Missives From the Reality-Based World
I’d like to take credit for this, but I can’t. Las Vegas didn’t make their smog go away overnight because I advised them to do so yesterday.
The real cause? Twenty-four hours of steady southwesterly wind, approximately 20 MPH, with gusts to 40.
It will be back, though.
…what’s happening there is most certainly not staying there any more.
This is a doppler image from this morning, showing the fug of smog and shit spewing out of Sin City. My own locale is completely occulted by the crap. The brown shit in my skies is the result of the filth oozing out of Las Vegas. That cloud of pollution is nearly two hundred miles in diameter.
Gasoline can’t hit $8.00/gallon fast enough, as far as I’m concerned.
Oh — check out this loop from the NWS. It’s even more annoying.
Ordinarily I don’t mention when I un-roll another blog, but I thought I should go into why I’m not following Pandagon any more.
The warning signs came a few months ago when Amanda was still pushing for Edwards. At one point in an entry, she was dispensing advice on how to affect primaries so Edwards would have a stronger showing — overall a good idea, but her presentation was something along the lines of, “Here’s what you should do.” In context, that should felt considerably more like an order than a suggestion, and it rubbed wrong.
Additionally, the commenters on Pandagon often seem to have extremely low tolerance for those who don’t line up precisely with their views, which is ironic in any population that styles itself liberal.
Finally, though, she linked — with favorable comment — to an article from the Village Voice that starts out by launching lowbrow and narrow-minded (as well as humorless) critiques at another blog which, frankly, I value much more highly than hers. I didn’t read past the first page. Willingness to appreciate diversity in voices matters, and she seems to have lost sight of that fact.
If the liberal front is beginning to lose its sense of humor — something that almost always happens whenever a subgroup begins to take itself too seriously, begins to get a little taste of power — I promise you that in a decade it will look precisely like the conservative front does now: Angry, out of touch, and foaming with rage when things don’t go precisely as desired.
Life is too short to waste on that kind of anger.
The hospital here has an annual health fair called Kids’ Day, something attended by about 800+ kids and their families. There are interesting exhibits, lots of information from health vendors, and the kids can get their hearing and vision checked, as well as puppy shots. Given the rural setting, odds are pretty good that this is about the only exposure some of them get to medical treatment all year.
On the upside, there’s the collateral material promoting the event. This year’s poster was much more solidly colorful than last year’s was:
Because it already didn’t happen.
A West Coast scientist who believes it may be possible to transmit information backwards through time has been funded by individual donations after established mad-scientist groups refused to cough up.
Um … um … established mad-scientist groups?
Oh right, them.
ANYway, if we could send a message back in time, we could stop, oh I don’t know, maybe the last fire at Alexandria (”Don’t light the match!”) or the stupidity that was most of the twentieth century (”Avoid Hitler, look out for chickens with a cough, and fuck pretty much everything you hear from 1946 onward”), or gee, I don’t know, recent years (”It wasn’t iraq, you fucking goddamn useless wannabe Texan inbred retard, fuck you and your pissing contest with your dad, you both suck, and history will have a really fucking hard time deciding who was the shittiest president ever — ha ha, no, lie, it’s you, duh-bya, you’re worthless and we, the denizens of the future, wish you had choked on that pretzel”).
Seriously. If we could send a message back through time, what could possibly explain the fustercluck that has been, gee, everything we’ve ever experienced ever, in history?
So it’s obvious that this guy’s time travel thing never worked, just like everyone else’s never will have. It’s cute fantasy, especially when it includes David Tennant — a cute fantasy indeed — but it just. never. happened.
If it had, we’d have nothing to discuss.
Jeez, don’t you love Apriil Fools’ Day jokes?
Well, I do, if I have a chance to post images like this one, and especially link to them twice in the same article.
As I’ve mentioned earlier, I’m working toward licensure to fost/adopt parent — I want to be a dad. Things seem to be going well with the new agency. During the homestudy interview my contact kept looking though the paperwork for anything amiss, at me to see if I was furtively hiding dismembered body parts or whatever in random closets, and eventually adopted a kind of “what the hell” expression — as in “why did they boot you from the game at the five yard line?”
