MSNBC shares with us the story of Katherine Gunther, of Lebanon, IN. While performing the ceremony under the light of a full moon¹ in a cemetery — which includes, apparently, repeatedly thrusting the point of a sword into the ground — she managed to spike herself as well.

Now I suppose you could argue that the good luck ceremony actually worked, or else she’d have severed her femoral artery … but maybe in the future she and her fellow Wiccans will consider availing themselves of toy swords.

==

1. Of course.

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The article presents the diet in a more or less legitimate sounding light until the last few grafs. That was extremely troubling to me, so I posted this comment on the article:

This sort of pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo is not merely wrong; it’s actually dangerous.

Anyone willing to take diet advice from a man who didn’t even acknowledge that germs make people sick is treading a dangerous knife-edge of stupidity.

Please keep your articles to medically-responsible subjects.

While the online followup from the Calorie Lab editor was a bit snarky, I tried to keep it light. However, I received the following in my mailbox:

On Jul 17, 2008, at 9:02 AM, Mark Schrimsher wrote:

Did you actually read it? We said the guy was a crank and felon, and
then hoisted him by his own petard with quotes from his nutty book.

My reply read as follows:

But the article was preceded by a lengthy description of the diet. The excoriation came last. It was readable as an endorsement, and followup comments by others indicated a credulous acceptance of his teachings.

Mark Schrimsher then followed up with this incredible defense:

Yes, our normal pattern is to neutrally describe something like this,
and then after that to offer more op-ed evaluation. There are other
sites that simply rant against pseudoscience and the like, and because
of that they’re not getting ads or making any money, the writers
aren’t getting paid, and they don’t have much of an audience. That’s
the sort of thing you have the luxury to do on a personal hobby blog
without a payroll.

But in this case we trashed the guy before and after the neutral
description of the diet, which wasn’t so neutral anyway in that there
were sarcastic asides peppered throughout.

Check out YouTube and Flickr for “master cleanse”: For better or
worse, this is completely mainstream, with upper middle class people
buying Whole Foods 365 Grade B maple syrup by the gallon.

If you want to help out, go over to Wikipedia and try to edit some
sense into their Master Cleanse article. I’ve been making changes, but
there is some idiot reverting everything that is against the diet. We
need to gang up on him.

We have an order in with the Placer County, California, Department of
Vital Statistics for a copy of Burroughs’ death certificate, which
will hopefully yield some more material to trash the guy, since I bet
he died of something he claimed his treatments would cure.

Oy! Yes! Unbelievable! Not only was I taken to task for pointing out the stupidity of the diet, but I was blamed for being truthful, accused of being a “hobbyist”, and my legitimate objections were blown off as being, in essence, just so much whining.

I’ve added the full text of my reply here:

On Jul 19, 2008, at 6:51 AM, Mark Schrimsher wrote:

Yes, our normal pattern is to neutrally describe something like this,
and then after that to offer more op-ed evaluation. There are other
sites that simply rant against pseudoscience and the like, and because
of that they’re not getting ads or making any money, the writers
aren’t getting paid, and they don’t have much of an audience. That’s
the sort of thing you have the luxury to do on a personal hobby blog
without a payroll.

Wait. You’re saying you’re presenting a crank diet plan, which is known and documented to be dangerous to those that use it, for the money?

Um.

That can’t really be the message you want to send, can it? I mean, you can’t seriously be sending me the message that you’re doing it for the money, can you?

But in this case we trashed the guy before and after the neutral
description of the diet, which wasn’t so neutral anyway in that there
were sarcastic asides peppered throughout.

You’d better explain that to the others who’ve followed up, defending him, then. (You might have noticed that mine is the sole ‘anti’ voice in the crowd.) Or would you prefer me to do it?

Check out YouTube and Flickr for “master cleanse”: For better or
worse, this is completely mainstream, with upper middle class people
buying Whole Foods 365 Grade B maple syrup by the gallon.

Okay, so somehow now it’s my fault that an entire retinue of undereducated people are starving themselves at the behest of this guy?

Listen. Just because 50,000 coyotes are eating roadkill jackrabbit doesn’t mean I should do it too, even if I’m a goddamned coyote.

If you want to help out, go over to Wikipedia and try to edit some
sense into their Master Cleanse article. I’ve been making changes, but
there is some idiot reverting everything that is against the diet. We
need to gang up on him.

