Hey there science fans! You will have to forgive my playing a little loose with the premise this week, but boy, have I got one amazing cultural artifact to share with you nice folks, and to sit on this one for an entire day would have darn near killed me.

But first : ON WITH THE SCIENCE!

First up : fake blood saves a life!

A woman’s life was recently saved by a transfusion of a new blood substitute derive from cow’s blood. See, an Australian woman was in a very horrible car accident. She was in dire shape, with multiple serious injuries. And to complicate matters, she had lost so much blood that a transfusion was needed.

Problem : the woman’s religion forbids blood transfusions. Artificial blood, however, would be fine.

Enter our hero, HBOC201 (catch name, what?), a new synthetic blood made from cow blood. They shipped some from the USA to Australia, put it in our patient, and voila, she lives.

There’s been tries at blood substitutes before, a lot of them actually, but none have really worked. This, then, is a big stride in the drive for blood substitutes. What’s more, this stuff is made from something we kind of have a lot of (cow blood… don’t look, Hindus!), can last on the shelf for three years, does not require refrigeration, and matches any blood type.

Pretty damn cool, if you ask me.

The vampire community, of course, is still waiting on the all important taste test before passing judgement.

Our next hero is a humble bit of technological wonder called Gravity Probe B.

It’s a satellite designed to finally figure out if Einstein’s prediction that gravity distorts space and time are true. The effect, if present, would be very subtle, so what you needed in order to test it was :

1) a really big gravity well…. say, as big as Earth’s
2) the ability to go in and out of said well, and
3) the most sensitive gyroscopes ever made.

Oh, and, you know, a way to get the thing up into space and so forth.

This, NASA accomplished. That this involved making the most perfect spheres ever to exist on Earth only adds to the beauty of the whole experiment, in my humble opinion.

I want one.

And recently, amazingly, Gravity Probe B finished its mission. Einstein is, unsurprisingly, completely proven and utterly validated, and we all now know that gravity does, indeed, distort space and time. What’s more, we know that the Earth sits in a big puddle of distorted space and time created by its mass.

Gosh, science is neato!

I first heard about Gravity Probe B many years ago, when it was just a proposal, and I thought it was pretty damned cool then. I am, therefore, tickled a vibrant shade of pink by its success. It is a brilliant experiment, ambitious as hell (they had to invent new technologies just to pull it off) and aimed at some highly cool science, and as far as I am concerned, that all adds up to fantastic mojo.

Great job, NASA!

And now, our science fiction entry. Prepare to be introduced to the greatest superhero ever.

And his name…. is Captain Newfoundland.

No really, it is! Check it out!

Thank you, dear friend Felicity, for this most astoundingly cracktastic bit of Canadian pop culture detritus. The sheer amount of gloriously inept nerdity in that brief clip fills me with post modern joy.

There is just so much to say about it. Let’s start with a run down of facts about Captain Newfoundland.

1. He’s the spirit of Newfoundland. (Funny, I thought that was Screech. )
2. He lives in the hearts of all of us. (Like Jesus. )
3. His ancestors came from beyond the stars (explain how that is possible?) and settled in the great continent of Atlantis (great until that little sinking beneath the waves thing). Today, only the tip of the great island survives. (Wait… Newfoundland = Atlantis? Boss!)
4. He watches over said island to protect and advance the race of Man. (yay, advancing!)
5. He has the power to do anything. (Well, that should be easy to write. )
6. His mind speaks mentally. (That sentence is so clunky it’s beautiful. )
7. He travels through different dimensions and different times. (But, stays in Newfoundland. )
8. He represents the best in every one of us. (Yup… he’s Newfie Jesus. )
9. He has many friends. (And I bet he’s had TONS of girlfriends, and was really popular in high school, and never had acne or excess weight, and was sexually potent, and and and… )
10. And all his fans know his extremely original code : This above all, to thine own self be true.

I love every bit of that. It’s actually remarkably imaginative for a complete and total nerd fantasy, and of course absolutely brimming with everything seventies, which is also a plus.

It’s like something Jerry Todd would dream up for his alter ago. With the power of vudyo!

So remember kids, This above all : to thine own self be true!

Unless you’re a dick, in which case, fake it.

{WARNING : The following is all about Canadian politics and today’s election. If you are an American, I politely relieve you from all obligations of pretending you care. Go back to celebrating Osama Bin Laden’s death. You have earned it after all these years. }

Well that fucking sucked.

Canada, I am shocked and disappointed with you. I cannot believe that forty percent of the people in this country voted for that smug douche Stephen Harper and his horror cabal of Conservatives. Never before has his total contempt for Canada and democracy been more blatant, and yet, you rewarded him with a majority government. You think he was an insufferable cunt before this election? That’s how he acted when he had a minority government. Now that he has a majority government, that prick will be unstoppable. Only the constant threat of the other parties banding together to kick his ass out has restrained him so far. Now, we are completely stuck with this shithead for the next four years or so, and God knows what he will do to this country in that time.

