Pervertstition

I have to admit to being rather a bit disturbed about the recent religionist demonstrations against the Yankee republic. That that I object to the right of the people to conduct peaceful demonstration. The problem however, is that the demonstrations are not peaceful and they are violating civil rights, especially of those killed, injured, or discommoded.

This brings to the question of religionist expression versus civil rights. Which takes precedent? Obviously the superstitious will argue that their religionist exhibitions must take precedence over civil rights because they are superstition, after all. And the advocates of civil rights will argue that civil rights must take precedence because they are not religionist.

I have considered previously that superstition is coded into humans, a part of their nature and genetic code. Independence and individual existence are similar components. As a result, both religionist expression and civil rights may be considered fundamental to humans.

The religionists will argue that their beliefs derive from deity, which is an untestable, unverifiable claim and hence void of mass. Even if there is some accuracy to their claim, the interpretation of such revelation is as mundane as are the civil rights and hence the two are indistinguishable on the basis of origin.

This leaves us with a situation where one of two situations, neither likely stable or stationary, offer. That one or the other of these two, the superstition of religion or the superstition of civil rights, must be implicitly be ascendant, or that some tolerance will exist that permits the two to be selectively observed.

The latter is apparently unacceptable to the religionists involved. This is hardly surprising. Perversion tends to be absent of limit. Especially when it is rationalized as an absolute good, itself a perversion. So it is unclear what can be done about the nonsense and perversion other than we need be careful not to degrade ourselves to similar depths.

humans, behavior, religion, superstition, perversion

Bigot Business

One of my colleagues, Magnetic Inductance Force, and I were discussing the raids on Yankee government embassies by religionists. He reminded me of the phenomenon or characteristic of Unilateral Criticism.

Unilateral Criticism is a condition, associated with an organization, where it can give criticism, but cannot take it. In humans we take this as a blatant sign of immaturity and/or insecurity. Evidently the condition is most common with religionist organizations although it may be found in others, like the Yankee government. A variation on this is Selective Bilateral Criticism where some forms or azimuths of criticism are acceptable but other are not. For example, we can criticize individual partisan politicians, and even their parties but we cannot criticize democracy. Even when we don’t have any except in name.

Anyway, one of the things that distinguishes the Mohammedan religion from most others is that the response to criticism tends to be quite violent. It is not that the other religions cannot be violent in their reaction to criticism but that violence is not their prevalent response. In other religions the prevalent response is negation – ignoring the criticism.

What is unclear is why there is this pronounced difference. As noted before, if this were a human it would be ascribed either to pathological insecurity or sociopathic disorder, even paranoia.

humans, behavior, organization, superstition,

What?

Today, I am informed by the consistent majority of humans I encounter, is Thanksgiving Day in the Yankee Republic. The Canadians observe this holy day in place of Columbus Day, which probably indicates their rationality concerning the nature of that wight and the evils that he visited upon so many. Besides, as a harvest festival, the earlier date matches climate better.

The question always comes of what should we be thankful, or, more meaningfully, of what we are thankful. Or at least that is the effect burnt into my mind by annual successions of public shul educationalists desperate for something to occupy the noise and antagonism levels of kinder prior to the solstice holy day recess. Certainly it would be as impolitic as ‘Every Child Left Behind’ to inquire of what the little egoists demanded as mystical cargo cultists. Ah!, but they do that these days, don’t they? And publish the lists in the newspaper because there isn’t anything else to print except meaningless but prideful third rate basketball tournament scores. Talk about the borer worms of the mind!

All right, let me start by expressing my thankfulness for Abraham Lincoln. He wisely promulgated Thanksgiving Day to assure the eradication of the then form of Amerikan chattel slavery and for that I am thankful for him. It was a horrible evil, almost as evil as the current forms of slavery practiced in the country.

Springing from that, I am thankful for the absence of mouthing and visions of bottom score bog politicians. Perhaps today all that I will have to endure is utter nonsense from relatives and friends and not from the dismal potential choices for political governors.

On which azimuth, I am thankful for the stress that comes from the close companionship with family and friends. I consider it a release valve for the feelings that would otherwise ruin the rest of the year. I am also thankful of being reminded of how intelligent and perceptive I am and how stupid, banal, and useless all my friends and family’s thoughts are.

Unless, that is, those thoughts are the product of enormous quantities of unhealthy homemade (?) foodstuffs. Can’t we just go to a fast food restaurant and the cardiac ICU? Perhaps it is to make us thankful for tofu?

