step in and create the Advanced Research and Projects Administration, ARPA. ARPA got it done and created Arpanet. Several decades later when it was opened up to commercial entities the Arpanet was renamed Internet. This I think was the turning point I think. For the first time the legendary American entrepreneurial spirit failed. Companies, the empire builders of America, the organizations that for years, under the strong leadership of people like Carnage, made a daily habit of achieving the impossible, got scared and turned away from a project. And that laid the groundwork for all that was to follow.

It was a decade later that the oil crisis hit. The once invincible American auto industry was too slow to react to the changing circumstances. People needed economical cars, Detroit did not provide, and suddenly Detroit found themselves losing market share to imports... a blunder from which they have never recovered. An American industry, one of the key American industries of the time period, could not compete with the Japanese.

Anyone remember the space program? The source of national pride that was NASA? After being shocked by the soviets getting to space before us we responded with a vengeance and in just 15 years we fielded three different spacecraft of increasing technical sophistication from the original Mercury craft, Gemini, and finally Apollo. We set the ambitious goal of landing on the moon within the decade and we achieved it. Then we entered the ill-fated Skylab era followed by the shuttle program which is widely regarded these days as a disaster. Unlike the 60's and early 70s where we developed and flew three different ships we have been using the same design for the past twenty five, nearly thirty years. Every single attempt to replace the shuttle has met with failure. The once ambitious Space Station Freedom project got drastically scaled back and reintroduced as the International Space Station, something only a fraction of the size of the original Freedom design and as of yet incomplete. And even that is in danger, the once proud NASA wants to pretty much forget about a lot of the remaining station components and label the project "core complete" after just a few more pieces. Where Kennedy said that he wanted this nation to land on the moon, something never before attempted, within the decade Bush has said that he wants us to land on the moon, something that has already been accomplished, sometime within the next twenty years. Anyone seeing a pattern here yet?

Remember when we used to pride ourselves on having the biggest buildings? We built like crazy always trying to outdo ourselves. The Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, the Sears Tower, the Twin Towers. Always bigger and better then the last and no sooner was one complete then the next big project was underway. But then we stopped after the twin towers. No more huge towers for us. Before long the title of world's tallest building was taken away by Malaysia. And now in our post 9/11 world we are too scared of tall buildings to even contemplate building a new tall one.... even the twin tower's replacement, the "Freedom" tower, is a joke. Because we are so scared of tall buildings only the lower half of the freedom tower is to be used by humans! The rest is just an overgrown spire!

So where I am going with all this? I'm wondering what happened to this country! We are too scared to lead, too scared to build, too scared to innovate. We allowed the Japanese to take over our auto industry, we let them take over our electronics industries. We allow the growth of the Chinese economy to outpace ours. We allow the United Arab Emirates, China, Japan, Malaysia, to fight for the honor of the worlds tallest building... the one universal symbol of economic strength. While our space program has stagnated for the past thirty years China and Japan our rocketing ahead. Talking heads have been talking for years about America's transition to a service economy. A service economy?! What scares me the most is these talking heads don't comprehend how insulting what they are saying is. America!! The industrial leader of the world for most of our history reduced to a service economy?! We have essentially given up on competing with the rest of the world with our products. "We can't compete with cheap overseas labor!" the American Defeatist Pussies cry! Like hell you can't!! It's called make your product a hundred times better then anything produced by that ass backwards sweatshop loving waste of good land called China! You make a better product and it will sell it's that simple!

But that's not what we do! Take Ford and GM for example, they are having trouble competing with the foreign makes so what do they do? Do they create a revolutionary new product? Do they lead the market on alternate fuel vehicles? No! Their approach is to make themselves smaller, focus on established markets that they know will do well... small economical cars... that's their "new" vision and direction. They leave it to the Japanese to introduce innovative new products. And that is what American's do. Since the 60's we have become increasing more and more scared to take risks, to innovate, to try something bold and new and as a result we have been eclipsed by nearly every other major country!!! We talk a good game about innovating but don't deliver because true innovation requires risk, it requires investment of capital into a venture that might not pan out. And in our world of publicly traded companies that answer to no one but the share holders risk is unacceptable! Moving forward is scary! Leading the way is too dangerous! Going out and getting the job done is unsafe!

Pussies!!! That's what America has become, a land of freakin pussies too scared to take a risk, too scared to try something new. We have become content to let other nations pass us by while still clinging to our delusions of being the leader of the world. We may have the biggest and most guns, but that is pretty much the last area where we are still world leaders.

Wake up America! Wake up and take back your rightful place as the world's innovators, the captain's of industry, the leaders in science and technology. Get your heads out of your asses, stop being afraid of your own shadows, and do it!! Do it now before it's too late, before the day comes when we are all speaking Chinese.

Why Do You Have To Be So Sensitive?

2006-02-06T17:15:00.000-05:00

So the big news of the day are the cartoons. Specifically the Denmark editorials depicting the prophet Muhammad. The reaction to those cartoons has escalated to outright violance with Iranian citizens attacking the Austrian embassy. About 200 protestors smashed all the windows with rocks and then tried hurling Molotov cocktails through the windows. The Iranian government, instead of condemning the protester's violent actions instead responding by cutting all trading ties with Denmark. They have even gone as far as to withdraw their ambassadors, something typically done only as a prelude to war. In other countries there are reports of violent protests from Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, India, and Indonesia. There is no signs of the protests slowing down, if anything they seem to be growing increasingly more violent. Ummm... okay. So we are going to try to kill people, cut off trade, make outrageous demands, all because an editorial cartoonist drew an offensive picture of Muhammad. Pure insanity. Thankfully Americans don't react in such ways... can you imagine if the Right turned violent every time a cartoonist drew an insulting picture of George W? This country would have burned to the ground about two months after he won election the first time! Yup! We American's definitely have more sense then that!

No, not really. While we may not have gotten to the same kind of extreme as Iran, we are still some of the most hyper-sensitive people around. Let's look at some examples, after 9/11 the movie "The Day After Tomorrow" had to be edited. It originally featured some images of buildings collapsing under the stress of the rapid freezing. Those scenes had to be changed because post-9/11 they were deemed "offensive." After Flight 800 crashed off of Long Island several years back the airplane disaster movie "Turbulence" was not released into theaters. Why? Because the subject matter (an airplane in distress) was considered to be too offensive. After Columbine the movie "Small Soldiers" was released to theaters (good movie, by the way). Burger King was running one of their usual promotions where they packed movie toys in with the Kids Meals. Well one of the characters in the movie had a name that was similar to one of the Columbine shooters. So Burger King was pressured into ending that promotion and issuing a recall for all toys of that particular character. And let us not forget the infamous Super Bowl Boob. A half second of Janet Jackson's boob on TV in a scene that went so fast only the best quality TVs watched by people with the sharpest eyes could even see it launched a frenzy of people pressuring the FCC to clamp down on "offensive" content in television. We have a horribly politically correct society where Simon Cowell making a joke about a contestant looking/sounding retarded brings waves of complaints from retarded people's associations around the country for being offensive. It has gotten to the point where an artist, be it a screenwriter, author, TV personality, columnist, etc. cannot do anything without having some group raise hell over how offensive it is and try to have it censored. We have become a society of super-sensitive pansies who are so terrified to say or do anything that might be considered offensive by anyone.

I'm sure there are plenty of people who, if they read by blog, would be highly offended. So let's see, if you are offended by what you read here there is a very simple solution: Don't read my blog!! See, problem solved, it's just that simple. So let's take this very simple idea and apply it. After a plane crashes if you would be offended by watching a movie where a plane crashes don't go see that movie! If after 9/11 the thought of someone showing a collapsing building offends you don't watch it! If you are so super sensitive that the thought of a fictional character bearing a name that resembles that of a murder upsets you don't buy that character's merchandise! If the possibility of being exposed to a half second of naked boobs on network television scares you to death don't watch network television! And if you are offended by the idea of your holy prophet being made fun of in an editorial don't read that editorial!! See how simple this is?

I can certainly understand that certain things will offend people. If you are deeply religious I can understand that having your religion attacked would be offensive to you. If you lost a loved one to a plane crash I can certainly see how you might be offended by watching a movie about a plane crash. So don't watch it, don't read it, and that's it. Not everyone sees things as you do, not everyone is offended by the same thing. What offends one person might be hysterically funny to another. If you don't like something you have the choice to not participate it in, don't take that choice away from someone else by calling for a ban just because you or your group are offended. Free Speech, remember that? Free Speech is hardly free if you have to watch what you say and do for fear of offending someone somewhere.

