Ref. : The fat man in Casablanca.

It is too dammed hot. Good thing I have been looking into air conditioning some more. Turns out I can get a window unit from Canadian Tire for around $109, which is way less than the $175 that the Ashton Group (no relation) is asking.

But the Ashton Group’s price includes installation, and from what I have read that is no small thing for those of us who are not lucky enough to have a window the exact same shape as an air conditioner. From what I can tell, in order to really make these things work, you need to fill the rest of the window with something in order to make it a tight fit, and that involves getting a big chunk of plastic and cutting it to fit the window and then cutting a hole out to fit the air conditioner into, and all of that makes my head spin and gives me images of myself staring at a pile of scraps of white plastic, with a slightly blood-streaked Exacto knife in my hands.

See, part fo the problem is that we don’t have any horizontal windows in this apartment. All our windows open vertically, that is to say, right to left. And all the window unit air conditioners I have ever seen seem to be designed with horizontal windows in mind. Stick unit in window, lower window till it reaches top of unit, and voila, a seal can be formed.

But I am pretty sure that the only way that would work for us is if we stuck the air conditioner in sideways, and I am pretty sure they are not designed to work like that.

I may be wrong.

Until I sort all this out, though, all I can do is hydrate aggressively and point the fan at my head and try to make it through the afternoon. Right now, I have a heat-stroke headache and a little nausea, and so writing today’s blog entry is not real easy. I would rather be pulling a siesta right now and sleeping through the heat.

But I will be getting together with friends later, so that means I must needs blog now. Oh, how I suffer.

And speaking of heat, Iraq. (Because it’s very hot there. Wow, what a deft segue.)

As far as I can tell, we have to intervene. These ISIS bastards are not just some random faction in the sectarian melting pot. They are evil people who round people up and kill them, and I am pretty sure we are against that kind of thing.

But I can see why Barack Obama doesn’t want to step back into that quagmire. None of us do. We were all very happy to get the hell out of Iraq and leave them to their own devices.

“Well, we’ve done all we can. It’s up to you now. ” we told the Iraqi people, and they seemed pretty happy with that too. And we didn’t just run away, we left them with all the trained local soldiers and modern-ish military hardware they needed in order to competently defend themselves.

But there was no way we could have seen ISIS coming. We might have predicted that something like ISIS might arise, but we had no way of knowing that such a group would have a very brutal “take no prisoners” attitude that strikes fear in the hearts of their enemies and causes them to flee rather than risk being captured by ISIS and, if they are lucky, merely shot in the head.

So these pricks are way beyond the Geneva Convention, let alone any other form of moral restraint. They will continue to slaughter innocent non-combatants until they are stopped.

And we really don’t want them becoming the new government of Iraq and Syria.

Unfortunately, this means that the Republicans are right when they say intervention is necessary. They’re right for a lot of the wrong reasons, but they are right. They are even right when they blame this on the withdrawal of American troops… it is pretty hard to imagine that ISIS would have made much progress against the American military machine.

However, as painful as it is to agree with those morally deranged morons in the GOP, this turmoil might turn out to be a blessing in disguise for Obama, because if he does decide to intervene, he will be able to show the GOP and the rest of the world how you do an invasion of Iraq the right way.

Just imagine the dismay and confusion amongst the Dick Cheney set when not only does Obama do everything they said he should do (making it real hard to disagree with him on it, even for them), but does a way, way, way better job of it than Dick and Bush and Rumsy and Rice and the rest ever did.

That would drive them nuts. And they could totally do it, too, seeing as they are not, in fact, mentally retarded spoiled rich people who have no conception of the value of a dollar and who think of war as a fun game you play with the lives and money of poor people who don’t matter.

Obama has a lot of flaws, but he is very well organized and capable, and that is just the sort of person to lead both a smoothly efficient counter-ISIS operation and any resulting nation-building required afterward.

There certainly wouldn’t have been any of the insanity-producing incompetence that Dubya engendered last time.

It starts with the military advisers already there. Next will come air strikes, which are not a total solution but can at least keep ISIS bottled up in the cities they already hold. You might be able to hide an army in a city, but just try to move your troops against Baghdad when any visible troop movement results in death from above.

I also think special attention needs to be paid to where these motherfuckers are getting their money, and we have to be absolutely ruthless in punishing whoever is holding their cash for them.

Well, that’s all for me today, folks. See you again tomorrow!

Don’t worry, I am not going to subject you all to my endless gushing on about how awesome My Little Pony : Friendship Is Magic is today. This time, I am only using it as a jumping off point.

