Quantum Solos

Go West, Young Lad

2012-01-09T17:31:00.000-08:00

Western films have always held a special place in my heart. So many different types of stories can be told within a relatively limited, familiar setting. There's nothing so quintessentially American as a Western.

The genre saw its heyday in the fifties and sixties, but you still see one occasionally. I haven't seen very many old Westerns, because I rarely like any movie made before 1980 or so. But Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch is one I've seen, and holy shit is it good. This movie has a level of violence that's shocking to my jaded 2012 sensibilities; imagine the impact in 1969. Sergio Leone's Man With No Name trilogy was equally well-made.

But, as a child of the nineties, the first Western I ever saw was Unforgiven. Clint Eastwood can direct as well as act, as he shows with this film. Unforgiven takes some familiar elements we've seen in Westerns before - grizzled old bounty hunter, old scores to settle, whores - and turns all of it upside down. The old West was not a nice place. Realism wasn't this gritty again until Batman Begins.

In 2002, mobster movie mastermind Martin Scorsese released Gangs of New York, a film that can be called the anti-Western in a very real sense. It's set during the same time period Westerns are often set, but instead of the wide, open spaces, everything is cramped and filthy. (Side note: Can Scorsese and DiCaprio make amazing movies together or what? The Aviator, The Departed, even Shutter Island were all fantastic.)

Despite the potential, we didn't get a really good Western video game until 2010's Red Dead Redemption. You should play it now if you haven't yet, because I am going to spoil the hell out of this game.

Red Dead Redemption has a story that only could have come from Rockstar, the masterminds behind Grand Theft Auto IV. The game opens in 1911, following gunslinger John Marston. He wants to kill bandit chief Dutch, but his motivations aren't clear at first. It's eventually revealed that Marston is a former bandit who's trying to put his past behind him. Some unsavory government agents have kidnapped his wife and young son until Marston finds and kills every member of his former gang.

After a lot of awesome open-world game goodness, Marston manages to kill everyone on his list. The quest marker tells you to ride home and get your family. In any other game, you would see a joyful family reunion, and the game would end. But oh no, this is Rockstar, and things are never that easy. Marston lives with his wife and son for a while, teaching his son to hunt and helping his wife with household tasks. But remember, this is a Western, and a main theme of Westerns is that you can never, ever escape your past. Redemption is not an option. Before too long, the government agents show up and give Marston the only thing he deserves: a bullet to the head.

The game picks up three years later, after Marston's wife's death. You're now playing as Marston's son, Jack. You can clean up any side quests as Jack if you want. But, one strange blip appears on your map as soon as you start playing as Jack. It's not marked as a story mission, it's marked as a side quest. This is the option to perpetuate the cycle of violence by killing the man who killed your father, or let bygones be bygones. I made the only real choice - to kill that bastard. It's presented as a duel, and after the deed is done, Jack walks past the camera, the words Red Dead Redemption flash on the screen, and the credits roll.

It's the only time I've ever cried during a video game.

Video Game Retrospective: Mass Effect 1 & 2

2011-08-24T17:42:00.000-07:00

I like RPGs, but too many of them have this generic medieval European fantasy setting. That's a shame, because the genre is capable of so much more. Like science fiction, for instance.

Call the first Mass Effect a flawed masterpiece. Developer Bioware was just coming off the successful Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic games and the ancient-China influenced RPG Jade Empire. So they had a real track record of RPGs with unconventional settings. As a sci-fi nerd, I was really looking forward to it. A sci-fi RPG with a deep, fully realized universe, believable characters, romance options, and pretty decent third-person shooting action? It's like they had looked into my brain's list of video game desires, and assembled a game especially for me.

And boy, did it ever work. The universe is utterly compelling. Take the story of the quarians, who invented this race of self-replicating machines, who then proceeded to take over the quarians' homeworld. Now, they're a refugee race that lives entirely on a fleet of 50,000 starships. Or the story of the krogan, who were winning a brutal war until scientists developed a "genophage" that significantly decreased their birthrate. Now the krogan are a dying race.

Other aspects of the universe can be a little derivative - or simply "influenced" by older sci-fi universes, depending on how generous you're feeling. The whole idea of humanity being the new kid on the block in this wider galactic civilization is right out of Star Trek, for instance.

But actually playing the game was sometimes a less than pleasant experience. It had severe, noticeable texture pop-in that could be really jarring. Also, the game masked loading times with super-long elevator rides, which would be fine, except it meant that installing the game to your hard drive would not decrease loading times. And don't get me started on the Mako - a little car you drove around planet surfaces that had the worst driving controls imaginable.

Maybe that seems like a lot of complaining, but I really did enjoy the first game. The main story missions were all fun and very high-quality. The voice acting was all great, especially Seth Green as starship pilot Joker and the always reliable Keith David as Captain Anderson. You were also tasked with making several key decisions during your play-through, which would have major effects on how the subsequent games' stories would play out. And, of course, immersing yourself in the universe never got old. It's just a shame that it still had these other issues that made the game a less than stellar experience.

Until Mass Effect 2, that is. They fixed everything wrong with the first game. Everything. The Mako? Gone. Elevator load times and jarring texture pop-in? Gone and gone. Extremely boring side missions? Gone. What's left is a kick-ass sci-fi RPG with a heaping helping of third-person shooting action that rivals Gears of War.

The story is vastly improved from the first game. While that game tasked you with tracking down some random bad guy, Mass Effect 2 takes its structure from a heist film - spend much of the game recruiting your team, and finally do the suicide mission itself.

The characterization is some of the best I've ever seen in a video game. Every one of your team members are real people with personalities, not limp video game characters. This is in large part due to the character-specific missions, where your team member needs some help with some issue. These were all great, from Grunt's need to fell like a real krogan, to Mordin's desire to rescue an old friend, to Jacob's need for help with his stranded, possibly insane father. That last mission, in particular, was very fun, even if is an obvious homage to Apocalypse Now.

Choices are back in full effect. You're charged with making very serious decisions regarding all sorts of things. It's almost unbelievable how many plot threads they're going to have to account for in Mass Effect 3.

I've played through both games twice, first as a male, good character and then as a female, evil character. The gender of your character really only matters when it comes to who you can romance. It also cleverly changes some of your dialog options. However, playing as an evil character doesn't change nearly as much as I originally thought it would. Sure, some missions will play out slightly differently, but there aren't many ways playing an evil character will truly change the game. I realized that a "renegade" character, as the game calls it, isn't really evil per se, just more of a selfish bitch.

Play these games. Then play Mass Effect 3. You won't be disappointed.

Movie Review: Rise of the Planet of the Apes

2011-08-10T17:00:00.000-07:00

Planet of the Apes fanboys don't come any bigger than me. This has been one of my favorite movie franchises for as long as I can remember. It's telling that as I was in the theater watching Rise of the Planet of the Apes, I wasn't thinking at all about where this fits into the continuity of those movies, if it does at all. I was thinking about what a kick-ass movie it was. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a knockout, a slam dunk, a home run. It's everything I could have wanted from a latter-day Apes film.

James Franco stars as Will Rodman, a chemist testing a drug that may cure Alzheimer's. He tests it on chimpanzees, and one day takes home a baby chimp that inherited the effects of the drug from his mother. The baby grows up to be Caesar, who is super-intelligent thanks to the effects of this drug. After tragedy strikes, Caesar takes things into his own stinking paws.

The human characters are so-so. They're there more to move the plot along than anything else. James Franco is fine as the scientist playing God. Freida Pinto, the token love interest, does little more than stand around looking incredibly hot and spouting sci-fi cliches. ("You're messing with things that aren't meant to be messed with!") John Lithgow is natural as the dad with Alzheimer's.

No, the real characters in this movie are the apes, specifically head ape Caesar. Andy Serkis plays Caesar, buried under layers of motion-captured CGI. Serkis previously did similar roles as Gollum and King Kong. Here he makes Caesar, ironically, the most human character in the film. He says more with a few eyeball movements than most actors can with a whole monologue. It will be an extreme injustice if he doesn't get nominated for an Oscar.

Speaking of which, the CGI in this film is breathtaking. The CGI apes are almost indistinguishable from real apes. It's not just there to look pretty, either. This movie simply wouldn't work with less believable apes or, God forbid, humans in makeup.

There are little hints and nods towards the other movies in the series, but it's not distracting at all. I don't know if it's supposed to be a prequel or a reboot or what, but I do know it's a damn good movie that you owe it to yourself to see.

Amazon Kindle Review

2011-08-04T16:47:00.000-07:00

I've never been too interested in reading ebooks. I resisted the revolution, sticking to my outdated paper for as long as possible. But, the Kindle had a major revision and price drop last year, and I couldn't put off the inevitable any longer.

It's difficult to convey the physical size of the Kindle in just a picture. You really have to hold it in your hands. It's extremely thin - any thinner, and it would feel flimsy. The screen seems like just the right size - any smaller, and you would have to turn the pages too quickly. The Kindle won't fit in your pocket, but it's still smaller than a paperback book.

The advantage of dedicated e-readers over something like the iPad is the e-ink display. It really works. The first time I saw the Kindle, I thought it was a sticker or something over the screen. It looks just like a paper book. Maybe the only thing a little off is the background, which is a light gray color, not white. Also, every time you turn the page, the screen goes black for an instant before showing you the next page. It's a bit jarring the first few times, but I soon didn't even notice it.

Another advantage of e-ink is that it allows for tremendous battery life. It doesn't use power when it's just displaying words, so it can last a long time. I found Amazon's claim of two weeks of battery life with moderate to heavy use to be about right. Of course, this is nothing compared to paper books, where you never have to worry about battery life at all.

Actually putting books on the device is so easy, my grandmother could do it. If you want to buy the books from Amazon's store, it's all built in and automatic. The store is organized reasonably well, and it's easy to search or browse or what have you. One feature I really like is the ability to download the first few chapters of any book in the store for free.

Putting your own books on the Kindle is still easy enough. I suggest using the amazing piece of free software, Calibre, for this purpose. Think iTunes, but for ebooks. Unfortunately, sometimes file formats will be an issue. There's no universal mp3-like format for ebooks, so some formats work on this device and others work on that device. The Kindle can natively read the .mobi format. It's relatively common, but not universal. A more common ebook format is .epub, which is what the Nook and Apple's iBooks platform both use. The Kindle can't read .epub books, so you have to use Calibre to convert. Sometimes this works fine, but other times the formatting can get messed up.

PDF files are the other common ebook file format. The Kindle does have PDF support, but since most PDF files were made for a computer screen, this is less than ideal. You have to use the buttons to zoom in and out and navigate around the document, which is a big pain in the ass. I never bother with PDFs on my Kindle.

I also frequently copy-paste long texts from the Internet to read on the Kindle. I do this almost any time I come across a long article I want to read. The e-ink screen is just that good. I've also gotten into reading fanfiction on my Kindle. Through some experimentation, I've found the best way to do this is to copy-paste the text into Word, then save it as an .html file. Then use Calibre to transfer it to the Kindle.

It's difficult to understate how awesome Calibre is. I couldn't imagine trying to read ebooks without it. It even has this "fetch news" feature that will pull content from online newspapers and magazines, and put it into a Kindle-friendly format. If there's a website you visit frequently that doesn't already have fetch news support, it's an easy enough process to add it to Calibre using RSS feeds.

So, the Kindle's great if you want to read ebooks, but do you want to read ebooks? That's a tougher question. An advantage of reading books over say, playing PSP is that you could do it at the beach or in the bath and not have to worry about getting water or sand on it. The Kindle changes that. I'm wary about taking it to those places, because just like a cell phone or any other device, water is very bad.

The Kindle is also not ideal for textbooks or reference books. I read a lot of those "...For Dummies" books, and I like to flip around those a lot. Trying to find a specific page on the Kindle is very difficult. It's fine for novels and other books that are meant to be read straight from beginning to end, but for anything else I'll still take paper.

There's also still some sentimental attachment to paper books. I like holding it, looking at the cover, etc. I like putting a book I've finished on my shelf to remind everyone how smart and well-read I am. And it's still very weird paying money for something I can't hold in my hands.

So if you want to start reading ebooks, the Kindle is probably your best bet. But whether reading ebooks is desirable is another issue.

Other writing

2011-07-18T02:00:00.000-07:00

Hello! I've been doing some video game writing at various places. For the curious:

http://www.psuni.com/what-the-psp-did-right-and-wrong-10032/

http://www.psuni.com/l-a-noire-review-9700/

http://captainstarball.com/opinion/supreme-court-gets-it-right

http://captainstarball.com/opinion/more-devs-should-follow-la-noire-s-brilliant-use-motion-capture

Immigration

2011-07-14T02:34:00.000-07:00

This is a pretty spectacular story. This guy, Jose Vargas, is a prominent journalist with the Washington Post. He reveals in that article that he is an illegal immigrant. His parents sent him here illegally as a child, and he has been here ever since. He goes through his struggles as he tries to hide his immigration status from various employers and government agencies.

He ends up advocating for the Dream act, a bill proposed in Congress that would grant citizenship to any illegal immigrant who was taken here as a child, if they get a college degree or serve in the military, and have a clean criminal record, among other requirements. It makes sense. If your parents took you here when you were two years old, you are, for all intents and purposes, an American. The Constitution grants citizenship to anyone born on American soil, regardless of parental immigration status. Whether you were born here or were taken here as an infant appears to be a meaningless distinction. Deporting an adult who was taken here illegally as a child amounts to nothing more than punishing him for the mistakes of his parents.

On the other hand, I understand the reluctance to pass the Dream act. Maybe its passage would guarantee hundreds of thousands of children would be sent here illegally by their parents. After all, one thing all parents want for their children is a better life. And the Dream act would prompt many overseas parents to send their children here illegally, just for that small chance of gaining American citizenship.

Immigration is a difficult issue to grapple with. As someone lucky enough to be born on American soil, I've never had to worry about things like this. Vargas' article was a real mind-opener for me. I sympathize with his plight, but I understand the two sides of this coin.

You stink of human!

2011-07-05T21:20:00.000-07:00

I normally don't like movies made before I was born. It's just not my thing. They're usually too slowly paced, with dumb stories, etc. However, there are a few exceptions. Citizen Kane, The Godfather, and the Planet of the Apes series. What an awesome science fiction franchise.

It all started with the novel La Planète des singes by French author Pierre Boulle. It concerned a French astronaut who landed on a planet populated by intelligent apes. It wasn't bad, but it's clear Boulle was more of a social satirist than a sci-fi writer. That was a pretty crazy nugget of a story, however, and a loose film adaptation was released a few years later.

The original Planet of the Apes film is the most famous Apes property, and for good reason. Charlton Heston starred as Taylor, an American astronaut who left Earth because he believed "there has to be something better than man." Due to the effects of time dilation, several thousand years have passed since he left Earth. He lands on what he thinks is another planet in orbit around a star light years away.

Soon enough, he's captured by intelligent apes who hunt humans for sport and scientific examination. Two chimpanzee scientists, Cornelius and Zira, take interest in Taylor for his ability to speak. The orangutan statesman Dr. Zaius, however, believes Taylor to be a threat, because he knows the true story of his planet. He knows man is a cruel animal, and he cannot allow Taylor to live if he wants to protect ape-kind.

Dr. Zaius is the best part of the movie. He's the best kind of villain - he's right. About everything. He's played as the film's antagonist, but he's only doing what he thinks is best for his species. His methods might be a little rough, but the only reason he's not the protagonist of this film is because of his species. Dr. Zaius is both the Minister of Science and Chief Defender of the Faith, which Taylor points out as being a contradiction. Talk about subtle references to creationism.

Rod Serling co-wrote the movie, and it really does feel like one long Twilight Zone episode. The early parts of the film have this kind of creepy "what the hell is going on here?" type of feel. The final, haunting image is also pure Serling. I also really like the division of species displayed in ape society, based on real ape characteristics. Chimpanzees are the scientists and intellectuals, orangutans are the statesmen and philosophers, and gorillas are the warriors and manual laborers.

The film spawned four sequels, some of them good. The first sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, concerned Heston lookalike Brent, who crash lands on the planet of the apes looking for Taylor. Taylor disappears under mysterious circumstances, and Brent has to find him. There are some heavy-handed references to the Vietnam War, with bloodthirsty gorilla warlord General Ursus giving a rousing speech early in the film. This was easily the best scene in the whole movie. It's eventually revealed that Taylor was captured by some human mutants who live underground and worship an atomic bomb. (!) Talk about WTF. The bomb is detonated at the end of the movie, destroying the world. This was supposedly a last-minute script revision by Heston, who wanted to prevent any further sequels. It didn't.

Beneath is a weird, weird movie. Mutants? Bomb worship? It's also kind of surprising they were able to get away with such a bleak ending in a mainstream Hollywood film. It also suffered from a significantly lower budget than the first movie, so it has special effects that were bad even by 1970 standards. Fans of the first movie will be entertained by this, but it didn't set the world on fire.

The next sequel starts with a deus ex machina. A lot of movie plots are resolved by deus ex machinas, but Escape from the Planet of the Apes sets its plot in motion by one. The chimpanzee scientists Cornelius and Zira have somehow retrieved the spaceship Taylor crash landed in, got it to work, and flew it through space and back in time to 1970s Los Angeles. So these apes, who were amazed at a paper airplane in the first movie, have somehow rediscovered space travel. Yeah, right. There's also this mysterious chimpanzee scientist Dr. Milo, described as the brains behind the whole operation, but he dies early in the film, so he never explains exactly how he accomplished this amazing feat. This premise also fails from a sci-fi perspective. The effects of time-dilation due to relativity, making Taylor travel forward in time, are explained readily enough in the first film, but going back in time makes no sense at all.

However, Escape is a pretty good movie once you get over the really dumb premise. It takes many of its cues from the original Pierre Boulle novel. The apes are first studied as curiosities, then paraded around as celebrities, and finally hunted as threats. More complexity is added when Zira gives birth. Dr. Otto Hasslein, played with some intensity by character actor Eric Braeden, does the Dr. Zaius thing this time around. Hasslein, the science adviser to the president, believes, rightly, that the apes come from Earth's future, and that either their descendants or apes they teach to talk will one day overpower man as Earth's dominant species. Thus, he believes the apes should be exterminated. Like all good villains, you can understand his perspective and his goals, even if you might disagree with some of his means.

The next film, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, concerns Caesar, the ape born in the previous movie. Humans have begun to enslave apes, and as the only ape capable of speech, it's up to Caesar to start the revolution. It uses the old cliche of a randomly totalitarian government to create dramatic tension, but otherwise it's a pretty good movie.

Conquest is a dark, dark movie. There are some obvious parallels to the civil rights era and to various Communist revolutions in the intensity and nature of the apes' revolt. Nonetheless, it can be really uncomfortable to watch sometimes. Who, exactly, are we supposed to root for when an abused gorilla is shown murdering a police officer? This is a movie with no easy answers. Roddy McDowall played Cornelius in the previous movies, and he returns in Conquest as ape revolutionary Caesar. It's a very different performance. Caesar's final speech at the end of the movie is absolutely bone-chilling. It's not affected by some "now let's have compassion" lines hastily added in post-production.

The final film, Battle for the Planet of the Apes, is about one final battle between humans and apes. Caesar is now the leader of ape society, and he leads the charge against some final bands of humans. There are short scenes set further in the future, about 1200 years before Taylor, at the beginning and end of Battle, that show the Lawgiver. The Lawgiver is sort of an ape prophet; the apes are shown bowing to statues of him in the first two movies. Here, he's preaching friendship and harmony, while in the first two movies the apes twist around his message and say he advocated hatred and killing of humans. It's a really interesting dichotomy.

Other than the Lawgiver scenes, however, Battle isn't a good movie. First, it's clear they were working with a bare-bones budget. The makeup and sets are laughable. The script is kind of dumb, and the whole thing just feels unnecessary. Only hardcore Apes fans need apply.

So that's the original Apes film series. It's pretty amazing that anyone new to the series can start with any film, keep watching them in order, and the last one will always tie in to the next one. No other film series does anything like that. The first movie is fantastic. It has everything you could want out of a sci-fi romp. The sequels are pretty good, especially Escape. They'll stand forever as one of the best sci-fi film series of all time.

But wait, the Apes saga was far from over. It's a valuable property, so it was resurrected in 2001 by Tim Burton. His "re-imagined" Planet of the Apes movie uses that core nugget of an idea from the novel and first movie to make a whole new story. Mark Wahlberg stars as Leo Davidson, the American astronaut, and also features Tim Roth as villainous chimpanzee General Thade, and a prominent Michael Clarke Duncan as a high-ranking military gorilla.

This movie gets a lot of hatred on the Internet, but I don't think all of it is deserved. No, it's not as good as the original, but that's not a fair comparison. That was the first ever Planet of the Apes movie, nothing can ever repeat that. This one is not supposed to be a simple remake. It's just another loose adaptation of the novel, like the original movie. I think the world is big enough that more than one film adaptation of the same source material can coexist.

Okay, it was just kind of a dumb summer popcorn movie, but it did have some things going for it. First, except for Mark Wahlberg, the performances were pretty good. I especially like Tim Roth as General Thade. The original movie portrayed chimpanzees as being all-around smart and good, but chimps can be kind of nasty. Watch a documentary on chimpanzees, and you'll see that they kill their young and can be obsessed with sex and violence. Tim Roth was able to capture this creepy nastiness very well. Also good was Paul Giamatti as a sleazy orangutan slave-trader, Michael Clarke Duncan as Thade's right-hand ape, and Charlton Heston in a cameo role as Thade's father.

The makeup and ape movements were fantastic this time around, as well. The original film series just had humans acting human-like, but in ape makeup. This movie gets the actors to act ape-like - shrieking, sniffing, jumping, and walking on all fours. Someone did their homework. Plus, the makeup is very realistic in this movie.

That says nothing about the plot holes big enough to drive a car through, and the eye-rollingly bad action movie cliches. Like: the kid who wants to fight the apes, but as soon as he gets out there, his horse falls over and Mark Wahlberg has to go rescue him, which he does, just in time. Snore. Overall, the remake is good for some mindless fun, but not much more.

Can you tell I'm excited for the new movie, Rise of the Planet of the Apes? Because I am.

Emotions

2011-07-03T03:57:00.001-07:00

Another webcomic from the master! (Click to enlarge)

Survive This

2011-06-23T02:35:00.000-07:00

It's easy to mock reality television. I've done it before, in my now famous look at Toddlers & Tiaras. But there's one reality show that lies at the total opposite end of the spectrum from that disturbing slice of Americana: Survivorman. I recently rewatched the entire series on DVD. Here's why it's so awesome.

The basic premise concerns this survival expert, Les Stroud, who gets dropped off in the wilderness with very few supplies and some cameras. His job is to survive for seven days, and film the entire ordeal. He's stayed in places like Australia, the Arctic Circle, Papua New Guinea, and the Kalahari Desert. In one memorable episode, they put him on a raft in the middle of the ocean.

It's extremely fascinating watching Stroud try to acquire food and water. This is man and nature at its most pure. We feel for him, even though we know his ordeal is entirely self-imposed. We smile when he finally succeeds in getting a fire going, and we feel horrible when he fishes for hours without a single bite. Stroud is a real man's man: just him and his wits against the power of Mother Nature. Just look at that cold, hard glare!

A big part of the appeal, for me, lies in the simplicity of Stroud's goals. He's not trying to win a million dollars or anything. He's just trying to acquire the basic necessities of life: food, water, shelter. With our video games and computers, it's easy to take these things for granted. Reality TV doesn't get any more real than this. That's him, throwing up in the woods alone.

There were only three seasons of the show, comprising about 20 episodes. Stroud said it was just too much of an ordeal to keep going. But that's okay. This series will live forever as one of the all-time best.

Harry Potter Sucks

2011-06-18T20:06:00.000-07:00

I hate Harry Potter. Don't worry, I'm qualified to make that judgment; I've read all seven books. You may ask why I would read all seven entries in a series I despise. Good question.

I started reading the first few books as they came out when I was still pretty young, probably elementary school age. As they kept coming out, I kept reading them. But then sometime around the fourth or fifth book, I realized, wait a minute, these actually aren't very good. But by that time Harry Potter was turning into this huge juggernaut with cosplaying and midnight releases and big-budget movies and all the rest. I knew I had to keep reading the books if I wanted to keep effectively mocking pop culture. So I finished the series. And here's my two cents.

The biggest problem with Harry Potter is all the stuff that just kind of comes at you. Elves and giants and dragons and unicorns and werewolves and all these other fantasy tropes just kind of come in and out without much rhyme or reason. It's just overwhelming. Before you get used to the last fantasy cliche, Rowling throws you another one. And another one. Now, if you're a kid, you might be delighted by all these fantastical creatures. But adults should demand more creativity from their fiction.

And why is the government of the wizarding world this brutal police state? Why don't they have democracy or something? The Ministry of Magic is always portrayed as at best apathetic, at worst actively evil. They're constantly shown as having no problem spying on citizens, using propaganda, and locking up political dissidents. Actually, I can tell you why the government is so oppressive. It's because Rowling is such a lazy writer. Having an evil government is always the easiest way to put the characters in sticky situations.

Another thing I've always found annoying is how excessively, defiantly English the books are. The whole premise surrounds taking a train through the English countryside to an old English boarding school. On several occasions Harry and his friends use their magic to heat up tea for supper. I distinctly remember reading once that the Minister of Magic, the ostensible leader of the wizarding world, has regular contact with the prime minister of England. Not the US president or the secretary-general of the UN. No, the infinitely less powerful British prime minster.

I guess the Harry Potter series makes for good kids' reading. Kids probably wouldn't be annoyed by these problems and would just enjoy this story of the average boy who has fantastic adventures. But anyone older than 14 who reads Harry Potter needs to seriously reexamine their lifestyle.

Teaching

2011-06-02T02:31:00.000-07:00

I normally enjoy PZ Myers' blog, but occasionally he says some dumb things. Like here. He compares teachers to soldiers, quoting the New York Times to make his point:

If the results aren't there, we blame the planners. We blame the generals, the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No one contemplates blaming the men and women fighting every day in the trenches for little pay and scant recognition.

And yet in education we do just that. When we don't like the way our students score on international standardized tests, we blame the teachers. When we don't like the way particular schools perform, we blame the teachers and restrict their resources.

It's such a straw man. Who, exactly, blames teachers for low-performing schools? Show me someone somewhere stating that schools would get better if only we spent less money on education. That doesn't happen. In fact, the opposite is true. There are very few real advocates of standardized testing. No Child Left Behind has been a laughingstock for as long as it has been around.

Myers, for his part, simply calls for more money from the government. Of course he does, he's a liberal, and all liberal blogs seem contractually obligated to demand more and more government spending. I'm just getting real sick of this argument that education quality is nothing more than a function of the money spent on it. In fact, the US has the second highest per capita education spending in the world.

Later on, Myers makes the audacious and never-before-heard claim that teachers are underpaid:

The average starting salary is $39,000; the average ending salary — after 25 years in the profession — is $67,000. This prices teachers out of home ownership in 32 metropolitan areas, and makes raising a family on one salary near impossible.

I don't even understand what "underpaid" is supposed to mean in a free society. No one forced them to teach for a living. They do it because they love it, not to get rich. $39,000 sounds pretty good to me for a person just starting his career. I have a hard time understanding how making sure all teachers can drive around BMWs and wear Rolexes will make for a higher quality education.

Movie Review: Thor

2011-05-07T18:58:00.000-07:00

Attempting to build a shared film universe is risky. This is the first time anyone has attempted to do something like this, and I applaud Marvel for taking the risk. Thor is the latest entry in the Marvel film universe, and it's pretty good.

The titular Thor, the Norse god of thunder, (Chris Hemsworth) disappoints his father, king of Asgard Odin (Anthony Hopkins) by picking a fight with the Asgardians' ancient enemy, the Frost Giants. Thor is subsequently banished to Earth, where he must find a way back to Asgard. Meanwhile, Thor's mischievous younger brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) plots for the throne.

I get how explaining this plot in a few sentences makes it sound immensely stupid, but trust me when I say it all kind of works when played out on screen. The scenes set in Asgard share many elements fantasy - and Shakespeare - fans are familiar with, such as familial tension when it comes to ruling kingdoms. The set design and costumes are all spot-on. Director Kenneth Branagh (!) infuses Asgard with a real sense of awe. You can't help but feel that this a place of magic. The early scenes on Earth have a lot of fun with Thor's fish-out-of-water plight, just enough to not be annoying. The setting of remote New Mexico desert contrasts nicely with the magical Asgard.

The acting ranges from decent to pretty good. Chris Hemsworth certainly looks like a god. I found his character arc to be totally believable, which is saying something given the turns it takes. Natalie Portman is fine as the the token love interest, although the script tries to wring some emotional heft out of her relationship with Thor later on that it didn't quite earn. Anthony Hopkins is natural for the role of grizzled old Odin. The real star, however, has to be Thor's younger brother Loki. The script makes the character believable and sympathetic, not a cackling villain. You can understand his actions, even if you might not agree with them. Playing it like that was no easy feat, but Tom Hiddleston succeeds brilliantly. And the obligatory Stan Lee cameo is really funny this time around.

One of my biggest criticisms of the last Marvel Universe film, Iron Man 2, was all the time it spent reminding you about the upcoming Avengers movie. Parts of it felt like one big trailer for that movie. Although Thor does feature SHIELD and it enigmatic Agent Coulson prominently, there was very little in the way of advertisement for other films set in this universe. The name of the movie is Thor, and that's where the focus is. Mostly.

I saw the movie in 2D, because I've never thought the larger ticket price was worth having something pop out at you once in a while. It all looked good to me, so I'm glad I didn't pay the extra money. See it in 2D, if you decide to see Thor. And you should.

I don't watch TV ... does that make me cool?

2011-04-29T15:43:00.000-07:00

As my regular readers are well aware, there are many, many types of people in the world I can't stand: preachy vegetarians, people who use the word "veggies," people who audibly say "beep beep" when you're in their way, etc. But worse than all these are the ones who go around telling anyone who'll listen that they don't watch TV because they think that makes them cool and different and interesting. It would be funny if it weren't so pathetic.

Most of these "arguments" against any and all television hinge on the claim that all TV shows just make you dumber. Television is totally useless because it isolates you from your community and is just mindless entertainment.

I think that TV, like anything else, depends on how you use it. It can be a unifying force, if you want it to be. Take Chappelle's Show. This is a show that just about everyone under 30 remembers. Okay! What?! Yeaaa - yuh!! These simple phrases will forever bind our generation together and give us some common ground. And something like South Park is basically a political cartoon in animated form. There is something to be said for having this constant commentary on current events that everyone can relate to.

Now, I'm not saying that TV is always good, or that you should do nothing but watch it all day. I'm just saying it's not always bad. I also have a real problem with the elitism of those who say they never watch it. It doesn't say to me, "Oh, this person is cool and different," it says, "This person is a smug asshole."

I eat only unnatural food

2011-04-21T15:47:00.000-07:00

Organic food is one of the greatest marketing coups in history. It's right up there with bottled water and diamond rings. If there's one thing we Americans are good at, it's taking normal products, marketing the hell out of them, and jacking the price way up. Organic food is Exhibit A.

It's all about guilt. These privileged white yuppies can't help but feel that every extra dollar they have has the blood of a hungry third-world child on it. Which is not entirely untrue. So they buy organic to make themselves feel better. Classism is also a big part of it. "Oh, I eat organic. I'm so much better than that riffraff that eats at McDonald's." It's a status thing, like vegetarianism. No one who eats organic keeps that fact quiet. They think it makes them cool and special, while simultaneously assuaging their guilt over being born in a prosperous country.

But, they can't admit that guilt and snobbishness are the reasons they eat organic, so they've invented a few actual arguments in favor of organic. Like, organic food is healthier. Actually, it's not. Even the FDA, the governmental organization in charge of regulating the use of the word "organic," does not claim and has never claimed that organic food is any healthier than regular food. And it's not safer, either, as both organic and regular are subject to the same safety standards. The only demonstrable difference between regular and organic food is the price tag.

Child Abuse Entertainment

2011-01-19T21:20:00.000-08:00

I've had a lot of free time over the past few weeks, and I've been using it to do what every hot-blooded American does with time off - watching lots and lots of trashy reality TV. In particular, the TLC series Toddlers & Tiaras, chronicling child beauty pageants. I suggest checking it out for shits and giggles, as well as the overall air of superiority for not being the people depicted.

Maybe I'm the wrong person to judge a show like this, considering I've always thought grown women dressing up and parading around in front of judges for awards based solely on looks was a pretty silly, if harmless pastime. But doing it to children is beyond the pale. I turned on the show for the first time because I was so horrified, and maybe a little intrigued, that such a thing even existed. I have since learned a lot about the human race.

There's no narration in the show, ostensibly to avoid judging the seriously disturbed stage moms. But the editing does all the judging you need. Often, the mother will claim in an interview just how much her daughter loves competing in pageants, and then it will immediately cut to a shot of the mother physically restraining her crying child while applying fake eyelashes or spray-tan.

However, some of the children do seem to genuinely enjoy competing in the pageants. These are little girls after all, and they like dressing up and pretending to be princesses, right? I think so. I was never a little girl, so I couldn't tell you for sure. But even if the kid does like it, one has to question the wisdom of parents spending thousands of dollars on an activity that is solely for the enjoyment of their children, instead of putting that money into, say, a college fund.

The pageants themselves were almost as disturbing to watch as the pre-show stage mom drama. How do you "judge" a six-year-old for walking around a stage wearing fancy gowns and eyeliner? What kind of adults would be willing to say, yep, that child is better looking than that other child? Pedophiles, that's who.

Although never really talked about during the show, the aura of all-around creepiness is everywhere. There's something genuinely weird about watching prepubescent kids dressed in the same kinds of clothes and makeup grown women use to attract men. How is this ever seen as appropriate? This reaches uncanny valley level of gross-out.

You have to wonder if the format of a television show was the best venue for showing the world this craziness. I think a Jesus Camp-style documentary would have been more devastating. Keep the lack of narration, just show us these crazy adults emotionally abusing children for 90 minutes or so, and release it at Sundance. That would better galvanize public opinion against this sort of thing.

I stand by what I said earlier about recommending the show. Most of it is on Netflix streaming; go check out at least an episode or two. Then you'll understand why the terrorists hate us.

Smoke 'em out

2010-12-30T16:44:00.001-08:00

I don't smoke, but I think this country's attitude toward smokers is pretty ridiculous. What's the law now, you can only smoke in your apartment, under the covers, between the hours of 1am and 3am?

First they got it out of airplanes. Okay, fine. On an airplane you can't really get away from it. And out of hospitals. Sure, fine. But then they banned it from the inside of most buildings. Now, hold on. The government shouldn't have the right to do that. If you own a building, you should be able to decide whether people can smoke in it or not. It takes government officials a lot of arrogance to believe they can regulate something like that.

And then, recently, they banned smoking from outside! You can't even smoke outside anymore. Forget how ridiculously unenforceable a law like that is for a moment. How is smoking outside in any way harmful to anyone? If you're really disturbed that much by another person smoking, just walk away. How is that so difficult?

There's another thing, secondhand smoke. I don't understand at all this hubbub and kerfuffle over secondhand smoke. As a nonsmoker, I'm not really bothered when someone lights up near me. Sure, maybe it's slightly annoying, similar to if someone is eating something near you that smells really bad. But since when are we in the business of banning public behaviors that are slightly annoying?

Recently New York passed a law that forced any place that sold cigarettes to post graphic images of how smoking destroys your lungs and teeth. Really? We already have huge warnings on the packs, billboards, commercials, DARE, and all the rest warning us about the dangers of smoking. Do these people really believe there is anyone left in 2010 that doesn't know smoking is bad for you? Enough is enough. You should have the right to do things that are bad for you. That's the essence of living in a free society.

Dealing with death

2010-12-15T01:31:00.000-08:00

An acquaintance of mine died recently. Branden Dallo, age 21, Valhalla 07 graduate. A classmate of mine. He worked at the Harvest Ranch next door to my Starbucks, and we would always joke around when we saw each other. And then, just like that, he's gone.

I don't do well with death. No one close to me has ever died. Ben Hedberg, who I knew in middle school, died several years ago. But that was different, as I hadn't seen him for a few years, and I never really talked to him. And my maternal grandmother died when I was 11 or 12, but she lived far away and I didn't know her too well.

Am I being selfish, just talking about my own feelings when a person has died? Probably. But writing has always been a good coping mechanism for me. I suppose dealing with death is just part of the maturity process. Undoubtedly, someone close to me will die someday, and I can't imagine ever dealing with something like that.

It's strange going about about my normal life after something like this. Play a video game? Study for a final? Read a novel? I feel selfish doing things that interest me. Life really is too short.

What's especially tragic is how he died. He crashed his car drunk driving. It's so awful to hear that it was something so preventable. And it's kind of spooky that my last post here was about drunk driving. I cited statistics and everything. Dallo, as I called him, has now become a statistic.

Here's to my friend, Branden Dallo. Rest in peace.

Just Lower It, Already!

2010-09-20T15:54:00.000-07:00

* This article was submitted for publication to SDSU's student newspaper. It was rejected.

I’m sorry for stating the obvious, but the drinking age in this country needs to be lowered by three years. At this point, that is a very noncontroversial statement. The most common argument for it is that once you hit 18 and have all the responsibilities of an adult, you should be allowed to drink. This argument is everywhere; Chris Rock even does a whole routine around it on one of his HBO specials. It’s very common and everyone and their grandmother has heard it; it is also very compelling. I have yet to hear anyone seriously propose a counterargument.

Let’s not beat around the bush here; the reason the drinking age is 21 today is drunk driving. This was a much more serious problem 25 years ago than it is today. In 1984, the year the current nationwide drinking age was set, there were 24,762 fatalities due to drunk driving. In 2008, there were 13,846. (Source) This is despite a steadily rising population. Maybe, maybe, I would have been in favor of a law like this back then. Drunk driving wasn’t on the radar as much, and this law probably has saved a few lives.

But times have changed. The word has gotten out there. If you go out drinking, get a designated driver. These words are drilled into most of us before we even know what alcohol is. Deaths due to drunk driving are decreasing every year, despite an increasing population. It simply isn’t that much of an issue anymore.

Also, look at the attitude young people display towards this law. We see it as an absolute joke. Go to any party on College Avenue on a Friday night, and everyone has a beer in their hand. Does anyone know who is 21 and who isn’t? Does anyone care? I know I don’t. If you’re in college, you drink alcohol. It’s kind of sad in a way that one of the laws of our society is seen so widely as optional.

Okay, you might be saying. It’s easy for me to preach from my pulpit about this injustice, but what would happen if, tomorrow, the drinking age was actually lowered? I’ll tell you what would happen; 18, 19, and 20-year olds across this country will go insane. You think binge drinking among young people is bad now? Just wait until they can do it legally. I would be afraid to leave my house.

But that’s what has to happen. There are always periods of adjustment whenever the government allows a certain group to do something they weren’t allowed to do before. In the months and years after the drinking age was lowered, society would slowly readjust, and generations of children will grow up seeing 18 as the normal, natural, drinking age. Pouring massive quantities of alcohol down your gullet will be seen as only one of many things you’re allowed to do when you hit that crucial age.

That’s another argument you sometimes see against lowering the drinking age: binge drinking. It is very common among SDSU students, even though it can be very dangerous. But if the drinking age were lowered, it wouldn’t be as common. Drinking alcohol for 18, 19, and 20-year olds, precisely because it is illegal, is seen as this scary, cool adult thing. Classic reverse psychology. Because they are not allowed to do it, they do it more. And harder.

My 21st birthday is coming up, and I am going to get absolutely wasted. I plan on drinking until I can’t hold anymore. I know binge drinking is dangerous. And I’m going to do it anyway, because I haven’t been allowed to for the first three years of my adulthood. I’ve never drank that much, and I desperately want to see what all the hype is about. If the government goes out of its way to prevent me from doing something, the first thought that pops into my mind is, boy, it must be really fun.

The American League is on crack

2010-08-22T21:09:00.000-07:00

In baseball, the American League has a very stupid rule. It's called the designated hitter rule, and it says that the pitcher gets a permanent pinch hitter. American League pitchers never have to hit the ball. It's retarded and it goes against everything baseball is supposed to be about.

The reasoning behind it is simple. Pitchers are almost always terrible hitters. The idea is that giving him a permanent replacement at the plate will lead to more hits and thus a more entertaining game.

It boggles the mind how anyone familiar with the game can think this is a good idea. Why don't we just make it like football, where nine guys come out to defend, and then another nine guys come out to hit? No, no, no. In this game, you have to be able to do both of these things well. If you can't do one of them, you should not be playing professionally.

Baseball is the quintessential American sport. If you're a proponent of the DH rule, you are defiling America. You might as well go kill a bald eagle while you're at it.

Circumcision

2010-06-06T19:27:00.000-07:00

Back when the Jews were invented, Yahweh decreed that all male babies were to have their foreskins removed. It was merely one in a long list of detailed rules surrounding your entire life, demanded by the god of the Old Testament. Mutilate your child's penis, or risk a smoting.

Bafflingly, people are still doing this today. Despite many, many Old Testament provisions that even the most fundie theists completely ignore, virtually all of them, and a good number of non-Christians as well, still circumcise their children.

(Am I the only the one who sees the inherent contradiction between "God made our bodies perfectly as they are," and "There is a part of the human body that offends God and must be removed as soon as possible?")

But today, you can't offer as a reason for performing an invasive surgical procedure on an infant something so banal as "God told me to do it," and expect to be taken seriously. So now they offer pathetic "arguments" for routine infant mutilation.

Such as: Circumcised men have better sex. (No, they don't). Circumcised men have less chance for acquiring AIDS and other STDs. (Yes they do, but only very slightly less chance; see above link.) There's also the argument that ... Oh wait, those are the only two arguments pro-circumcisors ever give.

Okay, you might be saying. Circumcision offers a slightly less chance of STDs. Isn't that reason enough to routinely circumcise? No, of course it's not. Since when is it acceptable to perform an invasive sugical procedure on an infant because of slightly less chance for disease later on? I'm sure that routinely removing the appendix from newborns would decrease their chance of appendicitis later on. But no one would seriously advocate that. If your son grows up and decides he wants to remove his foreskin, by all means he should have the right to do that. But forcing it on infants who cannot understand what is being done to them is unconscionable.

Now, some hardcore anti-circumcisors say that parents shouldn't even be allowed to circumcise their children. I disagree. I think parents should still have broad rights to decide what medical procedures should be performed on their children. But they should choose not to perform this one.

Bless you

2010-05-01T23:02:00.000-07:00

Whenever I'm in class and I sneeze, about eight people around me clamor to say "Bless you," that ridiculous nonsensical thing you're supposed to say to be polite. This really grinds my gears.

First of all, I think everyone agrees that the actual words of the phrase have no meaning. I don't think there's anyone who seriously believes that your soul is escaping when you sneeze and that saying "Bless you," crams it back in. Everyone understands that it is just an antiquated little phrase from a time long past. But everyone says it anyway, because they think it's polite. And here we hit the crux of the problem.

We should be polite because it demonstrates respect for the people around you. Saying please, thank you, that sort of thing is respectful more than anything else. That's why we do it. But saying "Bless you," after a sneeze is anything but respectful. In fact, it's kind of rude to point out and acknowledge someone else's bodily functions like that. I've read Miss Manners, and the rule of thumb is to ignore people's bodily functions. Pretend they didn't happen. That is polite and respectful.

Except when it comes to sneezes, when you're supposed to robotically spout this nonsense phrase. Why don't we do that for any other bodily function? There's no dumb little phrase you're supposed to say in response to someone's cough or fart or throat clear. There's no reason why sneezing should be any different.

Piracy

2010-02-25T19:13:00.000-08:00

Freddie is one of my favorite bloggers. His posts always, at the very least, get you thinking about the issues, which is what good writing is supposed to do. I've linked to him several times before, and it's time to do that again. He recently wrote about piracy, and how it is destroying our media. His argument is basically that piracy = loss of profits = no more music, movies, or video games. I find this to be a little simplistic.

First, Freddie talks about all media like it's all the same. But the nature of each specific medium means that how each one adapts to piracy will be different, so I'm going to take them all on individually.

Music is probably more pirated than anything else. It's just easier than anything else to pirate. But that doesn't mean that professional music created by professional musicians will disappear anytime soon. What Freddie doesn't seem to get is that there are other ways musicians can make money other than just selling their music directly to consumers. There's concert tickets, to name an obvious example, but there's also merchandising, and licensing the songs to be used in movies, video games, and commercials. Yes, the loss of revenue from selling CD's does mean that musicians probably won't make the obscene gobs of money they have made in the past, but there are many other ways to make money off music, and the best musicians will still do just fine.

It's a similar case with movies. Pirating movies does not mean that they will stop making movies. Freddie doesn't mention box office revenue at all in his post, which is still the biggest money maker for the studios. Sure, maybe piracy means that fewer DVDs will be sold, but so what? Good movies will still make a lot of money in the theater.

Now, what will piracy do to video games? I think we'll just slowly see developers stop making PC games. Piracy is just too much of a problem for anything besides MMOs to survive on computers. Everything else will just go to the consoles, which are much more difficult to pirate. Rampant piracy does not mean the video game industry will whither to nothing, as Freddie claims, it just means PC games won't be as common as they once were. And that would be just fine with me.

Movie Review: Avatar

2010-01-09T19:33:00.001-08:00

Avatar sucked. I don't know why this movie is doing so well or why the critics are falling all over themselves singing its praises. The story is so atrocious, no amount of pretty 3D effects are enough to rescue it. A shiny turd is still a turd.

Yes, the 3D effects are good. They're very good. And the CGI approaches photorealism. But who cares? The plot is extremely bad. Here, I can save you $12.95 and give you the entire plot in one sentence. It's Dances With Wolves with aliens. Very, very human-like aliens. We've seen this story a thousand times before. Some jaded white guy ends up living with the noble savages he wants to kill, but he becomes so enamored with their culture, he ends up opposing his own side. It might have taken James Cameron ten years to make this movie, but it looks like he spent ten minutes writing the script.

That's another thing; the aliens are extremely human-like. I've always hated Hollywood's lack of imagination when it comes to designing aliens. They always look just like humans, but with one or two slight changes. I thought last summer's magnificent District 9, with its grotesque, unsavory appearing aliens, had started a reversal of this trend, but boy was I wrong. Avatar takes this to an extreme. The aliens look like supermodels, but with blue skin, misshapen noses, and tails. That's it. It's like they weren't even trying.

It's hard to believe this movie is from the same director of Aliens and Terminator 2, but this is what Titanic has wrought. It's bad enough that that movie made so much money, but then the studios wrote Cameron a blank check to make whatever he wanted, and this is the result. One man's awful pet project.

Bad words

2009-12-29T02:13:00.000-08:00

Edit, 12-30-09: Removed some unnecessary stuff that was just distracting.

The idea that there exists "bad words" is drilled into most of us from childhood. There's a certain set of words, completely apart from all other words, that makes you very naughty, maybe even actively immoral, if you use them. The idea of bad words is, needless to say, bullshit.

Notice how people who use the bad words never refer to the words they're using as "bad" or "profane." They see it as a perfectly acceptable, normal way of speaking. The only ones who acknowledge such a thing as bad words are those who are against their use. These people invent the concept of bad words out of thin air (or at least make no argument when it is presented to them as children), and then use that concept to attempt to censor everyone else's speech.

The most visible form this takes is that of the FCC, which unconstitutionally imposes sanctions on broadcast radio and television stations for using one of these bad words. Congress' stated justification of this unlawful free speech violation is that there is a finite broadcasting spectrum which can only hold a finite number of stations, thus the stations have to conform to "community standards of decency." These standards are decided, of course, solely by unelected government bureaucrats.

As is usual, the ineptitude at work here is painfully obvious. The government should stop censoring my speech and let the market decide. If I want to watch something with lots of fucking fucks fucking, there would be stations that would allow me to do that, because they want my eyeballs for their advertisers. But if I don't want to hear "bad words," there would be a station for that, too.

Now, look, although I oppose any government censorship, I understand that there exist a handful of words that are meant specifically to disparage certain groups. I think someone who uses these words when referencing the groups these words are meant to disparage has shown himself to be unable to communicate as an adult and should not be taken seriously.

This does not mean I support a ban on these words in the public arena, or that those who use them on television should be fined. In discussing these words, we should not be afraid to use them. That sort of fear can go to ridiculous lengths, such as the government official who was fired for using the word "niggardly" correctly in a sentence. ("Niggardly", meaning frugal or stingy, has a completely different etymology from "nigger" and is no way related to Africa or black people).

Censorship of words is censorship of ideas. It's that simple. You should be allowed to express yourself however you see fit, not just by the government, but by teachers, bosses, and parents as well. If that means using a specially designated set of words deemed by some to be "bad," so be it.

The PSPgo - a tragically misunderstood video game console

2009-12-25T22:50:00.000-08:00

I don't normally do this, but the PSPgo has been one of the most hated, feared, and misunderstood video game consoles since the Virtual Boy. I've been enjoying my PSPgo for a few weeks now, and I really like it, too. It's not perfect, but it fits my needs very well.

First, my history with the PSP system is very relevant to how I feel about the Go. I got a first-generation PSP-1000 near launch all the way back in 2005. I liked the system, but I never did much with it. Lumines was a blast, and I played that game to death, but otherwise the machine didn't do a lot for me. I actually reviewed it on Amazon at the time. After I set Lumines down for the last time, my PSP collected dust for four years until the release of the PSPgo. I took the plunge, and I'm glad I did.

I was attracted at an aesthetic level to the Go, which for the record is a very slick, sexy piece of machinery. It doesn't have the futuristic-ness of some of Apple's products, but it gets the job done well. I have no problem whipping my Go out in public for some quick gaming sessions. It's pretty small, but not too small. It fits nicely in your pocket. The sliding mechanism is very smooth and nice. Button layout is nice; I never had a problem getting used to it and I don't cramp up after long play sessions. One baffling design choice, however, was to put the select button ABOVE the start button. It's weird and unintuitive, but I nevertheless got used to it quickly.

Much has been made of the fact that buying a Go locks you in to Sony's pricing structure. No bargain-bin hunting, no used games, no renting games etc. And that's just fine for me. I don't hunt for bargains and I don't buy used games, so that's not a problem for me. However, I still have my old PSP, so I can use that to play rented games if I wanted to. And while we can argue back and forth all day about pricing on the PlayStation Store, let me just say that it seems reasonable to me. $15 - $20 for great games like Daxter, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories and God of War: Chains of Olympus is a great deal.

But yes, Sony has committed to maintaining "pricing parity" between the UMD and digital versions of PSP games for the time being. You can make the argument that the digital versions of games are worth less, because they cannot be resold, and therefore they should cost less. I happen to agree with that statement, especially seeing how digitally-delivered games cut out factories, trucks, warehouses, and all the rest (although the cost of servers and bandwidth is not insignificant). However, Sony can't afford to undercut its retailers, so for now we have pricing parity. It doesn't bother me really, because like I said, I don't bargain hunt, but it is one of the things you should be aware of.

Also, many have complained that there are still many old PSP games that aren't on the PlayStation Store, such as Lumines and Crisis Core, and are thus unplayable on the Go. Now look, the PSP has been out for almost five years, and so it has amassed a huge library of games. With all the licensing stuff going on, it's unrealistic to expect every one of those to be online. Before you decide to get a Go, make sure the games you want are on the PlayStation Store.

New to the PSPgo is the Pause Game feature, easily one of the coolest innovations in handheld gaming in recent memory. This allows you to stop the game's action wherever it is, so you can go back to the XMB (the PSP's menu) and surf the Internet or put the system to sleep or whatever. It's similar to the "save-state" feature on many PC emulator programs. This is great for games that don't have a save-anywhere option (I'm looking at you, GTA), and makes it much easier to just pull out the Go wherever you are and play for a few minutes.

One quibble I have about the system is the lack of detailed battery information. In my old PSP, there was menu option that allowed you to view exactly how much battery life was left. This was removed in the Go, so all you have to go on is the little battery symbol with three bars, which is not very informative at all. Maybe this was hardware related, seeing as how the Go is the first PSP to not have a removable battery, but it is a little frustrating nonetheless. Also, as on the old PSP, and unlike the DS, the system gives you no notification that you are almost out of battery life. This would have been a nice addition.

In the end, I think the PSPgo is a good option for anyone looking for a new portable game device, current PSP owner or not. If you are a current owner, hold on to your old PSP so you can play rented games on it, if that's your style. If not, then the PSPgo is still a very good, sleek piece of fun technology, provided you understand what the machine can and can't do.

Digital distribution is the future of gaming, and if the PSPgo is any indication of how that will look in practice, I'm very optimistic indeed.

Moore lies, please

2009-10-03T19:48:00.000-07:00

Michael Moore has always been a polarizing figure for me. On the one hand, he makes good movies. I've always enjoyed their clever editing, witty, informative interviews, as well as the wacky stunts he pulls. On the other hand, his opinions have always been boring, run-of-the-mill liberal. Poor people this, poor people that, government will solve everything, bla bla.

So it is with his newest movie, Capitalism: A Love Story. One of the biggest scenes in the movie is the heartbreaking story of a family who owned a house for forty years, but couldn't pay their second mortgage, and lost their house. Moore gets plenty of shots of the kids crying, but never asks the family any of the hard questions. Like, why did you refinance your house? Why didn't you make sure you could pay the loan back before you got it? Maybe you deserve to lose your house if you make stupid bets with it.

Another big part of the movie involves airline pilots, who apparently don't make much money. Moore profiles the poorest of them, pilots who were paid so little, they had to get food stamps or a second job. The whole time I was watching this, one thought kept coming back to me: If you feel your job doesn't pay you enough, GET ANOTHER JOB! Oh, you like being a pilot, do you? Then deal with it! What do expect? If you like being a pilot so much, you're willing to work for peanuts, then you deserve to get paid peanuts.

Moore ends the movie by showing FDR's famous last State of the Union address, where he advocates that every American should be guaranteed things like a living wage, paid vacation, and free health care. No, they shouldn't. If you know that the government is going to provide for all your needs, then what's your motivation to get a job? Absolutely none. A government big enough to provide for all your needs is big enough to take everything you have.

I don't why I always go see his movies, I have this kind of reaction to every one. Clever editing does not good arguments make.

I'm healthy enough - stay out of my pockets

2009-08-16T22:38:00.000-07:00

Socialized medicine. Don't make me laugh. The government does such a great job running education, I'd love to see them run hospitals, too.

But I digress. Amongst all the ink currently being spilled in the health care debate, one thought constantly springs to mind. Somehow, no one seems to realize that no innovation happens in the socialized utopian hospitals in France, Canada, and Germany. There is no incentive to innovate - everyone is paid by the government, so they get their money either way.

So where does all that innovation happen? Where do drugs, medical equipment, and procedures get invented, tested, and marketed? Right here in the United States. All these other countries piggyback off our innovation because they have none of their own. It's exactly like education - no one has the need to improve. But the price we pay for all these amazing advances is that sometimes, Grandma won't be able to pay for her medicine.

I'm not going to go so far as to propose a completely laissez-faire approach to health care. I think the government has to get involved somewhat if only to appease the nanny-state liberals we have to compromise with in order to get anything done.

Nope, once again, our old buddy the voucher system saves the day. The government would issue a voucher to every citizen who files a tax return, which can be redeemed with a number of providers, who are obligated to serve all your health care needs for the year.

A voucher system applied to health care has some wrinkles that need to ironed out first, though. For instance, what do you do with someone who refuses to redeem their voucher anywhere? Fine them? Jail them? And, because the voucher system rewards cost-cutting, maybe doctors will be under constant pressure to not order expensive medicine or procedures. I can see that happening easily. But, while vouchers aren't perfect, I think it's better than both our current system and Eurotrash-style socialism.

I'm Edjumacated

2009-07-30T11:08:00.000-07:00

Education is like health care. It's something everyone needs, but who should pay for it? Under our current system, the government both pays for and runs education, and I think we can all agree it's not working out too well. Luckily, there's another option: vouchers.

Under the voucher system, the government gives parents a certificate which they can redeem at whichever school they choose to send their children to. It's basically taxpayer-funded private education. The idea is that with everyone able to send their children to whichever school they choose, competition among schools would vastly improve school quality and create more choice.

The voucher system makes sense, because under our current system, there is no desire to innovate or produce better schools and teachers. What incentive do administrators at government-run schools have to make learning more fun, to change the school day to later in the day to better coincide with students' sleeping patterns, or to fire bad teachers? Just about none.

Also, some research indicates that private schools cost significantly less than public schools, while producing better results (provided, of course, you define "better results" as "higher test scores.") This is plausible; after all, government-run schools have no incentive to cut waste and spend money more efficiently - they're not businesses and there is no competition.

But vouchers aren't without their problems. First of all, most private schools in the United States are religious institutions, and I certainly wouldn't be very happy with my tax dollars going to teach children that the earth is six thousand years old and that evolution is an evil Communist conspiracy. Say what you will about our current system of education, but at least there's some form of accountability to the public in place - we elect school board members and can attend their meetings. Subsidizing education with taxpayer money and not giving taxpayers any say in how the schools are run amounts to taxation without representation.

The Supreme Court has ruled on this very issue, but unfortunately they came to the wrong conclusion: voucher systems that include religious schools do not violate the First Amendment. There's only two things that can change a Supreme Court ruling; either another Supreme Court ruling, or an amendment to the Constitution. Neither of those seem likely anytime soon.

But you could argue that, if a voucher system is implemented, the market would cause more nonreligious schools to open, thus decreasing the current preponderance of religious schools. However, the market would never force religious schools out completely, because many, if not most religious parents would choose to send their kids to religious schools.

In any event, I'm still completely for a voucher system. As far as I'm concerned, the farther away from children the government has to be, the better.

Your government: creating black markets since 1984

2009-07-26T21:09:00.000-07:00

Do you ever get so amazed at the stupidity of your fellow human beings? Not mad or angry, just dumbfounded at the arrogance and complete disregard for common sense displayed.

That happened to me when I read this. Someone is being "accused" of paying people in Israel for their kidneys, and then selling them with huge markups in the United States.

Think about that for a minute. It is illegal to sell your organs in this country. But, of course, you are allowed to donate your organs if you want to. You can give it away for free, but if you try to sell it, men with guns are going to come to your house and arrest you.

The article reporting the story, being a mainstream news report, didn't go into why this law exists. The tiny amount of research I did didn't reveal anything either, so we're forced to speculate. The best I can come up with is that lawmakers were afraid criminals would kidnap innocent people and take out their organs to sell.

That makes sense ... UNTIL YOU THINK ABOUT IT LONGER THAN ONE NANOSECOND. We already have laws against kidnapping and cutting people up when they didn't consent to it. Enforce those. And what about the body parts it is legal to sell: sperm and eggs? When was the last time you heard of criminals kidnapping a man, jacking him off, and then selling his sperm? Or forcibly taking eggs out of a woman with the intention to sell them? Oh yeah, you've NEVER heard of that happening, because it doesn't happen.

See, selling your sperm is legal, and therefore subject to normal market forces. So if you need some sperm or eggs, there are various companies competing for your business. You research them and find the best one before you buy your baby-making ingredients. Also, the industry is subject to government regulation, within reason, of course. These ensure a high level of safety and security.

Outlawing the sale of organs creates a black market, which makes none of that possible. Selling your kidney makes you a criminal, so if the buyer decides not to pay you, you are completely out of luck.

Stupid government. The specific law banning the sale of organs is called the National Organ Transplant Act, and it was cosponsored by Al Gore, of all people. The year it was passed: 1984. Coincidence?

Moon landings and failures

2009-07-20T21:16:00.000-07:00

Today marks the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo moon landings, so naturally no one is talking about anything actually significant going on in the world. Instead, the media is falling all over itself singing the praises about how great America is because we got to the moon first. What bullshit.

Why did we go to the moon? To learn new things? To continue mankind's long history of exploring the unknown? Of course not; we went there to beat the Russians. I'm sorry, but that's it. We most certainly would never have done it if it weren't for the Commies.

Why don't we ever talk about the first man in space? The first woman in space? The first artificial satellite? Oh yeah, because the Russians did all that. We Americans lost all those parts of the space race, but at least we got to the moon first. Were' so much better than those filthy reds.

Come on, people. The Cold War is over! Stop patting each other on the back for winning a minor battle in a war that ended 20 years ago.

Judd solves the world's biggest problem

2009-07-07T02:27:00.001-07:00

The gigantic world problem I'll be solving today is overpopulation. Whether or not this is actually a problem is not really relevant to me, but it wouldn't hurt to have a solution ready if it is.

It's simple, really. Let's say a woman is pregnant. If the father wants her to have an abortion, but she keeps the baby anyway, then the father has zero legal responsibility to the child. The same rules apply if the man wants to keep the baby and the woman does not, but I suspect that that situation is relatively rare.

Of course, this is just a suggestion; I don't know how it would work if actually put into practice. I think the complete lack of discussion of father's rights in the abortion debate is terrible, and this is one way they might be taken into consideration.

In some sense, it's kind of understandable that father's rights are almost never discussed in the abortion debate. The baby is inside the woman, after all, and I'm on record as defending abortion rights simply because the baby is inside the woman. However, the man has just as much ownership in the situation the woman does, and he has as much to gain or lose from the baby being born as she does. His feelings on the situation ought to be important, and this is one way they might be taken into consideration.

Race to the finish line

2009-06-30T02:10:00.000-07:00

After a short break from the blog, I am back with more Juddtastical goodness.

Today I'm going to respond to the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in the Connecticut firefighters case. The CliffsNotes version of the case: Some prospective firefighters of all races took a test designed by an outside firm. The white firefighters did well and thus were likely to get the job, while the black and Hispanic firefighters didn't do so well, and thus weren't likely to get promoted. The city simply threw out the results of the test, just because the minority firefighters performed poorly. The white firefighters sued, and the Supreme Court sided with them.

I think the court is absolutely 100% correct. The city's firefighting force should be composed of the best, regardless of color. It's frustrating and ridiculous for these arbitrary quotas imposed on people in an attempt at "racial balance." If the blacks and the Hispanics weren't good enough, I say don't let the door hit you in the ass on way out.

Then there's this guy.

It is truly baffling that some people continue to insist that we are entirely or largely “past race”, given the continued demographic realities in this country concerning who is financially secure, who is educated, who owns a home, who is incarcerated….

Give me a break. If blacks can't work hard enough to get past all that, oh well. It's not our responsibility to promote them over whites who deserve it more. White guilt in this country is so much worse and does so much more damage than any white racism that might still exist. Blacks now have the same opportunity to succeed in this country as anyone else does. If they still can't, that is entirely their problem.

Affirmative action. What bullshit.

Mission aborted

2009-05-15T00:05:00.000-07:00

Ah, abortion. What a great topic of discussion. Although I wrote about it some last summer, I don't think I quite knew what I was talking about then, as evidenced by Mike's comment. But I've been doing some reading up on the issue recently, and I think I'm ready to try again.

I am still pro-choice. It's a privacy issue. The government simply does not belong inside a woman's vagina. You should have the right to decide what to do with your own body.

Now, look, it does make me a little uncomfortable knowing women can just get rid of their fetuses whenever they want to. It does. But the government stepping in and telling them they can't do that makes me more uncomfortable.

And, because of that, I also don't think the fetus is a human. How can you be a full human being when you live inside another human being? You can't. Birth is where life begins.

Of course, none of this addresses the validity of the Roe v. Wade ruling, where the Supreme Court said that all antiabortion laws in the United States violated the Constitution. This is a claim I find tenuous at best, and it's probably the only legitimate point the pro-life side makes. Nevertheless, I wish abortion to remain legal, even if the route it took to legality is suspect.

This is why I love Wikipedia.

2009-05-06T23:57:00.000-07:00

Fuck is an iconic word in English language slang, used to indicate absolute and forceful emphasis. In its canonical transitive verb form, it simply refers coarsely to the act of sexual intercourse, indicating a concept of fornication. By extension it may be used to profanely or negatively characterize anything that can be destroyed or defiled, and it is due to the semantic convergence of these two highly-charged concepts (sex and destruction) that the term carries such overloaded emphasis and has such vulgar connotations.

Your Blogger Has Cometh

2009-04-14T22:09:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I wish the English language still used the "-th" ending in verbs. Wouldn't that be awesome?

"I goeth to 7-11 and buyeth a Slurpee."

"I wish to eateth at Panda Express tonight."

"I driveth to a bar and picketh up a woman who will cureth my blue balls."

I'm all for the dramatic uses of English. Say what you will about the King James version of the Bible; it gave us the oh-so-cool "Thou hast forsaken me!" line. I really need to find a place to use that. Maybe even one where it's appropriate, for a change.

I wouldn't bet on Blaise

2009-03-30T14:13:00.000-07:00

You would think an argument that was discredited 400 years ago would be totally forgotten today. But of course, to think that is to discount the human love of unreason. As acupuncture still isn't dead, so too Pascal's wager is inevitably brought up to me, all the time, by Christians trying to save me from hell.

It goes like this. Even if there is no evidence to indicate God exists, you should believe in him anyway, because in the off chance God does exist, you'll be rewarded for eternity. If you don't believe in him and you turn out to be right, well, you'll just be lowered into the ground and eaten by worms when you die.

Do I really need to point out all the problems with this? First of all, what god do you believe in? There are hundreds, if not thousands of different, mutually exclusive religions and claims of gods out there, and most of them offer eternal bliss to adherents upon death. How do you choose? Do you flip a coin? Pascal, of course, simply proposed Christianity, although he gave no reason as to why we should choose that particular religion.

Secondly, there's the whole forced belief problem. How can you be expected to force yourself to believe in something for which there is no evidence? Or is just saying you believe it enough? I've heard some Christians (read: my family) say, more than once, that once you've prayed that special prayer to become a Christian, there is no going back. You're going to heaven, and there's nothing you can do to change that. This is good news for me; if God ends up existing despite leaving absolutely no evidence to indicate that, I'm on way to eternal paradise, having indeed prayed that prayer when I was six years old.

Finally, you have to consider God's feelings on the matter. Would he really appreciate someone believing in him simply because of a cold, selfish, cost-benefit analysis? If I was God, I know I sure wouldn't. I would want someone to take my existence seriously because I've left enough evidence behind, not out of blind faith.

Come to think of it, why would God even tell us about heaven and hell? That seems like something it would be in his best interest to keep quiet. Telling us about hell just makes a lot of people subscribe to the religion out of fear. That's a pretty sad state of affairs; the creator of the universe has to resort to threats of violence to get people to join his church. So it's either that, or religion is all just made-up fairy tales. One of these things is not like the other.

I'm Fully Baked

2009-03-26T19:35:00.000-07:00

I think most of us are libertarians at heart. You know, that mentality that says, hey, let's try to leave people alone and let them do what they want in peace. As long as it doesn't hurt anyone else or infringe on anyone else's rights, where's the problem?

I'm talking, of course, about the colossal failure of marijuana prohibition. So some people want to have a joint sometimes! Who cares? Really, I can't figure out why this is even an issue. What interest could the government have in preventing its citizens from smoking pot?

To say the arguments put up by the ever-dwindling number of Americans who support prohibition are weak is like saying fish like water. "Oh, marijuana is, like, bad for you, so it should be illegal! Aren't I so smart and special? Please pay attention to me!"

Jesus Christ. It's child's play to demolish this argument. Donuts are bad for you. Does that mean they too, should be outlawed? Of course not. You have the right to do things that are bad for you. The government has no business sticking its ass into the things you put in your body.

See, every decision about whether to make a law involves a cost-benefit analysis. Maybe there is some slight benefit to society by outlawing marijuana, but it's very clear that that's more than outweighed by the tremendous cost of enforcing the pot prohibition. As Freddie puts it:

The other reasons are caught up in the utter failure of criminalization to prevent Americans from using marijuana, the massive financial costs of arresting and prosecuting marijuana offenders, the waste of valuable police resources on enforcing marijuana laws, the numbers of nonviolent marijuana offenders sitting in our jails and costing us public money, the increase in police corruption and misconduct that is an inevitable part of drug criminalization, and the occasional tragedy where an arrest on a marijuana possession results in the injury or death of the accused, a police officer, or both. The costs to this country from the continued criminalization of marijuana are truly massive, and the payoff is negligible.

If they do end up legalizing marijuana, they better make the age you can use it 18. If it turns out to be 21, I'm moving to Amsterdam.

The late shift

2009-03-17T10:13:00.000-07:00

I'm going through withdrawal right now. It's been almost a month since Late Night with Conan O'Brien went off the air. He's not coming back until June 1st, when he's taking over The Tonight Show. I feel like a junkie who just went cold shoulder.

I've been trying to fill this gaping hole in my life with many things: David Letterman, Jay Leno, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Craig Ferguson, even Jimmy Fallon. All to no avail. They're all competent hosts, but of course none of them can match Conan.

Now, much has been made of what's happening to Jay Leno, the current Tonight Show host, when Conan takes over. Leno's going to get a new talk show in a new timeslot, 10pm, that is going to be very similar to his version of The Tonight Show. It will have the same band, same comedy bits, and even be taped from the same studio. Really all that will change is the name of the show and the timeslot.

I'm conflicted about this. It's a double-edged sword. I won't like it because it will take some of the glory away from Conan, who oh-so-ever deserves it. Part of the appeal of The Tonight Show is that it has the earliest timeslot of any talk show on NBC. But giving Jay Leno his own prime-time talk show takes that away. Also, part of me feels like Conan is still going to be playing second fiddle to Leno. It was announced five years ago that Conan would take over The Tonight Show in 2009, and ever since then, I've waited for the day when Conan would finally be the first contender, not known only, as he puts it, as "that jackass who comes on after Leno." Again, this takes away some of the focus Conan would have had on him if Leno had just retired.

But another part of me likes this arrangement. Because if NBC had just said goodbye to Leno, he probably would have gone to another network like ABC or Fox, and gotten an 11:30 talk show on one of them. And then, every night, there would be a three-way competition between Letterman, Leno, and Conan. And who would finish last in an arrangement like that? Would it be one of the guys who have been in that timeslot for 17 years? No, of course not, it would probably be Conan, the newcomer to the timeslot, the one who deserves last place the least.

I sympathize with NBC, really I do. That was quite a dilemma they were in, and they solved it ingeniously. What do you do when you have a brilliant host like Conan who clearly deserves a timeslot earlier than 12:30 in the morning, but the guy you already have at 11:30 is doing well in the ratings and isn't planning on retiring any time soon? This move solves that problem in one fell swoop, and it saves NBC heaps of money to boot, because talk shows are much cheaper to produce than the dramas and such that would normally air at 10pm.

I have two and a half more months to go before the prophet Conan, as prophesied in the ancient scrolls, returns to Earth. Wish me luck.

Born to athert

2009-03-12T18:35:00.000-07:00

As an atheist, sometimes I think about how I'm going to raise children, if and when that might happen. It's a tough question, because I grew up in a Christian household and will basically just have to find my own way.

First of all, I don't plan on indoctrinating my child into atheism, if that's what you're thinking. The question of whether God exists or not is a very adult question, and I don't think we have any business indoctrinating children into one viewpoint or the other unless and until they have developed the mental faculties necessary to grasp all the (sometimes very subtle) arguments.

That's something religion does, and I'm going to break the cycle and say we atheists don't have to follow their game plan. When you take very young children to church, they get caught up in the lights and the music and the socializing aspects of it. They don't start thinking about the wacky, farfetched claims of religion until later, but by that time most of them are far too caught up in the other aspects of being a believer and attending church that they simply don't question the things taught there. It's actually kind of a brilliant method of indoctrinating children, in my opinion.

But what should I do when my child starts asking about death? That's tough for any parent to deal with, but especially for the atheist, because they don't have the crutch of "Grandma went to heaven and is smiling down on us now" to rely on. I would just tell him the truth: we don't know for sure what happens at the time of death. But we have a pretty good guess. I would assume that I've already had the birds and the bees talk with the kid at this point, so I'd use that as a starting point. I would ask my kid if he could remember where he was before he was in his mommy's tummy. He would say no, obviously. Then I would make the simple point that death is probably just like that.

Now, I suppose my "hands off" approach to religion (or lack of religion) when raising children might look good on paper, but how well would it work in the real world? Obviously, my kid is going to notice that there's a lot of believers in the world, and that a lot of them go to church every Sunday, while his dad just stays home and watches football. If and when he asks, I'm just going to say that some people in the world believe in these things, while others don't. If he asks my opinion, I will tell him, without sugarcoating it. But I won't attempt to indoctrinate him to my position, unless I've judged that he's mature enough to properly weigh both sides.

And if my kid did somehow turn into a religious believer, I wouldn't attempt to stop him from practicing his belief. I wouldn't be thrilled about it, but I certainly wouldn't punish him for going to church or anything like that. I know from personal experience that parents forcing their religious beliefs on their children is not a good situation for anyone involved.

College for all......?

2009-03-04T17:14:00.000-08:00

There's a disturbing trend I've noticed recently among politicians and other education commentators. It's this idea that college is something everyone should do. Even Obama has gotten in on the act. I don't know where this idea came from. The government does such a great job educating everyone up through 12th grade, I say four more years!

But seriously. I think the whole idea of 12 years - let alone 16 years - of public education is a ridiculously stupid idea. Why the hell do I need to know how to analyze Shakespeare and prove geometric theorems and the ins and outs of dodgeball? My career is probably going to be something dumb like insurance claims adjuster. That's okay; I've accepted that. A job like that is something I feel I could have done at 14. But no, I have to jump through all these stupid hoops - middle school, high school, college - to get there. Schools teach nothing useful and are only there so the government can pat itself on the back and say "Look, we provide free education to everyone! Aren't we so great?"

I understand the need to educate children. Some grasp of math, science, and history is necessary for a full life as an adult. But I find it endlessly amusing (and terrifying) how badly schools mess everything up. The charge that schools, of all levels, simply require students to memorize arbitrary lists of facts is 100% accurate. This is done in all levels of education, including college, but I also find it endlessly amusing that college professors are aware of this charge, and claim not to do it, while they are doing it. I've blogged about this hypocrisy in post-secondary education before, of course.

But it's not entirely the fault of educators and the government officials who pay them. It's also the fault of the employers who require that any applicant for a job worth having must have a bachelor's degree. Let that sink in for a minute - you have to memorize arbitrary, boring lists of facts for sixteen years of your life before you even meet the minimum requirement for getting a decent job, a job that has nothing to do with all the facts you spent most of your life memorizing. (This is of course not counting technical jobs like accounting or engineering; the few careers that really do require years of training).

Now, I've heard from my parents and others that employers require bachelor's degrees because they just want to see that you "have what it takes" to finish college, not because they think you actually learn anything useful in college. But I disagree with that reasoning, if in fact it is true. Why can't they just establish reliability in interviews, like they do with every other characteristic? Why do they have to force me to waste 16 years of my life?

I think it's too obvious I've been thinking too hard about what to major in.

The trouble with Islam

2009-02-26T23:18:00.000-08:00

Uh-oh.

There's a bill in the UN right now that would outlaw blasphemy against religion.

*shakes head*

Really, why do I have to share the planet with these morons? I am ashamed to be of the same species as these demented, deluded retards. What the hell? Although the bill doesn't specifically give special protections to any particular religion, it's widely assumed to be meant specifically to "protect" Islam from criticism, especially since it was sponsored by 57 Islamic theocracies.

Although I believe all religions are equally false, there are some real problems I have with Islam that I don't with Christianity or any other religion. There are some good historical reasons for this, I think.

See, about 400 years ago, Christianity had an enlightenment, where the ideas of scientific inquiry and religious tolerance first came from. Western civilizations widely accepted these concepts and, although most Westerners are still religious believers, they accept that others should have the right to believe in whatever god (or no god) if they so choose.

Muslims find these concepts to be alien and bizarre. Islam never had an enlightenment. The idea that one's religious beliefs are somehow separate from one's beliefs about government, history, or science is very foreign to Muslims. Islam is today where Christianity was about 600 years ago.

Why do we put up with this? Salman Rushdie is condemned to death by the leader of Iran for writing a novel and everyone just shrugs and cautions us to make sure we refrain from criticizing anyone's religion? No, I'm sorry. Any system of false beliefs that is such a pernicious, destructive force on human rights is going to be heavily criticized by me. No exceptions.

The Mind and the Body

2009-02-18T16:33:00.000-08:00

Dualism is the belief that the mind and the body are two different things and that one can exist without the other. I've found that most humans are naturally dualist; this is an easy concept for us to grasp. Note all the fictional stories about people who switch bodies. We're able to laugh at the shenanigans of characters who switch bodies, because it's easy for most of us to understand what that would be like.

Religions also rely heavily on the concept of dualism. When you die, according to most religions, your mind (or your soul) leaves your body and goes somewhere else, usually either a place of eternal paradise or eternal torment. Again, it's easy for most humans to get that - your body stays here, your mind goes somewhere else.

But there's one problem with all this dualism - it doesn't exist. Although it's mostly talked about in philosophical circles, it is a scientific question that is testable. And there hasn't been one example in all of history of a mind existing without the body. Which makes sense - I find it to be obvious that your mind and your personality just come from the brain. If the brain stops functioning, the mind will as well.

As with the problem of evil, this is another very simple problem with most religions I enjoy talking about. How can they possibly purport to tell us what happens at the time of death? They can't, really, but the claim that we'll go suffer forever if we're not a member of their club is completely unfalsifiable. So I don't see why it has to be taken seriously.

I sometimes get asked what I, as an atheist, believe what happens when we die. Here goes: we die. That's it. Your mind stops functioning forever. Remember what life was like before you were born? Yeah, neither do I. But your brain wasn't functioning then, and we know it won't be when you die. So there's no reason to think anything special happens at the time of death.

Sometimes, when Christians hear me say this, they're taken aback. They wonder how I could possibly keep living knowing that death really is the end. But it's simple for me, really. I simply try to make this life as good as I can possibly make it. So far, so good.

The Problem of Evil

2009-01-30T15:28:00.000-08:00

Something that always amazes me about religious believers is their total denial of a major, gaping hole in the logic of their beliefs. I'm talking about the problem of evil. This is something believers have known about for at least 500 years, and they still haven't been able to solve it. I enjoy talking about it because it offers a concise, unanswerable flaw in the story we're fed on Sundays. When someone asks me why I'm an atheist, there are dozens of things I could talk about, but I usually choose the problem of evil, because of its devastating simplicity. It can be used against Islam, Judaism, and some other non-Abrahamic religions, but here I'm going to focus on Christianity because that's the religion we're all most familiar with.

It goes like this: we can all agree that if you see evil going on around you, and you have the power to stop it, and you do nothing, then that's wrong of you. You take at least some responsibility for the evil-doing. But God, according to Christians, has the power to stop any and all evil in the world. And he allows it to continue.

The standard response, the one I've heard the most often from Christians, is that God didn't want us to be zombies who mindlessly do good. He gave us free will, including the ability to do evil. So are they seriously stating that God values free will more than human happiness? That God would rather people have the ability to do whatever they want, even if that means torturing and murdering others?

But okay, that explanation actually sounds reasonable enough. I myself am a believer in free speech over life, similar to free will. Let's say I accept it. But we still have a problem, because that only accounts for evil caused by human beings. There is a lot of evil in the world not caused by anybody. What about natural disasters? What about simple accidents that are no one's fault? Are we seriously supposed to believe that God simply doesn't care when hurricanes, tornadoes, and tsunamis kill millions of people? What's wrong with God?

So we have a few options. Just because God allows evil things to happen doesn't mean he doesn't exist. Maybe he's not all-powerful or all-good. But neither of those fly with the traditional Christian conception of God. We cannot ignore the fact that the problem of evil does indeed falsify the existence of an omnipotent, all-loving God.

Freeifying Speech

2009-01-25T00:23:00.000-08:00

The very fact that there is a debate over what kind of speech should be allowed in America infuriates me. You'd think the first amendment would be the end of that discussion. But no, of course it can't be that simple. You have to have stories like this one, or this one, where retarded idiots are pushing for restrictions on free speech, when it is obscenely obvious to everyone else in the world that that is wrong.

In both those cases, laws are being implemented to protect children. In the first one, MSNBC notes that anti-cyberbullying laws have been implemented in 35 states. Children who commit suicide because of cyberbullying grab headlines all the time, and these laws attempt to address that.

Okay, maybe these people are well-meaning. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions. (I don't think I'll ever tire of that saying). They're missing one crucial point, one that isn't said nearly as often as it should be, and one worth repeating over and over again.

Free speech is more valuable than human life.

It feels empowering to say it outright, now doesn't it? In a perfect world, we wouldn't have to make this decision. Everyone could say whatever they want, and we would all be fine because of it. But of course, the real world doesn't work that way. Real freedom of speech is a terribly powerful thing, a double-edged sword that can do tremendous good and tremendous evil. And there is no way to keep the good but get rid of the evil. I wish there was, but there's not. Sometimes free speech will lead directly to death, destuction, and other terrible things. But it is my opinion that the good things we get from free speech far outweigh the negative.

If you want to live in a place where no one could ever say anything harmful or offensive to you, then there are many countries in the world, like Singapore, where you can do that, provided you behave exactly how the government wants you to. But that is not what the United States of America is, and I'll be damned if that's ever going to happen under my watch.

Adultism

2009-01-10T19:20:00.000-08:00

I touched on the topic of children's rights and the age of majority in my post last week on animal rights, but I have too much to say on the topic for it to be relegated there. It's deserving of its own post.

In a perfect world, there would be no need for an age of majority. There would simply be a test that you would be able to take whenever you wanted. It would test you for maturity, to see if you can handle the responsibility of driving a car or owning property or the right to vote or sue somebody. Unfortunately, we don't live in a perfect world. A test for maturity is probably impossible.

The alternative is an age of majority, an age that, once you hit it, you have all the rights and responsibilities of a full adult. An age of majority is much easier to enforce and many times more practical than my test. But it has its problems.

The most obscenely large, glaring flaw with an age of majority is that it is inherently unfair, because there are people under 18 who are mature enough to do all the adult things, while there are many over 18 who aren't. This is simply an unfortunate byproduct of any age of majority, and there is really nothing that can be done about it.

Also, sometimes the line can feel largely arbitrary. I don't think there's anyone who seriously suggests that you are significantly less mature when you are 17 years and 364 days old than you are the next day, yet the law treats you as such. Again, there's not much we can do about this besides apologize.

Now that we've decided to have an age of majority, we have to decide what it should be. In the United States, it is 18, which is pretty good. I actually feel it would be better at 17, because many kids enter college at 17, yet are still not allowed to do adult things. I think once you're in college, you should be treated as an adult, period. But I won't nitpick; 18 is close enough.

Of course, a place where 18 is the age you can do all of the adult things, and have no adult rights or responsibilities before that is a little place I like to call "Imaginationland." It is certainly not the United States of America.

The concept of an age of majority is undermined here by several things. First, sometimes they charge juvenile criminals as adults. Did you catch that? I'm going to repeat it because it's so ridiculous. Let's say little Bobby is 14. Bobby murders both his parents in cold blood. The judge decides to charge Bobby as an adult, meaning that instead of going to a detention center for ten years or so, little Bobby could face life. The government has decided that Bobby is too immature to drive a car or drink alcohol or keep a credit card, but he is mature to commit murder and be responsible.

This is unconscionable abuse of the law. How can the government look Bobby in the face and tell him he cannot have any rights of an adult but that he must be held to adult-sized standards? It is an abomination.

"But wait," I can hear my critics saying. "Does this mean that you think Bobby could commit a heinous act of murder when he is 17 years and 364 days old and still be tried as a child?" Yes, I do. It's despicable to withhold rights but force responsibility.

In the same vein, there is one thing adults cannot do until they have been an adult for three years, possess alcohol. Again, I don't think it's necessary to point out the ineptitude required of a lawmaker to seriously propose that 18 is old enough to die for the country, but not have a Coors.

But another, larger problem I have with the national under-21 rule is that it is a clear violation of states' rights. In 1984, Congress passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, which forced every state in the union to raise the drinking age to 21, or else lose highway funding. What a ridiculous abuse of the power of the federal government. Have any of these idiots ever heard of the Tenth Amendment? I doubt it. To refresh your memory:

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

I don't recall the Constitution ever saying anything about giving the federal government the power of forcing its pet policies on the states through strings-attached money. I trust Sacramento a hell of a lot more than I trust Washington, and it will be a cold day in hell before I take this oppressive nonsense sitting down.

Familial Nomenclature

2009-01-05T02:23:00.000-08:00

Why do some people have such weird names for their grandparents? What's the deal? I don't get it. I've actually heard people older than six talk like this:

"And my Naw-Naw gave me $25 for Christmas, and ..."

Me (Interrupting): Wait, what? Your Naw-Naw? Are you high? Please tell me you're high on something right now. I'd be very worried about the state of the human species if sober people let nonsense like that come out of their mouths. Now go get me a glass of water!"

Don't get me wrong, I've asked these idiots where they came up with these retarded names for their grandparents, to no avail. They probably got it from the same place "veggies" came from.

Animal Rights - More Like Animal Wrongs

2008-12-26T16:31:00.000-08:00

The animal rights movement disgusts me. I can understand the rationale behind it, I suppose. Keeping some animals from extinction is an admirable ideal to pursue. But they go about doing it in totally the wrong way.

First of all, they only ever want to save the cute animals. The polar bear, the panda, the seal that floats around on its back and claps its hands and does cute little human tricks. No one ever cares about saving the armadillo or the dung beetle.

This does not mean, however, that the concept of animal rights should be dismissed out of hand. Occasionally you will come across a serious argument, like this one, from Peter Singer.

The crux of Singer's argument is that inter-species discrimination is just as wrong as discrimination based on sex or race. The obvious reply is that humans, on average, are smarter than other animals. Singer responds by pointing out that some individual humans are dumber than some animals:

Perhaps the most obvious difficulty with the appeal to mental sophistication to justify the way in which we discriminate against other species is that some humans are no more mentally sophisticated than are some animals. Human babies, in fact, are far less cerebral than are mature primates. And of course there are many unfortunate mature humans who, either through and accident of birth or subsequent disease or damage, are no smarter or more mentally sophisticated than is the average ape. If certain forms of mental sophistication are our criteria for determining who is deserving of full moral consideration and who is not, then the boundary between those who are deserving and those who are undeserving will not coincide with the boundary between our species and others. It seems that we will have to say that, if it is morally acceptable to experiment upon or kill for meat the smarter animals, then it is morally acceptable to treat babies and the mentally impaired in a similar way. Or, if we continue to insist it is morally wrong to treat the less cerebral humans in this way, then we will have to say that it’s equally wrong to treat the smarter animals in that way too.

No, we don't. Earlier in the post, it was pointed out that discrimination against children is morally justified, because children are dumber than adults, and therefore should have many of their rights suspended:

Of course, no one has ever suggested we shouldn’t be able to discriminate between conscious beings, or that we are not often morally justified in doing so. For example, we discriminate between children and adults. We give adults the right to vote, to drive, and live their lives more or less as they see fit, while withholding all these rights from children. But this discrimination is morally justified. Children are not yet mature enough to be able to exercise the right to vote responsibly or to drive a vehicle safely. Here is a difference that does indeed morally justify our discriminating in the way we do.

Now watch what happens when I simply apply the same argument Singer is using to argue for animal rights to the question of children's rights. See, the age of majority in the United States is 18. But there are many people over 18 who aren't mature enough to have a credit card or own property. Similarly, there are many under 18 who are mature enough to do those things. So, the under-18/over-18 boundary isn't fair. It is largely an arbitrary boundary.

I understand that. We can't be letting all children do whatever they want, and the alternative to an age of majority is some sort of test for maturity, something that is probably impossible in practice. So we have to have some relatively arbitrary boundary between children and adults.

Similarly, we need to have an arbitrary boundary between humans and nonhumans. It would be impossible to test every animal for maturity before we kill and/or eat them, so it is justified to simply divide all living things between humans and everything else.

I'm not advocating that animal cruelty and wanton destruction of animal life should be allowed, of course. As I said in the first paragraph, preserving some species from extinction is admirable, as are animal cruelty laws, because clearly they can feel pain. But I see no need to go all the way Singer does and say that we should apply the same rights humans have to animals.

Encyclopedia Simpsonica

2008-12-17T16:35:00.000-08:00

The Simpsons are awesome. I mean, really. What a great show. I've enjoyed that show ever since I was a wee little cynic. Here's why.

When it first debuted in 1989, The Simpsons was revolutionary. At that time, the TV comedies were all of the father-knows-best type, like The Cosby Show. But the Simpsons felt like a real family. They watched TV, had money problems, and went to church. (Yes, God does exist in the Simpsons universe.) Not that any of that would matter, of course, if it wasn't satirical and funny, which it was.
In my opinion, what allows the show to be such a force of commentary is its large cast of secondary characters. When you think about it, many of them are nothing more than cultural archetypes. Corrupt politician = Mayor Quimby, lonely old person = Abe Simpson (or Agnes Skinner), computer nerd = Comic Book Guy, street thug = Snake, Christian = Ned Flanders, foreigner = Apu, lawyer = Lionel Hutz, snobbish actor = Troy McClure, has-been Jewish celebrity = Krusty the Klown, etc.

(Okay, maybe that last one was a bit of a stretch)

Much of its sucess has to do with the simple fact that it is animated. This allows for concepts and adventures that would be impossible (or impossibly expensive) in live-action sitcoms. Notice how, in normal sitcoms, it's rare for the setting to leave the normal set. This is because it costs money to shoot elsewhere, a nonissue in animation. However, animation can be tricky because the show can quickly turn to lots of goofy, far-out plotlines if you're not careful. Matt Groening famously tried to prevent this when he made a vow that nothing would happen in the show that couldn't happen in the real world. And he mostly suceeded, at least outside of Halloween episodes and dream sequences.

Much has been made over the last decade or so of the show's declining quality. I, for one, cannot deny this, but we have to realize that any comparisons made from current episodes to past ones aren't really fair. The Simpsons isn't competing against the other shows on TV; it's competing against its past glories. Which, to us humans' nostalgia-clouded brains, will always be superior to the modern episodes.

That being said, there is no denying that the show's golden age was about the third-eighth seasons, comprising 1991-1997. It took two years to find its footing, and was spectacular for about five or six years, when it finally jumped the shark. I can pinpoint the exact episode when the show's golden age ended, with the 1997 episode "Homer's Enemy."

"Homer's Enemy" was a simple episode, really - it concerned what would happen if a normal person entered the universe and met Homer Simpson. Homer was exposed for what he really is - a bufoonish, fat moron who wouldn't last five minutes in the real world. And it ruined the show for me. Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating, but you understand I thought this was the worst episode of the series. (Still do). The whole setup of the show was undermined by the introduction of the Frank Grimes character. Nothing in the Simpsons universe made sense when someone from our world enters it.

And so The Simpsons quickly declined in quality, at least when compared to past episodes. (It's still the best show on TV this side of Conan O'Brien). I think a lot of it is due to the preponderance of guest stars. I mean, really, why does the family have to meet Denis Leary or Ray Romano every episode? It's just distracting. The guest stars rarely even play characters anymore, just themselves. Come on.

But enough ranting and raving from a child of the 90s who only had television as his teacher, pastor, friend, and secret lover. The Simpsons is great. I'll leave it at that.

You're offensive

2008-12-08T20:08:00.000-08:00

There are some words I hate. I just hate these words with a bloodlust bordering on unhealthy. And one of these is "offensive."

You see this often, and sometimes even hear some particularly misguided individuals say it out loud. "Don't say that. It's offensive." "I find that offensive." Etc., etc., ad nauseum. Most of the time, whoever is saying this doesn't attempt to back up the statement up with any sort of justification, and just leaves it hanging there as if it were a criticism. But to say something is offensive is not anywhere approaching a criticism or even a negative statement. The word is nowhere near objective or quantifiable. It is merely... well, I'm not quite sure what it is. And neither is anyone else.

And here we hit the crux of the problem: The word is extremely poorly defined. I looked it up in the dictionary, and was surprised to find this lucid, direct definition:

offensive: causing displeasure or resentment

Yes, thank you, that is exactly right. It causes the speaker displeasure or resentment. Unfornately, I have seen this definition of the word fall out of disuse, and now sometimes there is this implication that some words are inherently offensive, that being offensive is some property of the word itself. This is utter nonsense. There is nothing, no word in any language, that causes everyone displeasure, using the above definition.

This is because, obviously, what causes me displeasure may not cause you displeasure. To say something is offensive without going any deeper into the issue is to eject yourself from the world of adults who talk through their problems and disagreements.

Evolutionism

2008-11-23T21:50:00.000-08:00

It has been far, far too long since I've had a good anti-creationism rant. Well, what the hell am I waiting for?

Creationism is such a phenomenal introduction to skepticism. The beliefs of the creationist are a treasure trove of logical fallacies, wishful thinking, backwards reasoning, and good old fashioned pseudoscience. It certainly served as my jumping-on point to skepticism, and, eventually, led to my complete rejection of religion. There are many, many problems with creationism, but here are a couple that really stick out.

To start, it serves as a great primer in logical fallacies. The argument from ignorance is breathtakingly common.

No known laws of nature allow complex, living, information-containing systems to develop from the random interactions of matter. Yet, this is what is required in order for life to have evolved in the universe. (Source)

Not knowing how life first arose on Earth says nothing about the falsity of evolution, much less the correctitude of creationism, of course. This is a question that a great deal of work is being done on as we speak, and really, sometimes it's okay to say you don't know how something happened.

Then we get to the conspiracy theories. See, to be a creationist, you have think that virtually every scientific organization in the world is wrong when it rejects creationism. This argument is misleading because even the creationist is right when he says that the number of people who believe in something says nothing about how true it is. But dig a little deeper and you'll discover the ineptitude at work here.

I ask the creationist, "Why do scientists so overwhelmingly accept evolution when the evidence is so much to the contrary, as you say?" I think that is a reasonable question to ask. The reply, most recently demonstrated by Ben Stein's Expelled movie, is that "scientists don't want to overturn the status quo."

The notion that scientists want to keep the status quo is utterly ridiculous. Overturning the establishment is every scientist's wet dream. The scientists that become famous are the ones who show us new ways of looking at the evidence. Think of all the famous scientists: Newton, Einstein, and yes, even Darwin. All of them are so well known because they gave us new theories and new concepts. That's what science is - attempting to find problems with hypotheses and correcting any that might pop up. Anyone with a seventh grade knowledge of the scientific method can tell you that.

All of this is irrelevant, of course, because all that really matters are the piles of evidence for evolution. But creationists rarely like to talk about actual evidence. They focus on wordplay, conspiracy theories, and a heaping helping of fallacious reasoning. They have to. This is religion we're talking about, after all.

Sporting

2008-11-18T16:04:00.000-08:00

I've always enjoyed professional sports, for a lot of reasons. But I think a lot of it has to do with the sense of identity it gives the city. "I live in San Diego! Home of the Padres and Chargers!" That creates a camaraderie with almost anyone who lives here.

I'm fascinated by the business side of sports. What teams work where, team moves, owner struggles, dominance wars, and the like. Like, for instance, I like pondering why L.A. doesn't have an NFL team. I mean, what the hell? That city has two baseball teams, two basketball teams, and they had two football teams until 1995. But they both left that same season!
Isn't there a market for professional football up there?

I read this book about two years ago. It was really good. The history of the NFL is full of great stories, like the 1984 move of the Colts from Baltimore to Indianapolis. The Baltimore city government actually declared eminent domain in a vain attempt to keep the team there. And all the intrigue and suspicion surrounding the NFL-AFL rivalry and the nature of their eventual merger in 1967.

One thing I hate is when sports teams are named after a region or a state rather than a city. "Colorado Rockies?" "Florida Marlins?" Ugh. This is more common in baseball than in football, though the NFL isn't entirely blameless. I'm looking at you, the "New England Patriots." I don't care what you decide to call yourselves, you are the Boston Patriots.

I do wish we had a basketball team here in San Diego, however. I've always enjoyed basketball, but I just can't get into the game without my own professional team to root for. I guess I can't really blame the NBA, though. They already tried having two teams here, the Rockets and the Clippers, but no one really cared.

All Opinions Are Not Created Equal

2008-11-06T09:38:00.000-08:00

So I was listening to my favorite radio show this morning, The Mikey Show. It's normally great. But Mikey said something I have heard elsewhere, an argument as common as it is retarded.

They were debating gay marriage, and Mikey said, "Both our opinions are equally valid."

No they're not! If I am debating you on something, and our opinions are diametrically opposed to one another, then one of them is right. They can't both be right. I've had about enough of this wishy-washy nonsense that says that whatever you think is cool, I think what I think, and let's just tell ourselves we're both right. I'm sorry, the world doesn't work that way. You and I debate until one of us (probably you) can't say anything else to defend your position. When that happens, I have won, you have lost, and my opinion is right (or at least better than yours) and your opinion is wrong.

Another thing. When debating someone, what is the point of telling your opponent, "You're not right about everything." I encounter that line so often when discussing issues with people. It's just a textbook red herring. Of course I'm not right about everything. But the number of things I am right about is irrelevant to this issue.

Or, worse, when my opponent says, "That's just your opinion." Of course it's my opinion! By definition, I believe my opinion to be right. That's why it's my opinion. Your job is to tell me why my opinion is wrong. If you can't do that without resorting to time-wasting wordplay, then I have won the argument.

Robert Plant Is Now On My List

2008-10-31T14:57:00.000-07:00

Led Zeppelin was an amazing, majestic band. They broke up in 1980 after their drummer John Bonham died, and have reunited for a handful of one-off events since then, the most recent in December 2007, but no tours or albums.

Until now.

Guitarist Jimmy Page and bassist John Paul Jones have been dropping hints about going on a world tour very soon, ever since December, with Bonham's son Jason filling in for his dad. No promises have yet been made, but considering the level of fan desire for this to happen, and the complete lack of anything significantly resembling a music career by the three surviving members all but guaranteed it to go down sooner or later.

Singer Robert Plant, however, has a different story. He's now saying he certainly won't go on tour with anyone anytime soon, and implies that Led Zeppelin fans should just get on with their lives.

"It's both frustrating and ridiculous for this story to continue to rear its head when all the musicians that surround the story are keen to get on with their individual projects and move forward," Plant said.

Oh yes, all their great individual projects. Let's see, what has Jimmy Page been up to for the past 28 years? Failed project after failed project, with everyone from Graham Nash to David Coverdale making appearances. Jones? Doing absolutely nothing except, until recently, steadily quashing rumors of a Zep reunion. And Plant recently went on tour with, of all people, hippie female American singer Allison Krauss. Ugh!

Why can't great rock musicians of the past simply give their fans what they want instead of constantly trying to deny the past? The Eagles realized this. So did The Police and Van Halen. But Led Zeppelin? No, I can't make my fans' dreams come true, I have to continue to be a little bitch and deny and supress the greatness of the original Led Zeppelin and do stupid little pet projects in a vain attempt at "artistic growth."

You know what, Jones confirmed they would probably just get a new singer and continue with the tour. Which I would be fine with. Plant can stay in England and keep spitting in his fans' faces. Led Zeppelin will go on tour and bring their powerful music to a whole new generation - with or without Plant.

You Like Me! You Really Like Me!

2008-10-22T17:19:00.000-07:00

There's one idea I've been thinking about recently that everyone pays lip service to, but no one really follows. Of course, I'm talking about everyone's tendency to go off on long monologues about how they don't care what people think of them and will just "do my own thing."

For instance, if you find yourself with nothing to do and you also happen to be masochistic, surf the About Me sections of anyone's MySpace profile. Almost all of them say something to the effect of "I don't care what people think of me, I do my own thing." This is a load of crap.

You have to care about what other people think of you! I certainly do. I have to care about what my boss thinks of me if I want to keep my job. I have to care about what my teachers think of me if I want to get good grades. I have to care about what my parents think of me if I want to continue living at home. Most of life is getting people to like you. Imagine how easy your life would be if everyone in the world thought very highly of you. You would be handed high-paying jobs. You would be looked to for input in important decisions. Stores and restaurants would give you things for free. Women would line up around the block to service you sexually. Everything would be great.

What's the most common saying in business? "It's not what you know, it's who you know." Of course it's who you know that counts. We live in civilization. We have to rely on each other to survive. If you say you don't care what anyone thinks of you, you're a liar. Unless, of course, you're a misanthrope and you grow your own food and don't rely on anyone else.

Of course, there are some situations where being yourself is beneficial. If you're trying to find friends or a mate, you can't be putting on a mask all the time. Sooner or later, they will find out who you really are and this will hurt. But when you're dealing with authority figures, people you want something from, you can't be yourself.

Gayness

2008-10-09T09:05:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a lot recently about this gay marriage initiative we're going to vote on in November, Prop. 8. It feels like I'm from two different worlds; I'm around my grandparents who are constantly imploring me to vote yes on it (against gay marriage) and then I come to my ultra-liberal public university where everyone implores me to vote no on it (for gay marriage).

If you have even the smallest conception of who I am, you know I'm going to vote no on it. Why would I care about who people want to marry? If you actually care about preventing your neighbors from marrying who they love, you need a hobby. Go to the beach! Build model trains! Do something!

But of course, that's not going to happen, because this is (you knew I was going here) at its heart, a religious issue. Once again, religion is getting in our faces and bossing people around because Christians believe God told them homosexuality is a sin. So, naturally, they're going to annoy everyone with their beliefs and attempt to impose their misguided sense of "morality" on everyone else. First amendment, people. The Bible does not now nor should it ever be used as a guide for American law.

You know what, you can think homosexuality is immoral all you want, I don't care. But here's my question: Why do you care so much about applying your morality to law? So you think it's wrong. Fine. But why the hell does that then mean you want to outlaw gay marriage? The two things do not go together. Why do you care so much if others do immoral things? If you think someone else is behaving immorally, you should offer them support, tell them why it's wrong, give them a way out, and, above all, try to lead a moral life yourself. But the last thing you do is try to get that behavior outlawed!

Some Christians attempt to downplay the religious aspect of this issue. But there are no (good) secular arguments against gay marriage. Allow me to obliterate all of them.

Gay marriage will lead to legalization of polygamy, bestial marriage, incestuous marriage, prostitution, and all sorts of other sexual perversions. The slippery slope fallacy. The one thing will not necessarily lead to the other.

We need to protect tradtional marriage. I call this one the "grandfather fallacy," a form of the argument from authority. Something being the way things were done for many years says nothing about the truth or goodness of it.

The primary purpose of marriage is to raise children. Gays can't procreate. The proponents of this argument fall silent when asked why we should allow infertile couples to marry. The purpose of marriage is to give loving, monogamous couples some legal benefits as well as commitment. Children are irrelevant.

Same-sex couples aren't the optimum environment in which to raise children. Similar to the last argument, this one falls apart when we look at the kinds of people already allowed to have children. Murderers, thieves, even known child molesters are freely allowed to marry and raise children. Oh, all that pesky science also gets in the way of this argument.

Churches will be forced to marry gay couples. This one is a straight-out lie. Churches are like any other business; they can choose who they will or won't service. Some churches don't marry couples of different religions, or if they feel the couple's not ready to get married, etc. No one's going to make any church marry people they don't want to.

Now, maybe I'm missing the whole point. After all, the issue of "judicial activism" is a part of this, considering that in 2000, voters approved Prop. 22, outlawing gay marriage. But then last May, the California Supreme Court overruled that, calling Prop. 22 unconstitutional and instituting gay marriage. This opens a huge can of worms, this one not about civil rights, but about who should have power in a democracy. Am I going to get into that? You bet I am.

Here's how state goverments work. The people elect a governor, who has certain powers. The people also elect their representatives in the state Congress, who collectively also hold certain powers, but mostly they just make the laws. And some judges are appointed by both of them to make sure the other two sides don't do anything stupid.

That's all well and good, but in California, the people have the right to propose and vote on laws themselves if they want to. It's called the initiative. Okay, since we have a system of checks and balances, who will check and balance the people? How do we prevent tyranny of the majority? We can's just blindly make the laws whatever the people want because sometimes majority opinion is wrong.

Now, obviously I'm not saying majority opinion is always wrong, or wrong most of the time, or even wrong at all. I'm saying it could be wrong. Most of the time, making government look the way the people want it to look is fine. But the initiative messes up the balance of power. So I think the judicial branch should indeed have power over us; to keep the people from voting in something stupid. If the people want to bring in another initiative on that same issue next election, fine. Let them.

So who should check and balance the judicial branch? The other two branches. Wait, it already is like that. We elect the people who appoint them. They're not going to get too much power.

But I am going to make a new rule. There must be at least four years after a proposition passes or fails before the same proposition is put in front of the people again. We're voting on that damn parental-notification proposition for the third time in a row! I understand the need to put the same proposition up every so often; public opinion does change. But no more of this ridiculous voting on the same thing election after election.

Stick it to the man

2008-10-03T14:02:00.000-07:00

Here's something to ponder. "The Man" is an insult in this culture. It refers to Big Business, Big Government, Big Media, Big Science, or any other big entity you might want to villify. To say someone is "The Man" is an insult of the highest order.

Well, then where the hell did the saying "You're the man!" come from? How is that a compliment when all other uses of the phrase are insulting? It's ridiculous. We need to fix this. Stupid inconsistent language.

Spiritual Atheism is an Oxymoron

2008-08-31T23:00:00.000-07:00

Ddjango over at Post-Politics has a post about spiritual atheism. As one who has posted on this topic in the past, this interests me.

My definition of "spirituality" is quite simple and "old-fashioned": it is, "Acting from the consciousness that there is something greater than my Self, of which I am a part, and which is a part of me." Spirituality is present in a human to the degree that narcissism is absent.

That last part is a bald-faced claim Ddjango does not even attempt to provide evidence for. I assume the argument that he is trying to make is that the atheist asserts there is no god looking out and caring for us, so humans are all that exists. This supposedly causes narcissism.

But wait a minute. The most common type of spiritual person encountered is a Christian. And if you're a Christian, you think the Creator of the Universe cares personally about your life, and that you know, with absolute certainty, what he wants for all of mankind. While I think that we’re basically alone, not very special, and are just fumbling through our random existence trying to do the best we can.

And I’m the narcissistic one? (Source)

Now, obviously Ddjango is not a Christian, and doesn't believe in a personal God. But he does believe in a "power and spirit" which, it is implied, makes him less narcissistic than a fully naturalistic atheist. This is, of course, a textbook non sequitur.

I do believe in power and spirit that encompasses humans and everything else.

What the hell is that supposed to mean? Ddjango offers no further explanation as to what it is he believes in. What is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Although I suppose he is still allowed to call himself an atheist, because atheism is simply a lack of belief in god or gods. As long as you don't call whatever it is you believe in God, you can call yourself atheist.

After fumbling around and making all sorts of nonsensical claims about how it's okay, even desirable, to be a spiritual atheist, Ddjango descends into some militant atheist bashing. Ddjango quotes Mike Merritt to make his main point:

For my part, saying that someone is delusional for having a belief in a deity is no better than a religious person saying that an atheist is doomed for an eternity of fire and brimstone. It certainly doesn’t advance intelligent discourse, and only spreads enmity.

A delusion is defined as a falsely held belief. To the atheist, the belief in God is a falsely held belief. Therefore, it is a delusion. Of course, this doesn't advance intelligent discourse, (It's not yet an argument, just a claim) but it is certainly a truth statement from the perspective of the atheist.

But atheism has expelled me. It has expelled me because it has in its heart contempt and loathing and fear of the other.

Of course some atheists contempt and loathe (though not so much fear) religion. Religion is in many (though not all) of its forms is a destructive, pernicious force. It asserts that the omnipotent, omniscient creator of the universe doesn't like certain people, has certain chosen people he really likes, routinely kills his enemies, sends his followers to eternal paradise, and has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. Those claims, once believed, all conspire to cause otherwise good people to do terrible things.

A phenomenon as dangerous as that should be loathed. Now, in my opinion, Christianity in the United States has been effectively pacified by science and civilization to the point where it's basically harmless now. There are some sects of it here and there worth worrying about, but for the most part, it is not what I am talking about.

But wait, I can hear the religious apologist, saying how bad religion is not an argument against its correctitude.

Of course it's not. You can talk until the cows come home about how bad something is; that says nothing about it's validity as a hypothesis. But many proponents of religion say things like, "How can you be against my religion? It's such a good thing for mankind!" In that case, talking about how bad religion is is an argument against that argument for religion.

Religion - Now With More Mumps!

2008-08-29T16:17:00.000-07:00

In this delightful story, there's a community in Canada that is suffering from an outbreak of mumps. Wait, you say. Don't we have a vaccine for mumps? Isn't that a disease science conquered a long time ago? Why, yes it is. Then why is there a mumps outbreak? Is it because these people can't afford the vaccines? Is it because the Canadian health care system is laughably incompetent? Why no. It's none of those things, silly.

It's because they believe God will protect them.

I'm compelled to ask these people how their theory is working for them. If you take the vaccine, you will have no mumps. If you refuse the vaccine and pray, you will have mumps. Isn't that pretty clear evidence PRAYER DOESN'T WORK?

No, of course it's not. Prayer has no effect beyond that of pure chance. Of course, prayer's hideous lack of results is dismissed by proponents of religion as "God working in mysterious ways," a response that is flabbergasting to me. If prayer doesn't work, why do it? If God will just do whatever he wants anyway, then why try to pray? Does an omniscient being really need reminding that disease is a bad thing?

From the article: "Their interpretation of scripture is that to immunize would be to show a lack of faith in God's ability to protect them, and therefore they choose not to do that."

So do these people wear seatbelts? Wash their hands? Take showers? According to that belief they have, doing anything science has shown will protect you is blasphemous.

Maybe God exists and is just trying to send these people a message. The mumps have spread beyond the initial religious community and are now affecting other parts of Canada. He's trying to tell them not to rely on him for your health.

The Neccesary Evil

2008-08-17T01:20:00.000-07:00

I'm often asked, "Gee, Mr. Good. You are always so correct about everything and I am often blinded by the correctitude of your opinions. What political party are you affiliated with so I may vote accordingly?"

That's a great question. Well, I'll tell you. Unfortunately, all of human opinion doesn't fall neatly into two spheres, so I can't expressly identify with one party or the other. But I do have tendencies.

When it comes to hot-button social issues that really shouldn't have much much to do with politics, I'm a liberal. I think gay people should be allowed to marry other gay people. I think the government has no business being in a woman's vagina.

But when it comes to the real issues that matter, I'm a conservative. I favor fiscal responsibility, low taxes, and a small government. Has anyone else noticed how the liberal/conservative opinions on the social/real issues seem to be contradictory? I have. In most cases, conservatives favor the government not getting involved, EXCEPT in issues like gay marriage and abortion, where they expressly advocate for more government interference. The converse is true for liberals.

The whole college professor/liberal/Democrat crowd just oversimplifies things way too much. Their solution to everything is simple - just have the government toss more money in the direction of the problem. Now, there is a kernel of truth in there. Government programs do a lot of good, and the better funded they are, they more more good they can do. There's no doubt about that. But liberals take that factoid and stretch it until it's totally FUBAR, and apply it to every little problem in the world to the more-money policy.

See, unlike everyone else in the world, my opinions are consistent. I favor a smaller, less involved government most of the time. Smaller taxes, fewer government services, and less regulation of things. That includes the government not getting involved with who people choose to have sex with.

That's how I arrived at my position on everyone's favorite game of political football, abortion. Abortion is an issue that touches on tricky things like personal choice, individual accountability, sexual responsibility, and the right to life. That's why it's been so divisive and why its supporters and detractors are so passionate. I think it is morally wrong to end the life of an unborn child. But I do not think abortion should be illegal, for two reasons. One, there's its personal nature. The government outlawing abortion would require inspectors and forms filled out in triplicate being inside a woman's vagina. Two, outlawing abortion wouldn't do anything. People are going to have abortions whether we like it or not, and if they are going to do it, I would rather it happen in the office of a licensed doctor than in a back alley.

That's a distinction I don't often see others make. In this culture, it seems that if you think something is morally wrong, that automatically means you think it should be outlawed, two things that don't always go together that smoothly.

Because of all of this, I often find myself voting Republican. Unfortunately, that's also the side all the fundie Christians vote on. How did I end up voting with these people? How come thinking a small government is better than a big government automatically put me on the same side as the people who think there's an invisible man floating in the sky that hates gay people? The answer, of course, has to do with the general trajectory human opinion has taken over that last few centuries. It's that same reason atheism is often associated with liberals and Democrats, an association that's outlived its welcome. Choosing not to subscribe to the looney claims religions make in no way says anything about my opinions regarding anything else.

Rocking Out

2008-08-08T22:52:00.000-07:00

Regular readers of Quantum Solos know I despise the word "spiritual," and all its various forms, and I viciously slander anyone who uses it. However this is my blog and I can do what I want, so I'm going to use that very word right now.

Anyone who likes music can't deny there is a spiritual quality to it. When I put on something by AC/DC or Metallica or Led Zeppelin or Boston or Van Halen or Black Sabbath or Nirvana or Guns N Roses, I know what I'm going to feel. It's an effervescent, exhilarating feeling of flowing, pounding energy that overtakes one's whole psyche and turns you into an air-guitaring, sing-alonging, air-drumming maniac. You better hope there's no one around when this happens to you.

This phenomenon has been named before, the most popular name I've seen is "rocking out." I find that term lacking, to say the least, so it's that time again, dear reader. I'm going to coin a new word: Rockstasy. Many times I don't answer my phone because I'm rockstatious. And someone's probably going to get hurt if I get rockstasied while driving.

I'd really like to find out, biologically, why rockstasy happens. But the science of music cognition is, to use a way-overused expression, still in its infancy. The connection between music and sex, and, more specifically and far more graphically than is neccesary, rockstasy and the orgasm, has been made before, by writers better than myself, but I would hypothesize that that link is more than a coincidence.

I am not a Darwinist

2008-08-02T22:11:00.000-07:00

A New York Times blogger has a particularly good post about that one particularly annoying habit of creationists: Calling anyone who believes in evolution a "Darwinist," or referring to evolution as "Darwinism." This is so stupid. You never hear anyone but a creationist use this terminology. Fortunately, anyone with even a modicum of knowledge of the history of evolutionary theory knows that this is a dumb thing to do.

Evolutionary biology has come a long way since Darwin's day, and the modern view is fairly different from Darwin's day. For instance, genes were entirely unknown in Darwin's day. Mendel had been around and was trying to stir something up, but he was almost totally ignored. But genes are the building blocks of evolution. Now, we've pretty well combined genetics and natural selection and know many, many things Darwin couldn't have dreamed of, and, ahem- ahem- been accruing evidence that evolution is correct the entire time.

Probably precisely because genetics was in such an infantile stage at that point, Darwin was just plain wrong on a lot of things. For instance, taking his cues from Lamarck, Darwin thought traits parents acquire during their lifetime were passed on to offspring along with the traits they were born with. This was discredited about a 125 years ago.

Why do creationists do this? Why do they insist on calling us by the name of a long-dead scientist who had a lot of good ideas, but was also in the dark on a lot of things? I think it's because they want to bring us down to their level. They have a messiah, obviously, and they want to make it look like we do. They want to show that hey, look, we evolutionists aren't much better than they are; we praise and worship and bow at the feet of this one historical figure! They want to make it seem as if we unquestioningly accept everything the Darwin-god told us, like they unquestioningly accept the extravagant claims of their religion.

Creationists do this wordplay in lieu of actually finding real evidence to support their position, because they know there is none. They know their best bet is in courts and in the minds of the average Joe. So, they play word games instead, like their "only a theory" schtick. For those looking for a complete annihilation of that "argument," look no further.

Discrimination

2008-07-27T21:20:00.000-07:00

I think we're all familiar with those long disclaimers you see when a teacher hands out a syllabus telling you the things you're not allowed to criticize in someone, or when companies like to brag about how nondiscriminatory they are:

"In this class, there will be respect and tolerance of everyone's race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and religious preference."

"ABC Company does not discriminate based upon race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or religious preference."

That's all well and good. But to me, one of those items has always stood out and been of a distinctly different nature than the others. Religious preference. See, all those other things you can't help. People can't help what color they are, what gender they are, who they're attracted to, or if they're disabled. No one has control over that in themselves.

But "religious preference" is most certainly a personal choice. It is simply a type of belief, like someone's belief in gravity or the Pythagorean Theorem, and therefore it should be subject to criticism based on evidence like every other human belief. Think about it. What other type of belief has a taboo against criticizing it? None at all. Only religious belief has that.

Why do we have to "respect" someone's religious beliefs all the time, no matter how wrong or loony or destructive they are? I think that's crap. If you have a belief that is not supported by evidence, I'm going to unapologetically criticize you for having that belief.

How did this happen? Why is religious belief put on such a high pedestal? I think it's because theists feel that their religion is right, and are appalled that anyone could have the audacity to have a different opinion. Most of them can't even imagine any contrary evidence that could conceivably be presented to them that could convince them to give up their religion. Which of course, simply means they have a small imagination.

So, the theists of the country reluctantly banded together (they all hate each other, remember?) and made it taboo to criticize their religion because they don't want their beliefs to be criticized. In my experience, someone who doesn't want their beliefs criticized is probably holding false beliefs.

An atheist child - WWJD?

2008-07-25T01:47:00.000-07:00

Someone asked Billy Graham what to do now that their seventeen-year-old daughter is an atheist.

DEAR DR. GRAHAM: Our 17-year-old daughter says she doesn't believe in God anymore, and now she even refuses to go to church with us. When we try to talk with her about it we just end up in an argument. What can we do? -- Mrs. S.McD.

DEAR MRS. S.McD.: The most important thing you can do is to pray for her -- because only God can overcome her spiritual resistance and draw her back to Himself. Jesus said, "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him" (John 6:44).

But you also can let her know you that love her, despite your differences -- and by doing so, you'll be showing her that God loves her also. Don't let your discussions degenerate into arguments; this will only make her more determined to keep her position. In other words, don't let this become a test of wills between you -- your will battling against her will -- because almost the last thing she wants to do right now is admit she is wrong. The Bible says, "A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger" (Proverbs 15:1).

The mother used some revealing wording when she said that her daughter "now even refuses to go to church." She hinted that she thinks it would be all fine and dandy if the daughter disbelieved in God, had a big disbelief-in-God party, but it's her refusal to go to church that sets the mother off. On the surface, that doesn't make sense. Shouldn't the mother be more concerned about if the kid subscribes to this theology than where she goes on Sunday mornings? But religions often emphasize the ritual aspect more than the doctrine itself. They're all about the ritual. In fact, Pascal Boyer showed how religious systems actually are a natural extension of the various rituals humans like to do.

I actually agree with Graham, or at least part of his answer. He says all you can do is love her. Don't argue, because arguments hardly ever come to good (especially if the argument you're attempting to defend involves ancient Jews babbling in the desert). Which is way better than some of the other answers to this question we've heard Christians give before. (Force the kid to go to church, or, worse, "Jesus Camp" or even entirely disown her) But then he says some things I have a problem with:

Let me encourage you also to ask her why she has come to this conclusion. Has someone influenced her? Has she been reading one of the recent books on atheism? Atheism has become something of a fad in recent years, and this may have influenced her.

But the real reason, I suspect, is that she wants to run her own life -- and that's far easier to do if you push God out of your life. Help her realize what she's doing, and then warn her of the dangers. Above all, urge her to look at Christ, for He alone came "to bring you to God" (1 Peter 3:18).

Graham starts to falter when he speculates where her atheism came from. He says she probably deconverted from Christianity as a form of rebellion - just to be different from her parents. I've come across this suspicious line of reason from my parental units in the wake of my own athersion. (Yes, I just invented a new word - "athersion" - meaning convERSION to ATHEism)

I think it's just difficult for parents to accept that their child now has firm reason for disbelieving in God, a belief very probably central to the life of said parent. So they rationalize and justify the athersion, saying that it wasn't due to the kid actually finding real evidence for doubting the existence of an omnipotent supernatural being, it was due to some other factor, like rebellion, or to get in on a fad.

Graham hinted at the real reason I, (and I suspect this girl), turned to atheism, with his "recent books on atheism" remark. I wonder if Graham has read Harris or Dawkins. Just imagine if he does and then has his own athersion. What would your average Christian have to say about that? And for us atheists, we would have our own Anthony Flew. Not that we need one, of course.

"I'm Spiritual! Aren't I Special?"

2008-07-20T00:46:00.000-07:00

Man, I hate it when people say that. "I'm not religious, I'm spiritual! Aren't I so special and important? Please pay attention to me!" (Usually said with in a high-pitched whine with a heavy lisp)

The principle problem with this statement is that it's so vague and imprecise. What, then, do you believe in? Are you agnostic? Atheist? What? Most people who say that can't answer these simple questions. Often my conversations with them go something like this:

"I'm not religious, I'm spiritual."

"Are you agnostic?"

"No."

Atheist?

No.

"Deist? Pantheist? Wiccan? Polytheist? What?"

"Stop trying to pigeonhole my beliefs! I think no one can ever know if a god exists or not."

"That makes you agnostic."

"Why are you so mean to me? Waaaah!"

Either that or they make vague references to some kind of "higher power," "greater force," etc. Some kind of pseudo-divinity. Statements that do much more to confuse than if they had just not started talking in the first place.

Actually, I can understand where these people are coming from. It seems to me that they're so turned off by organized religion that they know they want to reject it but can't seem to go all the way and start calling themselves atheist. Or they just don't know that that's even an option. Humans certainly have a wanting for something greater than themselves, and it takes a lot of self-discovery to come to terms with the fact that that something almost certainly doesn't exist. I sympathize with these people; in these situations I try to take the opportunity to turn them away from their grasping at straws of "spirituality" and show them what atheism really is, and how it is a real option for living a happy, fulfilling life. I wish someone had done that for me when I began to have doubts about organized religion, approximately, oh, ten years ago.

The Razor

2008-07-14T14:42:00.001-07:00

That's right. I drew a cartoon. (Click to enlarge)

Little Guy Syndrome

2008-07-11T23:59:00.000-07:00

I've come up with a new phrase to add to the pantheon of words and concepts I invented, in the grand tradition of "eatware" and "asterisk fallacy." It's called little guy syndrome.

Little guy syndrome is what you have when you falsely believe yourself to be the minority voice in an argument or debate. The controversy over Christopher Columbus is my favorite example. You often hear professors, or just normal people, say things like, "Everyone thinks Columbus was a great guy. But he wasn't. Besides not really discovering America, he did all these bad things to Indians the man doesn't want you to know."

In this case, the idiot whose mouth those words are coming out of is suffering from a severe case of little guy syndrome. The majority opinion on Columbus is that he was this terrible guy who was also an idiot. The anti-Columbians paint themselves out to be the little guy here because people always root for the little guy and they're trying to score some cheap points. That is almost always the cause of little guy syndrome.

Little guy syndrome is breathtakingly common. Religions do it incessantly. Religious people always talk like they're the tiny voice for righteousness in this big, bad world of godlessness. That is a patently false statement, for the simple reason that upwards of 95% of people in the world identify with a religion. You could argue that the particular religious person saying this, quite probably a Christian, of course believes his religion to be the only right one. Very true. But there are still 2 billion Christians in the world. If you're talking America only, then the vast majority of people around are Christian. Quite the little guy.

America Hating Pt. 2 - Languages

2008-07-10T13:58:00.000-07:00

You hear this a lot. "Oh, Europeans know two or three languages. They're so much better and smarter than we are!" The same crowd that often goes on rants on how terrible of a place America is talks about how most Europeans know several languages, while most Americans only know one, as if that was evidence that Europe is a better place than America.

It boggles the mind how retarded of an argument that is. In Europe, they have to learn several languages. There is no choice. Take a five minute walk down the street in Europe, and you'll pass through three or four international borders. So many languages are spoken within such a small area, that to live there, you will be unable to do very much communication if you're monolingual.

I think it's a testament to American prosperity that we only have to learn one language. We're not monolingual because we're somehow dumber or lazier than Europeans; we're monolingual because learning a second language is strictly optional here. Americans who do know more than one language often forget that second language as time goes by because they never use it. Most people take some years of a foreign language in high school and/or college, but how many of them remember it twenty years later? Almost none.

Fat People

2008-07-07T23:53:00.000-07:00

Oh, sorry, I mean "horizontally challenged individuals." Anyway, obesity has been a problem here in the US for several years now. A lot of ink has been spilled over what causes it and how to deal with it. Here's my two cents.

Why has no one stated the obvious? Is reality too offensive? I don't find reality offensive, so I'll state the obvious. Women's lib caused this obesity epidemic. It's so painfully obvious, I never felt the need to say that until now. Women moved out the home and got jobs. Fine. I have no problem if women want to work. But when they did that, they couldn't stay home and cook dinner. Families were forced to go out for food or subside on Hot Pockets. Kids got fat. What's the mystery?

If you want to slim the family down, then all you have to do is make the woman quit her job and stay home and cook. Does saying that make me a misogynist? I don't think so. We have to choose between fat kids and oppressed women. Sucks, I know.

The Eternal Debate

2008-07-02T20:48:00.000-07:00

It really is the eternal debate. Books vs. movies. To an exquisitely well-read person like myself, this debate is immensely frustrating. So many idiots see one movie based on a book and think, well, I don't have to read the book now; I've seen the movie. No, you couldn't be more wrong when you think that.

First of all, a novel and a film are extremely different mediums. They really don't even come close to being approximately the same. You see a movie, it's two hours; you read a novel, it's two months. When you make a movie from a book, the best you can hope for is a vague, highly edited summary of the novel. Many people don't seem to realize this. Even when they do TV miniseries based off long novels, such as with It or The Stand, which can be six hours or longer, you still have to cut out a veritable crapload of dialogue, character development, and subplots.

Usually the first thing to go is any commentary or meaning the novel might happen to convey, and leaving the mindless action and sex scenes. Note that this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Look at Jurassic Park. The novel was a modern-day Frankenstein, about the dangers of playing God and messing with nature for amusement or profit. The movie was a lot of dinosaurs chasing and eating people. It was just an enjoyable, big-budget summer action flick. I don't mind that. In cases like this, I don't consider the movie to be a filmed version of the novel. Rather, I like to use Tim Burton's term "re-imagining," i.e., using the events and general outline of the novel to write a completely new story based on those concepts.

Rarely, the exact opposite will happen. The novel will be almost free of heavy concepts, and the movie will add some. The only example of this I can think of is, of course, Planet of the Apes. The novel was a strange little French ditty about a guy going to a planet just like ours, but ruled by apes. Big whoop. The movie was an allegory on man, the things we hold dear, and our place in the universe. So many great scenes, so many great lines.

Of course, there are more practical concerns. There are many things I can think of that are difficult or impossible to film, but easy to portray in a novel; while there's nothing I can think of that goes the other way around. Take this passage from one of my favorite novels, The Time Ships, by Stephen Baxter.

"But then the watcher seemed to melt away. The scattering of distinct constellations, the foamy galactic structure - even the glare of the burning sky - I saw them no more - or rather, I saw them as an aspect of reality, but only as a surface." (pg 478)

Now try to film that, Spielberg! Also, there's the issue of foreign languages in movies, which must be handled rather clunkily through subtitles or having ancient Greeks speak perfect modern English. In a novel it's easy.

"What time is it?" Bob said in Japanese.

There. Nice and simple.

In the end, whenever a movie comes out of a novel I've read, it's just more of a temporarily distracting amusement. A good novel remains in my head much longer than a movie.

America the Beautiful ............... ?

2008-06-26T20:06:00.000-07:00

Seriously, what's with America hating? It's become something of a fad recently. It's almost cool to say you hate America. You can definitely see where these people are coming from; it's obviously a response to the blind ultra-nationalism that arose in many red parts (read: evangelical Christian - oh, sorry, I forgot, of course one's religious beliefs don't influence his political tendencies at all) of the country after 9/11.

They often point to the (many) failures of the Bush administration as evidence for their position. But that's stupid; you can't judge an entire country by one president's mistakes. In fact, that's part of what makes America great; if someone stupid gets elected, you just have to wait four years to elect someone else. And, moreover, if the president is bad enough, then Congress and the courts will conspire to hobble his power as much as possible, which is what happened for most of Bush's second term.

Both sides have it wrong. The ultra-liberal college professor America-hating crowd unquestioningly accepts that America is a terrible place and every other country in the world is Utopia. The other side unquestioningly accepts exactly the opposite. Both sides have it wrong.
America certainly isn't perfect, there are numerous human rights abuses perpetuated within the last ten years that have lost us credibility in the international community, and also some frighteningly large social problems we have yet to solve (health care, illegal immigration).

The most likely reason it's taken us so long to solve these problems, when compared to the rest of the developed world, is because America is so much larger than any other First World country. Places like the UK (population: 21% of the US's) and Canada (population: 11% of the US's) were able to solve the health care problem faster simply because there aren't as many competing interests there. Just give us time; we'll do it.

I'll let Richard Jeni take it away.

"I just wish people didn't agree with foreign countries so loudly around here. 'Well, they must be right, they're not us.' Come on! I've been to France, it took the French people to invent to croissant. But it took the American people people to stuff it full of ham and greasy, shiny cheese, and make a billion dollars a week flinging it into your car window at the drive-thru."

The Prisoner

2008-06-21T22:10:00.000-07:00

If you have a Netflix subscription (and if you don't ... why not?), you should immediately rent all the DVDs of an old TV show named The Prisoner. Why? Read on, dear reader.

It's from the sixties, and it stars Patrick McGoohan, much later to become famous as the king from Braveheart.

"It follows a former British secret agent who, after abruptly resigning from his position, is held captive in a small village by the sea by an unidentified power which wishes to establish the reason for his resignation. Episodes typically feature the unnamed prisoner, labeled "Number Six" by his captors, unsuccessfully attempting to escape from "the Village", but successfully resisting interrogation and attempts of brainwashing."

Yes, thank you Wikipedia. It's an extremely good show, with elements of spy thrillers, sci-fi, fantasy, and mystery. Very Kafkaesque in its execution, The Prisoner is one man thrown into an insanely weird - and malevolent - situation, and trying his best to fight it.

Some of the earlier episodes aren't so hot. Many of them center on what No. 6's escape plan is this week, and how the main bad guy, No. 2, is going to stop him. But stick with it, later on, it becomes a hell of a lot more exciting as No. 6 stops trying to escape and just find out what he can about this strange world he's been nonchalantly tossed into.

One of my favorites is the fist-pumping catchline for the show.

"I am not a number - I am a free man!"

Couldn't have said it better myself. Continue sticking it to the man.

What's in a name?