So that's it for our easily offended society... my advise to you: shut up, act like an adult for a change instead of a child throwing a temper tantrum, and stop ruining things for the rest of us! Tomorrow, barring any major blogworthy news, I will tackle a related topic: America: Land of the Free; Home of the Whiny Weak Pathetic Wimp.

...

2006-02-02T17:21:00.000-05:00

Ugh. I feel so drained today (wow, big surprise there). I really hope Tina's home cleaning idea takes off soon, I hate feeling like this all the time, and every day I just feel more and more tired and worn out. I never get enough sleep. I find myself drifting off while driving to work, from work, while people are talking to me... basically anytime I am not actively doing something I am falling asleep. These 14 hours days are just a killer (actually they are closer to 15 hours these days). I usually don't get home until around 11-11:30. I should go right to be immediately but I like staying up and talking to Tina. We'll usually talk for around an hour or so then I'll get ready for bed. So by the time I get to bed it's around 1:30 and I'm up again in five hours to go do another 15 hour day. I could cut out that hour of taking to Tina and get 6 hours of sleep a night but I really don't want to do that, imagine how much that would suck? I walk through the door: "Hi honey, I love you. Okay, see you tomorrow I'm going to bed!" So the only time I'd see her is on the weekend? That would be horrible... so I stay up at night longer then I should so I can at least have some kind of meaningful interaction with my wife. I get through the week by looking forward to the weekend. Then of course the weekend comes and usually one day of it we have to do errands, we need to buy groceries and wash clothes and do any other errands that didn't get time during the week. So in actuality I get one real day off a week. Now the whole week I spend thinking about all the things I can't wait to do when the weekend comes... spend time with Tina and Allie, play this game, watch that movie, catch up on the TV shows that I've recorded... and is there time in one day to do all the things I've been thinking about all week? Not by a long shot. So Sunday night I will usually get very moody and depressed and try to stay up as long as I can because as soon as I go to sleep the weekend is over, time for another work week. I fuckin hate it. I can only imagine that Tina feels the same way, being stuck at home all week long having to take care of Allie by herself all that time. Now when Tina's business takes off maybe then I can stop! My regular shift is four days a week, ten hours a day with three consecutive days off. How sweet is that?! Only ten hours a day? That's nothing! Just four days with three days off?! I'd have all the free time I need to spend quality time with my family and do all the things I want to do! That would be so awesome!! And Tina's got a really strong work ethic so I know she'll be really successful once it takes off and then finally we'll have a nice balance between work and home life which would be sweet since I really do love my job and I of course love my family. Unfortunately I know it takes a while for a business like that to really get going so for the foreseeable future it's nothing but work work work. But it needs to be done so I need to just shut the fuck up and get to it. I very rarely talk about how I'm feeling in my blogs so forgive this rant. Or not. Whatever.

They Never Fail to Surprise Me

2006-01-31T12:52:00.000-05:00

Here is something very shocking. Fox networks, the most conservative Bush loving Republican ass kissing network around is NOT going to be airing the State of the Union address! Of all the networks only Fox is not going to be showing it. And the reason? They don't want to preempt American Idol. The world must by coming to an end. I mean, I understand American Idol is huge. Several network dramas that had been doing reasonably well, such as Commander in Chief, are being canceled as they have lost pretty much all of their viewers to American Idol. I get it. But the idea that the Republican stronghold on network TV is not airing the State of the Union address... that I just don't get.

Speaking of our good friends on the Right I read something very disturbing today over on MSNBC. It seems that Jerry Falwell's fundamentalist Baptist college, Liberty University, is very hard at work training the next generation of fundamentalist Christian lawyers. Liberty has dramatically increased the size of, and spending on, their debate team. "Falwell and the religious right figure that if they can raise a generation that knows how to argue, they can stem the tide of sin in the country. Seventy-five percent of Liberty's debaters go on to be lawyers with an eye toward transforming society. 'I think I can make an impact in the field of law on abortion and gay rights, to get back to Americans' godly heritage,' says freshman debater Cole Bender." Is anyone scared yet? I sure am! They are actively recruiting and developing a large group of people to go out into society and try to impose their fundamentalist viewpoints. This is disturbing and scary not so much because their side is doing it but because our side is not. And therein lies the problem. Poll after poll shows that the majority of Americans do not support the Religious Right, yet the Right continues to gain ground in every area. They control both houses of congress and the presidency, they now control the Supreme Court. It is their agenda that dominates our political processes. Yet they are not the majority! So how does this happen? It is very simple actually. The Right is extremely good at organizing, at doing things like training a crop of fundamentalist lawyers. Bush was able to win reelection by mobilizing the religious right. They have organization and structure, they have effective and charismatic leadership, they have huge organizations devoted toward pursuing their agenda such as the Christian Coalition, Focus on the Family, The Family Research Council, etc. We have nothing. No strong leaders, no effective organizations, no strategy for rallying our supporters. Nothing. That is why they are winning this war. The Left must wake up! We must organize, we must strike back. We need lobbying groups at least as powerful and well known as theirs. We cannot afford to continue being apathetic. We have let the Right convince us that "liberal" is a dirty word. We have let them spread the message that God=Republican. They are not winning because they have a better message, because they are right. They are winning because we're letting them. We are too scared of being labeled as liberals or being attacked as anti-religion or anti-family that we do nothing. We try hard to tell America why they are wrong but do nothing to show why we are right. And until that changes America will continue its slide into the far right. We are becoming a society that I don't want to raise my child in. Canada is looking better and better all the time.

What Can You Possibly Need All Those People For?

2006-01-27T12:23:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the lack of a post yesterday. Our instructors took away our computer access in class. I was planning on posting during my OT shift but wound up not staying for it. So last night was interesting. I left work early (early = only an hour after my normal shift ends) so I could help Tina with her tire. When I get home the tire is completely flat so I go to put on the donut spare so we can drive to the Wal-Mart supercenter mechanics. I love Super Wal-Mart!! I don't know of any other place where I can go and do my regular shopping, my grocery shopping, get a haircut, get my eyes examined, all while someone is working on my car. To the small mom and pop retailers who complain about Wal-Mart taking over I say once you start doing all the things that Wal-Mart can do in one location then perhaps I will support you. Until that day comes I hope you all fold to make way for more Super Walmarts! But anyway, I finally get the car jacked up (who ever invented the hand cranked mini-jack needs to be shot!), I've got all the nuts off but try as a might I could not get the tire off! It was freakin stuck! So time for plan B. I lowered the car, reattached the nuts, and filled up the old tire hoping the leak was slow enough that we could quickly drive it to Wal-Mart. We get it there finally and it took them two hours to get it changed for us. So that was pretty much my night. On the plus side I did get to spend some time with Tina and Allie, so it was all worth it.

I read a very interesting article yesterday. A study was just released on the affect the internet has on our social life. Conventional wisdom holds that the internet will serve to limit our social life by reducing our physical contact with the outside world. People will choose chatrooms and email over physically visiting someone or calling them on the phone. Turns out this is not true at all. According to the results of the study people who email their closest friends and relatives were 25% more likely to have weekly phone contact with them then people who did not use email, the increase is even greater among those that use cell phones as their primary phone. The study shows that the internet is actually helping people maintain their relationships and that it's an easy and seamless thing to do to transition between internet, phone, and face-to-face communications.

Interesting! But it was the last set of statistics of that survey that really blew my mind. The findings say that internet users tended to have a larger network of close contacts, about 37. While non-users had about 30 on average. And that is where my head exploded! 30 people?! 37?! My god!! How do people manage a social network of that scale?! And why would you even want to?! Looking at myself I have one close person whom I speak to at least once a week, my wife. Though now that I'm blogging again I have more regular contact with Andrea as well so I suppose it would be fair to say 2. People who I consider close but do not speak to regularly I've got about three 3 more (those three are more like once a month, once every two month communication). So I've got a total of 5 people whom I would consider to be close contacts. And that's it! I can't imagine having any more then that. Hell, I can't imagine speaking to the five people I'm counting on a weekly basis, that would drive me insane. Someone tell me how you can maintain close relationships with 30+ people? And why? What possible benefit could all those people bring? And how in the world do you find the time? Seriously, for networks that large you must have to spend so much time maintaining those relationships that you have no time leftover to do your own things. Can you tell that I am totally confused and baffled by this?

