Dear Little Bald Bastard,
Can you loan me 50 bucks?
- Fiscaliberal
Dear Fiscaliberal,
Yes, as long as you can accept it in monthly installments of $.05 for the next 83 years. I'll leave nickels on the floor of the Spring Garden El station. Look for the first one in a few days.
You should know that I have a lot of problems with deism/religion. There is the usual complaint about the exclusiveness inherent in any belief system that purports to reveal the one true path to the divine. But when deists look to their patron spirit(s) as the driving force behind natural events, I start foaming at the mouth and gnawing on chair legs.
The world is, almost completely at random, a stunningly beautiful and unfathomably horrible place. Invoking a supernatural explanation for unpredictable events is a double-edged sword. Also, both edges are coated in battery acid, and they're aiming for your exposed throat at the same time.
At best, ascribing events like these to the influence of magical sky beings fosters the belief that natural events occur because of the everyday behavior of the persons affected. (At its logical extreme, of course, is the delusion that these events can be influenced or even controlled by good behavior, dietary restriction, virgin sacrifice, etc.) At worst, a default deistic explanation makes us less safe, by acting as a disincentive to actual productive inquiry.
Our only hope for minimizing the damage from pandemic illness and natural disasters lies with objective scientific investigation. Better prediction of geological and meteorological events. Structures built from modern materials and designed to survive extreme stresses. Efficient, workable evacuation plans. Vaccines to prevent communicable diseases. These things don't just happen, no matter how humbly we petition or how hard we pray. They happen as the result of brain work and perseverance, and the underlying assumption that events that kill a lot of people should and can be prevented. If we call it the will of god(s) and trust in the power of prayer to save us, we're leaving it to chance. Without the will to make our own way in the Universe, and the scientific diligence to learn how it all works, we're signing on as the future test subjects in an experiment testing the power of fervent prayer to alter the trajectory of a civilization-killing asteroid. In that scenario, my money's on the giant rock.
I've got a couple of things cooking, I promise. Hectic events have put me a little behind with the updates, but there should be two new ones this week. In the meantime, feel free to send a question my way by clicking here.
Now With 20% More Bells, Whistles:
I've added some new functionality to Ask LBB. There's a new RSS feed, as well as an email subscription service. Your inbox, it burns us!
One Thing Athiests Never Do:
Pray for the deaths of people who disagree with them.
When Wiley Drake, pastor of a Baptist church in Buena Park, California, used church letterhead and a church-affiliated radio show to endorse former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee's candidacy for president, it raised some red flags. Under federal tax law, non-profit organizations (religious or not) aren't allowed to endorse candidates. Those that do so risk losing their non-profit status, and the attending tax benefits.
There's a minor piece of oft-ignored legal jargon called the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. It's supposed to keep religious zealots from interfering in government, and vice versa. Despite the creeping theocratic bent of the current administration, maintaining federal tax benefits for a religious organization that endorses candidates is still a no-no. So, a group called Americans United for Separation of Church and State asked the IRS to investigate the church's non-profit status.
Instead of defending his actions, Drake called on his flock to join him in praying to their god for the deaths of two of Americans United's leaders. While I'm pretty confident that there's no grumpy bearded man in the sky, grinding fresh points onto a pair of lightning bolts and aiming for Americans United's headquarters, it does raise some interesting questions.
Drake is asking for help to petition the omnipotent creator of the Universe to kill two human beings. How is that substantively different from trying to hire a hitman? The question of there actually being an omnipotent creator of the Universe is immaterial; Drake believes a god exists, and he's asked that god to pop a cap in his enemies.
It's the belief that is the key here. If I believe that I've hired a hitman to kill someone, I've committed a crime. It doesn't matter if my "hitman" is an undercover FBI agent, and my intended target was never in any real danger. I've engaged in a conspiracy to commit murder. In many jurisdictions, the penalty for this crime is on par with what I'd face if I'd actually done some killing.
