I was trying to explain bra-size notation (36C, 24B, etc) to a 16-year old friend on SDF, and I realized that a picture was worth a thousand words. Allow me to post.
The abu ghraib prison scandal's most worrisome effect has not been in damaging the moral reputation of the united states, but rather in damaging the credibility of its military power. A willingness to dehumanize prisoners, ignore the laws of the geneva convention, and delight in the abuse of another human being to me indicates a glaring lack of discipline. The soldiers who sexually humiliated iraqi prisoners and then took leering photos of this abuse have proven themselves to be undisciplined, and an undisciplined soldier is universally an ineffective one.
Every form of military training, from paris island to a karate class full of 10-year olds, employs mental discipline as its cornerstone of instruction and building of effective martial minds. Since this mental discipline is absolutely essential to the martial mind-set, the soldiers depicted in the abu ghraib photographs are not fit to be soldiers -- not because of some cloudy issues of sexual morality, but simply because they may not be able to do their jobs.
The rest of the world has watched the abu ghraib scandal unfold, and the reputation of the united states military as a disciplined and therefore effective fighting force has been damaged, probably beyond quick repair. The united states already had a questionable reputation in this regard -- it's widely thought outside of america that one mujahedeen, one al quada lieutenant or one bosnian serb militiaman is more than a match for two american soldiers. The word around the campfire is that the united states relies on corporate technology and air-power, being able to comfortably ignore the fact that their manpower is relatively much less effective. The word around the campfire is that american troops are soft, and that they're undisciplined.
Whether or not this is true, the abu ghraib prison scandal re-enforces this view of the u.s. Soldier, and ultimately undermines the united states's reputation as a military force to be reckoned with, a reputation that is essential to effective international diplomacy.
This is really obvious, but I haven't yet seen it all explained in one place. Every reasonable person knows there's nothing ultimately unexplainable about astrology, but I've yet to hear a cogent description of exactly why there's nothing much to it.
Astrology serves the purpose of encouraging people to explore positive activities, regardless of whether that person is genetically inclined to pursue those activities over others. Imagine an 'ares' (the ram) whose sign indicates that he's supposed to be assertive. He has that quality, I'm sure, but he also has others qualities that are attributed to other signs. However, knowing that he's supposed to be assertive, society will foster, and teach him to foster in himself, this trait above others. Everyone possesses all of the astrological qualities to a degree, but the existence of particular qualities associated with a particular astrological sign might encourage that person to focus on some particular set, purely because of the cultural influence. For instance, I might have been encouraged to do more self-expressive, personal activities (writing, drawing, playing my guitar, etc), because i, my peers, parents and teachers knew that 'sagittarius' is independent and self-expressive, although I am also sometimes sensitive like a pisces, assertive like an ares, or fickle like a gemini.
I learned that sagittarius is associated with independence, self-expression, and ultimately creative expression at a very early age, and of course my parents knew it as well. They might have exposed me to avenues of creative expression, perhaps unconsciously believing that as a sagittarius, I'd be inclined to pick them up. Likewise, I might have pursued these things with heightened interest for similar reasons. Teachers, counselors, and friends also tend to know childrens' birthdays, and might shape their influence over them based on the indications of astrology. I don't know too many people who aren't aware of the signs and who don't have at least a little bit of familiarity with their associated qualities. If the knowledge is out there, this will perpetuate, either through conscious or unconscious mechanisms, through self-development or influenced development, the correspondence of individual traits to what is associated with that individual's astrological sign.
If a baby born on December 6th (a sagittarius) were abandoned on a desert island from birth and given a supply of bananas and monkey meat to see him through the years, then if he turned out to be creatively expressive, this correlation would have nothing to do with his astrological sign being a causal agent. In other words, the influence of astrology is purely cultural, which makes sense inasmuch as it is itself a purely cultural phenomenon (the positions of the stars are fixed in our familiar way only from the vantage point of the earth, the seat of human culture).
Astrology can serve the purpose of providing some guidance and direction for specialization. Most children are renaissance (wo)men of a sort, and can more or less do everything. But at some point, most people begin to specialize a little bit, and their area of focus is often in part determined by the stars.
