agnes on faith

Stolen from RDN

idiocy all around

Mike Huckabee thinks that bumblebees can't fly, and believes he is not a primate. And this idiot--yes, idiocy is the only word appropriate in this context--is running for US presidency? WTF??? (Thanks to Recursivity).

I must then, together with many other bloggers and scientists, call for a presidential debate on science and technology. We cannot have a person ignorant of the basic facts of the universe we live in, the planet we are stuck on, and the way of thinking that is helping us uncover these facts (i.e., science) in charge of the most powerful nation on the planet. This job carries an awesome responsibility and an incredibly dangerous amount of power; village idiots need not apply.

coolness over there

Sunspot no 978: about the size of Jupiter as of this writing, getting ready to explode and utterly beautiful. I can stare at stuff like this for hours...



For more details, go to SpaceWeather

Unholy Racket No 004: A short update

1.Vancouver is full of weird-looking people, and, considering that my definition of weird is perforce different from that of mere humans, you can imagine what I mean.

2.Why is it that when I am waiting for a bus, reading a book on quantum field theory and desperately trying to wrap my brain around a particularly painful Lagrangian, some old codger or a born-again fool always attempts to engage me in some inane conversation? And they refuse to stop babbling and persist in ruining my concentration. Go play on the freeway, you goddamn freaks!

3.Conversation overheard on the bus:

SLOB, to DRIVER: "Are you going to Vancouver?"
(The front of the bus is lit up with a glowing sign saying, MAX via Jantzen Beach).

D.: "No, I am going to Delta Park."

S.: "Just to Delta Park?"

D.: "Yes."

SLOB (getting on the bus): "Let me know when we get to Mill Plain."

!!!!!!!!!

4. An old joke popped up in a new book on brain states:

--Knock knock.
--Who is there?
--O.J.
--O.J. who?
--You're on the jury.

5. Finally, to clarify my definition of weirdness, I prefer mango peach salsa to chocolate. So there!

tom tomorrow rules

Yeah.

Today

The Golden Compass opens today. You may wonder why I am squawking about this movie so much. Well, for starters, it is one of my favourite fantasies (of the epic sort) ever. Much better than the thin, silly Christian propaganda of C.S. Lewis and, let's admit it, derivative and just-as-religious and authoritarian dream of J.R.R. Tolkien (although Tolkien holds a special dear place in my heart for his linguistic prowess and consequent palpably real sense of place and time). But Pullman is smarter, more interesting and certainly more original and iconoclastic than either of them. And I would rather have my child be exposed to fantasy fiction via Pullman than Lewis, or even "The Hobbit". There; I've said it. The above sentence is precisely the reason why all the totalitarian-in-disguise religionists are foaming at the mouth in their trembling lust to denounce this movie. Yeah, check out some of these (and that's just this morning's crop of articles; some more balanced than others, and some quotes more idiotic than others, but that's the way the world is, after all):

PREACHING ATHEISM. I love the quote from Father Michael Okere, whoever he is: ""The motive of this movie, it has been noted, is to sway innocent children to derail from their faith.". Probalby not quite true (the original message of the book has, reputedly, been diluted to the point of inoffensiveness), but of course even if it were so, I'd say more power to them! That kind of innocence needs to be derailed. Is it OK to brainwash children? It is, however, OK to teach them how to think for themselves, which is what Pullman's books, and, hopefully, the movie, are doing. And one of the final quotes in this article is telling: ""Christians need to be careful about what they let their families see." Isn't that lovely? I'll let you draw your own conclusions.

The Golden Compass raises Some Eyebrows.

Is 'Compass' fantasy adventure or atheism for kids? (I like that title; I hope it's both! ;))

Parents decry reading of controversial book to Shallowater third-graders. Some real side-splitting idiocy there; but this piece of news is from Texas, after all, so I guess we shouldn't be surprised...;)

Compass points: Catholic and atheist (That's BBC for you, huh!)

'Compass' author's atheism stirs debate on film's message Some interesting stuff here; apparently many people miss the point of the books, which is a bad thing, I suppose. Or is it? There are some great quotes from Pullman himself towards the end of the article.

