Politics

Keith Olbermann’s Special Comment on Newt Gingrich

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

Keith Olbermann had a Special Comment on Newt Gingrich’s speech about Free Speech.

Crooks and Liars has the video and transcript.

Olbermann: “What a dark place your world must be, Mr Gingrich. Where the way to save America is to destroy America. I will awaken every day of my life thankful I am not with you in that dark place. And I will awaken every day of my life thankful that you are entitled to tell me about it. And that you are entitled to show me what an evil idea lurks there and what a cynical mind. And that you entitled to do all that thanks to the very freedoms you seek to suffocate.”

Politics

No Sex Until You Are 30?

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

I truly believe our government has lost it’s mind.

Here is a great column on the SFGate website entitled Sex Will Make You Go Blind
Single? Under 30? You are in grave danger. Your government says so. Please, stop laughing

…
It is the only viable explanation. It is the only way to account for something like, say, the latest twist in the Abstinence Education Program from Bush’s increasingly laughable Department of Health and Human Services, a $50 million slice of embarrassing government detritus that is now actually encouraging all states to tell their single, youngish residents that they should — how to put this so you don’t shoot coffee through your nose? — that everyone should avoid sex entirely, until they turn 30.

See? See your reaction? You are like: No way. You are like: Is the United States government really saying that? You are like: Laughter, a smirk, maybe a shrug and a sigh and a sad shake of the head and another glass of wine because, you know, what the hell is wrong with these people?

Maybe you think I am making this up. Maybe you think that our fair government, as sad and lost and nipple-terrified as it is, can’t seriously be suggesting that, to avoid STDs and unwanted pregnancy and unchecked misery in their obviously sad and irresponsible little lives, single people under 30 should not have sex, like, ever. And maybe not even then.

You would, of course, be wrong.

It’s for real. It’s an actual HHS dictum and there are people who actually believe it should be adhered to, and I’m right now guessing you broke this rule this very morning and if you didn’t you really, really wanted to, and if you’re over 30 and/or married chances are you are sitting there right now wishing you were still single and/or under 30 just one more time just so you could squishily, juicily break that rule again, oh my God yes please. Just a guess.

He’s right, that’s my reaction.

This is total insanity.

As they say over at Pandagon all the time, Why is everybody in the U.S. Government so concerned about what people do with teh cock?

It’s none of their fucking business!

Everybody with a functioning brain knows that abstinence only sex education doesn’t work! People are going to have sex, no matter what you tell them (and why shouldn’t they?)

So if you are really concerned with the teenage abortion rate, as all the fundimentalists claim they are, then you need to reduce teenage pregnancy. And if you want to teach abstinence, that’s fine, but you need to teach them about birth control and safe sex too, so that when they do have sex, which they will, they don’t get pregnant or contract an STD.

More from the column:

I remember Joycelyn Elders. I remember this feisty and outspoken surgeon general, appointed by Clinton back in ’93, who dared to suggest, in public, that masturbation is fine and healthy and nothing to worry about and perhaps should be taught to teens as a safer alternative to riskier forms of sex.

The nation blinked. The Christian right, of course, was apoplectic. Clinton was forced to ask Elders for her resignation. Later, on the lecture circuit, Elders famously said, “As long as I was in Washington I never met anybody that I thought was good enough, who knew enough or who loved enough to make sexual decisions for anybody else.” And there you have it.

I remember Ms. Elders (vaguely). I didn’t remember that she was forced to resign because of the damned fundies.

I don’t think anyone in the government should have any right to make any type of sexual decisions about anyone other then themselves.

Don’t like gay sex? Fine, don’t have it. But don’t tell other people they can’t have it just because you don’t like it.

And I’ll finish up with the end of the column:

I know, I know, it’s all a bit silly. After all, the Bush government is all about restriction, contraction, containment and self-righteousness and pain. They’re about as likely to pump out some positive sex vibes as the pope is to offer free condoms in the Vatican gift shop.

