Just One Look... Sometimes More

By Romeo Montague

It is amazing how much there is to eye contact.

This thought came to me while riding the bus home tonight. I'd say it was an ordinary bus full of students with no crazy people stories or overheard one-liners to report.

I say that but that's not what I felt during the bus ride. If you'd stopped me while I was getting off the bus ask questioned me on my ride I'd probably've said something like this:

"Um... It was weird. In a good way. I think. Just not really a bad way, you know?"

Why? Eye contact. And a good deal more of it what I was used to.

It's not uncommon to make eye contact with others on the bus in sort of a looking-at-the-stuff-around-me kind of way. This evening was different. Three people matched eyes with me multiple times with either no facial expression or one that was vaguely a smile.

Usually I look away as soon as contact is made because, I mean, what would someone think if I didn't?

Tonight was different in that I felt like I was having silent exchanges with these people I didn't know. I don't remember any nods or full-on smiles or frowns or any other signals that people give to strangers.

How much can one say through a look at a stranger who has no way of knowing the context or habits of your looks? This made me consider why we have so many different conventions with eye contact in society at all. Why is staring rude (or flattering)?

I think it's because a look is that person's attention. To have someone look at you is to momentarily have their attention. And to have someone look at you while you look at them is to make known to each other you are giving them your attention, if only for an instant.

Maybe that is why tonight left me pondering. I shared my attention, a moment of my own personal existence, with another who did the same to me. For no reason.

It felt like a mutual recognition of one another's existence.

And,

I think,

that is good.

The Dog Who Wasn't There

Posted by Malachi Constant.

I was walking to school one day, pretty relaxed pace. I had a quiz that day, but felt prepared for it. While walking along, appreciating the architecture of the neighborhood houses, a dog came along. It was a gray westie, with a spring in his step and a smile on his face. He couldn't be happier to be wandering the street alone.

He had a collar on, so I assumed he was safe to pet. I took a knee, and gave his belly a good patting. I looked around for an owner or an indication of somewhere this dog should belong, to no avail. There was a phone number on the collar, so I thought I would give it a call and see what happened.

"Hello, we are not at home right now. Please leave a message and we will return your call when we can?"

No name, nothing personal, just "we're not here." For some reason, I thought back to The Bourne Identity, where Bourne's voicemail message is just his phone number, and a please-leave-a-message, because he was working a couple fake identities at the time.

That made me think this was a little suspicious; I decided not to leave a message. At this point I faced a dilemma. What do I do? I can't leave him here, but I can't hang around and deal with him, I have a quiz to take.

I weighed my options, and decided to knock on the nearest door. I thought I would ask anyone there if they owned this dog, or knew who the owners were. I even considered asking them for some rope or some twine that I might fashion a leash from and take the dog to class with me until I could contact the owner. It had a tag from a company that specializes in retrieving lost pets, so I thought it would be relatively easy to report the dog as lost while keeping it safe.

Whatever I would decide to do, the first step would be to knock on the door of the house in front of me. I was rehearsing in my head what I would say to whomever answered the door, as well as what I might do if no one answered.

Just as I stood up, the dog bolted. He ran off just as fast as he could, and seemed just as happy as he ever was to be on his way again. I faced a new dilemma. Do I chase it? Do I knock on the door anyway and tell them that what may be their dog just ran that way? It was seeming less and less likely that the dog came from this house as he was wandering further and further away.

Given my upcoming quiz, the fact that I had no responsibility over this dog, and that I didn't want to be seen chasing a dog which I did not own, I decided it would be best if I didn't chase this dog.

I assume he was adorable and friendly enough to warrant someone else's compassion, someone without my exact time constraints, but I don't really know what happened to him. I wonder if I did the right thing.

On Tradition

Posted by Jack Aubrey

Our nation's Independence Day got me thinking, like most holidays do, of Tradition.

Why do I care?

To sum up all of my thoughts and conversations and more in brief, I must be to the point:

Traditions are fun. That is ALL they should be. Celebrating a birthday, anniversary or what have you is good. But any religious tradition or family practice that you end up going to out of guilt then feeling like there is no alcohol hard enough to make Uncle Rick tolerable are not in the true spirit of Tradition. They falsely represent a good thing by putting a buzz word like God or Family on it. No. Say 'NO' to this. Traditions should remind us of accomplishments or struggle or whatever. If it matters to YOU. Not to your people who you hardly identify with any other time.

To be fair I am not too proud to be in the same grouping as people like Glenn Beck, Carrot Top, and my old pal Tim as Americans; but I do celebrate the 4th of July. Why? Because

1) it represents something of ideals in practice and
2) it is fun, not boring, guilty or imposing some moral principle I only adhere to during that holiday.

SO

Celebrate everything and anything for sake of those things. That time you won that game in High School with your old buddies?Sure. Your first date with your wife of 25 years. Yes (and you just might get lucky... *wink*) But Jesus being tacked to a piece of wood for your metaphoric sins? Do you believe it every other day of the year? Do you really want to spend a boatload of money on people you don't like and see Uncle Rick be a jerk? No. Not if you don't want to.

Take it or leave it. Tradition.

Karate Kid 5: The Kung Fu Kid

Posted by Susan Calvan.

I recently saw the remake of The Karate Kid, starring Jaden Smith and Jackie Chan. Here are a couple thoughts...

Firstly, I should say that it was basically a frame-by-frame reshoot of the original Karate Kid, the only differences were in the little details. Instead of California, it took place in Beijing; instead of Karate, Kung Fu; instead of wax-on, wax-off, it was jacket-on, jacket-off. But there was one difference that really struck me, that instead of high school senior, it was twelve years old.

My hypothesis is that the producers thought that a remake wouldn't appeal to an older audience, so the target demographic is very young. To get the target audience to better identify with the main character, he is twelve. This isn't inherently a problem, until you consider that the remake follows the original so closely.

In the original version, Danny Larusso was about the age of seventeen, so the coming-of-age story where he defeats a powerful nemesis at his own game, against all odds, growing and learning about himself and even getting the girl makes sense. But at the age of twelve, this story line becomes problematic. For example, although they try to play it off as a just-friends relationship, the male and female lead share a kiss pretty early on in the movie, and there is a brief scene with some sexually suggestive themes between them.

Another example, in the original version, Danny plays a childish prank on the bully, and is chased all the way to the gates of his apartment complex where they begin to savagely beat him. Just in time, Mr. Miyagi jumps in and kicks their asses. It comes off as a badass-but-wise sage defending a beaten victim against a gang of thugs. In the new version, however, Jackie Chan is just beating up a group of school children, and it's quite off-putting.

Something about the original made the karate tournament seem like a sportsmanlike competition for honor and glory. Something about the remake made it feel like a bunch of seventh graders were beating the piss out of each other in front of a cheering audience.

Ignoring the fact that preteens should not be bodybuilding, maybe I'm just romanticizing the beloved Karate Kid movies of my past, but I just find a problem with twelve year olds being pitted against each other in violent competition.

Also, the healing scene was inappropriate.

Crazy Creationist of the Month: June

Posted by Lionel Boyd Johnson.

This month, it's Ray Comfort, for the usual reasons (even I'm starting to get bored by this).

In a blog post he made last month, he attacks the claim that atheists have any right to say that pedophilia is wrong.

The basis of your argument is that pedophilia is morally wrong "because it harms the child." Therefore, if a professional photographer used a two-way mirror, and took photos of naked children without them being harmed (and paid them well for their time), you would therefore consider it to be morally acceptable. The child hasn’t been harmed in the slightest. It fact, he (or she) has been greatly benefited with monetary gain.

Comfort then broadens his claim to all morality.

Your problem is that you cannot say that anything is morally wrong, because your morality is dictated by changing ideals.

And, of course, the punchline.

This isn't so with Christianity. Morality isn't dictated by sinful society nor by "does it harm the person." It is solely dictated by what God says is right and wrong.

In other words, it's okay to cause harm to a person, if God says it is.

None of this is new, especially not from Ray Comfort, but this deserves the prize of Crazy Creationist of the Month because of his follow-up post. When he first made the claim that atheists have no right to declare that pedophilia is wrong, but Christians can because they have the absolute moral standard of God's word to rely upon, the comments section lit up with the observation that the Bible never condemns pedophilia. This is a problem for Ray Comfort because he has already claimed that pedophilia is wrong, and also that right and wrong are specifically determined by the Bible, and nothing else. So if Ray Comfort can't find a verse in the Bible that says pedophilia is wrong, he'll have no choice but to admit that morality does not come from the Bible alone. Here's what he came up with (emphasis added)...

"But we know that the law is good if one uses it lawfully, knowing this: that the law is not made for a righteous person, but for the lawless and insubordinate, for the ungodly and for sinners, for the unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers, for fornicators, for sodomites, for kidnappers, for liars, for perjurers, and if there is any other thing that is contrary to sound doctrine, according to the glorious gospel of the blessed God which was committed to my trust" (1 Timothy 1:8-11).

