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You know?
More than anything else in the world, I dislike being alone.
Even a book is company enough, but without it?
I stop feeling real after a while.
I do not exist as an individual as much as I exist as an extension of a cultural process known as 'conversation'.
The abuse and misuse of science in the media by policymakers in order to manipulate the electorate has been a problem nearly as long as there have been elected officials. These distortions inevitably begin almost as soon as the government grants funding to public institutions of science, and the refrain of "don't trouble me with the facts!" has long echoed in the halls of power. In America, the distortion or suppression of science in order to legitimize or justify one's particular ideology has had a long and flavored history. One need look no farther than John Wesley Powell and the United States Geological Survey's scientifically sound settlement plan for the West just after the Civil War.
Powell saw that farming the arid land West of the Mississippi would require new techniques and significant irrigation, and felt that it could not be inhabited in the same way that the East and the Central states had been developed. He wanted to gradually move into a sustainable West without high population densities, and to leave some areas closed to any development. It was unfortunate then, that many in the government wanted to encourage settlement on the New Frontier as rapidly as was possible.
The Western expansion was Manifest Destiny personified, and it was very popular. Western representatives in Congress wanted to increase their populations in order to increase their voting strength in the House of Representatives, and to provide a growing labour pool that would help their economies explode into productivity. Eastern districts wanted an outlet to ease their increasing population density and to reduce poverty and crime within the cities of the coast. The public wanted to believe in the American Dream again: that anyone making their own way out in the West could strike it rich with the next Comstock Lode, or see their tiny herd of cattle someday grow into the King Ranch.
Nobody wanted the government to tell them where or how they could live, no matter how unsustainable their lifestyle. Reports were published declaring that development and population brought precipitation, and that the West would become as moist and inhabitable as the coast if only the people would arrive. Farms were founded, and then collapsed in drought. It was revealed that the mineral wealth of the West was homogeneous and evenly distributed. Individuals invested in mines digging for minerals that would never be found in those locales, and many shareholders would be ruined.
A hundred and fifty years later, it seems that we are still fighting the same battle.
The charges laid at the feet of the current generation of politicians have been particularly egregious. Is the mean global temperature rising due to human influence? Will teaching abstinence instead of sex-education prevent teen pregnancy and the spread of sexually transmitted disease? Are certain forms of birth control more hazardous to women's health than others? Is "intelligent design" a valid theory that should be taught in science classrooms? These are all interesting and important questions of some controversy whose resolution can and will have a very real impact upon the well-being of the United States of America... but the bottom line is that it doesn't matter what those answers really are if your government is going to ignore them in favor of its own preferred responses.
So what are you going to do about it?
Why not let all of the aspiring young cartoonists from the United States compete for the privilege of meeting the celebrity cartoonist of their dreams by sketching out a comic that either lampoons the abusers or helps to better educate the public over the basic precepts of science? While I personally might suggest that Gary Larson of "the Far Side", or Bill Watterson of "Calvin and Hobbes" fame might make for better celebrity judges, I can not disagree with the initiative behind the contest. Besides - if you aren't going to compete, you can still participate by signing up to vote for your favorite submissions, or to endorse a petition by the Union of Concerned Scientists to demand scientific integrity in policymaking.
It isn't a solution, but it is a place to start.
Next time I say that a girl is "my type", I may mean haplotype.
A photo from my mother of my father and one of our cats, Yoda. Apparently Florida has been treating both of them well...
Time for a little outrage.
Kids are dying in Iraq, the economy is slowly circling the global toilet bowl, gasoline in Texas is almost three dollars to the gallon, hurricane season is brewing again, and all the President can find to worry about is a way to write discrimination into the Constitution? A tiny minority of persons wish to share in the same legal protections and recognitions granted to their heterosexual neighbors, and to make de jure what is already de facto: their social commitment to union and family - and the President opposes this? Perhaps it should not amaze me that such would arise in a nation where a proposed 1972 amendment stating that "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex" would fail to be ratified by sufficient state legislatures...
That said, I am thrilled to see that even with a Republican majority, the Senate failed to achieve even a simple majority to continue debate on this nonsense. One can only hope that the House will follow suit and sensibly reject this atrocity later this week. Does the President really want to expend any more of his already catastrophically low political capital on this fight?
Tonight, the infamous "Curse of Braveheart" almost struck again. For those afflicted by The Curse, screening the 1995 Mel Gibson film or listening to the James Horner soundtrack can be courting disaster. It is fortunate for me that my iPod had only offered up track eleven, "For The Love Of A Princess" when the deer leapt into my headlights as I drove home tonight on SH 242 - and not the near-fatal track twelve, "Falkirk". Had track twelve been playing, the ghost of Sir William Wallace would have risen from the grave and claimed his vengeance in the name of Scottish dead... and I never would have swerved into the other lane in time.
This is a test, and only a test of the not-exactly-an-emergency blogcasting system. I would like to thank Dana Watson for encouraging me to use these tools to publish my thoughts. She was correct: they do provide an excellent vehicle from which to publish one's late-night rantings and ravings which greatly exceeds my old HTML version in facility and power. I would also like to thank Jeremy Tolbert for installing the basic Movable Type blog files, and for providing a few technical pointers to head me off in the right direction. I believe that most of the older archives have repopulated the history of this place, and I hope that many more words will follow hence.
Tonight I have broken my fifth blade while fencing, and the third of my personal weapons. This stunted collection of broken steel is why fencers wear some personal protection and face-masks while sparring. Not that the two thin layers of ballistic cloth my opponent wore would have actually stopped the jagged edge of my suddenly-sharpened tip, but I knew I held the moment and had already scored - and as such, I also held my point and was not preparing for another remise.
This latest casualty was an older épée of which I had become quite fond over the last year and a half, for while somewhat stiff and inflexible (indubitably what led to its demise), it was light and well-balanced. It certainly should have been well-balanced... I trimmed the tang down and fitted it to the hilt myself - the first for which I have done so. I am nostalgic, but there will be others... I suppose that I will be fencing sabre or on borrowed blades until I get it replaced...