Brush with greatness

Last night I randomly logged in to Full Tilt to terrorize the $1/2 games. I was absolutely crushing it for like 6 or 8 big bets, so I started snooping around and noticed there was some kind of "chat with the pros" section and there happened to be a live chat going on. Erica Schoenberg was the featured pro. I had never heard of her, so I decided to join the chat. I fired off a few questions, hoping some of them would be selected for her to answer.

2007-08-14 03:52:36.47 who are you?

2007-08-14 03:54:47.10 do you find that your anonymity inspires fear?
especially when you play against people i've heard of

Meanwhile some of her answers to other questions included Seinfeld quotes, references to the NBA, and her speaking french. Some questions seemed to imply that she was attractive. What was going on here?

2007-08-14 03:56:56.20 As a female who likes Seinfeld, do you find that I should know who you are? If so, why don't I?

2007-08-14 03:59:37.03 do you think that full tilt should sheild you from the tough questions? if not, please tell me who you are.

2007-08-14 04:02:08.53 lebron? francais? seinfeld? some full tilt tech geek just made you up right?

2007-08-14 04:04:10.16 all my questions concern your likely nonexistence. how do you handle the pressure of this kind of scrutiny?

Around this point it became obvious that this girl was dating some famous high-roller named David and happened to win a tournament. Apparently that makes her some kind of celebrity. My questions kind of deteriorated from here (or improved, depending on your perspective).

2007-08-14 04:11:37.30 did you and i ever play $15/30 together at the
taj? if so, did we flirt a lot and then never fully realize our
desires?

2007-08-14 04:14:27.18 i have AJo in the small blind. do you know
phil ivey?

2007-08-14 04:17:47.04 6 dude one time my buddy knocked gavin smith
to the ground cause he was so drunk. true story. now, hypothetically if
i shared a poilte lunch with you, who would have had a bigger brush with
greatness?

2007-08-14 04:25:28.31 if you could have dinner with any 5 people,
living or dead, would your zombie magic make you famous enough for me to
have heard of you?

At this point I decided to google this girl, I found pictures of her. She's kind of pretty.

2007-08-14 04:31:51.50 all those questions about who you are were
just jokes! who is this david, and why does your prettiness make my
tummy feel weird?

I later found out that her primary claim to fame is that she is engaged to David Benyamine and was part of some kind of strip poker DVD where she took her top off. (I'd link to pictures but this is a family blog. I'm sure you can find them though.) Only one of my questions made it through before she signed off.

[adspar]: who are you?
EricaSchoenberg: who are you?

fuck this shit

I just watched Bill Kristol tell preposterous lies right to Jon Stewart's face and when it was done, Stewart giggled and shook Kristol's hand. Then it cut to a commercial for the Democrat Senate election committee. Fuck this shit. Even the dissenters are lame-ass establishment pimps. God fucking damn this all.

this is me

Romney: bigot, hypocrite

Romney says: I'm a bigot against some people!!
Christians say: We're bigots against Romney!!
Romney says: Bigotry is wrong!!


I've come to realize that principles mean nothing to these people. They're just convenient props for self-promotion. Until they become inconvenient, at which point they're completely disposable. Fucking assholes.

if you're so inclined

Far-flung correspondent for the New Yorker writes about bonobos, and Frans de Waal responds. Frans is cool. Bonobos are cool.


Giuliani loves his money.


Republicans are like children.


IOZ calls it like it is.

the real estate blues

A few weeks ago I accepted an offer on my house. If everything goes as planned, we'll close in 2 weeks. I'm extremely nervous about it though, because my buyer is selling a condo before moving here. That buyer is 100% financed, and we haven't heard a final loan approval from that lender. The mortgage market is a disaster right now, and those kinds of loans are particularly suspect. I'm concerned that the deal is going to fall apart and severely mess up our plans.

There's nothing I can do, and there's nothing you can say. I'm just nervous and can't sleep and need to vent.

Another objectionable mass email

A relative sent this email to most of my family.

Subject: Fw: News Flash

> Verified with SNOPES--this is unnerving
>
> AT A CITGO STATION REGULAR WAS PRICED AT $2.82 PER GALLON, NO
> CUSTOMERS, HOWEVER ACROSS THE STREET IT WAS SELLING FOR $2.85 PER
> GALLON AND ALL PUMPS WERE HAD CARS
> WAITING TO FUEL. HERE'S WHY!!!!
>
> Have you noticed how the Citgo signs have disappeared in the past 7-8
> months? Very clever move by Chavez. But guess what...........
> CITGO IS CHANGING ITS NAME...this is serious Americans...make sure you
> read ..
>
> NEWS FLASH:
>
>
> Chavez is NOW getting a Russian Weapons Factory built by Putin The
> RUSSIANS are building an AK-47 Kalashnikov Assault Rifle factory in
> Venezuela , to give armament support to Communist Rebel groups
> throughout the Americas.
>
> Chavez NOW has IRANIANS operating his oil refineries in Venezuela for
> him. It is likely only a matter of time, if not already, before Chavez
> has Iranian built LONG RANGE missiles, with variety of warhead types
> aimed at: Guess Who?
>
> CITGO is NOW in the process of Changing Its Name to PETRO EXPRESS due to
> the loss of gasoline sales in the USA due to the recent publicity of
> ownership by Chavez of Venezuela .
>
> Every dollar you spend with CITGO or PETRO EXPRESS gasoline will be
> used against you, your basic human rights, and your freedoms. He will
> start wars here in the Americas that will probably be the death of
> millions.
>
> THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT because Chavez is starting to feel the loss of
> revenue from his holdings. HE OWNS CITGO. This is a very important move
> that everyone should be aware of.
>
> ANNOUNCED JUST RECENTLY, CITGO, BEING AWARE THAT SALES ARE DOWN DUE TO
> U.S. CUSTOMERS NOT WANTING TO BUY FROM "CITGO-CHAVEZ", HAVE STARTED
> TOCHANGE THE NAME OF SOME OF THEIR STORES TO: "PETRO EXPRESS"
> DO NOT BUY FROM "PETRO EXPRESS" EITHER!!! "PETRO EXPRESS" IS ALSO 100%
> OWNED BY "CHAVEZ."
>
> KEEP THIS MEMO GOING SO THAT EVERYONE KNOWS WHAT IS HAPPENING.
>
> BOYCOTT "CITGO" AND "PETRO EXPRESS"
>
> MAKE SURE THIS IS PASSED ON TO EVERYONE IN YOUR E-MAIL LIST IN THE
> UNITED STATES AND OUTSIDE OF AMERICA

I sent this response to everyone.

