I don’t get why people think New Yorkers are rude; over the last few days I’ve found the exact opposite to be true, and there’s a damn good reason for it. A rock that sits in a river long enough won’t have very many sharp edges. Or less poetically: when you have this many people crammed onto a relatively small island, individuals who are rude won’t remain un-stabbed for very long.

People here hold doors for strangers, smile and nod, and say “excuse me” when pushing through a crowd standing shoulder-to-shoulder in an over-packed restaurant on a Saturday night.

There’s a difference between rudeness, and having well-drawn lines, beyond which, courtesy turns into open contempt. I imagine this subtle difference is lost on a lot of those who either haven’t spent a lot of time around people from this part of the country, or just don’t possess the force of character needed to draw those lines for themselves.

Getting all the meat off the bones, then going for the marrow…

I’d meant to write this about a month ago; so while the timeliness of the post isn’t exactly optimal,  at least this is an exercise in following through.

The sign read “everything up to 70% off”, and they weren’t kidding; even the fixtures were marked down to a price point that tempted me to buy, and I don’t fucking need 15′ of commercial bookshelves.  That was just a few steps into the store.

Within minutes I had in my hands six books, including Solzhenitsyn’s tales from the Soviet gulag,  one on how Kennedy’s wiz kids borked up Vietnam, and a mangled Calvin and Hobbes compilation.

The mob now occupying our local Borders was vastly different than the cast of characters that could be seen here just a year ago.  Then, you’d have just swam with a fairly typical slice of “book people”; the creepy, middle-aged manga fan, the self help guide collector, or the recovering goth chick.  But now, it was as if these players were replaced with the cast of “Desperation: The Movie”.  People who clearly hadn’t been into a bookstore in years if ever, were now streaming into the building with the same ferocity Read the rest of this entry »

Before we start, yes, I fully grasp the irony of what I’m about to write under the above, meme-derived title.

On the way home from work today I mashed my car stereo’s “on” button and settled in for the return commute.  A few minutes into the drive, after dodging idiots who managed to get a license without ever learning how to merge onto a freeway, AC/DC’s “Hell’s Bells” came on the local rock station to which the radio was tuned.

I’d heard the song several billion times, so I wasn’t really paying it much attention, but for some reason the line “I won’t take no prisoners, won’t spare no lives / Nobody’s putting up a fight” jumped out at me.  And as many things tend to lately, something about it irked me.  After a moment or two of trying to ferret out of my subconscious why that was, I finally figured it out.  But instead of just coming out with the reason, I’m going to explain via dialogue. Read the rest of this entry »

This is from a speech Robert Heinlein gave in 1973 to the United States Naval Academy.  I’ve picked it up where he gets to the heart of the subject he wanted to impress upon the midshipmen; the fundamentals of morality and why patriotism is a practical matter of survival.

…why would anyone want to become a naval officer?

In the present dismal state of our culture there is little prestige attached to serving your country; recent public opinion polls place military service far down the list.

It can’t be the pay. No one gets rich on the pay. Even a 4-star admiral is paid much less than top executives in other lines. As for lower ranks the typical naval officer finds himself throughout his career just catching up from the unexpected expenses connected with the last change of duty when another change of duty causes a new financial crisis. Then, when he is about fifty, he is passed over and retires. . .but he can’t really retire because he has two kids in college and one still to go. So he has to find a job. . .and discovers that jobs for men his age are scarce and usually don’t pay well.

Working conditions? You’ll spend half your life away from your family. Your working hours? “Six days shalt thou work and do all thou art able; the seventh day the same, and pound the cable.” A forty-hour week is standard for civilians — but not for naval officers. You’ll work that forty-hour week but that’s just a starter. You’ll stand a night watch as well, and duty weekends. Then with every increase in grade your hours get longer — until at last you get a ship of your own and no longer stand watches. Instead you are on duty twenty-four hours a day. . .and you’ll sign your night order book with: “In case of doubt, do not hesitate to call me.”

I don’t know the average week’s work for a naval officer but it’s closer to sixty than to forty. I’m speaking of peacetime, of course. Under war conditions it is whatever hours are necessary — and sleep you grab when you can. Read the rest of this entry »

Random thought/dime-store epiphany:

It occurs to me that, above all else – economic, military, ideological, or other forms of control over a society; that the most effective means of controlling large groups of people is to manipulate their expectations for their lives.

If the state, religion, or a private entity, can convince enough people that 2.5 kids, home ownership, a white picket fence, and retirement in Florida, for example is “a life well-lived”; then people who hold this belief are effectively fenced within said white pickets. The same went for the founders of ancient Sparta, the Samurai, or the Viking thanes; they shaped the expectation of thousands of lives within a frame that dictated that glory was to be sought, and on the battlefield.