But most particularly, I think I am thankful for all the aches and pains of life epitomized by this holiday that makes the rest of the year so joyful to experience. Except maybe Newtonmas which has been polluted by corporate oligarchs into a mixture of mysticism and propertyism.

Tuesday Early Speculations

It has been a bit of a strange day, already.

As I was walking from my motorcar up to the bench in front of gym to wait for the arrival of the staffer who opens, I happened to look at the lights reflected in the windows of the building, at least the ones in my field-of-view. I was struck by the large number of red lights reflected but only one green the stop (go?) lamp just west at an intersection. This led me to stop and swivel about 2 pi radians and observe the lightscape around me. Just shy of 0400, the sun was unobservable and skylight was minimal despite a near full moon. I was pleased to see some green light but dim in comparison to the many reds, except for the traffic lantern.

This led to the question of whether so many people run red lights – in the vernacular – because they are so used to seeing red in the lightscape that the meaning does not register? I know about half are justified, the lantern changes emission when the driver is too close to safely halt, putting the lie to the value of the yellow phase, but what of the rest? Could this annoying endangerment be the result of nothing more than a jaded sense of perception?

The gym was nicely sparse today, evidence once more of the MWF programming of most people. I have to wonder how this is arrived at, what thought and decision processes occur to arrive at this ordering and the exclusion of TTS.

The podcast episodes were supposed to be science today but rather too much of it was not. Much of the time was taken up with the shmaltz of the last shuttle flight and much maudlin rhetoric. And I recall some blather about the Northwest Passage and Franklin – the ‘explorer’, not the eldest founding father. Overall, not much adhesion to what was coming through.

So I had some attention span units to devote to considering an article in IBN [Link] about humans being programmed to be superstitious. In particular,

“Forty separate studies (both analytical and empirical) conducted in 20 countries conclude that humans are predisposed to believe in gods and in afterlife.”

The problem is that there are no proper citations so it is impossible to verify the claims of the article. So much for competent, factual journalism.

Still, it does lead to some cogitation. Surely here in the old Confederacy, the predisposition is epidemic. Superstition of this sort is virtually inescapable and one has to guard oneself when it is lestviolence result from the superstitious. Nonetheles, we cannot dismiss that the opposite may the the delusional state. For once, the majority of bogs may actually be accurate.

But it also makes life more difficult by giving the clear indication that we humans spend our lives taking two steps sideways for every step forward, and we are always seeing things through distorted lenses. Perhaps it is not so much a descent into barbarity and desolation as the gotterdamerung of the species? Of course, we have existed for years with the majority of humanity being bogs and survived that depravity. But that thought leads to the one of what we might be with fewer bogs and more nerds? Nah!, even reactors need gratuitous absorbers to keep from overheating.

humans, behavior, superstition, insanity

Profane Alibam

During the Great War, aka the War to make the World safe for Democracy and the War to End all Wars, neither of which were effected. nor was it the only great war, the idea, and terminology, crept into several languages, including American English, of spending time on the line, in combat, and then being pulled out for a period of rest and then returned.

Even to this day I am never quite sure whether Monday is returning to the line or being withdrawn from it. In many ways getting back into the ‘work’ week is more of a relief than a burden. This was evidently also the situation with some soldiers who found the tension of combat less harrowing than the tension of not being in combat, rather like an introvert prefers a heavy but solitary work assignment to any form of social gathering.

Anyway, the temperature is quite moderate this morning, no ice anywhere that I observed, except perhaps in ice making appliances, and the gym was almost pleasant albeit with a return of the arrogant hordes of educationalists and weight bouncers. The podcast of the day was an episode of “The Best of IDeas” from the CBC, featuring a discourse by a woman mediaist/journalist that was more poignant than most but frustratingly passing in that much of the misery she discussed is social and mystical and hence cannot be alleviated by good acts, only by rationality, which is apparently in short supply on Tellus.

Today is the observation of Valentine’s Day, which is the pseudo-secular celebration of the martyring of two decommissioned (?) saints. [Link] Anyway, the two religionists honored were martyred for reasons that are unobviously connected with affection and attraction. We may in fact, based on the common practice of holy day abstraction and plagiarism of the catholic church to associate this day with some traditional observation of tthe ‘beginning’ of the spring season hence associated with beginnings, the renewal of nature, spring planting, fertility, …… The continuation of it in modern times is manifestly one of those holy days that have been absconded by corporate organizations intent on separating bogs from portraiture of deceased politicians.

