Glenn Beck: We knew Martin Luther King, We loved Martin Luther King. You, sir, are no Martin Luther King.

Tomorrow is the 47th anniversary of the March on Washington for Freedom and Jobs. Glenn Beck is going to attempt to hijack this day for his conservative agenda and has, to that end, been spreading a meme that conservatives--white conservatives--were the driving force behind the civil rights movement. This meme is false. They weren’t. Conservatives--not necessarily Republicans but Conservatives--were vehemently opposed to the movement and its goals. I have, in other posts, quoted William F. Buckley who articulated the conservative opposition to civil rights and so will not belabor the point here. However, I cannot--as the child of parents who were at the march with my elder sister (who was only a few months old at the time)--sit idly by and not try to counter this meme in some small way.

If one were to listen to FOX news or conservative rhetoric generally, one would think that the only significant words King ever uttered were “I have a dream...content of our character”. That’s it. Well, the man had much, much more to say and if he were alive today conservatives would pillory King as being so Marxist that they would consider Obama the second coming of Adam Smith in comparison. At any rate, I thought it might be useful to post--in all of its glory--the full text of King’s “I have a dream” speech.


I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. And there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.

We cannot walk alone.

And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead.

We cannot turn back.

There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?" We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their self-hood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: "For Whites Only." We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until "justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream."¹

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. And some of you have come from areas where your quest -- quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of "interposition" and "nullification" -- one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; "and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together."2

This is our hope, and this is the faith that I go back to the South with.

With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

And this will be the day -- this will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning:

My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.

Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim's pride,

From every mountainside, let freedom ring!

And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.

And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.

Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.

Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.

Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.

But not only that:

Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.

From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

Free at last! Free at last!

Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

Yvette Carnell: Low Black Male Graduation Rates Indicate a Failure in Faith, Not Circumstances

This is an eloquent and wonderful statement about lowered expectations within the black community, specifically as it relates to our young men. This was originally posted at Huffington Post.
Who was the first person in your life to introduce you to the concept of failure? Now, who was the first person in your life to teach you that failure was not only possible, but probable?
If you consider yourself successful by any measure of the Western standard, then you were probably never introduced to the Negro narrative of obfuscation, which teaches the inevitability that outward circumstances will methodically undermine any constructive steps you take in the direction of upward mobility.
All varieties of Negro head honchos, from shepherds of churchgoing hallelujah flock, to old timey civil rights activists, preach the defeatist mantra of how "the man" is out to get them and the variety of ways that our system keeps a "brotha" down.
Unfortunately, it now appears that this chorus of pessimism has entrenched itself in the minds of African American young men, teachers, and even parents.
According to a recent study by the Schott Foundation for Public Education, less than 50% of black males graduated from high school during the 2007-2008 school year. Even worse, according to the report, "(M)ore than twice as many black students are classified as 'mentally retarded' in spite of research demonstrating that the percentages of students from all groups are approximately the same at each intelligence level."
It is clear from the data that young black men are throwing in the towel at record numbers. These numbers should be anything but surprising considering how the black community has systematically lowered expectations for black men on every conceivable level.
In education, we feed young black men bleak statistics which forewarn that he will be killed or imprisoned before age 25, making the pursuit of education futile. In love, black women welcome the most pitiful representations of manhood into their hearts (and bedrooms) with open arms. And in our families, it is now widely accepted for black single moms to raise their kids alone and leave the court system to do battle on their behalf for child support - but what of male parental support?
Even the language we use to refer to our beloved black boys bespeaks his littleness and certain demise. The term 'young black male' is cold and devoid of any true emotion.
If we choose to push for a transformation of thought which undoes the damage of the over-empathizers, apologists, and recklessness in our community, then we must teach young black boys that life has meaning under all conditions. To suffer is a small thing, but to suffer without meaning is despair, and that should be avoided at all costs.
We must also implant in them the truest of all human truths; that they alone are responsible for their choices, and that although hustling has been painted as the clear choice for all warrior hearts, it is not. It is, in truth, a coward's exit. His flee from the battlefield.
Famed psychiatrist Viktor Frankl once mused that "If we take man as he is, we make him worse, but if we overestimate, we promote him to what he really can be." What our education system, homes, and churches are missing are idealists. Believe him grand, and he will be that. Believe him held captive by statistics and circumstances, and he will be just that.
You see, we save young black boys not by sharing their opinion of their own lives, but by nourishing a grander dream for them than the one they currently dream for themselves.
Our freedom, their freedom, lies in perception. You can either allow them to believe that their current conditions are building them up, or tearing you down. But in order to succeed, young black men must be taught that their lives are not subject to the whims of societal laws alone. They must be lived to have meaning.
It's time that educators and advocates alike tone down the rhetoric with regard to the circumstances young African-American men face, and turn the conversation in the direction of what they already have - inside. If we lose this generation of young black men, it won't be because of society, or our crumbling education system, but because we stopped believing.

Yvette Carnell: Low Black Male Graduation Rates Indicate a Failure in Faith, Not Circumstances
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/yvette-carnell/low-black-male-graduation_b_688342.html

NYPD Charges Man With Hate Crime After He Allegedly Stabbed Muslim Cab Driver | TPMMuckraker

Just saw this at Talking Points Memo. And so it begins....now, if anyone is tempted to connect this incident to, say, the controversy involving the Cordoba House community center let’s just stop that right here. This incident is the result of (everyone sing it, you know the words!) “one bad apple”. And when there is another incident--a firebombing at a mosque or what-have-you that will also be “one bad apple”. However, should some person who is the target of anti-Muslim violence strike back then that is all Muslims.

The New York Police Department has confirmed to TPM that a cab driver in Manhttan was allegedly stabbed by a passenger who asked if the cabbie was Muslim, and says the incident is being treated as a hate crime. The suspect has been charged with attempted murder and other crimes.
According to Detective Marc Nell, at 6:12 pm last night, the driver picked up Michael Enright, 21, of Brewster, NY, at the intersection of 24th Street and 2nd Avenue in Manhattan. The cab proceeded to drive north, and Enright asked the driver, who Nell identified as a 43-year-old Asian male, if he was Muslim. After the driver responded that he was, Enright allegedly stabbed him repeatedly with a Leatherman tool, according to police.
"[Enright] stabbed the driver in the throat, right arm, left forearm, right thumb and upper lip," Nell said.
According to police, the driver called 911, and stopped the cab on 3rd Avenue between 40th and 41st streets, managing to lock Enright inside until police arrived.
Nell told TPM that the cab driver is in stable condition, and that Enright has been charged with "attempted murder two as a hate crime, assault with a weapon as a hate crime, aggravated harassment second degree because of race and religion, and criminal possession of a weapon."
Nell could not confirm that Enright had admitted to asking the driver if he was Muslim.

NYPD Charges Man With Hate Crime After He Allegedly Stabbed Muslim Cab Driver | TPMMuckraker
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/08/nypd_charges_man_with_hate_crime_after_allegedly_stabbing_muslim_cabbie.php?ref=fpb

Nature is altogether more clever than we are

Earlier this summer, I made a post on the BFP message boards talking about the Gulf oil spill and how bacteria could be deployed to clean up the oil. At the time, I was thinking of oil-eating bacteria that lived in soil being adapted to live in salt water. What I didn’t realize (but probably should have) is that nature had already hit on this little trick and there are already bacteria that live in the deep, cold water and love to eat oil. NPR did a story on them this morning.
There are some encouraging signs from the Gulf of Mexico that bacteria are consuming the underwater oil plume from the broken BP well. The news comes just days after oceanographer Christopher Reddy and a team from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution said they had found a big underwater oil plume in May and June, but no signs of oil-eating bacteria.
At the time, Reddy said microbes are about as predictable as teenagers.  "Microbes are pretty selective in how they eat oil," he explained.  "Sometimes they kick in; sometimes they don't. Sometimes they do the easiest work and they don't do the hard work."

The thing that I'm learning from this project is that there are no shortage of surprises from the microbial point of view.

- Benjamin Van Mooy, scientist, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
The hard work is what scientists had been hoping to see — bacteria consuming the more toxic chemicals in the oil plume and rendering them harmless.  Reddy said sooner or later, the bugs should show up.