I'll say it again, because I think it bears repeating. Drake believes that he and his followers are asking an omnipotent (and not at all imaginary) being to kill his enemies. He has clearly shown the intent to cause the deaths of two people. This has to be a criminal act. If it wasn't all so laughably stupid, I'd say Drake should be prosecuted for his threats.
ReligionNewsBlog
Americans United for Separation of Church and State
LA Times (registration required)
Dear Little Bald Bastard,
I demand that you explain the unfathomable popularity of LOLcats. Get to it.
- Not LOLing
Dear Not LOLing,
LOLcats and their spawn - LOLPresidents, LOLBots, even LOLJesus - operate on the two bedrock principles of Internet humor:
1) Anything you can do, I can do better. (Ur captions. Let me improov upon them.)
2) Nothing makes a mildly amusing joke more funny that beating it into the ground until the whole world gets sick of it, and it can come back as ironic on a webcomic t-shirt.
Anybody who tells you that Web2.0 isn't a vast field of suck lit by vanishingly rare glimmers of talent is probably hoping to quit working in favor of blogging full time.
Random Internal Soundtrack
Ever since I managed to wash my iPod in the pocket of my jacket, the soundtrack of my commute has been a collection of overheard conversation, transit engine noise, and the tinny buzz of music from out of the headphones of the future deaf community. On days when I forget to bring something to read, my brain often fills the background noise with snatches of poorly remembered songs. I can usually only recall a few bars or so, and that short bit invariably lodges in my brain like a tumor with ninja training, repeating on an endless, maddening loop until I get involved in some task or other.
This morning, for some unfathomable reason, I got brain-smacked by the opening verse of the showtune Big Spender. I haven't heard it in years, but that's de rigueur for these random songbombs. What made it notable was that my stunted, malformed psyche managed to conjure up a version I've never heard before. I was hearing it sung by bathhouse-era Bette Midler. Loud, brassy, lungs that could power a small wind farm. I didn't even know that she'd recorded the song; thirty seconds on Google revealed 2005's Sings the Peggy Lee Songbook, containing Midler's recording of the song, a version arranged by her old bathhouse piano player, Barry Manilow.
I haven't ever heard this version of the song, nor do I plan to, so I guess I'll never know how similar it is to the one my brain vomited up. I just found the whole episode mildly disconcerting, and I thought I'd share my disquiet with the Internet. Isn't this the kind of thing that convinces the credulous that they're psychic?
Dear Little Bald Bastard,
Have you ever thought about politics?
- Will Vote For Food
Dear Will Vote For Food,
I burn a lot of brain cells fuming about how modern political discourse sounds like an elementary school playground. Contentious issues are debated in a more verbose version of "nuh uh!" "yuh huh!" and there's a remarkable amount of noise that carries very little information.
However, I suspect that the thrust of your question is whether or not I've ever considered running for office. I have considered it, and pretty much ruled it out. I'm appalled by the the money-driven campaigning process. I find the personalities and people who are attracted to politics irksome. I can't stomach the necessary pandering to every group and interest that it takes to get elected. Finally, there's enough questionable conduct in my misspent past that I doubt I'd survive the public vivisection that awaits a candidate for any office higher than dogcatcher.
But the thing that turns me off most about American politics is the way that anyone who has the temerity to allow their opinions to be influenced by actual events is labeled a "flip-flopper." Seriously? The whole of scientific and intellectual pursuit is grounded in the proposition that you have to be willing to scrutinize your beliefs. You base your opinions on the best available evidence, but if new evidence undermines those beliefs, you have to be willing to abandon them, no matter how compelling or comfortable they are.
That's why science is inherently progressive. You can believe as hard as you want that the Universe revolves around the Earth, until somebody points out that the other planets move in a way that only be explained if they and the Earth are all orbiting the sun. At that point, I want the people in charge* of my country to have the intellectual fortitude to not jam their heads in the sand and insist that the Universe is heliocentric.
If, to use a purely hypothetical example, you support a military action due in part to evidence that the target is trying to build a nuclear weapon, and latter it turns out that the nuclear weapon bits were incorrect, withdrawing your support for that military action wouldn't make you indecisive. It would make you a person who values truth over slavish devotion to an erroneous idea.
