Schandenfreude

I know they're really just fucking with me.

Because that's what the Eagles do. They trick me into thinking they're good, by doing something like making the playoffs and beating Dallas 44-6. I feel like I should know better by now. I know there's a game where we call only 10 rushing plays and Andy Reid performs some confounding clock management that sucks the life out of me just waiting around the corner. For now, I'll take it.

As happy as I am for my own team, I confess to experiencing some awesome schadenfreude in watching the Dallas Cowboys totally self-destruct. And yes, I've watched the highlights of yesterday's game like three times already today. This won't get old for a while.

War in Gaza

I'm somewhat hesitant to comment much about the most recent and on-going insurgency by the Israeli military into Gaza for a couple reasons. For one, I find recent events too awful to even read about. From the humanitarian crisis now experienced by Palestinians to how generally self-defeating the actions of both parties appear to me, the words that come off these news reports just fill me with dread. Secondly, in spite of emotional responses that have been triggered in me by reading about what is happening, I have a hard time feeling too much sympathy for either side.

Regardless of how anyone feels about who is right and wrong and what either side should be doing, I think we can all agree that we wish to see these horrible events come to an end as expediently and as peacefully as possible. It also seems obvious to me that until we can categorically reject this attitude, there's going to be no end in sight.

(1) Never forget the basics - the core issue is still an unresolved conflict about ending an occupation and establishing an independent Palestinian state - everything has to start from here to be serious (this is true also for Hamas who continue to heavily hint that they will accept the 1967 borders).

While I consider myself a pretty liberal person, this ecumenical view whitewashes the actual core problem between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The reason why there's an occupation in the first place, and why there is a dispute over land, is because both sides have a book that they believe was authored by the creator of the universe. These books make incompatible claims about reality (more often than not both are wrong), and both say that this alleged creator promised a strip of land to one group of people over another. Because the contents of these books are transcendent into a metaphysical lifetime, they become a great source of motivation for people who really ascribe to this mythology. The fact of the matter is that Jews and Muslims (and Christians, and Hindus, and Scientologists, Mormons, etc., etc., etc.) are arguing about fictional claims. This is absurd. Until we begin to admit that this is a dispute over superstition we will continue to prevent a rational conversation from taking place that could one day lead a peaceful resolution. Considering the apocalyptic scenarios believers of these iron age ideas hold, there is no time like the present to make every effort to alter our discourse. Time may be running out.

Food Fight

A history of warfare since WWII as portrayed by food representing various world powers. Yes, those are pieces of beef stroganoff infiltrating a Cuban sandwich.

Happy Secular Christmas!

Or Saturnalia, or Yule if you prefer. Maybe you want to celebrate the birth of Mithras or Dionysius today. Hey, whatever floats your boat. Just don't tell me that this is an exclusively Christian holiday. I've been having a nice secular Christmas with my mom in Pennsylvania where gifts were exchanged, a terrific roast beef dinner was enjoyed, and now I'm drinking a fine cup of java from the coffee press that was given to me this morning. Good times! Yes, this is possible to do in 21st century America. So, suck it, Bill O'Reilly:

Can we just get the new guy in already? part 3

So our new president is on track to appoint an actual scientist to Energy Secretary. What is this strange new country in which we live?

Democratic officials close to the transition team say that Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, appears to be increasingly on track to become energy secretary.

A Chinese-American, Chu is a professor of physics and molecular and cell biology at the University of California-Berkeley and has been the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 2004, where he has pushed aggressively for research into alternative energy as a way to combat global warming...Chu has been a strong advocate for the need to engage scientists in the search for ways to combat global warming by replacing fossil fuels with other energy sources such as biofuels and the sun.

What have we learned from Prohibition?

Apparently nothing. This past Friday was the 75 anniversary of the repeal of prohibition.

The entire alcohol industry was controlled not by licensed, regulated businesses, but by violent criminals willing to assume the risks of trafficking an illegal product in exchange for obscenely high profits -- profits inflated by alcohol's very illegality.

This new underground environment also transformed alcohol as a product. Bootleggers discovered there was more money to be made with more potent forms of liquor that could more easily be smuggled and hidden. Stealth and transportability, rather than safety, became essential.

And rather than reducing crime, alcohol Prohibition made pretty much everybody criminals, creating an unheard-of level of gang violence and police corruption.

By 1933, these factors, plus the Great Depression and the urgent need for tax revenues that could once again be generated by legal alcohol sales, had caused public enthusiasm for Prohibition to wane. Repeal came quickly and was relatively uncontroversial.

And what do we do today?

According to a 2006 report by George Mason University public policy expert Jon Gettman, marijuana is now by far the largest cash crop in America. At $36 billion a year, it exceeds wheat and corn combined.

Because we refuse to establish sensible regulations and controls on the manufacture and sale of marijuana, every cent goes to criminals and violent gangs. They pay no taxes and answer to nobody for selling to children or operating in an unsafe or irresponsible manner, just like the bootleggers of old.