If we're concerned about weapons in the hands of dangerous people that might be counter-productive to America's interests, we might want to be more concerned about this kind of thing. Nobody arms dangerous people with more weapons than the United States.

Additionally, some of the claims in the email might be a wee bit silly, like " Every dollar you spend with CITGO or PETRO EXPRESS gasoline will be used against you, your basic human rights, and your freedoms." This article explains how this claim is wildly inaccurate from an economic perspective, although economics are the least of the problems there. The idea that Hugo Chavez is actively attempting to violate American human rights and freedoms on a massive scale is pretty silly. Note that he has offered cheap heating oil to American poor. In his own country, he's fought poverty in numerous ways, getting real results. Let's worry about human rights violations and attacks on personal freedoms committed by our own government before we start worrying about hypothetical future violations by someone else.

Or "he will start wars here in the Americas that will probably be the death of millions." If we're worried about wars that will probably be the death of millions, maybe we ought to get our own forces of Iraq. As of a year ago, the best scientific estimate of the number of Iraqi deaths that had occurred since our invasion that wouldn't have happened if we had not invaded was 655,000. We're easily on pace to kill well over a million.

Note that none of this should be construed as blanket support for Hugo Chavez. There might well be valid criticisms of his policies and practices, but absurd fear-mongering hype isn't the way to address such issues. And my other objection is that if we're concerned about war and weapons and personal freedom, we'd be wise to tend to our own affairs first.

un-crazy

I think I have to agree with Trakker and Capt. Fogg that it is no longer crazy to suspect that Bush doesn't intend to stop being The Decider in 2009.

fuck the democrats

They could stop it, but they don't. Fucking assholes. There is no hope.

Glenn Greenwald:

With each day that passes, the radicalism and extremism originally spawned in secret by the Bush presidency becomes less and less his fault and more and more the fault of those who -- having discovered what they have been doing and having been given the power to stop it -- instead acquiesce to it and, worse, enable and endorse it.

John Cole:

At any rate, well done Democrats. If you are wondering why your poll numbers in Congress are so low, it is because the Republican opposition hates you, and the people who voted for you hate you more. Why? Because of stuff like this.

Grow a spine, you cowards.

Thoreau:

You mean to tell me that Harry Reid couldn’t get 8 more Democrats 40 of his 49 Democrats (plus Bernie Sanders) (edit) to say no to a President whose approval rating is currently a complex number with a negative real part and a large imaginary part? WHAT THE FUCK DID WE ELECT YOU SONS OF BITCHES FOR??!?!?!?!?!?

A.L.:

What's important to understand is that this bill would allow much broader surveillance than what the Bush administration has so far acknowledged doing. Until the administration actually discloses what activities it has engaged in and promises to abide by FISA, I just don't see how any self-respecting member of Congress could vote to give the administration additional powers. I understand that FISA is not a perfect law and there are ways it could be improved and further-modernized, but until you actually know what the administration has been doing over the last six years and the extent to which it is willing to comply with even an amended FISA, you're just legislating in the dark. It's craven and reckless.

The six months sunset provision doesn't give me much reassurance either. If Congress is too craven to withstand administration pressure in this scenario, does anyone believe they'll actually have the stones to take existing powers away when they come up for renewal? Not likely.

Who is IOZ?:

The senate just voted overwhelmingly to further expand the Executive Surveillance State, because, after all, this Executive has proven to be ethically rigorous and practically restrained in its use of the vast powers already conferred on it by the Congress

The government of the United States is just a criminal cartel. Democrats are just as much a part of it.

Jason Bourne kills your dinner plans

I love the Jason Bourne movies. They're on a select list of flicks that I can't turn off if I see them on TV. Tonight I saw the newest, The Bourne Ultimatum, and it somehow gave me a way to finally start blogging about food like I've been meaning to.

Bourne 3 deals with the idea of understanding the reasons for our actions. Assassins are told who to kill and aren't supposed to ask why. But Bourne, former CIA assassin, is troubled by the moral abominations of his past life and struggles to understand how he came to be in those situations.

There's a flashback scene where Bourne is given a gun and ordered to kill a hooded man, told only that doing so will help save American lives. Would you pull the trigger? I think that most people with a functioning moral compass answer that they would be reluctant to kill in almost any circumstances, and that in this specific scenario they'd minimally have to know a lot more before they'd take a life.

But if they were actually put into the situation, many more would kill than say they would. Why? Because people are social creatures, and they tend to follow orders. They rationalize that if an authoritative figure is giving them a command, there must be a good reason for it, and they probably ought to listen. Even if it turns out the order was morally wrong, it can't really be my fault, right? I was just following orders. The famous Milgram experiment chillingly documented this behavior.

Normal people can be manipulated or coaxed into doing things that they themselves would find morally wrong in other circumstances. Authority is one social mechanism to induce morally conflicted behavior. Another is the power of normalization - peer pressure, following the crowd. And yet another is to hide from people the immorality of the action. If everyone else does something, and I can't see anything obviously wrong with it, what harm can there be, right? Especially if the authorities are saying it is ok. That logic makes sense in the heat of the moment, but doesn't cut it for us as we carefully contemplate morals in a detached way. We see the moral obligation to make a reasonable effort understand the consequences of our actions before we act.

So what does Jason Bourne's moral crisis and the rest of this discussion have to do with food? Ask yourself these kinds of questions:

• Do you understand where your food comes from?
• Do you know how it gets from the ground to your plate?

If you're like most people, you don't know much about that. You know an apple grew on a tree and an egg came from a chicken on a farm, but you don't really know the whole process. And you certainly have very little idea about the complicated manufacturing project, the logistical miracle, that resulted in that soda or that microwave dinner or those corn chips.

Does it matter? Well, how about these questions:

• Do you understand the environmental impact of that process?
• Do you understand the public health impact of that process?
• Do you understand the political impact of your food choices?
  
• Do you know how the animals that you eat are treated?
• Do you know how the people who work along your food chain are treated?

If one or more of those sound like they might be issues of moral concern, you're probably a normal human being. You eat hundreds of times per year, spending thousands of dollars on food, and you don't know anything about the moral consequences of your actions. You don't know the answers to those questions because they're deliberately hidden from you. You eat more or less the way everyone else does, and it isn't something you've often thought to even question, aside from a few nutritional facts here and there. You compare prices, see what tastes good, and maybe try to be healthy sometimes.

Are you doing something morally wrong? Something to which you'd object if you only understood the whole situation? Would you kill a man without knowing why? Have you already? Why?

If you're like me, these are troubling questions. No wonder Bourne gets headaches. At first he tried to run away from the nightmare of all his questions, an understandable reaction. It is tempting to just try to forget about all this and keep eating the same way. Eventually Bourne realizes that he has to confront the questions.

And the answers turn out to be even more troubling. In real life and in the movie. No wonder Bourne is on an international rampage to get to the bottom of things. He has to understand it all before he can ever hope to make it right and try to be at peace.

visit him often

Who Is IOZ? operates on a few basic principles best expressed thusly: When the government talks, it lies. When Democrats and Republicans tell you what they're going to do, the Republicans are lying about the what and the Democrats about the do.

more bridges that might fall down

Perlstein:

The Minnesota bridge that plunged into the Mississippi River yesterday, killing four, and almost killing a school bus full of kids, was rated "structurally deficient."

So how about bridges in other states? Via the magic of Google, I did a quick and selective canvass...

Abuse of power: why worry about that?

Over the last year I've been involved in a series of heated email exchanges with the man who used to be known as "check my ip." He's a textbook authoritarian, reflexively defending the Bush administration's crimes in the name of security, while openly scoffing at the idea that government abuse of power is something reasonable people should be concerned about. I've given up on the emails, but I can't help but wonder what empty excuse he'd muster to salve the cognitive dissonance from the story about how the FBI concealed evidence that would have spared four men from 30 years in prison, rewarded and promoted those who orchestrated the cover-up, and now the taxpayers have to pay the $100,000,000 settlement. I'm sure he'd mutter something about a few bad seeds and then blame the liberal media.

Racism

Alive and well in America!

3 fun things to read

Ethanol is a terrible energy solution, but that won't stop our politicians from promoting it. As long as their corporate masters make money, they're happy. Who cares about the rest of the world, right?

George Bush can take all your money if you say bad things about him, and you can't do anything about it. Welcome to America, fucker!

Torture and rape make for good common ground with our new friend Libya.

Pilates for Dummies

I just did 30 minutes of Pilates for Dummies. Wow. My body feels different than anything I've ever felt. I might have to do this again.

Grilled Shark Loin

I am eventually going to blog about my new approach to food, but tonight I'm just going to tell what I cooked.

I found fresh shark loin in the seafood section at Safeway that said it was wild caught. (I don't know what other kind of shark meat is available, and I'm guessing it wouldn't work well to farm sharks, but I suppose we could find a way to make it happen if we really tried hard.) I marinated it in a mixture of olive oil, soy sauce, lemon juice, lime juice, garlic, salt, and pepper. That marinade wasn't from a recipe, it was just what was available in the kitchen and seemed like it might all work together. Then I grilled it.

It turned out ok. I think shark meat probably isn't my favorite, though I don't quite know how to describe it. It is almost bitter, and sort of musty. A few bites of it were very tasty though - the ones that were towards the center of the concentric circle patterns in the meat. They were the whitest in color and they tasted more like pork than anything else I could describe.

Even though I didn't especially like how it turned out, I'm glad I tried it. I used to be extremely averse to trying new food, but now I enjoy exploring.

everything in one link

President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki often “talk about their faith in God” when they speak once every two weeks.

I would have thought they'd have better things to talk about than their imaginary friends. Actually, I wouldn't have thought that at all.

in which the world implodes

Every single day I get more and more pissed off. The people who make decisions that change the world are overwhelmingly bad people. One of our major political factions are deceptive selfish fascists and the other are (at best) sniveling stupid wimps or (at worst) willfully passive enablers. The vast majority of our population is taken in with silly fairy tales that they believe are absolute truth, and agree that anyone who speaks out against this is a raving lunatic. We ravage our environment, devastate nations who can't stop us, and tell the rest of the world to go fuck themselves because we have the right to do it, as bestowed by our favorite imaginary friend.

I have a lot of hope for the future though. Everything is going to get better!

billo the racist

http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2007/07/normalizing-white-supremacy.html

Bill O'Reilly: But do you understand what the New York Times wants, and the far-left want? They want to break down the white, Christian, male power structure, which you're a part, and so am I, and they want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically break down the structure that we have. In that regard, Pat Buchanan is right.

blog... BLOG.... blog? blog.

Selling a house in a shitty market is nerve-wracking. Seems like things might be looking up for us, but we still have a long way to go.

I have a few things going on in my life that I would like to blog about, I just haven't made it a priority yet. Hopefully I'll get to that soon. As a teaser and placeholder, topics include:

1. drawing lines, in regards to evaluating the morality of various actions
2. religious weddings and funerals
3. food
4. slaves to convention

Topics 1 and 4 both arise as I try to figure out how to deal with 2 and 3. This is a poor numbering system.

stars aligned

I went bowling and rolled a 189 game today. I'm usually happy when I break 100. I'm not being modest or exaggerating.

WHAT THE FUCK ELSE DO YOU WANT, ASSHOLE

Look at this fucking idiot.

Novak sits around complaining about how mean we are and how nasty our words are.

His president is starting wars of aggression against countries that pose us no threat, torturing captives, suspending habeas corpus, spying on American people, pardoning felons on his own staff, and breaking American and international laws left and right, all with Novak's gleeful support, but woman and bloggers are just so fucking vitriolic. What a disgusting person he is.

What sane person responds to the madness of our government and the idiocy of our press with anything other than outrage? How the fuck else am I supposed to respond? Dick fucking Cheney says that he doesn't have to follow the rules of the executive branch because he's not in the executive branch and I'm supposed to treat that with something other than scorn? Every single fucking argument these people make is already filled with scorn. They scorn reality. They have contempt for laws. They don't give a fuck about anything but their own power, and yet all this fucking idiot can say is that the critics are just so mean. Fuck you, Bob Novak.

note to self

Stop calling the occupation of Iraq the Iraq "war."

RIP Mary

Friday July 13, 2007 would have been my great aunt Mary's 90th birthday. Instead it was the day of her funeral, so most of my family gathered in her home town of Providence, Rhode Island. A far as deaths go, Mary's was the good kind. Her body really should have stopped working 7 months ago, but she was a stubborn woman and hung on too long. Her death spared her further suffering. But her funeral was tragic.

When Mary's sister Agnes died in May, a few days before her memorial service, I wrote the following.

...religion tends to steal the deceased's thunder at the memorial service. I don't know what the plans are yet for Agnes' memorial, but she wasn't a religious person and I hope I don't have to sit through a bunch of Catholic crap just because her family is religious. She considered herself an agnostic ("I don't say there's no god. I just say that I don't know, because I don't."), but I would call her an atheist because she lived life without any belief in god. For a woman from her era, coming from her ultraconservative and ultraCatholic family, hers is a pretty impressive position by any name. The worst thing about religious funerals is how they manage to spend so much time talking about god and reciting ancient text passages instead of talking about the person that died. I don't want to be numbed into submission by boring chants and the empty consolation of "God's purpose." Agnes had an interesting life and I hope we take the opportunity to talk about her and not try to force the occasion into a belief system she rejected.

I got exactly what I hoped for for Agnes. Her family and friends gathered and talked about her, free of religious distraction. I realized that while Agnes and Mary had been around my whole life and I had gotten to know them in terms of their personalities, I really didn't know much about their lives. It was really special to hear people talk about what Agnes meant to them, and to learn about the work she had done. We shared memories for a couple hours, then shared a wonderful meal. I left it feeling very good about the occasion, with a tinge of sadness that it took her death to learn so much about her, and with a renewed general appreciation of life.

Mary's funeral was everything I hoped Agnes' wouldn't be, and worse. We sat through a Catholic funeral mass, then a brief blessing at the cemetery, then a reception. None of her friends or family stood to speak about her at any point. The only words delivered about her were in a homily delivered by a priest of whom Mary was quite fond. I found his message bizarre and despicable. As priorities go, remembering Mary was clearly a distant second behind bolstering Catholic dogma and tribalism. And his remembrances were tasteless by any standards, even in the context of his first priority. It was just really weird and sad.

He opened by reflecting on the gospel reading, which was from some letter of Paul to somebody, the Corinthians or Thessalonians or the Czechoslovakians maybe. The priest reflected fondly on how Paul's letter included an extended taunt towards some anthropomorphism of "death". You see, for "all of us believers," everything changed 2,000 years ago thanks to Jesus, and death could no longer end our lives. Thus, Mary's death was a happy occasion because she's passed on through the portal of death to a happy afterlife.

The priest was just getting warmed up. He moved on to a discussion of how important religion was to Mary. He spoke of how she came to him for confession (a Catholic ritual where people tell the priest their sins and the priest offers them forgiveness), but first she told him that her girl-friends giggled at the idea of going to confession. The priest proceeded to chide any of Mary's girl-friends who were in attendance for such crass impertinence. He then told how Mary's health problems started when she was hit by a car while walking to church. And he spoke about how in her last few months she voiced concerns that "she was in the wrong line," meaning that she was worried about going to go to hell when she died. He assured us that he has no doubts that Mary is in heaven and hoped that she was saving him a seat.

Here I'd like to take a moment here to tell the story of Mary's last few years as I understand them. Mary was walking across a street, and was hit by a car driven by an old woman. After that accident she never fully recovered, which isn't especially surprising for a woman in her late 80's even though she had been in fairly good health. She had a suffered a series of falls and other health setbacks until she ended up in an assisted living facility following several severe heart attacks. The last time I saw her she was in a bed, weighing probably 80 pounds, and too weak to lift her own arms. In spite of the rather severe physical trauma she endured, I never heard her, or heard of her, complain about bodily pain. But I know that she lived her last months in complete terror that she was going to hell. I watched her break down in tears at the certain doom that awaited her as my mother and aunt and uncle reassured her that she was bound for heaven.

So to recap the priest's homily:

• Death is so powerless to defeat us.
• It is one thing to use the mythology of an afterlife to offer comfort to the bereaved (I don't approve of making up lies, but I at least understand it), but to go on and on about what an impotent loser "death" is was just pathetic. Actually pathetic isn't the right word. It would have been pathetic if he was right - if "death" actually had been vanquished and he was going off on his defeated foe. But death had very clearly just won a battle, so I don't even know what word to for someone talking shit after they get their ass kicked . Insane? Delusional? (...Catholic.) Thanks asshole, but the abstract concept you're taunting just pwned this nice old lady. He's in ur base killin ur d00dz.
• And by the way, only believers don't have to worry about death. (The rest of you can rot in hell!)
• I'm sure it was wonderful for those in my family who know that I'm an atheist to be forcefully reminded that all the victories over death and happy eternal life don't apply to me. The only possible positive aspect (and I'm pretty sure it isn't a good thing, but for now I'll just concede that it could be) of their baseless belief system is that it might offer some deluded comfort at a time of death. The priest made sure to neutralize that positive aspect by emphasizing that all the happy heavenly flowers and kittens are only for people made eligible by their uncritical acceptance of preposterous fairy tales as complete truth. Did it never occur to him that there might be non-Catholics at Mary's funeral? If not, he's a thoughtless rube. If so, he's an insensitive prick. I don't see any other options.
  
• Trying to get to church is what killed Mary.
• I'm not saying Mary died because of religion (yet). I realize she could just as easily have been walking to the store or to a library or whatever. But the way I see it, she had no business walking around alone. Everyone talks about how the driver who hit her was to blame (and she certainly bears plenty of blame), but there's a reason why people help old ladies cross the street. An able and alert person might have been able to avoid getting hit. Mary was a stubborn woman and cared passionately about her Church, and it was that pride that was her tragic downfall. She needed to get to Church and she was going to go. From my point of view, it was pretty tasteless of the priest to mention this the way he did. Given that he was addressing a congregation of Mary's family and friends, he might not have proudly mentioned that she was recklessly risking life and limb to go see him. And given that his unstated but obvious top priority was to put more asses in the pews on Sundays, I'm not sure that this was a great selling point. "Come to Church and get blindsided by moving vehicles!"
  
• And what's with Mary's jackass friends who didn't encourage her to go tell her darkest secrets to a wonderful man like me!? Aren't they a bunch of losers! Oh and if you're here, make sure you start coming to see me too!
  
• Again, this is just totally classless both from a perspective of common decency in a time of loss, and from the perspective of someone trying to take advantage of a cynical recruitment opportunity. What on earth was wrong with this guy?

Needless to say everyone at the funeral sat there mouth-agape as this deranged lunatic delivered his diatribe. At the reception afterwards, we clustered around the more sensitive people, consoling them, all of us mutually assuring each other that he was a lunatic to be ignored. Some angrily denounced him and threatened to boycott his services.

Oh wait, it was the exact opposite of that. Everyone loved it. They all thought he was wonderful (with my baby sister the only exception I'm aware of) and "definitely understood now why Mary loved that priest!" I'm left to assume that within the rickety mental framework of the Catholic mindset, that kind of unfounded, insufferable condescension is inspirational.

As reception was winding down, my grandfather (Mary's brother) told us that "Mary certainly enjoyed this day." Setting aside my quibble over verb tense, the reality is that Mary (just like Agnes) planned her own services ahead of time, so that was the way she wanted it to happen. She must have requested that mean old priest specifically. She might have even specified that she didn't want anyone to deliver a eulogy, perhaps because she was so convinced she was going to hell that she didn't think anyone had anything good to say about her. So, maybe everyone thought the day was so wonderful because it was what Mary really would have wanted. But that it was Mary's wishes doesn't make me think more highly of the homily or the whole affair; it makes me sad that she would have wanted such an awful memorial.

So this is where I say that religion might well have ruined Mary's life. She was a wonderful, thoughtful and caring lady who was completely taken in by religion. Despite being a very attractive in her youth and very sociable, she never married. There's nothing at all wrong with being single, but in her case I strongly suspect that misplaced notions of Catholic virtue kept her from a more happy life. And maybe she had various personality characteristics that would have manifested themselves in other negative ways if not for the prodding from religion. Maybe something other than confession would have alienated her from her friends. Maybe some other cause would have given her stubborn reason to cross the street on her own. Maybe something other than Catholic mythology rendered abusive tirades from celibate old men an irresistible point of attraction. Maybe or maybe not. I can't firmly conclude that religion ruined her life. But it certainly ruined her death. Her last months were filled with needless anguish, and her funeral was a lifeless train wreck of her own design. Given her intense fear of the end, it is ironic that only death finally offered her relief from the religious madness driving that fear.

Rest in peace, Mary.

not sure if I get it, but I like it

Our Glorious Leader

It never ceases to blow my mind what a terrible person and incompetent president George Bush is. He says the Iraq disaster was Iraq's choice and can't even show the slightest bit of remorse over the shameful Valerie Plame outing. But he can dismiss America's rejection of his miserable and immoral failure of a war as some psychological defect and lecture how Congress simply needs to fund that war and shut the fuck up. This guy is insane (and not in the good way like IOZ).

Who Is IOZ?

I can't stop reading this blog. I'm convinced that this guy is some kind of insane genius. Check this out:

This plays nicely into my disunified field theory for understanding the present, apotheotic moment in the history of our empire. So much dissident effort is squandered in the search for a master narrative that accounts for the consolidation of executive power, or the so-called outsourcing of government work to private contractors, the invasions, the subversions, the lies, the repressions, the gutting of agencies, the parliamentary hijinks of the unlamented Republic majority, the martial fervor of war supporters, the Kafkaesque absurdities of the Terror War, and on and on down the list to such minor farces as the faithless, loveless, useless boondoggling of the the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives. And there is a lesson here, which is that plots don't necessarily have plots.

While everyone searches for a puppeteer, the more mundane reality takes its course. No one is actually in charge. There are greater and lesser influences surely, but at the end of the day a lot of bad men are doing bad things all on their own. That is not to say that there is no collective endeavor on the part of the current junta to wreck the world. It's to say, rather, that they are wrecking the world in the manner of an exquisite corpse.

Are you fucking kidding me? Who 1) sees this clearly AND 2) writes like this?

Or look at this brilliant nothing. What do you call it? A paw? A Hoof. Hoof!

UPDATE:

Unreal -

The image of Jim Morrison screeching "Mother! I want to fuck you . . . whaaaaa-all night looo-onnng!" while flapping his cock at that crowd in Florida appears before me. Yes indeed. From the Sermon on the Mount to Johannite moral asceticism to the Manhattan Project, Christianity leads the way.

This project to lump the whole span of history from the pre-Charmlemagnian dark years in Europe right up to the present moment into one perpetual, Christological Gemeinschaft is nothing if not audacious. Fortunately for those of us in the mocking arts, audacity is no antidote to idiocy, and is often its attendent. This argument was written with the intent to sound learned, and the natural result is that it sounds like a crackpot's pamphlet. This way to the center of our hollow Earth, ladies and gentlemen. I hold no brief for Western Civ, which is largely predicated on making trouble for everyone else, but it deserves better defenders than these.