A somewhat surprising incident

This is Gay Pride month. In celebration of this fact, my partner and I hung out our rainbow flag--the one that looks sort of like the stars and stripes, except a double-woman symbol replaces the stars and the rainbow replaces the red and white stripes. This was Saturday afternoon, in between my never ending homework in preparation for finals week (almost done, yay!). That evening we were watching a movie with the windows open and we heard someone walking by, talking very loudly. They interrupted their conversation to comment ‘f-ing homos live there’. I have to say this shook us both up a bit. This is the second blatantly homophobic incident we have experienced here in Portland in the last few years. (The first occurred a couple of years ago when someone threw a bottle at us from a passing car.)

We have lived in the Centennial neighborhood for a year now and really love it (my commute to Hillsboro is a little long but that’s another post) but this incident gave me a moment of pause. Now, we have a dog who is a fantastic guard dog--great during the day when we’re not home, not so much at night--and an alarm system. The people right across the street and right next door to us know us and know when we’re not home so I’m not too worried about someone doing property damage or breaking in. Still, in a city that prides itself on its tolerance and diversity just that someone would be so bigoted to say that was a little disconcerting.

We’re not scared, just concerned.

On another note, the other lesbian couple that lives around the corner from us has moved which was disappointing. Although I did see one of them in her car (recognized the rainbow sticker and color) driving down Division on my way to work.

Sunday on the Patio

It’s Sunday morning and I’m sitting on my patio getting ready to do my homework. Yesterday, I spent a good part of the day working on my chem lab drawing Lewis structures for 13 different molecules, now it’s time to do the online assignments and then get cracking on the math. I’ll probably be out of it tomorrow since I’m going to the dentist and know that there’s going to be pain.

On happier notes, my life is really sweet. We’ve been in the house for a year (Thanks Todd!) and we’ve now had Angus for a year. Tonight Jaime is going to give him a meat-cake for his ‘Gotcha day’.

Stand up for free speech

Lars Vilks, the cartoonist who drew Mohammed as a dog, has been attacked while lecturing on free speech. He was not seriously harmed. There is a video clip showing the attack, the chanting spectators, and the police quelling the mob.
The YouTube video is below.

I am a Liberal and so first and foremost, I have to stand up for free speech. If some folks are offended by the image of Mohammed with a dog’s body, then there are other ways to respond more in keeping the values of liberal democracy. Assaulting the cartoonist isn’t on that list. In further news, it turns out that an Al Qaeda front group is offering $100,000 for someone to murder Vilks!
Maybe not today, perhaps not tomorrow, but at *some* point we’re going to have take a stand and assert that free speech is valuable enough to US to risk offending the sensibilities of Muslims. If we can’t, if we do not value free speech even that much, how can we call ourselves liberal at all?

Louisiana Drilling Rig Overturns: Accident At Mobile Inland Drilling Unit

Well, I'm not saying that it IS Obama's fault but let's look at this.



Obama -- Oil. Both begin with O! But wait, what color is oil? It's black. And what did Obama put as his race on his census form? That's right, black! So, how likely is it that a BLACK man with whose name begins with "O" would JUST so happen to be president when a lot of OIL, which also begins with "O" and is also black, is spilled into the Gulf of MEXICO which ALSO, one can't help but notice, has an "O" in it!



Now, I'm not making accusations! I'm just asking questions! And Obama is a DemOcrat! And DemOcrats don't want Oil drilling off the coast. So what better way to get the American people to believe that America shouldn't drill for OIL off our coasts than for there to be a big "OIL" spill which leaks lots of the BLACK stuff into the gulf of MEXICO.



Since we're on that subject, why can't they get AMERICAN oil? Why does Obama want drilling of oil in the gulf of MEXICO! It's MEXICO! And what else comes from MEXICO? MEXICANS! How do we know that this isn't just an elaborate scheme to smuggle more illegals into America? I mean a lot of the Mexicans are brown. Brown begins with B. Black begins with B. And Barack Obama's name begins with a B.



I'm just asking questions!



"I'm Glenn Beck and I approve this message."
About Gulf Oil Spill
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Gladys gets some service

I’ve been a bad Audi owner! I was 3K miles overdue for service. Fortunately, my car is in really good shape and I didn’t have to have all the major stuff done (that’s another service about 6K miles down the road). I have to say, the folks at Sunset Imports really do know how to take care of their customers. Every time I’ve been here they’ve been helpful, explained what was going to happen and I never got the feeling I was being talked down to because I’m a woman.

A House Divided, Again

Another thought:



Why is it that the 'will of the people' only matters when it is *conservatives* who feel like their will is being ignored? Something over half of the American people want a single-payer healthcare plan and we didn't get it. But, for some strange reason, THAT isn't seen as ignoring the will of the people. Can any conservative--Mr. Blankley included--explain that to me? If I were opposed to the health care bill because it was 'socialism' (which it isn't) then the vote Sunday would be in direct violation of what I and others who constitute the People wanted but if I am opposed to the health care bill because it didn't go far enough then that doesn't matter?



Put another way why is it that letting corporations run roughshod over our democratic republic is an expression of the 'will of the people' but wanting to rein in corporations is isn't?
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Come out, come out, whoever you are!

James “The Amazing” Randi has now come out of the closet! He did so in a short but poignant post on his blog Swift, from which I quote below.

Swift
Written by James Randi   
Sunday, 21 March 2010 12:37
Well, here goes. I really resent the term, but I use it because it’s recognized and accepted.
I’m gay.
From some seventy years of personal experience, I can tell you that there’s not much “gay” about being homosexual. For the first twenty years of my life, I had to live in the shadows, in a culture that was — at least outwardly — totally hostile to any hint of that variation of life-style. At no time did I choose to adopt any protective coloration, though; my cultivation of an abundant beard was not at all a deception, but part of my costume as a conjuror.
I have always been an admirer of Randi’s. I became even more impressed when I found out about a stand he took for the cause of racial justice some 50 years ago. Now there’s this.
Thank you Randi, you truly are amazing!

Conservatives Re-Write Declaration of Independence

Your post is almost a perfect example of WHY these issues are so important. IF it were true that two people are treated equally regardless of race, color, gender, sexual orientation in all circumstances you would have a point. However, that is not the case. I have spent my entire adult working life in environments where I was THE woman (or one of a few) or THE black person (or one of maybe 2) and I have been discriminated against in hiring. I have had people express surprise that I was raised by a black family because my speech and diction are very precise.



What's more to the degree that people ARE treated equally before the law that has been because of the efforts of *liberals* and that work was opposed by *conservatives*. From Bill Buckley defending segregation on down, it has been conservatives who were opposed to equal rights. Conservatives would like us to forget that inconvenient fact. Please note, if you bother to respond, that I said conservatives not Republicans.



Voting Rights Act? Championed by liberals, opposed by conservatives.

Equal Housing? See Above

Equal Employment Opportunity? See above

Equal Rights Amendment? ditto

Elimination of miscegenation laws? (laws against interracial marriage) Ditto

Desegregation? Ditto.



Conservatives like to pretend that they were *always* in favor of the above, but they weren't and they also like to pretend that the fight for those manifestations of equality were and are a fight for 'equal outcomes'. They aren't.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Comparing Office Suites

So, I have both iWork ’09 and Office 2008 installed on my MBP. I go back and forth between the two suites and so, just for giggles, I’m going to do a comparison between the two. For the next two weeks anything I need to do in the way of creating documents I’m going to use Microsoft’s product. After that I’ll use Apple’s and see which ends up comes out on top.

Why I'm a progressive...

This wonderful and clear-eyed contrast between progressive and conservative ideologies offered at Huffington Post by Mike Lux.
Conservatives' answer to the question "Am I my brother's keeper?" is a resounding Hell NO. And that is the essential divide between them and the progressivism which Beck describes as a cancer: progressives believe that all of us are in this together. When our child is weakened by a chronic illness, or our parent by old age, we don't abandon them in the wilderness so that the lion can eat them up (and then laugh about it). When our brother stumbles and hits bottom, we don't stand back and see if he can pull himself up by his own bootstraps, we lend him a helping hand. When our sister is abused and treated unfairly by an employer, we don't tell her she's on her own, we work with her to make things fairer. We believe in a community that helps each other survive and prosper, because we don't want to live in a world where only the strongest and wealthiest and -- yes -- luckiest survive. We don't have fantasies that all our success is of our own making because we know that without good families, good neighbors, good school and libraries and roads and bridges paid for by public dollars, that without all that, we'd be much less likely to make it on our own. In spite of Beck's paranoia, we have no problem with people being successful. I have never once heard any progressive attack Steve Jobs or Eric Schmidt for their success, or attack the local small businessperson making a good living because he or she is supplying products a community wants. But what we do believe is that those lucky enough to be successful have a responsibility to give something back to their fellow citizens.
That just about sums it up.

