As you may have noticed, Bitchspot is down. Some genius thought it might be cute to hack the page and rather than just repairing, hardening and putting it back up again, I figured it was a good opportunity to just take it down entirely. To be honest, I’d been getting very dissatisfied with it for a number of reasons and, even after 2.5 years, I was having a harder and harder time justifying what little free time I actually had working on it. That’s not to say I don’t want to get another blog up again sometime, I just don’t know that this is the blog I want to run. It’s a blog that has always had a difficult audience to find, for a couple of reasons: I started out primarily writing about religion, or pointing out the foibles and fallacies thereof. That has a particular type of audience which, at least to begin with, came around in large numbers to read what I wrote, but rarely to ever comment, at least not in large numbers. I was never really happy with that, my original hope was to have an active readership where discussions and debates could start between opposing views but, with few exceptions, that never materialized. I also started to write more about politics and the like, but unfortunately, most atheists are liberals and I am most certainly not. Therefore, people who might come here for my atheist pieces would be understandably turned off by my political pieces. I had already split my potential audience, those who were more conservative politically were also more likely to be more religious and would thus be unhappy with the bent of the majority of my blog. Those who were here to read my religious pieces were more likely to be politically liberal and therefore would also be unhappy with the rest. I was estimating that only 10-15% of my total potential audience would be interested in the majority of my output, which made doing it at all, except for personal edification, pretty pointless. Then I had all my more geeky subjects that, to be honest, were more fun for me to write than any of the rest, but which really didn’t appeal to the overwhelming majority of any of the primary readership of the blog. So there, too, I had an issue finding enough people who wanted to read it, especially if it was to come from the combined audience of conservative atheists, and the number of people who might potentially enjoy what I was writing was down to a mere trickle. I’ll be honest, while I’ve become much, much less tolerant of religion in general as time has gone on, I’ve also lost just about all the fire I once had in fighting it. It seems like a pointless fight, not because I don’t think it deserves to be fought, but because I don’t think fighting current believers is going to do a damn bit of good. Over time, they’ll die off and those that come after will be less religious in general. Eventually, religion, at least fundamentalist religion, will fade away, to be left only in pockets of abject stupidity, while everyone else treats them like the embarassing uncle that nobody talks about. This is a battle that will be fought over generations, not over a few or even tens of years. This change isn’t just true here, but pretty much across the board, all of the forums I once posted to, where I was known as a tireless defender of reason and critic of religion in all it’s forms, I’ve dropped to mere lurker status, weighing in once in a while, but mostly just not caring enough to bother. Why, you might ask? Because it does no good, even for the bystanders. Nobody really cares. The religious are clueless, nothing anyone says will change their minds. The people on the sidelines are either rational or they are not, nothing I say is going to change that either. If they are rational, they will almost certainly come down on the side of logic, intelligence and critical thinking and reject religion. If they are not, then they may come down on the other side. The idea of someone perched perfectly in the middle, so entirely unconvinced by either side as to make my words mean anything seems so remote as to be hardly worth considering. In the more than 25 years I’ve been doing this, I can honestly say I’ve yet to run into that individual. They might be out there somewhere but in the age of information overload, I find it hard to believe that there are significant numbers of people who have never run into these concepts. Back when I started this blog, I never cared about who read it or how many did. I wrote because I had something to say and if people wanted to read my rantings, more power to them. However, since my focus has changed dramatically over the years, I am no longer convinced that Bitchspot is the vehicle I want to use. I may, over the coming days or weeks, decide to put it back up, I may start a different blog with a different title, I may just give up for the forseeable future, I’m just not sure yet. I guess only time will tell. Thank you for those who did stick by me and read my words “religiously” for lack of a better word. If you liked what I did, by all means, let me know, the Bitchspot e-mail is still up and running and I welcome all comments, positive or negative. If I do decide to move the blog, or just abandon it entirely, I’ll certainly leave word here, I’d feel bad just vanishing without any explanation, I feel I owe people at least that much, and if I get some encouragement, if I get some people who do want to see occasional forays into the dark underbelly of religion, or the commentary on American conservative politics, then maybe that will be something I can get back to, at least on a limited basis, when I feel the time is right. Thank you all for your time and support. It’s been fun. See you all in the funny pages. -Cephus

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I do a lot of TV reviews but mostly, they’re American shows or Japanese shows, I rarely touch on anything on the BBC except the occasional Dr. Who article so I wanted to make sure I took a look at a new detective drama they’ve been airing called Luther. It tells the story of John Luther, a police detective who has just returned from investigatory suspension in the nearly fatal falling of a pedophile in which many suspect he purposely let the criminal plummet.  As soon as he returns though, he’s faced with a difficult case, the seemingly unsolvable mystery of a father and mother and their dog being gunned down in their home, with no clear suspects and only their genius daughter having discovered the scene.  However, Luther suspects she did it, he just can’t prove it.  She’s a calculating sociopath who feels no emotion and he knows he can’t touch her unless she slips up.  She, on the other hand, becomes fascinated with Luther and starts to “help” him on other cases and his personal life and they develop an odd cat-and-mouse relationship.  She toys with him, he tries to figure her out.  As Luther’s marriage falls apart because of his obsession with avenging the dead, he lives in fear that one day, that pedophile who has been in a coma all these months might wake up and tell everyone what happened… The cast is excellent.  Idris Elba, best known for his role on HBO’s The Wire, plays Luther, the cop with the dodgy past.  Sure, it’s not the most original role in the world, Luther, like so many other TV detectives, has a special “gift” for seeing things nobody else can, which makes him essential to every case that comes along, but Elba does a good job making him believable.  Ruth Wilson plays Alice Morgan, his sociopathic opposite and she’s extremely creepy in her portrayal.  She makes you believe her character really wants to understand the detective and is trying to figure out how his emotions work, even though she is incapable of feeling them herself.  Indira Varma is Zoe, Luther’s estranged wife who still loves him, but realizes she can no longer live with his obsessive nature about the job.  Paul McGann, former Dr. Who, plays Mark North, Zoe’s new boyfriend, who cannot understand why she’s still hung up on her ex-husband. Like several other crime shows in the past, most notably Columbo, the criminal is always known from the beginning, the story is about Luther drawing the links to the killer and making the case before the killer can get away.  Knowing who the murderer is and being able to prove it are two entirely different things.  I find myself really liking Alice Morgan, who starts to fall for Luther as time goes on and shockingly, he starts to reciprocate.  He knows that he can’t be seen with her, that she’s harmful to his career, but he also can’t seem to stay away and she absolutely refuses to, going so far as to buy disposable cell phones that can’t be traced to keep in contact.  When Luther is at his limit and has nowhere else to turn to, she’s the one he asks for help, even though she’s probably exactly the wrong person to rely on.  At the very end, John is being hunted for murder, the real murderer is planting evidence that they know will convince the police and Luther and his compatriots have nothing to prove their innocence. The ending of the series is somewhat anticlimactic, you never really know what happens, but there are a couple of scenarios.  If you prefer happy, John convinces the police that he’s innocent, gets exonerated and lives happily ever after with Alice.  If not, then the police show up, find John and company over a dead body, carrying guns and open fire., never knowing that they killed the real murderer.  I prefer the former, but who knows.  In either case, it was certainly a series worth watching and any show that can make me really look forward to seeing a sociopathic murderer has something special going for it. Give it a shot.  You won’t regret it. ****½ (4.5/5)

It’s been a while since I put up the latest place Jesus has shown up, but this one strikes me as funny.  Jesus has put his face on a Red Cross flag at the Liquid Planet Water Park in Candia.  When Kevin Dumont and his family opened the park in 2008, they say there were far too many rainy days that cut into their potential profits.  However, since they discovered the face on the flag June 19th of this year, they say the skies have been sunnier and attendance is up 200%. Kevin Dumont’s sister, park manager Kelly Dumont, is a skeptic.  “I think they’re all a bunch of nuts. It looks more like a gladiator, or the Beatles,” she said of the image on the flag.  Sure, but I bet she’s still counting the money from all of the nuts that are coming to see the flag.  Now that they’re actively advertising that they have the Jesus flag, you can expect religious loons worldwide to fly in to see it.  How many millions have gone to the supposed “visitations” of Jesus or the Virgin Mary so far?  These people see vague things on a surface, their minds fill in the gaps and they declare it to be a miracle. It’s a flag! Father Volney “Von” DeRosia from St. Joseph’s Church in Epping is going to look at the flag and try to determine if it’s a fake.  If not, it may go to the Catholic Church to be declared an authentic miracle, although Kevin Donovan, spokesman for the Diocese of Manchester, said it can take years for the Vatican to confirm such phenomena.  One group of delusional people may be deciding if another group of delusional people are seeing a face in a flag. And you wonder why I think these people are so stupid?

