If you get the pun you should get shot. Nonetheless, I felt my blog needed some cheer and happy. Thus, I present to you kiwi.
Ok, so it turns out this guy has more animations. I admire and abhor this man.
May god have mercy on our souls.
So, I was over at my friend’s house and he asked me to do some crude voice overs in my infamous Yoda voice. There was this joke I had cracked years ago in high school (amongst other jokes from high school that will NEVER die) about Yoda being a bus driver and segregating all the “dark side” to the back of the bus.
Sigh, I’m not sure if I should be ashamed or laugh. Here is his crude flash animation.
Let’s take a lemon and make 40 glasses of lemonade out of it. Now, I understand the student may or may not have been racially profiled. I can accept that fact of life. I can accept the policemen may have went a bit overboard and used excessive force.
Now, the media spin. You give them an inch and they take a mile. First off, that is not a very non-violent protest when you tell them to fuck off, mention the patriot act, and a bunch of extraneous behaviors. Now, he said he was leaving, yet his reaction was to go limp? What was so hard about getting up and leaving?
Let’s assume the officers are out of control. So, why would you try to reason with them aggressively? Why not comply with their request to be escorted and THEN sue them later? Unless, of course, you feel your shocking will help the ACLU get more money. Even if this kid has a case, he’s definitely guilty of being a moron. And as far as students “pleading” with him, that dosn’t look like pleading to me. That looks like kids being stuck-up college students loving an opportunity to shove their finger in the authoritarian pie.
One bad move (by the police) met by another bad movie (by the student and students) equals a clusterF*ck. I suppose this UCLA student received a typical college education… one that lacks common sense.
Now, the full video with the swearing, student belligerence, telling them they are idiots on the spot.
I found two really great articles that open up the debate and somewhat counter-balance all the religious fanatics out there. Sadly, most believers are either too ignorant, apathetic, or too tired to play in the academic arena. I can’t blame them, academics is somewhat of a contrived thing in and of itself. Nonetheless here we go.
This first one is a long one, but it debases some common, weak atheist remarks. I have respect for a few atheists, just not most. I think most are actually agnostic, but I’ll get inot that with the next article.
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=110206C
The recent small spate of atheist writings by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris, noticed in the pages of Wired and The Guardian, revives an old and rather quaint controversy. It is one which, I believe, is good for religion; but to unearth the genuine value of atheist beliefs we need first to dispose of the clutter of illogic and absurd claims that have washed up around them over the years.
The figure of the village atheist is a rather comic one. He proves his superior intelligence by mocking the sheeplike conformity of the poor benighted believers. The old word “enlightened” has now been replaced by the word “bright” as the self-description of this sort of atheist. He is a variant of the “Cliffie the mailman” wonk who knows it all, or Sportin’ Life the cynic in Porgy and Bess. An older version is Flaubert’s character Homais the bourgeois anticlerical pharmacist in Madame Bovary, and an even older one is Thersites the scurrilous doubter in Shakespeare and Homer. Much pleased by their own originality, they take their mishaps as the martyrdom of the bold intellectual pioneer, and they have produced a group of arguments that should probably be taken apart.
One is that religious ideology is a unique inspirer of terrible wars. In the current perspective, such an opinion sounds plausible. But anyone with an historical sense will recognize that the few hundred people who die each month in religious conflicts are absurdly dwarfed by the tens of millions, almost all of them religious believers, who died, within living memory, under the savage atheistic regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong and the various dialectical materialist dictators of eastern Europe. We have seen what atheism looks like on the large scale, and it is not pretty: the Holocaust, the Gulag, the Cultural Revolution, the Killing Fields. Religion has indeed been a cause of appalling slaughter during the course of human history; but it must take fifth place behind atheist ideology, nation-state aggression, mercantile colonialist expansion, and tribal war in the carnage sweepstakes.