Oh, fuck it: too much shite to wade through, and I must go to work now. Too bad. I think I'll go see it tonight, after work; i am also organizing a group outing Sunday or Monday for several shots of whiskey, a matinee and a chance to laugh at christian protesters, should there be any.

America, the beautiful

...or not? Tell me if it pisses you off as much as it does me; we seem to be stuck in some barbarous age, with no relief in sight:

US says it has right to kidnap British citizens.

We've never had much respect for international law, but this disdain for lawful ways of resolving problems has reached new heights under this administration. And they complain about other countries' disrespect for the international community, nevertheless! WTF?

Destroying the planet again? + juicy idiotic religious tidbits

Are you using electrical power bought from companies that engage in mountain-top removal? You can find out by going to My Connection and entering your zip code. If your power is purchased by a destruction of a mountain top, the site will link you to a photograph of said mountain top. For example, my zip produces this.

Get involved; they are killing OUR mountains!

In other news, the Pope is pissing blood about atheism again (the full text of the new encyclical, Spe Salvi). What else is new? The old authoritarian asshole would be kind of amusing if so many people didn't take him seriously. As it is, he is rather frightening, in a cheap B-movie horror kind of way. He may eat you whole but at least it'll be funny.

A frustrated penchant for drowning

I live in a great house. It is huge and reasonably well-heated. My roommates are great: they share alcoholic beverages and we rarely get in each other's way. The rent is reasonable. The hot-water heater is huge, allowing me to take long-ass showers. But...

The house is a typical American, utilitarian structure, and for some reason it doesn't have a bathtub anywhere on the premises. On days like today, though, a bath never leaves one's thoughts. It looks bloody cold outside, and the wind is still trying to push its way in. What better way to spend one's time than blogging from a bathtub filled with scalding hot water and maybe bubbles?

Also, on a brighter note, the absence of a bathtub denies me at least two ways of offing myself. How am I going to drown myself after swallowing a bunch of sleeping pills, Kosinski style? And I will not even mention the sheer impossibility of a quiet check-out after slicing my wrists open, peacefully staring at a not-too-clean ceiling from the womblike embrace of lukewarm water...Damn What is one to do in circumstances like these?

Rambling on #13*sqrt(2)

It snowed for about half an hour yesterday morning, and though most of it melted before hitting the ground and the rest, shortly afterwards, it still was a wondersome sight. And it made the busses run late. Also, last night, the winds were supposedly up to 74 mph (that's 30+ meters per second for you metroids). I didn't venture outside and cannot vouch for it, but I do know that every crack in every window in my house turned into a frost-breathing dragon for a while, and there was some howling going on outside. Not a hurricane, but lovely nevertheless. Maybe next year we'll get one: a hurricane and a snowstorm, ripping roofs off fundamentalist churches, tossing SUVs across streets into yuppie windows, throwing icicles at porches of rabidly Republican domiciles...nah, one can only dream...

Meanwhile, today I am listening to Gypsy Jazz while learning octave and contemplating some bourbon later tonight. Brain is dead: too much sobriety over the last several days.

a tidbit to tide you over...

...while I am feverishly trying not to write anything at all, and not drink or fuck either. It's been a hectic week.

Anyway: Chuck Norris Facts...bloody hilarious.

Got to go be bored. Chah!

Morford strikes true

Mark Morford, always quite good, is purely awesome today:

reposted from http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2007/11/28/notes112807.DTL&nl=fix

Black Friday Die Die Die
America's most obscene shopping day meets its doom in an oily nightmare hell. All true!

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Is this why they hate us? Why we hate ourselves? Is this why we seem to have no real idea who the hell we are anymore, or what it means to have a humane and thoughtful national identity, and therefore we happily scratch and claw and fight our way into giant fluorescent-lit hellpits for a chance at a $29 DVD player and some crappy plasma TVs and a pallet of heavily discounted spatulas?

More broadly: Is this why we're suffering such a general feeling of ennui and disgust and apathy in the culture right now, the nagging feeling that we have no center and God has abandoned us and we therefore simply cannot consume enough goods and technology to try and fill the void? The answer seems rather obvious.