The episode in question is Feeling Pinkie Keen, the fifteenth episode of the first season. Briefly, in it, a somewhat nutty character named Pinkie Pie demonstrates repeatedly that her random twiches and flutters have amazingly accurate predictive powers. Twilight Sparkle, who despite being super magical does not believe in Pinkie’s powers (because magic makes sense and random twitch prognostication does not) and embarks upon an episode-long quest to prove that Pinkie’s powers are just random chance and not real, becoming quiet obsessive about it in a comedic way.

Of course, by the end of the episode, she finally breaks down and admits that Pinkie’s powers really do work. And I am fine with that. But the moral at the end was sort of vague and didn’t really make it clear what the true lesson from the episode is, so I thought I would clarify.

Furthermore, a little research and a lot of virtual banging my head against the wall and saying ARGH later, I have accidentally learned that the episode is hugely controversial in some quarters, especially the asshole atheist demographic who considered it an attack on logic and rationality, and flipped the fucking out over it, because apparently they get to say whatever they want but if something even looks like an attack on one of their sacred beliefs, it’s a national fucking tragedy.

Because of course they did. My lack of God, I hate those people. Doesn’t it always seem like those who claim to love a virtue most understand it the least? Because these people clearly did not understand the episode and do not understand how science, reason, and logic really work.

So here is the basic lesson for today, kids : science, logic, and reason are based on evidence. The evidence is king, always, forever, in all circumstances, period.

And if your theory does not fit the evidence, it is your theory that must change. Rejecting evidence a priori because it does not fit your existing philosophy is the exact opposite of reason and science. It is rank prejudice, an argument made out of ignorance instead of knowledge, and intellectual hubris of the worst possible sort.

Twilight Sparkle’s mistake was in ignoring the evidence. Sure, one or two accurate predictions might be coincidence, but in the episode Pinkie Pie makes at least a dozen, and a real scientist does not reject the evidence simply because it does not make sense to her. The entirety of science depends on us finding things that do not make sense to us, and figuring out how they work. It always starts with something that does not currently make sense. That is one of the greatest joys of the science and the pursuit of knowledge : explaining the previously inexplicable.

Instead of obsessively rejecting the very clear pattern in the available evidence, Twilight Sparkle should have simply treated Pinkie’s powers as the fascinating new phenomena they were, and studied them with an open mind.

I can see what pissed people off, though. Here is the moral of the episode :

No, no, no. It’s not about choosing to believe things. It’s about being open to the evidence. Reality doesn’t give a crap what we want to believe or choose to believe. Something is either true or it isn’t, period. Twilight Sparkle had no choice but to believe in Pinkie Pie’s powers because that’s the hypothesis supported by the evidence.

The choice lies in choosing to ignore the evidence because you don’t want to have to change your mind about something, not in finally bowing to the evidence. One of the bedrock principles of all forms of the rational pursuit of knowledge is that you are absolutely helpless before the evidence. You are a slave to reality. In order to be a truly rational person, you have to leave your mind open to being completely changed by new evidence.

Otherwise, all you are doing is putting a tinfoil halo on your own ignorance and prejudice.

The pursuit of reason and truth is not easy. The philosopher’s road has never been a smooth one. You have to remain steadfast in your belief in uncertainty, and be absolutely convinced of the need for doubt. Ignorance and prejudice can creep into even the most regimented of minds, and therefore you must be ever-vigilant in policing your own thoughts.

And you can never, ever, ever let yourself fall prey to the delusion that error and prejudice are something that happens to other people. You are as human as the rest of us, and just as fallible. One of the worst and most persistent delusions known to humanity is the delusion that you are logical.

Like hell you are. You’re an irrational, emotional, instinctual animal just like the rest of the grunting, mating, squatting creatures on the Earth. We human beings are lucky in that we are capable of using logic and the scientific method as the powerful tools they are, but they are only that : tools. And we are not our tools.

No amount of enlightenment can change the fundamental nature of human existence. Despite its hubris, reason and the right hand side of the brain can not eliminate the rest of our natures, and when we let arrogant rationality fool us into believing that this has happened, we only leave ourselves at the mercy of forces we refuse to even acknowledge exist.

True rationality comes from understanding and accepting our fundamentally animal natures, and embracing them when we can and working with them in mind when we cannot.

Otherwise, you’re just another smug delusional egotist completely sure they have all the answers, just like any other bigot, religious or otherwise.

Well that’s it from me for today, nice people. Sorry to get all ranty there, but this kind of thing pisses me off.

I get really angry about logic!

See you tomorrow, folks!