Another argument brought by the village atheist type is that to base one’s life on faith is intellectual suicide. This argument might be persuasive if there were any alternative, but there is not. Reason is not a basis for thought, but a method of thought. Kurt Gödel showed conclusively that every system of reasoning contains self-referential statements of the form of “This statement is unprovable”, which are correctly formed propositions that must be true or false, and must, if reason is fundamental, be provably one or the other. Analysis quickly shows that the statement must be true, but cannot be proved to be true. Reason is a process of proof, but reason is incapable of proving a certain true proposition, one that must take its place among the axioms of any logical system. Rationality cannot prove itself. The fundamental validity of reason therefore must be taken on faith; the only difference from a purely logical point of view between an atheist who believes in reason and a religious person who makes a primary act of faith is that the religious person recognizes the pre-logical basis of his beliefs, while the atheist does not.
If the village atheist dismisses this sort of thing as logic-chopping and takes his stand on the empirical down-to-earth evidence of the senses, the ground similarly disappears from under his feet. David Hume is rightly hailed as a hero of atheism, for his dismissal of the traditional arguments for the existence of God. But what his atheistic admirers miss is that his argument against empirical knowledge is even more devastating. Hume showed that the concept of cause has no logical necessity—that just because one event has often followed another, that does not mean that the same sequence must necessarily happen again, or that there is any necessary causal connection between them. Our expectation of causal connections in general, not just those that attribute the cause of events to God—is at best an emotional and practical habit. The religious person, by this logic, is actually more aware of the shaky basis of his commonsense than is the confident atheist.
Hume’s insight has actually proved remarkably prescient. In Hume’s time cause—courtesy of Newton’s magnificent discovery of the predictability of matter in motion—was seen by the scientific-minded as the only true relationship among events. In questioning cause, Hume anticipated the current multitude of relations now known to obtain among physical happenings. Quantum events, such as the emission of a particle by a piece of radioactive matter, are to a large extent purely random. Quantum coherence is different from cause—it is more like the existence of a harmonic between two vibrating violin-strings than like anything we would call cause. Nonlinear dynamical systems are so tangled and often so autonomous in their interrelations that any assignment of cause becomes virtually theological. For the initial conditions of the current state of turbulence are irrecoverable and irrelevant, and the outcome is, beyond the immediate future, increasingly unpredictable even if we had perfect knowledge, a condition impossible in this universe. And since the assignment of cause is in empiricist terms provable only by successful prediction, whatever cannot be predicted cannot be proved to be caused. And even prediction is tainted in some parts of the universe by second-guessing, rational expectations, theories of mind and self-fulfilling prophecy. Living social organisms are always involved in wildly idiosyncratic predicting contests with each other whose results are ecosystems that are both influences of their own and freely reinvented year by year. Human minds are causes of their own causes, or else the whole structure of legal and moral responsibility, which has built societies that have greatly altered the surface of the planet, is an illusion. And if something can be a cause of its own cause, the meaning of the word “cause” has evaporated. So cause, which is the basis of any empirical understanding of the world, must in itself be taken on faith.
The village atheist might still retreat to the pragmatist position, that though the rationalist and empiricist arguments for a basis in reason may be perversely twisted to question themselves, nevertheless the practical application of reason in the real world actually works and maintains our survival. We may never know exactly what electricity is, or what causes it, but when we turn the car key the engine starts. True enough, but even the pragmatist argument falls down in its own terms. For if in the absence of logical or evidence-based proofs of reason, usefulness and survival are adopted as the basic criteria of what is reasonable, religion actually comes off looking much more practical than unbelief. Almost the whole of the human race for all of its history has had some kind of religion or other, and has, triumphantly, survived and prevailed. As I pointed out in an earlier essay about demographics, societies with strong religious beliefs tend to reproduce themselves more robustly than societies without the hope and faith to sacrifice for the future. Societies that have developed sophisticated theological systems have tended to develop sciences and advanced technologies as well, because of a fundamental theological belief that things make sense and that there is an underlying order to the world. Thus from a strictly Darwinian perspective—the ultimate practical expression of pragmatism (and one to which I subscribe), religion is a powerful, perhaps the most powerful, survival strategy. One can even set aside the statistics that show that religious people tend to be happier, more long-lived, richer, and get better sex. If, pragmatically, by their fruits ye shall know them, and truth is whatever gets you the goodies and continues your germ line, the atheist should try to hypnotize himself into being a believer.