I don't even know what Kohl's is. I'm guessing some sort of mass-crap superstore, like Best Buy or Target or T.J. Maxx or a weird amalgam of all of those and it doesn't really matter because last Friday they opened at 4 a.m. for the mad rush of Black Friday shoppers, because if there's one thing you want to do when your body is groggy and sleep tugs at your heart and your dreams have turned vacant and sad, it's grope cheap waffle makers before sunrise.

Wal-Mart opened at 5. Target opened at 6. Across America, gluttony ruled. There were stores that had nothing whatsoever to do with gifting or holiday largess, stores with names like Cabinetry and More or Rug Depot that nevertheless opened at 6 or 7 a.m. on that now-ominous, insane, fateful day, if for no other reason than to capitalize on the fact that there were so many franctic zombified credit-carded bodies swarming about and it would be foolish not to take advantage.

(more)

P.S. I did not buy anything on Friday, except for a bus fare to work. For that matter, I didn't buy anything on Saturday either. And yes, I do feel smug about it, but my shopping footprint is rather minuscule at the best of times, and I am proud of that, too...

Everything is getting faster and smarter

Just over the last few weeks it seems that captchas have grown in length enormously: they used to be about 4-5 characters long; now, on my Myspace account, I usually have to fill out 8-9 characters. Hah! Nobody can escape the righteous wrath of spam. That's why we need true artificial intelligence to deal with it. (I won't make any bad jokes about the relative lack of natural intelligence on this planet, of course, nor about my addiction to self-referential statements. Consider yourself warned).

Golden Compass

...had its world premiere (a press showing) last night in the UK (I wish I were in London right now; I'd have finagled my way in somehow). The reviews are good, and I am going to watch it tonight, and tomorrow. will report when I am done.

Naturally, it's all done with torrents; I will still go to the theater on the 5th when it opens here and, of course, am likely to get the DVD when it comes out. But I cannot fucking wait!!! Since Pullman's trilogy is one of my favourite all-tome fantasies and certainly the best one in the recent years I must see it NOW...;)

Of course, the Catholic Defense League and other comparable wankers are pissing in the wind with their complaints (oh my golly! these scary free-thinkers are again going to oppress 85% of god-fearing Americans! Oh woe!). Fuck them. The message of the book has already been slightly diluted by the script, and it shouldn't really offend anyone but a few rabid morons. Also, what this world needs right now (as always, but now more than at some other points in history) is a good dose of public atheism and provocative free-thought. We have been taking things like freedom a bit too much for granted, especially here in these United States.

Go Golden Compass!!!

Bender's big score

...and the Universe is destroyed. Just lovely.

The last gasps of social conservatism...

...we hope. In any case, being a friend of President Bush nowadays is not such a great idea if one wants to have any kind of a political future. In Australia, John Howard was "comprehensively defeated" on Saturday, with his defeat owing a lot to his stance on Kyoto treaty (no), on the war on terrorism (he is a close Bush ally and a personal friend) and on public health and education. In a somewhat snide (but welcome) remark, the winning Labor party stated that "Australia will remain a close ally of the United States, and Rudd [the new Prime Minister-elect] remains committed to the alliance..." but "...if there is a Democratic administration elected next year, to some extent they would become closer.”

The world just took a small step towards sanity; not all news are bad, apparently.

and justice for all

From MyConfinedSpace:

with special thanks to lucretius

from The Stubborn Curmudgeon's blog.

Enjoy!

Turkeys'n'shite

Today, as a mental exercise, i am trying to imagine what Thanksgiving would be like had the Axis Powers won the Second World War.

I shall have sushi and sake for lunch, and dine in a German restaurant, on sausages and sauerkraut, with some doppelbok and a shot or two of good schnapps.

Drunken quotes from the throat of midnight

Bugs Bunny: "... batten down the hatches!"

supporting character: "But, Captain, we've already battened down the hatches."

Bugs Bunny: "Well, batten them down again. We'll teach those hatches!"