Hence I was attracted by a blip on one of the audio-visual electromagnetic receivers at gym that today marked a ban on cursing in Alibam. Being unaware of this, I did a bit of research and discovered this is not some prohibition on roman catholic practices but rather a campaign mounted by middle shul students in Lower Alibam to prohibit verbal profanity today. [Link] My ease wit the sentiment was ruptured when I readthis quote,

“’I know children who grow up in homes where profanity is as prevalent as English,’ said Merceria Ludgood, the County Commission member whose district includes Lott Middle School in this small town north of Mobile.”

It appears that the households Ms. Ludgood is familiar with do not converse in English?

Cursing, if we discount the formal anathema pronounced by religionists, is the verbal use of profanity. The words are part of the language, not, as Ms. Ludgood seems to think and obviously declaims, a separate language. So if this is the general state of education and knowledge in Lower Alibam I suppose I should be grateful the national media did not heap abuse and nastiness on our heads as they usually do.

But then  we are reminded, by Qadgop, of the line from “Forbidden Planet” by Dr. Morbius about a commander (commissioner) only needing a loud voice, not intelligence. Certainly this seems the situation in Lower Alibam.

I surprised myself to consider how much more common profanity is today than when I was in shul. My father used profanity sparingly, usually only under occasions of stress or injury. (Hammers were often involved.) I was only exposed to cursing once I went to work for the Yankee army and was exposed to field grade officers and sergeants who seemed to find this a more effective form than actual communication.

So while I find myself agreeing with the students, I wish they would pend their time doing something with a higher probability of success, like getting Every Child Left Behind repealed. Although it would seem too late for Ms. Lugdood.

superstition, religion, avarice, corporations, education, stupidity. profanity

Direction of Weave

Somehow it is fitting that it being Sundae, a couple of articles on litigation catch the attention span. First, we have a tale of an astronomer is court-bashing the U Kentucky because they did not hire him as the chief tube pointer of their observatory. [Link] Seems the astronomer in question is a bit of an evangelical and has been caught making religionist-science mumblings on the internet.

The difficulty here is that the Yankee government forbids discrimination n employment based on religion, except in those instances where the practice of the religion prevents the job from being performed. For example, it is unlikely that a rabbi could be effective in a catfish dressing plant. So the question is whether a mystical astronomer can be a scientist.

What makes the question attention gathering is that Kentucky is home of all sorts of religionist organizations and the U Kentucky is a hotbed of student evangelism. So what is up here?

Meanwhile, the suit of the folks in the land of golden earthquakes is not really news but it is significant. [Link] If you can’t get the poison palaces to clean up their foodstuffs directly then keep them from bribing and brainwashing the kids. Of course, MacDougal’s, who is the target, is making all the usual pseudo-religious cries of Gastronomy Gestapo, which is probably to their detriment because not a few folks associate fast food restaurants with Auschwitz.

I personally have scant respect for MacDougal’s or any fast food chain. During the extended childhood of CSPdatter any family meal eaten in restaurant had to be taken at MacDougal’s or be pouty at best and inconsolable at worst. The Happy Box, now Sack, is the sternest chain of slavery since the ear friend or an electrical circuit direct into the pleasure center of the brain. And since that childhood has ended any meal taken at a fast food chain franchise is not only the exception but a matter of no other choice.

A few words of condemnation of how the chins destroy Mom-and-Pop restaurants would also be in order. Take them as uttered.

I suppose the parallel here is obvious? A college professor purveying stercus knowledge and a genre of restaurant purveying stercus foodstuffs. The difference is the direction of the litigation. The manifest interest of humanity is not.

religion, superstition, government, litigation, food, poisoning

Holy Day Today?

I am advised by the folks at Encyclopedia Britannica [Link] that today is the anniversary of the initiation of the Scopes trial just up nawth of here in the Volunteer state.

Seems like a good opportunity to remind any of your religious fanatic creationist/intelligent design acquaintances that they are part neandertal.

Although I have to admit that I haven’t yet summoned the courage to discuss the matter with my mother. But I do wonder if that is why she has such a penchant for heavy handedly attempting guilt trips?

