BBQ Cat

Our little fuzzy genius, Photon, alias "Squeakers von Squeakenheim", set his tail on fire again. This's the second time we've had that aroma of BBQ fur wafting through the house. One day I fear I'll see Photster streaking through the house with a self-induced inferno on his heels. Darwin in action, I guess.

Judeo-Christian fundamentalism is scientifically disproven.

You know, I love the way that science works, whereby things are only ever disproven, not proven. This's very powerful. It just occurred to me, as I was having supper w/ my beautiful wife, that not only are (Christian) fundamentalists wrong, but we know they're wrong. Pope Benedict has recently said that the Bible's statements shouldn't be taken as "scientific" statements describing a literal truth, and here he points at Gensis specifically. In my case, I don't have a particular gripe with Genesis per se, and, while I applaud his statement, I think there's a better tack to take as regards falling into the fundamentalist error. This error is at the crux of Protestantism, the idea that anyone should be able to read the Bible, when it was never meant as literal truth (including the Revelations of John of Patmos being included in the canonical books only w/ the specific understanding that they not be taken literally). An unfortunate result of the otherwise laudible democratization of Bible-readership, though, is exemplified by the Left Behind series and all the Apocalyptarian horse-manure from which it's grown. We all know that the King James Bible is not, in fact, a literal translation, but a poetic one. But, even if we didn't have the historical facts that point to this (and I don't have them at my fingertips to cite them), the translation is immaterial: the stories are not all factually true in the scientific sense. My counterexample, which I raise to the fundamentalists, comes thanks to good old Bill Cosby. I was thinking about his story of Noah and bringing in all the animals two-by-two--his joke goes to the difficulty of selecting one each male and female mosquito. It's a funny dialog. The thing is, though, that there is only one (vertibrate) animal species on the planet that has decended from a single male-female pair: cheetas. The genetic record conclusively demonstrates that cheetas suffered a total genetic bottleneck, but they're the ONLY animals we're aware of, humans included, for which this can be shown. All other (vertibrate) animal species alive today have groups of breeding pairs as their ancestors, or came down to such near-extinction during more recently recorded history. It's not that other species might be found to have had such a bottle-neck, but the sheer overwhelming percentage of species for which such a bottle-neck has been conclusively ruled out. If you assert, as do the Fundamentalists, that the whole Bible is the literal truth and Word, then such truth stands or falls on the validity of any portion thereof, and, since we know the story of Noah not to be literally true, we therefore know the Bible as a whole not to be so, even without the other evidence to the contrary (like, for example, the fact that the happy ending in Job wasn't part of the original text, &c).

This does nothing to refute any portion of Judeo-Christian morality. Mitzvahs are still Mitzvahs; Cheeks should still be turned, &c. But, it puts another skewer through the program of all the neuvo-Pharisees promenading around calling themselves "Christian".

Not for the squeamish

Calcutta hospital qualifies for Wes Craven status after a particularly gruesome preventable death. Pain can be lethal.

Someone in Iraq screwed up

It seems that in the assault in Fallujah, someone, my guess would be a crew-chief or ordinanceman messed up, and they dropped a bunch of willie-pete on the civvies there. According to the cited article, there's a cover-up going on about it. I hope that's true. There'll be huge numbers of folks citing conspiracy & the like. Sort of like the old 'The CIA denied it, so it must be true' reasoning, anything of bad press must have been on purpose, at least if you believe the mainstream media. I suspect that someone, rather than wait for the proper ordinance, said "Hell, we've got these laying around over here from back in the initial assault, why not just use 'em up?", and now folks're crying foul. Dropping WP on areas containing civvies isn't the best way to win hearts & minds, but hardly constitutes a war-crime or Abu Graib(sp?) Mark II. Let's hope the cover-up succeeds so the guy who screwed up can get by with just a scolding instead of being court-martialled.


And also so we don't end up with yet another black-eye in the press to distract from the good that's being done there.

San Francisco rearview

The prospect of leaving San Francisco in a year or so has been filling me with some premature nostalgia. But no more. Just under 60% of San Franciscan voters have chosen to make handgun ownership illegal. Because of course, all criminals in the city, with nothing but the best intentions for society in their hearts, will turn in all their weapons and stop attacking people. Just like a few other misguided parts of the country, we're now a Mandatory Victim Zone. How I loathe people who'll happily ignore the upcoming preventable rapes, beatings, larcenies and murders in order to cling to their utopianist fantasies. Doesn't anyone remember the first country to do this, and the results of its doing so? I'll give you a hint, if it hadn't successfully disarmed its citizens (earning its leader Time Magazine's "Man of the Year Award", by the way), six million Jews wouldn't have gone on state-sponsored train-rides to their deaths.

And to top it off, a "symbolic" proposal that military recruiters not be allowed to contact children at public schools. It would be bad enough that the people here don't realize what value military recruiting serves now that we've got an all-volunteer military. Without this outreach & salemanship from our military's recruiters, all you'd have in the armed forces would be those forced into it by poor economic prospects, which is not at all what a modern military needs, much less what a bountiful state requires if it is to have the Cincinnati it needs (as in Cincinnatus, not the city). That would be bad enough, especially from folks so misguided as to think that forcibly removing the tools people need to defend themselves will keep them safe. But consider, it's more cinical than that. It's a "symbolic" regulation because it won't be enforced. It's completely acknowledged that enforcing this regulation would cause San Francisco schools to lose a chunk of federal funding, and so, even though it has been voted into law, its own proponents don't want it enforced. That's right, the people have spoken, and expressed their misguided will, and as a result, that decision will be ignored by politicians afraid to be criticised for the consequences of doing their jobs. The city that asks its citizens ("subjects" might be a more apt term) to trust the government to enforce the laws well enough to lose their ability to protect themselves specifically plans on not enforcing its own laws. "It's ok, folks you can trust the law. Or, at least, the laws we find convenient." I respect a principled stands, no matter how moronic I might believe its cause to be. People who're willing to stick to their guns (oops, um, stick to their, uh, spatulae?) for something they believe in deserve respect. But the folks here are out right now applauding each other for passing the measure, even though its proponents advertised ahead of time that they lack the spine to actually take the principled stand they've espoused. The cowards can only hint at the stand they would make if indeed they actually had principles.

I'm utterly disgusted.

Solar System to Scale

For all you (local) astronomy nuts, here's something to make the kids really understand how big this place really is.

The House

We received a wonderful tour of our house from Rushe, and I think Maddie & I "agree in principle" to something like the following:

1. No lemurs -- too college-dorm-roomy
2. Move clothes-washer hookup to garage -- requires plumbing work (2nd priority)
3. Reliable internet access/2nd phone line 1st priority so I can move in and immediately work
4. Wainscoting or chair-railing
5. Since the ceilings are so low (from S.F. standards) skip crown-molding & install picture-railing instead as near to ceiling as possible.
6. Add small sun-room in place of back porch
7. Keep the (rather well-done) chain-link fencing, but use it as a trellis for creeping roses &c.
8. Yank up nasty carpet
9. Wait a long time before upgrading flooring, if ever
10. Let Maddie "go to town" in the herb-garden -- whatever she wants
11. Re-install non-load-bearing wall in "procrastinarium" and knock out closet, making it two rooms again
12. Skip adding a darkroom; use local public facilities instead.
13. Knock out cinder-block wall in front of house & replace with greenery
14. Install internal doors
15. Partition garage & use that space plus part of back porch to make dining room