No, no, no, no, no. If YOU want to help out, it is YOUR responsibility NOT  to publish apparently-sustaining works on these diets, particularly not those that CALL THEMSELVES A HOW-TO, as your article does, under the aegis of a site that dispenses otherwise-valid dietary advice.

We have an order in with the Placer County, California, Department of
Vital Statistics for a copy of Burroughs’ death certificate, which
will hopefully yield some more material to trash the guy, since I bet
he died of something he claimed his treatments would cure.

You should have waited to go to ‘press’ until after you had that. As it is, you’re trying to make me out to be the bad guy, the lone crank, when you *know* I am right. Look again at the comments on the article, and ask yourself who’s really being irresponsible here.

Folks, I could really use some help here in shutting down this stupid idea that Burroughs’s diet is somehow valid. EVERY OTHER COMMENT on that article is favorable. Calorie Lab is being insanely irresponsible in their stand, and their unwillingness to back down, post a retraction or even publicly acknowledge their mistake could compromise the health of dozens, or possibly hundreds.

Their hand-waving that they’re waiting for a coroner’s report is utterly irrelevant. They’ve published shoddy advice as a diet plan, it’s being supported by other readers (look at the other comments on the post), and they’re trying to make me out as being the villain here.

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Atheist Nexus.

Do it. I did.

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Hit this link and listen to her piece under the ‘Timeless’ header; or just hit this.

That was last week, right?

h/t Warren

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Thursday he was in rare form, and opened with a nice salvo:

Another day in the Land of Inversion, where the obvious is not an option. I heard more interviews with learned politicians informing me that “drilling for oil” will not affect anything, least of all the quantity of oil. We must apparently wait until 2015, when a magic engine that runs on unicorn flatulence is invented. I have to ask: why is anyone investing in unicorn flatulence today, when it won’t make any difference for several years? The answer’s simple: the engine will Appear at the chosen moment, borne from the clouds by starlings, but only if we have repented of our foul ways, and the last of the sinners has left the cul-de-sac to reside in a home located a sustainable distance from his or her place of employment.

Ah, there’s nothing like a slice of finely-tuned rhetoric to start an intellectual feast. The gloss is mocking the belief that terminating our use of petroleum is a mythical magic bullet which will somehow see us into a golden age of energy independence — at least, in the minds of some — and his objection to that idea is valid. There really are people out there today who seem to believe in magic, who seem to believe that a total shutdown of oil use in the US will lead us into a rainbowed horizon of crepuscular-rayed effulgence. The suggestion that anyone who thinks we might want to continue working with petrochemicals is essentially a senile foolish coot is a nice icing on this confection, and is again probably valid.

I recall that a few years ago there was a big push among the greenish in favor of biofuels. When we started using them, the response seemed to be favorable, but no one really seemed to think about the hidden and collateral costs. With as much as 1/3 of the next year’s corn crop being committed now to feeding trucks, we’re already feeling the effects of food costs rising. I caught an article earlier this week talking about how catfish farms in the southern US are closing down because they can’t afford the catfish feed, which is apparently corn-based; that surprised me. I didn’t expect the repercussions to be that fast, and certainly not that oblique.

But from domestic issues we have a strange extension to world politics:

In Israel, for example,  this horrible prisoner swap -  child-killer exchanged for murdered soldiers. The fellow is welcomed home as a hero by Hezbollah and Lebanon’s Prime Minister and President, because in the Land of Inversion, heads of state clear their calendar when child-killers breathe the sweet air of freedom again. It’s all relative, really. One man’s child-killer is another man’s freedom fighter, and if you point out that  the “another man” is a Jew-hating idiot fanatic who’d be proud to blow up the Holocaust Museum in DC and take out a busload of Iowa tourists, you’re ignoring the significant impact this exchange had on the Climate of Trust that will lead to peace.

Apparently domestic resistance to opening oil drilling is equivalent to celebrating the release of a foreign killer. I’m having a hard time making the correlation.

But from here he goes directly into Godwin:

If Eichmann was still around there would be people lobbying for his release. Hadn’t he suffered enough? What’s gained by keeping him in jail, after all? This is the peculiar logic of the Land of Inversion: there’s a certain moral legitimacy that falls lightly on someone’s shoulders if he’s in jail. The crime is soon forgotten, and we’re left with the sad sight of someone languishing – they’re always languishing – in a grim prison.

Well, if he can pull out some heavy artillery, so can I. This last week we were treated to the release of interrogation video of a GITMO prisoner, in this case a Canadian citizen who also happened to be sixteen years old when he was detained by the US. He’s still at GITMO, and is now 21 years old.