However, astrology is also similarly damaging, simply because it discourages the existence of renaissance men and women, and furthers the problem of over-specialization in contemporary society.
Liberal and postmodern christians often blame 'fundamentalists' for being responsible for christianity's bad rap. The alternative to fundamentalism, or interpreting the bible literally, is to interpret it metaphorically. However, if one interprets everything in the bible this way, one could take passages to mean anything, depending on how interprets the metaphors. Guidance in interpreting biblical metaphors can come from authority (the church), or the individual, depending on the christian denomination. If the entire bible is metaphoric, then exactly what purpose does it serve? What is it teaching us? If we or a fallible, human proxy is free to interpret it freely, then doesn't it then lose its value as a schematic for behavior and/or belief? I can read the bible, draw the conclusion that the literary metaphor tells me to wear a green, winged viking helmet to work every day, and then call myself a 'christian' as I do so. The bible must be interpreted literally, or else the word 'christian' loses it's denotative, objective value.
People are sometimes desperate to call themselves christians, because of associations with culture or family that they don't want to give up. It's easy to find a 'christian' who doesn't believe that the earth is 6,000 years old, that people who don't buy the fish story or who do 'bad' things go to hell, that jesus was the 'son of god,' or even in an afterlife at all. But these folks continue to insist that they are christians.
This is easy to do. The definition of 'christian' can be interpreted as 'anyone who follows the teachings of christ,' which would include pretty much every nice person on the planet, including buddha, lao tze, gandhi, etc. Clearly, these people wouldn't have identified themselves as christian (a belief in jesus as the christ). But, if we interpret the definition loosely enough (following the teachings of jesus), they most certainly are.
What complicates this is the existence of the word 'christian' to mean 'good,''right' or 'kind,' as in 'stabbing your mother in the eye wasn't a very christian thing to do.' this demonstrates the extent to which the abrahamic religions have co-opted western morality. This isn't necessarily a bad thing -- if we all behaved in a 'christian' way, there would be a lot less pain in the world (unfortunately, most people, including most christians, do not). 'christian' being taken to mean 'good' instead of 'one who believes that you'll go to hell if you don't believe in a certain god' has serious implications for the definition of 'christian,' and its relationship to a shared cultural morality.
If you don't believe the immaculate conception, the resurrection, or substitutionary atonement, then I'm terribly sorry, but you're not a christian.
Of course, who am I to tell anyone that they are or are not a christian? If you are comfortable calling yourself a christian, and want to accept all of the cultural baggage that comes with it, then be my guest. I, however, will pass.
I'm inclined to believe that the only 'true' christians are fundamentalists. Everyone else is fooling themselves in trying to reconcile contemporary thought with morality and superstition. Let's face it: many people who call themselves christian are not christian. As a liberal, postmodern christian, you didn't believe you were going to 'hell' anyway, so what might the consequences of renouncing your 'faith' be? The loss of the culture? Do you really want to be associated with a culture that's probably done more to harm the earth and its population than any other force in the history of civilization?
Let's examine the nicene creed, because I think this is what a lot of uncreative christians would cite as 'what they believe':
We believe in one God,
That's fine, to distinguish from the belief in many gods. but 'god' was never defined to begin with.
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.
Father of what? Literally, 'father'? As in male parent? 'all powerful' doesn't make too much sense either. Neither does 'the maker of everything.' how can one object, one thing, one entity, have made everything? If it made everything, then did it make itself? How could it make itself if it didn't yet exist?
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father.
Through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven:
by the power of the Holy Spirit
he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,
and was made man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again
in accordance with the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.
This is starting to get ridiculous. The main problem is really the subjective nature of the word 'god.' as soon as this is defined properly, then perhaps the other things will start to make some sense. There are also problems with other terms, like 'holy spirit.' in the christian faith, the meaningfulness of terms like these is assumed axiomatically. One is never supposed to ask certain questions, such as 'when you talk about god, what are you really talking about?' and even if you did ask this question, it wouldn't be possible for an elder, pope or pastor to give an answer, because god is undefinable. I would posit that the term 'god' (as in 'yahweh') is therefore meaningless, but who am I to argue with 4,000 years of bullshit? I've heard fringe theories that describe yahweh as an alien being who appeared to the jews in the middle east 4,000 years ago for the purpose of making sure humanity would never evolve to threaten him. Frankly, this seems more plausible than many other explanations.