I was talking to a friend recently who works for a debt collection company and he mentioned to me the sheer number of people that they call, trying desperately to dodge collection attempts, who have religious messages on their voice mail.  The percentage is very high, according to him, of people who want to bless you, preach at you and try to convert you through their 30 second message.  One guy, in fact, has a mini-sermon, complete with Bible verses, on his machine. I guess these people never bothered to read the Bible they’re supposedly so fond of, especially the part about rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.  You know… pay your bills guys.  While I don’t want to get into a lot of chastising people for being financially irresponsible, he says the worst payers, the ones who do everything in their power to hide from collection agencies are the ones who are the most outwardly and absurdly religious. He also says there’s a good number of people who, well, for whom “stupid” is too mild a word.  People who can’t figure out how to put their name on their voice mail.  You get “Please leave a message for…” and a grunt, or someone cussing, or in one case, someone talking to someone else in the room.  One guy apparently forgot his own name in the middle of recording the message.  These are people who apparently are unable to repeat their own name in a timely manner and follow basic instructions and they never bothered to see what their message sounded like.  From what I understand, they come off acting like technology is some weird magical juju. And while this is purely unscientific and anecdotal, but once again we see those three old indicators correlate:  poor, stupid and religious.  I don’t think it even needs to be about people who can’t manage to handle their responsibilities, it’s still down to poor, stupid and religious.  Sure, we can probably explain it away, the poor don’t get educated and they tend to turn to religion for comfort because their lives suck.  I’m not sure it even needs to be said that if they spent more time working to improve their lot in life than on their knees praying to an imaginary friend, they wouldn’t be in need of religion in the first place, they’d be more successful in their lives.  I really think that’s the biggest issue I have here, people who dig their own holes, crawl willingly into them, then sit around and scream how wonderful Jesus has made their lives from the bottom of the hole.  Someone needs to give these people the shovel of reality and a good swift kick in the backside and make them actually fill in the hole and leave their Bibles buried at the bottom.  The world would be a much better place, and I’m sure my friend would be much happier, if they’d just get a grip on reality and deal with it as it actually is. Besides, what ever happened to “Hi, this is <insert name here>,  I can’t come to the phone, leave a message at the beep?”

While this isn’t exactly new news, I’ve known about the possibility for many years now, a recent article has come out that suggests that Jesus never really died on a cross.  Granted, that assumes Jesus ever existed in the first place and the Biblical stories are remotely accurate, both of which have little or no evidence to support them, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume for the moment that both are true. It’s most likely that Jesus died on a pole, not a cross.  According to Gunnar Samuelsson, there’s little evidence that Jesus was actually crucified on a cross, the word that was used in the New Testament, stauros, is actually a reference to a wide range of execution devices, most commonly a simple pole. “When the Gospels refer to the death of Jesus, they just say that he was forced to carry a “stauros” out to Calvary,” says Samuelsson, “‘Stauros’ is actually used to describe a lot of different poles and execution devices, so the device described in the Gospels could have been a cross, but it could also have been a spiked pole, or a tree trunk, or something entirely different.”  Seneca the Younger recorded in the first century about a large number of enemy soldiers being crucified on crosses, but then goes on to describe how a large number of the dead had been impaled.  “If you search for ancient texts that specifically mention the act of crucifixion [as we understand it today]” Samuelsson says, “you will end up with only two or three examples.” According to Josephus, most often it was the Roman legionnaires who decided on their own the method of execution.  This raises the point that there was rarely an official form of execution, it was left up to the “wicked minds” of the soldiers to figure out what they wanted to do for kicks that particular day.  Samuelsson says, “If we put this on the table, and think that the execution of Jesus was the result of the wicked mind of the soldiers at that very point, we can’t know how he could have been executed. The executions of that day could have taken a completely different form from ones the day before.” It seems that the concept of the cross came long after the supposed death of Jesus, we only see references to it starting in the 2nd century C.E.  It’s about the same time that lots of Christian dogma seems to have been developed, proving conclusively that much of what we view today as Christian came instead from the early church centuries after the supposed death of Jesus.  Christianity is a religion of lying men, not some man-god that came to earth 2000 years ago. Samuelsson, who is a Christian, had this to say to critics who accused him of undermining the Gospels.  “I’m really just a boring, conservative pastor and I start every day reading the New Testament,” he says. “But my suggestion is that we should read the text as it is, not as we think it is.”  I think that’s an excellent idea, but let’s be honest, most theists aren’t really interested in what’s actually so, just what’s most emotionally satisfying.  The iconic image of Jesus hanging on a cross is all they’re interested in, not whether or not it ever actually happened.  What would happen if they found for a fact that it was supposed to be a pole, not a cross?  How many would actually change over to wearing a toothpick around their necks?  Not many is my guess.  It is my firm belief that if more Christians knew more about the Bible and how it came to be, there would be fewer Christians. And wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing?

My wife and I were looking for a good, old-fashioned kaiju brawl movie and she had heard of something called “Death Kappa”, which sounded interesting.  Instead, I found this movie, which while it sort of looked interesting, didn’t live up to any of it’s potential. Set largely in the 1950s, it is the story of Yuta Suzumori, who lives in a small village.  One day, he meets a young kappa, a traditional Japanese spirit, typically pictured as a humanoid turtle, but in this movie, they’re just ugly green frog-like creatures.  Yuta befriends the kappa and goes underground to meet it’s family.  The kappa father spends his time building a strange machine out of salvaged human junk.  The mother spends her time cooking and caring for the family.  There is a legend in the village that the kappa will protect the village, but when the villagers find out that they actually have kappa living among them, they decide they’d better hunt them down and kill them for reasons that are never really adequately explained.  Yuta, in attempting to learn more about the kappa family, starts to reconcile with his estranged father, who in the climactic scene, sacrifices himself to save Yuta and some other children who were trapped in the cave with the kappa family when the villagers decided to blow up the entrance to seal the kappa inside.  As the children escape, the kappa mother and father are killed in a cave-in and Yuta promises the young kappa that he’ll come back to visit.  We move 40 years into the future where we find Yuta as an old man, with his adult son, finally returning to Japan after all these years to visit his father’s memorial.  They find a soul-ball, which provides them entrance into the kappa underworld where they find the young kappa, now an old man in his own right, who has waited all those years for Yuta to return.  Yuta’s heart fails and he dies after meeting his friend again and the last remaining kappa, who has apparently completed his father’s machine over the years, lifts off in his spaceship and flies off into the heavens, with Yuta’s son, clutching his father’s lifeless body, looks on. One thing you’ll notice about this movie is just how close it is to Steven Spielberg’s E.T.  Yes, there are some differences, but you have the 10-year old kid who really has no friends finding the alien and keeping it a secret from the world until everyone finds out and tries to kill it.  It’s not a bad movie, I think the acting is good, the effects are reasonably competent and the writing isn’t that bad.  It was done by the lead singer for pop band Kome Kome Club, Tatsuya Ishii and has a cameo by Tatsuya Fuji of In the Realm of the Senses, but even with that, it’s just not that great when taken as a whole.  This is especially true of the ending sequence where Yuta and his son make it underground and it looks like the young kappa has just spent 40 years sitting in a bubble waiting.  None of the mess had been cleaned up, it was just a pile of junk with a kappa sitting in it.  The fact that the kappa turned out to be aliens didn’t really help matters either.  The 1950s villagers really made no sense whatsoever.  If they truly believe that the kappa are there to protect the village, blowing them to kingdom come isn’t the brightest move they could make.  Further, are we supposed to believe that this family of alien kappa are the origin of the kappa myths in Japan, or maybe there were myths and these aliens just happened to be close enough that people took them as the mythical kappa?  Who knows, it’s never explained. It’s one of those movies that, while it has some really nice elements, they just don’t fit together well.  I’d like to recommend it, but I just can’t, but I can’t point out exactly where it goes wrong.  It’s like a jigsaw puzzle where every piece is exactly the same shape, you can put them all together, but you don’t necessarily get a great picture in the end.  There’s some good acting, but it’s never excellent across the board.  The kappa suits are fine, but the kappa designs are really ugly.  The scenery is lush and beautiful, but  the alien technology never improves more than E.T.’s record-player-and-Speak-and-Spell, it’s human junk, specifically made to look like human junk, salvaged for alien uses.  It’s not a bad movie to watch if you get a chance but I can’t really recommend seeking it out.  There are much better done, much better written and much better imagined movies out there that you ought to be looking for.  This one just isn’t quite there. **~~~ (2/5)