Sometimes people actually do languish in grim prisons. The difference is that the Israeli prisoner exchange (which was even reported in Iran as being unfair to the Israelis) deals only with Middle East problems. The GITMO case involves an incarcerated boy, a citizen of an allied nation directly sharing a border with us, and that it was our government, acting on our behalf, which imprisoned this kid for five years and counting. I’d say that’s a damn sight more relevant.

And then another strange digression:

Meanwhile, over in Blighty: every day brings another story that suggests they could power the lights on the Strand by harnessing the RPMs of Churchill’s corpse. Some I believe; some are almost heartening, such as this story – a fellow got in trouble for taking pictures of his own kids in a park, but the police declined to run him in for violating the Male And Therefore A Likely Perv Act. (Can’t find link, sorry.) Every other day has a story of a man who fights off intruders in his house, and is charged with Making a Fist Instead of Forming a Fetal Ball and Waiting for the Bobbies to Come ‘Round and Pretend To Take Down a Description of the Attackers.

Aha, now it’s becoming more clear. The suggestion seems to be that resistance to drilling for oil = sympathy for murderers = one day we’ll all be weaponless and terrified like the folks in England, who can’t even take pictures in a park.

I confess I’m having a hard time making all those associations actually function, but then, I’ve always liked the British. (And, as it happens, Canadians.)

And, hey, you know — I have yet to see evidence of this “every other day” phenomenon he claims wherein British homeowners are terrorized by intruders and forced to acquiesce in a cowardly way until the coppers show up. Maybe I’m reading a different BBC World?

He closes with a hit on the Church of England, or specifically the Archbishop of Canterbury, who recently said that some aspects of Christian faith might offend Muslims. Here, Lileks and I are in perfect harmony when we chorus, well, duh.

In his latest missive, he has acknowledged that parts of Christianity may “offend” Muslims, which is a fascinating choice of words. It puts doctrinal differences into the realm of emotional reaction, and as we all know “offence” must be followed with apologies and seminars and outreach and an hour of steady banging of the head on the hard marble floor. No one has the right to give offense, but everyone has the right – indeed, the obligation – to be offended by something.

I guess the planes into buildings thing was just an extreme version of offense.¹ And he wraps it up with this, and even though I’m an atheist, I really loved it.

Given the Islamic belief that Christ did not die on the cross, it’s only a matter of time before the Church of England mandates small step-ladders beneath every crucifix. You can believe he got down and walked away, if you like. We’re not saying he did, but we wouldn’t want to offend anyone who insisted he did.

Though, to be fair, Muslims don’t disbelieve in the crucifixion. They just deny the resurrection. So the stepladder would be superfluous.

After a bit more, he closes more or less with this:

To sum it all up: sorry about that whole Christ-died-for-your-sins thing; we’ll try to keep it down. Can you join us to work for a ban on plastic grocery store bags?

So it would seem that resistance to drilling for oil is functionally identical to milquetoast Christianity in the face of Muslim extremism. Got it?

Huh. Neither do I.

====

1. Actually, probably not, at least not on bin Laden’s level. I don’t think he really believes the fundamentalist shi’ite he spews. 72 virgins for any martyr? Then why’s he so afraid to die? No, I expect bin Laden has as much faith in Islam as the Pope does in Catholicism: He doesn’t actually believe any of this shit, but it cows the ignorant masses of followers, gives access to extraordinary amounts of power, and, in the case of the Catholic Church, has fringe benefits in the forms of immeasurable wealth and the occasional altar boy.

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The horror, the horror of it all! Damn those liberal blacks and their mockery of Political Correctness! Fortunately we have Fox to point out these lapses in judgment; without their staunch defense of polite, non-incendiary language, why, we’d soon be overrun with the terrors of gay men referring to other gay men as fags, or women calling other women bitches, or, worst of all, presidential candidates calling their wives cunts.

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Well, okay, maybe not — and this isn’t a post about childhood nostalgia nor longing for the Days of Old When Things Were So Much Better, gag.

Several months ago I began re-ripping my CDs to iTunes. I began the project partly because I had a newer iPod, and partly because the original rips I’d done were a substantial compromise. I was using MP3 tech — hey, it was the best available in the Dinosaur Days of 2002 — and had tried to strike a balance between size and quality.