But Jesus with a Hitachi Magic Wand, one thing you can reasonably hope for is a government that’s at least remotely in touch and relevant, the slightest bit informed about how life really is and hence will stop throwing these obnoxious bones to the gasping sexless Christian right. This is what you hope.

Meanwhile, we’re still stuck with the same old questions: Is this really what our government is all about? Will this ever change? Can they really not hear all the derisive laughter?

Go read all of it. Now.

Politics

Now That Habeus Corpus is Dead, What’s Next?

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

According to Newt Gingrich, the First Amendment protecting my freedom of speech (and yours) needs to go.

The most ironic part of this is that he was giving a speech at a banquet to honor people who stood up for freedom of speech.

And yes, of course, the excuse is that tired old pony, Terrorism!

Gingrich, speaking at a Manchester awards banquet, said a “different set of rules” may be needed to reduce terrorists’ ability to use the Internet and free speech to recruit and get out their message.

Also tucked in there are these little gems:

Gingrich said he will not decide whether he is running for President until September 2007.

He also said court rulings over separation of church and state have hurt citizens’ ability to express themselves and their faith.

Does he really think he has a shot at being the President?

Make the bad man go away Mommy!

Life

Santa Claus vs. God

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

As I was laying in my nice warm bed this morning not wanting to get up, I started thinking about the lack of proof of God’s existence.

Then it struck me that I have more proof that Santa Claus exists.

  • You see Santa Claus at shopping malls all over the country. Have you ever seen God in the shopping mall?
  • You get presents from Santa Claus at Christmas time (at least if you have been good.) Have you ever gotten a present from God? (I know, I know, the pro-lifers say that every child is a gift from God. But that’s not true, children are the result of a known, repeatable, biological process.)
  • You can write letters to Santa Claus and ask for specific gifts. And sometimes you get them! When you pray to God for things, do you get them?
  • Heck, there was a photograph in the newspaper the other day of a whole bunch of Santa Clauses. Have you ever seen a photograph of God in the newspaper? For that matter, have you ever seen a photograph of God, ever?

This all stemmed from a conversation with my wife last night. She was trying to make the point that not believing in God was a belief system in itself. That it was believing that God doesn’t exist.

I was trying to explain that refusing to believe in something for which there was no proof was different than insisting that something doesn’t exist.

I don’t insist that there is no God, I just refuse to believe that He exists without any proof.

Santa Claus on the other hand…

Maybe Santa is God?

Life

10 Most Dangerous Toys?

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

From BoingBoing comes a link to the W.A.T.C.H. website where they list the “10 Most Dangerous Toys”

W.A.T.C.H. stands for World Against Toys Causing Harm – what a lame acronym.

And are they ever a bunch of safety-nannies. (Ninnies?) Sheesh.

Here are a few examples:

The Pyramid Stacker:

The Pottery Barn Kids stacking toy, which contains multi-colored tiers, includes pyramid-shaped rigid, wooden parts, intended to be stacked upon a solid-wood dowel. A toddler who falls on the inflexible toy could suffer severe impact injuries. The manufacturer fails to provide any warnings despite marketing the toy for toddlers as young as “12 months”.

OMG! Your kid might fall on the non-soft toy. You should only ever give your kids soft toys to play with. Like mud.

The Sky Blaster:

“Sky Blaster” is sold as an “All In One Rocket & Launcher!” The manufacturer warns, among other cautions, not to aim at “the eyes or face of a person as an injury could result”, and further instructs that users must “[a]lert all within range when launching Sky Blaster.” Remarkably, despite these concerns, children are also encouraged to “bend fins … to achieve spinning flights”.

OMG! Who would sell a rocket to kids!

The Fear Factor Candy Challenge:

These “Fear Factor” pouches containing “spine-chilling spiders”, “mystery meat”, and a “buzzard buffet”, pose a “candy challenge” to children, asking: “[I]s fear a factor for you?” The grotesque buffet, available in the toy aisle, is based upon the television series which sometimes features contestants competing to eat as much as possible in the shortest time. Toy aisles should not be used to encourage food-eating competitions, which invite potential choking and ingestion injuries, particularly for young children.