We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son.
With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified.
He has spoken through the Prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come. Amen.
Whatever. It's a bunch of poetry -- inherently subjective and metaphoric. If it were interpreted literally, the interpreter would be implied to be insane. But since there are inherent problems with metaphoric interpretation, one is forced to think of it all literally. That's the problem, really: if you take it literally, you reject reality. If you take it metaphorically, any and all standards are lost, and you might as well not call yourself a christian.
I've wasted enough time and energy trying to logically dismantle something that wasn't logically built to begin with. I'm not going to convince a christian that s/he's deluding his or her self, and they're not going to convince me to accept jesus christ as my lord and savior. Consider this topic dropped.
I met kendal, a friend on SDF, for lunch at an indian restaurant. Three pictures came out, proving that ken and I are actual entities in space and time, as opposed to usernames on a little black puTTY screen:
The backyard here is very leafy and plant-overrun. But I don't have the heart (or the energy) to tell a plant 'you can't grow here because you don't correspond to my planned layout for the backyard,' and then rip it out of the ground.
Above: that's my backyard shed, in which there is a bunch of garbage, including that old tire and white strip of gutter-guard that you see there. I believe I painted that smiley face on the inside of the door when I was around 12.
I've largely forgiven my digital camera for its evil ways. It turns out it was very low on batteries, and that's why it was turning off of its own volition. I replaced them, and it actually worked. I also set it on picture view mode, in which the image to be captured is replicated exactly in a tiny screen on the back, so I'm not dependant on the off-center viewfinder. Really, the only issues now are the lack of a manual focus (lots of pictures come out blurry), the small memory capacity (which could be corrected by a new memory card), and the high battery-drain. But at least it does what it's supposed to do now.
I'm meeting someone from SDF for lunch today, and I'll test out my camera on him.
Mrs. White gave my mother and me a house plant several months ago. It was made to live on the kitchen table, and I assumed the responsibility of caring for it. This is a good thing, because my mother has killed ever plant she has ever owned by forgetting to water it. Really, it's a wonder I survived my childhood. I guess it's a good thing that I screamed when I was hungry. At any rate, my little plant has done really well, and is doing even better now that I've moved it into my room, in the window well. Within a few days, all of the leaves have turned to face the sunlight coming in -- it's very cute, really. I water it until it's completely soaked by putting it in the sink and running the faucet directly into the pot. Simultaneously, so my plant thinks it's really raining, I spray its leaves with a spray-bottle filled with water. Then, once the superfluous water has drained out of the pot, I replace my plant in my recessed window, putting it in the same place in accordance with the way the leaves are turned, and making sure the leaves don't touch the window.
That's my plant, sitting in my recessed window. When the weather was cooler, it enjoyed having it's leaves rustled by the breeze that blew in through the screen, but it'll have to be content with still air now until the fall. Every few days I check my plant's dirt, and if it's no longer damp about an inch down, I give it another soaking. My plant is doing very well, seems happy, and is getting bigger every day. It's a schefflera, and its natural habitat is the rainforest floor, away from direct sunlight (facing as it is towards the northwest, recessed in a window sill, and with a large tree directly outside, this condition is fulfilled). From what mrs. White and others tell me, scheffleras are very hardy plants.
Shceffleras are dissimilar to sport-utility vehicles, since they are small, alive, and imobile.
The advantages of driving a sport-utility vehicle (SUV) are twofold: increased visibility and increased collision-resilience (CR). However, these advantages are gained at the expense of the visibility and CR of other drivers. SUVs are difficult to see around, and if an SUV hits your car, your car is going to sustain a lot of damage (as might you). The current surge in SUV ownership now is a result not only of effective marketing, but also of competitive evolution: joe the driver notices that other SUVs on the road hinder his visibility and CR. In order to counter the effects on his visibility and CR, joe must also buy and drive an SUV. Indeed, the number of SUVs sold in the united states has increased every year since the late eighties or so.
biff: why did you buy an SUV?
spliff: because it has better collision-resilience and more visibility.
biff: why do you feel you need these things?
spliff: all of those people with SUVs that encroach on my collision-resilience and visibility.