And yet, for some unfathomable reason, the American voting public relates to its elected officials like a four-year-old to its father. Daddy knows everything; he can answer every question you pose, and he's never wrong. Why would he ever need to change his mind?
All of that is a long way of saying that I don't think I could get elected to political office. I don't believe I have a soul to sell, but I do value what's left of my brain, and I pride myself on a modicum of ability to think critically. Until being a successful politician doesn't necessitate coating one's brain in intellectual cement to block out new information, I'll have to stay on the "despondent voter" side of the political equation.
* For purposes of America, assume these people are old, rich white men.
Blogger Goes Batshit:
For those of you reading Ask LBB on Livejournal or in a feed reader of some sort, I have no clue why Blogger suddenly decided to republish more than a dozen of my recent entries. Unlike the last time this happened, I wasn't muddling about in the archives, or doing anything else that could have caused it. Blogger just seems to have had a Gary Busey moment. Sorry about that.
Dear Little Bald Bastard,
In 1,000 years, what will archaeologists who dig up Nike merchandise with the Michael Jordan logo think it means?
- Sarawesome
Dear Sarawesome,
It's hard to say what future researchers, rummaging through the remains of long-vanished early-millennial America, will make of the iconic spread-eagled silhouette. Will they recognize it as representative of superlative basketball talent turned into marketing gold? Or will they mistake it for a weirdly lumpy bird?
The key seems to be whether or not some civilization ending event happens between now and our hypothetical dig. We live in a hyperrecorded, obsessively archived age; the Intertubes are clogged with pictures of every cat in the industrialized world. With the sheer volume of information being stored every second, and given a smooth ascent into a glorious, flying car-filled future, it's hard to believe that any society sophisticated enough to make organized study of its predecessors wouldn't be able to find some reference to explain a symbol that was, during our time, so ubiquitous.
Then again, the logo could be uncovered on the other side of a catastrophe sufficiently horrible to destroy our delicate technological infrastructure. There are plenty of candidates; supervolcanoes, asteroid strikes, nuclear war and drug-resistant bacteria could all do the trick. It's hard to know what a rebuilt civilization, without the benefit of our LOLcats, will think of us and our marketing tools. However, I can say with a fair degree of certainty that they'll think those FCUK shirts are pretty fucking stupid.
The Machine, It Works!
I've successfully created the world's first chronometeorological transfer device. This morning, I swapped the August heat and humidity in the Delaware Valley for the drab, dreary chilliness of mid-October. I'm still damp, but it's from rain and not sweat. I consider this a victory.
Link Pimpin':
Spend some time beneath the tracks of the Market-Frankford El with David Kessler's Shadow World. It's a video blog featuring the people who live and work in the city's Kensington section. These are folks you don't see in the "Philly's awesome" flick that runs before Imax movies at the Franklin Institute. Their neighborhood struggles like an underfed vine in the grimy shadow of the El. The videos don't editorialize; there is no Michael Moore-ish self-promotion. Just simple, revealing moments among the city's forgotten, that should be mandatory viewing for the mayoral candidates.
Dear Little Bald Bastard,
Do you ever get tired of being sarcastic all the time?
- Wondering
Dear Wondering,
Are you kidding? I live in a world where thousands of Americans are dying in an occupied foreign country, which was invaded partly on the advice of a Vice President who doesn't believe he's part of the Executive branch of government. I'm pretty sure I sneer in my sleep.
Dear Little Bald Bastard,
How do you refinish wood floors?
- n00b homeowner
Dear n00b homeowner,
Because I have fewer home repair skills that the three-day-old corpse of Bob Vila, I refinish wood floors by buying an area rug to hide the worn spots. If this isn't acceptable, try grabbing the phone book and flipping to "Contractors." If you find one that's reliable and reasonably priced, let me know. My floor is starting to look like a jigsaw puzzle made entirely of braided polyester.