Well that's it for me.

Exercise? Umm... No.

2006-01-25T18:44:00.000-05:00

Well, I held off my regular post for the day until now waiting to see if some major blogworthy news story hit. Nope, not really. Let's see, Alito has enough Senate votes to be confirmed, Bush loves his spies, nothing really new. Interesting enough the big news story for the day seems to be what Andrea was talking about over on her blog. West Virginia is planning on using the video game Dance Dance Revolution in schools to fight obesity. I found this story on the front page of every news resource I go to, CNN, MSNBC, Betanews, USAToday, and Gamespot. So apparently this is big news. In her blog Andrea objects to spending that kind of money on something "dumb like a video game." Instead she believes West Virginia should place more emphasis on it's gym class, don't treat it like a joke. "Take the kids out to a track and make them run everyday, they can't refuse to do it!" is her proposed solution. In my comments on her blog I defended the benefits of DDR as a weight loss/exercise tool so I will not repeat those arguments here. I recommend that my readership head on over to her blog to read the original post along with our comments on it (I have now linked to that post on her blog three times in one paragraph, take the hint and go read it if you haven't already!)

Now that everyone has read her post and our comments on it we will move on to the subject of this blog entry: why taking kids out to the track and making them run or throwing them in a weight room will not work. Let's face it, in this country exercise is an inconvenient. Back in the old days exercise was just a normal part of day to day life, you had to walk where you were going, most work involved physical labor in one form or another, if you wanted entertainment you had to go out and physically play a game... with humans no less. We got our exercise needs just by our normal day to day activities. Now days society has progressed to the point where most physical activity is unnecessary. We can drive everywhere, we can order dinner from the comfort of our couch, we can play video games and watch TV, if we want to socialize we can do so from the internet. Our economy is transitioning to a service economy, fewer and fewer jobs require physical activity... most involve sitting in a chair all day and answering phones. We no longer get our required exercise from normal day to day activities. So now instead of exercise being a fully integrated part of the things we would normally do it is something we have to deliberately seek out. We have to make the time and spend the money to join a gym, we need to make the conscious decision to turn off the TV and go outside. Exercise is an inconvenience, something that needs to be scheduled and planned.

When I was part of a gym I did not mind the workout portion of it at all, what I minded was the inconvenience of having to physically drive the 20 minutes there and another 20 back. I minded having to schedule my workout around everything else I needed to do that day. I minded having to wait to use the equipment I wanted to use. Working out at a gym is simply a hassle. Working out at home isn't much better, first you shell out a lot of money on a piece of workout equipment for your house. That's the easy part. Now you have to consistently use it. Unless you are a fitness buff it is not fun, working out is work. So it doesn't take long for us to become bored with it and lose our motivation. Next thing you know that $500 treadmill that you bought is now a glorified clothes hanger. Working out is a chore, it is boring, it is work, and it is inconvenient. That is the attitude of myself and the majority of Americans (wow, for once I actually share the majority opinion on something... the world must be about to end!). Unless you are an extremely self-disciplined person, or someone who simply enjoys working out, it is extremely hard to exercise on anything resembling a consistent basis. The same thing applies to children. You can throw a kid on a track and tell him that he must run or he fails the class and yes he will run... barely. That kid will do the bare minimum needed to avoid failing the class. He will not push himself, he will not try hard, he will not set goals for himself to go a little further or a little faster each day. It's a waste of time. A school can only push a kid so far before they experience backlash from the parents when the kid comes home crying that her gym teacher yelled at her for not running hard enough.

So how do you get a person like me and most other Americans and American children to exercise regularly? You have to make it fun. You have to make it something that we will look forward to doing and not see as work or as an inconvenience. Dance Dance Revolution is a great way to do that. Now I am a guy who considers a good workout to be getting up off the couch to change my TV from the Playstation to the Xbox, yet I would play DDR for hours. I used to look forward to it. I remember so many days when we would play so long that by the end we would be dripping with sweat and not be able to feel our legs we were so tired. And why? Because it was so much fun you don't even realize you're actually working! I never worked half as hard at the gym as I did at home with DDR. Because the gym was a chore while DDR was entertainment.

So I strongly believe that games like DDR are the perfect solution to all the American's like me who need a good workout but do not respond well to traditional methods (like most kids). If you want us to exercise make it something that we can enjoy; don't make it work!

Surprise! They Have No Brains!

2006-01-24T20:17:00.000-05:00

Why is it that the best news always seems to come out after I've already done my entry for the day? In this particular case one of the most interesting articles I've ever read was just posted about an hour ago to MSNBC. Back in 2004 during the presidential elections researchers started a project to monitor how politician's minds worked. Researchers asked party members from both sides to evaluate information that was damaging to their particular party. The subjects brains where then monitored as they went over the information. On both sides of the aisle the results were the same, the section of the brain that governs reasoning never activated. From the article: "The test subjects on both sides of the political aisle reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted." And then, when the suppressed and ignored the damaging data the section of the brain that regulates pleasure activated which is the same way a junkie's brain reacts when they get a fix. So the end result here is that politicians on both sides ignore factual information that may support the other side, leap to unreasonable biased conclusions, and then get high off of doing so!

Here's the best quote of the article: "The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making." I love it! I've been saying for years that democracy does not work and now finally there is scientific research supporting that idea. Though I support the democrats, mostly because I can't tolerate the social conservatism of the republicans, the fact of the matter is neither side can be trusted to do what is best for this country. The way our political system is set up only those with tremendous money and influence can be elected. Campaigns cost massive amounts of money to finance, money that is graciously donated by people with their own agenda to push. The elected politician must therefore be completely closed minded to any other viewpoints aside from those of the people who bought and paid for him. If your election was thanks to money donated by the oil lobby you would be incapable of doing anything but supporting the oil industry. They own you. All the campaign finance reform in the world; all the laws regarding soft vs. hard money, they don't mean a damn. The bottom line is our politicians on both sides of the aisle are bought and paid for and therefore completely loyal to their masters.

So what do we do? The system that we have does not and cannot work. Meaningful compromise and debate is impossible if there is a "total lack of reason in political decision-making" by the bought men. If a system does not work then it must be tore down and a new system installed in its place. If the big problem is that our politicians are purchased by the special interests then a law barring private citizens/groups/corporations from contributing to politicians is in order. Our leaders will not be slaves to the special interests if they do not owe them anything, therefore I say we make government finance campaigns 100% with each candidate receiving equal funds. No personal money may be used for your campaign, just the government funding. That way the playing field is leveled. Elections will no longer be decided by who can raise the most money. No one will owe anything to special interests. Perhaps this way we can trust our elected leaders to actually represent the interests of the people who elected them.

Now if that doesn't work we need to get more extreme. But as my break is nearly over that is a subject for another day.

Back at the Beginning

2006-01-24T11:34:00.000-05:00

So yesterday I was talking about this great opportunity that had been presented to Tina. Not long after I had written that I uncovered info (thanks to the wonders of Google) that the company involved, Primerica, was nothing more then a scam. It is a Multi-Level-Marketing company similar to Amway except for investment products. In order to be successful you need to hunt down and convince people to work for you. Not a bad deal if you don't mind the fact that your friends and family now all hate you because you keep trying to recruit them. I felt horrible once I found all this out because Tina had been so excited about the opportunity. All day long I was dreading telling her what I had learned; I hate the thought of having to tell her anything that I know is going to upset her. So I finally get home, having been preoccupied thinking about this all day, only to find out she already knew. One of her other friends had told her. So I was stressing all day about nothing. Now unfortunately we are back to square one as far as job prospects go but at least we found out about Primerica before Tina got involved with them. You know, Tina is a phenomenal writer... I wish I knew a way for us to turn that into income.

I've done some housekeeping as far as my blog is concerned. I figured since it had been over a year since I posted I should probably just start fresh. So I went back and got rid of almost all my old posts from over a year ago. I kept a few of my more serious political pieces but the rest is gone.

So on purely partisan lines the Judiciary Committee has nominated Alito with all Republicans voting "yes" and all democrats voting "no." No big surprise there. Two more states are following Ohio's lead. Michigan is attempting to pass an abortion ban within their state as is Indiana. Interested how it is all states around here, I wonder if Kentucky will follow along. The more states attempt to pass a known unconstitutional law the better chance there is of one of them getting through and being challenged in the supreme court. This is very upsetting. I would say we should run away to nice Liberal Canada but that country has just fallen into the hands of the Conservatives as well. Is there no place left in the world where reason and rational thought still rule?

