Someone Who Just Doesn't Get It

From an interview on time.com, with a British political journalist named Dennis Sewell, who has written a book on the influence of Darwin's theory of evolution on politics:

All things considered, do you believe Darwin was a great luminary in the path of human progress?
What has the theory of evolution done for the practical benefit of humanity? It's helped our understanding of ourselves, yet compared to, say, the discovery of penicillin or the invention of the World Wide Web, I wonder why Darwin occupies this position at the pinnacle of esteem. I can only imagine he has been put there by a vast public relations exercise.

This is what happens when supposedly educated people don't receive enough education in science. While it is certainly one motivation of science to produce inventions (e.g. ones that allow uninformed journalists spout off on topics on which they don't know very much and can't be bothered to actually reseach), the first and foremost goal of science is to explain things. Darwin "occupies this position at the pinnacle of esteem" because he provided an explanation that, in turn, provides a framework for understanding how nearly every biological thing you see around you got the way it is. On top of being a very profound explanation of the nature living organisms, Darwin's theory helps us understand important, practical things like the emergence of strains of diseases that resist antibiotics, and drives our understanding of the applications of things like genetics in the natural world.

In my mind, what this guy is saying is the equivalent of saying: "What's the big deal with Newton, it's not like he invented the Ipod or anything."

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Why the Republican Party Sucks: Part 3 of an Inifinite Part Series

Just wondering......

How many of those Republicans in Congress who are opposed to allowing their employers (i.e. ordinary Americans) a "government option" for health care have voluntarily given up the "government option" health care plan that their employers (i.e. ordinary Americans) are providing for members of Congress. One would think that if the "government option" is so bad then the Republicans in Congress would not avail themselves of it, insure themselves privately, and save their employers (i.e. ordinary Americans) the expense of insuring them.

Imagine the tax cut that could be passed along to ordinary Americans if the millionaire lawyers who take up so much space in Congress just paid for their own health care!

Just wondering.....

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Why the Republican Party Sucks: Part 2 of an Infinite Part Series

I know I'm not the first to comment on this, but I simply cannot let it go uncommented.

Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, on February 24, 2009:

While some of the projects in the bill make sense, their legislation is larded with wasteful spending. It includes $300 million to buy new cars for the government, $8 billion for high-speed rail projects, such as a "magnetic levitation" line from Las Vegas to Disneyland, and $140 million for something called "volcano monitoring." Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C.

For something called "volcano monitoring"? Has Governor Jindal forgotten the 57 Americans who died when Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980? Are all monitoring services that keep track of potential natural disasters "lard" in his mind? How much worse would hurricane Katrina have been had there been no warning? Or does he honestly believe that services which monitor potential natural disasters are only justified when they benefit his state?

Or is it more likely that his Republican Party handlers decided to try for a cheap shot, thinking that most Americans don't live near volcanos? Or that volcanic eruptions are so infrequent that they could get in a cheap shot and not make too many waves? Either way, if volcanic eruptions can be considered acts of God, then perhaps the Republican Party has now learned what the Almighty thinks of its recent behavior?

The irony of the Mt. Redoubt situtation is that it's happening Republican Barbie's home state.

This is what happens when a political party develops an unhealthy contempt for science, combined with an unhealthy contempt for the citizenry.

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The Big One

Just my luck to start a blog about ranting (and books) at a time when my reasons for ranting have suddenly gotten scarce. So I'm having to dig back into my mental rant archives for something..... Luckily the previous eight years have provided enough rant fodder for a lifetime (or maybe not so lucky). This one's been brewing in the back of my mind since the year 2000.

So it is pretty much a given at this point that the presidency of Little Bush was a complete disaster, except for bazillionaires who don't plan on ever having children. Those guys at least got their tax cuts. What's not so clear is who is responsible. I mean, sure, Bush is responsible, as well as whoever was pulling his strings (Cheney???). But how did such a person, one of such questionable qualifications for high office, get into a position so that he could steal the election with a minimum of handwringing by the people?

Obviously Republican voters bear the brunt of responsibility for this. Without their 47.9% of the vote, Bush could never have beaten Gore's take of 48.4% of the vote. What about the other 3.7% of the vote, you might ask? Well thanks to the winner-take-all system of the Electoral College, these votes tend not to mean much in presidential elections, and this has pretty much been the case for over 200 years! When the election isn't close, or when both major party candidates espouse similar view on the issues, voting third party can be an important expression of dissent. Please note, however, than neither of these two conditions held in 2000. As we've seen (and as was clear even before voting began) the election was very close. As for anyone who can honestly claim that there's no difference between Bush and Gore, all I can say is get your head out of the toilet because after eight years of being submerged in your own vomit you probably need a bath. Or is that stench the rotting corpse of our civil liberties?

From an Electoral College point of view, Florida turned out to be a pivotal state in this election. It was razor close in votes for the major party candidates, and whoever got its E.C. votes would win the big banana. Included among the third parties on the ballot in Florida were the Reform, Libertarian, Natural Law, and Constitution parties. Voters in these parties are nutjobs who didn't want to vote for Bush because he refused to adopt the following into the Republican platform:

1. Paying out all monies in the Federal Treasury to "tax-payers", i.e. members of the Reform, Libertarian, Natural Law, and Constitution parties.
2. Disbanding the Federal Government in favor of home rule by the States, or else into smaller political units, the size of which will be determined later on the basis of effectiveness of allowing conservative nutjobs with guns to boss everyone else around.
3. Grinding up all people who are not True Americans -- those not Reform, Libertarian, Natural Law, and Constitution parties -- and disposing of the remains in vast toxic waste storage facilities constructed in Sodam and Gomorrah (i.e. Hollywood and New York City).

The only effect these voters were going to have on the election was to reduce Little Bush's votes, which is really a good thing, so more power to them.

But there was another third party at play in Florida, one whose voters were ardently opposed to all the principles behind Little Bush's candidacy. These voters were also in favor of many, if not all, of the proposals put forward by the Gore campaign, the difference often being one of quantity, not quality. Even for those who did not find much common ground with Gore would admit that he was by far better than a patently unqualified candidate whose policies would run the country into the ground (which is exactly what happened). Logic, common sense, call it what you will, even self interest, would suggest that in an extremely close election, voting for someone you don't like is better than shooting yourself in the head.

Yet these voters did exactly that, shoot themselves in the head. Not only that, but the bullet passed through their empty heads and managed to bring down the whole rest of the country. According to the Federal Election Commission, Little Bush won Florida by 537 votes. If even six-tenths of one percent of these voters had put the interests of the country over their own selfishness, held their noses and voted for the anti-Bush candidate who actually had a chance to win, then Little Bush wouldn't have been able to steal the election at all.

These people voted for Ralph Nader, and they "elected" Little Bush. They bear almost as much responsibility for the eight year long national nightmare as Republicans do, and no amount of clicking their ruby slippers together and chanting "there's no vote like IRV, there's no vote like IRV" is going to raise eight years worth of dead, heal eight years worth of wounded, or restore eight years worth of lost opportunity.

Eight years later I'm still pissed off, and it makes me hope that the religious nutjobs are right, that the Devil exists and that Hell is a real place, because the Green party presidential candidate from the 2000 election has a lot to answer for.

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Shoulder Spreader, Arm Rest Stealer Guy

You know who these guys are. They do not weigh 400 pounds and have no choice due to their natural body configuration. They sit next to you on the airplane. They probably got to their seat before you specifically so they can stake out as much space as possible. They view the flight as a game of Risk, only they're staking out the territory with elbows, shoulders, knees and feet. The space they paid for ends at the mid-line of the arm rest, not two inches into my seat.

And short of physical violence, there is nothing you can do to get them back north of the 38th parallel. And no, shoulder spreader, arm rest stealer dude, I was not trying to pull a Larry Craig on the airplane, I just wanted to be able to sit in my seat without having the right hand side of my body jacked.

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A Rant (but just a little one!)

In these dangerous times we all know the internet is not a safe place to be, what with phishing, viruses, spy ware, and hardware that will allow bloggers to remotely waterboard you via any of your computer's USB ports. So I view my bank's efforts at on-line security with approval, and I don't mind it when they periodically ask me to verify my identity using various security questions.

It does get a little problematic when I want to log in to my account and see if my paycheck has been deposited into my account, and the first question they ask me is to verify my account balance!!!

No wonder the financial system is floating belly-up like a dead guppy in that creepy aquarium at your dentist's office.

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In the Beginning

I've had several suggestions (okay, all from the same person, but she said it several times....) that I ought to put my rants into a blog, so I decided, what the heck. Of course just ranting would get boring really quickly, so I'm also going to write about some of the books I read, and maybe even include some other topics. But "Books N Rants N Other Stuff as I See Fit And Time Allows" just wasn't concise enough, so Books N Rants it is. Stay tuned: coming up is Deepsix by Jack McDevitt.

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