Still Tired

I now have a fuller appreciation for the old saw that if one has two weeks of vacation time coming to take a trip during the first week and to rest the second. My will power was so sapped yesterday that I could not even transfer photographs from camera to USB drive. It was all I could do to catch up on email and browse the articles that had amassed in the RSS accumulator. Reading those, in part, explains part of my lethargy and ennui.

First courtesy of LiveScience, [Link] I find confirmation of something I have always suspected: if you go to a chain restaurant and find something on their menu that they tout as ‘healthy’, it isn’t.

This strikes at the root of the problem of eating out and health. If you eat at a chain restaurant they are required by law to make available the nutritional information on their offerings – many, of course, flout the law [1] – but you now have confirmation that they lie; if you eat at a local restaurant, no nutritional information is required so it’s a poke opening. And you have to wonder if the foodstuffs manufacturers – the General Foods and the like – will shortly also be exposed as liars and terrorists.

I am not a fan of social engineering but harkening back to one of our greatest presidents, Teddy Roosevelt, I hold that government needs to do things to protect the citizenry from the food manufacturers. In his day it was the meat packing industry, today it seems to be the whole gamut of processed food purveyors. Of course, I suspect one of the qualities of bogishness is to be completely unconcerned about the foodstuffs ingested other than taste and quantity.

While on bogishness, I note, via Ben Goldacre, [Link] that psychologists have conducted people experiments that indicate that if superstitious people are allowed to use their luck amulets, or otherwise encouraged in their superstition, they perform better on trials of effort. The rational view of this would be that this catering makes these bogs relaxed and unstressed and hence they perform better. This is not exactly news. My sophomore mechanics (first semester) professor used to tell us to go bowling the night before examination. None of the class ever did but then none of us bowled. Nor were we particularly superstitious. I suspect being a student of physics tends to weed out that sort of nonsense.

Nor, as Goldacre points out, even being a journalist, most humans have some behavior that passes as superstitious. The question, left unasked and unanswered, is whether this type of thing should be abided? It may be argued that if toting around a scrap of dead plant or animal (e.g.,) relaxes one then the result is better and neutralizes the irrationality. But no one stops to total up how that irrationality pollutes other activities and aspects of human society. I believe this proves something I once read by Lord Kelvin along the lines of what “what we have not measured we do not know.”

And while we’re on accepting whacked behavior, I read [Link] that researchers have come up with some proposals on how to destroy a gravitational singularity. Quite apart from the uncertainty associated with the physics of the exercise, a rather more telling inquiry is into the propensity for homo sapiens to expend so much effort on destroying things, even things we cannot get to, much less at. I have to admit to personal experience with this trait encoded in out genes. Back when I was a young man and given to having difficulty handling frustration and stress, I would take a Tupperware (R) drinking glass and beat it against the counter top for several minutes in a most aggressive fashion. No, never hard enough to visibly damage the Formica, but hard enough to relieve my stress after five or ten minutes.

One of the advantages of this method is that Tupperware glasses are sold in sets of six or eight and bachelors have scant use of that many at any time; hence that many is only an invitation to piling dirtiness in the disk sink. Additionally, these glasses are quite durable and I never did actually tear up a glass although after a year or so of such drubbings, say once a month on the average for a drubbing frequency, I could render it unusable for drinking by deformation. I fear beating on a gravitational singularity will not be so benign.

And lastly, given beatings as an azimuth, we have a report [Link] from the Old Dominion state about garage doors misfunctioning, including raising and lowering uncontrollably. Naturally, some bogs saw this as being of supernatural origin and they seem to be close to accurate. The culprit turns out to be the military. Seems the electromagnetic wave frequencies used in controlling garage door openers have since been reassigned to military use and that use sometimes triggers the doors to open or shut ‘magically’. Perhaps if the home owners are permitted to carry parts of discorporated entities this will abate, or they could change the coding or frequency of the opener? But then, rationality is not romantic.
[1]  Anecdote: On our gallop FD SCP and I had problems finding somewhere to break our fast the first morning. Finally, in desperation, just before 1000 hours, we pulled into a McDougals in Selmer, Tennessee for a biscuit and beverage. No nutritional information to be seen, nor non-dairy creamer either – evidently McDougal’s discriminates against normal adults and disrupts their digestive systems with lactose. Our food was served on a flimsy plastic tray with a paper liner, presumably to thwart the sanitation laws. The nutritional information was printed in very small type on the underside of the liner.