Morning Malaise

1.I certainly do not want to go to work today. however, Momokawa Pearl sake is a wonderful beverage.

2.The degradation of civil society continues apace. How could we have ever thought that something like this would be funny? But it is. Laughter in the dark, laughter through tears, indeed. Tom Tomorrow rules.

A periodic reminder of why religion is evil

Today, reposted from http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/15/world/africa/15witches.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

African Crucible: Cast as Witches, Then Cast Out
by Sharon LaFraniere


UIGE, Angola — Domingos Pedro was only 12 years old when his father died. The passing was sudden; the cause was a mystery to doctors. But not to Domingos's relatives.

They gathered that afternoon in Domingos's mud-clay house, he said, seized him and bound his legs with rope. They tossed the rope over the house's rafters and hoisted him up until he was suspended headfirst over the hard dirt floor. Then they told him they would cut the rope if he did not confess to murdering his father.

"They were yelling, 'Witch! Witch!'" Domingos recalled, tears rolling down his face. "There were so many people all shouting at me at the same time."

Terrified, Domingos told them what they wanted to hear, but his relatives were not appeased. Ferraz Bulio, the neighborhood's traditional leader, said seven or eight captors were dragging Domingos down a dirt path to the river, apparently to drown him, when he intervened.

"They were slapping him and punching him," he said. "This is the way people react toward someone accused of witchcraft. There are lots of such cases."

Mr. Bulio is right. In parts of Angola, Congo and the Congo Republic, a surprising number of children are accused of being witches, and then are beaten, abused or abandoned. Child advocates estimate that thousands of children living in the streets of Kinshasa, Congo's capital, have been accused of witchcraft and cast out by their families, often as a rationale for not having to feed or care for them.

The officials in one northern Angolan town identified 432 street children who had been abandoned or abused after being called witches. A report last year by the government's National Institute for the Child and the United Nations Children's Fund described the number of children said to be witches as "massive."

The notion of child witches is not new here. It is a common belief in Angola's dominant Bantu culture that witches can communicate with the world of the dead and usurp or "eat" the life force of others, bringing their victims misfortune, illness and death. Adult witches are said to bewitch children by giving them food, then forcing them to reciprocate by sacrificing a family member.

But officials attribute the surge in persecutions of children to war — 27 years in Angola, ending in 2002, and near constant strife in Congo. The conflicts orphaned many children, while leaving other families intact but too destitute to feed themselves.

"The witches situation started when fathers became unable to care for the children," said Ana Silva, who is in charge of child protection for the children's institute. "So they started seeking any justification to expel them from the family."

Since then, she said, the phenomenon has followed poor migrants from the northern Angolan provinces of Uige and Zaire to the slums of the capital, Luanda.

Two recent cases horrified officials there. In June, Ms. Silva said, a Luanda mother blinded her 14-year-old daughter with bleach to try to rid her of evil visions. In August, a father injected battery acid into his 12-year-old son's stomach because he feared the boy was a witch, she said.

Angola's government has campaigned since 2000 to dispel notions about child witches, Ms. Silva said, but progress comes slowly. "We cannot change the belief that witches exist," she said. "Even the professional workers believe that witches exist."

Instead, her institute is trying to teach authority figures — police officers, teachers, religious leaders — that violence against children is never justified.

The Angolan city of Mbanza Congo, just 50 miles from the border with Congo, has blazed a trail. After a child accused of witchcraft was stabbed to death in 2000, provincial officials and Save the Children, the global charitable organization, rounded up 432 street children and reunited 380 of them with relatives, the witchcraft report stated.

Eleven fundamentalist churches were shut down because of reports of child exploitation and abuse. Eight Congolese pastors were deported. Villages formed committees to monitor children's rights. The authorities say the number of children who are abused or living on the streets dropped drastically.

Uige, about 100 miles to the south of Mbanza Congo, is another story. Surrounded by lush green hills, it is a cluster of mud-clay settlements around crumbling shops pockmarked by bullet holes. In this region, said Bishop Emilio Sumbelelo of St. Joseph's Catholic Church, persecution of children is rising.

