AAARRRGH!! Socialism! Fascism! Socio-Fascism, Fascio-Socialism! AAAAARGH!

I should state for the record that I do remember the 70’s fairly well, and the 80’s even more clearly than that. I remember sitting at my desk, watching the government approved short film on how to hide under our desks covering our heads in case of a nuclear attack from the Communists. Russia. Russia was evil. Russians were bloodthirsty people who lived in a corrupt country that was always cold and whose children were forced to become either ballerinas or gymnasts or soldiers (if they were boys). We had to be careful of the Commies! They would kill us all if they got the chance, just like in Red Dawn where the only thing that saved us was a teenaged Patrick Swayze and a few friends with guns up in the mountains. Yeah. Growing up in the midst of the cold war was a blast, let me tell you.

Eventually, the ‘evil empire’ fell (the other one, not ours) and all was peace and Perestroika and glurgey songs by The Scorpions. Which was great, ‘cuz I was 19 and seriously into stadium rock. Unfortunately for those in the political world…people stopped hating the Russians and started looking at our own policies. The whole guns for cash/Iran-Contra thingie. America went through a period where we tried hanging the sign ‘next Evil Empire’ on various countries…China, Iran, Iraq, …but our hearts weren’t in it.

I am so pleased to announce that is finally over. Our long period of life without a national bogeyman is over! We now have SOCIALISM! Right here in River Ci… er, downtown Dallas! The socialists are coming! The socialists are coming! And they’re bringing their icky government healthcare with ‘em! Because in Canada, you’re required by law to wait 18 months to see a doctor for a broken leg, and even then the doctor just tells you to walk it off and rub some dirt on it. And in France, the government will dictate to you who your doctor is, even if you’re a man and they send you to a gynecologist, even if you just need an eye exam and they send you to a proctologist. And in Belgium, something something, baseless lies and pointless fearmongering and SOCIALISM! SOCIALISM! AND FASCISM, TOO! BOTH AT ONCE! FASCO-SOCIALISM! SOCIO-FASCISM! Where’s Obama’s birth certificate, and why does he want to steal my guns from me?

Am I the only one here who gets the feeling that these people who cry ‘fascism!’ ’socialism!’ in tortured tones of great fear aren’t even really sure what either term means? All they know is, it’s bad and they don’t like Obama and they heard some politician or Glenn Beck  or someone on Faux News call him a socialist so that must be where we’re going because they wouldn’t lie and THEY LOVE OUR COUNTRY!

*sigh*…..

No. We are not moving toward socialism. Or fascism. Quite the opposite, in fact, moving AWAY from that one. Want to know what we really have? I’ll tell you. What we have is a Republican minority. And when the Republicans are in the minority, the only way they know how to get back in power is by scaring the living daylights out of people. It’s a proven game plan, so why bother actually helping the current administration come up with anything workable? Why try to be for something when you can be against everything? “If we were in charge this wouldn’t be happening!” Well, no, but we wouldn’t have any money at all and we’d be in the middle of a huge depression.

Stop worrying, folks. We’re not socialists. All we’ve done is taken a turn toward the middle of the road. Right now we’re so far right than anything left of Genghis Khan looks dangerously leftist. The socialists are not going to come take our wages while we sleep in our beds. All will be well. And maybe we’ll be able to climb out of the cellar of the worst neonatal and new mother death rates in the industrialized world. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Scientists Visit Creationist Museum

The University of Cincinnati hosted the North American Paleontological Convention last week. In what appears to be a planned field trip, approximately 70 paleontologists, paleozoologists and geologists toured the Creationist Museum in Petersburg Kentucky. Apparently they were unimpressed, and who can blame them?

Many of the paleontologists thought the museum misrepresented and ridiculed them and their work and unfairly blamed them for the ills of society.

“I think they should rename the museum — not the Creation Museum, but the Confusion Museum,” said Lisa E. Park, a professor of paleontology at the University of Akron.

“Unfortunately, they do it knowingly,” Dr. Park said. “I was dismayed. As a Christian, I was dismayed.”

Sorry abuot that Dr. Park. I can only imagine what it’s like to have one’s life’s work completely taken out of context and abused and mangled in the way hers has been. But even sadder, I think, are those who visit the museum with the expectation and belief that what is being represented is not a point of view, but verifiable scientific fact. That it’s passed on to children as fact is even worse.