In other words, atheists' problem is that they decide what's right or wrong by the standards of the imperfect society in which they live, but Christians can take comfort in the fact that they have God's unchanging moral standard, which includes society's imperfect and ever-changing standard, thanks to this minor loophole found in one obscure verse.

Dear Comcast, You Suck

Posted by Ed Tom Bell.

Comcast has made the switch to digital. They told us a long time ago to get a digital converter box, but I didn't listen because they've been threatening to switch to digital for years and I assumed this was another bluff. Consequently, I had to go get a converter box last week.

As it turns out, the box comes with a little IR antenna, and a remote control to point at it. I always liked that our TV set-up only used one remote to control everything, so I set my sights on programming our new remote to work the television so that we could go on needing only one remote. All the new remote had to do was control the power and volume on the television.

After the simple but tedious task of finding a working code for the remote, the power button worked and I thought it was one more chore I could cross off my list. However, the power button wouldn't turn the TV back on. I turned it on manually and tried the power button again, to have it successfully switch off the TV, but fail to turn it back on.

Hours of experimentation yielded the conclusion that the power button would turn off the TV, but to turn it back on, one would have to press any other button and then the power button. In other words, the power button would work, but its function could switch the TV only on or only off, and that function could be changed by pressing any other button on the remote. The volume still doesn't work (not to change the volume, anyway: it changes the aspect ratio).

Crazy Creationist of the Month: Better Late Than Never Edition

Posted by Lionel Boyd Johnson.

Sorry I'm late. I suck.

Anyway, this month it's Ray Comfort again (he'll probably show up next month, too) for the GM 2:8.



In case you're too lazy to watch a one and a half minute video, the GM 2:8 is an iPhone app that let's you preach in Ray-Comfort-style witnessing in another language. Here's a tutorial:



If you're reading this, you probably know Ray Comforts method of converting by fear by getting you to admit that you've ever lied or stolen, then implying that you're going to hell, and then offering that he has the only way out. Well, the GM does the same thing in many languages, so that you too can scare people, even when they don't speak English.

Why does this app exist? The church has been sending out missionaries to do this very thing for centuries, and the Bible is available in almost any language in the civilized world. Well, Ray Comfort rejects Catholicism, but the real reason that the Bible alone isn't good enough is because Ray Comfort doesn't need or really even want the Bible. Ray Comfort uses the authority of the Bible way more than he uses the Bible itself. If there was only the Ten Commandments, and the story of Jesus, Ray Comfort's preaching wouldn't change. The Bible is only useful as a vessel for the Commandments and Jesus where Comfort can claim that they are absolutely true and beyond scrutiny. Ray Comfort is selling his own brand of preaching that is separate from organized church, and where the church is doing what it does to try to take over the world, Comfort is spewing a different message, and in order to spread that message across languages, he has to resort to technology and computers, because the church's message is not good enough.

It's important to realize that Ray Comfort is not bringing people to Christianity, he's trying to bring them to evangelism, a specific sect of Christianity. This makes him no better than any other religious fanatic, that it's not good enough to believe in Jesus or to try to live righteously; you have to believe exactly what he believes in exactly the same way, and intimidate others into believing it too.

Why is this app good for Ray Comfort? Comfort should like the GM because it cannot be asked questions. It's a simple program, it has some recorded messages stored away, and it plays them when you hit the right button. It doesn't understand any of the languages, and it can't listen or respond. In a nutshell, it just says, "You're fucked, but I can help you." Ray Comfort likes this because it spares him the trouble of answering questions. He doesn't have to try to convince you that his speech is true, he doesn't have to listen to questions like, "How do you know what God wants," "What if the Bible wasn't written by God," or, "Why would Jesus condemn sexual attraction," and he doesn't have to hear himself being corrected. It becomes easier for him to wander around, playing his recording to anyone who'll listen, and keep playing it to whoever is buying into it.

Personally, I find this offensive, and here's why. Picture you're sitting at the beach, minding your own business, and someone confronts you.
"Pardon, monsieur, avez-vous un peu de temps?"
"Sorry, I don't understand," you say politely.
"Ah, une minute, s'il vous plaît."
He brings out his iPhone, "Have you accepted Jesus into your life," it asks in an artificial voice.
I can't testify to the patience of anyone else, but if it were me, I would punch him, really hard. And then again until he was on the ground. Then I would keep punching him over and over until the police were called to pull me off him and over to the jail.

But don't let my reaction sway you.

Crazy Creationist of the Month: April

Posted by Lionel Boyd Johnson

This month's winner is Kent Hovind, for his commentary on the recent media release of ardipithecus ramidus.

Who is Kent Hovind?
Once upon a time, Kent Hovind traveled the nation giving talks about creation "science." Footage of his seminars are easily accessible on youtube, but basically what he would do is try to convince his audience that the bible is the literal account of Earth's history, and try to justify it with explanations that use sciency words like, "magnetic polarity," and "angular momentum." For a while, he ran Dinosaur Adventure Land, a theme park that credited the extinction of the dinosaurs to Noah's Flood. I use past tense in this description because he no longer does any of this. For the past few years, Kent Hovind has been serving a ten year sentence for tax fraud, and his theme park has been foreclosed. Kent's son has taken over the family business, Creation Science Evangelism, but Kent doesn't contribute much except the occasional letter from prison.

This month, a blog post was published in which Kent has an imaginary conversation with Ardi.

Who is Ardi?
Ardi is the nickname of Ardipithecus ramidus, an ape-like fossil that has been dug up in Ethiopia over the past fifteen years. In addition to all the most vital parts of a skeleton that archeologists look for in a fossil, scientists have also found many thousand other plant and animal fossils in the nearby area. Ardi is special because she predates Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy) by about a million years, making her one of the oldest hominids ever discovered.

Kent Hovind writes specifically about Ardi's appearance in Time Magazine. His critique takes the form of a dialogue with the fossil as if it were conscious, could talk, and could understand English.

KH: So who are you really?
AR: Well, as you can see, I’m less than four feet tall, have big toes that stick out to the side so I can grasp tree branches, have long fingers and have feet that make it possible, but difficult for me to walk on two legs.
KH: That sounds just like lots of ape-like creatures today.
AR: Of course it does, because that’s what I am. God designed me for climbing trees.

I have that edition of Time. What the article really says is that Ardi walked on two feet most if not all of the time (as opposed to walking on feet and knuckles), but that running was difficult over a long period of time. Ardi probably commonly climbed trees (figs are believed to be a staple of her diet), but spent her life on the ground. Ardi's features sound like ape-like creatures today because Ardi is an ape-like creature. You know what else is an ape-like creature? Humans.

KH: The October 12, 2009 Time magazine article says you are 'A Long-Lost Relative of Humans (p. 42).'
AR: That’s ridiculous! Humans have babies all the time and they are always human. Apes, monkeys and gorillas have babies all the time as well and they are always like their parents. Why would those authors want to believe I’m their great-great grandma?

It's amusing to see people declare that evolution means that your dad was a gorilla, or your grandma was a marmoset. If a monkey gave birth to a human, it wouldn't confirm evolution, because that has nothing to do with evolution. (Although, if you want to be taxonomically correct, humans are monkeys, so the above scenario happens all the time.)

The foundation of the theory of evolution is "descent with modification." You look slightly different from your parents, who look slightly different from their parents. You have physical traits that are slightly different from your parents. For example, my hair grows at a slightly faster rate than either of my parents. Over time, these differences build up. You are different from your parents, a little more different from your grandparents, a little more different from your great-grandparents, and if you insert two hundred thousand "greats" before grandparent, you'll find that the little differences add up to something ape-like. Creationists refuse to allow a realistic timescale into their perception of evolution because they can't admit that there have been more than ten thousand years since the beginning of the universe.

To continue the dialogue...

AR: Why would those authors want to believe I’m their great-great grandma?
KH: I think it’s because they like the freedom from morals that this silly belief brings. If humans are just higher apes, then there are no rules against adultery, lying, etc.

Evolution doesn't free you from the responsibilities of living in a society. There are rules against immoral behavior. We, as a society, make laws for the rules that we consider important enough, such as murder, abuse, some kinds of lies, etc. Kent Hovind should understand, better than most, the importance of following laws. Here's something to consider, if people who accept evolution do it just so they can live a life of sin, then why don't they? Why do so many people understand evolution as a fact of reality and still live perfectly moral and reasonable lives?

KH: The magazine articles say you are 4.4 million years old. Is this true?
AR: It’s not polite to ask a woman her age, but that is a real insult to say I’m that old. Not only is it an insult, it is w-a-a-a-y off! I died about 4,400 years ago. I was a teen just about to get married and start my own family.

Well, that settles it. No need to use radiometric dating, or bother any further with any research. Kent Hovind already knows that not only was Ardi just a normal ape, but that apes marry and are monogamous, when she died, and how. All he had to do was ask her. Why didn't anyone else think of that?