See, my CD collection amounts to about 10 days’ music, and that’s not easy to stuff into an iPod.*

So with iTunes 7 I started exploring AAC and discovered that at a higher bitrate I could still enjoy the original MP3 rips, with better quality and with only a marginal increase in overall size per track.

In the expedition I found Joy Division’s Substance, and got to thinking about New Order. Specifically, I stumbled across Run 2 on iTunes, and it reignited a lot of memories.

It’s strange to me now to think of how completely I had forgotten New Order and how significant they were in my 20s. But as I plunge back into their albums I keep rediscovering tracks I’ve known for years, tracks which lay quiescent in my memories. I was immersed in New Order for a long time, in a lot of excursions best left undocumented here, and my musical tastes were defintely influenced by them.

This isn’t a political post; and it’s not a cultural critique. It’s just my comment on how weird it is that I moved forward with Bach, with Kurosawa, with animé and with programming … and yet retained an affection for Monty Python, The Cure and Douglas Adams … and still managed to forget a set of musical expressions that genuinely affected me for at least half a decade.

New Order’s minimalist design musically has been present in my preferences, too, in the bands I like. The Cure, for instance, has clearly been influenced by them. And their album covers have even dictated recent projects I’ve done: Expressive, evocative and unusual approaches to messages and content.

And I’m not alone in this. Songs such as Age of Consent have been used recently to sell cellular phone service for Cingular, and Blue Monday is widely recognized as being the most popular single of all time.

But my very favorite track by them, ever, is Your Silent Face** from Power, Corruption and Lies.

I’m not sure why, but to me this song pretty well evokes the entire sense of an era. PC&L was generally a good album — but this one song is something I realized, after I listened to it again a few months ago, was embedded deep into my psyche. For its genre, within its expression, I think this is probably the most beautiful song I’ve ever heard.

No, it’s not Bach, nor is it Seal; nor is it Coltrane. It’s simply lovely, and one that I’m glad I found again after all these years.

====

* Well, not a paltry 10 GB iPod anyway.

** Lyrics:

A thought that never changes remains a stupid lie.
It’s never been quite the same.
No hearing or breathing, no movement, no colors.
Just silence.

Rise and fall of shame.
A search that shall remain.
We asked you what you’d seen.
You said you didn’t care.

Sound formed in a vacuum may seem a waste of time.
It’s always been just the same.
No hearing or breathing, no movement, no lyrics.
Just nothing.

The sign that leads the way.
The path we cannot take.
You’ve caught me at a bad time, so why don’t you piss off?

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In the last few weeks, after all, Obama’s campaign has been shifting to a “centrist” message¹, one which includes overtures to the ultra-right fringe.² He’s waffled on GLBT rights — though he has, um, come out against California voters’ desire to ban same-gender marriage in that state — and he’s actively scampering away from Muslimish appearances.

So it really isn’t too shocking that he’d think the Federal government’s decision to support religious institutions financially is perfectly fine. In the last eight years, after all, we’ve seen the Bush administration actively eroding Constitutional barriers which previously seemed as impermeable as, well, levees on the Mississippi. This further importunation by the wedge has a feeling of hopeless inevitability about it.

Contrary arguments seem to hold that religious charities are more diverse, more penetratively deployed and, possibly, more effective than monolithic government programs. This is almost certainly true. The downside of that, of course, is that it’s also almost certainly true that a faith-based charity will, on one level or another, proselytize — not necessarily deliberately, but undeniably tacitly.

And there are other problems.

In Virginia there’s an organization called Commonwealth Catholic Charities. They care for kids of various ages, all of them children of illegal immigrants. They feed, house and clothe some of the least-empowered human beings in American society — a society which seems hell-bent on persecuting them simply for having the temerity to exist. This is obviously a worthy mission, and one I could unhesitatingly applaud if it were secular.

The source of my hesitation, though, rests with the story that four workers at CCC were let go a while back for helping a sixteen-year-old girl obtain an abortion.

CCC is falling all over itself apologizing for the event, since under Catholic policy the fetus is always at least as important as the mother, and in many cases more so. Rather than take into account the ghastly burden an infant would be on a teenaged girl who has no legal right to live in the US at all, CCC is treating the abortion as a tragedy equivalent to infanticide.

I’m aware that the Catholic church demands this of its followers. Many other religions expect the same of their membership. The phrase sanctity of life is trotted out so often that it’s effectively a verbal blind spot; we gloss it over without generally asking whose life, precisely, is being considered in the equation. And because we have a tendency in the US to treat religious belief with utter respect — even when it is intellectually, logically, ethically and humanely void — we might be apt to shrug and say, hey, if the Catholics want to believe that, it’s none of our business.