Hak-Shing William Tam, Prop. 8 Backer, Claims Gays More Likely To Be Pedophiles

This trial reminds me of nothing so much as the 2005 Kitzmiller vs. Dover School Board evolution case. In that instance you once again had Christians going into courtrooms and 'lying for Jesus' trying to disguise their *obvious* religious motivations. I expect that the judge in this case will deliver the kind of epic legal smackdown that was delivered by Judge Jones in the Dover case who commented that he was stunned 'at the breathtaking inanity' of the school board.



I understand WHY the pro-Prop 8 side of this case didn't want their positions broadcast, it's not because they thought they would be subject to ridicule it's because they realized that if they testified under oath their bigotry would be made plain and clear for all to see.



Cheers

LF
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Can a Science-minded Child be Raised Religious?

Metalboi:



I think you are taking the word 'faith' and stretching it to its breaking point. Let me try to explain. I'm a biologist. I recognize that, ultimately, my field is predicated upon chemistry 'working' and that chemistry working is predicated upon physics working. Now, I know the chemistry I need but nowhere near as much as a chemist. I know the physics I need to know and maybe a little bit more but that is nothing compared to a physicist. I *trust* that my colleagues in chemistry and physics have got their sums right and so, on a day-to-day basis, don't think about, for instance, quantum mechanics as it relates to populations even though, at the most fundamental level of understanding, populations of organisms are made of quantum mechanical systems.



Now, let's say that physics *consistently* failed to error correct or that chemistry consistently failed to understand the properties of various compounds. If, after consistent failures, I STILL insisted that physics and chemistry were sound THEN I would be acting on faith that *eventually* those disciplines would get their collective acts together.
About Religion
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Of COURSE it's not racist

A new professional basketball league called the All-American Basketball Alliance (AABA) sent out a press release on Sunday saying that it intends to start its inaugural season in June, with teams in 12 U.S. cities. However, the AABA is different from other sports leagues because only players who are “natural born United States citizens with both parents of Caucasian race are eligible to play in the league.” AABA commissioner Don “Moose” Lewis insists that he’s not racist, but he just wants to get away from the “street-ball” played by “people of color” and back to “fundamental basketball.” Lewis cited the recent incidents of bad behavior by NBA players, implying that such actions would never happen with white players:
“There’s nothing hatred about what we’re doing,” he said. “I don’t hate anyone of color. But people of white, American-born citizens are in the minority now. Here’s a league for white players to play fundamental basketball, which they like.” [...]
He pointed out recent incidents in the NBA, including Gilbert Arenas’ indefinite suspension after bringing guns into the Washington Wizards locker room, as examples of fans’ dissatisfaction with the way current professional sports are run.
“Would you want to go to the game and worry about a player flipping you off or attacking you in the stands or grabbing their crotch?” he said. “That’s the culture today, and in a free country we should have the right to move ourselves in a better direction.”

What he means to say, of course, is that he doesn’t go out of his way to burn crosses on lawns or anything like that. Since racism is burning a cross on a lawn and he hasn’t done that (lately) he can’t be a racist. See how easy a post-racial society is?

Bush Waited Six Days To Discuss Shoe Bomber With No GOP Complaints

Look, the universe will undergo heat death before conservative Republicans will grant ANYTHING to a Democratic President. Consistency is not something they give a tinker's damn about. If Obama didn't get a dog then the conservatives would say "you know, I just can't trust a President who doesn't own a dog. Oh and don't Muslims consider dogs unclean". He gets a dog and conservatives complain that the dog will pee on the White House carpets. If Obama came on TV and said that we should wipe every Muslim from the face of the Earth, then the conservatives would suddenly claim that 'we're all Muslims now' and 'I have always loved and respected Muslims and can't we just let bygones be bygones on the whole 9/11 thing...' Since he hasn't said 'kill all the Muslims' the conservatives take the tact of "we should adopt a policy of 'shoot Muslims on sight'".



Part of me wishes that conservative Republicans would fully grasp that Obama (and liberal Democrats generally) breath oxygen and drink water JUST so they could try holding their breaths so that they weren't doing anything that a liberal Democrat might do.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Geek wall art

So I received my EMF poster from ThinkGeek today! Yes of all the things I could use geek points on this is what I chose.




- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Another long day of training

I'm in Scrum/Agile training. Sitting in the world's least comfortable chair. This is day two. Will it never end?


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

The Side-Hug: Youth Group Puts Down Sinful "Front-Hugs" With Rap (VIDEO)

Eye bleach please! I want to un-see it!!!!



Oh sweet and sour Jesus that was, perhaps, the cheesiest thing I've seen since I watched Plan 9 From Outer Space 25 years ago. One can only wonder if these "rappers" realize how completely and utterly pathetic they look.



Cheers

LF
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Large Hadron Collider Smashes Its First Protons

One cannot help but note that, all the hype that was going on here a year ago on the day of the Great On-Turning (sorry couldn't help the Douglas Adams reference) not-with-standing about the LHC creating a mini-black hole and destroying the Earth, the planet is still here.



Cheers

LF
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Large Hadron Collider Smashes Its First Protons

What, precisely, do you want to know?



Cheers

LF
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Dems To Vitter: Denounce Glenn Beck's Landrieu-Prostitute Analogies

While I understand the offense (and am offended by it) I think that the Democrats are making yet another tactical error. It's a well-worn one for Democrats and it is this: they are showing that language like this bothers them. While the Dems are *correct* that the comments are out-of-line and offensive, they make the twinned mistakes of a) believing that the conservatives will *care* (they won't) and b) that this makes the conservatives look bad.



What it does is make Democrats look *weak* and one thing we should all have learned on the playground is that you never, ever, show weakness to the bully. Never. Should Vitter apologize? Of course he should! Will he? Of course he won't! And every request for apology will simply make Limbaugh, Beck, et. al. gleeful at the perceived distress which will only spur them on.



Cheers

LF
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Kirk Cameron Confronted Over Evolution (VIDEO)

Who are these evolutionists who dismiss evolution? There's debate in the biology community on how powerful of an engine natural selection is as opposed to, say, sexual selection (which was also first articulated by Darwin) or what (if any) role group selection plays but I know of not a single evolutionary biologist who doubts that evolution *happened*. Names, please. I want to know who these evolutionary biologists are who deny evolution happened.



Cheers

Lf
About Evolution
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Kirk Cameron Confronted Over Evolution (VIDEO)

Watched it. The movie is simply riddled with errors. In fact, I'm surprised that they managed to avoid getting Ben Stein's name wrong.



Cheers

LF
About Evolution
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Richard Tisei, Openly Gay Republican, Picked As GOP Gubernatorial Candidate's Running Mate

This will be interesting. Will the GOP base actually *support* someone who has an openly gay running mate OR will this person be put in the same category as the rest of us who are 'threats to traditional families'. The man, by the accounts I've read so far, is pro-gay--meaning that he's in favor of gays and lesbians having full and equal civil rights in this country (and not in that cheeky sense of "well, no heterosexual can marry someone of the same gender either so it's fair" or "well, people can lose their jobs for any number of reasons, losing your job because you are gay is the same as losing your job because you are incompetent").



This means that the GOP base has to make a choice now. How much do they REALLY mean their anti-gay rhetoric? If they mean it, then they cannot want and will not tolerate this man being a heartbeat away from the governorship. If they don't mean and can support him, then that means that they don't actually *mean* what they say about gays. If it's the latter case, then the Democratic party could find itself in serious trouble because if the GOP does *not* mean the anti-gay rhetoric, then it would behoove gays and lesbians to split their allegiances and try to move the GOP in a more inclusive direction. If, of course, they mean their rhetoric then it's the status quo ante.