"It is very, very, very common in the villages," he said. "We know that some children have been killed."

His church runs the town's only sanctuary for children victimized as witches, a shelter barely bigger than a three-car garage. Thirty-two boys, including Domingos, occupy bunk beds stacked a foot apart, their few clothes stashed in boxes underneath. No shelter exists for girls.

Since July, all newcomers have been turned away. "Children come here to ask for protection, but we have no space," the bishop said. "To date, we have not found any special way to fight against this phenomenon."

Many boys describe pasts of abuse, rejection and fear. Saldanha David Gomes, 18, who lived with his aunt until he was 12, said she turned on him after her 3-year-old daughter fell ill and died.

After, he said, his aunt refused to feed him and bound his hands and feet each night, fearing that he would take another victim.

A neighbor finally warned him to flee. "I am not a witch, and I was not a witch," Saldanha said. "But I had to run away because they were threatening to kill me."

Afonso García, 6, took the shelter's last empty cot in July. "I came here on my own because my father doesn't like me and I was not eating every day," he said matter-of-factly.

After Afonso's mother died three years ago, he moved in with his father. His stepmother, Antoinette Eduardo, said she began to suspect that he was a witch after neighborhood children reported that he had eaten a razor. Besides that, she said, "he was getting thinner and thinner, even though he was eating well."

Under questioning, she said, Afonso admitted that a male relative had visited him in his dreams, demanding that he kill a family member. Afonso denies ever confessing to witchcraft.

What unfolded next is typical of many cases here. Afonso's relatives turned to a traditional healer for a cure.

The healer, João Ginga, 30, wears a fur-collared leather jacket and works out of what he calls a hospital — a cramped mud-walled room. "If someone has a bad spirit, I can tell," he said one recent morning as clients waited on a bench. "We treat more than a thousand cases a year."

With such a busy trade, Mr. Ginga said, he could not remember Afonso's case. Afonso's aunt, Isabella Armando, said her family gave Mr. Ginga $270 in cash, candles, perfume and baby powder to treat Alfonso.

Mr. Ginga performed some rituals, put a substance in Afonso's eyes that made him sob in pain and pronounced him cured, she said. But Afonso's father and stepmother, the only relatives who could afford to care for him, did not agree, and expelled him from their household.

"I pitied him, and I still pity him because he was living in the streets," the stepmother explained. "But we were afraid."

Mr. Ginga is hardly the only healer here who claims to cure child witches. Sivi Munzemba said she exorcised possessed children by inserting a poultice of plants into their anuses, shaving their heads and sequestering them for two weeks in her house.

Moises Samuel, director of the provincial office of the children's institute, said he was concerned not only about traditional healers but also about a bevy of churches with soothsayers who claimed to exorcise evil spirits and drew crowds even on weekdays.

Once a soothsayer or healer brands a child a witch, child welfare specialists say, even the police often back away.

Officers kept Domingos, the boy who was suspended from a rafter, for one night at the station house, then sent him home, said Mr. Bulio, the settlement's traditional leader. They never investigated Domingos's uncle, who Mr. Bulio said led the attack.

"Of course it was a crime," Mr. Bulio said. "But because it is witchcraft, the police do not take any responsibility."

Domingos, now 15, insisted that he said he was a witch only to save his life. But even his 32-year-old mother, Maria Pedro, disbelieves him.

Ms. Pedro is obviously fond of Domingos, her oldest child. She beams over his academic progress and worries about further attacks by his relatives, should he leave the shelter.

Still, she said, she suspects that he was bewitched into murder. "It must be true because he himself confessed," she said, eyeing Domingos carefully across a table in her two-bedroom house.

At that, Domingos stood up and walked swiftly from the house. Ten minutes later, he reappeared in the doorway, his face red and splotchy. "Mother, from this day on, I am no longer your son," he declared fiercely.

Ms. Pedro wordlessly watched him go. "I just don't know why Domingos got so angry," she said later.

For more information on this story, see
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4677969.stm

Never seen you look that good

From Kaguya, a Japanese probe in lunar orbit now, the first HD image of Earth-rise from the Moon: