Words Like Locusts Flew From Her Fingers

The Truth is Out There

Our Incredible Shrinking Curiosity (washingtonpost.com): “…our understanding of the world and our support of the quest for knowledge for knowledge’s sake is a core measure of our success as a civilization. Our grasp, however tentative, of what we are and where we fit in the cosmos should be a source of pride to all of us. Our scientific achievements are a measure of ourselves that our children can honor and build upon.”

NASA may pull funding on the Voyager project, not because Voyager has nothing more to teach us, but because the management weenies at the top think the money would be better spent developing more “practical” knowledge. Certainly, practical knowledge is a good thing. You can build better weapons with practical knowledge. And, to be fair, you can also build better medicines.

I can’t help but agree with the Washington Post’s Rick Weiss, though, that pure research is necessary for us to continue growing as a species.

Falcon Cam

I’ve been watching the Falcon Cam every spring for 2 or 3 years now. It’s a web cam that captures falcon nesting activity on a platform owned by Minnesota Power. This particular stack is in Cohasset, Minnesota.

It’s really a particularly good cam — the image is sharp and the camera is close enough to the nesting platform that you can really see what the birds are up to. It’s a “live action” cam — not just still shots.

There’s a female nesting there this spring and, last I saw, she had at least a couple of eggs. A friend in Duluth (Minnesota) says he hasn’t seen the male falcon around, though, so… who knows what that all means.

Tune in regularly. It’s really fun to watch the little falcons eat and, as they get bigger, flap their wings.

Feeling Incomplete

I’ve decided to eliminate the “What I’m Reading Now” thingie I had over in the sidebar. If a book is good enough that I feel like commenting on it, I’ll just mention it right here. Makes sense, no? Why create all sorts of unnecessary complication.

On that note, I just began reading Rebecca Goldstein’s “Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel” and it’s REALLY good. It all fits in quite nicely with the entry I posted about a month ago, Postmodernism and Truth, though I didn’t really have that in mind when I got this book from the library. Actually, I had read a very good article about Gödel and Einstein at Princeton in the New Yorker magazine, inspired by this very book I believe, that got me all fired up about Incompleteness. I’d heard of it, of course, but really hadn’t given it or Kurt Gödel any thought in a long time.

It’s got me thinking about recursion and self-referencing systems and such. Ah….!

I’m in the mood to get out my old calculus books and work some problems. Or maybe my Formal Methods and Models book from my Computer Science days. Math is so…satisfying! I like it much better than Physics. I don’t like the intrusion of “real life” stuff that Physics requires. All those goofy problems about measuring the arc of a javelin that’s been thrown across a football field in a 50 knot north-by-northwest wind… I know a lot of people really appreciate the “real life” aspect of physics but to me it’s a distraction. Why throw the javelin to begin with?? I much prefer the purely abstract world of mathematics.

Whatever. I’ll probably post again about Incompleteness when I’ve finished the book (or even before).

Open Wide

Since 2001, Tom DeLay’s wife and daughter have been paid over $500,000 by political action and campaign committees.

The New York Times > Washington > Political Groups Paid Two Relatives of House Leader: “Mr. DeLay’s national political action committee, Americans for a Republican Majority, or Armpac, said in a statement on Tuesday that the two women had provided valuable services to the committee in exchange for the payments…”

All I can say is those must have been phenomenally good blow jobs.

[And, yes, I am unspeakably rude at times.]

Confronting the Judicial War on Faith

Look! It’s a list of crazy people and their craaaaazy organizations!

The “Confronting the Judicial War on Faith” conference, sponsored by The Judeo-Christian Council For Constitutional Restoration. We’ll learn more about the JCCCR soon (and we’ll have a closer look at some of the organizations listed in the conferences schedule of speakers) but, before I forget, I want to call your attention to the above web-site’s “visitor agreement”. Don’t you just love it when web site owners try to impose some sort of “agreement” upon you! It’s so amusing! (I mean…other than catching people who might be doing something illegal like plagiarizing their content, how precisely do they think they can enforce such an “agreement”?

Anyway… Their “agreement” tells us that we may not “use stopactivistjudges.org [the JCCCR web site] or its services to publish, post, distribute or disseminate any defamatory, obscene or other unlawful material or information…” Hm. I wonder whether they’d consider my making fun of them to be “defamation”. And as for using their site or its service…what in the heck are they talking about? I’m supposing that at the time the “agreement” was written, they had a bulletin board feature of some kind?? They don’t have one now, so… who the hell knows?

I’m a little surprised there’s not a requirement in the “agreement” that people visiting their web site will not mock them or snicker scornfully at whatever lame-ass thing they might put up on it.

Whatever. So, the JCCCR exists because “Activist Judges are undermining democracy, devastating families and assaulting Judeo-Christian morality.” Damn those activist judges. Damn them all to hell! As you all know by now, I believe “Judeo-Christian morality” has no place in a democracy to begin with. Certainly we must have laws and those laws will be very similar to the proscriptions of “Judeo-Christian morality,” but they must be based upon non-religious property rights and not on the beliefs of any religious group.

I searched around to see how many other people had noticed this group and found an enlightening entry on the Paperwright’s Fair Shot blog. He’s already said a lot of the stuff I would have said (better maybe) so I’ll let you just go to his site and give it a read.

Go ahead. I’ll wait here.

Interesting eh? Yeah, I thought so too.

Okay, so here’s a list of some of the organizations that will be represented at the “Confronting…blah blah blah” conference. I’ll include links to their web sites where I’ve felt like it.

Vision America: Their web site is really poorly designed and the picture at the top is just plain weird. It looks sort of like a blond-haired version of that kid who crawled out of the well in the movie The Ring, staring at a dumpster? Strange. Oh…if you go to the site, don’t bother clicking on the link to the People magazine article. The fools scanned the thing and have linked to a huge gigantic full-sized jpeg of the page. It’s like 2000×3000 pixels. Doh! Oh Rick?! Ever hear of PhotoShop? And who in the hell is Dr. Rick Scarborough? He’s some kind of religious guy. I presume he calls himself “Dr” because of some theology degree. Hey, he apparently received a 2005 Easter Message directly from Jesus so he’s got to have some pull, right?

Jews for Morality: As opposed to what? Jews for Immorality? Now that would be an interesting group!

Home School League Defense Association: Hey, I’m in favor of home-schooling. My nieces and nephews were home-schooled and they turned out great. It should only be done by people who aren’t crazy, though. (That is, people like Dr. Rick Scarborough should probably not be permitted to home-school their kids.)

AmeriSearch: Could this possibly be the right web site? I suppose. One of the things they’ll search for is court records.

Joyce Meyer Ministries: Never heard of her. According to her site, “Joyce Meyer is a best-selling author and one of the world’s leading practical Bible teachers, spreading God’s Word to millions of people around the globe.” Uh.. okay. You know, I’ve often though… I should start my own cult! I’m charismatic! I’m a good public speaker! I’d be great at it!

Texas Justice Foundation
Culture of Life Foundation
Judicial Confirmation Network
Coalition for a Fair Judiciary
Christian Legal Society
Conservative Caucus
Concerned Women for America
Alliance Defense Fund (Hey! We know them!)
Christian Law Association
Institute on the Constitution
Caucus for America

This one I must check out…
King for America: Huh? Now they want a monarch? No, no! King is the last name of the woman who founded the organization.

Eagle Forum (women with rolled-up copies of the Constitution shoved up their…oh never mind)
American Conservative Union
The Leadership Institute
Heritage Foundation
Family Research Council (They’ve never asked about my family)

And last, but by no means least…
RightMarch.com: Ooooo! They’re really crazy! Check out their “Martyr in the War Against Judicial Tyranny” ad with the picture of Terri Schiavo and clouds and a big tree and stuff. Yuck. It’s like seeing a bunch of vultures picking at the poor woman’s body.

Well, there’s plenty more a person could make fun of here but I’ll leave it to you all to explore further on your own.

More on the Mickel Case

I should have clarified in my last post:

I don’t think Mickel’s depression diagnosis alone is any sort of mitigating factor in his ability to defend himself. Rather, it seems likely — from the information provided in the Washington Post article — that at some point Mickel slipped over into some kind of paranoid schizophrenia.

His “advisory counsel” and the judge are dead wrong if they think that just because Mickel is intelligent and articulate he’s capable of making a reasonable decision about his ability to defend himself.

Don’t get the idea that I believe anyone who would murder a stranger (as Mickel apparently did) is mentally ill. That’s not at all the case. Who knows? Maybe Mickel’s completely sane and just really REALLY misguided. Based on the reported circumstances of the crime, though, there’s at least a good possibility that Mickel is severely mentall ill. The only way to know for sure would be for the judge to order a compentency examination. It’s grossly unjust that he hasn’t done so.

Insane Defense

Murder, Incorporated? (washingtonpost.com)

Check out this long–but interesting–article about California murderer, Andrew Mickel. The guy is an obvious loon but both his court-appointed “advisory counsel” and the judge presiding over his murder trial are allowing him to represent himself. The judge could have ordered a mental competency examination before deciding whether to let him represent himself but chose not to. When asked about Mickel’s previous treatment for mental illness his ‘advisory counsel”, James Reichle, responded “Everybody in America is on Prozac.”

According to the Washington Post: “Reichle, a former prosecutor, now semi-retired, takes a libertarian stance on the case — Mickel remains adamant that his history of depression should remain out of bounds, Reichle says, and he believes the defendant should have that right. “He is sensitive about it because he wants to make a statement and he doesn’t want the jury to see him as some crazy wacko,” Reichle says. Of course, his parents are going to say he’s crazy, Reichle says. But Mickel “is extremely bright,” his advisory counsel observes. “He just thinks differently from you and me.”"

What’s wrong with this picture? The judge should have insisted upon a competency hearing. If his legal counsel were doing his job, he’d have found a way of get a competency hearing. This is pretty disturbing. The judge, prosecutor, and “advisory counsel” are pretty much in cahoots to get this crazy guy convicted.

Pax Vobiscum

“His message was that faith must be grounded in truth and that the key to freedom is love and service to God. His themes were peace, justice and the sanctity of life. He warned that a spreading “cult of death,” in forms ranging from genocide and ethnic cleansing to legalized abortion, euthanasia and the frenzied pursuit of material goods, were leading to a “blunting of the moral sensitivity of people’s consciences.”"

– J.Y. Smith for the Washington Post

Pharmacists Refusing to Dispense Contraception

Ill. Pharmacies Required to Fill Prescriptions for Birth Control (washingtonpost.com): “Women in at least 12 states, including Wisconsin, Texas, North Carolina and California, have reported encountering pharmacists unwilling to fill their prescriptions [for birth control pills].”

Most Catholics have heard the expression, “If you want peace, work for justice.”

Here’s a new one: If you want an end to abortion, work for widely available and affordable contraception.

Let’s be completely frank here, shall we? People like sex. Yes, they do. They’re going to keep doing it pretty much no matter what. So make it safe. And make it easy to prevent the conception of children if the people having the sex don’t want them right away (if ever).

It’s obvious and it’s logical and it’s even moral.

If you want an end to abortion, work for contraception.