Cheers

LF
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

The things we do for love and science

I’m writing a paper on how New Agers misuse scientific language to bolster their claims of quantum flapdoodle. To do so, I am going to focus on What the Bleep Do We Know. I saw this at the Bagdad Theatre when it was first released in 2006. Not knowing what it was going to be, I thought it would be a very high-produc tion value version of “The Elegant Universe” by Brian Greene. I was wrong. I almost walked out of the movie but had to stay through the trainwreck.

Now I am watching it again. If I have to do this--then I’m sharing this with the rest of the world. Others have, I know. These are mine.

So Fred Alan Wolf has just proclaimed that even though his idiosyncratic view of quantum physics doesn’t allow for changing chairs into trucks but you can change how you feel about things. What a revelation!

So they just made the specious (and racist) claim that coastal Native Americans could not see the European’s ships because they had no idea what they were.

Interestingly they never identify their experts. I’m listening to some guy, with a guy who ‘looks like a scientist’ in a very ‘scientific looking’ environment.

Okay, so now we have Fred Alan Wolf as his super-hero Dr. Quantum alter-ego.

And Wolf butchers the double-slit experiment and he’d been doing so well!

There is liberal use of the word ‘super-position’ and very little on the value of h-bar. (the planck constant)

Intention imprinted electrical devices?


And now the Secret DVD

The first invocation of physics is how we can send rockets to the moon.

The second invocation of physics

Thoughts become things.

‘Thoughts have a frequency’

Thoughts are sending out that magnetic signal. (Joe Vitale)

Most people are thinking about what they don’t want. (John Assaraf)

Fred Alan Wolf, you can’t have a universe without the mind shaping it.

No one knows what electricity is. Bob Proctor.

“It has been proven scientifically that positive thoughts are more powerful than negative thoughts.” (Bob Proctor) Oh really Bob?

“Researchers tell us that we have 60,000 thoughts a day.” (Which researchers.)

Trust your feelings above and beyond all else.

Poor gets poorer. (Bob Proctor) Really? So the poor really are at fault for their own poverty.

Palin Booed By Book Tour Crowd

I fear Sarah, not because she says what she feels (although I would prefer she say what she thinks) but because of WHAT she espouses.



In Sarah Palin's America, gays and lesbians would be fired for being gay or lesbian and there would be no legal recourse.



In Sarah Palin's America, being a Muslim would be prima facie cause for profiling.



In Sarah Palin's America, pagans would be considered 'witches' and witches would not be tolerated.



In Sarah Palin's America, science would take a back seat to religion.



In Sarah Palin's America, educators would be beholden to the most radical religious beliefs.



These are based NOT upon some paranoia, simply upon her *own* statements.



She is in favor of profiling Muslims because they are Muslims.

She belongs to a church that engages in 'spiritual warfare' against 'witches'.

She believes the Earth has been around less than 10,000 years

She believes that research on fruit flies is a waste of time.

She believes that we can drill our way out of an energy crunch.

She believes that creationism should be taught in schools.



Yes, that scares me. There are conservatives I disagree with but they dont' scare me (John McWhorter and Shelby Steele leap to mind). Then there are Sarah Palin and her supporters--they scare me and that fear is justified.



Cheers

LF
About Bestsellers
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Chaz Bono On GMA: Gender Is Between Your Ears, Not Between Your Legs (VIDEO)

I *really* wish HuffPo would stop running these articles about Chaz. He has, at no small amount of struggle, come to peace with himself. His chosen path to that inner-peace harms no one and, in fact, effects no one here directly. Yet, there are people here who see fit to dehumanize him (calling him 'it' is dehumanizi­ng---human­s, no matter WHAT you might think of them, are never, ever 'it') because they think that they know better what it is to be Chaz Bono than Chaz does himself.



It reminds me, a great deal, of the flack I get as a butch lesbian. Some feel that my being butch is license for them to ask me "why do you want to be a man", when that is not what being butch is. Some feel free to erase my relationship with my wife by calling her my 'friend' or my 'roommate'. This is why, whenever there is an article about transgender folks, I go into the thread to defend these queer brothers and sisters.



For those of you using the wrong pronoun--it is not for you to say what Chaz's gender is, it is for HIM to say. For those who are stating that transgendered people don't exist, again this is not for you to say.



Just because you cannot empathize with someone does not mean that they are unworthy of empathy.



Cheers

LF
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Jon Stewart, Lou Dobbs Discuss CNN, Argue Over Health Care Reform (VIDEO)

Okay, so, let's say that we were going to get rid of all of the people here without documentation. How would you go about it? Should they be rounded up? If so, how would you go about that? Who should we be looking for? (These are very practical questions which, I'm sure, you have given great thought to)



Should there be checkpoints in the U.S. where some guy in a uniform and mirrored sunglasses asks "papers please"? If so, should they be checking EVERYONE's papers or just SOME people's papers? If the latter, what characteristics should they use to determine if that person is suspicious?



Your honest answers are, of course, appreciated.



Cheers

LF
About Daily Show
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Palin Suggests Evolution Not Real In "Going Rogue"

Let me also suggest that you go to your local library and find a Nova program on the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover School Board decision. You might find it very enlightening. If Kitzmiller were an isolated incident, then you might have a point but it isn't isolated. Kansas perennially has a move by the state education authorities to insert the teaching of creationism in public schools. A Texas university offers a graduate degree in Creation Science. Texas schools are constantly trying to teach creationism in school.



I worry because there's a large number of people who *would* have creationism taught in public school and a lot of other folks, whom I otherwise politically agree with, who in the name of 'fairness' dismiss the creationists as nothing more than a few hundred people scattered throughout the country.



cheers

LF
About Bestsellers
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Gay Married Couples Suing The Government Over DOMA

As I said to someone else on this thread. When we weren't talking about same-sex marriage but just domestic partnership, the SAME people (perhaps even you yourself) were opposed to domestic partnership because it would grant "special rights" to homosexuals and was a "threat to the traditional family". When it was civil unions the SAME people were opposed to CUs because they would (sing it with me, you all know the chorus) "grant special rights" to homosexuals and was a "threat to the traditional family". It doesn't matter WHAT we call it, if it grants legal standing to same-sex couples conservatives will oppose it as being a threat to the traditional family.



Cheers

LF
About Marriage
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Palin Suggests Evolution Not Real In "Going Rogue"

Well, see, Jesus LIKES Creationism and he *hates* Marxism. Or something like that.



It's interesting that if someone suggested that we teach, say, the Hindu creation myth alongside evolution ('teach the controversy, right?') that would also go over like a lead balloon and yet we're supposed to believe there's no religious motivation behind wanting to see creationism taught in a science class.



Cheers

LF
About Bestsellers
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Palin Suggests Evolution Not Real In "Going Rogue"

So you think the ICR and the Discovery Institute are just a couple of fringe figures sitting in a basement someplace? No. Not even wrong.



Cheers

LF
About Bestsellers
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Palin Suggests Evolution Not Real In "Going Rogue"

No, Timny. Based upon the sincere comments of people here--yourself included---I genuinely believe that people who reject evolution ACTUALLY believe that, for instance, we should be seeing crockoducks (a la Kirk Cameron) or that fish one day became humans.



I'm sorry but if you read through these comments--or anyplace else where creationists are commenting upon that which they know nothing about--you realize that they aren't making jokes, this is what they ACTUALLY believe evolutionary biology teaches. That one day there were monkeys and the next day, in a one-step mutation, there were humans.



This, of course, is not what the theory teaches.



Cheers

LF
About Bestsellers
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Palin Suggests Evolution Not Real In "Going Rogue"

Evolutionary biology is NOT a theory of the origins of life. That is abiogenesis which is a subset of organic chemistry. Evolutionary biology is a theory about the *diversity* of life forms.



Also, natural selection is a non-random process.



Cheers

LF

(who is amazed that people who seem to know next to nothing about evolutionary biology seem to feel competent to reject that which they know nothing about)
About Bestsellers
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Palin Suggests Evolution Not Real In "Going Rogue"

There is NEVER such a thing as "stick a fork in it" proof in science. There are things that have not been falsified and things that have been falsified. That's it. That's ALL you can do. Creationism is not falsifiable even in principle and so does not deserve to be considered in the same class as evolutionary biology which *is* falsifiable.