OMG! Not candy!

What a bunch of ninnies and safety-crats.

Wrap your kid in bubble wrap for the rest of his life why don’t you? What’s childhood without a maiming or a loss of an eye?

—-

While I don’t really advocate the maiming of children, I do have to say that I am continually dismayed by the parents who think that their children need to be protected from all possible injury.

Don’t wrap every corner in your house with rubber. Let your kid bonk their head once in a while.

How is your child going learn from their mistakes if they don’t get hurt?

Life

Burden of Proof

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

Someone else on the mailing list has joined in. He started out claiming that Creationism and Intelligent Design are not the same thing. After a couple of back and forths, we determined that his definition of ID was different than the current one, and he accepted that the current ID is the same as Creationism.

Then he explained his version of ID thusly:

I believe that God designed all the laws of nature, including evolution and natural selection. God is there in the picture the whole time. Laws of nature like evolution are all cogs that fit into the big machine that is the universe. When the species man became man the cognizant being, that is debatable. If you want I will share the theology behind that.

Someone else chimed in with:

Fascinating— I love this thread!

I guess it depends on what the definition of “cognizant being” is…
Do you mean humans/Man as hunter/gatherer?
The rise of Cities?
Or specialization; thus removing the substinence jobs of hunting and
farming from every man’s daily regimen?

He replied:

Actually, none of the above. Many Theologians would define that moment as the point when man was given an immortal soul, I would agree with them. What point in the great history of the planet did that occur, don’t know. If I had to hazard a guess I’d say maybe about 10,000 years ago, maybe less. From a theologic stand point, the traditional story of creation fits okay. Not the part about seven days, or taking Adam’s rib but instead the metaphor of why we are.

Then I chimed in with:

Ah, but I have a problem with this. What proof do you have that man has an immortal soul?

Verifiable, reproducible proof. Not the Bible. Not what the preacher man says. No leap of faith allowed.

I refuse to believe, on some human’s word, and without proof, that I have, or anyone else has, a immortal soul that is seperate from my body.

The first person that I was debating with then chimed in with this statement:

I guess you just to have to faith that your’s is the correct view, don’t you? ‘Cause you really don’t have proof that your view is correct either.

So this was my reply:

Ah, no. I don’t know that my view is correct. But, unlike the religious people, I can admit that I don’t know.

But as my view is that something does *not* exist, and you can’t prove that something does *not* exist, the burden of proof does not lie on me.

Examples: Prove to me that the Easter Bunny does not exist. Prove to me that there is not a teapot orbiting the sun exactly 180 degrees from the earth.

The religious people on the other hand, are claiming that something *does* exist: God, the soul, etc. Therefore the burden of proof lies on them. And yet they can’t come up with any evidence.

You don’t seem to understand that believing that something exists for which there is no proof is completely different than refusing to believe that something exists for which there is no proof.

They are not opposites. One is faith. One is reason.

The priest says “You must believe there is a God”

The faithful say “Okay”

The reasonable say “Show me”

If I were to tell you that I had invented a way to make my motorcycle run on plain water, but refused to show you how it was done, or to let you examine my motorcycle, would you believe me? Would you have faith in my invention?

Or would you be skeptical? (I certainly hope you would be skeptical.)

So the priests are trying to tell me that this invisible person is watching me, and will send me to this magical place (heaven) or this nasty place (hell) based entirely on how well I worship him and how well I behave. But they can’t show him to me (he’s invisible.) And they can’t offer any proof to me (other than some writing in a book that is 2000+ years old.)

And you think I should believe them? Or should I be skeptical?

But, you say, religion is different than making your motorcycle run on water.

Yes, okay. Why?

These are both claims made by men. Priests are men. The people who wrote the bible are men. The people who translate and interpret the bible are men. The only difference between these two examples is that religion has a special status.

