Holy Shit

Yahoo! has posted a trailer for the forthcoming film version of A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick.

Life on Mars?

So after Euro scientists announced the discovery of a big honkin' Martian ocean Monday, now we get this: elevated methane levels over this sea! "What the fuck?" you may wonder. WTF indeed. Life, baby. It's a sign, not unequivocal, but a tantalizing hint that there may be life on Mars after all. I say we send someone there to figure it out once and for all. I nominate me. I'm not doing anything important for the next couple of years, and I'd be way into fighting space beasts. Anyone have any friends at NASA?

(Un)Intelligent Design

This awesome editorial in the New York Times does a brilliant job of skewering Intelligent Design, a theological doctrine, err excuse me, "theory," so preposterous that its proponents should be ashamed of themselves. Christianity has a poetic beauty that transcends its petty linguistic transmission, and anyone who fails to see the (Christian) forest for the (biblical) trees deserves this kind of smackdown.

Dead in the Mountains

Hunter S. Thompon is dead. Why'd he do it? Who knows? I was skiing at Copper Mountain yesterday (not all that far away from where Thompson lived, at probably about the same time he shot himself), and all the loud, stupid music they were playing at the mountainside restaurants, and all the adverts plastered all over every visible surface made me want to do myself in, too. Whatever happened to our sense of the sacred?

Environmentalist Nun Killed in Brazil

Sister Dorothy Stang, an American nun and environmental activist who has worked since the 1970s with environmental and peasant groups in the Amazon, was killed yesterday by gunmen. I had a dream last night that I was in Brazil, too. Does this mean something?! No, it doesn't. In my dream I was trying to get a helicopter ride back to Rio from this jungle town and even though I had a ticket, the fat lady who was driving the helicopter wouldn't let me on because it was too full. But there were empty seats, dammit! There were empty seats!

Bush Social Security VS Regular Social Security

This comes via the Center on Budget and Policy Proposals but it uses nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office figures. This report is long and filled with confusing, boring figures, but the meat is in the innocently titled "Table 2," about a third of the way down. Basically, under the Dear Leader's Social Security plan, a person who chooses to use one of Bush's vaunted "personal accounts" can expect to lose 33-50% of their benefits versus the current social security system. And that's if the market does OK. It could do really well, true, but it could also do poorly. What Bush failed to mention last night is that the money in personal accounts IS NOT YOUR MONEY. You have to pay it back. All you get to keep is any extra money your private account earns above and beyond the 3% it would've earned if the Social Security Administration had kept the money in their own accounts. So if you earn 5% on it, great, but if you earn only 1.5%, whoops, now you OWE SSA money. And since it will cost lots of money to set up and manage these accounts, EVERYONE will get their benefits cut, across the board, not just private account holders.

This is a stupid idea. Social Security might need to be tweaked to keep it going and deal with our aging population, but this "fix" doesn't fix anything. It creates new problems and cuts existing benefits while offering little in return.

An Obvious Point I Need to Make About Christianity

Jesus was a radical. He was preaching change: religious change. Judaism was (and is still) a mess of complicated rules governing religious belief and daily life. Part of Jesus' radical agenda was to take religion out of the book and bring it back into the world. It is illustrative that his covenant is symbolized by an act (the crucifixion) rather than rules (the 10 commandments). Nowhere is this better illustrated than in this undoubtedly familiar parable: Some Pharisees bring an adultress to Jesus, telling him she's been caught in the act and pointing out, rightly, that Mosaic law demands she be stoned. They ask him what he thinks they should do. He ignores them at first, but on repeated questioning says merely: "He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone." The Pharisees think about this, and then slink guiltily away. The woman remains, and when everyone else has gone, Jesus tells her he will not condemn her, and that she should go forth and sin no more.

What's the moral of this Jesus story? Even if the Bible says something is wrong, you shouldn't condemn someone for doing it. That's not the point of Christianity. Jesus' call was a call to action, to embodying love in the world. It was not to an inconsistent application of confusing and contradictory religious formulae. We modern types, both Christian and not, seem to have forgotten this. Extremist Christians are driven to wicked acts by their rigid interpretations of scripture, just as the Pharisees were, just as non- and antireligious individuals are driven to dismiss Christianity out of hand because it carries baggage that appears outdated or incompatible with their personal moralities. And we are all, no matter what we believe, poorer for this loss.

So if you consider yourself a Christian, what does Christianity mean to you: condemnation or compassion? If you find yourself engaged in the former, no matter what the Bible says about your personal devils and no matter how much good you otherwise do, think about this story and try to figure out which side you're really on.

The Robots Are Coming!

Robot soldiers of the future (or, well, now...) will be on their way to Iraq soon. And you thought the title was a joke, didn't you?

DJ Shadow vs. GWB

Download this remix of Radiohead's The Gloaming by DJ Shadow. It's a great remix, and has some awesome Bush sampling at the beginning. This copy actually sounds better, but its hosted on a slower system, so you'll have to wait a bit for it to finish.

Your mission for today: Do not take a bath! We'll teach those bastard water utilities who's boss...

Irrational Objection

The stock market is dumb. Check it out for your self. Economists say people are rational agents who make decisions in their own self interest, which is patently stupid. Watch 5 minutes of TV and you quickly realize that most of our economic decisions, with the exception of very large ones, are 9 parts impulse and 1 part rationality. Even our biggest purchasing decisions, such as buying a home, have a large irrational component. And now the stock market has been shown to be random, as well.