Nothing Doing

2006-01-23T12:39:00.000-05:00

So Tina had her interview on Saturday; it turned out quite well. It turned out to be a well known and respectable firm in the financial sector (interesting, Tina would be in the same field as I am). It's a full commission sales job though, however you are able to work from home! That's huge, no babysitting/daycare costs to contend with. And I think Tina would be a phenomenal salesperson, especially if she believes in what she's selling. She seemed to be quite excited about the product she'd be pitching (financial consultations primarily) and sees it as a great way to help people. So I think she stands an excellent chance of being highly successful. We'll see.

This week's Battlestar Galactica episode was amazing (as usual). I just can't say enough good things about this show. I've never watched television as captivating as this.

So with Tina doing at home sales we are going to have to invest in a land line for the house as it would suck to no end if Tina is on her cell phone trying to close a big deal and the cell phone drops. I was thinking of going VoIP instead of a conventional land line. Anyone have any experience with VoIP who can share their thoughts on it?

Still trying to get those missing episodes of Lost! I finally got a good working version of episode 4, but I'm still working on episode 3.

Nothing going on in the world of politics so I'll leave it at that.

Privacy Now!!!

2006-01-20T17:52:00.000-05:00

And I thought it was going to be a nice simple post day, then I started reading about the issue that Google is having with our friends in the DOJ. For those who haven't read this story yet I'll give you the brief recap. The National Association of Old Angry White Men Who Want to Run Your Life (hereafter called the OAWM) are at it again. The supreme court had previously declared unconstitutional some online pornography laws the Bush administration had passed. These laws were designed to "protect" children from online pornography The OAWM, seeing the shifting makeup of the court are about to make a push to reinstate those laws. See the OAWM feel that internet filters do not do a good enough job of keeping children away from porn and to prove their case they want search records from all the major search engines to show exactly how many times links to porn would appear in search results. AOL and MSN quickly complied with the DOJ and handed over their search records. Google refused, saying it was committed to protecting the privacy of its users. So now we have this big showdown brewing over your right to privacy. Hmmm.... that brief recap wasn't all that brief was it?

Now let me go on record saying that I hate the privacy fanatics. Their position is incomprehensible to me and completely flies in the face of everything that a modern, connected, and efficient society stands for. And though I disagree with the OAWM's purpose in seeking this data from Google (children do not need the government to protect them from "objectionable" content, they need their parents) I do agree with the government's right to request that data. So Google, shut up, get off your moral high horse, and comply with the orders you were given!
For years Americans have grown increasingly obsessed with this idea of privacy. We panic at the thought of a National ID Card, of random government wiretaps, of easy access to our "personal" information. And for the life of me I cannot comprehend why. We are so scared at the thought of "Big Brother" that we ignore the massive benefits that a more connected; less privacy obsessed society would bring. I say we have nothing to fear from "Big Brother."

I want a National ID card! More then that, I want a National ID card that performs a lot more functions then simple ID. I want all my medical info, employment info, and financial info coded on the card. Let me tell you what I hate, shortly after I moved here I went to a doctor. When I met this doctor I of course explained my issue. But more then that I had to fill him in on my previous medical history, try my best to remember exactly what drugs I had been prescribed in the past, when it was, etc. I didn't remember all the details. Now why did I need to deal with that? When Tina first went to her OB/GYN after she got pregnant, both me and her got asked for our complete medical history. In giving my history I omitted the fact that I had Epstein Barr and that omission nearly caused a complication later on. What did that have to happen? In both these cases why didn't the doctor just know our complete histories? I'll tell you why, because our medical records are not universal; they are not easily accessible by other doctors. When I go to a new doctor he should be able to just scan my National ID Card (hereafter NID) and have complete access to all my information. That way the doctor I went to when I moved would know exactly how and when I had been treated in the past, be able to see my old prescription records, doctor's notes, etc. instead of having to rely on my own often faulty memory. Tina's OB/GYN would have known immediately that I had had Epstein Barr and it would not have been such a big shock later on. If I'm traveling out of state and get into a car accident I want the EMT's who respond to know if I'm allergic to the drug they were about to inject me with! Doctor's need information, they need all the facts, in order to perform their job to the best of their abilities. Under ordinary circumstances yes, you can just give the relevant info to the doctor yourself, but unless you keep detailed records your recollection will never be as good as the actual official data from your previous doctor and suppose you are in a condition where you cannot provide the data? You had an accident and are unconscious or otherwise incoherent? I don't want to die because a doctor didn't have immediate and complete access to the info that could have been used to save me. If coded on an NID a doctor or paramedic can have all the info in a matter of seconds. That is a huge, huge benefit!

The same can be said for our financials or employment data, think of when you apply for a mortgage, all the supporting documentation you need to produce. Forget all that! Scan the NID and the bank has all the information it could possibly need to approve and process your loan on the spot! Right now lenders and other institutions rely on credit reports which does not give a complete picture of one's financial situation. Having all your data on your NID would give your lender all the data needed to make a better, more informed, decision on your true creditworthiness. Benefit to the lenders: sounder lending decisions will reduce the risk of extending credit. Benefit to the consumer: A fairer more balanced judgment of their financial situation without the hassle of producing stacks of financial information. For employers job applicants lying on their resumes and applications is a serious problem. Most large employers spend massive amounts of money on outside vendors to provide background checks for applications simply because application provided information cannot be trusted. That problem is solved if all your previous employment, educational, and criminal data in on your NID! For the applicant your entire application process can now be completed in half a second with a swipe of your card and employers can save tons of money on costly and time consuming background checks. Everyone wins when data is easily available!!

"But what about the potential for misuse of data?!?!" the reactionary privacy freak screams. What of it? Yes of course safeguards must be build into the system. A company card reader should have access to your employment, education, and criminal data but not your medical data. A doctor's office should have access to your medical data but not anything else. The card itself must be heavily encrypted and physically protected. Perhaps it has a built in biometric reader so it will only work when being held by you and that biometric reader is powered by the card reader itself so your NID will only transfer data if it is both physically in your hand and inserted into a reader slot. Perhaps it shouldn't even be a card, a card can be stolen and perhaps hacked. Perhaps it should be an implanted chip that is only powered and transmitting data when you are in physical contact with a reader. I don't know. The point is we can think of ways to keep your data secure but still easily available to the people who need and could benefit from it. If a company hacks your NID to access your medical information then that company has broken the law and should be severely punished. A good combination of physical and legal safeguards are certainly necessary; I will not dispute that for a second. But the privacy freak would say that because of the potential for misuse an NID like mine should not be attempted. They fear progress, they fear technology. Instead of letting society advance and move forward the privacy freak prefers to stick their head in the sand and hide. I say yes there are issues; yes there are legitimate concerns, but the potential benefits make it well worth pursing. What does privacy truly matter anyway?

Which leads into the final point. The privacy freak is terrified by the idea of government wiretaps and surveillance cameras in public and the DOJ requesting search data. Umm... why? If you are a law abiding citizen then you have nothing to hide. I can see your concern if we lived in a repressive country like China where even the mention of Democracy is illegal, but we live in a country where I am free to jump on a blog and talk about how I dislike the Bush administration and the right and anything else I choose. I am not breaking any laws in doing so (thank you 1st amendment) so what does it matter if the government should monitor me? If you are breaking laws then you have everything to fear from government monitoring, if you are planning to lie on a job application then you have everything to fear from your data being on an NID, if you are planning to, or already have, done anything underhanded or illegal then to you the easy sharing of information and surveillance is a horrible thing. But to the vast majority of us honest law abiding Americans the sharing of data only brings benefits.

A connected society is more efficient, more orderly. The benefits of easy access to data are extraordinary, and while there are valid concerns about the misuse of said data such concerns can be addressed and remedied. Sticking your head in the sand and refusing to do what will only benefit society is not the answer. Addressing the concerns and moving forward... progress... that's the answer and always will be.

Let's Get Lost

2006-01-20T12:40:00.000-05:00

Well nothing of much interest is going on today in the world of politics, so let's talk about what I originally going to talk about yesterday... TV!!!

Tina and I got into Lost a few months ago when we bought the first season on DVD on a whim. We finished the DVD set in two weeks. Which was amazing as Tina is usually very slow going through DVD sets, only watching one or two episodes at a time over the course of a few weeks whereas I will watch and entire season in one sitting if at all possible. Now we have a problem though, we finished the first season but the second season DVD set wouldn't be out until toward the end of the year!! So what do we do? I've been downloading all the episodes and burning them on DVD which is awesome 'cause the episodes I download are full DVD quality so it looks and sounds perfect on our TV. I'm fully caught up with all the episodes except for episodes 3 and 4. So I've got the entire second season so far sitting on DVD waiting to be watched but we can't do anything about it until I can finally find episodes 3 and 4! Anyone know a good site where I can get those two please let me know! In the mean time I've been satisfying myself by reading the recaps on Television Without Pity. If you've never been to that site please go, read a few recaps, they are awesome! But reading recaps isn't the same as actually watching the episodes on your television. Argh the frustration!!!!! I could buy the episodes I'm missing from iTunes but the copy protection on those files prevents them from being burned as DVD video. Anyone know how to strip the DRM from iTunes video files?

In other TV news, Battlestar Galactica has finally started up with their new episodes. For anyone who doesn't watch it, what the hell is wrong with you?! It is without a doubt the best show on television. It is so well written and well executed that even when I know everything that is going to happen from reading spoilers on TWoP's message board I still find myself sitting on the edge of my seat staring at the TV with my jaw dropped. Here's a perfect quote from TWoP's recapper talking about last week's episode: "Okay, seriously, every week. How do they do this? If you continually reset the bar for yourself...I don't know what happens. I guess there's always room for improvement, but I don't understand how this show keeps getting better and better. I don't know...it's just nice. It's nice to love something that is very, very excellent." Watch this show!!!!!!!!

I think that's about all I've got for today. Nice and simple.

The Mother of All Battles Has Begun

2006-01-19T10:06:00.000-05:00

So my wife has joined the world of real bloggers!

You know, I was planning to talk today about Lost, a little about Battlestar Galactica, and then make fun of my wife a little for her fascination with social boards that pretend to be blogs like mySpace. But then I go to lunch and as I'm sitting there eating I notice a copy of the Cincinnati Enquirer in front of me. Scanning through the headlines I came across one of the most, if not the most, disturbing thing that I have ever read. It seems the great state of Ohio is already planning on taking advantage of our new more conservative high court with the introduction of House Bill 228.

It's kind of funny that Andrea just posted a response to my previous blog saying how she doesn't see any challenges to Roe v Wade coming up and yet here it is. HB 228 would ban all abortion in Ohio except in such cases where the mother's life is in danger. If passed it would be illegal to have an abortion in Ohio and it would also be illegal for an Ohio resident to cross into another state for the purpose of having an abortion. But wait a second! Roe v Wade clearly says that abortion is legal in all 50 states! Surely a state law that bans it would be illegal! Why yes they do and that is exactly the point! Ohio is deliberately trying to pass a known unconstitutional law in order to trigger a review by the Supreme Court in hopes that the new conservative slant to the court will overturn Roe v Wade as a result!!!! This is pure insanity! I can completely understand the point of view of people opposed to abortion, but if you think it is wrong then simply do not have one should you accidentally get pregnant! That's it, that's the solution. If you don't believe in it then don't do it, but don't impose your view of right and wrong on everyone else.

There are so many unwanted children in this world already, so many children who are trapped in the system bouncing from foster home to foster home, so many stories of mothers abandoning their children in dumpsters and such. Are we sure we want to add even more unwanted children to the system?

The National Association of Old Angry White Men Who Want to Run Your Life don't care about that. In their single minded obsession with preserving all life they never stop to consider the quality of said life, they never stop to consider what the individual wants. What about the 16 year old girl, sexually active and very responsible about it. Chooses her partners carefully and always uses protection. Then one day her birth control fails and she winds up pregnant. To the conservative what she wants doesn't matter, she should be forced to carry and deliver that baby, she should not have a choice, she should not have the right to say "This is not what I want. I was careful and I was responsible. I have thought this through and decided that this is not what I want." The Old Angry White Men say she should not be able to make that choice because they know better what is right and wrong and what they say is right and wrong is right and wrong for everyone.

It is very easy to look at a situation and say "This is wrong, they shouldn't be allowed to do that." until the time comes when you are in that situation. I remember Natalia, when a friend of hers got pregnant and decided to have an abortion Natalia freaked out saying how wrong it was, abortion is murder, she should have been forced to have the child and either raise it or give it away, etc. She was so certain that it was wrong, she could not understand how her friend could even consider having that abortion.... and then Natalia got pregnant and decided to have an abortion herself. And suddenly she understood how and why her friend made the decision she did. It is very easy to look down on a person and their actions as being wrong until the day comes when you find yourself in the same situation. Then suddenly right and wrong is not so black and white.

I am so angry and disgusted at the direction this country is heading. Hopefully Andrea is right and we see a reversal in 2008, I'm just afraid that by the time reason and rationality reclaim our government the damage will already have been done.

Support the National Association of Old Angry White Men Who Want to Run Your Life!

2006-01-18T09:44:00.000-05:00

Tina has a job interview on Saturday! Yay!! Some kind of trainer's position, we don't know much about it yet but it's exciting nonetheless. Hopefully that will be a good opportunity for her.

So today we heard from one of my favorite groups, the Family Research Council. Yesterday the Supreme Court ruled that Congress did not have the power to stop Oregon doctors from performing physician assisted suicide. An important thing to notice about this ruling, which goes back to what I was talking about yesterday, was that it was 6-3 with Roberts being on the minority opinion. If Alito had been on the court for this case it would have been 5-4... it appears that the usually conservative leaning Kennedy has become a very important swing vote. Now the problem with Kennedy was that in his written opinion he showed that the law as it exists now does not give the federal government power to stop the Oregon doctors but he was very clear in showing that congress can, at any time, introduce new legislation giving them that power: "Even though regulation of health and safety is ‘primarily, and historically, a matter of local concern,’…there is no question that the Federal Government can set uniform national standards in these areas." So enter the Family Research Council (why is that that these ultra conservative let's legislate everyone's person lives groups always have such nice friendly sounding names? Family Research Council, Focus on the Family... why can't we get a conservative group with a more appropriate name? Like the National Association of Old Angry White Men Who Want to Run Your Life? I think that would be a perfect name for one of these conservative groups!) Anyways, the Family Research Council along with other conservative interest groups immediately issued demands for legislation to be introduced banning assisted suicide at the Federal Level. So here is something interesting about our good friends in the Republican Party, they go on and on about state rights, leave things to the states, smaller Federal Government, etc. What they are really saying, however, is that they support leaving issues up to individual states to decided so long as the states agree with them, otherwise Federal intervention is clearly required.

I love our political system!

The Conservatives are Coming!

2006-01-17T09:50:00.000-05:00

Okay guys, yes I know it's been over a year. I appear to have access to blogger from my new job so for as long as it lasts I will attempt to keep this blog updated. I will give you all the very brief history of me for this past year, I got married in March of 05 to Tina, the girl that I talked about in previous entries. On October 1stwe had our first kid, a beautiful baby girl named Allisondra. For more info about my wife and daughter please see her blog at spaces.msn.com/members/queenelizabeth79. I also changed jobs about two days after my daughter was born (great timing there). And that about covers me. So moving right along to more important things.

Can someone tell me what the deal is with the advertisements in my blog's comments? Now I understand that advertisers need to find new ways to reach people, I get that and am not totally opposed to seeing advertisements, but at least let's try to make it relevant. I've gotten in my blog comments over the past year about six comments all advertisements for various romance/soft-core porn writing. Umm... and what does that have to do with the things I've talked about on my blog? If you want to advertise to me that's fine, but at least try targeting it to the things I've discussed. I don't recall every discussing my desire to become a romance novelist in my blog before.

So it appears likely that Alito will be confirmed next week. As much as I love Kentucky I think it's time to look into moving elsewhere, like Canada... or perhaps Iran. Anything's got to be better then a high court with Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito! We are about to enter a period of horrible social conservatism by our high court where everyone's right to live as they please will be under constant attack. A good conservative isn't happy unless they are regulating how other people can live their lives. So Roe is probably going to go; this country will have to prepare itself for an influx of system burdening unwanted children... which actually kind of helps me make my case for a parental test before you get have children. Perhaps it wouldn't be so bad, we have three liberal judges and four conservative judges. Out of those four I think Roberts is the most moderate, perhaps he will become more of a swing vote thus giving the high court some balance. But I doubt that. I predict bad things coming for anyone with a lifestyle or belief system outside of the religious right. Since the mid 90's this country has become more and more conservative, the religious right has gained more and more power. It is a highly disturbing trend. The question is what can we do about it? It is here that I have no ideas.