Why does religion have a special status? That’s a big question, with lots of history behind it. But it really boils down to the fact that the religious leaders managed to convince the kings in days of old that there was a God, a Heaven and a Hell and that they should worship God or they would burn in Hell forever.

This all happened back in the Dark Ages, don’t you think it’s time to come out of the Dark Ages?

Computers

Wierd SPAM

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

I got this very weird SPAM in my webmaster mailbox today. It’s kind of fun to read actually.

Subject: Well, I’ve heard it pronounced both ways.

It’s all so simple when you put it that way, you poor, miserable bastards.

I have a very simple policy concerning unexpected doorbells: I treat them in the same way as television commercials, would-be hitchhikers, or lost children at the airport. It’s the sort of thing that was fascinating to visit, once.

Remarkably, neither of them called me on the ruse.

Most of them wouldn’t even have the bottomless iced tea.

RRR

Then there was some stock market spam.

Then followed some more stream-of-consciousness writing. Pretty fun to read actually.

I have manually uninstalled everything on the lists in your readme file.

Hopefully, I’ll have plenty of travel and hotel stories soon, and should return safely to our regularly scheduled nonsense late Friday night. As I slipped into a sweet food coma, I could just make out the smoke escaping my boss’ collar as he dropped his AmEx for the check.

If it rains, it rains.

But she was going to lose some sleep over it, dammit.

Having a clever turn of phrase deemed ‘functionally fixed’ seemed a mysterious and arbitrary decision, but we could hardly fight it. Or even a giddyup transplant.

I can’t possibly be the only one.

But when I mention it now, I spend the night on the couch.

Hope that other leg grows out for you. I’m not looking forward to that.

After satisfying all of your stated conditions, I have been unable to make your stupid installer work. Then again, I can barely tie my own shoes, so maybe I’m not the best person to judge by.

And anyway, screw ’em. And anyway, screw ’em. He didn’t get it to you?

well, in the fall, New England weather does whatever the hell it wants to do, often in the space of an hour.

By one pm on Friday, I was back on an airbus, speeding toward home.

After that, you can fall back on the ‘winter blahs’, ‘spring fever’, and summer vacation time to keep the shirking streak alive. It’s just that it’s a little creepy, too.

But the first meal, before the road has beaten you down and the trip has gone all to hell, is fair game. He’s never seen me limp before; maybe he thinks I’m faking it. On paper, Body Worlds is an educational and unique display of anatomical structure and comparative physiology. It’s what I imagine visiting a bordello would be like.

So I stumbled down to the door. But she was going to lose some sleep over it, dammit.

Me, I start celebrating on the Monday of Thanksgiving week, where ‘celebrating’ means ‘stubbornly slacking off in the spirit of the season’. By the time the encounter ended, she was in a huff, he was pissed at being woken up, and I was biting my lip, trying desperately not to break up laughing. In other words, not concerned at all.

What’s a ‘booby bar’? It’s the sort of thing that was fascinating to visit, once. They’d lived here considerably longer than our two weeks in town, and we trusted them to take us to Boston’s finest areas.

I’ll catch up with you this weekend. What’s a ‘booby bar’? Juicy details at eleven!

But it’s pronounced FAN-yuhl.

Or better yet, a good circus. Me, I start celebrating on the Monday of Thanksgiving week, where ‘celebrating’ means ‘stubbornly slacking off in the spirit of the season’.

Life

Dear Christians…

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

From over on The Indigestible blog (a new one – to me – discovered via a link from God Is For Suckers) comes an open letter to Christians:

I present to you an open letter in three parts, a sort of triune epistle issued in the hope that it will save one, just one of you from the trap of self-imposed ignorance that is religion, particularly the fundamentalist type. Following find my notes on “Intelligent Design”, prayer in school, and the mix of religion with politics.

Make sure that you read this comment, it is a very good one showing the difference between scientific method and faith.

Another good blog to add to the list.

