Deep tweets: Holy See

Best capture of the moment I saw all day on the social nets.

Like this photo. via @hardknoxfirst pic.twitter.com/oL8lpRIubl
— Hudsonette (@hudsonette) March 27, 2014

Deep tweets

It's become routine but I will never get over having lived to see pictures actually being sent to Earth from Mars. Just astounding.

Absolutely crazy thin blades of surprisingly competent eroded rock in @MarsCuriosity image http://t.co/UDw4PBaFlk pic.twitter.com/q49mIbS9s4
— Emily Lakdawalla (@elakdawalla) March 27, 2014

Subterranean homesick blues

Today would have been my Dad's 86th birthday if he had lived to see it. I bought garden plants because that's what I did for his birthday for the last twenty years of his life. My soul brother Mark Herschler's new song seems to be the only thing I have to say today. Reminds me of how much I miss my Happy Valley family as well. It's been that kind of day.

The Liar's Crusade

By Capt. Fogg

Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.

--Saint Augustine:  De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim --

______________________

Well you knew it was going to happen.  When it comes to a vessel big enough to contain the egos of the illiterate Biblical literalists, the world is not enough and if anything can expand, can inflate faster than the early universe, it's those very egos who insist we consider their idiotic, superstitious, fatuous and fact-free delusions to be reasonable alternatives to demonstrated and proven physical law. 

Too bad that moronic mob of pretenders to received authority know as little about Christianity and its foundations as they know about nature as revealed in science and mathematics. Anything once rational and functional in early Christianity seems to have shed those attributes as vestigial organs, like the hip bones in a whale as an example of just how evolution works in all things.

There is nothing about the origin of species in the Fox TV series Cosmos that is without massive evidential support or that hasn't been thoroughly and repeatedly demonstrated in the fossil record and in the laboratory. The truth is that DNA based life forms not only can and do but must evolve over long periods of time into quite different life forms because of the mechanisms involved.  To argue otherwise is either dishonest or stupid or pathological.  Face it, only if one is staggeringly uninformed about basic physics and chemistry, geology and paleontology or mentally impaired and basically dishonest, is there any need to treat the fundamentals of science and mathematics as "opinions" that can honestly and reasonably be held by honest and reasonable people.

Few people would take the argument that because one can't come up with a final figure for Pi all numbers are so equally probable that I can't be mocked for saying it's 4 or worse. Would anyone honestly assert that I must be allowed in every classroom to insist that it's 4 because there's an old paleolithic legend I choose to delude myself with?  But it seems that there are more than a few who will, for many sinister and stupid reasons, tell you that facts are irrelevant and demand the right to interrupt your evening's entertainment and your offspring's education to demand respect for stupidity.

Danny Falkner, of Answers In Genesis showed up on the "Christ Centered" Janet Mefford Show  yesterday to accuse the Fox television series and its host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, of "marginalizing" those marginally rational and totally dishonest delusionals with "dissenting"  views on accepted scientific truths, reports Right Wing Watch. They say it's only fair to be allowed to refute the irrefutable -- and because they "believe" and belief is all they need to shut you up.

“Boy, but when you have so many scientists who simply do not accept Darwinian evolution, it seems to me that that might be something to throw in there, you know, the old, ‘some scientists say this, others disagree and think this,’ but that’s not even allowed,” 

Said Mefford, and presumably there were nodding heads all over the halls of idiocy and  cesspits of mendacity.   It's frightening to think someone can think of getting away with asserting that we have "so many scientists" and can't see the inherent contradiction.  (If you prefer unsupportable tradition over science, you're not a scientist) 

So perhaps we have so many football fans who think the Seahawks lost the Superbowl, that the Sun orbits the flat Earth and Methusala lived 900 years. I have the right to interrupt anyone to assert this and for free.  May I demand the right to show up in any church on any Sunday to insist that there is no Yahweh, no El or Elohim, no trinity, no creation and never could have been?  That Jesus was nothing but another of many, failed anti-Roman zealots, that there is no heaven, no hell, no sin, no forgiveness, no resurrection -- no spirits, demons, angels and no souls?  Do I have the right to set up an altar to Zog in every Church, synagogue, Temple, Mosque and public school?

And why the hell not? 

Because it's not about fairness. It's not about honesty, it's certainly not about freedom of speech or of belief .  As Salmon Rushdie said of Fundamentalism: it's about power. It's about bringing untold trouble and sorrow, it's the idiot's crusade.

The extraordinary deeds of ordinary men

By Capt. Fogg

I won't comment on the proposition that the men who were honored with the Congressional Medal of Honor yesterday had been overlooked because they had been identified with some less favored ethnic group. It takes away from their individual stories and suggests that by honoring them we're doing them some sort of favor by elevating them to the level of  "regular" Americans. 