Who the hell is this guy? This is amazing.

Fidel Castro

Castro is an interesting dude.

O'Reilly Fears the Pink Pistol Lesbians!

hahahahahahaha

"Well, you know, there is this national underground network, if you will, Bill, of women that's lesbians and also some men groups that's actually recruiting kids as young as 10 years old in a lot of the schools in the communities all across the country," he reported. "And they actually carry a number of weapons. And they commit a number of crimes."

"Now, the other thing, too, that our viewers are going to find very, very interesting, is the fact that they actually carry—some of these groups carry pink pistols," Wheeler said. "They call themselves the pink-pistol-packing group. And these are lesbians that actually carry pistols. That's 9-millimeter Glocks. They use these. They commit crimes, and they cause a lot of hurt to a lot of people."

interesting

Here's a professor that fits very well with my interests. All of these sound very cool to me:

"Evolutionary psychology, environments that support (or undermine) reasonable behavior, cognitive maps and the structure of knowledge; adaptive connectionist models; attention and mental fatigue; expertise and public participation."

I'll have to browse through their Personality and Social Context area to see if they have people filling the other side of my interests.

I wonder if I could get accepted there.

My interests

I've been trying to write this more eloquently, but end up getting nowhere, so I'm just going to force it out.

I want to apply to grad school by the end of 2007, to start a full time PhD program in fall of 2008. I've settled on Psychology as my subject, after seriously considering Economics, Anthropology, and Philosophy (and less seriously considering Biology and History). Clearly my interests don't fit into a neat container, but I think Psychology is the best match for me.

The broadest way to describe my interests is that I want to understand what the hell is wrong with everyone. That's really what is comes down to. Is that a bad way to approach this? It doesn't mean I don't think there are lots of things right with everyone, and I see that there is good in the world, but I look around and see a lot of weird shit going on and I want to make sense of it. The last few years I've been trying to figure it out on my own, but now I want to make it more formal.

I think there are two areas that I most want to pursue, both of which I think I can find in the right Psychology program. Before I get to that let's highlight some of the things I think are so fucked up. We'll go to bullet format, and I won't elaborate on them all, I'll just list items.

• Political system
  
• Religion
• Mass Media
• Environmental destruction
• Tribalism
• Addiction
• Corporations
• Unhealthy lifestyles
• Education system
  

Most of those are America-centric, and it certainly isn't meant to be a comprehensive list. That's just off the top of my head and not fully explained. I've written about many of those topics to some extent already and will surely continue to do so.

But getting back to the two main areas of study that I want to pursue, I think that all of those topic above are related by a theme: the human mind operating in a foreign environment. And the two areas of study are the human mind and the environment. I don't know if that makes sense to anyone but me. None of this is especially profound. My categories are poorly formed and everything is interrelated. But I just wanted to get my thoughts out there in a raw form.

I imagine that if I have a long academic career, it will involve digging into the way that evolved features of our mind manifest themselves in strange ways in a modern first-world environment, especially in regards to some of the bullet points mentioned. What I mean by evolved features is that humans are biological entities, evolved from earlier entities just like every other living thing on this planet. So some understanding of human behavior has to come from a biological perspective, and what is crucial is that life evolved to survive and reproduce in its environment.

If you take life out of its native environment, strange things can happen. Humans didn't evolve to live the way I live - in a suburb with cars and supermarkets and television and air conditioning and handguns and Internet pornography. And so strange things happen, like those bullet points above. To understand those strange things requires understanding how the mind works, and how the environment effects it.

I've touched on this before, but two examples of specific realms of study that interest me are personality psychology and evolutionary psychology. I think understanding personality types and how they respond to group settings is hugely helpful to understanding lots of those bullet points, which is why I've mentioned that Robert Altemeyer's work on authoritarianism has been of such interest to me. That's the part about how the mind works. And then evolutionary psychology is about understanding how we evolved, the challenges we faced, the psychological mechanisms we developed to survive and reproduce. Understanding the differences between where we've come from and where we are now is another crucial piece of making sense of those bullet points.

Pulling it back to what I want in grad school, I think it is more realistic for me to initially focus on the social/personality psychology, given my academic and career background. I've studied economics and done a lot of marketing research, and so I have a bit of experience with some of the research methodology used in that area. I maintain a keen interest in the evolutionary side, but my biology background isn't strong, and I'm not sure if I want to do anthropological type field work. So I'd like to be in a program with a few professors who are doing social/personality psychology research that I can get involved with, and also with a few professors doing evolutionary psychology work that I can watch closely.

Questions for anyone who can answer them:

• Do the ideas I've described above make sense as a decent way to approach going back to school?
• Can I, with a lot of refinement, use these ideas in essays and interviews to explain my research/career interests?
• What is the best way to identify schools that would be a good fit? I've just been looking at some program rankings, starting in kind of the 2nd tier because I don't think I have a top tier resume, and reading about the faculty at each school, with some geography considerations thrown in.

House for Sale

My house is for sale.

8714 Drexel Hill Place
Montgomery Village, Maryland 20886

Take the online tour!

Come by and visit, and then make me an offer and buy it.

Here's how my Realtor describes it:

SPECTACULAR SIDE ENTRY END UNIT, BRICK, RESERVED PARKING, NEW BERBER CARPET, FRESH PAINT, RECENT HEATING AND COOLING, 2 STORY FOYER, CERAMIC COUNTERS, BREAKFAST BAR AND NATURAL LIGHT, SEPARATE DINING ROOM, COZY FIREPLACE, TONS OF WINDOWS AND , FANTASTIC LOCATION OVERLOOKS OPEN SPACE, AMPLE PARKING, FENCED PATIO, SUPER PRISTINE CONDITION, MINUTES TO SHOPPING AND METRO, SELLERS HATE TO LEAVE !!!!

Note the caps and exclamation points. That means it's good.

Can I take credit for this?

Yay!

fuck this place

Everything is so fucked.

See? Fucked.

The feeling of helplessness and hopelessness is overwhelming. Everyone in charge of everything is either indifferent or retarded.

Fucked.

We're literally killing ourselves while convinced of our own superiority. Nobody can change this.

So fucking fucked.

Our Supreme Court protects free speech for rich corporations but not for kids with uptight teachers, arbitrarily restricts medical procedures for women, segregates black kids, won't let citizens challenge the rise of theocracy, and drinks the blood of puppies.

YAY AMERICA!!!

Nate bit a Tibetan

After the last post I decided to research more about palindromes. Check this out! It goes on and on:

The fact is, palindromes are out there in the language, waiting to be dug up. Any wordsmith that starts playing around with the word snore during a sleepless night next to some roaring relative will eventually begin to wonder what words end with erons. It won't be long before herons comes to mind and voila! there's a palindrome: Snore herons.

It's true that there are other things that can be done with herons. Snore doesn't have to come first, but that means finding a word beginning with an h, whose remaining letters must spell something backward. Ham is such a word. And so we find ourselves with the exquisite "Ma, herons snore ham." Though more complex, this too is one of a finite number of herons palindromes. The number of h words that contain another word resting in their posteriors is few. The number of four-word palindromes with "herons snore" as their center could easily be listed on this page. If the palindromist is an artist at all, he's like Michelangelo chiseling at a block of stone to find the human body he already knows is inside.

The above scenario-a sleepless night next to bleating kin-is not a fiction. The event occured early in my palindroming career. I was so delighted with the "Snore herons" that I told everyone about it in the morning. But shortly thereafter I was reading Richard Lederer's Word Circus (in the conventional direction) when I happened upon "Snore herons" in a list of palindromic animals. The pearl of wisdom gleaned from this experience was well worth my disapointment. Palindromes belong to the world, not the individual, and they are continually rediscovered. Imagine my joy when I pried the complete sentence-a rarity among palindromes-"Nate bit a Tibetan" out of the language. Since then I've found it in two other palindrome books.

Sadly, even the best palindromes fail to excite some people. You can imagine that if "Nate bit a Tibetan" sometimes gets a blank stare, "Ma, herons snore ham" can inspire undisguised disgust. The innocent passerby, caught off-guard by an insistent, excited palindromist, can't be expected to understand or appreciate the beauty of such a phrase. The truth is, finding a palindrome is in most cases far more fun than being assaulted with one. If you've spent hours toying with the word "snore" you're bound to be more interested in what it could mean to "snore ham" than those who have spent their time following other pursuits. And so, instead of just perusing the palindromes I and others have excavated from the earth that is the English language, try to build your own. Like any true gourmand, you'll better apreciate the meal when you can recognize the ingredients.

Palindromish?

The Celtics now have Ray Allen and Allan Ray on the same team. Weird.

Buy the book

What he said.

reminder

Bush is a dummy and the war is bad and America sucks and there is no god and basketball is fun and I want to go back to school and I'm not good at poker and I miss my cats. /blog

BEARS!

I'm having fun ripping O'Reilly lately. Here's a video Olbermann put together to show what O'Reilly considers more important than war coverage.

more O'Reilly pathetic

Walt: "totally argument pwned by 16 year old kid, then resorts to insulting him"

principles

" Destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not ethical"
- George W. Bush

The lack of self-awareness is fucking astonishing.

bits and bits

• The dramatic unveiling of Digby was really really cool. I'd put up links to explain it but I don't feel like it now. So I guess that is just an inside comment for people who know what I'm talking about.
• That kind of makes me revert back to a blogger identity crisis that I fall into from time to time. What am I doing? Am I informing? Commenting? Exposing? Ranting? I dunno. I just do whatever I feel like. Is that still a good way to do this.
• I still get ad revenue from poker sites. I play a few hands on Full Tilt every once in a while. I can barely stand to watch WSOP coverage on ESPN. I still enjoy High Stakes Poker though.
• Speaking of TV, the new season of Man vs Wild started last week. Bear Grylls is awesome. Les Shroud on Survivorman is also awesome, but I haven't seen any new shows from him in a while.
• Brice Lord introduced me to....
  

I have a headache

But politically, what I want is for the White House to be honest. In 1998, the Clinton administration’s HHS conducted some research on needle-exchange programs. Officials found that the programs curtailed the spread of AIDS and did not lead to more drug abuse, but the administration decided not to pursue the policy anyway. They acknowledged what the research told them, but said they’d decided to go in a different direction anyway.

In contrast, the Bush administration just makes up nonsense, denies reality, and intentionally deceives. It’s rather embarrassing.

Awesome words revisited; Procrustean

The last time I took a serious look at what search terms lead people to this site, I noticed a large number of beard related hits. Thus, Man Beard Blog was born.

Now I'm noticing that I get a lot of hits from Google searches for "awesome words" which gives a pretty good link to a See For Yourself gimmick post that doesn't even have any words in it. This makes me think two things. (#1) I've come a long way since including a map of America there, and since my follow up on it; and (#2) I need more awesome words here. Since 99% of my posts now address that point #1, I'll get going on #2.

I don't think I'll be starting a new blog dedicated to awesome words, though I actually went through a phase a few years ago where I decided I was really into learning cool words. I bought several books of amusing or unusual words, most of which I've forgotten. But I'll never forget my all time favorite word. It derives from a Greek myth. Procrustes was a villain who would invite travelers in to his home, where he told them he had a magical bed that would fit anyone precisely. The magic of the bed was that Procrustes would chop off the victim's legs if he was too tall for the bed, or stretch him on the rack if he was too short. "Procrustean" is an awesome word meaning "marked by arbitrary often ruthless disregard of individual differences or special circumstances."

Any further commentary about the awesomeness of this word is too likely to lead back to point #1, so the post ends here.

distraction as policy

"POOR FORM!" strikes again.