Speaking of scary things, Mayor Nagin, the mayor of the ruins of New Orleans, today declared that god destroyed N.O. because he is mad at America. ""Surely God is mad at America. He sent us hurricane after hurricane after hurricane, and it’s destroyed and put stress on this country." Now there is the kind of person who I want leading one of our major cities (or a destroyed major city). Can we get leaders who are rational and logical? Is that really too much to ask?
I guess it is.

You've Got More Waffles Then a House of Pancakes

2004-08-30T12:58:00.000-04:00

Okay, on to the topic of the day.... Flip-Flops! John Kerry's perceived flip-flops on various issues have become the focus of the republican’s campaign against him. From him reversing his position on the war on Iraq by first voting for the war and then voting against additional funding for it, to him supporting Clinton's proposed gas tax in the early 90s and then saying his is opposed to additional taxes on the middle-class now, and him originally supporting the nuclear dump at Yucca Mountain in Nevada in the late 90s and then now saying he will not support the dump, the republicans have mercilessly hammered away at every perceived flip-flop that Kerry has made in his career.

I've always had a problem with the issue of flip-flopping. My issue is that I don't see it as an issue. It seems like the idea in politics is if you support a policy you must always support that policy no matter what. If twenty years down the road you change your position for whatever reason, you're a flip-flopper!

I don't buy it. Things change, situations change, people change, that's life. Let's take a look at the tax flip-flop that the republican’s have been talking about lately. In the early 90's during Clinton's first term he proposed a $0.50 per gallon tax on gas. Kerry supported this proposal. Fast forward ten years to 2004 where Kerry has repeatedly said that he will not raise taxes on the middle class. What's going on here? In the early 90s he supported a new tax on the middle class and now he doesn't. He's a flip-flopper!!! Yes, this is the republican’s argument; this is what they're saying in new ads. So the idea that is being presented is that if Kerry supported a tax increase in the early 90s he should support those same tax increases today, anything else shows inconsistency and is therefore bad. If you stop to think about what is really being said, it’s ridiculous. The economic situation in the early 90s was completely different from the economic situation now. Is there anything wrong with saying in the early 90s the economic situation was such that a gas tax made sense, so I supported it then? However now in 2004 the economic situation is such that a gas tax is a horrible idea so I will not support it. Is that a flip-flop? I suppose it is as a flip-flop is defined simply as changing one's position on an issue. But is it wrong? Is it something that indicates that Kerry is unfit to be president? I don't think so.

Or how about this one? I was in Vegas last week and there the republicans are running constantly a commercial attacking Kerry for his position on the Yucca mountain nuclear waste dump. When the proposal was first introduced Kerry was one of its supporters. Shortly after the proposal was approved (in a near unanimous vote I would add) the residents of Nevada were in an uproar, they did not want the facility to be built in their state. So Kerry withdrew his support for the bill. There he goes flip-flopping again! So he originally supports a bill but then withdraws support when he sees that the general public does not approve. But isn't that what a good politician is supposed to do? Aren't they supposed to represent us and our interests? So if a politician supports a bill but then realizes that the public does not support it, shouldn't that politician follow what the public wants? To me this shows that Kerry is willing to listen to the people he is supposed to represent instead of following his own agenda, public be damned, like Bush does.

And then we have the war issue. One of the republican's early attacks on Kerry was that he originally voted for the war but then voted against additional funding for it later on. I fail to see the problem here. He supported the war based on the information that was presented at the time. You know, Saddam has weapons of mass destruction; he's got ties to Al-Quada, etc, etc, etc. Based on that information I supported the war too. Hell, most of American supported the war because the war was justified based on the information that was presented. Now when all that info turned out to be bullshit I no longer supported the war, the public in general no longer supported the war and Kerry no longer supported the war. Is it a surprise that he voted against providing Bush with additional funding to fight what turned out to be nothing more then his own personal crusade? Can you call that a flip-flop? Certainly. Is there something surprising or wrong about it? Definitely not.

People change their positions all the time. When new information comes up, when the situation changes, etc. If you, as a regular person, were to stick to your old position even when new information is presented that shows your position to be wrong, or when the situation has changed so that your position is no longer workable, you would be considered stubborn and foolish. Yet these seem to be the personality traits that politicians look for in one another, someone who will stick to their original positions now matter what. No wonder nothing ever changes in this country, our leaders are too afraid to change their positions in favor of something new for fear of being labeled a flip-flopper!

I say I don't want a politician who refuses to change their positions, give me a flip-flopper!

The Price of Freedom is.... Idiots in the White House

2004-07-08T21:15:00.000-04:00

Brandon and I were talking today about the presidential election, as we usually do, and he mentioned to me that Edwards had made a comment joking around about how the democrats had better hair then the republicans (so true, just look a Cheney!). He was complaining how issues like looks affect presidential campaigns. That brought to mind my belief that our entire electoral system needs to be changed.

Right now people vote for president for the most trivial of reasons. I've seen people vote for Clinton because he was cute, people who voted for Bush because Gore was boring, people who voted for a candidate on the basis of one policy initiative without any comprehension of how they would accomplish this initiative or what the other candidate had to say on the same issue.

This is just wrong. The President of the United States is the single most important job in the country and electing that president is one of our greatest responsibilities. This is the man (or woman one day, hopefully) that has to represent the American people and their interests to foreign governments, ally and enemy alike. This is the man who has at his command the most devastating and lethal armed force the world has ever seen. This is the man who, with the approval of just one other person, can press the big red button and end the world. The job is too big and carries to much responsibility for us to cast our vote for trivial reasons or without a complete understanding of the issues at hand.

My proposal is simple. Voting should be a privilege, not a right. We must instate poll tests immediately! If someone wants to vote they must first pass a test designed to test their knowledge on the candidates, both candidates, and the issues. Only if the applicant can demonstrate that they truly understand the issues and the platforms should they be allowed to vote. I don't care about anything else other then knowledge of the issues. Anyone over the age of 18 should be able to take the test regardless of race, gender, political belief, religious belief, sexual orientation, etc. If you can't read you should be able to take the test verbally. If you can't speak English you should be able to take the test in the foreign language of your choice. I do not want to appear discriminatory in any way shape or form. Voting is a privilege open to all American citizens if and only if you know enough to be able to vote responsibly.

Seriously though, the idea that voting is open to all people regardless is crazy! We make people take qualifying tests for a driver’s license. Why? Because an unqualified driver can hurt or kill a lot of people. Well, by the same token an unqualified voter can elect someone that will get our troops killed for no good reason or destroy the economy. But for some reason we’ll let anybody vote but test drivers. I don’t get it.

It's sad to say, but the average American simply cannot be trusted with responsibility. Most people would rather hear about the latest Hollywood sex scandal then what's going on in the world. And these are the people who right now are being trusted to choose our president.

Scary!

Dark Age Dawning

2004-07-06T20:07:00.000-04:00

Hello everyone! Welcome to the return of The Misanthrope's Sanctuary's political and social commentary! Today we're going to discuss every Texas president named Bush's favorite subject: oil. Andrea once said that she hopes one day to see a world where people don't kill each other over oil. Unfortunately, the way I see it the oil related killing has barely gotten started. I'm talking about the Third World War. I am predicting World War III will kick off sometime around 2050. Here's why:

We are running out of oil.

An alarmist statement to be sure, but there is evidence to support my position. We are heading for what L B Magoon calls "The Big Rollover." Put simply the Big Rollover is when demand starts to outstrip supply; production beings to fall off as existing wells run dry and the discovery of new wells doesn't happen fast enough to replace the ones we lose. The Big Rollover will be preceded by regional rollovers, some of which have already happened. The US and Canadian rollover took place in 1970. That is when our production peaked. Demand outstripped supply leading to the infamous gas lines of 1973 (which I wasn't alive to see, but my parents talk about frequently). At that point we began to rely more heavily on foreign sources of oil, particular Middle Eastern oil. US production has been slowly dropping ever since the peak in 1970 as fewer new wells are opened and existing ones dry up. The former Soviet Union experienced its rollover around 1985; its production has been steadily dropping since then. The UK rolled over around 1999. So now Russia, along with the US, is almost totally dependant on foreign oil. The US imports 58% of its oil, mostly from the Middle East and uses a whopping 26% of the total world oil supply.