Cheers

LF
About Bestsellers
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

NASA on a crusade to debunk 2012 apocalypse myths

I don’t know what is worse, that our tax dollars are going to this kind of thing or that we need our tax dollars going to this sort of thing.
NASA has a page dedicated to debunking the various myths surrounding the Mayan ‘prophecy’ that the world will end (or change, or be transformed, or turned into a jelly donut) on 21 Dec 2012. Some of the more interesting bits are below.

The doomsday scenario revolves claims that the end of time will come as an obscure Planet X -- or Nibiru -- heads toward or collides into Earth.
The mysterious planet was supposedly discovered by the Sumerians, according to claims by pseudo-scientists, paranormal activity enthusiasts and Internet theorists.

“There is no factual basis for these claims,” NASA said in a question-and-answer posting on its website.
If such a collision were real “astronomers would have been tracking it for at least the past decade, and it would be visible by now to the naked eye,” it added. “Obviously, it does not exist.”

“Credible scientists worldwide know of no threat associated with 2012,” NASA insisted.
Initial theories set the disaster for May 2003, but when nothing happened the date was moved forward to the winter solstice in 2012 to coincide with the end of a cycle of the ancient Mayan calendar.

Nibiru is a name in Babylonian astrology sometimes associated with the god Marduk. Nibiru appears as a minor character in the Babylonian creation poem Enuma Elish as recorded in the library of Assurbanipal, King of Assyria (668-627 BCE). Sumer flourished much earlier, from about the 23rd century to the 17th century BCE. The claims that Nibiru is a planet and was known to the Sumerians are contradicted by scholars who (unlike Zecharia Sitchin) study and translate the written records of ancient Mesopotamia. Sumer was indeed a great civilization, important for the development of agriculture, water management, urban life, and especially writing. However, they left very few records dealing with astronomy. Certainly they did not know about the existence of Uranus, Neptune or Pluto. They also had no understanding that the planets orbited the Sun, an idea that first developed in ancient Greece two millennia after the end of Sumer. Claims that Sumerians had a sophisticated astronomy, or that they even had a god named Nibiru, are the product of Sitchin’s imagination.



“Planet X” is an oxymoron when applied to a real object. The term has been used by astronomers over the past century for a possible or suspected object. Once the object is found, it is given a real name, as was done with Pluto and Eris, both of which were at some time referred to as Planet X. If a new object turns out to be not real, or not a planet, then you won’t hear about it again. If it is real, it is not called Planet X.
Eris is one of several dwarf planets recently found by astronomers in the outer solar system, all of them on normal orbits that will never bring them near Earth. Like Pluto, Eris is smaller than our Moon. It is very far away, and its orbit never brings it closer than about 4 billion miles. There is no secret about Eris and its orbit, as you can easily verify by googling it or looking it up in Wikipedia.

There is a telescope at the South Pole, but it was not built by NASA and not used to study Nibiru. The South Pole Telescope was supported by the National Science Foundation, and it is a radio telescope, not an optical instrument. It cannot take images or photos. You can look it up on Wikipedia. The Antarctic is a great place for astronomical infrared and short-wave-radio observations, and it also has the advantage that objects can be observed continuously without the interference of the day-night cycle.
I should add that it is impossible to imagine a geometry in which an object can be seen only from the South Pole. Even if it were due south of the Earth, it could be seen from the entire southern hemisphere.

Calendars exist for keeping track of the passage of time, not for predicting the future. The Mayan astronomers were clever, and they developed a very complex calendar. Ancient calendars are interesting to historians, but of they cannot match the ability we have today to keep track of time, or the precision of the calendars currently in use. The main point, however, is that calendars, whether contemporary or ancient, cannot predict the future of our planet or warn of things to happen on a specific date such as 2012.
I note that my desk calendar ends much sooner, on December 31 2009, but I do not interpret this as a prediction of Armageddon. It is just the beginning of a new year.

10. What is the polar shift theory? Is it true that the earth’s crust does a 180-degree rotation around the core in a matter of days if not hours? Does this have something to do to do with our solar system dipping beneath the galactic equator?
A reversal in the rotation of Earth is impossible. It has never happened and never will. There are slow movements of the continents (for example Antarctica was near the equator hundreds of millions of years ago), but that is irrelevant to claims of reversal of the rotational poles. However, many of the disaster websites pull a bait-and-shift to fool people. They claim a relationship between the rotation and the magnetic polarity of Earth, which does change irregularly with a magnetic reversal taking place every 400,000 years on average. As far as we know, such a magnetic reversal doesn’t cause any harm to life on Earth. A magnetic reversal is very unlikely to happen in the next few millennia, anyway. But they falsely claim that a magnetic reversal is coming soon (in 2012) and that this is the same as, or will trigger, a reversal of rotational poles. The bottom line is: (a) Rotation direction and magnetic polarity are not related. (b) There is no reason to expect a reversal of magnetic polarity any time soon, or to anticipate any bad effects on life when it does eventually happen. © A sudden shift in rotational pole with disastrous consequences is impossible. Also, none of this has anything to do with the galactic equator or any of the other nonsense about alignments that appears on many of the conspiracy theory websites.

11. When most of the planets align in 2012 and planet Earth is in the center of the Milky Way, what will the effects of this be on planet Earth? Could it cause a pole shift, and if so what could we expect?
There is no planet alignment in 2012 or any other time in the next several decades. As to the Earth being in the center of the Milky Way, I don’t know what this phrase means. If you are referring to the Milky Way Galaxy, we are rather far toward the edge of this spiral galaxy, some 30,000 light years from the center. We circle the galactic center in a period of 225-250 million years, always keeping approximately the same distance. Concerning a pole shift, I also don’t know what this means. If it means some sudden change in the position of the pole (that is, the rotation axis of the Earth), then that is impossible, as noted in the answer to Question 10. What many websites do discuss is the alignment of the Earth and Sun with the center of the Milky Way in the constellation of Sagittarius. This happens every December, with no bad consequences, and there is no reason to expect 2012 to be different from any other year.

12. When the sun and the Earth line up on the galactic plane at the same time with the black whole being in the center couldn’t that cause something to happen, due to the fact that the black hole has such a strong gravitational pull.
There is a giant black hole in the center of our Milky Way galaxy, and like any concentration of mass it exerts gravitational force on the rest of the Galaxy. However, the galactic center is very far away, approximately 30,000 light years, so it has negligible effects on the solar system or the Earth. There are no special forces from the galactic plane or the galactic center. The only important force that acts on the Earth is the gravitation of the Sun and Moon. As far as the influence of the galactic plane, there is nothing special about this location. The last time the Earth was in the galactic plane was several million years ago. Claims that we are about to cross the galactic plane are untrue.

13. I am scared about the fact that the Earth will enter the Dark Rift in the Milky Way. What will this do? Will the Earth be swallowed up?
The “dark rift” is a popular name for the broad and diffuse dust clouds in the
inner arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, which block our view of the galactic
center. The entire “galactic alignment” scare is pretty crazy. Late in
December the Sun is always approximately in the direction of the center of
the Galaxy as seen from the Earth, but so what? Apparently the con-men who are trying to scare you have decided to use these meaningless phrases about “alignments” and the “dark rift” and “photon belt” precisely because they are not understood by the public. It is too bad, but there is no law against lying on the Internet or anywhere else except in a court of law. As far as the safety of the Earth is concerned, the important threats are from global warming and loss of biological diversity, and perhaps someday from collision with an asteroid or comet, not the pseudoscientific claims about 2012.

16. All my school friends are telling me that we are all going to die in the year 2012 due to a meteor hitting earth. Is this true?
Your friends are wrong. The Earth has always been subject to impacts by comets and asteroids, although big hits are very rare. The last big impact was 65 million years ago, and that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Today NASA astronomers are carrying out a survey called the Spaceguard Survey to find any large near-Earth asteroids long before they hit. We have already determined that there are no threatening asteroids as large as the one that killed the dinosaurs. All this work is done openly with the discoveries posted every day on the NASA NEO Program Office website (neo.jpl.nasa.gov), so you can see for yourself that nothing is predicted to hit in 2012.