But this is shooting fish in a barrel. There are, actually, many valuable correctives and important questions that are offered by the atheist perspective. One of them is an implication of one of Dawkins’ favorite arguments against the rather feeble theist objection that you can’t prove that God doesn’t exist—you can’t prove a negative. Dawkins triumphantly retorts that
“There’s an infinite number of things that we can’t disprove, You might say that because science can explain just about everything but not quite, it’s wrong to say therefore we don’t need God. It is also, I suppose, wrong to say we don’t need the Flying Spaghetti Monster, unicorns, Thor, Wotan, Jupiter, or fairies at the bottom of the garden. There’s an infinite number of things that some people at one time or another have believed in, and an infinite number of things that nobody has believed in. If there’s not the slightest reason to believe in any of those things, why bother? The onus is on somebody who says, I want to believe in God, Flying Spaghetti Monster, fairies, or whatever it is. It is not up to us to disprove it.”
This argument actually isn’t an argument against religious belief as such, any more than the presence of thousands of myths about the invention of fire or the succession of the seasons or the phases of the moon casts doubt on the existence of a fire-inventer or the terrestrial or lunar orbits. In fact the multitude of divine myths could be taken as weak evidence that something divine must be going on, or else all those people wouldn’t have thought there was. There were thousands of beliefs about the healing powers of mosses and lichens and certain soils before penicillin and the antibiotic virtues of soil molds were discovered.
But Dawkins’ argument does cogently address the great scandal of religious differences, especially the fanatical clinging to one particular metaphor of mysterious unseen powers. What the atheist critique implies is that the religions had better seriously get together on their stories, because their insistence on the factual certainty of their own versions is both a cause of justifiable skepticism and a justification at the extreme of suicide bombers and the massacre of innocents.
Valuable also is the moral lesson of atheism. Virtuous atheists actually have a stronger claim to real goodness than virtuous Christians, Jews, or Muslims, because there can be no taint of cupboard love in their obedience to the moral law. They do not believe in a reward for goodness, and thus must love goodness for its own sake. The challenge to religious people is that they ought to do the good as if there were no afterlife, no heaven, no reward. God does not get a reward for all the good things he does, and if we are supposed to become as much the image of God as we can, as we are told in the scriptures, then we should seek out that life of love and service that is its own reward.
Atheism also challenges religious people to take nature seriously. Atheists like to point out that religious accounts of the creation and maintenance of the universe are often wretchedly totalitarian, and they find it easy to refute the idea of the first cause. If something ordered always needs a creator, and if God is ordered, they say, who created God? Was it gods all the way down? Can something reasonably create itself? Cosmological physics, as I pointed out some time ago in a piece on evolution here, has rather taken the wind out of the sails of this argument, because it is now forced to postulate trillions of universes with every possible set of initial conditions before the Big Bang—a mess perhaps even more in need of Occam’s Razor than the postulation of a self-creating creator. If indeed every possible configuration of universes must have coexisted with this one, presumably at least one of them must have been so put together as to constitute, by sheer chance, a gigantic beneficent Intelligence capable of manipulating all of its own constituents and creating from them an ordered universe like our own. So the only current viable non-theistic theory of the origin of the cosmos virtually mandates a beneficent creator somewhere that would look an awful lot like God.
But setting aside such rhetorical fun with our atheist friends, there is an imaginative delight in the naturalism of the atheists that has been lost to Christians, Jews and Muslims at least since the renaissance, and which maybe ought to be brought back. If religious people genuinely believe that God is responsible for the existence of the universe, then they must take into their religious consciousness and conscience, as the renaissance did, those aspects of nature that attract atheists away from any parochial little set of tribal myths. Religious people must undergo the shock of Job, who after those sophistical little squabbles about sin and blame and justification must suddenly see the universe in all its terrifying glory, the grandeur of Leviathan and Behemoth, the mysteries of the womb, the joy of the horse and the ostrich, the glitter of the Pleiades. We know now that there are millions of planets circling alien suns out there. Some, perhaps many, harbor forests, oceans where their own leviathan swims, perhaps even alien civilizations with histories and stories and religions of their own. Beyond the old question–What is man that thou art mindful of him?—there is the further implication that God has let everything go its own way, that the universe is free to create and generate itself, and that God values this wild autonomy. Evolution is not a disproof of God, but it may be an indication of the lengths to which he will go to let his creation live out its own genius and destiny. What generosity, to so delegate his creative power, to relish diversity and strangeness and above all freedom so very highly!
