If the modern/postmodern world is alienating and dehumanizing in some unique and unprecedented way, as many people insist, then why is history loaded with nonstop philosophical and theological invention and re-invention? Why are there a zillion different religions, all equally goofy and equally earnest in their attempts to ameliorate human misery, if if there's something special about our misery?

Or is our angst and alienation special only because we're the ones who happen to be living it at the moment?

Ok, back to chainsawing zombies....

Here's The Symphony of Science, where John Boswell posts his autotuned snippets of Cosmos and other scientific talks, turning them into song. Here's Ann Druyan discussing the songs on the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast.

The sky calls to us
If we do not destroy ourselves
We will one day venture to the stars

A still more glorious dawn awaits
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise
A morning filled with 400 billion suns
The rising of the milky way.

Carl Sagan

Man. That's shameless geek foreplay right there. No wonder we love him.

Happy Birthday, Carl.

Thus twoth TooManyTribbles, anyway.

I'm ashamed to confess I didn't even realize that the First (hopefully) Annual Carl Sagan Day was upon us. Or will be tomorrow, the 7th, anyway.

But that's the nice thing about holidays and other special occasions.  Just tack an "eve" on the end, and you get two excuses to party for the price of one. \0/

So take a moment to light a candle in the darkness, or watch an old episode of Cosmos, or read one of his nifty books.  Or puff on a fat ol' doobie, 'cause I'm pretty sure he'd have liked that, too.

Fun movie.  Believable, in the sense that if you spend much time in the martial arts it's not hard to meet (or become) guys like the ones portrayed in the movie. Not believable, in the sense that I just can't buy Ewan MacGregor as a nebbish twit---he always looks like he's on the verge of shagging your sister.  Sweet, in a Hollywood kind of way.

( Flawed, in a Hollywood kind of way. )

Here's what's not so fun. The Iraqi army has been using fake equipment to search for explosives at security checkpoints. They're basically dowsing for bombs, and it doesn't work. Is it just me, or is dowsing for bombs an awful lot like remote-viewing for terrorists?

Anyway, here's a nice interview with Jon Ronson, who wrote The Men Who Stare At Goats. It sounds like the book is more serious than the movie, and it might be worth a read.

Since my laptop is on sabbatical at the Lenovo warranty repair depot I did the thing I sometimes do where I go to the Apple store and lust over the shiny aluminum MacBooks.  While reviewing specs and salivating on the shiny I noticed that in all the ports and all the little accessories that plug into the ports, I didn't see anything that looked HDMI compatible in the whole store.  Well, except for a Mac TV.  Did I see that right?

Let's see if I have this right.  Dick Cheney is campaigning for Kay Bailey Hutchinson, who hopes to unseat Rick Perry as the governor of Texas.  Sarah Palin, on the other hand, will support Rick Perry.

I swear, sometimes Texas is just another third-universe hell-hole waiting for minions of Azathoth and Yog-Sothoth to finish fighting their proxy wars so the survivors can go home and have a fucking pie.

Science Daily: "Bad Driving May Have Genetic Basis, Study Finds"

I kind of tuned out after the first paragraph because I drifted off into fantasies of improving the human species by shooting people who drive slowly in the passing lane.

That is what this is about, right?

A few loosely connected thingmabobs.  Let's see...

Number one.  Lisa Miller wrote an article for Newsweek called Two White Guys Walk Into A Bar... and it's about how boring she thinks debates between atheists and theists have become.  Well, I can sympathize; it's irritating having to listen to the same old vacuous by-the-numbers religious apologetics over and over agai...oh, wait.  She's bored by the atheists. 

Apparently atheists "are, more than other interest groups, joyous cannibals and regurgitators of their own ideas."  Wow.  You'd think she'd never heard of theology.

Apparently the ability to sell books means that people like Dawkins and Hitchens are insincere. I'll remember that the next time I look at the size and sales of the religious literature market.  And what about all those Bibles and prayer books and devotional tsotchkes swag merchandise produced to fulfill the spirituality of the masses?

Apparently---oh hell, now I'm getting bored.  See Jerry Coyne for the red-blooded beatdown, if that's your thing.  There is one good thing about Miller's essay, however, which is that she mentions Doubt: A History, by Jennifer Michael Hecht.  Unfortunately she draws the wrong lesson from Hecht's book.  A poetic and pluralistic reading of religion only works, after all, if you already know on a deep level that religion isn't actually true.  For dealing with the people who think that their god actually exists and provides a template for how they should be allowed to run the world, you need some atheists who are willing to be obnoxious.

You're welcome.