Terry Mortenson, a lecturer and researcher for Answers in Genesis, the ministry that built and runs the Creation Museum, said he did not expect the visit to change many minds. “I’m sure for the most part they’ll be of a different view from what’s presented here,” Dr. Mortenson said. “We’ll just give the freedom to see what they want to see.”

Dr. Mortenson and others at the museum say they look at the same rocks and fossils as the visiting scientists, but because of different starting assumptions they arrive at different answers. For example, they say the biblical flood set off huge turmoil inside the Earth that broke apart the continents and pushed them to their current locations, not that the continents have moved over a few billion years.

“Everyone has presuppositions what they will consider, what questions they will ask,” said Dr. Mortenson, who holds a doctorate in the history of geology from Coventry University in England. “The very first two rooms of our museum talk about this issue of starting points and assumptions. We will very strongly contest an evolutionist position that they are letting facts speak for themselves.”

I love it when religious people disagree with the fundamental conclusions of a scientific discipline but then try to use select parts of those conclusions to support their positions. It’s one thing* to reject science in favor of religion. It’s quite another to completely misrepresent science in order to force it to conform with your world view. The above statement is more than merely uninformed opinion, it’s intentional deceit. This man and the people working at the museum are intentionally deceiving the public in order to make their beliefs seem as though they actually have some bearing in scientific fact.

I’m more than a little amused that people who become so bellicose about science ‘making a mockery of religion’ are completely sanguine with the science fiction that is Creationism. It’s as if they thought to themselves that because science (in their opinions) belittles their beliefs, they now have the right to criticize science. Which seems somewhat arrogant and ignorant all at the same time.

What they don’t seem to realize is that science isn’t around specifically to disprove god or religion or anything of the sort. All science does…is explain our physical universe. Believe it or not my ignorant little theists, it is not necessary to even look at god in order to  do that. I do not need to invoke some unseen unknown inscrutable thing in order to know what conditions need to exist in order for lightning to occur. That isn’t a slight, no matter how badly you want to take it as one. It’s just that science sees that the simplest explanation is usually the best and most accurate. You need to get over yourselves. In short: science just ain’t that into you.

*Okay, yes, one very stupid thing.

My Annual Valentine’s Day Rant

So. Here we are once again, February 14th, and you’re nervous as hell that all you managed to get your SO after days of searching and sweating and asking the opinions of others is a bunch of overpriced flowers picked by Brazilian produce workers for pennies an hour and some chocolate that you’re not quite sure she’ll like and you’re afraid you’ll come off trite and insincere when, dammit, you TRIED, and who the hell came up with this stupid holiday, anyway? I will tell you, as I do every year. It was not, as those even more cynical than this chronicler (hard to imagine, isn’t it?) will tell you, the South African diamond merchants and the Hallmark people…though if there’s justice, a specialized hell awaits them all. Damn, atheism bites hard sometimes. No. It was the Romans. And, is too long to sum up, so I will splain.

Once upon a time, there was a rather sweet little custom held by the ancient Romans called the Lupercalia. As I tend to leave the dry, scholarly posts to those who actually enjoy such things, I will link the wiki article for you to peruse and enjoy at your leisure. Essentially, the Romans were celebrating fertility. They liked doing that quite a bit, and managed to find many, MANY inventive reasons for doing so. Every year on February 15th, the local priests would round up the year’s crop of likely young men and take them up to the cave where the she-wolf suckled the twins, Romulus and Remus. There, they were daubed on the forehead with the blood of a goat, and afterward, they were to take strips of goat skin, dip it in the blood and run through the streets touching everything in their path with the goatskin. Especially women. Go figure. It was supposed to cleanse the town and make women fertile. And afterward…and this is my favorite bit… there was a HUGE feast; lots of meat (goat, sure, you didn’t want it to go to waste after all…), lots of wine, everyone laughing and happy, and just when the evening hit its zenith…there was the sex lottery. You heard me. See, while the young men were up on the hill, the unmarried young ladies would all put their names in this urn. After the feast, the boys would draw names from the urn, and they’d take the young ladies off and do what it is kids do. It was an arrangement for a year to decide whether or not they liked each other well enough to be married which, when you get right down to it, is a hell of a lot more practical than a lot of what we do now. It was considered lucky if she became pregnant on the Lupercalia, and the pregnancy generally signaled an intent to make the arrangement permanent.