So all the major oil producing countries with the exception of the Middle East has had their production peak and being to decline. What does that translate as? Total dependency on the Middle East! Is it any wonder then that our government goes out of its way to protect our oil interests in that region? The Middle East has not rolled over yet, but imagine what happens when it does? Already the signs are there. Most distressingly is the number of new wells opened. In the past five years we consumed 27 million barrels of oil a year, but the oil industry only discovered 3 million barrels a year in new fields. We are exhausting existing fields quicker then we're finding new ones at a rate of 9 to 1! And the volume of new oil discovered has been decreasing year by year!

So when is the Big Rollover coming? Many experts predict that the world production will peak and being to drop sometime between now and 2010 with complete depletion of the world's oil supply (except for whatever we and other countries have been stockpiling in strategic reserves) by the 2050s. We will run out of oil within our lifetimes! Now, in the interest of fairness and balance I will say that these are just projections that may not come to pass. It is entirely possible that tomorrow we will discover a new field with enough oil to last for the next five centuries. It's possible that ten years from now we will develop a technology to make 30 billion barrels of oil a year synthetically. It's possible, certainly. But can we afford to take that risk?

Let's consider what would happen in the world once we realize that the oil is running out. Consider that the economies of all the major Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran are nearly 100% based on oil production. All of a sudden these countries will be staring into the face of complete and total economic destruction. And what will a desperate leader of a country facing annihilation do? What every desperate leader throughout history has done... go to war. Out of all the Middle Eastern countries Saudi Arabia is the only one who is stockpiling a reserve. They have set aside excess production capacity of about 3 million barrels a day. Their excess production will suddenly look like steak to a starving man in the eyes of the other Middle Eastern countries. So they will invade to secure the oil reserves for themselves. Now do you think America will sit still while our friends the Saudis get invaded? Nope! We will launch our own invasion to protect Saudi Arabia (under the guise of "protecting freedom and spreading democracy" I'm sure). What about Russia and China, who are every bit as dependant on Middle Eastern oil as we are? Are they going to sit back and watch the region go to hell, counting on the goodwill of the eventual victor to help them out? I don't think so! More invasions!! Soon, every country with even the slightest dependency on Middle Eastern oil (read: every first world nation) will be involved, trying to secure the last remaining oil for themselves. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you World War III.

And what happens when the war is over (I would imagine that the war effort itself would exhaust whatever reserves we may have)? We and all other first world nations have an oil based economy. In other words we are looking at a global depression the likes of which will be unparalleled in all of human history. The world economy will completely collapse. This in turn will probably lead to another round of war as we fight over the remaining scraps of resources. It will truly be the dawn of a new dark age.

So is this incredibly bleak picture of the near future preventable? Yes it is!! First things first, in the short term we must do everything in our power to minimize our dependence of foreign oil. Now if that means drilling up the ANWAR then we drill the damn thing up! Protecting the future of our country must be more important then preserving a small section of some animal's natural habitat. Now of course this is only a temporary solution, designed to give us enough breathing room to create a permanent solution. We must invest aggressively in alternate fuels and power sources. The hybrid cars on the road today are a good first step but obviously not enough. We need a hydrogen based economy... fuel cell cars. We need new energy sources like wind power, or solar power, of fusion based power. Obviously any of these solutions will require a lot of research to develop so we'd better get started! Next, we have to deal with the problem of the US oil corporations resisting a more away from oil. We have to encourage them somehow to abandon oil. Perhaps some kind of massive tax penalty against any company not actively working to convert to a non-oil based economy? Now with our foreign dependency on oil reduced thanks to increased domestic production via the ANWAR and our big oil corporations spearheading the conversion to a non-oil based economy that gives us the opportunity to address the last major problem: the Middle Eastern countries. Regardless of what we do domestically, they still have an oil based economy. One that will start to crumble as we start reducing our oil consumption. We must actively invest in those countries in order to help them diversify their economies so when the last well pumps the last barrel they have something else to fall back upon aside from war.

If we do all of this we will enter the latter half of the 21st century with a stable middle east, no energy crisis, and a country that is not dependant on anyone else to support its way of life. Perhaps this will be the dawn of a new Golden Age for peace and prosperity throughout the world.

So there is hope for the future; a possibility that Andrea's vision may come to pass. But with people like Bush in the White House, and all other conservatives who act like the oil gravy train will never end, I think perhaps I should invest in a fallout shelter and a stockpile of canned food.

Well that's it for today! Hopefully we can elect a good liberal who has the stomach to stand up to the oil companies and wean this country off of the oil that will be our doom. If not then as L.B. Magoon said: "Hang out tight! If we don't recognize the problem soon and deal with it, it's going to be quite a ride!"

(Statistics taken from "Are We Running Out of Oil" by L.B. Magoon)

So Who Misses the Cold War?

2004-07-01T20:59:00.000-04:00

So just one more thing about yesterday's topic and I'm done for the day. Seriously. Andrea brought up an excellent point in her comment to my last post. The integration of religion and policy decision is not a new phenomenon (though Bush is taking it to new heights). It's actually something that started in the Cold War. See, communism is atheistic (one of its many redeeming qualities). To differentiate ourselves from the "godless" soviets we did two major things. First, we added the motto "In God We Trust" to our paper currency in 1953. Then in 1954 we added the phrase "Under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance. Add to that a little revisionist history to make the founding fathers sound like good little christian boys and you've set the stage for a country based on religion. We created this idea that American was a country founded on and based in religion as a weapon for the cold war... to show the world how America is better then the godless commies. The world has moved on since those dark days... unfortunate our politicians have not.

What bothers me is that people act as though "Under God" was always part of our pledge. It wasn't!! Even people alive in the mid fifties when it was added act as though it was always there. Again the specter of revisionist history surfaces. Our founding fathers were people who were fleeing from religious oppression. They were not good christians, most of them were deist. When the Southern Baptist convention asked Thomas Jefferson how he would integrate god into policy decisions, Jefferson wrote back the famous letter to the Southern Baptists where he created the now infamous phrase "a wall of separation between church and state." Jefferson was stating how religion will not affect policy decisions.

This wall of separation lasted well until the 1950s when communism became our mortal enemy. This was the era in which paranoia caused schools and libraries to remove copies of "Robin Hood" because the idea of robbing from the rich and giving to the poor was communist. This is the era where the Boston Reds changed their name to Boston Redsocks because "red" was communist. Anything associated with communism was considered evil and all attempts were made to purge such things from our society. This, unfortunately, extended to atheism. Thus our pledge and our currency were desecrated, history retold, and the country has never been the same. Thomas Jefferson must be turning in his grave.

Remove "Under God" from our pledge! Remove "In God We Trust" from our currency! And rebuild that critically important wall of separation between church and state!

And I'm done. See, that wasn't as bad as yesterday. I'm off to see Spiderman 2 tomorrow with Brandon. I'll post my thoughts on the movie for you all to read when I get back. You know, I talk as though there are tons of people reading this when in reality it's probably just Andrea and Brandon (hey guys!). I need to get my readership up!

Goodnight all!

And Just Whose God Are We Supposed to be Under Anyway?

2004-06-30T20:31:00.000-04:00

(Please read this whole post, I know it's long but it's important.)

Yesterday I said that today I was going to talk about Microsoft's revolutionary new technology. And indeed I was in the process of writing out that particular post, talking about how exciting this technology was and the wonderful things it could allow as to create that would make life so much better. I was almost done when I just happened to be browsing through MSNBC.com and saw an article from MSNBC blogger Eric Alterman entitled "Atheism un-american?" In the article he mentions several political commentators (all republican, mind you) who try to discredit their political rivals by calling them atheists. The idea of course being that if you're an atheist, your ideas carry little value.

Reading that made me angry enough to ditch the post I was working on and start compiling info for this post instead. It reminded me of a story I had read about several years back. This story if about former president George H. W. Bush and it goes a little something like this (portions of this story copied from an article originally written by Madalyn O'Hair in 1991):

When Bush, Sr. was campaigning for the presidency in 1987 he made a stop in Chicago Illinois on August 27th where he held a formal news conference. There he spoke briefly with Robert Sherman, a reporter for American Atheists who was a participating member of the press corps by invitation. Sherman asked Bush: "What will you do to win the votes of American's who are atheist?"

