Right, then - 13 January 2007

[silveradept]

Somehow all my good intentions went to hell - namely, I was going to go up and do something for work today, and then I just sat down and watched hockey games all day. It being Hockey Day in Canada helped, but really, I should have done something, right? Tomorrow, maybe. It’s not due until Thursday, but my work-sense is nagging at me. And the only way to get rid of it is to actually do the work.

A collaborative project between myself and 2dlife has launched as a Livejournal Community. We’ll be adding in our thoughts about, well, potentially anything, as we have our dialogues. This also means that we can be argued and agreed with through the comments, with additional things we missed being pointed out or new angles being presented. It’s conversation logs, though, but people used to this journal’s longwindedness should have no problem picking up the stuff there, right? Anyway, if I haven’t managed to scare you off sufficiently, the community’s name is twoheadsbetter. Please go and read, at the very least.

In other materials, we have to say that it’s taken a while to move, but the Doomsday clock has ticked closer to midnight. We’ll see if it moves any closer to midnight in the next couple years. I expect it to tick closer if this rhetoric of Iran and Syria as the next targets continues.

Atlanta was not friendly to a visiting scholar. By his account, a plainclothes officer stopped him for jaywalking, asked for his identification, and when asked to see the officer's identification, was significantly roughed up. With backup brought in. The account given by the Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting comment war between those who think the policemen were just doing their job and dealing with a belligerent professor and those who think the historian was the victim of police brutality. From the account of the event, assuming it’s all true, I’d be inclined to say some excessive force was used. The professor was let off in traffic court the next day.

Going ape (bananas?) in one's diet leads to reductions in weight and cholesterol. Really - the diet of fruits and vegetables was plentiful (a little fish, later) and after the adjustment to the vegan diet, the improvements were noticeable. The subjects dropped blood pressure, cholesterol, and kilos. This is not rocket science, really. With sufficient diet and exercise, we can all be healthy. Most of us just aren’t doing it. (Some world citizens can’t. Which really sucks.)

The Gates Foundation is reassessing the companies that it invests in. So, apparently, the press about the inconsistency or contradiction of the investments had an effect. Or maybe, they decided now was a good time to actually do what they said they were going to do. So, perhaps we’ll see some changed. Perhaps not.

For those communities where the people have to rely on each other to get their business done, where there’s an underground economy that thrives, perhaps more than the one that gets reported, what goes on in the underground economy can work, but it can also trap everyone in it into staying in it. There’s a lot that goes on in this country that never makes it to a tax sheet. I wonder, if those people could manage to bring their services above-the-fold, whether they would, and how much it would help them.

Perhaps removing another objection to same-sex civil unions, New Jersey tells its clerics that they're not going to be required to perform homosexual civil unions. This was an underlying assumption of many of the supporters of civil unions, to let the word and marriage ceremony simply be the province of the religious, while obtaining the legal benefits of the joining ceremony. A further battle to be fought would be to get religious clerics to be okay with the idea of marriage in their churches, with religious blessings, but for now, the legal benefits are the first goal.

Something of note - a claim has been made that allowing boys to dress as female characters could help them become better readers. The reasoning behind it is that imagination and being able to see from all points of view makes for better reading. Naturally, there are others who say that letting boys cross-dress causes gender confusion and claim that “boys learn to read well when taught properly, using the phonics method.” I note with a historical perspective that in theater for a long time, boys were playing girls, period. And furthermore, I note there’s a bit of a variance in what “reading well” is among the two sides - the side for letting boys explore female roles wants reading comprehension and conceptual understanding, the side against seems to be content with syntax, grammar, and the ability to pronounce the words properly. I assume the pro side wants these as well, and then further understanding beyond that. As things are, I do agree with the comment that says boys are generally restricted to male roles and discouraged from exploring female ones, in youth and later. Females, luckily, and thanks to the feminist movement, are getting more encouragement to cross over into male roles, and to occupy them, if they fit. A little gender equality, please?

Last whacks for tonight involves Christians, but Christians of the stripe that believe that God is with us all the time, guiding us, reminding us to return to his ways, and such. The kind who will homeschool because the public education system is godless, think the government is secular in all the wrong ways, and want to see the United States united in a history and government that acknolwedges YHWH and Jesus as the prime movers of all things. Fundamentally-inclined theocrats who believe in a chronology with God actively in it. Harper's Magazine chronicles one person's attempts to learn and understand American fundamentalism. In what he finds, there is a lot of potentially scary stuff - Orwell learned well (although misattributed) and attempting to be used, revivals that exhort the faithful to be ready for war and to have their swords ready, and the unshaken faith that in the end, they will be victorious and God will look with favor upon the country once more. One wonders whether they will be successful simply by being unrelenting from generation to generation, making progress, perhaps at a snail’s pace in some eras, in bigger leaps in others, until what they seek has been achieved. At the same time, I wonder what will happen when they manage to achieve their perfection, and then nothing happens. No Armageddon, no Second Coming, only a planet that has been laid to waste. By that time, I will likely have been killed, mind you, as a heretic or a non-believer, but it’s nice to speculate what the looks will be like when what they consider to be perfection occurs, and Jesus either fails to show up or backhands them for being so irresponsible.

Comments

[annaonthemoon.livejournal.com]

The Doomsday clock - So when it gets to midnight, what happens?

"For the first time in 36 years this year I had vegetables with my Christmas dinner," he says. "Usually, I say no to them and have a few extra roast potatoes instead."
last time I checked, a potato was a vegetable, but even so, I can't believe that man hasn't eaten vegetables since childhood. Wow. Insanity.

The reading article is interesting. Even more so is the opinion that it's bad to let boys dress as girls because it "encourages cross-dressing and could cause gender confusion". But then wouldn't that apply also to girls who want to dress up as pirates? It's such a continual double standard that it's OK to see a girl in pants, but not OK for a boy to wear a skirt! You see it all the time in school productions, too - not enough boys sign up, so a few boy-parts get given to girls. But if there's a shortage of girls...oh, you need to recruit more, because a boy can't possibly play the role of a girl.

That poor professor! I mean, if someone stops me after I cross a street and they aren't obviously a police officer, I'm going to ask them to show me their badge. And from what I was told, we have a right to ask an office to produce their badge, and if they don't, we then have the right to refuse to talk to them until they bring back-up, or allow us to call the police. I hope that officer gets reprimanded for the way he treated the professor...especially since it was over something as trivial as crossing a street.

[silveradept]

When the clock strikes midnight, World War III occurs. Or, rather, has occurred. Assuming there is anything left to report the movement of the clock to midnight.

Potatoes are starch more than vegetable, at least, nutritionally, I think. As for not eating vegetables, it's one of the first thing that goes from the collegiate diet.

The fear is that the boys will grow up and have teh ghey, onoez! Because it's utterly unacceptable for manly men and boys to put on skirts or dresses, because if they're ghey, then there's no chance of them knocking up a girl and continuing the family line. Girls, on the other hand, are allowed to be imaginative, but I suspect the expectation is that they'll settle down and be proper girls in skirts who cheer on and get knocked up by the football players. A girl still in pants past a particular age is under suspicion as a feminist, a lesbian, or someone who's never going to have kids (possibly all three). Being any of those things is looked down upon as well.

From the sounds of things, the plainclothes officer got fed up with all the people jaywalking and when the Tufts professor asked for his credentials, he lost it, seeing it as deliberate spite rather than an honest question. Still, that's not really acceptable behavior.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is an excellent magazine that I heartily recommend. I pick it up regularly from Hastings. They give you information that you'll never see in American media. If you have any interest in world security news, it's a must-read IMHO.