Usually, later on this month, I’d be writing my big San Diego Comicon reviews, but not this year.  Not that Comicon isn’t fun, it’s just too big and we’re tired of leaving frustrated every year, not being able to do the things we want to do, not being able to see the things we want to see, simply because the facility is ridiculously overcrowded.  Last year, we decided we were done.  I’ve gone for 30-some-odd years straight, my wife has gone for about 23 or so, both before we were married and after, my kids have gone since they were maybe 6 each, but it’s just not a worthwhile use of our time these days, you cannot stuff that many people into that city and still be able to accomplish anything.  Therefore, we’ve decided that until they move out of San Diego, we’re not going back. I’ve kind of kicked around the idea of making the trek to Wondercon, it’s a smaller convention than SDCC, some have described it as what SDCC used to be before Hollywood got their hands on it and I absolutely would love to get that kind of feeling back in my convention going.  SDCC used to be a lot of fun, right up until it was 150,000 stuffed into a convention center and a city that was just not built for it. Originally, our plan this year was to hit Westercon this year, which is going on as we speak, as a SDCC replacement.  However, due to scheduling difficulties, we weren’t able to make it, even for one day.  It’s sad, I haven’t been to Westercon since 1989 and my wife has never been, but it isn’t like it doesn’t roll around every year and we can’t go later.  Next year is in San Jose so that’s a possibility as well.  I still remember getting a couple of friends together and doing the “Harlan Hover” around Harlan Ellison on the one rare occasion that we found him alone in a hallway.  We didn’t want him to feel like he wasn’t completely surrounded by adoring fans so we… improvised.  He’s kicked my backside, metaphorically, over the years for doing that to him. We might hit Loscon, I’m not sure yet.  The problem, of course, is that it’s over Thanksgiving weekend and we usually have lots planned with family and friends, it’s hard to run off to a convention right after Thanksgiving dinner.  I think the most memorable, although unpleasant LostCause I ever went to was 1988 where the hotel was having renovations done and somehow, the sewage system backed up into the ventilation, causing the first two floors to be utterly unlivable for 4-5 hours one night. It turns out that I’ll have a week of vacation in the spring that I absolutely have to take or I lose it.  It has to be before the typical “con season”, so we’ve decided to hit Galifrey next year, mostly because Peter Davidson promises he’ll really be there this time. Really.  He means it.  Yeah, I don’t buy it either, but my wife wants to see him so off we’ll go in our TARDIS. Click here to view the embedded video. Maybe I’m outgrowing conventions to a certain degree.  There was a time when a lot of the craziness was kind of fun.  It struck me earlier today when I was watching a video for the Minneapolis convention that’s going on this weekend, ConVergence.  Lots of people, from Lousy Cannuck blogger Jason and his wife Jodi to the SkepChicks to P.Z. Myers are there and probably having a ball, but you know something, I really think that the whole con culture has changed over the years, to the point that the harmless screwing around stopped being fun and started being obnoxious.  Sure, back in the day, we used to do some pretty screwy things, but none of it was destructive, none of it was designed to piss anyone off or cause property damage or ruin anyone’s fun… Okay, let me take that back.  When I and a bunch of furries were running around on the last day of the aforementioned Westercon ’89, when the hotel had a Baptist convention scheduled to come in as the convention was heading out and those Baptists took it upon themselves to convert all us heathens… yeah, we were trying to piss them off.  When they were running around the hotel praying over us, we were hissing and tearing up their tracts.  Immature, maybe, but hey, they started it. Anyhow, as I was saying, none of what I ever commonly saw in the “good old days” was destructive.  We had fun, but it was a respectful fun.  Today, I see far too much that’s aimed at making everyone around them mad, destroying private property and going hog-shit-wild, just for the sake of doing it and giving everyone around them a bad name.  That’s the kind of thing I really object to and it’s so commonplace today that I pretty much prefer none of it to happen anymore.  People are being assholes just for the sake of being assholes and it’s accepted, perhaps even expected behavior.  People who are into that kind of thing are just not the kind of people I choose to spend my time around and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find anyone who is intelligent, respectful and reasonable and thinks before they act.  You want to show up in costume?  Great!  You want to do your level best to make your costume as offensive as possible without getting you thrown out?  Not so much.  I think as a society, we’ve gotten far too self-aggrandizing and conventions are just a microcosm of that problem.  People used to get out of your way if you were taking a picture.  Now they just walk straight through your shot.  If you stopped to look at something, people went around you.  Now they push you out of the way.  People act as if you owe them every little thing, just because they’re there.  Personally I’m sick of it. Therefore, I think we’ll stick to smaller conventions for a while.  SDCC, while in concept it’s a great idea, in execution it really sucks.  Too many people, most of them complete assholes, stuffed into too small a space, acting like they own the place, just doesn’t work for me anymore.  Sure, there was a time when conventions were the only place you could buy some things, but today with the Internet, you can get almost anything faster, cheaper and easier than going to a convention.  Seeing celebrities?  Sure, there was a time, many years back, when celebs used to just walk around and people could talk to them.  Today, they have security entourages and they’re far too busy and self-important to deign to talk to anyone.  I got to know lots and lots of writers, TV and movie actors, etc. over the years at conventions, some of those friendships continue to this day, but anyone entering the world of fandom today will never have that opportunity, you just can’t get close enough to chat, there are a thousand other people constantly fighting for attention, even on those rare opportunities where they’re made available for an hour or so here and there.  Gone are the days when you could hang out at a booth and talk to a well-known scifi writer.  I’ve had writers and TV personalities come back to our hotel room to play card games before, just to get off the convention floor.  I can’t imagine any of that happening these days, the celebs are just not accessible, not that I blame them with all the insane fans around.  I can go talk to people I’ve known for years, but meeting anyone new, at least without an introduction from a mutual friend, is virtually impossible and that’s just too bad.  Celebrities are just people too, so long as you treat them as such and not as weird objects of worship, most of them are pretty good people, at least in my experience. I guess it’ll be a while until we hit a con again, close to a year if we don’t break down and go to LostCause, which frankly I would like to do, but they never tell anyone what their one-day rates are and like I said, it’s almost impossible to go for the entire thing due to scheduling, so it’s unlikely.  I think they lose a lot of potential dollars that way, but it’s not my con.  Hopefully things will be a little better at Galifrey, I’m really looking for a good old-fashioned con experience with good people, a good atmosphere, lots of room to move around and people not running wild through the aisles. Think I should be holding my breath?  Me either.