Bush replies, "I guess I'm pretty week in the atheist community. Faith in God is important to me."

Sherman: "Surely you recognize the equal citizenship and patriotism of Americans who are atheists?"

Bush: "No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."

But, wait! It gets even better! On December 23 1990 in Chicago Sherman met with Ed Derwinski, the secretary of the Department of Veteran's Affairs, to discuss exclusion of American Atheists from veteran's groups which have been chartered by the United States Congress. Mr. Derwinski said he would do "absolutely nothing" about the discrimination. On January 3, Mr. Sherman crossed paths with Ed Derwinski again at the Illinois inaugurations. He asked Mr. Derwinski, at that time, what American Atheists could do to have the Bush administration take an interest in the problem of discrimination against American Atheist veterans. Mr. Derwinski's response was:

"What you should do for me is what you should do for everybody: Believe in God. Get off our backs."

So it was the clearly stated policy of the Bush, Sr. administration that atheists should not be considered citizens and that discrimination against atheists was perfectly acceptable by that administration. After all, if they're not American citizens, how can they be discriminated against?

Fortunately, that was over 10 years ago. Things have changed since then, right?

Hmmm... perhaps not. One of the first things that Bush did when he took office was establish the "President's Council on Bioethics." It was the job of this council to discuss bioethical matters such as stem cell research, abortion, birth control, etc. to find ethical research solutions and then present these solutions to the president to become policy. On the surface this sounds like a good idea. In reality, though, this council does nothing more then support the official Bush policy. On February 28th two researchers, Elizabeth Blackburn and William May, were fired by the Bush administration from their positions on the Council. It is important to note that of the 18 person council, these were the only two members who did not support the official Bush policy that stem cell research, abortion, and birth control were immoral. They were instead replaced by two non-scientists who supported the Bush party line.

Bush has also said that he wants to fund faith-based initiatives to teach abstinence to teenagers and refuses to provide funding for any initiative that teaches birth control, or some combination of birth control and abstinence.

He has repeatedly said in speeches that America is on a "divine" mission and that God wanted him to be elected. In fact, Deborah Caldwell of the religion news service of the Pew Organization wrote an article expressing her concern over Bush's ever increasing theology. She talks about how Bush's personal religious beliefs are influencing his policy decisions more and more.

There is nothing wrong with having a deeply held religious belief. We are all free to believe whatever we want to believe, that's what makes this country great. So if you feel that devoting your life to Jesus is the right thing for you to do then by all means devote your life to Jesus. But it becomes a problem when you start trying to force your religious beliefs on other people.

What we have here is George W. Bush, our president, making policy decisions, funding decisions, war decisions, based on his religious beliefs! This is a commingling of church and state at the highest levels of government!! As an atheist this both scares and angers me, even more so then his father's remarks in 1987. But this is not a problem that should only scare atheists! Most people believe in a god in one form or the other. The general consensus is that the atheist population is only 7-9% of the population. But not everyone who believes in a god believes in the same god or in the same way. Bush is drafting legislation around his own brand of conservative evangelical christianity. But what about the Jews, the Muslims, the more liberal christians, the wicca, the pagans, the satanists, the buddhists, etc, etc, etc....? Just like the atheists, they too are having religious beliefs that are not their own forced upon them in the form of presidential policy decisions!

We have a constitutionally mandated separation of church and state. Every day he is in office that man finds new ways to break that separation. Do not allow your elected leaders to force a religion down your throat, do not allow them to shape policy around their religious beliefs, but most importantly... do not allow that man to win reelection!!!!!!

On Never Ending Violence and Human Nature

2004-06-28T20:19:00.000-04:00

Ugh. A very unproductive day it was. I called AG Edwards as soon as I got out of work today. Unfortunately, by the time I got home they were already closed. I don't know when I'm going to find time to call them. My lunch "hour" is only a half an hour, fifteen minutes of which are wasted just leaving and reentering the building, so I have no time there. I'll have to think of something. I'm scheduled for my motorcycle test on Labor Day weekend, now I just need to get the permit so I can take the written test. However, New Jersey just adopted new rules for proving identity when you try to get a new license. You have to provide your birth certificate, drivers license, utility bill, social security card, and bank statement (or other official document). Driver's license and social security card are easy. But I have no idea where my birth certificate is and I do all of my bill pay online so I don't get any physical paper bills or statements in the mail (and they don't accept computer printouts). So I'm not sure how I'm gonna handle this.

In other news I'm going to a John Kerry volunteer's party on July 17th and a gathering of NYC Atheists on July 11th. Finally, I can be around people who think like me! LOL. And perhaps I can even meet a nice woman at one of these events (okay.. now I'm just dreaming).

On to more interesting matters! Andi said something interesting in her "Fahrenheit doesn't reach my boiling point" post (nice title, by the way!). She said that she refuses to give up her idealism, her belief that piece is possible, and that one day we can learn to stop killing each other (or at least stop killing each other over oil). Though this tends to be rare, in this case I have to disagree. Peace is not possible; we can never learn to stop killing each other.

"Why such a pessimistic outlook?" You may ask. It's simply basic human nature. We are an aggressive and violent species... we evolved from hunters, we learned to fight to protect our kills; our mates; our territories. We set up our societies, not as unified groups of people who cooperated with one another for a common good, but as competitive structures divided into nobility and peasants, rich and poor, citizens and slaves, haves and have nots. We learned to compete with one another to become a "have." It would never occur to most people that perhaps if we work together then everyone can be a "have." No, in order to be a "have" someone else must be a "have not."

Why is it like this? Why do we allow a society that is sharply divided along every imaginable line? Simply because society cannot function without such divides! We live in a capitalist society, a capitalist society functions on competition. In order for our system to work there must be poor, their must be disadvantaged people. Without them the system falls apart. Consider this... ten million dollars is a lot of money. But why is a lot of money? Because very few people have ten million dollars! If every single person had ten million then ten million wouln't be worth very much anymore. We always need to compare ourselves to something, to quantify how we are better, this is the essence of competition. When a religious organization pressed on why god allows evil in the world, one of the standard responses is "Without evil, how can we recognize good?" By the same token, without the poor how can we recognize the rich? Without the ignorant how can we recognize the intelligent? Without the have-nots, how can we recognize the haves?

We can't. We need the opposites. The act of comparing oneself to his fellow man is at the very core of our society, it is the heart of a society built around competition. And as long as we have a society based on competition we will always have those divides. As long as their are divides there will be conflict. With conflict comes the killing, the wars, the oppression.

And just as the people within a society must compete with each other to function, so must a society itself compete with other societies in order to survive. An empire must expand in order to survive. A society has to always look outward, to compete with other societies, to give the populace a common enemy. If a society stops competing, stops tying to expand, it stagnates and eventually dies. Look at every great empire throughout history. As long as they were expanding they were prosperous. As soon as their expansion stopped, they fell. Today we don't expand with armies across territory (at least not that often), today we do it with money. We expand our economy, push into rival markets.. always trying to find new sources of profit. The expansion of American businesses, and with the businesses, American culture, into other lands has created huge backlashes of anti-american sentiment. Thus, more conflict; more killing.

So, is true and lasting peace possible? No! Can there ever be a stop to the violence? No! As long as we have a society based on competition, there will never be peace and there will always be violence because such things are integral components of a competitive society. The answer is then to alter society. But such a solution is impractical. Consider socialism for a moment. There we have a societal system built completely on cooperation, where there are no haves or have-nots but rather a fair middle ground for all people. But socialists are ridiculed and ignored at best, hated and feared at worst. We thrive on competition, the idea of cooperation is alien to us. At my core I consider myself a socialist... I think that is the only path that can bring down the divides that separate us and bring about the best chance for real peace. I hate the competitive nature of society. I hate the conflict.. the divides. But I also realize that nothing is going to change it. Basic human nature is competitive... and we as a race haven't been able to move beyond basic human nature in all of our history.

What are the odds that we're going to start now?

And I'm done! LOL. I don't feel like I did a good enough job presenting my arguments convincingly. It's been five years since I've written any kind of political or social commentary, so I'm a little bit rusty. :) I'll get better, I promise!

I welcome comments! Please, post your thoughts, your counter arguments, tell me how wrong I am, give me your ideas on how society can start to move from competition to cooperation!

Goodnight all!