Easy! Just email me and ask.
I will email the PDF to you in return.
But remember, you can share it via email all you like, but DO NOT upload it anywhere that the general public can get at it.
No temp file services, no FTP sites, no websites, nothing. That would count as publishing and publishers do not like books that have already been published.
Other than that, though, share away!
All diary today. Well, OK… one link.
You would think that seeing a grown man (with stubble!) act like a 2 year old girl would be creepy. But somehow, it just makes it all the more adorable.
I admit, that is probably not everyone’s reaction. Damn, I need a boyfriend.
Anyhow, I thought it was a brilliant idea for a fairly unique brand of comedy. It gives us insight into the strange and magical world of the two year old, too.
At that age, we are still more animal than human, and yet we are taking our first steps towards becoming human, and that is fascinating.
She seems fairly advanced for 2 years old, actually. She uses language like a three year old. Full original sentences in the proper context, and all that.
But anyhow, enough about her. What about me? (Imagine that said by James from Pokemon).
I had a fairly productive therapy day. I unpacked a lot of the thoughts I have been sharing with you folks about being more positive, seeing turning 40 as the end of the previous chapter and the beginning of one that is fresh and new, and hunting down and ejecting those nasty negative thoughts.
I am coming dangerously close, in fact, to positive self-esteem.
And that is sort of scary. You would think it would be something someone would eagerly embrace as their salvation, but I have hated myself for a long damned time and liking myself would mean a lot of changes.
In fact, I seriously suspect it might lead to… you know… doing things. Eek!
Not that I want to stay forever in this sad little world of mine where I do very little that is productive and I spend all day fucking around playing Facebook games and the highlight of my day is when I eat.
In fact, in good news (trust me, this is good), I felt my anger and impatience at spending my days like this rising this afternoon. In fact, I came very close to some kind of emotional crisis.
That’s a good thing. You have to let go of the old before you can embrace the new sometimes, and I know that in order to make room for a more productive and fulfilling life, I am going to have to make a break with the sort of mindless (but stimulating) activities that I have used to fill all those big empty spaces where my life should be.
And I think that I have grown so ossified in my ways that it will take some sort of large emotional breakthrough to grind through all that rust on my bones and set me free.
Some things, despite my fondest wishes, cannot be done slowly and incrementally. Sometimes, it takes something puncturing your equilibrium and scrambling all the eggs in your little basket for you to finally be able to grow.
And growth is life. Lack of growth is death. We must grow to live. I believe that from hat to socks.
So hopefully, I will have some kind of emotional apotheosis soonishly and that will be, of course, bloody unpleasant but it will also open the doors for me to rearranged myself into a more content, calm, solid, fulfilled, and above all happy version of myself.
Happiness is definitely the target. That is the absolute top priority in life right now. Become happier. I have only recently pulled myself across the finish line of “thinking I deserve to be happy”, so I am not expecting spectacular results right away.
One recent realization that is helping with the happiness trail : I find dating/matchmaking sites depressing because all the guys on their are either shallow, skeezy guys looking for a “discreet” hookup, really fucking boring people.
I am telling you, I am getting so sick of profiles that start “I am just a normal guy… ” or “I am as regular a guy as they come… “[1]
I am SO ready for one that starts “I’m a freak of fucking nature… “.
I mean, why are these guys so eager to advertise how dull they are? It’s things like this that make me realize that I am actually pretty damned picky about the people with whom I associate and the odds of finding my Man of Life via some dating site are fairly low.
Because the thing is, I don’t really get along with normal people. Even when they are gay. I am a rare and exotic breed of weirdo, and I need the company of the same.
At the very least, I need another intellectual. And that goes way beyond intelligence. There are a lot of quite smart people who are nevertheless not intellectuals, and some people of fairly normal IQ who nevertheless make the grade because they have active, curious, deep minds.
That alone means I am choosing from like, 20 percent of the 10 percent, so already I am dealing with only 2 percent of the population right there.
Of course, there are alternatives to dating sites… like actually going out there and meeting people. In places outside this apartment. Places full of people I don’t know.
That sounds super freaking scary. But if I choose my venues properly, I should be able to cut down on just how uncomfortable I am.
So whenever I am ready for that step, I will look for the sort of thing that attracts intellectuals like myself, and go there. Should improve my odds and my anxiety levels.
Hmm, anything else to say about today… oh right. Picked up the magnetic clip-on sunglasses that were supposed to come free with my new glasses, but there was a mix-up and I only just got them today.
They are the right strength, and the magnetic part is kinda neat. But it adds weight to the glasses and makes me feel like they are always slipping down my nose.
Still, I have wanted something to fight glare for a long time, and these ought to do the trick.
And…. that’s about it!
Got a few things to share with y’all.
Like this : Guess what city in the USA has the highest number of same-sex couples raising kids?
New York City? San Francisco? Some gay commune in the Florida keys?
Nope, it’s Salt Lake City, Utah.
Turns out, when you raise people with family values, they raise families.
As counterintuitive as this factoid may be, it makes sense when you think about how same-sex couples raising kids tends to happen.
Usually, it is after one part of a heterosexual couple with kids comes out of the closet, they get a divorce, and the homosexual person ends up with custody. They meet someone new, and bam, Heather Has Two Mommies, or Daddies.
After all, lots of place still ban gay adoption, so that’s not going to happen much. And without that, gay men have no avenue to get children. (That’s why so many of us spoil our pets.) So that eliminates half the homosexual population right there.
That leaves lesbians, and while they have the option of opting for artificial insemination, I can’t see that happening nearly as much as the divorce scenario.
But why Salt Lake City? I think it’s precisely because it’s the sort of place most gay and lesbian people would flee for a bigger urban center which will be more understanding.
Young homosexual people will take that option in droves. But people old enough to have kids already are going to have lives, jobs, mortgages, friends, and most importantly, the kids themselves.
In other words, they have roots, and can’t just pack up and go. So they stay.
All the young, unattached homosexuals end up in the big cities, and the older ones stay where they are and make do, and so the percentage of gays and lesbians raising children goes up.
Next up, we have some rich people being extremely silly.
I mean, very very very silly. I particularly like the completely deadpan way Olivia Wilde said “I only got in because I’m an android from the future. ” That made me LOL big time.
And yeah, Sir Richard Bransen can’t act. It doesn’t matter. He is such a megastar of awesomeness that he can get away with not being a super good actor.
I mean, nobody gives a shit if Einstein could golf.
And obviously, talking about not going to the bathroom is just their way of mixing in potty humour with a very simple and important message about water. It is physically impossible to keep from going to the bathroom for very long.
Eventually, it just happens.
Of course, if you take the phrase “going to the bathroom” very literally, you certainly can avoid going to the bathroom. It’s easy to avoid entering a specific room. No problem.
You will still urinate and defecate, just… somewhere else.
The best spin I can put on that is rich people squatting behind bushes somewhere. Or wearing adult diapers. Or some kind of horrifying “Rudy will await your foundation” kind of scenario.
Next up, we have a very delightful and fun to read subreddit called Shit Cosmo Says.
On it, people lambaste and ridicule all the crazy garbage that lurks inside the pages of Cosmo magazine, especially the really mindlessly sexist and patronizing “advice” to women.
It was a real eye-opener for me as a kid when I suddenly realized that women’s magazines were incredibly sexist. They reinforced this idea that women are vapid, vacuous, silly creatures who only care about fashion and makeup and how best to please a man. Nowhere do they give women credit for having brains, ambition, concerns, and a life completely independent from men and what attracts and pleases them.
And for a few years, I just kept this thought to myself. I mean, surely I was wrong. I couldn’t imagine that millions of women bought these things and eagerly devoured the degradation like it was chocolate. There must be something I am not getting.
And then, I read an article that said that most women’s magazines are in fact written entirely by men, and suddenly it all made sense.
This was the patriarchy feeding women a version of themselves that was acceptable to the patriarchy. Men were very unlikely to write things that would challenge or confuse women. Instead, they get empty intellectual calories designed to make them feel they need to constantly be focused on their appearance or they will die alone.
I am sure that this is not consciously in the minds of the men writing and editing these rags, but it is still there. It is the same sort of thing that makes shows like The View and (forgive me!) Ellen make my skin crawl and my soul scream.
I am very lucky to have a mother who was quite liberated before it was even cool. My mother went to college to learn, not just to bide time and hunt husbands. She took courses where she was the only woman there and endured a lot of sexist abuse from the male professors thereof. She worked for all of my childhood, with an income equal to my father’s. She is an intelligent, inquisitive, deeply intellectual woman, and is therefore nothing like the women such magazines are aimed at.
And that is probably why they horrify and enrage me. My mother isn’t like that. Neither of my sisters are like that. Any time I have met any woman like that, I have found it profoundly irritating, to the point of taking me dangerously close to displaying my contempt to them.
And I am a very polite and sensitive fellow, so that is something I simply Do Not Do.
So my point (and I do have one) is that I hate women’s magazines and their ilk, and so I am happy to see a home for ruthlessly mocking their sexist horribleness.
Oh, and finally, the bondage. Normally I download pictures and rehost them, but this is furry art, and I feel like that would be stealing from the artist.
So I will just (Warning : NSFW, boobs)link to it.
Now, bondage does nothing for me and females do almost nothing for me, but I felt like sharing that image because I find her facial expression absolutely enchanting.
Sweet, naughty, inviting, shy… it’s all in there. She is just plain adorable. It makes me want to give her a big hug.
Although presumably, that’s not what she has in mind.
But she’s so darn cute!
Time for another life update!
My birthday was quite pleasant. We had a pleasant dinner at one of our favorite local eateries, ABC Country Kitchen. Great good, reasonable prices, and they are willing to turn the music down to a level where we can hear what each other are saying.
That has been a dealbreaker for us with restaurants before. We eat out together to enjoy one another’s company and that means conversation at a less than shouty volume.
Plus, we are all quiet and bookish type people, and those kinds of people tend to dislike loudness of any sort. That certainly applies to me. Even as a small child, I hated loud noises. They scared me.
So me and my friends bring our custom only to quiet restaurants. And seeing as we are the sort of people that keep going to a place if they find one they like, that means a fair amount of business for the places that meet our standards.
So I had a nice meal of a club sandwich and fries. The club sandwich will always hold a special place in my heart, and not just from the cholesterol.
See, when I was a child, I was a typical Taurus child in that I was what they used to call a “fussy eater”, although “conservative eater” would be more accurate.
It’s just really hard to get us to try something new. We are risk-averse to a fault, and incredibly stubborn, so getting us to try something new can be an absolute nightmare.
This came to a head, more or less, when in the summer of 1977 or 1978, my mother and father packed up all four of us kids and took us on a peregrination to go see my father’s family, otherwise known as the Ontario side of the family.
You know how most family sedans have seating for five? Well basic math should have told you by now that we were a family of six. My parents’ solution? Have me sit in the front seat in between them.
Now just picture that. There’s my parents in both fronts seats and there I am, a wee tot, sitting between them on the bench seat, with no seat belt, no child carrier, no airbags, no anything between me and the dashboard and/or the windshield.
Nowadays, people would absolutely flip the fuck out if they saw a child being transported in such a clearly unsafe and insecure fashion. They would probably all grab their cell phones and the police would get a rush of calls and the next thing you know, my family is getting pulled over by the cops by some cops with no sense of humour at all.
But it was the 70′s, and we were wrapped up in a warm cocoon of happy ignorance.
So there we are, trekking across the country from Prince Edward Island to Ontario, and eating three meals a day in restaurants.
And no matter where we went, I wanted the exact same thing : a hot dog and French fries.
See, even back then I loved wieners!
And my siblings kept trying to encourage me to try new things, and I was having none of it. A hot dog and French fries. Over and over again.
But one day, my sister Catherine saw club sandwich on the menu, and said something like “You’d like this, Michael! It has bacon, and chicken, and lettuce, and you like all those things!”
And I frowned dubiously, but I really had no basis for objection, and so I grudgingly agreed to try a bite of hers to see if I liked it.
And it was love at first bite. Of course it was. Club sandwiches are awesome! I had found a new thing to order and I have loved club sandwiches ever since. And ordering it made me feel grownup. This was not kiddie food. It had lots of ingredients and was all colorful and pretty, and even came cut up into four pieces with toothpicks in them. That, to me, said “grownup food”.
In fact, I am fairly sure that for the rest of the trip, I ate nothing but club sandwiches. Well, one step at a time. It had taken a lot of effort to get me to try one new thing, and it was a lot more nutritious than a hot dog. No point in trying to push it ever further.
Hmmm. This is turning into more memoir than update. Where was I? Oh right, ABC.
So we had a pleasant meal, and I had a dessert, which is understandably quite rare for me. But as a compromise, I had a small dessert. No need to go crazy with it.
And ABC was nice enough to give me my dessert for free because it was my birthday. And Felicity paid for the rest of my meal, so I ate out for free.
And that’s always fab.
Oh, and I should mention that in addition to the usual gang of me, Joe, Julian, and Felicity, my friend, former roommate, and regular reader William “spuug” Graham was there. And I am always happy to see him, because he’s a very sweet guy and we have marvelous conversations about science.
Afterwards, we all went to the BCSFA meeting, which was very fun as usual. Kathleen was nice enough to make a tiny birthday cake out of a brownie and a match for me. It sort of looked like the brownie was asking for an encore.
So how does it feel to be 40? Pretty good, to be honest. I feel better about myself lately. I am learning how to accept myself for what I am, and refrain from torturing myself over what I am not.
I am a wonderful guy. Sure, I have limitations, but who doesn’t? And the things I do have are pretty impressive, when you think about it.
I might just be ready to declare myself to be “enough”.
And then I would be all out of excuses for not being awesome.
And that’s a scary thought!
Well, enough navel probing over being 40 years old now. Back to reportage!
First, some video content. Some very special and extremely unique video that lets you know what it would look like to have something very bad happen to you while you stay safe at home.
Warning, the following video is disgusting, frightening, and hilarious.
See what I mean? This is as close as most of us want to get to the actual experience of being eaten by a bear. If Stephen Colbert saw this, he’s shit himself so hard, he’d deflate.
Yes, I said “most”. I know of people for whom that would be wildly pornographic.
But then, what isn’t porn to someone? I am sure some people beat off to the Antiques Road Show and climax just when he says how much the thing is worth.
I find I can only watch the video around a minute at a time. Any more than that and the disgust starts to overwhelm me and I find myself beginning to try to imagine what his breath must be like.
I mean, look at those teeth. Ewww. No such thing as a dentist for bears, I guess. On the other hand, his palate and uvula look nice and healthy. We get a nice long look at them.
The most amazing part is that the camera survived undamaged! Whoever makes GoPro cameras should totally use this fact in their advertising.
Fast. Fun. Functional. Feature-rich. Bearproof. GOPRO.
Also in video content, something even more disturbing and horrifying than the last one.
Apparently some chick known as Tan Mom made a music video.
And it is one of the worst things I have ever seen.
Seriously. That is so bad it would not make an episode of Tim and Eric’s Awesome Show. Even their most strenuous efforts to make things which are deliberately as awful as possible can’t keep up.
I have no idea why she is called Tan Mom or why that makes her famous.
I just know that I feel violated.
Moving on, let’s talk news. First we have this item about how the nurses who are treating Dzhohkar “The Boston Bomber” Tsarnaev feel about the experience.
The part of this that really struck me was this :
“You see a hurt 19-year-old and you can’t help but feel sorry for him,’’ one nurse told reporters. She said she and another nurse had to form a pact after she accidentally called Tsarnaev “Hon,” and they agreed to alert each other if they used a term of endearment with him again.
The nurses also declined to use their names in the interviews, fearing judgment from the public. Others said they felt guilty for doing a good job treating him.
“When you’re in the room, it’s just a patient. You’re here to . . . make sure they’re feeling better,” a 29-year-old nurse who initially treated Tsarnaev said. “When you step away, you take it in. I am compassionate, that’s what we do. But should I be? The rest of the world hates him right now. The emotions are like one big salad, all tossed around.”
And I just wanted to go on record as saying nobody should expect a nurse to be anything less than completely professional and compassionate. That is their job. It is not their job to pass judgment on those they treat and decide who deserves sympathy and who does not.
And really, this goes straight to the heart of my feelings about the spiritual nature of compassion. At this point, he really is just a hurt 19 year old boy. Human beings rarely turn into monsters in order to make it easier for us to hate them for what they did.
The worst villain you can imagine is still just a fragile, confused, imperfect human being who deserves compassion just like anyone else. That is why we call them human rights. They are the rights of all human beings, and nothing you or anyone else can do will ever change that.
I know that people get angry and when we are angry with someone we want to punish them. The easiest thing in the world is to decide people who have done terrible things are not human beings any more. Then we can do whatever we feel like to them and not feel bad about it.
But what can be more evil than hurting someone who is helpless before you, just to make yourself feel good? The line between them and us is thinner than we would like to believe.
For all we know, Dzhokhar thought he was punishing evil people who deserved whatever they got because their crimes meant they were less than human now.
I am not saying he is innocent or that he should go free. Justice must be served and he needs to be put someplace where he can’t hurt anyone any more.
I am just saying that the true test of our compassion is how we treat those we have every reason to despise. And if our ethics be true, we will treat them just like anyone else.
Lastly, we have this story about a school district dealing with a budget crisis in the most extreme way possbile : by just plain shutting everything down.
All the schools, all the classes, shut down as of now. They are not even going to finish out the school year. And I, for one, applaud this decision.
With the best of intentions, people in caring professions like nursing and education enable the abuse of those people in their care by always managing to make do with less every time their budget is cut.
This protects Philistine politicians from any and all consequences of their callous and thoughtless actions, and insures that their bad behaviour will continue.
The only way people will get the message is if they are the ones who will suffer for it, and that means no longer protecting them from the consequences.
And nothing lights a fire under parents’ asses like suddenly having to find and pay for a babysitter in a town where demand has suddenly shot through the roof.
There will be hell to pay. Heads will roll.
And because the teachers won’t even be teaching any more until the budget is fixed, the people’s wrath will have only one target : the budget-slashing assholes who caused the problem.
Society costs money, people. Civilization doesn’t come for free.
Grow the fuck up.
Well, today’s the day. I am officially forty years old now, and thus, I am dead.
Obviously not in any literal sense. After all I am still here writing this, and unless I have become a very literal ghost writer, that sort of implies I am still around and my bucket is, as yet, unkicked.
But the pre-40 me is dead, dead, dead. I have decided to treat turning 40 years old as the demarcation point between my previous life and the life I want to lead now.
This date shall serve as a big thick heavy black line across the ledger of life, and everything before the line will be nothing but a terrible dream, a long illness from which I am recovering, and when it is gone I will be ready to go back to living my life as it was supposed to be, before I got sick.
My therapist recently reminded me of some advice I have given to myself (and others) many times : I am not my illness. I am not merely a depressive.
Sure, I have been sick a long time and it’s kept me on the sidelines of life. But I am no more my disease than a person with long term cancer.
I am a normal, healthy, valid human being who happens to have contracted a nasty illness called depression in my early twenties and have suffered from it ever since. But it no more defines me than my shoe size or my eye color.
It is very tempting to cling to one’s diagnosis. After all, before your diagnosis, you had no idea what was wrong with you, and being able to name your demon is almost infinitely better than not knowing.
After that, the diagnosis becomes the identity that you desperately need because of the way depression has of suppressing your true identity. It seeps into all the empty spaces the disease leaves in your psyche until, eventually, it becomes hard to remember that things were not always this way.
You were not always depressed. You were not always sad and fearful all the time. You didn’t always hate yourself. That is the disease talking, not you. You are a real, valid, worthy person with a disease that happens to be good at making you feel like shit.
But you are not shit. You are a wonderful person who happens to feel like crap right now. And no matter how long your disease has been around and no matter how long it lingers in the future, that will never change. You and it are separate things.
Remember the last time you had the flu. Sure, you felt terrible. Sure, it kept you from being an active part of the world for a while. Sure, you had to do things to manage your symptoms and speed your recovery. Sure, the symptoms were often really gross and disgusting and there were times when it felt like the damned thing was going to be around forever.
But you knew it was only temporary, and that all you had to do was take care of yourself and endure the symptoms and eventually, it would all be over and the experience would fade into just another bad memory of something that almost feels like it happened to someone else.
Remember what that was like, and hold on to that experience. This too shall pass. Depression is an illness and not a part of who you really are.
And no longer how long it will last, no matter how long it has lasted, that will never change.
So today, the old me dies. The sun has set on the previous version of me, and risen on a new and improved version without the accumulation of errors and memory faults inherent in the previous version.
But don’t worry, my faithful public. All the features that you know and love from the old version will be retained. The changes will be mostly under the hood stuff. Mostly to fix that tendency of the mood and self-worth subroutines to crash one another. That is definitely not a feature. It’s a bug.
This suicide of mine is purely metaphorical. All the wonderful features like my sense of humour, my wit (not the same thing), my kindness, my gentle spirit, my empathy, and most of all that big old brain I lug around with me will all be there.
But I plan to expand my ambition, my imagination, my courage, my enthusiasm, and uninstall all that tired old bullshit about being worthless and useless and a drain on others and blah blah blah.
I am a wonderful person with a hell of a lot going for me. Other people would be tickled pink (and spanked red) to have all the neat brain powers I have.
So I am not very good at physical things. I am clumsy and uncoordinated and there is a missing gear somewhere between my hands and my eyes. So what? That is a tiny thing in this modern virtual world. There are more ways to make a living (or at least a life) using only your brain and a computer keyboard than ever before, and they continue to grow.
All I have to do is go out there into the warm and sunlit world and get myself noticed. Obstacles will be circumvented, navigated, and even, if absolutely necessary, bulldozed over.
I am wicked awesome and it is time I embraced that fact, held it close to my heart, and made sweet, sweet love with it until it and I are one.
Time to shed my skin and bask in the sun till I dry out. Toss out all the heavy baggage I have been lugging around and travel light, with nothing to hold me down.
There will be depression. There will be fear. There will be doubt. There will be times when I feel like just giving up.
But I will never give up. I will just keep on believing in myself till my dreams come true.
This, I swear to you, to the Universe, and to myself.
Time to be born!
More link n’ load tonight. (Lock and link? Nah. )
First, one I have had hanging about and mixing with the wrong crowd in my browser for almost a week now, the charming story of a family of four that went for a little bit of a walk down the road.
This is a highly quotable article. For example :
Another witness, Charlotte resident Jill Mead, told the paper that the sight “blew [her] mind.”
Really, dear? That’s all it takes to blow your mind? The sight of an old lady, her daughter, a toddler, and an infant walking down the road in the State of Grace, clad in glory, popped your noodle?
I find that adorable. But then again, I have lived with nudists and I am a sexually deviant pervert. So my frame of reference might be a little different.
Here’s one from the officer in charge of the case, Captain Rod Farley, regarding the conclusions drawn from the medical and psychological examination of the two adults :
“It didn’t appear that they had any problems short of that they didn’t have any clothes on,” Farley said.
Don’t you just love that gift for understatement many people from the South have?
But the true beauty comes from the simplicity of the explanation :
As for the inspiration for their public nudity, the women gave as good a reason as any: Farley said they told police, “the Lord told them to get naked and walk down the street.”
Kinda hard to argue with that.
Now the kids, they will be fine. Infants barely even know clothes exist and toddlers are not sold on the concepts yet either. This odd excursion will do them no harm.
But as for the adults, apparently, both women agreed that God had told them to walk naked down the streets, and that’s what really blows my mind.
What was that conversation like?
Grandmother : Well, God just told me we should walked down the street naked with the kids.
Daughter : Yup. Me too.
Grandmother : Well, best get to it, then.
And then they just shucked down and went for a stroll.
The alternative is that one of them talked the other into it, which I find equally hard to believe.
And what about the officer? What kind of day did he have? There he was, on his third Krispy Kreme, and he gets a call from dispatch.
Officer : There’s a what on Providence Road? You’re kidding. And all of them buckass naked? Not a stitch on? Alright, this I gotta see. I’m taking the call. But send backup. With blankets.
It must have seemed like a gently amusing dream. Just one of those odd little things that happen in life. I can’t imagine a single person being truly upset by it.
Frankly, the whole thing strikes me as adorable.
Of course, the police often have to deal with nudity.
Nude Police Lineup by Bob Newhart
Bob Newhart is a hero of mine. His gentle style of comedy is, to me, absolutely beautiful.
The other news item I wish to address is this latest teapot trapped tempest.
Here is the headline as it is making the rounds on Facebook : Bill Nye Booed (not Boo’d, you knobs) In Texas For Saying The Moon Reflects The Sun
And as such, it is perfect Internet bait for all of the Asshole Atheist crowd to crow about and point out how stupid and superstitious all those inbred yokels down in Texas must be.
So that set is falling all over themselves to post things like “And to think, these people vote!” and “No wonder these people have Rick Perry as their leader” or the always elegant and original “*facepalm”.
Yeah, good thing us cool people aren’t smallminded bigots intolerant of those different from ourselves while patting ourselves on the back for being The Right Kind Of People, right?
And that’s how the Asshole Atheists and Sadistic Skeptics would like you to interpret the article that foes with that headline, but that is not the truth at all, and I can show you the smoking gun.
Here it is. Emphasis mine.
But nothing got people as riled as when he brought up Genesis 1:16, which reads: “God made two great lights — the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.”
The lesser light, he pointed out, is not a light at all, but only a reflector.
Note the important words there. He brought up. Nobody asked him a question. Nobody was suggesting teaching Genesis 1:16 as science in schools or making it part of Texas law.
He was the one who brought up the Bible in the first place.
In other words, Bill Nye The Asshole Guy started the fight. He is the aggressor here. He deliberately attacked these people’s faith and now is acting all disingenuously butthurt because they got mad at him for it.
What the hell did he expect to happen? They would look at him and say “Gosh, you are right, Science Guy. My faith is a sham and the Bible is a pack of lies. All hail Bill the Science God!”
He knew exactly what was going to happen. He poked these people in the eye, and not even to make a point, just to generate this kind of bogus news story so he and all his bigoted atheist skeptic friends could masturbate their egos over it.
Tell me, Nye, would you have done that in a synagogue? Or a temple? Or a black Baptist church?
In doing shit like this, all you do is confirm to these people that scientists are out to get them and there is no possibility of middle ground between you and them.
You, sir, are no humanist, secular or otherwise. You are an abusive bigot religion-bashing just to score points with your bigoted friend, and that makes you no better than the people who you oppose.
In fact, you are worse than them, because you are smart and educated enough to know better.
I had a hard time forgiving you after that detergent ad where you sold out your credibility and your responsibility to teach the truth to children just to make a quick buck.
You chose money over science, Nye, and that is something I will never entirely forgive you for. What were kids supposed to think when they saw you shilling for some megacorp?
Still, over the years I got over that, mostly. After all, I loved your show, I loved you on Almost Live, and I have enjoyed your recent work.
But this erases all that and puts you further into the red than ever.
You are a bad person who did a bad thing Bill. You have fallen in with the Richard Dawkins, Ayn Rand, Neil DeGrasse Tyson bunch of tiny minded “skeptics” whose idea of science is to shit on all beliefs other than your own and close your minds and your hearts to the vast majority of humanity.
And that is just plain unacceptable.
You are dead to me until you renounce your wicked ways and come back into the true light of promoting understanding, cooperation, tolerance, and acceptance in humanity.
That’s what a real humanist does. It’s what a real liberal does.
It’s what real human beings do.
Come back to being human, Bill, before it’s too late.
Guess what, science fans! It’s SCIENCE TIME again!
And this time, we will be doing our science roundup in two parts : non brain science, and….
…wait for it, wait for it…
….actual brain science.
No extra points for getting that right so you can all put your hands down now.
Our first brain unrelated items comes from the fascinating world of DNA and the almost as fascinating world of carnivorous plants.
It turns out that recent developments in sequencing the genome of a plant called Utricularia gibba (or “Uggie”, to its friends) have yielded some very interesting results.
Turns out that Uggie baby’s genome consists of 97 percent active genes and only three percent “junk” DNA that doesn’t code for any proteins.
This is a sharp contrast to us naked beach apes, whose genome consists of only 2 percent active DNA and 98 percent rubbish DNA that just lays about without coding a single protein.
Thus, the puck is pushed back into the “junk DNA truly is useless” end of the rink and away from the “junk DNA is somehow very important even though it codes for no proteins” side of things. After all, it seems you can at least have a complex multicellular plant with almost no junk DNA.
The article (and the research) assumes that Uggie has somehow “deleted” nearly all junk DNA but I consider that assumption unwarranted. It may never have had junk in its DNA sequence in the first place, in which case the question is, why does any species have junk DNA?
My armchair scientist theory is that adding new DNA without getting rid of the old and just changing which genes are active allows for a faster rate of stable mutation and hence benefits species which have had to adapt to various conditions, like people, or our food crops.
Next up in the brainless science field (so to speak), we have this story of a natural reservoir with billion year old water in it recently discovered in Ontario.
Scientists found it while working 2.4 km under the ground and chemical and isotope analysis show that the water in this underground lake has definitely not been in contact with Earth’s atmosphere for at least a billion years, and is abundant with hydrogen and methane, two of the building blocks of life.
This is exciting news because it means that somewhere in that reservoir may be life that has not been part of Earth’s surface biosphere for a billion years. Who knows what strange and previously unheard of avenues of evolution such life could take?
It might even be its own shadow ecosystem that works on different principles than our own.
However, don’t expect anything multicellular, as I can’t imagine what the energy inputs for an ecosystem like that would be. Chemical? Geothermal? Who knows.
For those of us in the primary biosphere, it’s sunlight.
OK, now on with the brain science!
First off, we will talk about recent progress made in the scientific understanding of individuality.
A study has shown that mice who explore more develop more new neural connections than ones who do not. This difference in neurogenesis provides an important clue in the mystery of individuality, because all of these mice were genetically identical. Forty mice, all twins.
And yet, there were differences. And the mystery really takes off when you realize that there was differences in behaviour in these genetically identical mice before they even started the study.
So obviously, individuality is not a solely genetic thing. There must be another factor that somehow tells us “you are bold and exploratory” or “you are cautious and neophobic”.
And if that factor is not in our genes, then where the heck is it?
I would like to know if these differences in temperament appear even in genetically identical mice raised in isolation with one another.
It might be that somehow we communicate with others of our species (via pheromones, perhaps) and “negotiate” who has what job in the community.
“You’re already bold and exploratory? OK, I’ll be cautious and sensible. ”
And if that held true in humans, it might be that this genetic negotiation happened when we were all sitting in the maternity ward together.
As a distinctly cautious type, that prospect both intrigues and disturbs me.
And now, onward to the edge : University of Oxford scientists think they may have come up with a way to make you better at mental arithmetic.
And all you have to do is train for five days while they use something called transcranial random noise stimulation (TRNS) on your brain.
After that, you will have a sharper, faster brain that manipulates numbers more easily than ever before, and the effect will even still be there six months later.
Frankly, this smells a tad off to me. Nowhere in the article does it say there was a control group that had the stimulation without the training, and without that control, you cannot say the transcranial stimulation had anything to do with it.
Maybe five days’ training is all anyone needs to get better at maths.
But who knows? The science of transcranial magnetic stimulation is still quite new. Maybe they are on to something after all.
Still quite spooky to imagine a bunch of kids studying math with brain stimulation helmets on, though.
Plus, this caught my eye because I have had a lovely resurgence of my own mental arithmetic skills lately. I used to be quite food at it as a child but as I grew I somehow lost the ability.
And now it’s back! Wow, I wonder if I can get my old singing voice back too.
On a more serious note, scientists from the University of Adelaide and the University of Colorado have collaborated to create what might just be a cure for heroin and morphine addiction.
Turns out, they both bind to the same receptor in the brain, and the scientists thing they can create a drug that blocks access to those receptors, and thus eliminate the craving for the opiods.
That would certainly shoot the main mechanism of addiction right between the eyes. No cravings, no addiction, basically. And it might even lead to a cure for another serious problem, morphine tolerance.
Patients with long term intractable pain often develop a high level of resistance to morphine and its derivatives, leading to the inevitable point where the only dosage strong enough to stop their pain is one that would be fatal.
If we could cure the cravings for the morphine, we could slow down the development of tolerance and thus give the patient more time where the drug works for them.
And that… would be awesome.
That’s enough for this week, folks! But stay tuned, more brain science soon.
British Columbia had an election last Tuesday, May 14.
To everyone’s total shock, the wrong people, namely the incumbent provincial Liberals (liberal in name only LINO bastards) won with a majority.
The polls all predicted a landslide by the other major party around these parts, the provincial NDP.
But historically low levels of voter turnout handed the election to the Libs instead, and that is profoundly depressing to me.
Full confession : I did not vote. I was having a very poor mental health day and I could not imagine facing the social anxiety acid test of going to the polls.
Really regretting that now. Not that my vote would have made a big difference to the election, but it would have made a big difference to how I feel about the whole thing right now.
It would have been worth it to be able to say “I did what I could”. But I didn’t.
And here’s the thing. Everyone is wondering about how the polls could have been so wrong. But I think I know, and it’s not a pretty picture.
I think there were far too many people like me who believed the goddamned polls that predicted that Andrian Dix and his NDP would win by a landslide, and so they thought “Well, the right thing will happen whether I vote or not, so why bother?”
And thus, the old adage about evil requiring nothing but the inaction of good people comes true. Left wingers are historically a lazier group than conservatives, and far less inclined to band together and work hard toward a common goal, especially when it requires such an illiberal thing as doing what you are told or restraining your rampant self-expression, and that is all conservatism needs to be able to overcome the political system with their superior organization and dedication.
So we are stuck with these bastards for four more years. Fan fucking tastic.
Of course, there is a another, much darker explanation for how the polls can be so drastically wrong.
The side that won did it by cheating. They rigged the election, stuffed the ballot boxes, subverted democracy by turning it into a mere show to make the masses feel like they are in control.
When you think about it, how would we know the election was rigged? The only way to tell would be if the election results were radically different than what the polling suggested, especially the exit polls.
And I am quite certain that the forces of political evil are willing and able to do it. After all, if you think 47 percent of the voters are mindless parasites, it would be ridiculous to let them really be in charge. So why not steal the election?
It’s for their own good. They have no idea what is good for them.
And the warning bells clang louder every day. The entire Canadian federal government is under investigation for enormous amounts of vote fraud.
Down south, there was all kinds of hanky panky in their last election too. People have forgotten it by now because Obama won. But that should not keep the truth from being revealed.
So who knows? Maybe the powers that be have truly given up on democracy. Maybe they have perfected the art and science of tipping elections in their favour no matter what, and the kinds of governments now running the world are exactly the type they like : incompetent, partisan, dogmatic, elitist people far, far removed from the life of ordinary citizens and hence unlikely to feel like one of the people any more.
After all, they are one of the elite now, and act to protect their own group above all.
How would we know? And even if we knew, what could we do about it?
I would love to do a massive post-election poll where you ask everybody “Who did you vote for in the last election?”.
Allowing for a certain amount of self-reporting bias, it would still be a very useful yardstick for measuring the accuracy of the election.
If the results were in line with the pre-election polling and not the elections results, I think that would be enough evidence to launch an investigation into just what went on.
Because honestly. How else would we know if the results of an election are accurate? It would take only a little corruption of the system in just the right places to sway an election, especially if it’s close.
And have you noticed that all elections have been getting closer and closer over the years? The difference between winners and losers is often less than five percent, over and over again.
Are the people truly that evenly decided? Or are we only told that we are so the powers that be, the One Percent, can pick the winners without it being too obvious?
I have no proof or evidence of any of this. I only have questions and suspicions. I think it is worth looking into by someone far better at research than I am.
And seeing how far politicians have gone in completely ignoring the will of the people on dozens of issues, who can doubt that somehow, somewhere, something has gone disastrously wrong?
Every day, people grow angrier and more disillusioned and frustrated. The feeling that the average citizen is powerless against a system that is run by the One Percent, for the One Percent is growing.
I am convinced that this is, in an indirect way, the reason why there has been so many acts of random, senseless violence all over the world recently. Sometimes, all it takes to push an unbalanced person from thinking about it to doing it is a rise in the frustration level of the zeitgeist.
People do crazy things when they feel they have nothing left to lose. It’s how tragedies like mass shootings and bombings happen.
And it is also how revolutions happen.
Maybe it is time for another one of those. People need to demand democracy, and if they do not get it, they need to be ready to tear the whole system down.
That is the only time when the powers that be are scared enough to make real change.
We need to make their afraid for their lives again.
Tonight we start off with a very powerful and moving video.
But before you watch it, please read this.
SEVERE TRIGGER WARNING for all of of us who were bullied as children. Caine talks about his experience and it might just be a lot like your own, so fair warning, make sure you are ready before you watch this.
I can tell you that it’s worth it, but I must warn you that it is rough.
That duty discharged, please watch the following video.
Caine is a very brave young man. I am not sure I would have had the courage to do what he did when I was his age. I was only able to understand and articulate my problems that well when I was much older than him.
When I was 11, I was just trying to survive. both physically and emotionally. The idea that what was happening to me every school day was deeply wrong would not have occurred to me, let alone the notion that I could do anything to protect myself by talking to adults.
All the adults in my life had failed me. When I was 11 years old, I was at least three years into giving up all hope that there was anyone, anywhere, who in any way cared enough about me to go to the trouble of protecting me from the violent abuse I faced every day.
I tried to tell my parents. They shut me down immediately. I tried to tell teachers. They said various unhelpful things that were supposed to placate me but really just gave me the message that they really did not feel like actually doing anything about it. Same with the principal’s office.
Never thought of escalating it to the school board level. I doubt I would have been able to summon the courage anyhow. I was a crushingly shy and timid child in many ways.
But the real point is that saving myself was not my job. I was just a kid. My job was to go to school, get good marks, stay out of trouble, and be part of a family.
It was not my job to protect myself from the vicious assaults and humiliation of my peers. Every day of my elementary school life, I was exposed to things which would be easily recognized as serious crimes if it happened between adults.
But somehow, between kids, it was considered “normal”.
I will never forget one day when I tried to tell one of the teachers who oversaw the playground during lunch and recess about the horrible beating I had just suffered not ten feet directly in front of her.
I don’t know who she was. These ladies were often not the regular teachers at all. For all I know, they were parent volunteers, or just people the teachers hired so they would have some peace while the kids went out and played.
Kids in a playground. What could be more wholesome than that, right? The sound of it still takes me instantly to a very bad place. Trigger city, big time.
Anyhow, so I tried to tell this playground monitor what happened, but I had not gotten two words out before she just glared at me and jabbed a finger back at the playground.
It would have hurt less if she had jabbed her finger directly into my heart. And that would have healed a long time ago. Not this.
I guess that told me where I stood. She was mad at me for even trying to talk to her. I find it hard to believe that she did not see the crowd all gathered around where a bunch of bullies where having loads of fun kicking me and stomping on my head as I lay helpless on the ground.
I suppose that if she had let me talk to her, she might have had to face the fact that she just let me get brutalized right in front of her and did nothing about it, and then she might have had to ask herself why, when I am entirely sure that if I had attacked one of the popular kids, she would have been on me like a flash of lightning and I would have been in the principal’s office before the dust settled.
Things like that, and like young Caine’s video, make me really wonder just what kind of effect that kind of abuse has on a child. The damage is impossible to calculate.
All the feeling of security that a child should have and internalize is gone, destroyed. All faith in others is gone too. In my childhood world, there were savage peers and apathetic adults and that was it.
What choice did I have but to withdraw deep, deep into myself? Where else could I go? What else could I do? It was my only means of escape.
So in a way, it is amazing that I grew up to be as sane as I did. Somehow I held it all together enough to get through school and not end up killing myself or anyone else in high school.
Again, thank you so much, Doctor Klein. Having someone to talk to in those times probably saved my life, even if I could only see you every three weeks and you were not, objectively, that great of a therapist.
But people dying of thirst are not going to notice or care if the water is a tad brackish.
Looking back, I realize that I did not just have one or two childhood traumas. I had hundreds. Thousands. Every school day was a fresh hell.
And like with poor Caine, a good day for me when I was a student at Parkside Elementary in Summerside was one in which everybody leaved me the hell alone.
There is something seriously wrong with a child’s life when their greatest wish is to go one day without anyone noticing them.
That’s usually reserved for children in war zones, isn’t it?
Or at least it should be.
Lately, I am doing my best to reprogram my brain.
It’s more or less cognitive therapy that I am administering to myself. Cognitive therapy is, of course, the easiest sort for a fanatically cerebral sort like myself.
One might argue that something more based on emotion and the darkness between thoughts would more directly address my problems, and that is probably true.
But that sort of thing is mighty tricky to self-administer if you are the logical, rational, verbal sort like I am. We overgrown front lobe types refuse to accept as real anything which cannot be explained and/or understood my the conscious, rational mind.
This can be very powerful, and at the very least can make you sound very smart indeed because you are so articulate and fluent. The demand for rational sense and expressable thoughts creates a deep and powerful pressure in the mind for articulation and the development of a high live of capacity for creative expression. If that is the only way the feeling can get out, they will work hard to get out that way.
Even if you never share this articulated thoughts (or emotions, or ideas, or whatever) with anyone, just the need for them to pass through the barrier between the conscious and unconscious minds in order to find expression pressures the mind towards developing its expressive capacities.
In my case, that means verbal expression. Language. I have no talent for the visual arts and I lack the proper mindset for programming or technical jobs.
But boy, do I rock the wordsmithery.
However, being the meticulously thorough and honest philosopher I am, I am fully aware that, as dazzling as all this verbal jimcrackery can be, the restriction of conscious expression can be quite damaging.
Being unable to deal with your deeper, subverbal self without making it go through the slow and painful process of finding rational expression means it is very hard for someone like me to get at what is really going on inside this noggin of mine.
Consciousness is, after all, merely the shining, glittering surface of the waters of the mind. Most of who and what we are lives far beneath the surface and trying to deal with that from a point of view that says only the surface of the water is real is like trying to understand marine biology entirely based on what you can see from shore.
I could never let myself be so limited. I am the sort who seeks the truth of things over everything, and that means that I expand my find to fit the truth, whatever it may be, whatever the cost.
Most people, it seems to me, shrink the truth until it fits their mind.
So I recognize the truth of the limitations of the rational mindset, especially when dealing with one’s own mental issues, which are often far away from rationality and in some causes may ever be caused by it, or at least, an overzealous and ignorant application of it.
And for a while, I was stuck there. I knew there was far more to me than my rationality could hope to grasp, but I was still limited by this rationalist mindset and so it seemed like I had no idea how to proceed. All my tools were rational. I was stuck on the shore without a canoe.
There is simply no rational approach to dealing with irrational emotions (and that’s most of them). You have to set your rationality, with its externally defined realities and powerful incisiveness and blindingly bright light, aside.
You have to instead enter the murky, internally defined world of your own true emotional self. The person you would be even if you didn’t have that big bright rational mind dragging you around in circles. The person you were as a child, before all the bad things happened, before you learned to use your rationality as both sword and shield, before you hid yourself away from the world and learned to blinker yourself so that you never noticed how tiny and cramped your hideout had gotten.
And that’s not easy. For someone like me, all our instincts are wrong. This is not a truth that can be pursued down a long chain of reasoning and deduction like cops using dogs to find a criminal. It is not the sort of thing that comes from long rational contemplations that result in neat, encapsulated insights you can share with others and have them be entertained and informed.
It comes instead from just opening up your mind and your heart to find out what is there, and learn to accept it and deal with it on its own terms.
And I am learning to do that. It’s slow going but I am learning to accept my mystical, poetic, spiritual side. And that is vital to my becoming the more integrated, solid, together person I want to be.
Compartmentalization is the enemy. Integration is the goal. The walls have to come down. The waters have to be allowed to flow together and merge and find their own level, and this process cannot be controlled, predicted, or directed.
All you can do is let go and let it happen, with the only thing left to you is faith.
Faith that after the waters reside, you will find peace, inner harmony, understanding, and the calmness and stability that you have always wanted.
Faith that this unpredictable, uncoordinated, unplanned, uncontrolled process will lead to greater happiness in life.
Faith that only by letting go of control can you ever hope to truly live the life you want.
Faith is very hard for those of us who want to know where the road goes before we set foot on it. Our rational minds have always been our best protection from the world. To us, emotionally, the unpredictable is virtually identical to the negative because we always assume the worst.
But the world is not against us. Frankly, it doesn’t care about us.
And that means anything is possible.
Dive in. Let go. Find out who you truly are.