On one of the most recent Chariots of Iron podcasts, they talked once again about atheist community and how atheists need to have more “empathy” with their fellow atheists.  In particular, author Darrel Ray was saying he thought long-term or lifetime atheists needed to understand all of the issues that new atheists had, issues that they had either never experienced or had long since dealt with.  Granted, this is probably a very valid point and some of these new atheists do need kid-glove handling because they are coming from an inherently difficult position. Religion, by it’s very nature, seeks to disarm a believer’s individuality.  It wants to turn everyone into a part of the collective.  You’re no longer you, you’re now a part of a larger brainwashed whole.  As such, you are encouraged not to think for yourself, but to seek out your religious brethren and make decisions as a part of a religious hive-mind.  All aspects of your life are subsumed by religion and the religious community to which you belong.  You meet your mate there.  You raise your children there.  Many people get their jobs there.  Your social life is spent within the walls of the church.  Many people, especially long-term or lifelong theists, have never known any different.  For these people, certainly I support groups which seek to re-educate these poor sots away from the religious indoctrination and group-think they’ve had forced on them their entire lives.  I heartily recommend Darrel Ray’s Recovering Religionists groups, they sound like a great starting point for people who want to change the brainwashing they’ve received.  Find a group, get sane. However, I still have problems beyond that initial point where the religious mind-poison is still wearing off.  If we’re really seeking to get to a post-religionist position, where religion is entirely irrelevant, it seems counterproductive to substitute an all-consuming non-theist support network for the previously existing theist one.  It’s like treating someone’s heroin addiction by getting them hooked on crack cocaine.  The whole idea of putting all of one’s social eggs in a single basket makes it all the more difficult to avoid group-think so that you fit in.  That goes for both theological (or non-theological) thought as well as political and social thought and more.  Instead of encouraging people to go out and find groups they fit into, it encourages people to change their views to fit into a group that they may not already be a good fit for. It’s said that organizing atheists is like herding cats and it ought to be.  Atheism isn’t something to congregate around.  If religion vanished tomorrow, atheism would have no meaning.  I would no more go to a non-stamp-collectors meeting than I would to an atheists meeting, assuming it was just about not believing in god(s).  Political and social activism are positive things.  Sitting around grousing about not believing in god(s) is not.  If that’s not important though, if that’s not what you’re doing, why have an atheist group to begin with?  If you’re just watching movies or playing games, what difference does it make what the other people you’re hanging around with believe, so long as they don’t try to push it on you?  I could sit in a theater with 300 people and watch a movie and not care if any of them were theists or not, if any of them were politically conservative or liberal, if any of them were vegetarians, if any of them collected stamps, etc.  It’s entirely irrelevant to me, it doesn’t make a bit of difference because we’re all here to watch this movie and maybe sit around and talk about it afterwards.  What they might do in other aspects of their lives is entirely irrelevant.  So long as they keep it to themselves, I don’t care.  If they don’t keep it to themselves, I get to decide if I’m going to go to the theater with them again or not.  If the entire group is not to my liking, I can go find another group or create one myself with people I actually want to hang around with.  It’s my choice. Unfortunately, I think most people are inherently lazy.  They want to move from a theistic community that’s fully formed and realized to an identical atheistic community, also fully formed and realized, without actually having to do any work to get it.  They just want to trade membership cards.  They want to switch from a God-believing club to a non-God-believing club, but they still want to go to pot-lucks and play bingo every Saturday night.  Far too many people are spoiled rotten. The same can be said for all the people who become atheists and magically want a solution for their religious spouse.  They just want a magic wand that they can wave and make everything all better.  They don’t want to face the reality that the world is full of difficult choices and sometimes they have to decide what is more important to them and act on that decision.  Is it hard?  Sure.  Nobody ever said life would be easy.  The whole “My girlfriend is a religious zealot that drives me crazy with her Christian bullshit, but I still love her…” nonsense makes me insane.  Is it more important that you have this one, particular girl, or is it important that you and your mate are compatible?  Make your decision.  Stick with it.  Sure, it’s harder when you’re already married, especially if you have children, but the problem is still the same.  Make your decision and stick with it.  It’s going to be a difficult decision to be sure and it will come with serious consequences no matter which way you go, but that’s life.  Deal with it. I was just thinking of a personal example that, while it has nothing to do with religion, I think still applies.  My father, who died almost 10 years ago of cancer, knew for a long time that he had cancer but he never let on.  He refused treatment and kept it from everyone, including my mother, for more than a year, even as he got sicker and sicker.  He kept telling her that he had a lingering case of pneumonia that doctors were trying to figure out why it wouldn’t go away.  Eventually, after he had to be hospitalized at stage 4 and it came out, my mother thought it was a sudden thing that nobody ever knew about.  Myself, I only found out the whole story at his funeral, when some of his friends from work pulled me aside and told me the tale, making me promise never to tell my mother the truth.  To this day, I haven’t and whether or not she ever found out on her own, I have no idea.  My father cared more about the mental wellbeing and happiness of my mother than he did about his own life.  The chances of curing his cancer were slim and his quality of life, had he gone with chemo and other treatments would have been horrible and doing so would have bankrupted them, his insurance coverage lifetime maximum ran out pretty early on and it was only covered by his life insurance pay-out.  It was easier to just accept reality and do the best for the people he loved that he could and for that, I’m eternally proud of him.  It certainly couldn’t have been an easy decision to make, but it was the one he chose and so far as I know, it was one he lived with for the last months of his life. One of the biggest problems I have with the whole hand-holding nonsense is that it doesn’t make anyone strong enough to stand on their own two feet.  Back when I was a theist, I was probably the most fervent in the family, I spent many long hours with my butt in a pew, the majority of my social life was either through the church, youth group or highly religious school I attended.  I stood to lose plenty when I deconverted, but I did it anyhow because it was more important to me to maintain my intellectual integrity than to maintain relationships.  Did I lose family members?  No, but my family wasn’t shallow.  Did I lose close friends?  Damn straight I did.  People who I used to go to church with, who I had known and been close to for many years, suddenly vanished when I stopped going.  I went from being reasonably popular to being an outcast of sorts.  Sure, I still had some friends, the true friends who really care about you and not about the minutia, but lots of people just walked away when I stopped believing in their imaginary friend.  And you know something?  I’m entirely fine with that, no matter how much it hurt at the time.  I had my integrity and I found out who really mattered in my life in one fell swoop.  However, unlike my fair-weather religious friends, I didn’t reciprocate, I didn’t toss out my religious friends just because they were religious, which is why many of my best, longest-lasting friends are religious to this day.   I don’t care that they believe, they don’t care that I don’t believe.  Our friendship is not now, nor has it ever been based on mutual delusions. Changing something so fundamental is going to be tough.  That’s just the way things go.  The idea that people ought to be hand-held the whole way to make the process as simple as possible is silly to me.  Certainly, there ought to be support available but it doesn’t do anyone any good if they don’t have to actually fight to achieve a goal.  This isn’t like trading in a used car, it’s changing one’s entire outlook on life – their complete worldview.  That’s not a simple thing to do. I am completely sympathetic toward people who can take such a monumental step, I can appreciate how difficult it is, what pitfalls lie in their way and what sacrifices they’ll likely have to make along their path.  I’ve been there.  Empathy is about understanding what others are going through because you’ve been in their position, not trying to take away every hurdle you went over because it makes their path simpler.  I am not sympathetic, however, to people who just want to trade one fully-realized belief system for another with no muss and no fuss.  I don’t respect people who are only changing from theism to non-theism because they’re in a no-loss situation, they get all of the benefits of religion with none of the downsides.  Take a stand.  Decide what’s right.  Act on it and accept the consequences.  It might hurt a lot right now, but in the long run, you’ll be a lot better off.  Take it from someone who knows from experience.

As if we needed yet another example of the abject stupidity in the anti-illegal-immigration debate, here we go again.  Peggy West, a county supervisor from Milwaukee WI, weighing in on the Arizona immigration law 1070 where she clearly has no business doing so, proved just how stupid she really is.  She said, “If this were Texas a state that borders Mexico I would have to look twice at this, but it’s Arizona, a state that is a ways removed from the border…” Wait a minute, I know Wisconsin is a long way from Arizona, but she doesn’t even know that Arizona is a border state?  I suppose she thinks California is somewhere in Africa too.  And this idiot was elected as a representative of her county? West was named the 2004 Hispanic Woman of the Year by UMOS, Inc. A committed believer in community service, Supervisor West volunteers for UMOS, Inc. and Mexican Fiesta and serves as a mentor at Notre Dame Middle School.  Her Facebook page, at least until this incident, listed one of her interests as “Mexican history”.  Too bad she doesn’t actually know where Mexico is, huh? See, this is the real problem with the “debate”, these people don’t have a damn clue what’s going on, they don’t know any details of the problem, some of them don’t even know where the battle-lines are drawn, they’re just reacting emotionally to an issue that has little or nothing to do with emotion.  They just don’t have any capacity to handle it rationally, just listening to them proves conclusively that there is no rationality rattling around in their tiny little brains, they’re too busy “feeling” to bother “thinking”. Hopefully, voters in Wisconsin will take one look at Peggy West’s ignorance and initiate a recall, or at the very least, oust her in the next election.  Having someone in office who doesn’t even know where another state is just makes the whole state look bad.  We can do without any more stupid, ignorant liberals in power.  They’ve already screwed things up enough.

It’s been a long time since I’ve written about action figures, mostly because, for the past year, we’ve pretty much given up on it.  Once the economy started to tank, the number and variety of action figures on the market, especially aimed at a more discerning and adult audience, went straight to hell.  Series that I was collecting or looking forward to were either discontinued wholesale or released in such limited areas that they became absurdly expensive in the secondary market. I guess it started off with the Indiana Jones series, wave 4 in late 2008.  Now the first three waves of the series hadn’t done particularly well, mostly because of Hasbro’s packaging scheme.  Some figures were ridiculously common, there were several in every case, while there were some that were extremely rare, they were in maybe 10% of the cases.  This caused problems because retailers bought cases, then ended up having a ton of peg-warmers as collectors had already gotten the common figures and nobody wanted yet another Indy or Monkey Man figure.  Because these never sold, stores stopped ordering new cases, which means that every store had nothing but these ridiculously common figures that absolutely nobody wanted and those rarer figures that everyone was looking for… never appeared on store shelves. So Hasbro decided to only release the last set in the series, the set for Temple of Doom, on the east coast.  That means, surprise surprise, that anyone on the west coast had to spend a ton of money to get them, if they could find them at all. Then there was Heroes, a series I collected seriously, I had every figure, every variant, every exclusive… right up until the show went in the dumper and the last two series never came out at all.  While I do have a complete set of figures that were actually released, there are 10 figures that were officially announced, displayed at SDCC and other conventions, then tossed in the trash.  Thanks guys. Perhaps the one that makes me the maddest right now is the last series for the first Iron Man series.  Again, I seriously collected the set, I have every figure from the first three waves but, of course, the last one was a limited east coast release and now the prices are off the chart.  I saw prices in the $200 range for a single wave 4 figure, something I’m certainly not willing to spend, especially for a figure that went for less than $10 on store shelves. We had pretty much written off collecting toys because of this, it just wasn’t fun, there wasn’t anything new coming out that we cared about and with the wholesale failure of the action figure market, we figured it was pointless.  We had gone from buying 8-10 figures a week to 1-2 a month, if that.  There was virtually nothing to look forward to so we just stopped looking.  I walked down the toy aisle at the local Walmart once in a while, just to see the same old tired crap that never sold and was never replaced, but nothing made me want to crack open my wallet. I was vaguely aware of the figures when the second Iron Man movie came out but I didn’t pay much attention.  After the failure of the first release, I didn’t put much stock in Hasbro’s ability to put out figures I’d care about.  Finally though, I did break down and bought a couple, just for old times sake and now, I’ve decided I want to jump back into the game.  They’re nice figures, they’re being released in three categories: movie, concept and comic book, which gives a nice big pile of figures that aren’t just repaints of existing figures as some of the first movie release ended up being.  So far, as the picture above shows, I’ve picked up a dozen and probably have twice that to get. Today I was wandering through Target and I found a couple of stragglers from the Marvel Universe series and picked them up.  I had been picking and choosing from wave 1, back in 2009 but it looks like wave 10 is going to come out next month and there are some things I really want to find.  Like most Marvel and DC sets, I don’t go for completion, I just pick the things I want and ignore the rest, but there are probably a good 20 figures I want to get and since at least some of them seem to be on toy store shelves still, I’ll have to make the rounds and see what I can find. My wife has also decided to get back into collecting Dr. Who figures, she’s fallen quite behind now.  It figures that the one year we decide not to go to SDCC is the year they have 5 SDCC exclusive Dr. Who figures, she’s trying to find a friend who is going who can pick them up for her. Hopefully now that the economy is somewhat better, the action figure market will rebound, especially the adult collector market.  I’ve missed picking up figures more than I realized, it would be nice if these companies would put something out I’d want to buy.  It’s sad having money in your pocket that you want to give to someone else, if only they produced something worth buying.