2008-06-15T15:24:00.000-07:00

A lot, as a matter of fact. Today, we're (surprisingly) going to discuss something that makes me mad. The ridiculous politically correct names for American racial groups.

Let's start with "Native American." I'll dissect it and expose it for what it is word by word. First of all, they're not native. They came over the Bering land bridge 12,000 years ago. The only people who could reasonably considered "native" to anywhere are those still living in Africa's Great Rift Valley, because that's where humans evolved. Now, "American." That's right, first we come over, steal their land, and massacre them, and then, to add insult to injury, name them after a Venetian mapmaker who had never even been to America. Makes perfect sense!

Fortunately, there's a term we can use in its stead, "Indian." Now, it's a popular misconception that Columbus named the Indians this because he thought he was in India, an idea so stupid I don't know where to begin. He didn't have any idea where he was. There wasn't even such a thing as India in that time; it was known as Hindustan. It's a reference to the color of their skin - "dios" - people of the sun. A perfectly respectable word.

Just as bad is the name the government invented for black people, "African Americans." (Shudder). What if a white racist from South Africa decided to come over and call himself an African American just to piss everybody off? He'd be perfectly entitled to do that. Or what if a black Jamaican came over and got offended when people started referring to him as an African American? Africa is a big continent and there are people who live there who aren't black.

We should resist, tooth and nail, this effort by the multi-culti crowd to make America more homogeneous by inventing stupid words for everything and further accentuating everyone's differences.

In the Garden of Eden

2008-06-12T19:09:00.000-07:00

You all know the story of Adam and Eve. I think it's important, because it is a big reason why I'm not a Christian. Being that this is my blog, I'm going to share what I think about it with you, dear reader.

First of all, I think it's morally bankrupt to punish children for the mistakes of their parents. That is really wrong and unfair, and anyone with even an iota of sense and decency knows that. But, according to the story of Adam, God did it. And in fact, he went a lot farther than that. He punished billions of human beings for the mistake of one of their distant ancestors.

Not only that, he set everything up so that would happen! He created Adam with curiosity, and then forbade him to slake it. What did he think would happen? And what was Adam's crime that warranted damning billions of innocent people to Hell? He ate from the Tree of Knowledge. Got that? The Tree of Knowledge. What does that say about a God who's willing to inflict so much torment on so many people because one man wanted to gain a little knowledge about the world around him? And some say there's no conflict between science and religion...

"No," I can hear the moderate Christians saying. "The story of Adam and Eve isn't meant to be taken literally; it's an allegory meant to teach us a lesson about God's relationship to humans." I call that particular argument the asterisk fallacy: the tendency of modern, moderate religious people to read their sacred text through rose-colored glasses and say, "That passage doesn't mean what it says. There's a huge asterisk next to that verse saying what it really means, and that alternate meaning changes the implications of the verse around so much it's actually compatible with basic human decency."

But, let's assume that they're right and the story of Adam is meant to be taken allegorically. Okay. But if you do that, then by what standard do you judge whether a Bible story should be taken literally or allegorically? What about the part of the Bible that talks about Heaven, Hell, and a guy named Jesus? Are all those parts meant to be taken allegorically, as well?

So, we have two options. God is really mean and cruel (the story is literally true), or the story is completely bogus made-up crap. I think you know which option I chose.

Nostalgia

2008-06-12T19:01:00.000-07:00

What is it with old people? Seriously. They always hate "nowadays" and "kids today." That's such a cliche, but it's absolutely true. "When I was a kid, we loved each other! We were respectful to our elders! Not like nowadays."

My response: "When you were a kid, black people couldn't use the same water fountains!"

What is that in humans that makes them so nostalgic for their childhoods? Why do we not appreciate what we have now, instead of vainly wishing for days gone by? I think it's because most people, did, in general, have pretty good childhoods. And, now, as an adult, they have mortgages and minivans and dates and job interviews. They tend to look back and remember the good things about their childhoods while forgetting the bad things, and then draw the mistaken conclusion that one "time" was better than another.

If I ever do that, please, someone kill me.

Imagine no religion...

2008-06-07T19:48:00.000-07:00

So I just finished reading two books, about almost the same thing. The End of Faith by Sam Harris and God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens. That means I've read something by three of the four most influential modern atheists ("The Four Horsemen") - eventually I'll get around to reading something by Dennett and I read Dawkins several months ago.

They were both pretty good, and mostly right. Harris' was the better one, though. He was exquisitely able to capture the frustration that is modern religion - something asserted without evidence, while simultaneously totally insulated from criticism due to modern multi-culti taboos. I particularly liked his definition of the word "atheism" - it's simply a refusal to deny the obvious.

He's right; it's retarded how every area of human belief is totally open to criticism except religious beliefs. If someone says they believe in unicorns or UFOs, they will be endlessly mocked and ridiculed. But if someone says they believe the creator of the universe has written a book condemning homosexuals, then that belief is totally beyond the pale and exempt from any sort of criticism, because it's labeled as "religious."

Harris got a little too woowoo near the end for my taste. He said humans have a "spiritual side" that is discoverable by science. I don't know; I've never liked that word "spiritual" because it's so vague as to be almost meaningless. There's probably something to it, though, but Harris was 100% on when he said we'd have a hard time undoing the iron stranglehold organized religion has on all things metaphysical in the eyes of the layman.

Hitchens simply added more detail. It was, predictably, a lot of theism-bashing. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that as long it has a clear focus, which Hitchens did. He showed how personal freedoms, and sometimes even public safety, are restricted in favor of open expression of religious belief, such as when the Catholic church, which in many places of the developing world is the only source of health information, preaches against condom use and all the negative consequences that has.

All in all, good reads, and as a newly deconverted freethinker, I'm glad I read them.

Liberalizing America

2008-04-08T17:29:00.000-07:00

Picture this. You're in class, minding your own business. Suddenly, and without warning, the professor starts espousing a particular political point of view. His ideological fanaticism starts to take its toll and you begin to wish he would do something less painful for you, like assign a pop exam or give you a root canal. Most things about this hypothetical professor - age, sex (if you'll excuse my gender exclusive language) are impossible to guess with just the information I've given you. Then why is it so easy to guess what political point of view the professor is propagating?

It's the pink elephant in the room everyone is aware of, but for some reason, unwilling to talk about. Well, if no one's going to do it, I will. College professors are too liberal, and, worse, too eager to make sure you're aware of that fact. They aren't even anywhere approaching subtle about it. There might as well be a major here called "Why America Sucks Studies." Hell, it would probably be more useful than half the majors offered.

Professors seem to obsess over class and inequality almost fetishistically. As if poor people were the most important thing in the world. Now, don't get me wrong, I have nothing against poor people. What I'm talking about is this constant, mindless yammering that says somehow everything, everything, has to revolve around them. It goes to ridiculous lengths. Professor hands out an assignment entitled "Poor people - big problem, or the biggest problem?" Where's Stephen Colbert when you need him?

Corporations are mercilessly villified. It's almost as if professors would like you to believe there's some evil head honcho with a monocle, petting a cat, sitting in his underground lair, brainstorming ways to take money from poor people, keep the black man down, and keep the masses fat and happy by throwing out rhetoric like "freedom," and "democracy," concepts that obviously do not exist in the real world. It's nonsense.

The worst part is, every professor also likes to paint himself out as being the little guy in this big bad world of evil capitalists. Every professor! How many little guys can there be? They say they're going to teach you how to think critically, and then only present you with one point of view. They pay lip service to this ideal religiously: "We're going to teach you how to be a real human being and think for yourself - oh, by the way, your entire grade is based upon how well you can memorize and spit back the opinion I'm going to throw at you." Whenever a professor asks for your opinion, he's lying. He wants his opinion, written in your voice.

It's not the liberal point of view I'm specifically against. It's the propagating to captive audiences of the liberal point of view that I'm against. If we lived in some alternate universe where all college professors were conservative instead of liberal, I would feel the same way. If Professors went, "Here's my opinion: Blah, blah, blabbity blah," that would be different. But they don't do it that way. They present their opinion as if it was fact. Cold, hard, inarguable fact, as self-evident as a blue sky. And then they have the audacity to grade on how well you know their opinion!

There has to be a solution to this. As a student, my style is to be sarcastic and sardonic in subtly poking fun at the whole thing. In one of my classes recently, the professor assigned an article to read about how evil corporations are. He asked us what we thought about it, and I said, "We read something at a public university that villifies corporations? Somebody pinch me!" Needless to say, he didn't react very well to that. But this is America - a great country, by the way, Mr. Professor Man - and you can't just sit back and let yourself be preached to under the guise of "education."

The Five Best Bands Ever

2008-04-01T14:07:00.000-07:00

These are my top five favorite bands, and why they’re so good. If you don’t like any of these bands, you are very, very wrong. In fact, if that’s the case, please navigate away from my blog right now. I don’t want your kind artificially inflating my hit counter.

5. Van Halen

One of the most inventive and innovative virtuoso guitarists to ever please our collective ears, Eddie Van Halen and his band released their self-title debut in 1978. Van Halen was the best Van Halen album, and, by extension, one of the best ever. The album starts off with the demonic, rocking, magical, mystical, blood-pumping, testosterone-drenched rocker “Runnin’ With The Devil.” Listening to this song, an inescapable urge to bang your head overcomes you and will not let up until all three minutes and thirty-six seconds of it are over. In fact, there’s an extremely popular YouTube video of me air guitaring to it that’s caught the Internet on fire.

Elsewhere on the album, “Eruption” was a flabbergasting testament to EVH’s virtuoso craftsmanship when composing a guitar solo, and it remains the gold standard of songs to cover for amateur guitarists, separating the boys from the men. “You Really Got Me,” “Ain’t Talking ‘Bout Love,” and “Jaime’s Cryin’” were all testaments to the innate ability of EVH to lay down a rollicking guitar lick, Alex Van Halen and Michael Anthony to be the one of the best rhythm sections in all of hard rock, and, of course, David Lee Roth to strut around and spit out nasty double entendres.

After that, Van Halen released several forgettable albums before hitting it big with 1984, and its songs like “Panama,” and “Jump,” before descending into the pit of Hell. But that first album assured their place on this list.

4. Led Zeppelin

The second best heavy metal band ever, Led Zeppelin defined the genre as well as its actual sound. Jimmy Page was another virtuoso guitarist, able to craft jaw-dropping riffs and solos out of nothing. Backing him was the best drummer of all time, John Bonham. In any other band, you could replace the drummer just like that and no one would notice. Not John Bonham. He had smokin’ hot drum solo in almost every song, and he hit those skins with ferocity. Add in John Paul Jones, a bassist that did a good job complementing Bonham, and the huge set of pipes courtesy of Robert Plant, and you have rock and roll history. With a string of classic rockers along the lines of “Whole Lotta Love,” “Rock And Roll,” “Immigrant Song,” “Kashmir,” “Black Dog,” and “Good Times, Bad Times,” Led Zeppelin enjoyed tremendous success for a good decade before they broke up in the aftermath of Bonham’s death in 1980. But they’ll always be remembered, and maybe sometime (soon?) they’ll get off their collective arses and reunite.

3. The Red Hot Chili Peppers

Where to start? The Peppers have consistently put out deeply emotional music that is a lot of fun. Their first four albums – The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Freaky Styley, The Uplift Mofo Party Plan, and Mother’s Milk, were not perfect, to say the least, but some good rockers did come out of them, such as “True Men Don’t Kill Coyotes,” “Hollywood,” “Fight Like A Brave,” and “Higher Ground.” But overall, the albums weren’t very consistent and were too weak to make much of an impact.

Then, a little album came out known as BloodSugarSexMagik, Forgive its unwieldy title. This was one of the best albums of the nineties, along with classics such as Nevermind and Siamese Dream. It all came together for the Peppers here, with gems such as the first (and so far only) song to ever make rap listenable, “Give It Away,” the rockin’ title track, and the tender, emotional ballad “Under The Bridge.” This album vaulted the Peppers into the stratosphere in terms of fame and recognition, and rightly so.

After the phenomenal success they earned with BloodSugar, Peppers guitarist John Frusciante, plagued for years by drug abuse, left the band. Frusciante made up only one-fourth of the band, but he was creatively responsible for a good 70% of the music. Dave Navarro, of Jane’s Addiction fame, took his place, and with him, the Peppers released one album, the underwhelming One Hot Minute. Merely an average album, One Hot Minute was a major disappointment.

Luckily, though, Frusciante returned, and the Peppers had a phenomenal comeback with 1999’s Californication. A spectacular return to form, Californication hit it big with the haunting main riff and lyrics of the title track, the lonely introspection of “Scar Tissue,” the almost heavy metal rocking of “Around The World,” and the strange metaphors of “Otherside,” a song I suspect is about being gay, of all things. Check it out for yourself.

The Peppers returned with more in 2003 with By The Way, another great album. Songs like the title track, “The Zephyr Song,” Can’t Stop,” and “Universally Speaking,” showed the Peppers had a mind-boggling ability to start with an endearing guitar riff courtesy of Frusciante, add some competent drumming and bass by the rhythm section Chad Smith and Flea, and finish it all with a wallop of introspective lyrics and huge set of pipes from Anthony Kiedis.

In 2006, their most recent album, Stadium Arcadium, was released, with another set of magic. The rocker “Dani California” starts things off with a bang, followed by other great songs like the title track, “Readymade,” “Tell Me Baby,” and, especially, “Snow.”

2. Boston

Another spectacular group with a debut album that transcended everything. When Boston was released in the summer of 1976, it quickly shot up the charts to become the best-selling debut album of all time. Guitarist and studio mastermind Tom Scholz was yet another virtuoso guitarist that knew how to compose deeply emotional licks and solos that nonetheless rawked. Lead singer Brad Delp had a nice warm voice, and he sang his comforting, optimistic lyrics over the arena rock-groove Tom laid down. Some songs, such as the platinum single “More Than A Feeling,” and the underappreciated “Hitch A Ride,” were softer and more introspective, while others, such as “Rock And Roll Band,” and “Smokin’,” irresistibly compel one to air guitar. Listening to the album is like curling up with your favorite pillow.

After that, the almost-as-good Don’t Look Back was released in 1978, with its highlights being the title track, “It’s Easy,” and the grooving “Party.” Unfortunately, Boston lost most of its fan base when it only released an album every eight years after that. Eight years! Third Stage came in 1986, Walk On in 1994, and Corporate America in 2002. Now, don’t get me wrong, some good songs did come out of these, most notably “Amanda,” “Walk On,” and “You Gave Up On Love,” but of course they couldn’t touch the first two albums. Now with Brad Delp’s tragic death, the future of Boston is in limbo.

1. Black Sabbath

Black Sabbath is a legendary heavy metal band. Guitarist Tony Iommi led the band through thick and thin, going through who knows how many singers, drummers, and bassists. The band’s most famous lineup, and unfairly so, is Tony Iommi on guitar, Geezer Butler on bass, Ozzy Osbourne doing the singing, and Bill Ward on drums. Tony created some riffs that were doomy, scary as hell, and, of course, rocked like nobody’s business. This is most evident in the gold trifecta of early Sabbath songs, “Paranoid,” “Iron Man,” and “War Pigs.” Here were some catchy, almost pop-like melodies, played through loudly distorted guitars. But I’m sorry, I did not like Ozzy at this point in his career. His voice was flat and uninspired, and personality unengaging, one of the central jobs of a vocalist. And the lyrics sucked! His material as a solo artist did markedly improve, however, as the fantastic album he created with Randy Rhoads demonstrated, “Blizzard Of Ozz.” But that’s another story.

Ozzy left in 1979, to be replaced with the almighty Ronnie James Dio, of Elf and Rainbow fame. The first album with him, Heaven And Hell, was released in 1980, and it remains among the top three albums ever released. Things get going quickly with the kick-ass “Neon Knights,” a pounding, in-your-face, assault of heavy metal glory, fantasy lyrics, and a seriously awesome guitar solo. The soaring title track, the grooving, almost funky “Lady Evil,” and the great “Children Of The Sea,” round off this spectacular album.

A year later, the almost-as-good The Mob Rules was released, with its highlights being the title track, “Turn Up The Night,” and the seven minute epic “The Sign Of The Southern Cross.” But Dio left Black Sabbath quickly after that, and Black Sabbath descended into the pit of Hell, going through numerous lineup changes and some seriously bad music. But in 2007, Dio, Iommi, and the other boys released a compilation album, The Dio Years, and recorded three new songs for it. The sessions turned out to go so well, they went on a tour under the moniker Heaven And Hell, for some reason not Black Sabbath, and whispers of a new album appeared. The future looks bright for the Sabs.

Expulsion Of Life

2008-03-30T12:33:00.000-07:00

I'm sure you've all heard of Ben Stein's new creationist documentary, Expelled? It's saying that creationist scientists (did I just contradict myself?) are being blacklisted and fired for questioning evolution. Then it tries to make a connection between belief in evolution and Nazism.

This is one of the worst pieces of creationist propaganda to come along in years. This is such a ridiculous controversy to begin with. One side says, "Following the evidence and the scientific method to wherever it may lead, we've found out that human beings and all other life on Earth is not constant, rather they have gradually changed from other species in a simple and common-sense way that makes perfect sense." The other side says, "The invisible man that lives in the sky told me that he created everything six thousand years ago." That's what they're arguing about!

"Evolution is just a theory." If you're telling me that you've never heard someone say that, you're a liar, and a bad one at that. In science, theory means that it has been tested, and found to be consistent with the evidence. But in common usage, theory has come to mean something some guy just thought of, some unwarranted postulate or hypothesis. Unfortunately, creationists have been able to exploit that rift between scientific jargon and the vernacular to make it seem as if evolution is just unfounded speculation. Which, of course, could not be further from the truth.

You Are About To Enter The Cone Zone

2008-03-29T12:11:00.001-07:00

Conan O'Brien is the greatest talk show host ever known to mankind. Ever since the first talk shows done in caves, we've been waiting for the anointed son of Heaven Conan O'Brien to come down to us and deliver approximately forty-four minutes of pleasure, daily.

Other hosts are too nice. Jay Leno and Jon Stewart are just too nice of guys to be funny. Stephen Colbert is starkly original, but he's just playing a character, a character that gets old quickly, at that. Comedians shouldn't be bland and inoffensive, they should be sardonic and cutting, bitter and sarcastic. Conan is like that. He's also a extremely good physical comedian. Conan fans know his little mannerisms - The String Dance, The Catscratch, The Rock-a-Bye Baby, The Jump, etc. And how can you not like his hair?

The Beginning of a New Life

2008-03-28T22:44:00.000-07:00

So, today I had an idea. An inspiration, if you will. An epiphany of glorious proportions. I want to be a writer. It's something I've always liked and been good at it, if you'll allow me to toot my own horn a bit. And what better way to start my career than with a blog? A great place to post my thoughts, great stories, links to good sites, or whatever else may strike my fancy. I hope you'll come with me, dear reader. It's going to be a bumpy ride.