Not sure, and not really relevant; it’s just background. A few months back, hanging out at the locally owned café, I made the acquaintance of the weekend dishwasher, a teen kid with whom I connected, entirely and totally, after about nine to eleven seconds of conversation. The interdigitation was strong and a little eerie in its depth.* He’s how I hope my future son will be, very bright, very sweet and just a good kid all around.
Where he works there isn’t a pair of dishgloves that fit him — the set there is too small. So when he takes them off at the end of his shift, they wrinkle and fold back on themselves, and end up in a disordered heap on the rack, in a way certain to irritate the store’s owner. He can’t help it, and being a teen is a bit scatterbrained, so he tends to forget the state of the gloves.
A few weeks back I was in the café, and there were the gloves, disheveled and hopeless in a rubbery heap where he’d left them the night before. I smiled to see them, thinking of the bundle of energy and life that had touched them last, thinking of nothing else in particular, and then realized that what I was seeing was a deep lesson — that a rumpled pair of gloves would be meaningless, anonymous, just a bit of noise to most observers; but they meant something to me — they were a cipher whose code I could read — and that the world is actually full of this noise.
A Drama in Two Acts
Act the First: Two PERSONS and a GODBOY in an elevator.
Person 1: The other day I was stuck in traffic for nearly two hours. Sheesh!
Person 2: Yeah, it’s a real nightmare since the construction began.
GodBoy: When I’m stuck in traffic I like to pray to Jesus!
Person 1: I wonder if the plans they have for light rail will help.
Person 2: Can you imagine the construction issues with that?
GodBoy: I can’t wait for light rail! Then I’ll be able to sit and read the Bible instead of having to drive!
Person 1: Actually I’d like to see more bike paths.
Person 2: No joke! Less traffic congestion, less pollution, and a healthier population. Wins all around.
GodBoy: When I ride my bike I listen to ChristGasm on my iPod!
Person 1: Hey, man, do you have to turn everything we talk about into some kind of God or Jesus issue?
Person 2: Yeah. This one-track-mind thing of yours gets pretty fuckin’ old. It’s like religion has fried your capacity to carry on a rational discussion about anything else.
GodBoy: …I’m going to pray for you.
[Exit.]
In the last few months my meditation practice has deepened considerably. In November, during a day-long at-home retreat I decided to stop pining for a practice group here in this little town I live in, and actually inaugurate one. The result, Sangha, has had mixed attendance. Some Sundays I have one or two people. Some Sundays I have none. (Those are what I call slow days.) Attendance is by people new to meditation, experienced meditators with little or no Buddhist background, and practicing Buddhists.
Lately I’ve been retrospecting on my practice, how it’s changed me, and what parts of it I accept now that I didn’t used to — and what parts I feel much more confident about rejecting. A big shift for me took place in about 2002, when I finally gave up on the notion of having a soul. That was surprisingly painful, given that I was an avowed atheist by then, and had been for half a decade or so. It was strange to see the illusion, the clinging to a notion, and to watch it evaporate as I let it go.
It wasn’t that I felt I was sliding into a nihilistic pointless life; to the contrary, I was finding all sorts of new ground to explore and experience. It was simply the idea that I missed, a sense of losing something I’d always taken to be there, a constant companion. I felt much the same way when Carl Sagan died, and again with Douglas Adams, and even Jim Henson. These people had done things that mattered to me, and though I’d never met them I still felt I’d lost something important when their minds were at last deliquesced.
Hope is a strange thing. We talk about it, we claim to have it, we put energy into it — but I don’t know how thoroughly we actually analyze it. When someone we know is sick, we say, “I hope you get well soon” — but do we, really? Or is it more likely that, thirty seconds later, I’ve forgotten all about Sylvia and her cold? How is this an expression of hope for her recovery?
And is it really even much of a hope? Colds are not, by and large, fatal; generally they’re little more than inconveniences. (Though the two-week marathon rhinoviral infection I just got over, which included seven full days of full sinus concretization, seemed a hell of a lot more than that when I was in the middle of it.) So when we express the “hope” that someone will recover soon from a cold, what are we doing apart from spouting vain platitudes?
The sequel to Postergasm I, here I drop various images of various things for various purposes. As with the first post the high-res versions are optimized to print on an 11 x 17 sheet — not exactly movie-poster size, but large enough to be noticeable.
After the fold, miscellaneous posters along with descriptions. Enjoy!