Number two, and a case in point.  Richard Dawkins has a hilarious essay in the Washington Post about the Catholic Church's recent bid to absorb disaffected conservative Anglicans.  He's too good not to quote:  "Give me your homophobes, misogynists and pederasts. Send me your bigots yearning to be free of the shackles of humanity."  I wonder if the Anglicans will take Dawkins' advice and respond in kind? "Send us your women, yearning to be priests, who could make a strong case for being the better-qualified fifty percent of humanity; send us your decent priests, sick of trying to defend the indefensible; send them all, in exchange for our woman-haters and gay-bashers."  Somehow I doubt it.

Number three.  Paul Haggis has renounced Scientology and written an open letter to explain why (in short: Scientology sucks). He cites the abusive bureaucracy, the dirty tricks, the cult atmosphere.  Lots of people are praising his courage.  Me?  I'd be more impressed if his reasons for leaving included the fact that Scientology is just about the stupidest fucking thing on earth.  The scary thing about Scientology is that in a few more decades we're all going to be walking around pretending (like we do for Joseph Smith) that L. Ron Hubbard, like Joseph Smith, was something other than just another con man proving that a flock of suckers can be assembled every minute. (Edited for clarity.)

Number four.  Atheists have cartoons now.  It's a miracle!

Edit---one more!

Number five. Heh!

My poor little laptop, Midgard, is on its way to Lenovo's warranty repair depot.  I'm convinced that the touchpad has a mechanical fault.  Unfortunately it's one of those intermittent things:  sometimes it works; sometimes it's dead; sometimes it's spastic like ferret on crystal meth.  And it's one of those things where, after hours of failed troubleshooting, it will suddenly start to work for no apparent reason, making me question my sanity and my odds of getting a decent repair under warranty.

All in all it seems to me to be the sort of thing that might be caused by a loose wire or a bad plug.  But I wasn't brave enough to find out myself---that would have voided the warranty!

Have just returned from Evil Dead, The Musical.  Very funny.  Very silly.  A few technical and timing issues, but the show pays off in the end. Two thumbs uaaaaarrrgggggghhhh!

When Sarah's good, she's very very good, but when she's bad she's better....

"Beware Vikings bearing gifts."

That's all, really.

Normally I'm "rah rah rah" for atheism, but today I think I'll post links to a pair of thoughtful essays that look critically at the state of atheist culture.

First is "You Don't Have to Be a Skeptic to be an Atheist" by Amy at the blog Skepchick.  Amy reports on her experience at the recent Atheist Alliance International convention, where she's surprised by the number of people so committed to railing against religion that they're unaware of a broader skeptical movement.

Second is "Culture and Barbarism: Metaphysics in a Time of Terrorism", by Terry Eagleton.  This is an essay that feels a bit quaint in its willingness to indulge in sweeping generalizations about the nature of civilization and culture.  I think Eagleton makes a mistake in equating what he calls liberal humanism with something that would better be called technocratic utopianism, and I think he's also mistaken in thinking that people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are the standard-bearers for that utopianism -- they both strike me as people resigned to an understanding that human nature is far too intrinsically shifty to be the object of mass scientific reformation.  (They just don't think this is an excuse for excusing superstition.)

I'm going to want to think about the second essay some more.  I can feel myself reacting defensively to it, and that would be contrary to the spirit of skepticism, after all.

At Salvage Vanguard Theater, Oct 9-31.


Who wants some?

I'm not good at being sick. Contracting diseases I'm good at, but the business of being sick is something I just don't like. When I was a kid I sometimes threw stuff across the room in frustration from being bed-bound and unable to go out and play. Imagine what missing this made me throw. Or rather, want to throw: when your fever is over 102 F it's hard to muster a lot of energy.  It's also hard to work from home when it takes 30 minutes to compose a 30-second e-mail.

(Is it just me, or do we now feel not only the traditional guilt of missing work from illness, but also an additional layer of guilt if we don't actively try to cheat ourselves out of our sick leave benefits by working from home?)

This bout of the flu has been a bit weird, with two or three distinct false recoveries during which my temperature dropped down to normal for a brief period before shooting back up again.  It began to feel like the damn virus was playing cat-and-mouse with me. Feeling good?  That's nice, run around...just a little more...WHAM. 

As a result I began to start thinking of the flu not as a routine disease but as The Enemy.  It is not just an infection to be endured with bed-rest and liquids; it's an invading force that merits the full treatment of war, including especially sufficient anthropomorphizing to lay the foundation for a subsequent campaign of calumny and dehumanization. The enemy must be made less-than-human in order to justify killing it, but that only works if the enemy starts out human enough to be worth killing in the first place.  Or something like that. 

Let's just say I've spent a lot of time screaming extremely rude things at the virus in my mind.