Having listened yesterday to the long recitation of the deeds of these medal recipients, I don't doubt that they all earned the long delayed distinction in full.  In fact I felt that although I had only turned on the TV for a quick check of the stock market, I was duty bound as an American to watch the entire ceremony -- and I did.  None of these men seem to have borne a grudge for having been overlooked and that's more to their credit and speaks more to their character, but no one who endured such risk or paid such a price should ever be forgotten even by those like me who may not have approved of the actions that put them in harm's way and cost so many of them their lives.

We're a nation that loves to say "support the troops" instead of supporting their interests while they serve and afterwards.  There's far more to support than pestering anyone in uniform with applause while voting for politicians who constantly attack their benefits.  Applause is cheap, medals are inexpensive. Remembering what happens when we go to war; remembering what apparently ordinary men have done and can do when something needs to be done and despite the danger or the personal consequences, is a part of the obligation they place on us and the least we can do in return. 

Of all the things we are urged never to forget by people who foment wars, such men, such deeds are the most often and soon forgotten.  I would remember them individually if I could, but not so much as heroes but as another reminder of the value of human life; of how much an ordinary man can do, of how far beyond common experience he can rise and of how little his value has to do with the petty ways we measure our fellow Americans.

None of the survivors became millionaire industrialists or could afford to purchase political favors. Perhaps some could be described by the 'Patriots' on the Right as takers looking for handouts from the government at our expense. Can we ignore the lesson that the measure of a man is not money, nor knowledge, nor industry?  Can we remember that the man who mows your lawn, fixes your BMW or drives a school bus -- even the man who has never been able to hold a job may be, in such a staggering way, a better man than we are, that I am?

They don't want you to know

By Capt. Fogg

I'm probably repeating myself by warning you that a sales pitch insisting that the item or idea or information you're selling is something someone doesn't want you to have or to learn about is a marker for hokum and perhaps outright fraud.  Similar marketing techniques include warnings that you must get this or read that or go to the website "before they ban it" or that scientists, or historians or doctors or liberals are hiding the real truth from you about things like magic beans or  some dietary trick that will block the effects of eating ten thousand calories a day -- or that some common ingredient is making you sick or pumping you full of  obscure 'toxins'  you can only get rid of if you buy my book.

Such marketing, if you can call it that, is so pervasive that it might seem as though the truth about most things has been hermetically

encapsulated in an impenetrable shell of propaganda: websites, infomercials and advertisements designed to misinform and mislead for profit.  We recognize some of it, tolerate much of it as just hyperbole and humor, but sometimes too much flim flam will send you to the slam.

Kevin Trudeau, whose Natural Cures "They" Don't Want You To Know About is a prime example of health and nutrition hokum, just found out the hard truth the hard way and will have ten years in Federal prison to meditate on life.

Do booksellers who feature and promote such books bear some responsibility for misleading millions into harming or at least neglecting their health?  As far as I know there have been few cases like it. It seems to be a rarity and there are no end of fraudulent sales pitches for water "with a different, non-toxic hydrogen bond angle,"  bracelets and pendants "tuned to natural frequencies" and books that assure you it's only the gluten-containing bun on that triple bacon chili cheese megaburger with cheese fries making you sick and giving you "grain brain."  Caveat Emptor after all, is part of the Tea Party Utopian dream where allowing anyone to cheat anyone else leads to liberty and justice for all -- and of course enforcing any kind of truth in advertising law would run up the debt and cost jobs and place an unnecessary regulatory burden on business.

One of their aricraft is missing

By Capt. Fogg

Let's be certain of one thing today:  Nothing whatever has been going on on planet Earth for the last couple of days that is worth interrupting the constant speculation and obsessive concern with the missing aircraft.  There is no armed uprising in Venezuela, escalating Russian aggression against the Ukraine isn't worth mentioning and that the Dow is down nearly 260 points this afternoon is of no consequence whatever.  One of our aircraft is missing, or rather one of Malaysia's aircraft is along with 200 odd mostly Chinese passengers.

If any of the other things that go one everyday happen to interest you, CNN doesn't want to be bothered with it and you'll have to tune in to something like BBC or Al Jazeera where you might learn about the collapse of  the cease fire between Gaza and Israel, the struggle for democracy in Turkey, a left wing victory in El Salvador, the arrest of journalists in Egypt. . .  you know all that boring stuff that none of the hip people are interested in when there are celebrities and calamities carefully selected as the thing we need to hear about to the exclusion of all else.

No, the proliferation of the all-news format has resulted in far, far fewer choices and much less information for Americans and apparently we like it that way.  Entertainment news, infomercials, rumors of scandals and commercials and one major story at a time, chewed on, speculated on, extrapolated from endlessly until some other profitably sensational thing comes along to drown out our interest in the real world as we are led through the chutes to be fleeced.

Sentimental Sunday

When I was teenager I had a raging crush on Peter Noone of Herman's Hermits. I kind of forgot about him for years but then I read this interview and I'm crushing on him all over again.

Deep tweets

Nor teally such a deep tweet but it is amazing art.