I was, and am, completely unprepared for this. Somehow, amidst all this talk about the “Orange Tide”^[1] of NDP support sweeping the nation, it had never occurred to me, even in my darkest moments, that Harper would get the unfettered majority that he has craved for so long. I really thought that the worst case scenario that we faced was him retaining a minority and shaking his fist in impotent rage at all the puny mortals who keep blocking his plans to turn Canada into the USA. Somehow, the thought that he would get the majority and be able to ruin this nation with glee and without restraint was simply far too horrible to even accept into my consciousness.

It was unthinkable. And now, it’s happened.

Turns out, that “Orange Tide” of NDP support was just the perfect thing for Stephen Harper to surf to his majority government. All this upsurge on the left must have scared the old people something fierce (after all, we on the left do things like protect their pensions, commies that we are) and so they showed up in droves to put their guy into this cozy majority position and keep us all from going to the Kaiser.

A fellow could really get to hate old people some days. I know this is a petty and unworthy thought, but sometimes I think there should be some sort of mental competency test for voting. If you sincerely beleive three things which are clearly and demonstrably and objectively provable as false, you don’t get to vote. Or maybe we take your vote as a special Senior’s Voting Station, then just don’t count their votes. Let them think they voted. It will make them happy without ruining the country. Everybody wins!

I know, I know. That’s evil. I’m not saying it is a good idea. It’s just the dark thoughts of an angry lefty.

I am in such a dark mood, not even this happening to me could cheer me up.

Right now, Canada’s only hope of avoiding a gruesome fate lies in the unpleasant subject of voter fraud.

Normally, that’s not the sort of thing I would even be thinking about. After all, nobody likes a sore loser and it’s not like Harper just barely squeaked in.

But the man’s campaign manager has five convictions for election fraud, everyone knows how badly he wanted a majority and how little respect he has for democracy and Canada, and now with these reports of “somebody” in key swing ridings calling people up and falsely and fraudulently telling them their polling station had been changed to one an hour away has got to make people suspicious.

My fear is that the one person in the best position to really press an investigation into these matters, Jack Layton, will be so completely flushed with his “victory” in giving Canada its first-ever NDP-led Official Opposition that he will completely hand-wave away all these reports and miss the critical window when eople might be open to revisiting the results of this election, and then we will be stuck with fraudulent results.

Having the NDP surge into more power than they have ever had before, only to have it be completely meaningless because the Forces of Evil hold a majority and don’t even have to listen to anyone any more… that is cruel even for you, Universe.

Fuck you, Stephen Harper. I hope you choke and die.

Only somewhat special this time, seeing as I basically did the same thing yesterday. Lazy!

First off, some mandatory viewing : Obama lay down the comedy law on all the idiots who oppose him.

Bring the Word, Big guy!

Comedically speaking, he’s a great President. (Ouch! Burn. ) Seriously though, I think it’s not so much that his material is great so much as his targets deserving it so god damned much and making it so god damned easy. And as Donald Trump’s poll numbers clearly prove, his opposition is at its weakest.

Weird to hear a cover of Hulk Hogan’s ring anthem “I Am A Real American” after all these years. I had a moment of total blinkfuckery where I went “That sounds like….. but it can’t be…. wait, it is!”. And it’s the perfect song for the sentiment, don’t get me wrong on that. It’s an inspired musical pick. It’s just that my brain temporarily had trouble processing the rich and varied pop culture reference storm that suddenly overtook my consciousness at hearing that song, in this context, unexpectedly.

I must be gettin’ old.

Moving on, we have this marvelous notice for a garage sale I would feel positively compelled to attend. I mean, check this shit out :

Just follow the rainbow!

LOL. People who advertise their garage sale via an anthro unicorn peeing a rainbow are clearly my kind of people. Weird, funny, and a little perverted? Sign me the hell up.

Oh, and bonus points for a (misspelled?) use of a form of the expletive “frig”. I have fond memories of people saying “frigging this” and “frigging that” back home, almost always in situations where you wanting to say “fucking” but felt you could not. Like at school, or in front of your mother. Thus, to me, “frig” is a euphemism of sorts, and retains the same sort of humble charm as saying “darn!” instead of “damn!”, or one of my all time favorites that I got from a girl I went to Junior High with (Summerside Intermediate School, represent!), swearing by saying “Sugar!” when you really want to say “Shit!”.

It’s like saying “Shoot”, but even cuter. Too bad she was otherwise a crazy trailer park bitch.

Moving along : I learned something from this article about how semen is supposedly an antidepressant for women that just plain blew my mind.

First, let’s dispose of the main point so I can more clearly obsess over a casually mentioned factoid : the article does, in a sort of halfassed way, make a case that semen absorbed via vaginal tissue does act as a sort of pick me up for the ladies. Considering that humans have a unique reproductive strategy that involves being sexually receptive all the time, it’s at least plausible. But that is not what floored me.