KH: How did you die?
AR: It was terrible! We had heard about this man named Noah building a big boat he called an ark because a flood was coming, but it had never rained, so most other humans thought he was crazy. The people God had made were so wicked! They didn’t care what God’s rules were. They did what they pleased. There was lots of violence, too.
When the ark was done, two of my cousins felt this strange urge to go get on the boat, so they did. Lots of animals went in there, and God shut the door. A few days later, we heard and felt the ground shake like the earth was ripping open! All the animals that were not on the boat began to panic and run around looking for a place to hide. It began to rain terribly hard and water came shooting up out of the ground. It was awful! About forty of us cousins all tried to run to safety, but there was just no place to go. We all drowned together. The last thing I remember is the water and mud getting deeper and deeper over our heads.

There you have it, God drowned Ardi because He didn't like the humans of the time. Not because Ardi did anything wrong, but because God felt it would be easier to start from a clean slate. Some divine morals, eh?

KH: Well, a lot of people spent a lot of time digging up your bones in Ethiopia and hundreds of people have spent thousands of hours studying them.
AR: Do they get paid for that?
KH: Oh, yes! Lots of money!

Lots of money? Maybe it takes a lot of funding to dig up fossils in Africa for fifteen years, but paleoanthropology and archeology aren't exactly pursuits of wealth.

Ardi goes on to ask to Kent to convince the world to stop wasting its money researching evolution. Kent promises that he'll do the best he can, but that he's stuck for the time being.

KH: Hey, Lord? You said that if I would delight myself in You that You would give me the desires of my heart (Psalm 37:4). My desire is that my case be overturned and that I be sent home!
GOD: I’ve got everything under control, Son. Go walk a few laps. I’ve got your back.

The sign of the truly deluded. Even though God stood idly by while Kent was thrown in prison "doing the Lord's work," He's still got his back and is looking out for his best interests.

It's Not a Shelf

Posted by Gennao Sabbat.

I was in class yesterday, one of those classes where there are barely enough chairs for everyone, and although class attendance is expected to dwindle over the course of the term, today was as crowded as could be. I got there early to get a good seat, and I noticed most of the people there had their backpacks on the seat next to them. I assumed they were saving seats for friends, and turned to my own business.

A few minutes after class started, late-comers started to trickle in, and, being a crowded class, they had to hunt a little for seats. Watching some of them search optimistically for a seat before the nose-bleed section, I noticed there were still a number of people who had their backpacks on the seat next to them. In normal circumstances, I assume that when a backpack is left on a seat, it means the owner went to the bathroom and wanted to save their seat, which is perfectly fair to me. But then I realized as the late-comers asked if anyone was occupying that seat, that the owners hadn't left the room briefly, they just wanted somewhere to put their bag.

And I'm thinking, "MOVE YOUR FUCKING BACKPACK OFF THE SEAT." It would be nice if there were enough spare chairs that your stuff didn't have to be left on the floor, but chairs are for people, and this particular class can't afford for people to take up two seats: one for them and one for their stuff. How selfish do you have to be to think that's okay? How do you sit there in your seat, with your pencil case on the seat next to you -- one of the only empty seats in the whole classroom -- and not move it when someone who needs that seat walks in?

And as if by luck, it happened again on the bus later that day. I was sitting on a crowded bus with my backpack on my lap, and sitting across from me was a girl with her backpack taking up the seat next to her. Now, I've been known to let my things sit in an empty seat, but only when there's clearly no demand for that seat. Yet here people were still getting on, forced to stand, and even forced to invade each other's personal space to fit, and this girl sits with her headphones on, eyes open to all of this, and acts as if she's doing nothing wrong by pillaging an extra much-needed seat all to herself.

Why can't more people have a little common courtesy and decency for the needs of people immediately around them? The moral of the story: don't be obtusely rude.

Fast and Furious: Scene 1

Posted by Casanova Frankenstein.

This is a novelization of the first part of the film, Fast and Furious, or as you may think of it, The Fast and The Furious 4: Running Out of Names. This won't really spoil the movie if you were planning on watching it, but I wouldn't care even if it did, because this movie sucks, and I knew that from the very first scene.

We start out in the Dominican Republic. Vin Diesel was forced to flee the country as a fugitive at the end of the first movie, and has accrued a new gang of criminals because he still hasn't learned his lesson. Maybe his character will learn in this movie that crime doesn't pay? I'll let you watch and learn that for yourselves (but he doesn't).

The camera tracks along a gasoline truck, slowly revealing that it's dragging five tankers behind the cab. This is the point where I knew this movie was going to be gratuitously over the top, and it was in the first fifty seconds. In the otherwise abandoned road, three vehicles quickly approach the truck: a black muscle car, piloted by our protagonist, and co-piloted by his girlfriend Michelle Rodriguez; and two tow trucks, piloted by Vin Diesel's loyal gang members.

Michelle Rodriguez crawls onto the hood of the car, which at this point is tailgating the five-trailer-long tanker, and jumps onto the last one, carrying a scuba tank on her back. Vin Diesel navigates the muscle car next to the truck, which, incidentally, puts him right into oncoming traffic. Michelle Rodriguez shimmies her way to the hook-up between the fourth and final trailers, and sprays it with liquid nitrogen (or something) from the scuba tank. During this time, one of the tow trucks has skidded a 180 and is now going in reverse, in the same direction as the tanker and tailgating behind it. The tow truck's passenger climbs out the back window onto the bed and hoists a tow hook onto the back of the tanker.

Obviously, all these vehicles are modified to have more than one reverse gear.

So when Michelle Rodriguez strikes the frozen trailer hook-up with a hammer, it shatters, and the tow truck drives off dragging a complete and almost undamaged gasoline tanker. The driver of the tanker feels something and turns away from the magazine he was reading while driving on the job and searches his side view mirrors to find nothing out of the ordinary. Then he says something in Spanish to his pet iguana in the passenger seat and goes on reading his magazine.

The gang has one more tow truck and Michelle Rodriguez starts going into position to steal another tanker. As she's walking across the roof of the tanker, there is a gentle bend in the road and the driver of the tanker is at an angle to see her, and realizes that someone is jacking his load. He quickly swerves into the other lane, smashing into Vin Diesel's muscle car. During this obscenely dangerous maneuver, Michelle Rodriguez drops her hammer, but the second tow truck has hooked up to the tanker, and can't come undone. The driver of the tanker is still on the offensive, retrieves his revolver from the glove box, and fires a couple shots in Vin Diesel's direction. Vin Diesel drifts back, out of the line of sight, and tell Michelle Rodriguez to spray the hook-up, even though she doesn't have a hammer. She sprays it and now has to jump onto the muscle car, all amid the gunshots still being fired at them. She makes it somehow and Vin Diesel skids the rear of his car around the front and continues to throw it into the joint of the trailer, breaking it free and allowing his comrade to drive off with it. The driver of the tanker now finally notices the downhill stretch of road leading to a sharp turn, and past that sharp turn is a cliff. He decides not to apply any brakes, but instead grabs his pet iguana and jumps out of the cab, which is still going at freeway speeds. Allegedly he survives and leaves the tanker going out of control towards a cliff, because it's not bad enough that he lost two tankers to criminals, he decides the best course of action would be to hurl the remaining three tankers that he does have off a mountain.

Well, the tanker veers into the adjacent cliff side and skids around out of control, contorting itself to pieces and eventually leaving Vin Diesel in his muscle car, at a complete stop in front of one tanker at the cliff's edge, and with another violently rolling and bouncing his direction, on fire I might add. Vin Diesel calmly and expertly revs the engine, spinning out the back tires and, at just the right moment, lets it loose and just barely makes it under the the bouncing tanker, narrowly dodging impending death. The camera pans out and moves to the next stupid scene.

What are some things wrong with this opening? Firstly, big vehicles are designed to carry large weights, but five gasoline trailers is way beyond the capacity of any semi. Secondly, any driver brave enough to take the job would pay more attention to the road, and off his leisure reading, as it would take him about three miles to come to a complete stop. Thirdly, a driver would have no need for a gun, there's no way he would be held responsible for the stolen gas. I would just let them take it and go one with three tankers, since he ended up losing it all anyway. With the heist, their plan is highly dependent on people working well on top of moving vehicles. If anyone had fallen off, the whole operation would be ruined, and also someone would die. It's unreasonable to expect a 150lb woman to navigate those kinds of conditions with a scuba tank on her back. It's also unreasonable to think that a small tow truck could be modified to do the stunts portrayed and still be able to tow, and tow something way bigger than it's designed to at that. I'll stop here, and leave one final remark that physics doesn't really work the way that it seems to work in the movie.

So basically, it's a movie, of course it's stupid. It's a Fast and the Furious movie, too, so of course it's really stupid. Now that I think about it, I don't know what I was thinking. This whole write up was a waste of time.

Crazy Creationist of the Month

Posted by Lionel Boyd Johnson.

This month's crazy creationist goes to the Texas State Board of Education, with emphasis to Don McLeroy.

Who is Don McLeroy?