Amazing art by Ben Heine pic.twitter.com/tBWqsIshl7

— Sexy Summer (@LeahyTrahanqip) January 31, 2014

I want my Obamaphone!

By Capt. Fogg

The younger generation, and to me that means almost everyone, sees a cellular phone as something much more than a telephone.  It's a symbol even if everyone and his 5 year old kid has one and the semiotic value has much to do with the snob quotient, the joy of having something before anyone else has one, and very little to do with making phone calls. So judging from the jealousy in Rush Limbaugh's voice, the phone to have, the phone he doesn't have, is the Obamaphone. 

No, being filthy rich won't help, in fact it has no price and it's so exclusive it doesn't actually exist.  It's just another vintage lie from past Republican campaigns, wandering zombie-like from lectern to podium to  press conference to blog page to radio show.  Yes.  Yes indeed.  There is one born every minute and a Tea Party con man to take him.

If you're dumb enough to believe that Barack H. Obama is handing out free telephones to the gleefully unemployed "takers" along with the free money he takes from you and hands out to leeches and bums and welfare queens -- you're just the sort of person the Tea Party wants on its side.  That's why they keep telling you you can't have one of these phones even though your life's blood is being drained in order to pay for thousands of them.  That's Tea Party Dumb.  That's Drudge Report Dumb.  That's the sort of dumb Kansas Senatorial candidate Milton Wolf  hopes Kansans are when he uses this moldy, mangy, sleazy and threadbare lie  to make people so angry they'll vote for a piece of shit like him.

Recently a frozen virus was dug up in Antarctic ice and it's still viable after 300,000 years.  Republican lie makers can only dream of such near-immortality, but their lies do last, don't they?  They still believe Democrats started the Great Depression, that Barack Obama started the near-Depression years even before he was elected and they still believe 47% of Americans live tax free and get free money, food, lodging and telephones and people like Rush Limbaugh pay far too much of their hard lied-for income so that lazy black women can have free cellphones to talk on while they lay around eating free food and waiting for the welfare check.

Now there has been a program in place to provide phones for the indigent so that they can look for jobs, but it's private money and it was started by George W. Bush, just like the recession and two wars and the record spending and unemployment they think you're dumb enough to blame on Obama.

And are they right about you -- you Tea Party stooge, you Limbaugh listening, Fox following empty headed fool?  If you're one of those, eat your heart out.  You can't have an Obamaphone or one of those special welfare queen edition Cadillacs or any of that free money and you can't have a country with any future either. And that's no lie.

Your moment of Zen

Frozen Niagara Falls [photo credit - more photos at link]

I sing the body mechanical

by Captain Fogg

"America's love affair with the automobile" used to be the most noticeably overused cliche in the the American idiom and indeed, starting with the 20th century few things transformed private life and personal liberty like the automobile. Few things contributed so much to economic growth From the end of  WWII and through the 1960's everything was about cars.  If you're one of the dwindling part of the population who remembers first hand, I don't have to explain.  You'll remember the car culture and you'll remember how it made the USA run.  Our youth was about the freedom cars brought.  The status of our families was displayed in the driveway and our introduction to love had a lot to do with the freedom of the road and the secluded areas it led to. It's gone. It's strip malls and plastic signs and Japanese designs. It's people locked safely inside, staring at little screens.

What would have happened to Jack Kerouac, who would have heard of Ken Kesey if this had been a nation where people gleefully chose some soulless transportation appliance chosen for cheapness and that simply took you places safely and economically without your participation?  Where do you find America, how do you get there but on the road?  Why even have a road if we can live in a hive?

I can't understand the mania for taking away our cars, for looking forward eagerly to cars that differ from Subway cars only in the passenger capacity --  that run on electronic rails?  Safety and economy and the vision of  a future without back roads, the crunch of gravel, the wind in your hair on Summer nights, the smell of gumbo in road houses you pass as the V twin rumbles between your knees or the V8 sings as you change down from 6 to 5 to pass that Toyota safetybox with blacked out windows nd the 'Star Safety System' and the airbags.  I sing the body mechanical -- the music of the night and of freedom. The poetry of machines.

Soulless appliance, we don't know how it works and don't care -- a place to wait and text message and facebook and link to Linkedin and watch American idol as the soulless matrix sucks the life out of you in perfect safety.  What the hell has happened to us?  Are we really heir to the termites, the moles -- timid troglodytes  living in plastic tubes and breathing filtered air -- too timid to take control?

Pardon me, I'm making myself sick.  It's a beautiful Saturday and in the garage, my new Harley gleams, a symphony in Blue -- and route 714 waits, just over the bridge, leading west out to the big lake under miles of  trees, arched over the asphalt like a cathedral knave and the air smells the way most of you have never smelled it.  South along 441, along the levee, the live oaks and Spanish moss and fish camps and orchards and road houses and kids that still wave from front lawns as you ride by.  America, I'm still here, and I still remember. Of thee I still sing.