It’s this factoid here :

Perhaps you’re familiar with the McClintock effect, the observation that when groups of reproductive-age women live or work together (in college housing, the military, all-female workplaces, etc.), over time their menstrual periods tend to become synchronized. The accepted explanation is that the women detect each other’s pheromones, subtle scents that each of us produce, and somehow these only-faintly aromatic but powerful compounds influence the women’s hormones and make their menstrual periods arrive around the same time.

But at the State University of New York, two evolutionary psychologists were puzzled to discover that lesbians show no McClintock effect.

Excuse me? Are you for real man? Lesbians have no McClintock effect, in other words, their menstrual cycles don’t sync up when they live together? Seriously?

This blows my mind. Why haven’t I heard about this before now? To me, this is front page news. I had accepted the “pheromones” explanation like everyone else when I first learned about this fascinating effect, but obviously, it’s more than that, if it fails to occur in lesbians. Somehow, semen, or at least penis, has to be involved. That’s the only biologically relevant variable that I can think of. Otherwise, nature doesn’t know the difference between a straight woman and a lesbian. So what’s the deal?

To me, this makes the mystery all the more fascinating. I am quite interested in the murky world of the biological communication that goes on quite outside the conscious mind of the modern human being, and yet influences us in many ways both subtle and profound.

It makes sense that human mating and menstruation would sync up in some way, and without a yearly cycle and with sexual receptivity a constant, it make sense that it would be the male factor that provide the timing stimulus, so to speak.

But to imagine it used such an intensely biological pathway… it just blows my mind.

Talk amongst yourselves.

Yee haw, pardners! It’s Friday night and time for all us science cowboys to wrestle us some prime broncs from the world of discovery and put out brands on them! So strap on your science spurs, grab your six shooter of speculation, and put on your ten gallon hat filled with twelve gallons of curiosity, because we’re heading out to rustle us some news from the Science is OK Corral!

{ The preceding was written by little eight year old Billy Batson of Watusi, Hawaii, who fell into a time warp from the 1950’s and is a little shaken up right now, so the Make a Wish foundation insisted that I let him write the intro to what they assured me is his favorite feature on his favorite blog in the whole wild world. Boy, those celebrities really know how to lay a guilt trip. }

Well, Little Billy, let’s play a fun game. Let’s see if you can figure out what the following scientific device is designed to do before seeing the label at the end of the video.

That’s right, Little Billy….. sperm collection! It seems our ever clever friends in the Orient have harnessed their twin assets of mechanical genius and complete and total sexual perversion and invented a one-stop shopping destination for the millions of guys who would really love to donate some sperm, like right now, but just don’t want to go through all the hassle of waiting in line and filling out forms at the sperm bank. Imagine the efficiency and convenience if there was one of these little suckers on every street corner, next to the ATM!

We would finally achieve mankind’s longest held and most treasure dream : enough sperm for all.

And free blow jobs, obviously.

Moving on to our next story…. ahem. Mi mi mi mi miiii! *fwee!* ah yes. Ahem.

Someday we’ll find it
the Atlantic Wind Connection
The generators, the shoreline, and you!

(to the tune of this, obviously)

The above-linked story talks about a highly exciting and ambitious project to creature a series of ocean-based wind farms connected to (and tethered to) the shore by transmission lines. The story says that wind farming at sea makes sense, because the wind is stronger and steadier out there, and you are less likely to get yobbos and doofi complaining about the noise or the view.

Makes sense to me. I suppose some fishermen or deep-sea tour operators might bitch, but you can always just offer them jobs on the wind farms. One of the aspects of the emerging new energy economy that I hope to see flourish is the possibility of independent entrepreneurs to go out and create their own energy-generating businesses, which would then allow a certain freedom to people to create their own personal lifestyles in a way never seen since the days of the Wild West. I would be quite eager to see what sort of communities sprang up based around offshore wind farming. The system they are talking about could support many small or medium sized energy producers, and I can well imagine that attracting the sort of eclectic mix of dreamers and drifters and misfits that the Gold Rush did.

I imagine small floating towns springing up to service these floating islands of entrepreneurial spirit, and a whole sea-based lifestyle emerging somewhat like the Florida Keys or the Greek Islands. A combination of relaxed atmosphere and ambition could make for a pretty interesting culture.

Heck, I might try it myself. After all, no reason they can’t transmit the Internet along those lines….

Finally, holy crap, now they have made quantum entanglement you can see!

Quantum entanglement is that freaky effect that makes two entangled particles continue to behave in opposite ways even if you separate them by (at last count) hundreds of miles. You do one thing to Particle A, and Particle B does the opposite, and what’s more, does so with absolutely no detectable time delay.

And while the results of the study in question, which replaced the standard mechanical photon detectors with the ones in the eyes of a bunch of scientists, are a trifle iffy (turns out, photo amplification and quantum entanglement don’t play well together for deep mathy reasons), it’s still a pretty exciting development in the world of quantum entanglement.

I am waiting till this stuff is developed enough to make a super expensive geek toy out of it. Imagine having two little boxes, and no matter how far apart you separate them, you can still get tinny audio through them with no delay. They would be the ultimate walkie-talkies!