He is a practicing dentist and super-conservative Christian creationist who has been on the Texas Board of Education for a little over ten years before recently being defeated by just a sliver of votes. Before leaving, he managed to oversee the textbook standards revisions done once every decade. Where in the past he has attacked evolution and called for teaching weaknesses of evolutionary theory alongside the theory itself (if he knows enough about it to name any weaknesses at all), he and fellow ultraconservatives on the board were narrowly overturned by more sane and rational members. The Board has turned their sights this month on history standards, with minor adjustments to sociology, government, and economics as well.

The myth has been propagated for a long time that America was founded as "a Christian Nation," and the Texas BOE would like to continue that myth. Although in a sense, the first pilgrims were fleeing religious persecution in their native countries, almost immediately upon arrival did they manage to commit similar or equal atrocities against people of different faiths from their own. When the time came to construct a government for the United States, it was decided, by enlightened, rational minds, that religion of any kind deserves no place in the formation of any government. For that reason, America was founded to be the first secular nation, neither condemning nor condoning any one faith over any other.

Evidently, however, the members of the Board don't want their children to know that, which is why they voted down students learning "the reasons the founding fathers protected religious freedom in America by barring the government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion above all others.” This is also why they completely removed Thomas Jefferson, who is credited with the term "separation of church and state," which, even though is not verbatim mentioned in the constitution, is clearly implied, as the first amendment cannot mean anything else, and have decided to teach John Calvin in his place. Predictably enough, they removed teaching the first amendment and all its implications, choosing to stress the second amendment, and all its implications.

In an attempt to teach balance, the BOE has pushed for the teaching of the Venona papers, which loosely try to vindicate McCarthyism. They seek that students learn the violent acts of the Black Panther Movement alongside the works of Martin Luther King Jr, but strangely they rejected any addition of any Black or Hispanic names that contributed to American History.

The phrase "capitalism" has been replaced with "free-enterprise system." “Let’s face it, capitalism does have a negative connotation,” says Terri Leo, one of the Board members. By changing the name, they attempt to shadow any criticism or flaw with capitalism, plus they probably like using the word "free," because it makes them sound like freedom-loving patriots.

They would like their children to think of America as a haven of tolerance, incapable of making mistakes. That's why they want to play down the internment of Japanese-Americans in WWII, and what's more, because they consider tolerance to be a Christian virtue, they want tomorrow's leaders not to understand that the government cannot promote Christianity over anything else. In McLeroy's own words, “History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left.” You could make a case for that, but it can't be "canceled out" by imposing conservative bias into the curriculum, that's called "truth is in the middle." Biases should be corrected with factual accuracy, not by swinging the pendulum all the way around, so that the system is still broken, just in another way.

Why should you care that Texas educational standards are being decided by biased religious fundamentalists with no expertise is history, sociology, psychology, or economics? Well, because of Texas's large size, textbook publishers but a lot of weight on what Texas wants in their books, and many other states simply follow Texas's lead and buys whatever books they buy. In other words, what they teach in Texas could eventually make its way to your state, though California is large enough to fend off Texas standards for a while. Moreover, these standards will be difficult, if not impossible, to change until the next revision comes around in ten years, which means that your children could be at risk at learning incomplete or skewed facts about basic history.

Thankfully, Don McLeroy is on his way out, so there's not much more damage he can cause, but he managed to deal a heavy blow to educational standards before leaving.

I'm a feather on the wind.

Posted by Hoban "Wash" Washburne

I drive an old pickup truck with gauges that work when they want to or not at all. It squeaks and yelps as it goes over bumps. It rumbles when it is taken out of gear and roars when turned on. I refer to my truck as a she. She is a very finicky truck and I love her to death.

And sometimes, when I am driving her around, I feel like a pilot in a movie.

I say this because tonight reminded me of exactly that feeling. Let's start from when my brother and I head off to the store at around 11pm.

As we are leaving the shady liquor store some fellas try to get us to buy any drug we can think of. My brother, naturally, tries to shake a good deal out of them as a joke while I get the car running. Except that she won't start. Here's what was happening in my head:

Click click click--silence.
"Dammit, I knew that damn starter was trouble. Shoulda gone for the name brand."
Click-----
"Come on honey. I'm sorry, but I just need to you start now so I'm not stuck with some angry drug dealers and you are stolen from me and taken apart."
Click click ROAR.
"Thank you thank you thank you!"
Look at each other:
"We barely got out of that one!" (cheesy I know)

Off to the next store but this time I say I will be staying inside to keep the truck running. My brother takes longer than usual at this other shady liquor store. As the rain begins to come down like in that scene in Jurassic Park I notice the Oil Pressure Gauge is alarmingly low and the Engine Temperature Gauge is alarmingly high. Shit. Now what?

"Keep her running! We can't risk her not starting back up again here!" (yes, now it's 'we')
"She can't run much hotter! Especially with the Oil Pressure so low!"
"Wait, maybe at idle the fan isn't kicking in and we already know that the pressure drops when at idle... What if we get her running to get some air flow, the fan going, and oil cycling?"
"Yes! Make it so! (shut up)"
"We can't leave him in there!"
"Go without him!"

Suddenly, perfectly on cue, out comes my brother running through the rain into the truck and off we go. As we speed into traffic the Oil Pressure raises into the green and the Engine Temp backs off as the fan kicks in... Narrow escape.

To sum up: I glamorize my boring life by comparing the mechanical failures in my aging pickup to exciting Hollywood action scenes.

You know you do it too...

Poll for the Silent

Posted by Malachi Constant.

I was walking along, about to board the bus home, when I saw someone I know. We're very close, but not as close as we used to be; I know her, and I know her well, but I don't know her well anymore. I wanted to wave, and even to stop and chat, but for some reason I didn't. I walked towards her for about fifty feet, in her plane view, on my way to the bus. I eventually got less than ten feet in front of her, looking at her the whole time expecting her to see me and wave, but I finally turned and entered the bus, without saying a word. I feel like I should have made more of an effort to say "hi." I should have waved in some way, or smiled, or even gone up and tapped her on the shoulder, but I just couldn't bring myself to care enough. I tried to rationalize it, "Why should I bother, she didn't notice me," "Never mind that she was talking to other friends, she's not blind, and I was close enough to spit on her," but I realized that if I really cared about her, I would've gone out of my way just to bid greetings.

I bring this up only as a specific instance, but this kind of thing happens to me all the time. Almost once a day do I see someone I recognize and can name, but they seem to give no hint of recognition to me, not because they don't remember me, but because they never notice me in the first place. Because I feel there's an expectation that they, as a conscious human being, should notice that I'm right there in front of them, when they don't notice, I usually don't feel responsible to call attention to myself, but rather just let them keep walking, without any knowledge of my existence.

When I say "right in front of them," I'm not exaggerating. There are a handful of people I know whose personal space I can invade, not sneaking around, either, before they notice I was within eyesight for a hundred feet. In other words, on the occasion where I decide to stop by and say "hello," I habitually get close enough to physically poke them on the shoulder, staying within their line of sight the entire time, before they learn that I'm there at all. On rare occasions, I can get that close under the same circumstances and still go unnoticed.

So I ask you, reader, how often does this kind of thing happen to you? How often do you go unnoticed by someone you personally know for what seems like too long? Have you ever gone unnoticed so long that you decide to remain unnoticed, and walk right past someone you know and like without saying a word? Have you ever been shocked to find someone you know standing right next to you, with no other explanation than that they walked right up to you, right in front of you, and you none the wiser until long after you should have reasonably seen them? Comments can be left anonymously and I eagerly await your thoughts.

I Gotta Go

Posted by Lennie Small.

I was on campus today leisurely making my way to class, but it was relatively unfamiliar land on campus. In accordance with normal bodily functions, I had to pee, which means I had to walk past my classroom to go hunt for a restroom. Halfway through circling the building, I found one, but it was the women's room, so I quickly hypothesized a couple potential locations where the men's room should be found. At first I tried the door ten feet down the way, but that was the entrance to some administrative office, which not only did not have a bathroom but was also no place where I belonged. My next guess was on the other side of the structure, by symmetry, but there would be no door at all to be found there.

After one more circle around the building I was left with no choice but to conclude that this small lecture hall was built without a men's room. Perplexed, I eventually wandered to the adjacent building and finally found somewhere to do my business, but I feel like such a basic need should be better covered in the modern times in which we live. After all, how hard should it be to find a bathroom in a college lecture building, particularly when they obviously found enough room for the ladies' room?

Crazy Creationist of the Month: February (Part 2)

Posted by Lionel Boyd Johnson.

Welcome back. We were just getting to the part where Ken Ham calls his fellow Christians to action.

The Bible says if you're not with me you're against me (Matthew 12:30). [...] There is no neutral ground.

It's not enough for Ken Ham to deny science and reasoning, or to influence others to do the same. He has to rally Christians to fight against science, education, and intelligence. And when he says neutral ground, he doesn't mean between religion and secularism, he means between the Bible and science. In other words, everyone who is Christian must assert as fact what the Bible says regardless of what any evidence may indicate, and to have doubt or honest skepticism is unacceptable.