There is no trying

Occasionally I experience a sort of ‘accidental juxtaposition of ether waves in the void’ in regard to RSS feed articles. One piece of this juxtaposition has been the recent grrr brrr over the National Science Foundation’s decision to leave out pieces of science from their report card on how Amerika rates on science.[Link]

The two pieces that got left out are evolution and the big bang theory, both of which have strong correlations with religious beliefs. The excuse offered by the NSF for this omission can be paraphrased as “Amerikans are rational except when they are irrational and they are irrational about their irrational, mystical beliefs.” So the NSF, being a little bit about science but a whole lot about politics, did a sorta science thing and renormalized the sample space. In political terms this is something like gerrymandering or rotten boroughs. The analog is the old saw “if you can’t stand the answer don’t ask the question” except in this case it’s ‘if the answer will be embarrassing and make Amerika look like a superstitious, illiterate, pseudo-state, then don’t ask the question.’

But what is chilling is that back in the early years after the Great Patriotic War when Robert Heinlein wrote about the great American stupidity and the second dark age it was titillating; now, in actuality it is terrifying.

The second piece of the juxtaposition was an article in the Washington Times about community colleges. [Link] Apparently community colleges now account for half of all college students in the Yankee republic. The thought that first emerged from this was my own experiences as a manager and hiring people who had attended community colleges. I should warn that I am going to be largely speaking about means and majorities hereafter, not deterministic absolutes.

First of all, people who go to community colleges do not get technical educations. In fact, it is not clear that they get education at all, at least from my limited sample of community colleges in the old Confederacy. In some perversion of the Capellan ideal, they take a lot of diverse courses, few of which have any real relevance to making them productive graduates. In fact, the ones who go to a community college for a couple of years and then transfer to a university to get a technical degree generally end up having to add a year to make up for the time spent in community college, if they don’t flunk out or just give up. I am informed by administrators at several universities that the majority of third and fourth year students who flunk out spent their first two years in community college. So characterizing community colleges as a cross between an extended high shul and country club may not be too far off.

And these mainstays of Amerikan higher education are suffering from inadequate funding. What seems the wonder is that anyone – except politicians and career educationalists – entertain that idea with any sincerity.

This is not to say the that exceptional community college student will not be wildly successful and end up actually doing something more than being a model consumerist serf. But these are rare and do not seem to justify dignifying this extension of the stupidifying of Amerika by the educationalist apparat much further.

If we cannot do people the service of educating them then we should be honest that they are only being trained. At least in Huxley’s Brave New World there was some superficial integrity about this.

News at Gym

The season seems to have taken a bit of a humorous turn. This morning at gym, in observing the structured photon flood from the monster monitors of the walls, I thought the advertised Three Stooges Marathon had started. Upon closer observation this was disproven since the channel in question was Reynard News and there was only one stooge present and this one blond and female.

What I had taken for a skit about mid-Twentieth century fascist dictators was merely an interview (interrogation?) that would have been right at home in the halls of Third Reich Germany except for the nose on the interrogator, which was pronouncedly untermenshen in shape. The interviewee was the chief executive of Freedom from Religion organization, [Link] which has been doing the billboard thing this season.

From the interview I had to conclude that Reynard News is not only an inherently fanatical superstitious and mystical organization, but bigoted as well, holding that only those who agree with their religious prejudices should be permitted freedom of speech and worship. Or at least that is what was conveyed by the talking head and since the stoogism was permitted it must be policy. Or should we say doctrine?

This does explain the network’s fear of terrorists, especially muslims. After all, one oppressive dictatorial theocracy can abide no others of its kind.

And then, like a cherry on top of an outrageous sundae, the head went on to declaim that the snowstorm that engulfed Yankeeland this weekend was demonstration of the absence of global climate change. This is distressing. After all Curly at least had some understanding of basic thermodynamics. Not that I expect any mediast/journalist to have any knowledge of anything, especially scientifical, but I do expect the news writers who feed the dentally reconstructed babblers to check to make sure there is some degree of accuracy.

It is one thing to mutter and moan and stupidify about made up things like human rights, such as freedom of religion and speech and such like, after all what is a democracy for if not to deny equalities to some of its members and exalt others- just like dictatorships and monarchies and oligarchies but different – but material reality? If this is the best that humanity can do we have scant reason to call ourselves wise, much less continue to exist.

But it is humor full and robust in its absurdity.