Now this one isn’t proof of creationism per-say either, but it’s a good argument similar to the above, but in a bit more friendly terms. Granted, yes, it’s on a religious “science” website, but give it some benefit the doubt. It at least opens the door that perhaps being agnostic is a lot more sensible than being an atheist. Actually, this one doesn’t copy well so I won’t copy it, but I’ll just link it.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v22/i1/creation.asp
P.S. This article on the disparity in the studies claiming the link between chimps and humans is somewhat interesting. It furthers the gap in proof for evolution, IMO. Not saying there is NO proof, but it definitely furthers the room for debate.
Okay, so people say Americans are lazy and unmotivated. You know, our low and staggering voting ratings, our general apathy towards politics and the environment, our pitiful academic standings, etc. But, hey, what do assholes know? When we have something more important than paying the bills (e.g. our horrific American debt which most households have) is the REALLY importnat things…. waiting in like for 8 hours to 3 days for a $800+ videogame console.
The stores around here had only 5-6 units per store (I’m told from workers). Now, I wonder if Sony is liable for inciting riots and such. But seriously, I am so glad these morons froze their asses off for nothing and I hope many got injured. I praise all who bought a PS3 and sold it for 4-5X the value.
I swear this strange North Korean karaoke propaganda (yes, I know i can’t laugh without saying or typing that) seems like the perfect creepy Mentos commercial.
Fresh makes better, Mentos! Don’t you feel cultured?
So, now Senator (shudder) Hillary Clinton is speaking about Health Care. Now, I’m not questioning her ability to be a Senator–esp a junior senator which means she really can’t do crap. The thing is, though, given her previous and pretty much damning prior experience with minor administrative roles, I pray to god she stays as far away from the White House as possible. I’m no sexist, and if she was qualified for the position I’d give the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, she has proven herself worthless.
Here’s her talking about health care….
She . . . said Democrats would focus on improving the quality and affordability of health care–a touchy matter for the former first lady, who in 1993 led her husband’s calamitous attempt to overhaul the nation’s health care system. The failure of that effort helped Republicans win control of both the Senate and House the following year.
“Health care is coming back,” Clinton warned, adding, “It may be a bad dream for some.”
Now here’s a 2003 entry from a LIBERAL economist Brad DeLong explaining why Hillary + White House = Bad
My two cents’ worth–and I think it is the two cents’ worth of everybody who worked for the Clinton Administration health care reform effort of 1993-1994–is that Hillary Rodham Clinton needs to be kept very far away from the White House for the rest of her life. Heading up health-care reform was the only major administrative job she has ever tried to do. And she was a complete flop at it. She had neither the grasp of policy substance, the managerial skills, nor the political smarts to do the job she was then given. And she wasn’t smart enough to realize that she was in over her head and had to get out of the Health Care Czar role quickly.
So when senior members of the economic team said that key senators like Daniel Patrick Moynihan would have this-and-that objection, she told them they were disloyal. When junior members of the economic team told her that the Congressional Budget Office would say such-and-such, she told them (wrongly) that her conversations with CBO head Robert Reischauer had already fixed that. When long-time senior hill staffers told her that she was making a dreadful mistake by fighting with rather than reaching out to [Sen.] John Breaux and [Rep.] Jim Cooper, she told them that they did not understand the wave of popular political support the bill would generate. And when substantive objections were raised to the plan by analysts calculating the moral hazard and adverse selection pressures it would put on the nation’s health-care system . . .
Hillary Rodham Clinton has already flopped as a senior administrative official in the executive branch–the equivalent of an Undersecretary. Perhaps she will make a good senator. But there is no reason to think that she would be anything but an abysmal president.
It bothers me greatly that Medicare and especially Social Security are major issues that are in dire straits, yet politicians on both sides choose to ignore it. The problem is people have emotional attachment to stupidity and thus the debate isn’t even on a level playing field. Given the track record of the government’s ability, I am still unsure why liberals and many Americans are so trusting of the government to handle their medical issues and retirement. The government is extremely conservative with their investments (e.g. your taxes) and generally banks yield what… 3..4%? The market continuously yields 8-10% given diversified investments.