Harry Reid says that outgoing Joint Chiefs Chairman Peter Pace was incompetent and is immediately hypocritically attacked by the White House and John McCain, among others, for daring to criticize the military in a time of war. Rather than address the substance of Reid's remarks with an honest analysis of Pace's performance, conservative lunatics and their fawning press have focused on the manufactured scandal about whether criticism of the general was appropriate. In a world where basic respect for logic and consistency is valued, this tactic would be laughed at and then dismissed, along with those who use it. Too bad...

recent political reading

US v Bush lays out a very specific case against the Bush Administration for defrauding the American people on the way to war with Iraq. The case is very straightforward and provides ample grounds for impeachment only on this very narrow issue.

Impeach the President is a collection of essays building multiple cases for impeachment. Most of the usual reasons are well covered - Iraq fraud, rampant lawlessness, human rights violations, stolen elections, etc - as well as some interesting abuses that were new to me, like US interference in Haiti.

Al Gore's book was generally very good. His rampage against Bush was heated and devastating. In establishing his broader thesis about the Assault on Reason in America, he makes some very good points about the degenerative effect that television has had on public political discourse, and sees hope in the rise of blogging and similar Internet innovations. I have some complaints about how he sometimes yearns for reason in one paragraph and then praises faith in the next, but overall this was a stimulating read.

Failed States was my first book-length delve into Noam Chomsky, and I'll definitely be going back for more. The loose thesis indicated by the title is that the United States shares a disturbing number of characteristics with the "failed states" in whose affairs it often intervenes, purportedly for the noblest of reasons. These characteristics include a government that acts as if international laws and treaties don't apply to them, that fails to act in the interests of their own people in favor of the interests of an elite few, and whose reckless use of violence endangers its own people. Chomsky is a powerhouse. I found his scathing critique of corporate marketing particularly powerful.

more O'Reilly

Media Matters covers the story that I mentioned a couple days ago, and adds some more information about O'Reilly's remarks on the subject. I found this paragraph interesting:

Additionally, O'Reilly asserted that "CNN and MSNBC put [coverage of the Iraq war] on because they want to give the impression that the war is a loser and Bush is an idiot," adding: "Now, that may be true. The war is a loser, and Bush may be an idiot. OK, I'm not -- that's for you to decide. But that's why they're doing it." O'Reilly claimed that the reason he doesn't "do a lot of Iraq reporting" is "because we don't know what's happening. We can't find out."

So O'Reilly admits that he doesn't know what is happening, and is thus unfit to comment, and that he can't find out, and is thus an incompetent reporter. Also Bush may be an idiot (not that he'd say that himself, perhaps because he is unfit to comment and incompetent at investigating). But he's quite sure that CNN and MSNBC cover Iraq because they want to give the impression that the war is a loser.

Seriously, how is this man not doubled over in pain at the stupidity of his own ideas? He knows that the people who know more about him about Iraq think it is a losing effort, and yet he finds something sinister in their reporting of the facts that support this idea.

O'Reilly also stated that he "can't speak for Fox News" but that his program does not "highlight every terrorist attack because we learn nothing from that. And that's exactly what the terrorists want us to do. I mean, come on, does another bombing in Tikrit mean anything other than 'War is hell'? No, it does not."

He completely refuses to consider the idea that reporting on violence might be relevant to analysis of the war. He recognizes the possibility that the Iraq War might be "a loser" but doesn't want to say one way or the other. I wonder how he's going to make that determination without knowing anything about it and without accurate coverage of the ongoing violence.

All this would just be further evidence of his being so completely brainwashed into some kind of "America is always good and right and doing God's work" mindset that he can't recognize the logical conclusions of his own partial thoughts. But then he throws in this, making him once again look like pure evil:

Media Matters has also documented O'Reilly's previous expressions of indifference to the situation in Iraq. During the September 25, 2006, broadcast of his radio program, O'Reilly declared: "I don't care what Iraq was, I don't care what it will be," and added that he "[c]ouldn't care less" about the country.

We destroyed their country, killed hundreds of thousands of their people, and committed numerous other atrocities, and he doesn't care about it at all. Evil.

I wonder

A theme I've touched on repeatedly at this blog is that Americans pay way too much attention to trivial bullshit and not enough attention to important things. A lot of the time I blame this on the American public, and a lot of the time I blame it on the media. I wonder which is fair. Thinking out loud here...

One can argue that the media is just a consumer product giving the public what it wants, and there is probably some element of truth to that, but I wonder how much. The study that showed Fox News devoting much more coverage to Anna Nichole Smith than other networks relative to the Iraq War, and the recent press feeding frenzy over Paris Hilton's incarceration are prime examples of news media choosing to cover meaningless bullshit. Basically, massive corporations that own the networks make strategic choices, and those choices drive public demand, at least somewhat.

I bet that if you surveyed the American public, the results would show that they think news programs should devote more coverage to substantive issues and less to gossip. That doesn't mean there isn't a demand for gossip, but people know where the tabloids and E! channel are. The whole infotainment phenomenon isn't something they welcome on the 'respectable' news programs. But, people aren't so concerned about it that they demand changes, and they get sucked into the addictive superficial story lines and passively go along with it.

So to the original question of blame, as always it probably isn't fair to just blame one party. And that means that you can't only blame the public. The media makes choices, and America is a relatively captive audience. But until we fight back and demand better reporting, we won't get it (at least not on TV).

The ironic thing is that I think what is actually going on in the world right now is more interesting that Anna Nichole and Paris combined, in the same train wreck sort of way. Just about everything our government does is a huge fucking disaster, and it would be funny if it weren't so tragic. That is a riveting story line. Why won't more reporters try to tell it?

homeschool

Anytime I try to give thought to my future academic plans, I end up reflecting on my previous schooling. And I always conclude that my previous schooling was a fairly huge disaster.

With that limited introduction, I'll now mention that my new fascination is home schooling. If and when I have children, it is my current intention to keep them out of the mainstream education system as much as possible.

I might post more thoughts on this topic and some interesting links soon.