Imagine if instead, someone managed to shape the expectations of enough people, that the point of all human life was to spread out into the universe; to discover everything there was to know about existence itself. Think about what we could accomplish if even a small percentage of people went from birth to death within this framework, with this definition of “a life well-lived”.

I’d been meaning to use this blog as a repository of comments I’ve made in discussions on various sites, blogs, social media, etc, for a while now. This one’s from Facebook.

In response to the idea that the Department of Defense, and the Department of Education should switch budgets:

Schools need to be a lot harder. Not everyone should graduate from high school, let alone go to college. It’s the dumbing down of the standards that’s hurting the country, not the lack of money.

The main problem with education in the US is the notion that everyone has an equal chance of being a lawyer or a surgeon, while the gas station attendant is just there because he failed to apply himself, or the system “left him behind”.

To revamp the education system, the first thing that needs to happen is extensive intelligence/ability testing starting every year from kindergarten, that is objective, thorough, and free of any possible cultural bias (to eliminate advantage of children born to highly educated parents).

This should be followed immediately by placing students on tracks that leverage their individual strengths while helping address their weaknesses and bring them up to a minimal level to function in all areas of their life as a competent adult.

We need more Shop classes, more Ag classes, more Vocational classes in general, for those who are better suited to manual labor. There is no shame in this, nor should there be any applied to a child who has the potential to help feed the rest of the country, but doesn’t have the potential to engineer the tractor he’ll be driving.

My great-grandparents were farmers; their farm, well at least their land, a hundred miles or so north of Kansas City,  is still in use today.  Of course, at one point after they passed on, it was apparently being used to grow marijuana.  But I guess there’s worse things that could be done with it.

We should take a lesson from the Japanese about how it’s not so important what you’re doing for a living, as long as you’re doing it to the best of your ability; that’s where the honor and status in your life should come from.

Of course, you can’t buy the latest baubles, sports car, or McMasion to impress people, with status and honor. Our cultural values are, indeed, fucked up.

Guess it’s not a surprise on some issues; I might actually have to pick up this book.

In other news Jon Stewart is uncharacteristically out of his depth and does a crappy job with this interview.

The reason I say “we think alike” is because it was just the other day that I made a post on the JREF’s forums saying a similar thing. We need to come to a consensus on what constitutes a workable sense of morality that’s stripped of all vestiges of religious nonsense. For example: if you strip the religion out of the Ten Commandments, you get:

Read the rest of this entry »

This one, in response to the ever popular “women drivers suck” status post on a friend’s wall.

Although it’s also been demonstrated that, due to thousands of years of males being predominately hunters, we’re better at spacial recognition, judgement of distance, and anticipating others’ course corrections; all skills which are essential to good driving.

Women, however, are superior at distinguishing colors and patterns, which were skills that allowed them to discern which fruits and berries were good and which were deadly. Apparently women are able to perceive more shades of red than men as well.

So while men may actually be, as a gender, statistically better at driving, ultimately we’re still buying red sports cars to impress women; which tells you who really has the power in the situation.

…for some people, is both disturbing and depressing.

Stumbling around the net this morning, I came across this:

UNCW prof vows to destroy atheist student groups: “I seek power over the godless heathen dissident”
Cory Doctorow at 10:07 PM Sun

A Supreme Court decision forced a California state university Christian society to accept gays as members as a condition of receiving support from the school (“Other groups may exclude or mistreat Jews, blacks, and women — or those who do not share their contempt for Jews, blacks, and women. A free society must tolerate such groups. It need not subsidize them, give them its official imprimatur, or grant them equal access to law school facilities.”).

This ruling has upset Mike Adams, a prof at UNC Wilmington. He’s vowed to disrupt atheist student societies by filling their rosters with Christian evangelical students, “to use my young fundamentalist Christian warriors to undermine the mission of every group that disagrees with me on the existence of God.”

As PZ Myers points out, if the situation were reversed, Adams and his fellow travelers would doubtless be even more apoplectic: “I can just imagine what would happen if I tried to turn freethinkers on campus into militant disruptors of other organizations: their faculty advisors would descend on me in fury.”

But Mike Adams isn’t looking for debate. As he says, “I do not seek robust debate. I seek power over the godless heathen dissident.”

The reason I’m sharing this is simple. For a long time I’ve pointed out to people on my various websites, social media outlets, or in person, that as the members of a group with a shared world view or belief system dwindle, those that are left grow progressively more rabid and more radical. And this is something we’re seeing right now with fundamentalist Christianity.

As we (hopefully) continue the march of progress towards a society that would make Carl Sagan happy, this problem will grow in direct, inverse proportion to said progress. The further we shrink the gaps in which the conventional notions of “God” hides, the more violently will his believers defend their faith. In the next few decades, I’m sincerely expecting to see an increase in Fundamentalist Christian violence, including domestic terrorism. Don’t believe me? Ask George Tiller.

Read the rest of this entry »