17. If Nibiru is a hoax, why doesn’t issue a denial? How can you permit these stores to circulate and frighten people? Why doesn’t the U.S. government do something about it!
If you go to the NASA home page, nasa.gov, you will see many stories that expose the Nibiru-2012 hoax. Try searching nasa.com under “Nibiru” or “2012”. There is not much more that NASA can do. These hoaxes have nothing to do with NASA and are not based on NASA data, so we as an agency are not directly involved. But scientists, both within NASA and outside, recognize that this hoax with its effort to frighten people is a distraction from more important science concerns, such as global warming and loss of biological diversity. We live in a country where there is freedom of speech, and that includes freedom to lie. You should be glad there are no censors. But if you will just use common sense I am sure you can recognize the lies. As we approach 2012, the lies will be come even more obvious.

The Butch Crew

Yesterday I went to the first meet-up for The Butch Crew at the Flying Cat coffeehouse in SE. It was fantastic! I feel like I’m watching a butch renaissance happening right before my very eyes. We had butches from all walks of life and covering two or three decades.

I could use more of that.

I am NOT a nice woman

A couple of weeks ago, the following was posted on the Pharyngula blog. It features a homeopathic “doctor” named Charlene Warner giving a talk about light therapy. The level of stupid indulged in was painful.

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I posted the following email to her after my eyes stopped bleeding from the dumb:

Dr. Werner:

You don't know me, but I saw a video of you giving a talk about homeopathy and light therapy. In it, you made a number of factual errors that I assume were well-meaning and unintended and so I thought that perhaps, I would write you privately to point them out.

1> You cannot remove mass from Einstein's special relativity. The amount of mass in the Universe is entirely irrelevant for the implications of this equations. The reason, for instance, that you can move a one-ton car 300+ miles on just 50 lbs of gasoline is because the burning of that small amount of mass releases a huge amount of energy.

2> Stephen Hawking did not create string theory. In point of fact, he has been largely hostile to string theory (for fairly good reasons). The Steven you are thinking of is Weinberg.

3> String theory, if it is true (and there are very good reasons to doubt that it is) has none of the implications that you state it does. The 'vibrations' of strings are, if they exist, a probabilistic quantum mechanical affect and should not be taken to mean something actually vibrating. Rather it is a fluctuation of energy within a defined range of probable states.

4> Even if string theory is true, it would have absolutely no implications that we would directly experience since a single string would still be smaller than the smallest particle and in the same way that you are not affected by individual Z-bosons, for instance, you would not be affected by any single string.

5> String theory is a mathematical description that seeks to explain certain interesting features of the Universe at the sub-atomic scale and in particularly intense gravitational fields. Neither circumstance is something you will ever experience.

6> While it is true, in a very limited and technical sense, we are mostly energy it is true only because E=mc2 actually does hold with mass intact. E=c2 is actually a non-sensical statement on its face sense if E=c2 then the value of E would be E-squared but that is NOT the value of E. This gets necessarily mathematical so bear with me:

If A=B then B = A. If A is squared then B is squared if the preceding is true. Therefore, if A=2 then B must also be equal 2. If A is 2 then A-squared is 4. This means that if A=B then B is ALSO equal to two and four respectively. This is a necessary and inescapable conclusion for the math. So your statement that E=c2 is non-sensical because that would mean that E is equal to the speed of light squared *directly* but that is manifestly not the case.

7> Your statement that 'nothing is really mass' is incorrect. The reason you are not floating away right now (and you aren't) is because the mass of the Earth warps space-time around it and creates gravity. The reason why everything in the solar system orbits the Sun is because the Sun is hugely massive and warps space-time around it. If what you said was true then gravity would not work since Einstein showed that gravity is the warping of space-time by mass.

I think that's pretty much it. Btw. I am not a physicist by training. Rather, I'm a graduate student in biomedical informatics but I read a great deal in physics (well, when I'm not in school) which is why the mistakes in your talk caught my eye.

Have a great day. I hope that you will take this email in the spirit in which it is given. As you are a medical doctor, I'm certain that the last thing you want to do is provide erroneous information to the public.

Like I said, I’m not a nice woman!

Interracial Couple Denied Marriage License By Louisiana Justice Of The Peace...

...but he’s not a racist, apparently.

(AP) NEW ORLEANS A Louisiana justice of the peace said he refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple out of concern for any children the couple might have. Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish, says it is his experience that most interracial marriages do not last long.
"I'm not a racist. I just don't believe in mixing the races that way," Bardwell told the Associated Press on Thursday. "I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else." [Emphasis mine]
Bardwell said he asks everyone who calls about marriage if they are a mixed race couple. If they are, he does not marry them, he said.
Bardwell said he has discussed the topic with blacks and whites, along with witnessing some interracial marriages. He came to the conclusion that most of black society does not readily accept offspring of such relationships, and neither does white society, he said.
"There is a problem with both groups accepting a child from such a marriage," Bardwell said. "I think those children suffer and I won't help put them through it."
If he did an interracial marriage for one couple, he must do the same for all, he said.
"I try to treat everyone equally," he said. [Emphasis mine]
I thought that the passages in red deserved particular attention in light of some other musings I have been percolating on the subject of race.
Most germane to this discussion is the following passage from another blogger’s musings on race.
Many people would label a person as a racist for using the n-word, yet I have known many that use it, that have many black friends and hire black people and them well [sic]. Conversely, I know many, mostly liberal whites, who would ostracize people that would ever use the n-word, but who never hire blacks and have no close black friends.

I wonder if the author of the post would consider the justice of the piece a racist, given that he has “piles and piles of black friends” who he generously consents to let “use my bathroom”. This brings up the question of what is actually meant by racism?

My dictionary program (based on Webster’s) defines racism as: the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, esp. so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.

Perhaps Mr. Bardwell should go back to school.

Obama wins the Nobel Peace Prize! Conservatives bust a gasket...

...and some liberals discover, suddenly, that they don’t like the Nobel Peace Prize.

Okay, so I think that the Nobel Committee made an interesting choice in choosing President Obama. It might even be fair to say that they made a premature and, from a domestic political point of view, bad choice (because of the downstream political implications not because of some inherent unworthiness of Obama). However, as I think about this award I begin to think that, perhaps, it is more understandable than it might seem at first blush. Now, I admit, my first blush thought was “why?” but then I thought a little more deeply about it as the day went on. Looking at America from the outside, which the Nobel Committee is doing, Barack Obama has already accomplished a couple of measures of astounding courage. Firstly, he went to Egypt and gave a speech where he claimed, right out front, that America was not the enemy of Islam. Let’s be real about current-day American politics, that took serious cast-iron cajones to do. Sure, sitting here in Portland, OR it seems like an everyday thing to say “members of my own family practice Islam” but while Portland is an American city, America is not Portland. There are places, many of them only a minutes drive from Portland, where saying “members of my own family practice Islam” is tantamount to saying “and I cheered as the planes crashed into the WTC and the Pentagon”. That alone took courage. Barack Obama has, in something less than a year, begun the rehabilitation of America’s image abroad. Secondly, Barack Obama’s election is a singular event in world history. It may not have occurred to people here but this is the first time in world history that a majority white nation (meaning European or its spin-offs) has ever been headed by a non-white person.

Now, I will admit that some of the critique of Obama--that he has not spun-down the Iraq or Afghanistan wars in six months is somewhat justified but only just barely. I recognize that, as liberals and progressives, we are not used to thinking about military matters beyond the knee-jerk, reflexive “military = bad” mantra. However, it may well be that, in fact, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars cannot be spun down too much faster than they are and I am not entirely convinced that spinning down the Afghanistan war is the right thing to do. Certainly we cannot spin down the Iraq war tomorrow. Or next week. I would be pleased if our forces were largely out of that country by the Summer of 2011. Wars are complicated endeavors and, as much as we might not like to think in these terms as liberals, there are both tactical and strategic considerations that our war-planners must take into account. They must do so. It’s what we pay them for.

The Afghanistan war is a bit more complicated. On the one hand, I know enough history to recognize that Afghanistan is proof of Vincini’s (from the Princess Bride) Dictum: Never get involved in a land-war in Asia! It is the place where empires go to learn humility. On the other hand, whether we like it or not, we now do have a strategic interest in the region. That strategic interest is, Pakistan. It is not in our strategic interests for Pakistan to go the way of Afghanistan circa 1999. It simply isn’t. Iraq doesn’t have nuclear weapons. Iran probably doesn’t have them. Pakistan definitely does. We know this. The Taliban know this. Al Qaeda knows this and, most sobering, India knows this. India, by the way, also has nuclear weapons so it is in the best interest of all parties concerned for there to be a very stable region between Pakistan, India and Afghanistan. So we are torn in two different directions. On the one hand, we don’t want to occupy Afghanistan. The Afghanis don’t want us there. And we know, because we watched the Soviets learn humility in these same mountains, that this is a lesson we would just as soon learn vicariously than by the blood of young men and women.