Every once in a while, I’ll read through the Hey Answerman! column over on Anime News Network.  Frankly, I find most of it to be pretty vapid nonsense, but that’s really what it’s intended to be so I can’t be too critical.  However, one thing that has always been true of ANN is they’re very critical of scanalations and fansubs and the like.  Why?  Look at their site, it’s jam-packed with advertising from all of the legitimate American anime companies!  They pretty much have to be critical because they face a major loss of income if they’re not. However, I keep running into the same mindless arguments there, people who think that just because someone owns the rights to something, they’re automatically right.  From the latest column, someone complained that it’s difficult to find a DVD copy of the excellent anime film Wings of Honneamise for less than $60, simply because Bandai Visual refused to release it for less before they went under and now, nobody has any right in the U.S. to put it out on DVD, you’re limited to the remaining stock, as long as that lasts.  So great, people can either buy the Blu-ray version (which came with a DVD version which isn’t available separately) for $60 or… what?  Not watch it?  Suffer? See, these are the kinds of situations where I just have zero sympathy whatsoever for the rights-holder.  How can you come and bitch at me for pirating something that they’re not making any effort to make available whatsoever.  Sure, as some have said, they don’t owe me anything, but guess what?  I don’t owe them anything either!  You, as a producer, need to *EARN* my business.  If you’re not earning my business, and certainly you can’t be because you’re not even making an effort, then I have every right to tell you to take your non-existent products and cram them deeply up your ass. This shouldn’t be a hard concept to comprehend but apparently it is.  I don’t care what the letter of the law says, I care about the logic of it all.  If you’re not going to produce something that I can go out and buy at a price I’m willing to pay, then how can you complain if I go elsewhere for it?  Yeah, I know you own the license for it, but if you’re doing nothing with said license, I’m not going to sit around in hopes that someday you might actually get off your fat ass and make it available.  I don’t care how much you might wish that was the case, it’s not going to happen. This goes for everything.  Movies, music, TV shows, books, manga, you name it.  If you can’t find a way to get it out where I am, then I don’t owe you a dime.  You haven’t done any work to earn it!  It doesn’t matter if it’s Wings of Honneamise, a movie that came out in 1987, or the latest album from some j-pop group or a Godzilla movie.  If you’re not going to put it out where it’s available in the U.S., especially for movies which are region-restricted, then go straight to hell.  Don’t come whining to me when I download it off the Internet.  I would have bought it if you had actually made an attempt to make it available!  You could have had my money if you had made the slightest effort.  But you didn’t.  So you’re not getting paid. Deal with it.

I’ve already said how much I was looking forward to Steven Moffat’s reign on Dr. Who.  Honestly, it was more the joy of getting rid of that stupid twit Russell T. Davies, plus the fact that almost without exception, every really good episode of Dr. Who in the past couple of years has been a Moffat-written masterpiece.  How, I thought, could the man who brought us River Song and the Weeping Angels not make the show a phenomenal success? Well guess what?  It isn’t.  I mean, it could be.  It ought to be.  I think he’s just trying too hard.  Or maybe he’s not trying hard enough.  I don’t know.  I just know that there are a lot of problems with Dr. Who and I don’t know how to fix them all.  It isn’t that I don’t really, really, really want to like it, I’m just being overwhelmed with the… wrongness of it all. First off, I love Matt Smith as the Doctor, but something is wrong.  I don’t think it’s really him.  I think it’s how he’s being written.  So far, the 11th Doctor is… an idiot.  Seriously, he mumbles, he makes stupid mistakes, he misses obvious answers, it’s like Doctor Who with Alzheimers.  For someone who is supposed to have 907 years of life experience, he makes some really absurd mistakes.  He’s spending far too much time running around telling us how stupid he is and missing the painfully obvious solutions staring him in the face.  Want an example?  When Rory was shot by the Silurian Restac in Cold Blood, instead of sitting around explaining to Amy that Rory would be erased from all existence if he got taken by the Time Field crack, why didn’t he do the sensible thing and toss Restac into the crack?  If she was erased from existence, she couldn’t have shot and killed Rory, therefore he would still be alive.  But no, it’s an obvious path of action that he entirely ignored. And then there’s Amy Pond.  Karen Gillam does a wonderful job in the role, she’s just… off.  You go from someone who idolized the Doctor for her entire life, finally gets on with her life and gets engaged, then the second she’s away from her fiance, she’s making googly-eyes at someone she met one night in her entire life.  It makes no sense. Her fiance Rory Williams was a great guy and he’s played expertly by Arthur Darvill was, perhaps, the best character in the show until he was mindlessly killed off because Moffat declared it “about time for a sacrifice”.  That’s just stupid.  Seemingly, having Rory around was one of the only things keeping Amy out of the Doctor’s pants, so of course he has to go.  It was a cheap death, made worse by the even cheaper re-appearance of pseudo-Rory in the most recent episode.  He had a pointless death, then his Auton-replica goes on to seemingly murder Amy while trying desperately to be Rory again.  Meaningless melodrama.  Even worse is the scene at the end of “The Pandorica Opens” where Amy suddenly remembers everything about Rory.  Apparently, Moffat isn’t clear on what “being erased from the universe” and “never having existed” means.  It means she could not possibly have remembered him, no matter how much emotional impact it might have, he never existed in the first place.  When she met pseudo-Rory in Roman times, that would have been the first time she would ever have met him in all of history.  When you can’t even get the simple stuff right, how can I expect you to get the challenging stuff?  And you know something?  I don’t care if Moffat set up the emotional scene for episodes on end, I want the story to make sense and be internally consistent.  This just isn’t. River Song was great two series ago in the Library, but this season, she’s a stupid, annoying bitch.  Yes, she has an advantage of sorts over the Doctor, in that she’s meeting him at different intervals in time so she knows more about his future than he does, but seriously, she went from being an intelligent, wise professor with a bit of a Han Solo streak to being a convicted murderer?  Huh?  It seems that every time she shows up, I like her even less.  She’s a con-woman, certainly not someone I would expect the Doctor to fall in love with, it’s just not in his character. The biggest problem though, now that we’re down to the end of this series, is that Moffat is desperately trying to out-extravaganza the master of over-extravaganza himself, Russell T. Davies.  One of my biggest complaints about Davies, other than he kept trying to turn the Doctor into a horndog, is that he kept trying to top himself every season.  It always had to be bigger and more flashy and more dangerous, but that kind of thing is always self-defeating because eventually, you just can’t go any bigger.  But damn, Moffat is sure trying!  The worst Davies ever did was drag the Earth half-way across the universe.  Now Moffat is trying to end the universe entirely!  No, not only end it but to revoke it’s entire existence! So where in the hell does he go from here?  Seriously, what’s bigger than the non-existence of the entire universe. The writing, almost across the board, is poor.  I’ve complained about writing like this in the past in American shows, where people are written extremely stupidly because if they didn’t make obvious mistakes and miss glaring possibilities, they’d have no story.  It’s bad writing done specifically to cover bad plotting.  It’s too much trouble to make characters operate in character and still tell the story, therefore they have to throw characterization out the window and have everyone act like idiots so the badly-plotted story can go on. Case in point, the most recent episode, The Pandorica Opens.  There is a scene where thousands upon thousands of alien ships arrive in Roman-occupied England, the product of a grand plot to contain the Doctor inside the Pandorica Box because they fear that the Doctor will destroy space and time.  He’s standing at Stonehenge on top of a rock, screaming at the assembled alien fleets that he’s there and nobody had better dare oppose him.  Now even though the plot to contain the Doctor hadn’t been revealed, these are the ships of the Doctor’s greatest enemies who he has beaten time and time again.  These are the Daleks and the Cybermen and the Autons and the Sontarans and dozens of other species that have every reason to hate the Doctor and want him dead.  What, nobody thought to take those 10,000 fully armed warships, ships the Doctor said himself are loaded to the brim with weapons, and blow the crap out of the unarmed guy standing on a rock in the middle of the British countryside?  I don’t care if the guy can regenerate, if he’s reduced to component atoms, he’s toast.  But no, even though in every single other encounter between the Doctor and his arch enemies, they’ve done everything in their power to kill him, the one time they have an overwhelming force that cannot conceivably fail, they don’t pull the trigger. That’s just stupid.  However, we can’t have the aliens act in character or remotely logically because if they did, they couldn’t have the ridiculous cliffhanger!  Maybe if they plotted it better and didn’t have the scene with the Doctor standing on a rock with a target on his head, it wouldn’t have been so bad, but nobody ever thinks of that. Maybe, as my wife suggested, Moffat just needs someone to keep him in line.  Maybe he just doesn’t do well being in charge.  Maybe he just learned how to do everything wrong from Davies and just needs time to chart his own course.  Maybe it just wasn’t his time to take complete show of such an iconic show, especially after the show was pretty much run into the ground? But if they do as my wife is thinking and end the series by saying the last 5 or so episodes were all a dream of the TARDIS, I’m very, very seriously thinking dropping the show entirely.  It was an idiotic idea in Dallas, I won’t stand for it in Dr. Who.

You know, the longer I go on debating people, the more I’m convinced that I’m completely wasting my time trying to debate the utterly stupid.  You know the kind, the ones who will tell you the most absurd things, without a shred of support, will ignore any amount of evidence no matter how well documented and who just ramble on and on no matter how utterly destroyed their claims have been.  It’s not just the religious, although those are certainly one of the worst offenders, it’s lots of people who couldn’t reason their way out of a wet paper sack, yet remain supremely convinced that they have to be right, just because they think they are. Take this one mental midget earlier tonight who was arguing for illegal immigration.  The debate hit a new low, which is really saying something because it wasn’t particularly high-brow to begin with.  He’s great for throwing around insults every time he gets backed into a corner, then returning with his same old, tired, disproven arguments verbatim because obviously his opponent wasn’t smart enough to get it the first time around.  Somehow, in this particular debate, he’s convinced that because the Native Americans didn’t stop European settlers from showing up, that we somehow have an obligation to take all comers, no matter what.  I pointed out several problems with the claim, of course. There was no unified Native American front from which to grant or deny immigration status.  They not only had no laws regarding immigration, they had no concept of “citizenship” in the first place.  Their idea, in general terms, was that nobody owned the land, therefore claiming that only certain people could come and go was ridiculous to them. As there were no laws regarding immigration, the early European settlers could not, by definition, be considered “illegal immigrants”.  You cannot break a law that does not exist.  That is not the case today. Perhaps most egregious, he claimed that Native Americans somehow “own the land in perpetuity” because they were here first.  The idea of eternal claims on a chunk of dirt are absurd.  Native Americans are no more the permanent owners of North America than amoeba are and certainly primitive amoeba were here long, long, long before the first proto-Native American came across the land bridge from Asia.  This is the same kind of stupid nonsense that has the Jews claiming they own Israel forever. Whatever the Native Americans may or may not have  done hundreds of years ago has absolutely no bearing on U.S. immigration policy today.  It doesn’t matter if they embraced everyone with open arms, that doesn’t obligate us to do so today. But of course, all of these ideas are firmly wedged into this idiots tiny little mind and nothing short of C4 is going to get them out.  No matter what you say to him, he keeps insisting that he’s right because he cannot fathom the possibility that he just might possibly be wrong.  He makes his arguments by bald assertion, there isn’t a shred of evidence rattling around anywhere in that little pea-sized brain of his. As much as someone might make the argument that it’s not this self-involved twit that I ought to worry about, but the bystanders, frankly I think the bystanders are all tired of listening to his idiotic rants already.  Anyone who is incapable of seeing through his stupidity is probably a lost cause already.  It’s like looking at people who support Ray Comfort and wondering if they can be saved.  If they’re so utterly blinded by the verbal vomit that comes out of Ray’s mouth now, there’s no saving them.  Some people just cannot be saved because they are too damn stupid.  You have to have something to work with and if there aren’t even two brain cells firing, there isn’t much you can do. It’s like arguing with conspiracy theorists.  What do you do with people who can’t conceive of a reality where they aren’t right.  What’s the point of debating the lunatic who thinks the universe poofed out of some god’s asshole 4000 years ago?  How worthwhile is it to discuss matters with the loon who’s convinced 9/11 and the moon landing were hoaxes?  How much with you accomplish  hashing it out with someone who just repeats himself over and over, no matter how entirely discredited his claims? More and more often, I’m just throwing up my hands and walking away.  At one time, I used to get frustrated and say “you can’t possibly be that fucking stupid,” but today, I just sigh and say “oh look, another moron”.  It’s stopped being a rarity, now it’s the norm.  Fanatics who have no argument other than “I’m right because I’m right” are coming out of the woodwork. Frankly, I don’t have enough time in my day to spend refuting their stupidity, I know they’re just going to turn around and spew it all over again verbatim.  How worthwhile is it to get my blood pressure up, even though I know I’m wasting my time from the get go? I’m beginning to think I have better things to do and ought to spend more time doing them.

I know everyone has heard of them, those wonderfully annoying “helicoper parents”, the ones who constantly hover around their kids, hoping in vain to protect them from all of the dangers of the world.  You know, like learning to think for themselves.  And these parents, since they never allow their kids to actually do anything, end up producing mindless adults who haven’t the slightest idea how to handle themselves in the real world. My youngest daughter has a friend that has, perhaps, the most absurd set of helicopter parents.  Her friend is not allowed to go anywhere.  He can’t go to a friend’s house.  Friends can come to his house, of course, but he can’t go anywhere else.  His mother follows him around incessantly, even in his own house, she’s constantly checking on him.  In fact, his mother acts as a room-mother for his school just so she can keep an eye on him all the time.  What’s even worse, she has a little network of spies among his friends who she tells to watch him when she’s not around and report back to her. Yes, she is that bloody paranoid.  This kid is going to grow up to be neurotic, perhaps even more neurotic than his mother is.  As such, this kid doesn’t have many friends, he doesn’t do all that great in school and he spends most of his life trapped within the walls of the family house. Now contrast that with our kids.  We’ve never been overly protective.  Sure, we watch out for them, but we don’t hang over them 24/7, just in case they get in trouble.  They’ve been taught how to act, what to do, what their boundaries are, and pretty much, they get to act within those boundaries.  If they make a mistake, and trust me, they certainly do, they reap the consequences of their actions and learn in short order what they can and cannot do.  They’ve both learned those lessons very well, they know what is expected of them and they know that, while we’re behind them all the way, they are responsible for what they do or don’t do and we’re going to either reward or punish based on their actions.  Both of our kids are at the top of their classes, have tons of friends, are very well socialized, etc.  My oldest daughter has a 3.8 GPA, which I know since we just got her report card in the mail today, and that’s only because she’s not all that hot in math.  If she improved that, she could easily have a 4.0 GPA. So why isn’t my daughter’s friend doing well?  Because he’s being stifled.  He’s being suffocated by overly cautious parents who simply cannot let go and let their kid learn how to actually live.  I see years of therapy in this kid’s future and a disastrous life, just because he’ll be entirely unprepared for reality once mom and dad aren’t constantly coaching him.  He won’t understand how to deal with the thousand little things that come up every day, he won’t know how to pay a bill, fill up a gas tank, or balance his checkbook.  Sure, those things are a few years off, he’s only 11 now, but the kind of crushing presence his parents have on him right now, and will likely have on him for years to come, almost guarantee it. What’s sad, though, I don’t think they really care.  They are so paranoid on their own that they entirely overlook all the damage they’re doing to their won.  This isn’t about keeping him safe, it’s about avoiding any possible trauma or difficulty they might have to face if their son, by chance, does anything wrong.  It’s not a security blanket for their kid, it’s entirely for them.  They want all the control so they never have to deal with surprises. But without surprises, just how worthwhile is life?  Unfortunately, he’s going to suffer his entire life because his parents were terrified of things not going to plan. Some people ought not breed at all, I guess.  Kids are not porcelain sculptures that must be put up on a shelf, kids have to be allowed to roam free and make mistakes, for without mistakes, how does anyone learn?  Certainly you mold your children, you guide them, you point them in the right direction and do your best to keep them from suffering unnecessarily, but to entirely ignore their individuality is to fail in your role as a parent.  You’re not raising a carbon copy of yourself, you’re raising an independent, intelligent, rational and mature future-adult who can think for themselves, reason and make credible decisions and improve the next generation and those generations to come. Otherwise, why the hell bother in the first place?

Eric Holder, the first black attorney general in U.S. history, has some serious problems.  Exactly why is this politically-correct hack in office again?  Can someone please explain that to me? He dares to suggest that America is a nation of cowards when it comes to race, yet here we are in a nation with the first black president and the first black attorney general, yet we’re somehow cowards? What the fuck is this asshole smoking? Wait a minute, let me get this straight.  Is this retard thinking, if you can use that word, along the same vein as black race-baiters like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, where, on one side of their heads, they talk about their ideal America being color-blind and on the other, they can’t say three sentences without bringing up “black culture” or the “black community”?  Yes, it’s color-blindness only if you’re not black, but if you are, you can be as much of a racist fucktard as you want. I guess Holder is terrified that he might actually offend someone, after all, he’s got a political agenda to push.  He refused to actually say the words that needed to be said with regard to the Texas armory shooting case.  No “jihad”, nothing at all relating to Islam or even religious extremism.  Even though it’s demonstrated that Nidal Hasan acted in such a manner because his religious beliefs told him to, this little chickenshit is terrified to actually mention the facts for fear of pissing off fundamentalist Muslims. If the top law enforcer in the nation is afraid to upset anyone, what the hell good is he going to do in the job?  Oh no, he might actually offend the criminals, we’d better not say anything like… oh, what they do is wrong, or that they deserve punishment!  The horror!  Maybe we should just give all the criminals a lollypop and a pat on the head to make them feel a lot better about their anti-social ways. Click here to view the embedded video. Speaking of criminals, he’s gone on record saying he considers Arizona Bill 1070 to be unconstitutional, yet he freely admits he hasn’t even read the damn thing!  Like so many other liberal shit-fucks out there, he’s just making a load of nonsense up to satisfy his political leanings, even if it’s demonstrably ridiculous.  Now keep in mind, the law is only 10 pages long, you’d think that the highest law officer in the nation could be bothered to actually read 10 pages before passing judgment on it, but no… that’s too hard.  “I have not had a chance to — I’ve glanced at it,” Holder said at a House Judiciary Committee hearing when asked by Rep.Ted Poe, R-Texas whether Holder has read the state law cracking down on illegal immigrants. “I’ll give you my copy of it if you would like,” Poe responded. Click here to view the embedded video. He wants to bring a suit against Arizona because he doesn’t like they enforcing federal immigration laws that are currently on the books, because the U.S. government refuses to enforce their own laws!  What a moron! Now in the most recent case, he doesn’t want to say anything about these Mexican rock-throwing twits being criminals, he wants to portray them as innocent victims.  They’re not victims!  The 15-year old who died was already an established member of a Mexican illegal-alien smuggling operation!  He wasn’t innocent!  The idiots throwing rocks weren’t doing it for fun, they were trying to get the Border Guard to move on so they could get back to smuggling illegals into the U.S.!  Does anyone think for one second that if Americans were throwing rocks at cops, they wouldn’t be taken immediately into custody?  Do you think they might not be fired upon?  After all, this is clearly a case of assault with a deadly weapon, aimed at police.  There’s no way in hell it would be ignored, like Holder seems to want to ignore the Mexican issue.  This is nothing new either, there have been dozens of instances in just the last several years where Mexicans have thrown rocks at border patrol officers.  In fact, in the last ten years, there are at least 15 major incidents, some of which involve an exchange of gunfire, but we don’t do a damn thing about it, we just welcome that sleazeball Calderone with open arms so he can be a fucking hypocrite asshole. Whatever happened to “rule of law” in this country?