But with Federal money being poured into church-driven charities, it actually is our business. One serious issue with what happened in the CCC case is that they are accepting Federal money, and it is illegal for Federal money to be used to obtain an abortion.

Illegality aside, the influence that CCC would otherwise have exerted on this girl — essentially forcing her to give birth — based solely on religious reasons should give any of us pause. That they are working under the aegis of being a faith-based initiative moneytaker is a considerable indictment of the entire concept that our government, which should be and must always remain secular, can play fringe games with religious establishment in this fashion.

The faith-based initiative is bad enough as it is. That Barack Obama wants to expand it should damn well be a major issue to anyone who plans to live in the US until at least 2012.

W.B. Yeats’s poem, The Second Coming, keeps coming back to me, more and more, as this dreadfully-overdrawn election cycle drags on:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Is this election going to produce a hawk in patriot’s clothing, or a new bush waiting to burn in the desert and lead a nation into forty years of blind wandering?
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1. Relatively centrist. Against the backdrop of our current social framework, he’s still too liberal for many; however, his “center” shift here is approximately as right-wing fruitcake as Jerry Falwell was when he started the Moral Majority (which is neither) in the late 1970s.

2. I realize this phrase might be read as elitist by some. I have no problem being labeled an elitist, as it implies anyone so labeling me is inferior to me by default.

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Some say his wealth and famous opportunism are reminiscent of the robber barons of yore. Yet here is a man who has set a goal to eradicate malaria. Rich as he is - his net worth is an estimated $50 billion - you can’t call the man greedy when he has pledged to give back to humanity all but a tiny fraction of 1% of that fortune.

Nutgraf aside, Bill Gates is a thief, self-aggrandizer and general all-around bastard. His stealing of DOS is a legendary tale; his knowledge in 1994 that Win95 would be a virus test bed of an OS is a matter of record; his callous disregard for aesthetics is obvious in every OS MS has ever made. To lionize him now and make him into a business poster boy is a bit like promoting Michelle Malkin as an ideal commentator, human being and Christian. In order to make it possible, you have to overlook basically everything that’s known, disregard years of recorded truth, and forgive every likely plausible future transgression as well.

But in the Land of the Buck, where the most profitable corporations in the last five years are all war profiteers (cf. Blackwater et. al.), I suppose MS is close to softcore porn for economists and those who like their money just a bit less bloody.

The fact that Bill likes to read and drive is just the iceberg’s tip. He’s a manipulating, scheming, greedy bastard who doesn’t spend one moment thinking about anyone but himself. If he’d been killed by a meteorite strike in 1991, you would not today have to scan every email you receive for viruses (Mac and Linux users still don’t); he doesn’t give a shit in an outhouse for what the rest of the world has to tolerate on his behalf under the tyranny of the worst OS in recorded history; and no amount of gilded storytelling will change the reality.

This is why no one with an MBA is fit to do anything but sit in a corner, drool and have baby food administered thrice daily via mouth syringe. My single sole hurdle every day in executing my work is some tard with an MBA who thinks his ability to obfuscate the most transparent sentences (”We’re leveraging our assets to craft a memo on that topic at this moment” as opposed to “I’ll put it on a sticky note”) is somehow worthy of respect.

It was marketroids that made Gates; it was marketroids that drank the MS Kool-aid.

I hate being a graphics nerd in a non-Mac world; but more, I hate being a code geek on an MS-ruled planet.

As an engineer, Windows offends because it’s awkward, clumsy and needy. It’s like a small child who, while you’re trying to have a conversation, keeps pestering you with “mom mom mom, look at me mom, look at what I’m doing, hey mom, hey mom, hey look at me, are you watching me, hey mom, mom, hey lookit this, hey mom, hey mom lookit this, are you watching, hey mom, mom, mom…”

(”Click OK to continue”)

As an artist, it offends me even more. MS is guilty of being ugly as a mule fucking a woman.

A scrawny mule. With mange.

Fuck Bill Gates, fuck his read-and-drive habit, fuck anyone who ever tries to defend him, and fuck his dirty money. And fuck CNN for turning him into a living martyr to capitalism’s most obscene, under-the-table excesses. I hope he dies fast. Like metastatic pancreatic cancer fast.

We never needed him, and we goddamn sure don’t need more like him.

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