Life

More Conversation About Atheism

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

Wow, these entries are flying fast and furious today. Here is some more conversation with my friend about Atheism:

I get the strong feelings Tim. You make your case very well. Are you waging a personal battle against it for some reason though? You don’t have to get into your reasons, it’s just that there is no way you or anyone is going to change it. In fact, as we’ve seen in recent years, the world is becoming more ideologically defined, for the worse, as you point out. I just don’t see the benefit of fighting against all religion. Thousands of years of human faith in something or someone larger than ourselves is a hell (heh-heh!) of a tide to try to turn.

If no one fights against it, how will change occur? I’m waging a personal battle against it because the religious politicians are trying to tell me how to live my life. They are trying to (and succeeding) pass laws based on their religious viewpoints. They are limited my freedoms based on something that I don’t believe in.

As someone stated earlier in this thread, the Pilgrims came over here to escape religious persecution. Our Constitution firmly lays out the separation of church and state. And yet they are passing laws that weaken this separation.

Stating that there is no way that anyone is going to change something (anything, not just religion) is, I’m afraid, a cop out. It’s the lazy way out. There have been many things that have been hard to change, yet have been changed. Segregation, aparthied, etc.

As far as bucking 2000 years of religion, what do you think the christians did? There were religions before christianity, and yet they bucked them.

As an aside, our you opposed to anything “spiritual”. Is that what atheism is about? Is it OK to worship trees? And then spike forests that are being logged to injure loggers? (That’s the only analogy that comes to mind right now, lame as it is)

No, I am not opposed to ‘spirituality’, what I am opposed to is belief without proof. Atheism is about not believing in god. Any god. Atheism is about rejecting the fact that we are taught to just believe that God exists because ‘We tell you he does.’ Where is the proof that he exists? All we have is stories in a book. That’s not proof.

If you what to think of atheists as worshipping anything (though atheists don’t worship) it would be the truth and scientific method.

And no, it’s not okay to spike trees to injure loggers. WTF does that have to do with atheism?

The risk I see is that becoming too involved in fighting against religion is basically a religion in itself, isn’t it? If I don’t have the energy or interest to be a devout Christian why would I expend energy fighting against it actively.

There is a difference between a ‘religion’ and a ’cause’.

A religion is based on blindly believing what you are told by an authority figure regardless of the facts.

A cause is something that you believe in because you have checked the facts and proven to your own satisfaction that it’s the truth.

JSYK, this is the most conversation and thought I’ve EVER had about faith in my life. Including confirmation classes and whatever we did before we got married, in our Lutheran church.

Heh. I’ve been doing a lot of reading of atheist blogs and books recently, but this is also the longest conversation I’ve had about it.

It is helping me clarify my position though.

With regard to several of the bullet points you make, I can see how, even without religion involved, these are issues that will generate strong opinions for and against, simply as to what is right and what is wrong.

I have no problem with opinions on what is right and wrong, as long as they are based on sound ethical reasoning.

When people make statments like “homosexuality is wrong because the bible says so”, then I have a big problem.

Don’t quite know where to go from here, what do you think. Maybe it’s time to get some work done.

Maybe. I’m more than willing to continue this dialog if you like.

Just as something to make you think some more about this, here is a nice little story about saying the Plege of Allegiance. You know, the pledge we probably all said in school. The one that the religious groups managed to get the phrase “under God” added to in 1954. (See this for the background on that.) Read this story and see how it might make you feel.

I would highly recommend these books to anyone who thinks that religion is a benign force in the world:

‘Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism‘ by Michelle Goldberg (this one scared the shit out of me.)

‘The End of Faith‘ by Sam Harris

‘The God Delusion‘ by Richard Dawkins

There are also some really good athest blogs out there, some that I read
are:
Atheist Revolution
Atheist Ethicist
10,000 Reasons to Doubt the Fish
God Is For Suckers (this one is pretty in-your-face)

And for a good blog about what the religious groups are trying to do to
science (and other misc fun stuff to read): Pharyngula

Enjoy!