I’ve talked about the absurd way that some people use “tolerance” to justify anything and everything and why this is an asinine idea.  It happens in plenty of different genres and fields, I recently found it in regard to MMOs and it reminded me why it’s such a bad idea across the board. In the discussion at hand, people were talking about those who want to play completely immersive games, games where you are basically playing an entire secondary life in extreme detail and I brought up the possibility that some people may be looking for games like that because they want to live vicariously through a video game because they are trying desperately to escape from reality.  Immediately, I got lots of people screaming about how “intolerant” I was because I dared to point out a possibility that some people might actually have problems and are using a game as a medication for their problem.  How dare I!  In fact, as often happens in this situation, plenty of people adamantly said they had no problems and they just liked playing games like that, something I never once suggested they shouldn’t do.  I specifically said *SOME* people may have problems and these clueless wonders immediately leapt to the unwarranted conclusion that I was accusing anyone and everyone who enjoyed these games as being some sort of social defective.  Even after correcting people several times, the outrage went on, apparently I’m not allowed to have an opinion about a small portion of the population because that opinion automatically must apply to everyone.  The people who want these deep, immersive, hyper-detailed games represent such a small minority that anyone who enjoys these games must be defended at all costs, as if admitting that there may be underlying issues for some people somehow invalidates any and all justification for wanting to play at all. I’m sorry, but just  because someone is “the enemy of your enemy” doesn’t make them your friend.  Take a look at the gay pride movement.  There are lots of people who they invite out to their parades, simply because they want to believe that if they stand up for these people, these people will stand up for them if the situation is reversed.  It wasn’t that long ago that they extended that “courtesy” to groups like NAMBLA.  You had open pedophiles marching down the street at gay pride parades, just because the organizers didn’t dare say that some things are just too extreme.  That happened right up to the point that they realized that the damage having NAMBLA show up was far, far more than any possible benefit they might someday get.  The same is true of many other lesser offensive groups, such as the so-called “dykes on bikes” crowd.  There’s certainly nothing wrong with them in general, but the only reason they’re in all the parades, according to friends of mine who are active in the gay community, is because they initially supported gay rights, therefore now the gay community is reciprocating.  There’s nothing particularly wrong with that, but I will say, I think it gives the gay community a potentially bad image.  It’s one thing to show people that gays are normal, happy, well-adjusted individuals just like everyone else, it’s wholly another to produce a spectacle with leather-boys and pedophiles walking right alongside.  Yes, I understand that these parades aren’t intended to show outsiders anything and I also think that in and of itself is problematic.  With any unliked minority, you’re on stage 24/7 whether you like it or not, people are looking for anything they can point to to support their dislike.  Therefore, you need to always put your best public face forward, letting go and going wild really isn’t an advisable option. Now as much as I personally support the gay rights movement, I do think that tying oneself to a downtrodden minority, just because they are a downtrodden minority, in hopes of forming a mutual admiration society, is potentially problematic.  Lots of atheist groups have, for years, set up booths at gay pride parades, just because they want the gays to step up to the plate when the atheists come under fire.  I’m not sure that’s a great idea and, as I said, where do you draw the line? I’ve also addressed this as a major downfall of furry fandom, the idea that anything and everything has to be tolerated, simply because if you don’t put up with everyone else’s fetishes, you can’t expect them to put up with yours.  We’ve all seen how well that worked out, it went from a reasonably successful fandom to a cesspool, full of degenerates and perverts, all because you couldn’t say “hey… we don’t put up with that kind of thing around here…”  As I said above, even if there is a niche market for furry fetish art, it isn’t the wisest idea to tie your whole fandom to that niche and that’s exactly what they did.  They took tolerance way, way, way too far.  It’s not at all uncommon to run into furries at conventions who are open pedophiles, beastialists and racists wearing full Nazi uniforms, but nobody is allowed to say that those things are bad.  It might hurt someone’s feelings. As I’ve said before, the core requirement for “tolerance” is that something be tolerable.  It’s foolish to stand up and support something that you personally detest, in the hopes that they’ll reciprocate.  If you have no standards whatsoever and will simply go where the wind blows, what’s the point of supporting anything? So getting back to my initial point, the idea that anyone and everyone who does anything even tangentially similar to what you do, even for entirely different reasons, must be defended to the death is utterly idiotic.  The idea that a concept, no matter how vile, must be supported because you hope those vile, evil people will turn around and support you is absurd.  If something exists, it exists on it’s own.  The number of people who support it or the number of people who practice it are really irrelevant, except from a marketing standpoint.  You don’t have to embrace all the other people who share the same general interest of yours, just so that those people will continue to buy your stuff or pat you on the back.  If that’s all you’re doing, you’re just as much of a loser as they are.  Have some standards, decide what is right and what is wrong and then stick by it. If you can’t do that, what’s the point of you at all?

It’s bad enough when Catholic priests molest innocent children and use their religious positions as a means to harm their parishioners, but now, it looks like at least one of them is financially benefiting from their crimes. Oliver O’Grady, called by some the “Hannibal Lechter” of pedophile Catholic priests, has done a horrendous amount of damage in his 17 years as part of the Stockton Diocese.  So far, 22 different abuse suits have been settled, with more than $18.7 million in damages paid to victims and there are more lawsuits in the wings.  In fact, they made a film about O’Grady called “Deliver Us From Evil“, detailing his molestations.  Now, it appears that O’Grady, who has returned to his native Ireland, is going to get paid almost $800 a month for the next ten years by the church and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. The church purchased an annuity seven years ago, long, long after O’Grady was a known sex offender, which happened back in 1993, and long after he was finally released from seven years in prison, so the church has no case in saying they didn’t know, but they are still rewarding his actions that have cost the church many millions. “He gets rewarded. I get very frustrated,” said Nancy Sloan, 45, who was sexually abused by O’Grady when she was 11. “The church has certainly gone back on its word countless times. I don’t know why it wouldn’t even cross their minds to go back on the annuity — give it back to a victims fund.”  Certainly, the Catholic Church, which constantly complains of having financial shortfalls to pay out on all of these pedophile cases, could use the money, even though the total of this annuity, at $94,560, is really just a drop in the bucket.  What’s clear is that O’Grady has no business whatsoever profiting from his crimes. Some have claimed that the annuity was just “hush money” to keep O’Grady from testifying against people like Cardinal Roger Mahoney, who is widely thought to have moved known pedophile priests around and kept it quiet, but others disagree.   According to Bishop Stephen Blaire, who set up the annuity, he fervently wished he could have stripped O’Grady of more than his ability to perform priestly duties, but defrocking a priest was a “long and cumbersome process,” one with “no guarantees,” especially a decade ago, Blaire said.  The only way to control O’Grady was for O’Grady to personally request a change of status. “He was going to be paroled in November 2000,” Blaire said. “I was determined that he not leave prison as a priest. His lawyer told me O’Grady would consider seeking laicization if a pension annuity would be made available to him.  I found it distasteful to provide an annuity as part of the arrangement. But I wanted to provide some measure of justice or peace of mind for his victims that he could never again use his priesthood to damage families. I didn’t see any other way of guaranteeing that he would be out of the priesthood.”  He says he realized at the time that the annuity payments would be received badly, which is exactly why he didn’t actually tell anyone that they would be happening until it was too late.  And yes, there was absolutely another way of guaranteeing that he would be out of the priesthood, by going up the chain of command at the RCC until you either exhausted all possibilities or someone did something about it and then going to the press with the names of all those bishops and above who wouldn’t help.  Shame the Church into taking action, even if it costs you your job.  Isn’t that what doing the right thing is all about? But no, says Mary Jane Doerr, associate director of the office of Child and Youth Protection for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington, D.C.  “Yes, he did a terrible thing,” Doerr said, but a bishop has a responsibility to take care of priests in any case — he can’t just kick them to the curb. Like hell he can’t! This is the kind of crap that always makes me maddest about the Catholic Church.  It’s a bunch of people covering their own asses, doing what they know is absolutely wrong because they know the people above them won’t support what’s actually right.  It’s bad enough having this asshole priest, who has committed serious sexual crimes against children on two entirely different continents, over more than 20 years, not being throw in a hole for the rest of his miserable life, but to reward him with monthly payments as a bribe to keep his mouth shut? That’s absolutely unforgivable.  All of you are headed straight to the Religious Horror Show.  May you all rot.  Slowly.

After the recent announcement that man has managed to create life from scratch in the lab, now we’re getting exciting news from the Cassini space probe that has been taking readings from Saturn’s moon of Titan, that there is now good evidence that it may support methane-breathing life.  Certainly, that life would be very simple and microscopic, but life is life. According to the preliminary reports, chemical signatures detected by the probe may be indicative of a very basic form of life, or at the very least, a precursor of life. One key finding comes from a paper online now in the journal Icarus that shows hydrogen molecules flowing down through Titan’s atmosphere and disappearing at the surface. Another paper online now in the Journal of Geophysical Research maps hydrocarbons on the Titan surface and finds a lack of acetylene. This lack of acetylene is important because that chemical would likely be the best energy source for a methane-based life on Titan, said Chris McKay, an astrobiologist at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., who proposed a set of conditions necessary for this kind of methane-based life on Titan in 2005. One interpretation of the acetylene data is that the hydrocarbon is being consumed as food. But McKay said the flow of hydrogen is even more critical because all of their proposed mechanisms involved the consumption of hydrogen. “We suggested hydrogen consumption because it’s the obvious gas for life to consume on Titan, similar to the way we consume oxygen on Earth,” McKay said. “If these signs do turn out to be a sign of life, it would be doubly exciting because it would represent a second form of life independent from water-based life on Earth.” So far, methane-based life has been strictly theoretical, just like some of the other exotic chemicals upon which life could, in theory, be based, such as silicon and flourine.  While there are some lifeforms on Earth that are known to have the ability to survive in a methane environment, for a methane-centered biosphere to thrive, much colder temperatures are necessary than are found on Earth.  In fact, for some of these compounds to facilitate life, substances like water must be completely absent because water tends to break down the chemical bonds that would make life possible.  However, it’s been known for a long time now that Titan has lakes and rivers of liquid methane, ethane and other hydrocarbons.  Now, evidence shows that something is consuming a huge amount of atmospheric hydrogen, a by-product of sunlight breaking apart acetylene and methane molecules in the upper atmosphere.  Scientists also expected a huge amount of acetylene to be present on the surface of Titan, but their mass spectrometers report none whatsoever to be found.  Some process is scouring these elements from the planet and one of the best explanations is some form of bacterial or other simple lifeform. “It’s as if you have a hose and you’re squirting hydrogen onto the ground, but it’s disappearing,” Darrell Strobel, a Cassini interdisciplinary scientist who has been studying Titan’s upper atmosphere said. “I didn’t expect this result, because molecular hydrogen is extremely chemically inert in the atmosphere, very light and buoyant. It should ‘float’ to the top of the atmosphere and escape.”  Strobel is careful to note that while this evidence is consistent with conditions that could produce an exotic, methane-based life form, it does not definitively prove its existence.  That will take a specifically designed lander to go looking for that life. “Titan’s atmospheric chemistry is cranking out organic compounds that rain down on the surface so fast that even as streams of liquid methane and ethane at the surface wash the organics off, the ice gets quickly covered again,” Roger Clark, a Cassini team scientist based at the U.S. Geological Survey in Denver, said. “All that implies Titan is a dynamic place where organic chemistry is happening now.” If this turns out to be true though, it’s just one more nail in the coffin of creationism, a coffin that already looks like swiss cheese.  What are they left with?  Oh yes, Earth is so special that… well, there’s another instance of life, within our own solar system, based on an entirely different chemical basis, so we’re not all that special, are we? Cassini is still scheduled to make a couple more passes at Titan and will be seeking to confirm this data, but if confirmed, can we please put a fork in this idiotic creationism idea?  It’s done.  It’s over-done.  It’s so far past done that it’s approaching charcoal.  Time for you idiotic Christians to get it through your little pea brains that your whole farcical load of religious bullshit is pathetically laughable. It’s not like the rest of us haven’t know it for a very, very long time.

I get into discussions all the time where someone will make a claim that some set of actions or beliefs or morals, etc. are “objective” and almost without exception, I reject that claim.  I’ve kept meaning to write something more about it, but on the most recent Atheist Experience, they had a couple of good discussions on the subject, with Matt Dillahunty saying that he was more of a moral objectivist, that I thought I ought to get it out of the way. Now maybe it’s the definition of objective and subjective that I’m using, so let me get that out of the way first.  For me, “objective” means something that is factually true regardless of one’s feelings about it.  While it’s an imperfect example, let’s take gravity.  No matter how you feel about gravity, no matter how much you believe or disbelieve in it, gravity exists.  It is not beholden to the human mind, it is not bound by opinion, desire or consequences.  You can disbelieve in gravity all you want, the second you step off the top of that building, you’re going to fall. Reality doesn’t care what you think. The dictionary defines “objective” in this sense as:  expressing or dealing with facts or conditions as perceived without distortion by personal feelings, prejudices, or interpretations.  It defines “subjective” as:  modified or affected by personal views, experience, or background.  I think these two definitions fit pretty well with what I’m talking about. However, there is a point that Matt was making where I really disagree.  He says he’s closer to a moral objectivist, but he also said that if lots of people who hold the same values get together, they can decide whether or not something is true.  What he’s really doing though is arguing for collective subjectivism.  Certainly if the group of people is large enough, they can use their political clout to enforce their subjective ideas within the particular society where they hold sway, but does that make their ideas actually true, or just powerful?  This isn’t a case of objectivism at all.  It’s no better than if a bunch of people got together and decided gravity didn’t exist.  That wouldn’t change anything about gravity and even if this group got very powerful and could impose their views on everyone, we wouldn’t go floating off into space. One of the examples I commonly use is that of slavery.  200 years ago, slavery was widely accepted and in fact, people have kept other people as slaves throughout most of human history.  In American slavery in particular, religion widely taught that the Bible commanded that blacks were inferior (the “Mark of Cain” argument) and that white were doing them a favor by keeping them under control.  Today, however, especially in the Western world, we view slavery as immoral and unconscionable.  The argument I’ve seen is that we know better today.  So if we somehow “know  better” than people 200 years ago, what happens if, in another 200 years, they’ve adopted slavery again.  Do they “know better” than we do?  Does that make us wrong today if, at some point in the future, people change their minds?  If not, then by what basis can we declare that the people of 200 years ago were objectively wrong if we’re not willing to acknowledge the possibility that future beliefs might make our current ideas objectively wrong? I’ll be the first to say I probably agree with most people about slavery.  I find it personally distasteful and abhorrent, but that’s because of my upbringing and cultural indoctrination.  In different circumstances, being raised with a different set of social norms, I could easily have been pro-slavery and so could everyone else.  It’s not about slavery being absolutely wrong and that’s really the point.  When it comes to morality and ethics, absolutes simply don’t exist.  We find this kind of thing commonly among theists, they want whatever beliefs they have about their deity’s desires to be absolutely true and applicable to everyone, but we also see it in non-theists.  Lots of humans, whether they recognize it or not, just want quick and easy answers to difficult questions so they don’t have to think about it anymore.  They don’t like moral dilemmas or hard questions that make them have to think and most important, they don’t like ambiguity.  They want a pat answer that’s always true. Sorry, sometimes in life, you just can’t get what you want.  As uncomfortable as it might be for some, you can’t simply declare that our example of slavery is wrong, forever and always, it’s a topic that will need to be revisited again and again as time goes on and society changes.  We might hope that it remains wrong, but we can never be certain.  Now I’m not going to go into morality or ethics specifically here, that’s a long discussion in and of itself, but it all applies and we need to realize that we, as human beings, only get to make decisions within our particular sphere of influence.  I don’t get to declare something morally good or morally bad and impose that decision on everyone on the planet, just because I wish it were the case.  How is it any better that the U.S. tries to impose their “morals” on everyone else than if, say, the Muslim world tried to force Sharia law on the rest of the world?  You cannot say that either side’s beliefs are objectively true, therefore why would either position have more “truth value” than the other?  It comes down to “might makes right”, not “my morals are better than your morals”. So please, can we stop playing the absurd “my morals are inherently better than your morals” game?  Can we knock off the “I’m objectively right and you’re objectively wrong” nonsense?  I’m sick to death of going into debate after debate, only to be met with “I’m just right, I don’t have to actually defend anything I say, I already win!” No you don’t, the second you say that, you’ve already lost because you don’t even comprehend the rules of the game.