Yee haw, pardners! It’s Friday night and time for all us science cowboys to wrestle us some prime broncs from the world of discovery and put out brands on them! So strap on your science spurs, grab your six shooter of speculation, and put on your ten gallon hat filled with twelve gallons of curiosity, because we’re heading out to rustle us some news from the Science is OK Corral!

{ The preceding was written by little eight year old Billy Batson of Watusi, Hawaii, who fell into a time warp from the 1950’s and is a little shaken up right now, so the Make a Wish foundation insisted that I let him write the intro to what they assured me is his favorite feature on his favorite blog in the whole wild world. Boy, those celebrities really know how to lay a guilt trip. }

Well, Little Billy, let’s play a fun game. Let’s see if you can figure out what the following scientific device is designed to do before seeing the label at the end of the video.

That’s right, Little Billy….. sperm collection! It seems our ever clever friends in the Orient have harnessed their twin assets of mechanical genius and complete and total sexual perversion and invented a one-stop shopping destination for the millions of guys who would really love to donate some sperm, like right now, but just don’t want to go through all the hassle of waiting in line and filling out forms at the sperm bank. Imagine the efficiency and convenience if there was one of these little suckers on every street corner, next to the ATM!

We would finally achieve mankind’s longest held and most treasure dream : enough sperm for all.

And free blow jobs, obviously.

Moving on to our next story…. ahem. Mi mi mi mi miiii! *fwee!* ah yes. Ahem.

Someday we’ll find it
the Atlantic Wind Connection
The generators, the shoreline, and you!

(to the tune of this, obviously)

The above-linked story talks about a highly exciting and ambitious project to creature a series of ocean-based wind farms connected to (and tethered to) the shore by transmission lines. The story says that wind farming at sea makes sense, because the wind is stronger and steadier out there, and you are less likely to get yobbos and doofi complaining about the noise or the view.

Makes sense to me. I suppose some fishermen or deep-sea tour operators might bitch, but you can always just offer them jobs on the wind farms. One of the aspects of the emerging new energy economy that I hope to see flourish is the possibility of independent entrepreneurs to go out and create their own energy-generating businesses, which would then allow a certain freedom to people to create their own personal lifestyles in a way never seen since the days of the Wild West. I would be quite eager to see what sort of communities sprang up based around offshore wind farming. The system they are talking about could support many small or medium sized energy producers, and I can well imagine that attracting the sort of eclectic mix of dreamers and drifters and misfits that the Gold Rush did.

I imagine small floating towns springing up to service these floating islands of entrepreneurial spirit, and a whole sea-based lifestyle emerging somewhat like the Florida Keys or the Greek Islands. A combination of relaxed atmosphere and ambition could make for a pretty interesting culture.

Heck, I might try it myself. After all, no reason they can’t transmit the Internet along those lines….

Finally, holy crap, now they have made quantum entanglement you can see!

Quantum entanglement is that freaky effect that makes two entangled particles continue to behave in opposite ways even if you separate them by (at last count) hundreds of miles. You do one thing to Particle A, and Particle B does the opposite, and what’s more, does so with absolutely no detectable time delay.

And while the results of the study in question, which replaced the standard mechanical photon detectors with the ones in the eyes of a bunch of scientists, are a trifle iffy (turns out, photo amplification and quantum entanglement don’t play well together for deep mathy reasons), it’s still a pretty exciting development in the world of quantum entanglement.

I am waiting till this stuff is developed enough to make a super expensive geek toy out of it. Imagine having two little boxes, and no matter how far apart you separate them, you can still get tinny audio through them with no delay. They would be the ultimate walkie-talkies!

One of the most persistent and destructive forces in the political life of any nation is anti-intellectualism. As much as every society produces intellectuals of one stripe or another, it also produces a certain amount of anti-intellectual sentiment.

Often, this is directed both at intellectuals as individuals, and at intellectualism as a whole via its products, its establishments, its professions, and its affectations. No matter how enlightened or advanced a society might be, there is always the potential for and possibility of an outbreak of anti-intellectual sentiment.

It is worth noting, at this point, that in the history of the twentieth century, which saw many a bloody uprising of revolution, intellectuals were nearly always one of the first groups scapegoated and neutralized, if not outright killed. This is not just a matter of making life a little rough for quiz kids. At times, it has been quite literally a matter of life and death.

Being an intellectual myself, and having suffered that particular brand of individual anti-intellectualism known as “bullying” as a child, I have spent a great deal of time wondering why this is. What is it about intellectuals that creates such fear and resentment in others? What is it about the presence of a high IQ that makes so many people uncomfortable and unsettled? What do people have against us, anyhow?

And being of a particularly stubborn brand of intellectual known as a “philosopher”, I was not satisfied with the simplistic and dismissive answers I discovered when asking others about the subject.

“Jealousy” was often the first thing people thought of. But that simply doesn’t cut it. There are many reasons to be jealous of someone, but rarely have those ever coalesced into the sort of paranoid resentment that fuels political movements that anti-intellectualism represents as a historical force.