This phenomenon can be likened to a concert where everyone is sitting down. The people in the front row decide to stand up. In order to see, the people in the second row have to stand up, ad infinitum until the entire auditorium is now standing, and will continue to stand until they get back into their SUVs to drive home.
The SUV phenomenon is a good example capitalism being bad for a society. If everyone is forced into competitive behavior, the net result isn't always good (in this case, the net result is primarily the squandering an unrenewable resource). It's hard to argue with the advantages of driving an SUV -- who doesn't want to be safer in their vehicle? But in this case, what is good for the individual isn't good for the rest of society, unless others are willing to damage the earth or can afford to keep up with the jonses.
I think it's time for another look at my server logs, much to the probable chagrin of my paranoiac readers. I'll just include unique IPs (with the last block X'ed out, of course) from the period of 7pm EDT on the 20th to 7pm EDT on the 21st.
Server logs are in 24-hour time format, and they correspond to UTC (coordinated universal time). UTC is currently only four hours ahead of me here on the east coast of the united states, since the east coast of the united states is now into daylight savings time.
UTC time doesn't change according to daylight savings time. What's interesting is that UTC is another word for GMT, or greenwich mean time, which has its 'home' in greenwich, england, on the 0 longitude line. One might assume that greenwich doesn't move into british summer time (daylight savings time) like the rest of the UK, but this isn't the case. People in the city of greenwich, england, set their clocks forward during british summer time, but some official, mystical, realm-of-ideas notion of 'greenwich mean time' remains apart from the actual used, agreed-upon, functional time in the city of greenwich. This has to be the case, since GMT is the same year round, the city of greenwich is in the UK, and the UK has only one time zone, which is now in it's 'daylight savings' phase ('british summer time'), one hour ahead of GMT. In a sense, 'greenwich mean time' doesn't actually exist for part of the year.
Here are my server logs, made more human-readable by trimming out all the slashes, parentheses, zeros and colons, and putting the date and time into something resembling a civilized format. All times are EDT, my time, because it's my blog. Haha.
As always, my guess on 'most likely who?' comes from correlating information gleaned from whois, reveres dns, and geobytes queries.
| date | time | page | IP address | most likely who? |
| 20 may 04 | 8:48pm | 0014.html | 141.211.99.xxx | james. |
| 20 may 04 | 9:09pm | 404.html | 24.130.235.xx | someone in los angeles. It could be my cousin mike or serena's sister phoebe. I can't think of any other possibilities. Or, it might just be a google hit; without referrer logs, it's hard to tell. |
| 21 may 04 | 2:33am | 0003.html | 69.138.190.xxx | kajal. |
| 21 may 04 | 4:51am | 0031.html | 152.163.253.xx | I'm thinking my stepmom, but it could be anyone with AOL. That's the advantage of AOL, by the way: it's impossible for webmasters to trace users. Maybe there's a database somewhere -- who knows. |
| 21 may 04 | 11:14am | 0031.html | 12.73.132.xxx | martha. |
I considered posting the IP addresses in their full form, but there's a good chance I'd be howled at if I did that, and with good reason. IP addresses are public information, but the identity of the person behind the IP address is private, known only to the user herself and her internet provider. This information can be subpoenaed, but normally the mapping of IP address to user isn't known or available information. The only reason I'm able to make such good guesses here is because I'm a super genius. Just kidding. The only reason is because I'm reasonably certain that I don't have many, if any, blog visitors who don't know me personally in some capacity. So, once I find the city in which an IP address is located, mapping that city to a relatively small set of possible people is an easy task. By posting an IP address along with a name, I'd be revealing that person's identity when she might very well wish to remain anonymous. Granted, these are only guesses at the identity of my readers, but I'm 99% certain about some of them. So, I don't want to sell out my friends and family. I'm often kind of a prick, but I'm not that much of a prick.
To close, here's a quote on daylight savings time.
"I don't really care how time is reckoned so long as there is some agreement about it, but I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind. I even object to the implication that I am wasting something valuable if I stay in bed after the sun has risen. As an admirer of moonlight I resent the bossy insistence of those who want to reduce my time for enjoying it. At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy and wise in spite of themselves." -- Robertson Davies, The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks