Headlines of the Week (Or Whatever)

Dear Murka, I love you so.


You'll Never Believe What Font They Use: An Interview with the Westboro Baptists

Dear America, I Saw You Naked: Listening to a TSA Agent

Arizona Town's Stray Chihuahuas Are Creating a Public Health Threat

Hummus Is Conquering America!

10 Things Most Americans Don’t Know About America (A Post on Perspective)

Headlines of the Week (Or Whatever)

Between 1968 and 1973, somebody hijacked a commercial airliner nearly every week.

Queens of the Stone Age want your number, but it's not what you think — it's even creepier.

Stay gone, Snowden! Because despite what dumb people think, there is "no public interest exception to the Espionage Act".

The Race to Save Mali's Artifacts

“The Myth of Persecution”: Early Christians weren’t persecuted, says a historian of the early church.

Headlines of the Week (Or Whatever)

The Irrational Consumer: Why Economics Is Dead Wrong About How We Make Choices: A new paper reviews how psychology, biology, and neurology are ganging up on economics to prove that, when it comes to making decisions, people are anything but rational.

IRS sued for not enforcing politicking restrictions on churches! Yay!

On the "mind-blowing" revelations offered by use of LSD in science. Because science!

Occupy Earth Day: An Expose of the Corporate Propaganda Systems that Undermine Systemic Change Activism

The Rape of Petty Officer Blumer: Inside the military's culture of sex abuse, denial and cover-up.

Physics & Philosophy

From my weekly comments for Honors Colloquium:

"I like to think the moon is there even if I am not looking at it." ~Albert Einstein

In Newtonian physics, our world is orderly. Everything that happens is pre-ordained and with enough information, intrinsically predictable. Our scientific ideas of the time well-matched our religious ideas at the time, with human beings at the center of the earth, which was at the center of the universe, over which we could, given enough time and effort, completely control. This strikes me as reminiscent of our desire to embrace a fundamental reality in nature, which may or may not be known as God.

In quantum mechanics, our world is uncertain. Everything exists in a cloud of possibilities. Precise definitions are unobtainable, and as Sir Isaac Newton came to show us, even things we thought we understood had an even deeper level. Light is one such example; what we once thought of as particles turned out to be both particles and waves. With a sigh, we have alternately accepted and fought the uncertain duality of the universe ever since.

YRE Lesson Plans for April and May

YRE Lesson Plans for April and May

Dice and Determinism

“God does not play dice with the universe.          –Albert Einstein

On Interdependence

From my weekly comments for Honors Colloquium:

“The first [interpretation] is "this arises because that is," which comes down to saying that things do exist in some way, but nothing exists on its own. The second is "this, having been produced, produces that," which means that nothing can be its own cause. Or we could say that everything is in some way interdependent with the world..” –Matthieu Ricard, The Quantum and the Lotus

The postulate of interdependence in Universe in a Grain of Sand strikes me as sort of the ultimate religious syllogism; if a then b. It is, then, a logical idea; and one of words and language. It is also a religious idea, present in Christianity, in Buddhism, in Unitarian Universalism, and others. It is an economic idea and a scientific one, because all of our actions affect the world, as a butterfly might cause a hurricane vis-à-vis chaos theory. The idea of interdependence, then, is interdependent. I find this idea delightful.

Honors Comp Final Exam Essay: Paths to Salvation

Paths to Salvation

Jonathan Edwards and Billy Sunday were not born of the same time, place, or circumstance, but both men were deeply concerned with the concept of salvation. They each seemed to feel as though they walked through a world of unsaved souls, with false assurances of spiritual safety leading men astray. They each seemed to believe that salvation was of great concern, yet advocated different paths to their selfsame goal.

"Vell, Mitt's just zis guy, you know?"*

Dressage. Really. Although I have friends whom are avid riders, I had to search to see for the definition of 'dressage'. Apparently, it's horse ballet**, and is also known as the highest expression of horse training. Regular folks - folks who work and pay taxes and worry about a mortgage - don't own dressage horses. We also don't declare a tax loss of $77,000 for the care and feeding of a dressage horse that qualifies for the next Olympics. An interesting parallel is that in 2010, the same year in which they declared that loss, the mean yearly per capita income was less than $28,000.

But, hey, he totally represents me as a citizen!***

*Zaphod is equally well-suited to be our President, and for exactly the same reasons.

**I'm not being sarcastic. That's really what it's called!

***I am totally being sarcastic.

On Abortion

So here's the deal. Thousands of children die each year because they can't find organ donors. You can donate lobes of your liver with almost no problems. Kidneys are a little more problematic, but neither even comes close to having a child, much less raising one. So, if you haven't signed up to donate one, the other or both, then you have no business voting for a law that would force someone else to donate their organs to a child without consent. This seems like simple logic to me. Again, to recap:

If you think that unborn children have a right to my organs, then actual, live children surely have a right to your organs. So put up or shut up.

Yo, Christians.

Malachi.

“Is there not one Father of us all? Did not one God create us? Why, then, does each one of us despise his brother, violating the covenant of our fathers?” -Malachi 2:10

Why do so many modern Christians despise gay people, people of color, poor people, etc.? Love them. Feed them. Heal them. LOVE THEM.

A timely reminder...

A timely reminder about the importance of separating your religion from your government:

"I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference; and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

Random Thoughts

"The Fukushima situation has exposed a grave danger to our world. But the danger isn't radiation, it's the poor state of science education."

and

An Austrian atheist will be allowed to wear a colander on his head in his driver's license photo after successfully arguing that it counts as "religious headgear" for Pastafarians.

As a contrast, more people are upset about the Austrian atheist than the sad state of American education.

Good for a giggle.

I was reading curriculum reviews today, and came across a very unfavorable review for a particular company's science course. As a Christian creationist, the parent was upset that this company's science course was about... Science.