What [separation of church and state] really means is we get rid of the Bible. That's what it really means in people's minds today, in the secularist's mind.

True, but only half true: it's only getting rid of the Bible in government institutions, but it's also getting rid of the Quran, The Book of Mormon, The Bhagavad Gita, Dianetics, or any other religious scripture. Ken Ham is under the impression that freedom of religion means anti-Christianity. The truth is that separation of church and state inhibits government from imposing any religion with tax dollars paid by people who have the freedom to worship any other religion. Freedom of religion means that unlike in Iran, where apostasy is punishable by death, Americans have the right to practice (peacefully) any religion they choose, be it Christianity or no religion at all. However, since Ham has already claimed that having no religion is a religion, then of course he must assert that separation of church and state is just rejecting Christianity for another religion. Here's a lovely quote.

You can't have freedom from religion because everyone has a religion. In fact, there are only two religions, ultimately, either you start with God's word, or man's word. So what they really mean is, freedom from Christianity.

Where to start? Okay, the beginning. Not everyone has a religion, but we've already tackled that. Next point of dishonesty, that the Bible is God's word. This allows Ham to dismiss every other religion whose holy book is claimed to be on God's word, but it is well know that the Bible was written by men, and by today's standards, inferior men at that. Therefore, in this case, God's word is man's word, whether Ken Ham likes it or not.

The next section of the speech is where he bashes the newly released film, Creation. I can't say much about it, because I never saw it because it seemed boring, but this has nothing to do with the loss of a belief in God (unless, like Ham, you equate evolution with atheism). The film clips he shows transitions him into the point that belief in evolution leads to moral relativism, which Ham equates to having no morals at all. He says that "children of evolution" are committing school shootings as an act of natural selection. This is offensive, but you wanna talk about beliefs leading to violence or murder? How about when someone kills an abortionist as a "service to women?" How about when a mother prays instead of taking her daughter to get medical treatment, and the daughter dies? How about the people who were killed in the riots against the Danish cartoons depicting and image of Muhammad? Ken Ham is forgetting not only that his religion is responsible for the deaths of millions, but also that evolution does not claim any moral standing, it's just a model of reality.

Then we get to the Gap commercial. Ham claims that the Gap holiday commercial is more secularized and shows how we're losing God in America. Here's a brief summary about what happened: Gap made a commercial including Christmas, Kwanza, Hannukah, and winter solstice. The American Family Association, a Christian activist group, saw it and threw a bitch-fit, calling for the boycott of all Gap stores. Gap responded by cowering like a dog who's been beaten too much, and making a new commercial that only mentions Christmas. The AFA ended the boycott and the Christian fundamentalists win again. If anything, this shows that religious fundamentalists have too much power over the free market, but I wouldn't even extrapolate that much from it.

Next he talks about how blasphemy is so widespread and acceptable. He says that it's too common that Christianity is openly mocked and that Jesus is blasphemed against. Kind of like how Ken Ham blasphemes against and dishonors the God of any other religion, such as Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism? Kind of like how Ken Ham openly mocked Catholicism and mainstream Christianity earlier in this very speech?

Ham cites his book, Already Gone, and claims that too many young people are abandoning the church.

Research shows that two-thirds of our young people are walking away from the church, and you know the number one reason the research found? Because of hypocricy.

He clarifies that hypocrisy means that the church is saying that one must obey and believe the Bible, but it's ok to not consider Genesis as historical fact. He says that if people think it's ok to dismiss some of the Bible, then why not get rid of the whole thing, and that, he says, is how Americans are losing faith. For once, I agree with him. If people choose to dismiss the Genesis fables, or any of the huge number of inconsistencies or contradictions, then they've already found one flaw with the Bible, and that automatically nullifies when the Bible says it's infallible. With that in mind, you can't reasonably trust anything in the Bible that's not verified by anything else, so if you're going to have to filter it through your own interpretations, why not throw it away and view the world through your own interpretations and formulate what's right and wrong for yourself? You already do that anyway, whether your a religious believer or not. For example, Ken Ham is taking it literally when the Bible says to preach the gospel to as many people as you can reach (Mark 16:15), but he's neglecting to preach that the Bible says that when a man rapes a woman, she must marry him (Deuteronomy 22:28-29), or that any man who does any work at all on the Sabbath must be put to death (Numbers 15:32-36), or that Jesus said you must hate your parents if you are to be with him (Luke 14:26). Ken Ham, as well as any other sane believer, ignores these instructions, because they're morally reprehensible, but that just shows that the Bible is not a literal and perfect account from God, and they know it, so to say that it is literal and perfect is hypocrisy. The internet has made this information widely available and easily accessible and that may be the hypocrisy that causes young people to leave the church, many of whom choose to worship God in their own way.

The next statement cites BioLogos as a form of Christianity accepting evolution. Francis Collins, who founded BioLogos and worked on the Human Genome Project, thinks that God drove evolution and that Adam and Eve were a metaphor for the first evolved humans. He says this because he believes in God, but also searches for truth and is forced to assign God the role of creating evolution. Ken Ham doesn't search for truth, he has already decided truth, and therefore he must attack and dismiss any evidence, legitimate or not, that conflicts with his absolute truth.

Billboards are a noticeable theme in Ham's address. He calls attention to the billboards put up by atheist groups, billboards that say "You can be good without God," or "Don't believe in God? You're not alone," or a quote from Richard Dawkins. Ham claims that these are examples of secular humanism seeping into the culture and replacing God's word. This is interesting because later in the speech, he calls for more billboards like the ones his organization produces, billboards that speak out against abortion or gay marraige from a biblical perspective. Basically, freedom of speech should only apply to him. He can't be bothered with opposing views except to attack them.

He ends with a little suggestion to fix the economy: prayer. Because we Americans turned away from the Lord, he says, He has turned away from us, and if we turn back to God we will be an economic superpower by His will. Of course this implies that by praying, we will deserve a better economy than any other country, even if they pray, because Ham doesn't care about anyone who doesn't believe what he believes. Anything bad that falls on them is what they deserved for not worshiping God the same way he does.

I could only write so much on this, and to get the full effect of the stupid you'd have to watch it for yourself. It's an hour long, but if you have the time, you might get some laughs. Since all the points I've commented on have been better said on Youtube alone, I'll cite some of the major flaws in his reasoning with links to well-made corrections. Flaws like that atheism is a religion, and therefore requires faith, that God has established moral absolutes, that evolution is intrinsically atheistic, and most importantly, that the Bible is God's word.

Long Way From Home?

Posted by Lt. Dan Taylor

There is a young man who I have seen in my work a couple of times recently. As far as I can remember he has been wearing the same shirt every time. He is clean, his are clothes clean, his facial hair is trim and tidy but he has the feeling of someone lost or homeless.

Some of the girls have said they get the creeps from him. I can see why. He is always there for a couple hours just staring off into space or just watching people around him with a detached semi-smile on his face. He doesn't look menacing or crazy. Just... there.

Whenever he comes to the counter he knows what he wants and can talk well enough but has a slowness that goes with the whole creepy/lost feeling. Today he bought a tin of tea, out of the blue, and then asked me:
"Could you tell me where I am?"
"You mean, like, what streets we're at?" I asked. He shrugged a bit as if to say: 'sure.' So I told him the cross streets as I pointed and he almost reluctantly followed my gestures. Feeling as if I hadn't answered his question I asked:
"Where are you trying to go?"
He took a long sort of look at me then said:
"Well...Originally: Hershey Pennsylvania."
My face must have shown my complete bewilderment because he nodded and said:
"Well, thanks. 'Night." Then he sort of meandered out.

I still feel a little unsure about the whole situation. It had the feeling of in a movie or book when an angel or something comes to someone and asks them questions that they need to ask themselves but in a less literal way. "Could you tell me where I am?" or "Where are you trying to go?" Hershey Pennsylvania? It was so odd that I can't help but wonder about it still.

Crazy Creationist of the Month: February (Part 1)

Posted by Lionel Boyd Johnson.

This month's crazy creationist is Ken Ham, for his State of the Nation address on February 16.

Who is Ken Ham?
Ken Ham is the president and founder of Answers in Genesis. He believes that the Book of Genesis should and must be interpreted as a literal account of the universe being created in 6 days. He is also responsible for the building of the Creation Museum in Kentucky, which portrays Adam and Eve coexisting with dinosaurs before The Fall, Noah herding every animal on the Ark, and a number of other biblical tales, as certain fact.

Following the president's State of the Union address, Ken Ham has made his second annual State of the Nation about what's wrong with America and what, if anything, good Christians can do to bring it back.

He starts off citing that President Obama has declared that America is "no longer" a Christian nation, but a nation of many faiths. This offends Ham because he thinks his religion has the right, over any other, to govern the United States. He goes on to emphasize that this used to be a Christian nation, but that things have changed.

He then states that problem number one for the country is that we are losing faith (just like the Israelites did in the Book of Judges). We are forgetting good Christian values, such as reading the Bible, heterosexual marriage, and banning abortion and euthanasia.

This is why so many people have a problem with fundamentalists, because they think their Holy Book gives them the right to impose themselves into public matters, like abortion rights, gay rights, and setting biblical verses on government property.

His next outrageous claim is that when people compare Creationism to Science, they're not talking about observable science, the science that brought you all the modern technology you enjoy today, but about evolution which, he claims, is not real science.

When they use the word 'science,' I'm going to talk about that later on, but when a lot of people us that word, they're not really talking about observational science that built the technology to make a broadcast like this happen. They're really talking about evolution...

As if speciation has never been observed, a topic that can be thoroughly researched by two minutes on Google, Ham is clear that because evolution conflicts with his view of Scripture, it must be wrong and therefore, not science. However, there is no separation in the real world between science that everyone agrees on and evolution, they are both equally science. Evolution is as much a part of science as gravity is, and in fact there is more evidence behind evolution than gravity, because the law of gravity can be shown to be demonstrably wrong in rare instances.

What has happened that has really caused this? Such a fundamental change from a nation built on the authority of God's word to a nation now where we see those reminders of being built of God's word are basically being removed...

When Ham says America is a nation that was built on the authority of God's word, he is lying. The founding fathers were secularists who knew the value and importance of keeping religion out of government. I have no clue where Ham is getting this idea.

Ham's next fallacy is that evolution is a belief about the past, about origins specifically. Evolution is not a belief like Christianity is a belief. It's not really believed at all as much as accepted because it has been shown to be true. Creationists like to drag down evolutionary theory to a belief because then it looks like they are on equal ground, and that creationism has the benefit of being supported by God. But that was never true and evolution requires research and study to believe, not faith.

He then quotes Shirley Tilghman, president of Princeton, as saying

"Christian fundamentalists in the United States have launched a well-publicized assault on the theory of evolution..."

She's exactly right, people like Ken Ham are attacking evolution in order to try to convince the public that there is a controversy in the scientific world where there is none. For example, more historians deny the Holocaust than scientists deny evolution. Tilghman is saying that schools have a responsibility to teach real science, and too bad for Ken Ham if he doesn't consider evolution science, because the scientific community does.

Another cheap attempt to bring down evolution is to declare it the religion of atheism.

They're saying, 'When you look at the universe, life; mankind; all of reality, the supernatural has nothing to do with it. Everything is explained by natural processes.' Do you realize that that's the religion of atheism or the religion of naturalism.

When people say that atheism is a religion, or requires faith, or is a belief system, they just show that they don't understand the basic definitions of the terms they're using. When properly defined, it becomes clear that atheism cannot be a religion in any sense of the word. Moreover, evolution is not synonymous with atheism and never has been. Ken Ham says these things because he wants you to think that theism and atheism are just two different religions, and that his religion has the authority of God behind it. As usual, he's completely wrong.

Do you realize what they're doing? They're redefining science, and they've redefined science as having to do only with naturalism and the supernatural can't be involved, so they're eliminating the Bible, they're eliminating Christianity and replacing it with another religion.

Ham is redefining science, not anyone else. Science has always assumed to be working with natural processes because there has never been a case where assuming supernatural causes has shown to be right over natural ones.

Stay tuned for part 2 of February's Crazy Creationist of the Month, where we'll go over the second half of Ham's ridiculous blatherings.

Crazy Creationist of the Month: Runner Up

Posted by Lionel Boyd Johnson.

Welcome the first ever Crazy Creationist of the Month. This month, trailing off in second place, you guessed it, is Ray Comfort, for his two week series of blog posts, "Seven of the most important questions you will ever ask."

The premise is that everyone is going to die eventually, and there are a few questions that will define your life and give you meaning before you, too, eventually die. Let's take a look at the first one.

How do I know God exists?

First off, it's a loaded question; it assumes God exists already. However, the question of "Does God exist, and if so how will I know," is important, especially if there is an afterlife and God controls what happens to our "souls" after we die.

So how does Comfort answer?

It’s amazing how many people think that God’s existence is a matter of "faith." They think that we choose to accept that an invisible God exists, without any real evidence for His existence. We just "believe."

Correct, your decision to believe in any god is a personal choice, and can't be justified with logic or statistics. There are many logical proofs for the existence of God, and they've all been thoroughly refuted and disproved a long time ago. The same goes for any alleged disproof of God, it can't be disproved for sure. So which fallacious proof does Comfort offer?

Could you believe that a soldier’s barracks had no builder? Obviously someone put it together, because buildings don’t happen by themselves. The fact that the building exists is positive proof that there was a builder. Who could believe that a building—with its doors, windows, heating, air conditioning, carpet, electricity, etc., happened by accident, made from nothing?

Its design adds to evidence of a designer.

Ray Comfort and former star of Growing Pains Kirk Cameron went on Nightline a few years ago under the claim that they could prove that God exists without the use of faith or the Bible. Of course they didn't do it, but the argument they gave before resorting to the Bible was, "Creation is 100% scientific proof there was a creator, you can't have creation without a creator." Obviously it was all just a publicity stunt, and they clearly knew that their argument was flawed because they had been spouting it for years before that.

There are a number of fallacies in this claim, first among them being that creation proves a creator. Creation implies a creator, but that assumes creation; existence doesn't imply anything. On that same note, if everything had to be created, who created God? Comfort has already answered this by saying that God is eternal, but then why not cut out the middle-man and say all matter and energy in the universe is eternal, which evidence indicates it may be. If anything, his argument stands against existence for God, because if given the choice of the universe being eternal and the universe being created by something else that's eternal, Occam's Razor allows us to assume that the universe is eternal. But that's making assumptions as well.

The real argument Comfort is giving here is a combination of straw man fallacy and false dichotomy. The straw man is that the atheist believes that nothing created everything, a mockery of Big Bang cosmology. However, the Big Bang Theory states that there was a singularity: consider that all matter is mostly empty space within atoms, and that protons and neutrons themselves are mostly empty, then consider that matter can be converted to energy following the equation E=MC^2. Now consider compressing all matter to a plasma-like state so dense that nothing exists outside of it, not even time. This is the singularity, and it didn't explode like the word "bang" suggests, it wasn't floating around for a while until something happened to it because there was no time or existence before it. There was a rapid expansion of space-time that still continues to this day (note that the universe is expanding). This isn't idle speculation either, it's the most comprehensive explanation for all the observed phenomena in the cosmos. The false dichotomy is that Comfort implies that by attacking Big Bang cosmology, it would give credit to his argument by default. It doesn't, it's a dishonest and childish attack on what he doesn't understand and refuses to understand.

Besides, none of this goes any distance to prove the God of the Bible, which is what he's really lobbying for.

But there is more. The evidence shows that this earth upon which we live was intended for our use. We have lighting during the day so that we can see what we are doing. The sea breeze keeps the air fresh and cool, and the warmth of a massive ball of fire in the sky keeps us warm and dry. Cows give us succulent meat to eat and leather to wear. They chew grass and give us milk, and from the milk we get cream, cheese, butter, yoghurt, and ice cream. Sheep give us mouth-watering meat to eat, and wool from their back gives us warm sweaters, and supplies carpet for our comfort. Chickens lay eggs for us to scramble, and sacrificially provide finger-lickin’ meat on our plates.

Not true again, it makes more sense that life adapted to conditions on earth, the parts of it that are easy enough to adapt to, anyway. If things were different, and we lived on Venus, Comfort would just claim that Venus was designed for life. It's all a meaningless tautology.

Comfort has failed to prove that God exists. Again. Every question after this one is completely inconsequential, since they depend on the first question. That's all for the best, since they're pretty unimportant questions. What does God have that I need, What is God like, How do I approach him to get the gift [of eternal life], all the answers given assume that God exists, and that He exists exactly as the Bible describes Him. What irritates me is that Comfort is asserting as fact things he doesn't know, and can't know, and does it as a career. Don't mistake Comfort's seven questions for important, it's just a dishonest attempt to proselytize under the guise of thoughtful reflection.

Stay tuned for the winner of February's Crazy Creationist of the Month. (I'll give you a hint, he thinks Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs as beasts of burden.)

50 at 5:00

Posted by William Edwards Deming.

I was driving around the area yesterday, and it sucked. Five o'clock Friday traffic, and the rainy weather.

My first point of complaint is the weather. It had just stopped raining, and the sun was just starting to shine. With me driving west, that meant that there was a thin gloss of water on the road to perfectly reflect the sun that was already shining in my eyes. It was so bad I couldn't drive without holding my hand in front of my face, and it was physically painful even still.

Top that off with the rush hour traffic. Traffic has always been very interesting to me. Something about the interaction between people on such a large scale fascinates me, and being a topic of such interest, I become very frustrated when everything fucks up. The fact that millions of dollars was put into the highway as a system of ensuring that I can keep traveling at high speed; when I come to a complete stop on the freeway, in the fast lane, for no less time than a minute, I'm overcome with a feeling of defeat, like something (or several things) in my life has gone horribly wrong, and now here I sit, my delicate temporal planning shattered. These traffic jams aren't caused by an accident, either. It's mostly that people don't know what they're doing and can't get it together that causes them to slow down. Basically, everyone is ruining everyone and, interesting though it is (and it is interesting), I hate being a part of it.

So next time you're on the road, remember, keep the big picture in mind, and be courteous to your fellow driver.

Careful With That Jackhammer

Guest post by Kilgore Trout.

So I had a pretty epic dream last night. I was playing a video game, and the story for the game was amazing.

As part of a top-secret mission you are seated into a craft and launched into the future along with your team. The reason? A nuclear spill in the future has made it so people cannot have children. And because of a time warp caused by the spill, people in the past are dying, therefore everybody's parents are slowly dying before having children, and therefore people are getting younger until they die, à la Benjamin Button. (This getting younger thing is happening in the future where you are going, not in the present, but somehow that's bad for the present too. It all made perfect sense in the dream)

So your mission is to stop that, save the world, and save everybody from dying. You are obviously battling some enemies (but I don't really remember them). Eventually, you find a group of people who have children (they are special because nobody's been able to have children). So you have to protect these people against the enemies (All I know is they're dressed like FBI agents.) Anyway, here comes the epic part.

So what happens is somehow is you and the children people are in your craft and I guess you're supposed to be with them all the time. So at this point in the dream I'm like “I got stuff to do.” So I decide to quit the game.

The game says, “Do you want to quit or just leave the craft?” For some reason I just leave the craft. Then it says, “Fast forward 1000 years...” The craft is buried under rock or underground or in magma or something like that and the game asks you, “Do you want to dig the people out?” I don't remember what I answered but here is, as close to verbatim as I could, what the game said in the dream: “1000 years later. The world is destroyed, empty, buried in ashes. And you just a spirit of a baby, with a JACKHAMMER.”

Think about it, it makes sense. Such a good line.

I expect an offer from Microsoft games any hour.

Up Yours, Whitey

Posted by Carlos Argentino Daneri.

A civil rights group is trying to bring affirmative action to the University of California system.

Now in California, the Berkeley-based civil rights activist group By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) filed a federal lawsuit in order to increase the number of African American, Latino and Native American students at the University of California.

Even though affirmative action was banned more than a decade ago, these guys want it back.

In 1996 California voters approved the Prop 209 constitutional amendment, which banned government institutions from using race as a consideration to increase the numbers of underrepresented minorities who are employed by the government or attend public universities.

I knew something was wrong with affirmative action the first time I ever heard about it. Eventually, I learned the name of this fallacy: truth is in the middle. Picture yourself walking along, and you see two $5 bills on the sidewalk. You should turn them in to lost-and-found, but you'd prefer to keep them for yourself. After all, you found them and how do you know the guy at the lost-and-found won't just keep them for himself? With this minor moral dilemma in mind, would it be right to average the difference and keep only one of the $5 bills?

Similarly, if a particular racial group is underrepresented, by prejudice or any other reason, does it balance things out to favor them over any other group? It doesn't, because it doesn't work that way because there's no such thing as reverse racism.

Connerly said it is the affirmative action policies that are actually racist. By using race as a consideration at all, the progress of the civil rights movement toward a color-blind society is threatened, he said.

"Proposition 209 is in essence the same language as the 1964 civil rights act," Connerly said, referring to the 1964 federal legislation which banned Jim Crow laws.

The activist group is called "By Any Means Necessary." Think about that, they're going to do what they think is right no matter what, regardless of how unfair or unconstitutional it is. This, I think, is the worst name for any group to give themselves because it shows flat out that they want to impose themselves where the law and the people have already spoken.

The Girl in the Pink Sweater

Posted by Romeo Montague.

I was walking around school today, pretty normal. As I walked past the library, I saw this girl. Overall, she was cute, but I wouldn't find her particularly gorgeous. However, she had this lovely smile on her face, a look of complete contentness, and she had overwhelming confidence in her stride, like she was extremely satisfied with her life. I don't know why, but I instantly found her far more beautiful. There was something about the way she carried herself, with such happiness and serenity -- even though she was walking alone -- that drew my eyes to her. I never knew something like that could have such an effect on me...

Sex Scandal, Sex Schmandle

Posted by Alvah Scarret

The opinion section of any decent newspaper (or online version) is going to have articles there simply to stir the pot of ideas. Get people talking. I think this is a good thing. It can be annoying when the headlines are cheap hooks to get reactions, but papers need people to read them and people just don't read for no reason.

Moving on...

I often glance at the opinion section to see what people are writing on different issues. Particularly the ones that I didn't think were issues, or hadn't thought of in a while. Today I stumbled on a gem that had the tagline:

Not all affairs produce corruption, but the media should dig into the private acts that should be publicly disqualifying.

Should the media dig into the private acts of public figures (elected and appointed offices most importantly) to sniff out any possibly disqualifying ones? I get what the author is saying. He thinks that National Enquirer and other tabloid snooping and accusing, however often it is false and stupid, can reveal elements of character in potential or current public servants that are important. His example:

By rights, the Edwards story should have been entered in the “public service” category as well. If the supermarket tabloid’s reporters hadn’t gone digging where other journalists declined to even tread, we might never have learned how close the Democratic Party came to nominating a truly disgraceful character for the presidency.

Do we care that Edwards was sleeping around? So the guy is a sleaze. Does that mean he doesn't have a good record as a statesman? Does that mean he couldn't do a good job? Sure, it may not look so good but luckily for us no public office job is staying faithful. The article continues:

If Americans aren’t reading about Edwards and Rielle Hunter, they’ll just read about Tiger Woods or the Jolie-Pitts instead.

Better the former than the latter. Watching Woods unburden himself last Friday made me think: This really shouldn’t be any of my business. I’ve never had the same thought watching John Edwards confess his sins. Athletes and actors don’t work for us directly; they’re entrusted with great wealth and fame, but not great power. But the private peccadilloes of politicians tend to interfere with, and corrupt, their commission of their public duties.

I would think that NONE of this was my business. Actor or businessman or politician or athlete or astronaut. If a running politician has a secret habit of cutting up kittens in his garage, however, I might think that would be important. Or if he killed a guy. But both of these are examples of behaviors that represent a definite danger to the responsibility entrusted to a politician. Plus, they are actual crimes.

I'm not condoning this behavior by saying cheating on your spouse is OK in private. Nor am I saying it doesn't show something of the person's character. I am saying that it almost never matters to the JOB, and such invasive investigative journalism should not be encouraged. The author made a good point that mirrors my own:

Not all affairs produce corruption, and we don’t have to know every sin that our politicians commit. Bill Clinton wasn’t on the ballot in 2008, and maybe the public didn’t need a substantial investigation into his post-presidential sex life.

I'll end with that.

The White Man's Burden

Posted by Malachi Constant.

There was an article in the paper a couple days ago discussing an event about the privileges white people get just for being white.

"'Uncovering Whiteness' refers to some of the dynamics around whiteness," she said. "We don't talk about it the way we talk about other things. Back when this country was founded, people were called 'German,' or 'Spanish' or 'English.' When did we become 'white'? What does being white imply past just your skin tone?"

Nothing. At least, it should be nothing. People were called "German," "Spanish," or "English" back when there were fewer people who qualified under several ethnicities. As people from different nationalities interbred, it eventually became easier to just use skin color. For example, I have so many different countries in my background that I don't even know all of them or what fraction I am of any of them. What do I call myself with respect to race? German-English-Irish-maybeScottish-maybesomeothershit? No, I just say white, because it's easier, and I don't really care about tying myself to any country or any number of countries. All I know that I am for sure is American, and I can't even say native American. For another example, a girl I know is Hispanic, but has such dark skin that I just call her black. Some people think black is a derogatory term, but if I had used the phrase African-American, I would have been wrong, because she's not African. Another girl I know doesn't like to be called African-American, again, because she's not African; she prefers to be called black, because it's just an adjective and it's accurate. People who imply more than just skin color when they say "white" are usually exercising the same stereotypes that they are speaking against.

"The purpose of this is to get people thinking about the privileges they have in society whether it's based on race, skin tone, religion or whatever," he said. "You need to be able to recognize what advantages you have over the guy sitting next to you and know what advantages he has over you. We need to stop taking things for granted because these inequalities and injustices still exist."

That's perfectly fair. Indeed, there are statistics and 20/20 reports that indicate that there are, undeniably, inequalities between races. I'm sure you've heard of studies that indicate that a black man makes so many cents for every dollar that a white man makes in the same position, and that there is an abundance of certain races in certain job titles. I believe this is the whole point of the event that the article is mentioning, and I'm all in favor of it. But one quote in particular caught my attention...

Junior international agricultural development major Christina Ortiz noted that there weren't many "white" people planning to attend.

"If you're going to have a discussion about a certain type of people, then it's essential to have them there," she said. "They need to represent themselves. [...]"

They need to represent themselves? How is that? When I read this, I got the image in my head of the guest speaker picking white people out of the crowd and asking them to defend their race. Obviously, this is an extreme exaggeration, and I suspect that what the writer meant to say was that white people should be there as another racial group to enhance diversity in the discussion. But that brings up another point, what can one white person, or even a group of white people, have to say on behalf of the entire race?

Here's the thing, a political party, extracurricular club, or religion can be represented by a smaller fraction of that group, because those are things made of people who choose to define themselves as Democrat, Anime Club member, or Christian, to name a few examples. If one person of the group doesn't agree with the merits of the group as a whole, he/she can leave, but my skin color is a circumstance of birth, and I never had any say in the matter. So one white person could never represent the whole of white people because there is nothing common among white people except skin color.

You'd Have to Quit Smoking, Too

Posted by Randle Patrick McMurphy.

There was a pregnancy scare among a small group of friends of mine. A friend of a friend was "late" and the worries were building up. As far as I know, it looks negative, so she's off the hook this time. I'm glad that she's probably not pregnant because she's certainly not ready for a child. However, when I first heard the news, I was almost surprised at how indifferent I was. This was a life changing experience for this woman, and still is even she turns out not to be pregnant, but I can't seem to care at all.

I think the reason I have no sympathy for her is that this isn't something that's completely beyond her control. What I mean is, there were a number of poor decisions to be made by her to lead to this predicament. Most importantly among them: the choice to have unsafe sex. If it turned out that she was safe and that something went wrong, then for the most part, that was beyond her control, and I think I would feel a little worse for her, but the possible consequences of unprotected sex are well known and there is no excuse for an educated adult to be in such a situation. I realize that using a condom does make sex less enjoyable, but you know what's really unenjoyable? Having a child when you're in no place in your life to raise one.

If it turns out to be a false negative, and she actually is pregnant, I'm not saying it was all her fault. The father would have a lot to answer for as well. I'm saying that it's important to take responsibility for your baser instincts and be able to control them, and be smart about it.

Dumb Brain, Dumb Body

Posted by Mack and The Boys

I'm not much for reading the health section of the paper, or the health section of anything, but in a sickday induced boredom I wandered off the usual path...

I discovered an article in The New York Times entitled 'Low I.Q. Predicts Heart Disease'. I wasn't really surprised at the conclusion hinted by the title, but I was a little surprised that it was published with such a direct headline. People usually try to protect low intelligence persons from all the bad labels often associated with them: socioeconomic status, occupation, health risks, etc.

The article made a point that had occurred to me as I read the headline:

People with lower intelligence also are known to adopt less healthful behaviors — they smoke and drink more and are more likely to have a poor diet. It may be that people with low I.Q. have a more difficult time understanding complex health messages and don’t fully understand the long-term health effects of an unhealthy lifestyle.

This seemed pretty straight forward to me, and the most likely correlation between the behaviors of those that test highly in I.Q. tests (educated, wealthy individuals usually) and the behaviors of those that don't.

The article, however, mentioned another possible theory:

It may also be that a high I.Q. is associated with better overall neurological and physiological “wiring,’’ meaning all the body systems, from brain to heart to liver to kidneys, function at a more efficient level.

For instance, some studies suggest that people with high I.Q. also have faster physical reaction times.

Intriguing, no? The idea is that those that score better not only are smarter but everything in their bodies is working better making higher intelligence possible. This also makes sense to me in thinking of those in lower socioeconomic situations scoring lower as they do no have access to healthful options in many areas of their health and may not even know enough to care.

Take a peak at the article... It's interesting.

Even if it is in the Health section.

A Shortage of Men

Posted by George Sand.

The New York Times printed an article last week, basically about the plight of single women in universities. Since about ten years ago, women have outnumbered men in colleges and universities, and the article is about the fact that women have a hard time finding a date because there are so few men.

Jayne Dallas, a senior studying advertising who was seated across the table, grumbled that the population of male undergraduates was even smaller when you looked at it as a dating pool. “Out of that 40 percent, there are maybe 20 percent that we would consider, and out of those 20, 10 have girlfriends, so all the girls are fighting over that other 10 percent,” she said.

Always be wary when faced with figures. First of all, there are 20 percent that you would consider; that doesn't mean that no one could love the other 20 percent, so really everyone is fighting over the 30 percent that are single. Secondly, these numbers are useless because they are strictly anecdotal, and have no data to back them up. However, addressing the point she's making, there are always few people you really connect with on a romantic level, when compared against the number of people you meet that you just plain don't care about or don't even think about. You're at no more disadvantage than anyone else when you remark that there is such a small percentage of people you meet that you want to date.

Thanks to simple laws of supply and demand, it is often the women who must assert themselves romantically or be left alone on Valentine’s Day.

What a tragedy that would be, if a woman asked a man out on a date. I, for one, have been flattered when a girl has asked me out, even if I'm not interested. Moreover, I find it extremely weird when I hear about a girl who likes a guy, but does nothing, waiting for him to notice her, when it's clear that he simply hasn't given any thought to it, and that he would probably be very open to the idea if he were just prompted with it.

“Girls feel pressured to do more than they’re comfortable with, to lock it down,” Ms. Lynch said.

Bullshit. This assumes that a girl must be in a relationship. If you don't want to "do more than you're comfortable with," then don't. The worse that can happen to you is that you're single. Being single won't kill you. In fact, you can learn a lot about yourself.

“Women do not want to get left out in the cold, so they are competing for men on men’s terms,” she wrote. “This results in more casual hook-up encounters that do not end up leading to more serious romantic relationships. Since college women say they generally want ‘something more’ than just a casual hook-up, women end up losing out.”

If you want something more, you should consider not sleeping with someone you just met and know nothing about. When you do, it sort of sends the message that it's just for the sake of a good time.

Remember when people were complaining that there were too many men on college campuses? That men were setting the norm by population, and basically the same crap was going on? Does it seem like the situation has reversed and they're still complaining about the same thing, just in a different way? If a date is what you want, and you can't get it, maybe you should ask someone out where you would normally wait to be asked out; maybe you should be more open-minded about people you wouldn't normally consider; or maybe you should just exercise patience, and realize that not having a date isn't the end of the world, and that many people have dates and are still miserable.

With Headlines Like These

Posted by Stephen Harper
I enjoy a good sporting event like anyone else. Basketball game? Sure! Soccer match? I'm in! Winter Olympics? NO. Not only do the Winter Olympics look puny and stupid in comparison to the Summer (Real) Olympics, but everyone seems to think that when I say 'I don't care' I really mean: 'When I say No, just try harder.'
Let's start with the recent death of the Georgian Luger. It's sad when someone dies at what is intended to be a clean sporting event. It would almost be acceptable to hear about it and all the details around it every time I turn on any sort of news or talk show for a week if he had been doing something like track and field or soccer. The man was racing down an iced track on a non protective device going as fast as possible. What the hell did people think would happen eventually? Not to mention it's a lame sport. Just like Curling or Biathalon or Figure Skating or that one where the skiers go down a hill and off a jump. Who cares?
All of this would be a non-issue with me if it wasn't thrown in my face everywhere. Like when I check my e-mail and get headlines like: "Snowboarder Complains About Peers' Pants" or "Ski Champ Dad's Awkward Moment." It's even on real news channels like The New York Times.
I can respect any 'sport' people dedicate themselves to and competitions for them. That does not mean it should be an Olympic Sport because people do it.

How Long Can You Go Without?

Posted by Carlos Argentino Daneri.

I was chatting with a close friend of mine, and among the many subjects that came up, she told me that the longest she had gone without sex (neglecting preadolescence) was three weeks. She went on to say that those three weeks were like torture to her.

Obviously, this woman likes having sex, and good for her. But three weeks? That's her record? Is three weeks even long enough to get over the person you last broke up with? (I'm not saying, in that last sentence, that every sexual partner she's ever had was one with whom she was in a committed relationship, because that would be foolish to say.) It made me wonder how many people she had sex with that she didn't even like; she just wanted to have sex. Knowing her, I would wager that it isn't many, since she considers sex a way to become closer with your partner. Even so, I don't think sex should be that essential to anyone, especially if your irreligious enough to consider masturbation as an option.

She acknowledges that her strong desire to have sex has gotten her into trouble before, and I can see how it would. Call me old fashioned when I say that sex should only be with someone you love, or at least like, but if you're going crazy in three weeks without intercourse, your desperation shows that you're probably going to take the first opportunity without consideration.

Immanuel Kant wrote about utilitarian behavior towards your fellow human being. He wrote that it is wrong to use a person strictly for their utility, as you might do with an inanimate tool. The relation that I'm postulating here is that this woman might have once been in the habit of considering a sexual partner only for his body parts, and that it bears consideration to be called immoral.