I have to take a moment to criticize my own political faction for a moment here. It is inexcusable for so many progressives who are on the right side of the cause of peace to be so dangerously naive about geopolitics and war. Yes, dangerously naive. We are reflexive in our opposition without thought. We do not, in the main, bother ourselves with considerations like strategic interests or tactical necessity. If we are going to oppose war, we should bother ourselves to understand, at some level, that which we oppose. I think, however, that some of our opposition is, again, merely reflexive and not necessarily principled. By this I mean that we are opposed to America making war. We are opposed to the West making war. We are opposed to Israel making war. But we are not opposed to, say, Palestine making war. I wonder how many progressives would howl and scream if China, say, invaded Taiwan (not Tibet) without provocation. How many would protest if China invaded, say, Iran? Why do I think that any outcry would be muted if present at all? Before you flame me, gentle reader, ask yourself why you are opposed to the Afghanistan war? (The Iraq war is a different situation because it was clearly not justified by any strategic or tactical imperative and so opposition to it is entirely justified.)

All of this to say that while I’m not sure that Obama is doing the right thing in Afghanistan, I’m willing to admit that he might not be doing the wrong thing. What if he is? Would we, as progressives, know? Would we care? One commentator I read on HuffPo observed that Obama didn’t deserve the Nobel prize because the United States maintains a large nuclear arsenal. Let us say, for sake of argument that we could destroy our nuclear arsenal in less than a year (we couldn’t) would it even be an intelligent thing to do? I would argue that it might not be. I would like to see us seriously draw down our nuclear arsenal and I would like to see the rest of the world agree to go to a zero-nuke state in my lifetime. I doubt that is going to happen. (And even if we did, the same people who are upset that we have them would become instantly upset at any plan conceived to dispose of them because of the wastes--at which point you have to make a choice. This is, by the way, what I mean when I talk about reflexive anti-Americanism.)

So, does Obama deserve a Nobel? Yes and no. As I said at the beginning of this essay, I think it is premature and that it creates a domestic headache that I’m willing to bet that David Axelrod would just as soon not have to bother with. On the other hand, I hope that this creates more pressure on Obama to rise to the occasion. He has been bestowed with the laurels of greatness. It is now up to him to live up to the great vote of confidence he has been given in the form of this honor.

Now, having said enough about progressive reaction to this news, let me express my utter joy and glee that conservatives are busting a gut over this. Every time the conservatives think “okay, now we’ve got him!” events intervene and change the dynamics on them. Last week conservatives were glorying in “world rejects Obama” because Rio got the 2016 Olympics. But now, they can’t argue that the world shares their view of Obama. In fact, the two groups they find themselves in bed with are two groups that they loathe---international peace activists (some) and Al Qaeda. You just can’t buy that kind of entertainment! As they usually do with all things Obama, conservatives are over-reacting and, once again, overreaching. Our President just won the most prestigious award you can be given and they hate it. It’s the little things that make life sweet.

HuffPo commenters bring the crazy to LCROSS

So, tomorrow, at 4:30 AM PST the LCROSS satellite will impact the Moon. (I’ll be up with my telescope to watch should be GREAT viewing conditions) Below is just one of the more sane comments posted on the web site (yes, this was one of the more sane ones). The scientific ignorance on display is absolutely breathtaking.

Bomb the moon? Are we insane? Are we space cowboys now? Why is everything we do to be bomb?
The moon shares a delicate etheric web with earth, which is why she controls the ebb and flow of tides, the menstrual cycle in women, enhances growth at night, responsible for gravity, and excites passion to poetry when gaze at. Bomb the moon? How about Bomb NASA! and save trillions of dollars of taxpayers money to be use to pay off our debt, help create universal healthcare, stimulate economic growth, and a dozen other matters of national urgency. NASA is not necessary anymore. It is outmoded, outdated, and without any real purpose.

Here are the numbers my colleague, Richard and I worked up:

   73459000000000000000000 kg  (Moon)
                      2366 kg  (Maximum mass of LCROSS Centaur Impactor)

                      3000 kg  (Hummer H2)
                         0.00000000000000009662532841448 kg (the "bug")

Mass of an average bacterium: 1 picogram. Weight of the "bug" above: 0.09662532841448 picogram.

So... if 1/10th of a bacterium hits the windshield of a Hummer, does it swerve?


Part 2:

So, I got up at 4:00AM (ouch!) and took my telescope out in the backyard on the hopes of being able to see the impact and the plume. Unfortunately, because I’m in Portland, it became overcast about 4;25 so I wan’t able to resolve much of anything. Frustrated, I went back inside to watch it on NASA TV which turned out to be anti-climatic. In my hopeful naivete that intellectual honesty is not just two, completely unrelated words in the dictionary, I went back to HuffPo to see what, if anything, the doomsayers were saying on the subject. Needless to say, my hope that someone anyone might have the courage to say “well, guess I was wrong” was ill-founded.

One person, SUSANINCOLUMBIA, posted a heartfelt and completely wrong-headed lament stating that she would “never be able to look at the moon in the same way”. Another poster, posted that “even though there was no reaction yet” there was sure to be one because “for every action there is a reaction”. The irony of her invocation of Newton’s Third Law was, apparently, entirely lost on her. I attempted to explain that there had been a reaction, which was the debris plume ejected from the lunar surface, and that this was the very reaction that NASA and every scientifically literate poster (all 9 or 10 of us) on that thread had predicted there would be.

At this point I began to despair. Not because the Moon would have its revenge in some vague, unspecified manner, but because I had believed that after the Bush administration and the reign of the non-reality based conservatives, the Progressives had ‘gotten it’ and decided to be the reality-based political faction in America. HuffPo has convinced me that, in fact, reality has no political constituency in America. These same people, who I have no doubt express frustration that conservatives reject the science of climate change for no scientifically adequate reason completely ignore the math and the physics of the LCROSS mission. Instead of ‘being humble before the data’ (which is readily available) they instead go on about vague prophecies of doom that will befall humanity or, just as stupidly, they draw a distinction between a meteorite hitting the Moon and a satellite hitting it as if the physics of those two events are fundamentally different, governed by different laws.

At one point, I had an epiphany that some of the opposition was the reflexive anti-Americanism that conservatives so often accuse liberals and progressives of indulging in. I began to muse upon the question of “what would the reaction be if it had been, say, India or Pakistan or China or Brazil?” I imagine that there would have been nary a peep or worry but because it was Americans this action had to be opposed. Why? Because it was, laughably, militaristic. That’s right, gentle reader, a physics experiment no more different, really, than dropping a stone into a lake observe the water ejected was an act of aggression. It made me embarrassed to be a Progressive, quite honestly.

I have known, for quite some time now, that Americans are scientifically illiterate but every time I think I have a grasp on the breadth and depth of the problem, something like this happens and I realize that we are in much more dire straits than I had imagined we could be.

To reiterate, opposition to the LCROSS mission falls into the falling species

• The Moon will be knocked out of its orbital position.
• It will throw off “the balance of the Universe” or the tides or gravity or women’s menstrual cycles or astrology.
• It is an ‘act of aggression against the beautiful moon, the only one we have’.
• It will lead to “Wal-Mart and Disneyland on the Moon” (SUSANINCOLUMBIA again)
• The militarization of the moon (Einstein10--on whom more later)
• “A reaction and it will be bad”
• It will throw the moon off by ten or twenty feet and this will affect the tides (Einstein10 again)
• We have no right to mess up the pristine moon until we learn how not to mess up the Earth (The typical anti-space program, anti-science mantra of the scientifically ignorant.)
• The Americans are doing it therefore it is bad.

The problem with all of those arguments is that not a single one of them is specific. In fact, to call them vague is to give them altogether too much credit for being coherent thoughts at all! What’s more, they are all based on pure emotionalism. Not emotion but emotionalism. By that I mean that they are driven not by any facts carefully considered but merely by “I don’t like this”. All of the reasons are, in point of fact, backfill to attempt to justify a position that is entirely unjustifiable.

One poster even invoked the ‘hollow moon’ idea. Yes, the purpose of the mission isn’t what NASA stated it was but to determine if the Moon is hollow. Naturally, he invoked the ‘Great Scientific Conspiracy’ to cover up the truth. Now, what I find fascinating about this little gem is that it perfectly illustrates one of the problems with anti-science in almost all of its forms. On the one hand, scientists are, if anti-scientists are to be believed, a bunch of incompetent boobs stumbling about trying to find new and ever more expensive ways to piss of Nature. On the other hand, they are fiendishly secretive and capable of maintaining such perfect operational security that the NSA, KGB and Mossad can only look upon their opacity with awe, envy and wonder. It would appear that the scientific community can carry on conspiracies of such fiendish and byzantine nature that only the most dedicated can even suss them out or understand their convolutions. Yet, these same scientists can’t seem to get correct the mass of the moon, or explain its tidal locking, or the flight of bumblebees, or the evolution of species. One would think that their utter incompetence would preclude being able to maintain such incredible levels of secrecy but apparently not.

Then there was Einstein10 who does what anti-science proponents do so much, namely invoke the name of a Great Scientist, almost always Einstein and then quote him, almost always out of context, from his letters or from “Ideas and Opinions”. All this while being almost entirely unaware of or interested in his prodigious body of scientific work or the implications thereof. Einstein10 was one such poster on HuffPo. When challenged, he would quote Einstein at us but when challenged to provide a single prediction of specific doom OR to even give a description of either Special or General Relativity in his own words, he would either disappear or simply quote more Einstein. It is insulting to the memory of a truly great scientist to treat him this way in the name of “respect” but there’s not much that can be done about disrespect for the memory of the dead.

I will say that the last 36 hours on HuffPo has given me a much better understanding of why PZ Meyers of Pharyngula and Steven Novella of the New England Skeptics Society are encouraging scientists and scientifically literate people to boycott Huffington Post. In-between the decidedly pro-woo spin given to articles related to medicine and health and the pervasive anti-science culture there, I imagine that both Drs. Meyers and Novella are trying to keep a generation of scientists from going to an early grave, either from repeated blunt-force trauma to the head from banging on the desk or from aneurisms vessels brought on by sudden spikes in blood pressure.

Oh and although I doubt anyone reading my blog needs to be told this, the Moon does not cause gravity. Gravity is caused by the warping of space-time by mass. The Moon and the Earth are bound to one another because of their gravitational masses, and both were created by gravity and held together by gravity but the Moon does not cause gravity here on Earth and the Earth does not cause gravity on the Moon.

Stay rational.

Some things never change

Saw this at The Daily Dish and thought to spread the meme around.

One cannot help but notice the familiar theme of “that which I disagree with is communism” and “the person I disagree with is the anti-christ”. Can we just have a moratorium on the political use of the words ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ in this country until such time as our educational system gets around to teaching Americans that A> words have meaning and B> those meanings actually count for something.

If you don’t know what socialism is, then you shouldn’t be calling something you disagree with socialist. Because socialist isn’t a synonym for “I don’t like it”. The same applies for communism.

Living through history

“Where were you when you heard...” is the question of our time. Depending upon the generation you belong to, those moments may be different. For my parents, the seminal events are the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, JFK being shot, MLK being shot and killed in Memphis and men landing on the Moon. For my generation, it was the Challenger exploding, Reagan being shot, John Lennon being shot, the September 11 attacks and now, the election of the first non-white person as President of the United States. So much of the history we remember, those ‘where were you when’ moments, are negatives. Looking at the list above, all but two of them are really negative events. But those two! There are two things this nation has done in my lifetime that we, all of us, can be unrestrainedly proud of--landing on the Moon and electing a black man named Barack Obama to the highest office in the land. We have no reason to be ashamed of the Moon landing and even if you didn’t vote for Obama, one has to admit that this bursting through is an event that not only did many of us not imagine seeing in our lifetime but this event heralds a new day in race relations. I’m nowhere near naive enough to believe that this means that America is ‘post-racial’ or that we have somehow magically slain racism once and for all. This new day that has dawned is not THAT day. What has changed is that four-fold; how whites see black people, how black people see ourselves, how blacks are seen by foreigners and how America, as a whole, is seen by foreigners. The way whites will look at black people has forever changed. The President is a kind of temporary embodiment of the nation, in a similar psychological way that a king or queen was back when people really believed in the divine right of kings. That a majority white nation elected a black man to be that embodiment is a powerful statement about how far we have come. What’s even more amazing is that Obama won in the face of, perhaps, the most racially charged Presidential campaign since Strom Thurmond ran as a Dixiecrat back in 1948! How black people see ourselves will also undergo transformation. A generation (let’s hope) is going to grow up and in their formative years will have seen a black President. The “Leader of the Free World” or “The Most Powerful Man in the World” now looks a bit like me. Young black children will now know that along with black doctors, black lawyers, black astronauts there is one more job, that most prestigious of all American jobs, that they can aspire to. What’s more important is that Obama shows a path for negotiating the minefields of race. Most of the time, as far as I read him, he moves through the world as if his race were not going to be an issue. When it becomes an issue, as it inevitably will, he addresses it. He does not pretend that it is not an issue but neither does he make it the core of how he projects himself into the world. It is a method and balance that I understand and hope that I, myself, manage to achieve on a more-or-less consistent basis. He pays proper homage and respect to those who came before him, while not behaving as if nothing has changed. Things have changed. In 1967, the year of my birth, there was NO WAY a black man was going to be elected President. Certainly not a black man named Barack Hussein Obama. Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist, writing on the Friday before the election related the following story: (requires free login) The other day I had a conversation with a Beijing friend and I mentioned that Barack Obama was leading in the presidential race: She: Obama? But he’s the black man, isn’t he? Me: Yes, exactly. She: But surely a black man couldn’t become president of the United States? Me: It looks as if he’ll be elected. She: But president? That’s such an important job! In America, I thought blacks were janitors and laborers. Me: No, blacks have all kinds of jobs. She: What do white people think about that, about getting a black president? Are they upset? Are they angry? Me: No, of course not! If Obama is elected, it’ll be because white people voted for him. [Long pause.] She: Really? Unbelievable! What an amazing country! While this story addresses my last point, vis a vis how the rest of the world sees America, I want to focus on how the rest of the world views blacks first. Notice that this woman’s view of black Americans is that we can be janitors and laborers but not the President. When Barack Obama goes forth on missions of State he will be the symbol of America to the rest of the world. It is sad but instructive to note that Americans, in exporting our cultural products like movies, TV, music, have exported racism as well. Lastly, this will change how people around the world view America. One of the things I couldn’t help notice as reaction poured in from around the world was that people all over the planet, people who had no direct, first-hand knowledge of the struggle of black people in this nation were weeping, crying and I realized that it was because, in their view, they got their America back. I know that we progressives/liberals can be blind to this from time-to-time but people around the world believe in America. They believe in what we say we stand for and they think that we mean it at least some of the time. The last eight years has been like having a great, goofy golden retriever go full-blown Cujo on the family but the dog is so big and strong no one can take it down. The election of Obama is a sign that whatever madness had gripped us as a nation, might have begun to dissipate. I hope so. I am not alone in that. I imagine that there are the better part of 6 billion people on the planet (notwithstanding the 40 - 50 million Americans who voted for McCain) who agree with me. One other thing about Obama’s surprise election. I had long thought that if I saw a black President in my lifetime, the first one would be a conservative Republican of the Colin Powell model. Instead we got a center-left former community organizer who is a Democrat. I am shocked and it really does put the lie to the conservative mantra that we are a center-right nation. We aren’t. The Deep South is center-right, the Midwest is center-right, but the coasts, with the exception of the four Southeastern states below the Mason-Dixon line are center-left. We are NOT a left-leaning nation, we are a confusing mix of the two. We push too far in one direction, perhaps, and self-correct back the other. We went far, far to the right. So far to the right that it looked like we were about to rendezvous with history. We ended up having a rendezvous with history but not the kind that some of us feared was coming.