Part of the ongoing tragedy of the stupidity of Iraq is the killing of uncounted tens — or hundreds — of thousands of innocent civilians by (let’s face it) US troops. Without going onto the ethics of action under combat, the fact is indisputable that, had we not invaded in the first place, those people would not be dead.
Often overlooked, though, is the could-have-been.
For instance there was a fairly hefty oil spill on the west coast of South Korea last month, a spill that wrought havoc on maritime ecosystems, and now seems to have killed at least one fisherman, protesting corporate inaction in the cleanup efforts:
Ji Chang-hwan drank poison before dousing himself with inflammable liquid and setting himself alight.
Now I’m not going to try to blame this on Bush — but I am going somewhere with this, so bear with me. In the same edition of the Beeb’s news we come across a report of a flood disaster in Zambia:
More than 40 people have been killed in the region, and roads, crops and livestock destroyed.
Rains have been going on for weeks and thousands are displaced. But wait, there’s a trifecta; hell appears to be breaking loose in Colombia too:
Thousands of people have been evacuated after a volcano erupted in southern Colombia, throwing out clouds of ash several kilometres high.
No one’s reported dead — yet anyway — but the eruption’s still young, so to speak.
What has any of this to do with Iraq? Imagine, if you will, a US military unencumbered by a pointless, endless, useless war. Imagine a military that hasn’t been overtaxed and overdeployed for the last half decade. Imagine an economy not crippled by mounting and overwhelming debt. What could the US do with all those resources?
Continue reading ‘George’s Bloody Hands, International Edition’
Last year I wrote that I wouldn’t say anything more about Obama unless I had to.
Yeah, well.
The Dem primaries are really bringing out a stack of ugly, aren’t they? Apart from the locker-room thinking that goes toward disparaging Edwards or Kucinich, we’ve got the usual gang of inbreds and their comments on Clinton and Obama. It’s funny, in a wretched gut-twisting sort of way, to see the right wing carefully stepping through their self-laid minefield of misogyny, sexism and racism as they try to find legitimate reasons to dislike the lead runners. It seems that, to them, the race has become all about gender and color.
But as Pam has pointed out, this isn’t happening with just the right wing. We know that cretins such as Limbaugh and Coulter are going to savage anyone in the Dem camp — it’s their raison d’etre — and we know that they’re going to use the veiled (and not-so-) language of privilege in order to accomplish it. Seeing it happen from the left as well is simply shabby.
There are legitimate reasons to have qualms about either candidate; for instance, Clinton voted in favor of attacking Iraq, and Obama genuinely is a little green (though, to be honest, there’s simply no way in hell he could do a worse job than the inbred caretaker at 1600 Penna Ave right now, but that could also be said of Clinton). I’d rather see Edwards and Kucinich getting more attention, because it seems to me that they’re closer to the mark in terms of what the nation actually wants — but hey, this is our political American Idol, innit? So we can’t count on being right winning out.
But when qualms become covert attacks — particularly racist ones, or fearmongering ones, or attacks that try to make an issue of something that’s already been discussed openly and in publication — it makes it a hell of a lot easier to knock out of the running the candidate whose campaign appears to be supporting the tactics. For me, that shoves Clinton to the back of the line, I’m afraid.
…however, the news that Nickelodeon is considering a show dealing with the subject of sex and love just makes me groan.
Their absolutely ludicrous treatment of the subject of youth romance with the inane, pointless Naked Brothers Band alone should warn parents about the “value” of anything else Nick execs might have to say on the topic. And to make matters worse, Britney seems to be in denial about the whole thing.*
As for the entire Spears family:
It appears the train wreck of the Spears franchise is just going to continue.
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* Though, given her tenuous grip on reality of late, this isn’t exactly surprising either.
Write them in. Sign the petition here.
Apparently someone rustled up enough cash to take out a hit on Kevin Federline. It’s amazing what the pennies that fall between the couch cushions can accomplish, isn’t it?
Leaving aside the wisdom of parents choosing either name, I have to ask why the hell New Zealand thinks it can accept or reject any name chosen for a child.
A New Zealand couple is looking to call their newborn son Superman — but only because their chosen name of 4Real has been rejected by the government registry.
Sure, both Superman and 4Real are stupid-assed things to call your kids. But should that be grounds for censorship?
Via Freethunk
Spew