Still, being reduced to a state of fevered torpor does give one time to do the things one might not attempt when well.  Like re-watch the entire extended edition of The Lord of the Rings.  And re-read the whole Usagi Yojimbo series.  And listen to a couple of old-fashioned formula mysteries as audio books.

(Speaking of which, in M. C. Beaton's Death of a Nag, it is revealed that a trip to church is just the thing to fix a group of people traumatized by murder, for "there are no agnostics on the battlefield."  Moreover, it is also revealed that being an atheist means that kindly old spinsters with lifetimes of otherwise unspotted virtue will find it easier to commit murder in what they think is a good cause because an atheist would believe that neither the murderer nor murderee risks suffering in an afterlife.  If only Ms. Beaton possessed a conscience about making her readers suffer in this life.)

But I need to stop. I feel the enemy encroaching again. The last day and a half have been like a slow sine wave, with my temperature swinging up and down as the body tries to repel the last pockets of resistance, seemingly one-by-one.  Load the flame-thrower, attack the next pillbox, rest.  Repeat until done.

The sweat and fever of combat descend....

Heavy metal pirates.

Awwww yeah.

The Wall Street Journal commissioned Karen Armstrong and Richard Dawkins to write short essays to answer the question, "Where does evolution leave God?"

( Ooo, watch him blather! )

On the web site of the Austin-American Statesman today I saw this story:  Some in GOP fear damage by fringe elements.  And I had to laugh, because...what "fringe" are they talking about?  I'm 40, and I can't remember a time when the Republican party not only tolerated but encouraged and relied upon race-baiting, misogyny, homophobia, militant nativism, and Christian supremacy as the bread and butter of its day-to-day political life.

Worried about the fringe?  The GOP is nothing but fringe.  

( I mean, it's practically a car wash, ladies and gentlemen. )

Video reposted from Dan Savage at The Slog.  This made me laugh.


I hesitate to post my own opinion on the whole health-care debate because it risks making it seem that I think I know what I'm talking about.  On the one hand I'm hesitant to expand entitlements with a "public option" given our vast national debt and not understanding how to pay for it all.  I don't believe that health care is a natural human right--it's a privilege that some of us enjoy by virtue of having a certain amount of income in a certain kind of society.

On the other hand, I don't believe that anything is a natural human right.  Life, Liberty, Property, and the Pursuit of Happiness?  Nope.  Not only are these things completely and utterly dependent on the goodwill of one's fellow human beings and the institutions they run, but there's no creator to bestow them, no omnipotent source of natural law that makes my well-being more valuable than the plant or animal that must be harvested in order to enhance my well-being.

However, I want us to strive to live as though natural rights existed.  It seems to me that these concepts are, like art and science and indoor plumbing, great accomplishments of human creativity, great tools that we can use to improve ourselves and our situation on Earth for the few years allotted to us.  So the question before us, as far as I can tell, is whether we're willing to expand our concept of rights to include a certain minimum level of health care and to build the social, financial, and technical infrastructure needed to deliver that to our citizens.

I can imagine three great benefits from such a change.  More people might be more healthy as a result--that's the most obvious.  Small businesses might be able to better compete with large ones, and individuals might be more willing to take entrepreneurial risks, if an affordable public health insurance option existed.  And if people could be reasonably assured of decent health care regardless of income, then it seems to me that a great cloud of fear might be lifted from our collective shoulders.

I don't believe that such a public policy would kill medical research in America.  Fundamentalist religion might, but universal health care would not, I think.  I don't believe that our mammoth financial and insurance conglomerates have existed in anything resembling a free market for decades, if ever, so creating a public option won't destroy a non-existent free-market capitalism.  (And anyway, perfectly free markets seem more likely to produce pharaohs and kings, in my opinion, than a libertarian paradise.) 

But the thing that most appeals to me about the idea of a robust and universal health-care or -insurance solution, though, is the idea that it might form a kind of check-and-balance in society.  The government has shown a remarkable willingness to discard the Constitution during the last several decades.  Separation of powers hasn't preserved the Bill of Rights against ethnic, religious, and nationalistic paranoia.  Public elections cause only minor shifts in the way Washington DC does business.  But a popular entitlement that's expensive and nearly impossible to get rid of, once implemented, might force us to think a bit harder in the future about whether it's really worth it to piss the national treasury away in endless land wars in Asia.

No guarantees, obviously.  We are a warlike people.  But the point of a constitutional democracy is to ameliorate such tendencies.  We measure the quality of a civilization by the zeal with which it creates and defends certain privileges--otherwise known as rights--enjoyed by its citizens.  Maybe it's time for the United States to take the art of civilization to slightly higher level.