And yet, according to the most recent FBI Uniform Crime Reports, we arrest more than 872,000 Americans a year for marijuana offenses, and that number has climbed every year for the past five years. That's one marijuana arrest every 36 seconds. And nearly 90 percent of those arrests are for simple possession - not dealing or manufacturing.

Can we just get the new guy in already? part 2

Remember all the great things about the past eight years? No, you say? Well, luckily for Bush cabinet members, they're getting a reminder during the waning days of this administration.

A two-page memo that has been sent to Cabinet members and other high-ranking officials offers a guide for discussing Bush's eight-year tenure during their public speeches.

Titled "Speech Topper on the Bush Record," the talking points state that Bush "kept the American people safe" after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, lifted the economy after 2001 through tax cuts, curbed AIDS in Africa and maintained "the honor and the dignity of his office."

The document presents the Bush record as an unalloyed success.

It mentions none of the episodes that detractors say have marred his presidency: the collapse of the housing market and major financial services companies, the flawed intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war, the federal response to Hurricane Katrina or the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

God forbid this guy can ever be held accountable for anything.

Can we just get the new guy in already?

Here's current EPA Administrator and Bush appointee, Stephen Johnson, on the relationship between religion and science.

It’s not a clean-cut division. If you have studied at all creationism vs. evolution, there’s theistic or God-controlled evolution and there’s variations on all those themes.

Let me address that first sentence. YES, there is a "clean-cut division". When religions stop making empirical claims about reality that are proven wrong through methods of inquiry, then we can agree with Mr. Johnson's statement.

But, I suppose this shouldn't come as any surprise since he was appointed by someone who said the following:

Well, I think you can have both. I think evolution can -- you're getting me way out of my lane here. I'm just a simple president. But it's, I think that God created the earth, created the world; I think the creation of the world is so mysterious it requires something as large as an almighty and I don't think it's incompatible with the scientific proof that there is evolution.

Yes, the creation of the world is mysterious. That's why universities have physics programs so we can encourage the best and brightest minds to work towards unraveling this mystery. They do this through observation, testing results, and re-testing results over and over again until they can reach some kind of consensus about matters of fact. Attributing such things to a god basically is where the line of questioning stops. Why try to figure out anything if you can just say, "Well, god did it. That's good enough for me."

Keeping my fingers crossed that Obama will not be appointing any religious kooks into our government.

I can't believe we won today!

I honestly have no idea who the Eagles are anymore. Are they the team that tied to Cincinatti (a team with one win) and lost to Baltimore 36-7, turning the ball over 9 times in 9 quarters? Or are they the team that just beat the Giants, the best team in football?

I still feel like I'm a player in a game of deception to get me sucked into thinking the Eagles are any good. This is probably what it's like being a drug addict.

We were supposed to be afraid of this guy?

If you live in world in which Sarah Palin is a great leader, the you might be a redneck...or you just may be one of the many voters who allowed wild stories about Bill Ayers scare you away from voting for Obama.

In reading from what the man himself has to say, any thinking person has to realize how absurd this fear really was. And lets be grateful that in the end it didn't work.

The Weather Underground crossed lines of legality, of propriety and perhaps even of common sense. Our effectiveness can be — and still is being — debated. We did carry out symbolic acts of extreme vandalism directed at monuments to war and racism, and the attacks on property, never on people, were meant to respect human life and convey outrage and determination to end the Vietnam war.

Peaceful protests had failed to stop the war. So we issued a screaming response. But it was not terrorism; we were not engaged in a campaign to kill and injure people indiscriminately, spreading fear and suffering for political ends.

10 Most Amazing Things the Sky Can Do

Images here.

The war on Christmas is WINNABLE

This makes me optimistic this morning. A secular group in Washington state has managed to muscle their own holiday display next to a nativity scene on the Capitol at Olympia. I approve this message.

"At this season of the Winter Solstice may reason prevail. There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds."

Amen.

Truth hurts

I don't pretend to fully understand the details of our economic collapse, but to me it seems fundamental to economic health for a country to be able to produce something in order to offset what it consumes from elsewhere. Isn't that at the root of our economic rot. American doesn't make anything. Seriously, if it wasn't for the iPods and Macbooks being used by people across the world, it would literally be nothing.



I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with a desire to consume. You can argue that its human nature. But look at how we consume. Look at how common flat screen hdtv's are these days. I have one. But who's making them? It's not us/U.S.

Dur...I'm Plaxico Burress...

...and I shot myself in the thigh. I'm a fucking dumbass. Durrrrr.

It's not like he needs either leg to, um, play football or anything.

Seriously, if you're getting paid millions of dollars to play football why are you going to any place where you feel the need to carry a gun? And this is the guy who caught the game-winning catch in the Super Bowl. Damn, I hate the Giants!