“Fear of the unknown” comes closer. We intellectuals are often nonconformists and come across as strange to the more average population due to the gap our intelligence create between us and others. We see things, understand things, and do things others do not, and this makes us stick out. But mere nonconformity does not quite explain the vehemence and pervasiveness of anti-intellectual sentiment.

No, the answer is simpler, more primal, and in some ways more shocking that the standard ones.

It’s about power.

And not just any kind of power. The power of superior intelligence is unlike any other kind of power, because intellect grants power that renders those with less of it are uniquely helpless against. It is a power advantage that is both hard to defend against and difficult to even understand.

Someone who is a great deal smarter than you can hurt you in ways that nobody else can. They can cheat you, trick you, mock you in ways you don’t even understand, manipulate you to their own ends or just for the hell of it, and the terrible truth is that there is very little you can do about it.

You cannot hope to meet them on their own terms and trust that you will be safe. They say they just want you to be reasonable, but that’s exactly what you cannot afford to be. Reason is their battleground. They have every possible advantage there. Like primitive peoples dealing with those from advanced cultures, average people can only possibly defend themselves by using irrational, unreasonable, broadly defined and perforce poorly thought out tactics that try to compensate for this wizard-like advantage the intellectually gifted have over them through force, suspicion, and mistrust.

It’s hard for us intellectuals to grasp the basic fact of how frightening an advantage that intellectual might gives to them, because most intellectuals have not met someone who has that same level of advantage over them. Individual intellectuals might vary by a notch or two on the IQ scale, but that is nothing compared to the qualitative gulf between those of standard intelligence and the gifted.

It’s not simply a matter of being able to do a little more than others. The power differential is not like the difference between being tall and being of average height, or even being naturally good-looking over having average looks. It’s more like the powerful and mysterious advantage an adult has over a child. To a child, all adults are magic, and they too often resort to unreasonable and irrational tactics in order to try to even the playing field a little.

Viewed from this point of view, the fear and mistrust of intellectuals by the public at large is entirely understandable, and even sensible in its own fashion. We might know that we are sweet and harmless, well-meaning peoples, but all it would take is one bad experience with the wrong kind of intellectual to make a person wary of us for their entire life, and they have no way of telling which one of us are good people and which might do them wrong in ways they can’t even understand.

So as prone as we are, as a group, to think ourselves the victims of an unthinking and jealous population who seem willfully insensate to the wonderful beams of enlightenment we wish to use to illuminate their lives, in reality, we are the ones in the position of power and we should really cut the average folk some slack. Give them some respect and understanding for the impossible position our intellectual gifts put them in. Do what we can to reassure them we are on their side.

After all, it’s the only intelligent thing to do.

Looking over the big bag of news I have gathered from today’s Twitter tide, I can’t help but see that this is a pretty good day for those of us in the reality-based community here on the left.

First up, great news from Japan (for a change) for us in the gay lesbian bisexual trans whatever community : Japan’s first openly gay candidate won his election in Tokyo.

This is the first time in Japanese history that an openly gay candidate has won public office in Japan, making this man, Taiga Ishikawa, sort of Japan’s Harvey Milk.

But hopefully, with a better life span. Watch out for crazy conservatives whacked out on Twinkies, Taiga!

If you are like me, your first reaction to this story might have been “Really? This is their first? In 2011? Really, Japan? I thought you were cooler than that!”.

I mean, this is the country that beats all others hands down (and tied to the bedpost with its own panties) when it comes to freaky, fucked-up pornography of every single possible description and some which defy definition by even the most insane topographers. And they are just getting around to electing their first gay dude to public office now? WTF, Japan?

But I suspect that social progress and reform moves at an entirely different pace, tempo, and trajectory in Asian countries as compared to us in the West, and we can’t judge them by our example.

Moving over to the always rich and satisfying world of conservative follies, we have this marvelous tale of an asshole conservative getting busted for pot.

Now any time a conservative gets nailed for pot possession, it’s fiesta time, but what makes this one a particularly juicy source of schadenfreude delights is that this asshole, Robert A. Watson (R) of Rhode Island, once made himself quite infamous by making the following statement at, of all places, a Chamber of Commerce meeting in Providence :

“I suppose if you’re a gay man from Guatemala who gambles and smokes pot, you probably think that we’re onto some good ideas here.”

He was quickly forced to apologize, according to the KOS story.

But he still said it, so for this yobbo to now get busted for pot on a routine traffic stop is nothing short of magnificent. Well done, Irony! You took down another one of these bastards. That will teach them the harsh lesson that those who ignore their sense of the absurd are doomed to to absurd things.

For his sake, I hope he’s at least a libertarian Republican, because as we all know, libertarian has come to mean “everything that is bad about hippies without their naive charm and good intentions to compensate”. Libertarian types are allowed to be pro-marijuana, although, of course, that means they will never get anywhere in the Party because the major GOP’s libertarianism extends only to taxes for the rich and would never get in the way of their desire to tell everybody else how to live their lives.