You give somebody $10,000 and tell them to invest it. Most people with some knowledge will throw it to a professional investor, mutual fund, stocks, etc. I doubt many would throw it in a bank and hope the interest revenue will suffice for retirement. The age of pensions and traditional Social Security/Medicare is dead, and people need to accept that.
The party of “choice” (e.g. choice over one’s own body) is also the party that says you’re too dumb to use your own money. Interesting concept. Furthermore, investment professionals are also too dumb to handle your money (e.g. privatized health care, social security, etc). No, only the government bureaucracy is smart enough to make sure your 6.2% and 1.2% taxes are handled wisely.
I wonder if I get a refund when the social security and health care system explodes.
http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2006520347,00.html
Paedo hid under girl’s bed
By GUY PATRICK
November 10, 2006
A PAEDO seduced a girl of 12 — then lived in her bedroom for THREE MONTHS without her mother finding out.
Scott Jennings, 22, cut a giant hole in the bottom of the youngster’s divan bed then used it as a secret den to evade detection if somebody came into the room.
He systematically abused the girl. And when she went to school in the morning, Jennings slipped out of the house to find food. Jennings, of Ashton-under-Lyne, Gtr Manchester, befriended the girl on a bus last year.
He began chatting her up, persuaded her to give him her mobile phone number and then arranged a date.
When they met, Jennings said he had nowhere to live and confided that he was wanted by police for a minor dishonesty offence.
He told the girl he needed somewhere to hide and was taken into her home unnoticed. The pair then cut a hole in the bottom section of her bed enabling him to hide in it whenever her mum came in.
Manchester Crown Court heard the girl then swore her ten-year-old sister to secrecy about Jennings.
His lair was found after the 12-year-old ran away with him leaving a note telling her mum not to worry.
Police went to the house and the girl’s sister confessed that Jennings had been hiding there.
Jennings was then found with the child at a flat in Fallowfield, Manchester, later the same day. He denied abducting the child and any sexual involvement but admitted living at the address for three months.
Jennings has now been jailed for two years and three months after he pleaded guilty to two counts of rape and one of sexual assault.
He was also ordered to sign the sex offenders register for ten years and was disqualified from working with children.
Last night Det Con Dave Donlan said: “It is a quite extraordinary case. It is absolutely unbelievable — but it is as it sounds. It came as a complete shock to all concerned.
“This is an absolutely unbelievable case that has had a huge impact on the victim and her family.
“The girl Jennings abused was extremely young and vulnerable and he took advantage of this vulnerability for his own personal gain.
“Not only did he live in the room for over three months, but he also systematically abused her.
“I hope the family can now start to come to terms with what has happened to them and move on with their lives.”
Uhm, wow i’ll get into this later… but GOOD JOB MOM.
Sorry, this is simply just badass. Thanks to stubbs for the heads-up about it.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/2176038.stm
Couple’s McDonald’s wedding reception
A bride and groom have celebrated their wedding with a happy meal at their local McDonalds.
Judy Foulkes and Andrew Smith from Gwernaffield near Mold, decided to shun the traditional bridal fayre in favour of some fast food.
The pair had both been married before and said they wanted something different.
“Some people thought I was daft but I just wanted a cheap and cheerful reception,” said 27-year-old Ms Foulkes.
“It was brilliant to see everyone tucking into Big Mac and fries while dressed in their wedding outfits.”
Instead of splashing out thousands of pounds the couple paid £136.87 for the spread for 33 guests.
Customers at the Northop branch of McDonalds saw the new bride join the back of the queue with her guests orders.
The newly wed added: “Our guests were a bit surprised but everyone said it was the most memorable wedding they had ever been to.
“It was brilliant because there was no arguing over menus or who sits next to who.”
The venue was booked several weeks in advance.
Restaurant Manager Stewart Williams said it was a strange request: “We were taken aback at first but we decorated the restaurant with some pink and white balloons.”
Great Occasion
“I’ve worked for McDonalds for ten years and never heard of a wedding reception at one of our outlets,” he said.
The couple had got married at Hawarden Register Office and an evening reception was held at a local pub in Gwernaffield near Mold.
“We had a great day,” said groom Andrew Smith.
“It was Judy’s idea to have the reception in McDonalds and it went down a treat.”
Crazy world. Next thing you know, they’ll let gays marry. God help people who met each other at a bathroom or crack den.