So what happened? Do you really need to ask? The Catholic church, of course. They got all tingly and uptight whenever they thought about the Lupercalia, and they knew that something that felt that good just COULDN’T be right. So they took a little known saint who may or may not have ever existed (Valentinus), ran it smack up against the Lupercalia, and, oh, yes, took away the sex lottery. Instead, the urn was stuffed with the names of saints, and the youngsters were instructed to research those saints and emulate them. Yeah, that’s more fun. Over the years, it has morphed and changed and become what it is; a holiday that takes the fun out of love. Manufactured romance. And yet…and yet…at the base of it…if we really want it…the Lupercalia is still there, winking and wearing not much more than a come hither look and a smile. So forget the flowers and the Whitman’s sampler and the two hour wait at the restaurant. Get a bottle of really good wine, some decent candles, and whatever it is you and your sweetie like best to eat. Feed each other in the candle light. Then go and make ol’ Lupercus proud. Be the secret entry in each others’ respective sex diaries. The page they never talk about and blush to think about.

Sarah Palin is the New Paris Hilton.

I wish I was joking. The very last thing our country needs right now is another famous for being famous cult of personality that’s as vapid and clueless as Sarah Hilt..er, Palin, but the fact of the matter is the woman simply. Will not. Go. Away.

When I woke up on Wednesday, November 5th, I rather foolishly comforted myself with the naive thought that it was all over and Caribou Barbie would sink back into the obscurity from whence she came. Okay, there’s no need to look at me like that, I see I was being stupid. Clearly, national attention is like heroin to the woman; why else would she have started her own PAC less than a week after Obama took office? Or announce that she’ll be having dinner with the President? Or, FSM save us all, write a book? The last one is so deliciously ironic the jokes just write themselves. “I thought she only read magazines and newspapers.” “A book? Will it have a soft cover and cardboard pages?” My biggest concern is that no matter who they get to ghost it, it’s going to be so obviously doctored, there’s simply no WAY anyone will fall for the fiction that it’s in her own words. How can it be? I mean, you could probably get a FEW pages out of soundbites, but eventually you have to develop plot and characters, no? And the syllables! The poor tortured syllables! It ain’t right to do that to unsuspecting words.

I was SO angry when John McCain compared Obama to Paris Hilton. I thought unleashing that human STD back on an unsuspecting populace was one of the worst things he could do during his campaign. Ohhh, but that was before Sarah Palin. Infecting us with Paris as opposed to infecting us with Sarah? Sadly, there is no Vancomycin for television.

I Wonder If Dorothy Parker Ever Felt This Way…

Well, likely not. It’s one in the afternoon, I’m awake and sober. All due respect to Mrs. Parker, I don’t believe the woman believed in mornings. Or sobriety. But I do wonder if she ever felt frustrated, restless, scared and breathless all at the same time…waiting for something to happen, worrying that it will…

There is a rhythm and flow to writing; a natural progression in which all the words just spew themselves from fingers to keyboard, bypassing the brain. Which explains why the ramblings are so damn disconnected. But the flow’s been interrupted the past week or so. Lately it feels like work, which is most distressing. Maybe if I drink alot and sleep in. I’m already acerbic and bad tempered. I could start insulting politicians. Oh, wait. I already do that.

I think what is really needed is a reset. Something unpleasant and soul destroying that will make me appreciate what I have and embrace life more fully. Maybe I’ll attend a Republican Ladies’ lunch. They’re lobbying to get ex-President Bush to speak at one of their fundraisers here in Dallas. My god, I think I’ve sufficiently horrified myself just with the thought. I’ll find inspiration. Just please do not make me spend time with those soulless stepford women.

Okay. Up and out of bed, laptop off. I will be back later, hopefully with something interesting to say.

And So This is Christmas…

…And what have you done?

Good question. I feel exhausted enough to have crossed every damn task off Hercules’ list. Those Agatean horses got NOTHING on moving house from San Francisco to Dallas in a soft market with kids in tow.

I decided that since I wasn’t especially in the holiday spirit, I’d take the advice of all those gushy, I-heart-Christmas people and try to jump start myself into it. I went shopping. This has never been high on my list during Christmas. The advent of the internet was, IMO, the best thing that ever happened to Christmas shopping. I get the soft happy emotion without having to deal with one idiot on the road.

Yesterday was asshole day at the mall, my friends. Yes, yes, the parking lot was full of them; I can’t believe they all just hung out circling for the best space before finally giving up, grabbing the best spot they could and going in. And THOSE are the people I spent time around. So many varieties of asshole, so few adjectives and modifiers.