But by far the most marvelous news for us on the left here in Canada is that the latest polls show the NDP surging ahead in leaps and bounds.

The story even states that the NDP could take as many as 100 seats in the election next Monday. This, of course, would make me insanely happy, especially if this also means that Steven Harper and his smugly evil fucking Conservatives go down in flames.

I would say that I wished them the biggest electoral defeat in Canadian history, but that honor already went to another group of Conservatives in the glorious year of 1988, when Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives (same party minus the redneck) lost every single seat but two.

So that’s the record to beat, Stevie. Come on, do Mulroney proud and lose every seat period, or all but one. After all, that would just prove how right you are, right?

Nothing could make me happier than Harper’s government getting a vigorous shellacking from the forces of good as represented by the Liberals and the New Democratic Party. I have been saying for years that my ideal government would be a Liberal minority government with the NDP holding the trigger. ^[1] The Liberals obviously need extra strong incentive to be, you know, actually liberal, instead of just “marginally to the left of the Conservatives, maybe, sorta, some of the time. ”

This news has given me a fresh enthusiasm for next Monday. Bring it on!

Well, I guess I should write something about this god damned fucking election.

For my American friends : this upcoming Monday, May 2, we Canadians will be going to the polls for a national election. Steven Harper’s Conservative minority government has fallen, and so it is once again time for us Canadians to do our patriotic duty and go to our riding’s polling station on Monday, and vote.

I am a little less than completely enthused.

It’s not that we’re having to vote that has me feeling down in the dumps. It’s the state of Canadian politics in general. I have never felt more like there was no good choices out there. You just have to hold your nose pick the poison you hate the least.

This malaise is, I suspect, common to all modern democracies (or at least, ones dominated by two major parties) at this point in history. It’s not just that the inherent weaknesses of representational democracy becoming increasingly grating on the population as our social reality evolves and our democracy remains the same as it was in the era of the horse and buggy. That’s a major factor, undoubtedly, and I could go on and on about that (trust me), but there’s something more specific afoot here.

It has to two with the two party system. In the USA you have that more or less explicitly. In Canada, we have fewer barriers to third parties than the USA, and indeed we have what might be considered an Official Third Party in the NDP, but due to historical inertia and (in my opinion) a general lack of courage and imagination in the population, our politics are still dominated by the two massive historical juggernauts, the Liberals and the Conservatives.

And to be blunt, that’s just not fucking good enough any more.

Democracy works a lot like capitalism, and hence, it thrives on competition. The more competition, the better the outcome for the consumer, or in this case, the voter. And any economist or business theorist will tell you that having only two players on the field does not a robust and consumer-friendly contest make.

And it shows. To me, it’s abundantly clear that all the Liberals and Conservatives care about is screwing the other party and getting elected. Neither has a clear moral focus or vision of the future of Canada any more. In terms of policy, they drift closer to one another every day in their all-consuming attempts to be That One Party Anyone Can Vote for. The names are meaningless, the Conservatives are anything but and the Liberals have obviously stopped feeling like they need to be any more liberal than it takes to be slightly better than the Conservatives, and of course, the Conservatives are only too happy to make that as low a bar to jump as they can possibly get away with.

So the party names are mere labels now. Gone are the days of truly ideological politics, where there was a feeling that the political parties represented clearly defined points of view and you could choose the one that matched your own. Now, it increasingly feels as meaningless as choosing any other mass produced and fundamentally identical consumer product. Gee, do I want the toothpaste with Whitening Action or the one with Stain Fighting Power? I just want clean teeth, god damn it.

Partly, I blame the consultants. Politics is dominated by image experts, message specialists, groomers, trainers, coaches, and all other forms of professional bullshit peddlers who have completely eroded all traces of genuine ideology and sincerity out from under the party’s platforms in their never-ending quest to justify their enormous consulting fees. As a result, politicians don’t even seem like human beings any more. They have no chance of genuinely connecting with the people and inspiring them. They are nothing but the sum of their various handlers, and hence, about as human as an airbrushed supermodel on a billboard.

But the problem goes deeper than that. There is a reason why nearly every voter decries all the negative advertising you see on TV and negative campaigning you hear from the mouths of of the candidates and yet it continues unabated, and indeed, seems to get much worse with every election.

It’s because the hegemony of the two party system relies on one overpowering message, one on which both parties wholeheartedly agree : there are only two choices. They have to convince you that the other party is the worst kind of evil because then you will feel like to vote for anyone but them is essentially to vote for The Other Guy, who is Satan, more or less. This squeezes out third parties without having to lift a finger directly against them. Combined with media collusion in the form of not treating third parties with any respect at all, and indeed often completely ignoring them and thus reinforcing the message that there are only two parties worth noticing, it keeps the competition low and the elections easy.

And they don’t care that they are destroying democracy by discouraging voters in the process. As far as they and their corporate masters are concerned, the fewer voters, the better. Makes elections easier to manipulate. And as long as the two big parties are entirely dependent on enormous amounts of election bucks to pay for all that negative advertising and soul-crushing consulting, they will continue to be panting at the end of the big corporations’ very short leash.

