Church and State should be separate in the body politic, but never in individuals.
(Last month)
M—: My aunt sent an e-mail to everyone the other day saying, “President Obama cancelled the National Day of Prayer. I know some of you are Democrats but I hope as good Christians, you can get angry.”
Me: Oh, that again.
M—: I was half tempted to link the snopes article refuting it, but I didn’t want to get into that drama.
Me: You should have just sent back that as a good Christian it gets you angry when a relative bears false witness.”
Happy National Day of Prayer, America!
(Disclaimer: None of the views here are those of the Wikimedia Foundation.)
Brendan Eich, creator of Javascript, resigned as CEO of Mozilla mostly over his unrepenting anti-gay views.
I must admit a brief bit of schadenfreude because I predicted that this change would happen on Prop 8 specifically. The only thing that surprises me from those six-year-old articles is the quickness of the sea change around this issue.Continue reading about Eich and other thoughts after the jump
Marie sent me this article today with the comment: “Surprisingly, not an Onion headline.”
The article says:
> The Texas congressman said that if Mr. Obama persists in executing the office of the Presidency *as defined by the Constitution,* he could face “impeachment and/or deportation.” … “Mr. President, there’s still time for you to get in line. But if you continue to fulfill the duties of President of the United States that are *expressly permitted* in the Constitution, you are playing with fire.”
If true, Reality has jumped the shark.
I found [this comment][megan] amusing:
> Finally, [[Megan McArdle][megan mccardle]] as an approximately 6’ tall, moderately attractive woman — who likes guns — libertarian, objectivist, and conservative fan-bois glommed on to her like a million sperm all trying to fertilize the same egg, which provides its own kind of mockworthy spectacle
The college I went to had a 6:1 guy:girl ratio at the time. Being an institute full of socially stunted nerds just like me, they had their own word for when multiple guys talking to or associating with a single girl: “glomming.” While it has morphed beyond its original meaning—it is short for “agglomeration”—it has become part of our [urban dictionary][urban glom], and the above example shows it in its original definition.
One day during Rotation, I was hanging out on the Triple on the second floor, and watched “glom pools” forming around the night’s new batch of [Freshman][frosh] girls in the dorm’s courtyard below. The image of “a million sperm all trying to fertilize the same egg” is an especially apt description. I can trace a direct line to [my intense shyness][shyness] [around women][photographing women] to that singular and instructive moment.
– **glom** *v.t.* to accost a girl who is already surrounded by multiple guys
– **glommer** *n* a male who gloms serially
– **glom pool** *n* an aggregation of many guys around a single girl
Oh yeah, if any Techers at the time are wondering about all the hacked copies of [CrystalCaltech Quest][crystal quest] on campus—the one where [ResEdit][resedit] to add Caltechisms like the infamous and indestructable “glom monster” toward the end? That was me.
[megan]: http://www.balloon-juice.com/2011/11/15/open-park-and-open-thread/#comment-2878747 “Open Park and Open Thread—Balloon Juice”
[megan mccardle]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megan_McArdle “Megan McCardle—Wikipedia”
[urban glom]: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=glom “glom—Urban Dictionary”
[frosh]: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=frosh “frosh—Urban Dictionary”
[photographing women]: http://terrychay.com/article/photography-and-the-social-wave-function.shtml “Collapsing the female wave-function”
[shyness]: http://terrychay.com/article/ruby-photography-women.shtml “Ruby, Photography, and Women”
[crystal quest]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Quest “Crystal Quest”
[resedit]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ResEdit “ResEdit—Wikipedia. Hacking the game became so popular, they created their own tool which they built into later editions of the game.”
Stephen Colbert finds his humor best, when people are at their worst:
It’s amusing to read right wing defenses of these actions. My personal favorite is “the clip is too short”—as if [you can’t use the googlez][occupy cal] to find that the full clip is even worse.
Another interesting one is that this is okay because Berkeley “accepts about 10-12% public money (or 88-90% private).” A cursory use of the google shows that they’re one quarter state funding. The other three quarters are from public AND private funding. For instance, any professor who brings in a grant (most grant, but not all, are publicly funded), has about 40% siphoned off by the university as overhead. This has always been the case. The university is also supported by [a $3.15 billion endowment][berkeley endowment].
(State funding used to be a much higher percentage of Cal’s budget, but was cut by the governator so the state could keep its prisons. The [largest single private grant to the university][bp grant] was done by [the hippies at British Petroleum][oil spill]. Those two facts explain why the “powers that be” at the University of California tacitly approved of these actions and [the one in 2009][2009 budget crisis].)
No matter, the discussion of “public” vs. “private” with respect to speech is a red herring. The [Free Speech Movement][free speech movement], which began in exactly the same place, settled this matter. Arguing that “pitching tents” is a bridge-too-far isn’t really going to save a lost cause when videos of your police dragging people by the hair and beating 4’10” asian girls in the stomach are going viral on the intarwebs.
But perhaps the most damning argument comes from [this observation][observation]:
> If we were to view the actions of police as Americans watching people attempting to gain their rights in a foreign country, we would find them appalling. Yet somehow there are those in this country who are all too happy to deny rights afforded to all Americans under the Constitution. The right of peaceful assembly is guaranteed and those who seek to deny them are ignorant of this “fact.”
Whether or not it is legal to “nudge with batons” to take down some students’ tents, it is clear what is right—which is why, I suppose it, [is a Right][first amendment].
> “The individuals who linked arms and actively resisted, that in itself is an act of violence.
> —[UC Police Capt. Margo Bennet][use of batons]
> It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms and forming a human chain to prevent the police from gaining access to the tents. This is not non-violent civil disobedience.
> -[UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau][chancellor letter]
Good luck with that line of thought. [Bull Connor approves][Birmingham campaign]!
[chancellor letter]: http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2011/11/10/message-to-the-campus-community-about-occupy-cal/ “Message to the campus community about ‘Occupy Cal’—UC Berkeley News Center”
[2009 budget crisis]: http://budgetcrisis.berkeley.edu/?page_id=1949 “Nov-Dec ’09 News—UC BErkeley Budget Crisis”
[occupy cal]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buovLQ9qyWQ “Occupy Cal 11/9/11 PART 1—YouTube”
[free speech movement]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Movement “Free Speech Movement—Wikipedia”
[observation]: http://www.mediaite.com/online/stephen-colbert-mocks-u-c-berkeley-campus-police-for-attacking-occupy-protesters/
[first amendment]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution “FIrst Amendment to the United States Constitution—Wikipedia”
[use of batons]: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=%2Fc%2Fa%2F2011%2F11%2F11%2FMNH21LTC4D.DTL “UC cops’ use of batons on Occupy camp questioned—SFGate”
[Birmingham campaign]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_campaign#Fire_hoses_and_police_dogs “Birmingham Campaign—Wikipedia. Bull Connor. “When the students crouched or fell, the blasts of water rolled them down the asphalt streets and concrete sidewalks.[68] Connor allowed white spectators to push forward, shouting, “Let those people come forward, sergeant. I want ’em to see the dogs work.”.”
[bp grant]: http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/02/01_ebi.shtml “BP selects UC Berkeley to lead $500 million energy research consortium with partners Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, University of Illinois—Berkeley. I like this article because it tells me that in 2007 one of my physics/math professors is chief scientist at BP. Smart guy but he always was an asshole, so I’m not surprised.”
[oil spill]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill “Deepwater Horizon oil spill—Wikipedia”
[berkeley endowment]: http://www.berkeleyendowment.org/ “Berkeley Endowment Management Company”
It is said that the reason many poor are opposed to social programs that benefit them is [a fear of coming in “last.”][last place aversion]
If that is the case, the [impending implosion of the euro][euro ends], as [predicted for years by center-left economists][can europe be saved], offers a marked example of schadenfreude for us Americans.
Besides the obvious worry over whether the death spiral will reach our shores, there’s the question of how [Rupert-Murdoch-on-steroids][sylvio berlusconi] could run the third largest European economy (7th largest in the world) into the ground, what’s with right wing obsession with inflation in times of deflationary spirals, and why this prediction seemed to only have been made by liberals.
So my thinking is our laughter has a touch too much nerves.
[last place aversion]: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=occupy-wall-street-psychology “The “Last Place Aversion” Paradox—Scientific American”
[euro ends]: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/09/this-is-the-way-the-euro-ends-2/ “This is the way the Euro ends—Paul Krugman @ New York Times”
[can europe be saved]: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/magazine/16Europe-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all “Can Europe Be Saved?—New York Times”
[sylvio berlusconi]: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/09/silvio-berlusconi-italy-great-procrastinator
Scientific thinking requires that the more outlandish the claim, the more compelling the evidence must be. It is this thinking that rejects the libertarian’s love children: Freakonomics, The Bell Curve, or nearly any book by Malcolm Gladwell.
During lunch, I exhausted my daily newsfeed and started to troll the top hits on digg when I ran across [this linked article in which a journalist and amateur geographer explains the Tea Party movement][geography tea party].
Here is the central claim that forms the basis for the author’s entire argument:
> We’ve never been a nation-state in the European sense; we’re a federation of nations, more akin to the European Union than the Republic of France, and this confounds both collective efforts to find common ground and radical campaigns to force one component nation’s values on the others.
[geography tea party]: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novemberdecember_2011/features/a_geography_lesson_for_the_tea032846.php “A Geography Lesson for the Tea Party—Washington Monthly”
What a load of crap!Continue reading about regionalism after the jump
Overheard:
“This is another song from a Swedish band.”
“Are they Swedish or something else?”
“I don’t know—some Scandinavian country I think. The song isn’t bad.”
“I think it’s a bit overplayed—it’s featured in a lot of TV and movies.”
“Yes, I guess you’re right. Did you know that it’s played a lot in evangelical churches, even though it not about religion?”
“Oh really?”
“Yeah, listen to the lyrics… ‘Save me, I’m lost.’… ‘Oh lord I’ve been waiting for you.’”
“Wow, he was asking for it!”
*Laughs* “Yeah. He probably shouldn’t have added ‘Oh Lord.’”
(The fact that the lead singer looks like [White Jesus][white jesus] doesn’t help either.)
[white jesus]: http://www.stuffwhitechristianslike.com/2009/02/15-white-jesus.html “White Jesesus—Stuff White Christians Like”
Continue reading the lyrics to Show Me What I’m Looking For after the jump
I find the [cheering of 234 executions][cheering executions] extremely odd for supposed supporters of the death penalty.
[cheering executions]: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/they-messed-with-texas/ “They Messed With Texas—Opinionator”
Rick Perry’s success in the primary hinges on being the daddy-figure posture with the right wing bedwetters. Given that he’s on record as having [executed an innocent man][new yorker death penalty], he has to double down to cover his mistake. So, I understand Rick Perry’s political strategy here.
But why cheer executions? Have we as a country sunk so low?
Continue reading about the economics, statistics, and morals of the death penalty after the jump