The malls here have a different flavor of asshole than those in California. They’re all every bit as self absorbed regardless of state, but there’s a subtle difference. Texans are louder for starters. Drunker, too. Coming from a place where cops just can’t WAIT to try out their breathalyzers, it’s stunning to look around and realize the reason for all the swaying is not the Christmas music. Then there’s the gods. Damned. Perfume. Holy mother of fuck, people, there is simply no REASON for all that damned scent. I went from ground state to raging headache in 0.5 seconds just walking through the doors. Everyone is trying to outsmell everyone else. It’s worse than the perfume counter at Macy’s. And what is WITH you idiots who decide the very best place to unload your Christmas shopping and chat with your friend is right here in the middle of the damn walkway where everyone has to go AROUND you? HUH? Do you REALLY believe you’re that goddamn important? Get out of the damn way or I’ll kick your presents over the ledge and you’ll have to move just to get them from the first floor.

Yeah. So shopping didn’t work. Moved on to baking Christmas cookies. This may have been a mistake. Four teenagers able to do math and add up mom in the kitchen + sugar, eggs & butter=treats gone the second they come out of the oven without even being decorated. I managed to salvage a few so that the darling man could have one or two at least before our voracious offspring could continue their piranha imitations.

We picked our oldest boy up last night from a party and, taking a side route, decided we’d look at the various houses running up their electric bills with ornate displays. This was once guaranteed to elicit “oooo” ’s from the kids, who looked forward to such diversions this time of year. The response last night? “Are we lost? Aren’t we going home?” *sigh*…. Maybe it’s time we looked into military schools…

Ah, well. We went home and rewarded our attempts at the Christmas spirit by going to bed and staying there, which is what we should have done in the first place.

Merry Christmas.

Lindsay Lohan Comes Out

Alright. I don’t often do the whole “gossip girl” thing, but this was sent to me by a friend, and, as with any trainwreck, I simply cannot look away. Lindsay Lohan, actress and human melt down, has come out.

London’s Daily Mail is not the most reliable of all papers, but they seem to have done their homework.

After months of speculation about their relationship Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson have finally confirmed they are a couple.

The pair were talking to an American radio DJ who asked them how long they had been together.

‘A very long time,’ replied 22-year-old actress Lohan, who has been living with the 30-year-old DJ since May.

Will this revelation finally signal the end of Lohan’s personal roller coaster? We can only hope so. Coming out is hard for everyone; to do so under a microscope cannot be easy. I, for one, wish her well and congratulate her for her bravery. Well done, Lindsay.

5th Grader Suspended for Political TShirt

Don’t you just love irony? Is it not delicious and tingly and affirming? Let me tell you a rather ironic little story.

Some time back, during Alberto Gonzales’ speech addressing several hundred people at Georgetown University, several students stood and raised a sign bearing the slogan “Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither,” a classic quote of Benjamin Franklin. Conservatives, right wing bloggers and pundits at Faux News were outraged (you can read Bill O’really’s righteously indignant comments here.)

Fast forward three years to a Colorado grade school. A fifth grade student, Dax Dalton (where DO conservatives get these interesting names for their children?) wore a Tshirt he had hand-decorated. The slogan? “Obama: A terrorist’s best friend.” At least it was spelled and punctuated correctly. Interestingly (at least to me), the same Faux news crew that was so horrified and outraged by the group of students who DARED speak out against a member of our government are now (okay, predictably) horrified and outraged that the grade school the 5th grader attends had the gall to ask the boy to either turn his shirt inside out or be suspended.

Ah, sweet irony…. D’you think if we keep pointing out the hypocrisy of these self-appointed protectors of all things American, they’ll eventually just shut up? We can but hope they’ll keep going…. how else would we know what NOT to do?

Calm down. The world is not ending.

I promise.

As I’m sure you all know by now, the Large Hadron Collider, a massive particle accelerator, is scheduled to be fired up tomorrow. It’s a huge undertaking, and the physics behind it is both astounding and exciting. As it turns out, in some cases it’s downright frightening.

The phycisists working at CERN are receiving death threats. Blogs here at WordPress are prophesying doom. Suits have been brought to stop the experiment from taking place. People, people, people. Calm. The f&*% . Down. There is no actual science behind the knee jerk reaction that the LHC will create a black hole and we’re all DOOOOOOOOMED, AAARRRGHARGHARGH!!!!

If you really want to know what is going to happen and how, go here. What this will tell us, essentially, is how matter acquires mass. Even if a black hole is formed, it will be miniscule, and will likely evaporate instantaneously.

So chill. Please. The world is not ending.

Edit: Had to plug in the xkcd comic. Love it.