And that’s why, no matter who you vote for, nothing really changes.

This election, I am voting NDP. I don’t know who their person in my riding is, and I don’t really care. I just cannot stand either of the two big parties, and Jack Layton actually has some good ideas.

And thankfully, he’s not considered important enough to be worth compromising. Yet.

I guess that makes me officially a grumpy old cynic. And I’m only 37. Well, I was always ahead of my age group in school.

Got a trio of slices of succulent schadenfreude for you, my lovely readers, today. I just happen to have come across three different news story about things that are sure to get the conservatives of the world good and angry, and thus, also bright sunshine and joy into my bitter little heart.

Here they are, from the small to the tall :

First off, we have a brand new book that challenges the heck out of the accepted wisdom about what the Bible has to say about sex.

The book has the ever so adorable title “Unprotected Texts: The Bible’s Surprising Contradictions about Sex and Desire” and is written by a religious studies professor from Boston University named Jennifer Wright Knust. It talks about how it is impossible to determine what the Bible’s attitude about sex is because the text so clearly contradicts itself on the matter in many places.

So in other words, she’s not really saying anything particularly new. The Bible contradicts itself on every subject and in every possible way. Just trying to reconcile the petty and petulant patriarchal God of the Old Testament with the kind, expansive, and forgiving Son of God in the New Testament is cognitive dissonance migraine enough. It’s good to hear from a religious scholar who takes a more broad and understanding view of things, but honestly, the people she is targeting, the people who use the Bible as a justification for intolerance, bigotry, and hate, are far beyond her reach, or the reach of any reasoned argument, whether based on the Bible, science, or just common decency.

It’s not like they are going to listen to anything from some university professor from the North, anyhow.

Next up, we have this charming tale of Barack Obama, unplugged and uncensored, saying what he really thinks about the Republicans and their cold hearted budgets.

As the story goes, Obama thought the reporters had all left the room when he unloaded some cold hard truth about the Republicans, including such gems as this :

“I said (to Republicans), ‘You want to repeal health care? Go at it,’ ” Obama told backers in a private meeting with an open microphone.

” ‘We’ll have that debate. You’re not going to be able to do that by nickel-and-diming me in the budget.’ ”

He said he added: “You think we’re stupid?”

No, President Obama, they don’t think you are stupid. They just think you are no smarter than they are.

It amounts to the same thing.

He also reportedly said :

When Paul Ryan says his priority is to make sure, he’s just being America’s accountant … This is the same guy that voted for two wars that were unpaid for, voted for the Bush tax cuts that were unpaid for, voted for the prescription drug bill that cost as much as my health care bill — but wasn’t paid for … So it’s not on the level.”

That was different. When their guy is in power, anything goes.

Personally, I think this was no accident whatsoever. I think it was a carefully planned event made to look, superficially, like an “accident” so that it would have more impact. I think it was about as accidental and unplanned as the Super Bowl half time show.

Normally, I would not credit the Democrats in Washington with anything near the level of intelligence, cunning, and killer instinct to do something so deft and effective, but then I read about this marvelous maneuver they pulled recently in the House, and suddenly, I have faith in their perspicacity.

It’s a little complicated, but I will try to explain.

Basically, you have the Republican Party, and a still more insanely libertarian anarchist woowoo group within it called the Republican Study Committee. This clutch of boobs hatched an even more brutally evil version of the main GOP budget, and this Extra Evil version came up to a vote in the house recently.

Now, you might ask : if the main GOP has their own budget, authored by their official Budget guy Paul Ryan, why would they let this Extra Evil version come up for a vote at all? After all, if it passed, it would be a huge slap in the face to Ryan and all his supporters, and be utterly toxic to all Republicans as they would have to own its complete and total evilness as a group.

The answer is that the main GOP was just doing what it always does, jacking off the base by convincing them that the whole GOP is one big tent and that they all want what the Tea Party jackals want, and it’s only those evil demon Democrats that keep them from bringing in the Great Glorious Red (State) Revolution.

In the standard script, most of the GOP would support this notion by voting for the Extra Evil budget from the RSC, counting on every Democrat to vote against it and therefore ensuring that only a small number of moderate Republicans need to vote against it for it to go down in flames and leave the vast majority of Republicans with clean Tea Party credentials. Hey, you know, I really wanted your budget to pass, but darn those Democrats, they are so pesky…

But the Democrats, showing a rare degree of sentience, flipped that script. Instead of voting “no” on the Extra Evil and Insane version of the budget from the RSC, they simply voted “present”. In other words, they, as one, abstained from the vote.

And glory be, suddenly the Republicans had an almighty hurricane blowing out of their collective ani, and a magnificent shitstorm did occur. Because now it was entirely up to the Republicans whether this completely insane and evil and politically poisonous budget passed, and a whole bunch of Republicans who had been all for this horrible RSC budget when it had absolutely no chance of passing suddenly had to show their true (sane) colors and switch their votes, right there in front of everybody, from “yes” to “no”.

Otherwise, that sucked would have passed.

As is, the thing only failed by 18 votes, and all those people who genuinely supported the Extra Evil budget got to turn to their supposed compatriots and say “What the hell? You just told me you supported this budget and now you are voting against it?”

Absolutely. Fucking. GENIUS.

Nothing they could have done could possibly have been more effective at baring the huge rift between the main GOP and the Tea Party saps that honestly want to do things and change stuff. They put the GOP machine in a position where they had to completely flipflop on an issue right there in the House and show the Tea Party just how little the main GOP cares about them right to their faces.

Nothing could be finer than seeing evil people turning upon one another. That’s vintage, that is.

I am hoping that this breaks things wide open, and a massive schismatic bloodbath ensues. I have been predicting a breakup of the GOP into Tea Part and Still Sort Of Sane factions for quite some time now, and this would be a simply marvelous way for it to get started.

Hey Tea Party, are you going to just take that from them? Don’t you realize that the real enemy is the Republican establishment that has been lying to you and keeping real conservatives from having a voice in government all this time?

After all this time, the truth is revealed! The People’s Front of Judea the Republican establishment is worse than the Democrats! They betrayed and humiliated you in front of the whole world!

It’s time to MAKE THEM PAY, and take the Republican party back for REAL conservatives, in REAL America!

Let the games begin.

Oh right, these. I used to do these, right? I can do another one. Sure.

I swear to God, the science news just got boring for a while. Honest!

First up on our news roundup : scientists are improving computers’ AI by teaching them regret.

Insert generic pop culture joke here along the lines of “what did they do, [undesirable thing involving something or someone currently unpopular]?”

What did they do, [take the computers to see Atlas Shrugged?]. Like that.

Anyhow, the idea is that if you can teach the program to recognize situations it wishes to avoid ahead of time and hence let it avoid them, you have effectively taught it an analogue to the human emotion of “regret” and this will lead to better, faster, and more accurate results.

It seems to make sense. Imagining how we would feel in potential future situations is the basic way the all important “future” aspect of sentience operates. When choosing a path, we can project our minds into the future and essentially imagine various things happening to us, and use that as a basis for our decisions.

So when they say they are teaching computers “regret”, what they are really doing is teaching them to imagine future regret. Which I suppose involves the capacity for real-time regret as well. Imagine that, a computer that can feel stupid for doing something.

I fail to see how that is a big improvement over just good old statistical outcome analysis, though. Other than sounding cool and attracting funding, of course.

Next up on the roundup turntable : from our For The Love Of God, Don’t Try This At Home department comes the story of how hooking a nine volt battery to your brain makes you better at video games.

Yes, they did a study in which a simple device powered by nothing more than nine volts of battery made the subjects twice as good at a video game designed to help soldiers train for ambushes. In point of fact, the device actually made the subjects twice as good at the game.

But before hordes of nerds rush off to get the batteries and baling wire and spit-stick electrodes to their noggins hoping to really improve those frag counts on Team Fortress 2, I feel compelled to warn you that this is just one study, and a small one at that point. Hardly enough of an experimental basis for alligator clamping the battery from your Geo to your earlobes.

And what is more, transcranial direct current stimulation is nothing to mess with on your own. This is not like bodging together your own ham radio receiver over a weekend. If you screw up this time, the breadboard you fry will be your brain stem, and brother, that’s no easy fix.

Plus, honestly, to me this sounds like the sort of thing that could easily be explained by the placebo effect. People were thinking “Wow, my brain is now SUPER CHARGED WITH POWER” and it’s that feeling, not any true enhancement, that drove the results.

Finally, we throw caution and quite possibly causality, not to mention sanity, by diving into that freaky jungle that is the world of modern quantum physics with a story about how they have succeeded in the quantum teleportation of light.

By “they”, I of course mean “scientists”, not the usual informal infinitive “they” we use in such statements as “they say the secret to a power breakfast is complex carbs and protein” or “I am looking forward to the new movie based on my favorite fantasy series, but they will probably screw it up. ”

Leaving the actual quantum mechanics questions delicately aside, the thing you need to know about this whole teleporting light thing is that they basically used quantum teleportation to transfer information (in the form of light) and that really opens up the possibility of a future of quantum computing, which besides also sounding cool and attracting funding means a future filled with computers so smoking fast that they make the fastest computer on Earth today seem like a one armed man with an abacus.

That, in turn, opens up a theoretical question I have been pondering for quite some time : at what point would we no longer have any use for faster computing (or networking)?

Certainly, we won’t hit that point any time real soon now, but it is an interesting thing to ponder. Certainly, there will be a limit to how much computing power you need to have in your pocket. Scientists might need something that can create realtime models of solar systems or something, but you just want to play video games and watch movies, and current computers already do that fairly well.

Plus, with current network speeds being perfectly capable of piping good quality video right to your viewing device of choice, one wonders how much more “pipe” we really can use.

I look forward to finding out!