Oldie but goodie. Since Cheney’s apparently on the “prowl” again in armed fashion.

…and why evolution keeps getting booted from U.S. classrooms:

I was just listening to a radio chat show in a major metropolitan area featuring a public intellectual, a mayoral candidate, and a supposedly well-educated host, all middle-aged women involved in policy and public life and old enough to have been around the block a few times.

They were talking about the recent announcement by McDonald’s that their fries contain approximately a third more trans-fats than previously realized, and the conversation went something like this:

“So I suppose McDonald’s is willing to release this information now that it’s known that fat doesn’t matter.”

“What? Fat doesn’t matter? I was just watching the movie ‘SuperSize Me’ with my kids last night and we’d resolved not to go out for fast food so much anymore.”

“Oh yeah, didn’t you hear about the new study? Scientists were wrong in the past, fat doesn’t matter in health after all.”

“Even lots of it, in deep-fried foods?”

“It kind of makes you wonder about so-called science and scientists, doesn’t it? All these years and all these big government agencies have invested all this time and money into doing research and telling us to eat our fruits and vegetables and get lots of fiber, and now they turn around and say ‘Nevermind, we were wrong, eat as much fat as you like.'”

“It’s true, the study said that no matter how much or how little fat you eat, it doesn’t statistically affect you, you still have the same chance of dying. It makes you wonder about other science issues right now, like evolution in the classroom or stem cell research. If they’ve been wrong about this for so many years, what else might they be wrong about?”

“And all those poor overweight people and people with diabetes who have been told for years that it’s their fault, and now we find out that it must be something else causing their problem. How must they feel, to have been blamed for all this time for a problem that they just didn’t cause, and that they have no control over?”

“It just makes me want to get teary-eyed. But first I want a Quarter Pounder and a supersized fries.”

Laughter all around before moving on to the wiretapping scandal.

—

Now, the study they were talking about is this one, which:

1. Only studied the caloric reduction in fat consumption from 40% of a diet to 30% of a diet (not to the 10-20% that most doctors recommend), certainly not “as much or as little” dietary fat as anyone wants.

2. Found that while the total fat quantity that you consume is not important in diets between 30-40% fat, previous research still demonstrates that the types of fats that you consume remain extraordinarily important (trans-fats and saturated fats, i.e. McDonald’s frieds, still being desperately bad for you).

3. Made no claims whatsoever about a high-fat not causing obesity, which remains a considerable risk factor for heart disease and cancer in and of itself. In fact, it did the opposite (in light of the popularity of the Atkins diet), saying that a low-fat diet did not contribute to obesity, an obvious conclusion given that the caloric density of fat is twice that of non-fat dietary foods.

The fact that three women got this so f*cking wrong and did it on a widely heard talk show, especially when they are considered by the listening public to be a part of the illuminati, is very troubling. Things that I note:

1. Americans want to be told what they want to hear, i.e. that you might as well have as many fries and hamburgers as you want, then blame someone else or some other power when you’re 800 pounds and dying of heart disease and colon cancer.

2. Americans have a fundamental misunderstanding of, and suspicion about all things scientific and technical, even when sitting in front of computers and radios, with life expectancies in the mid-70s instead of the 30s, having driven to work in a motorcar in the morning. After a hundred years of Hollywood, they simply believe that science is fake and that it is magic and “belief in your heart” that make the universe, and things like can openers and pencil sharpeners, function.

2a. American’s don’t even know what a scientist is or who the scientists really are. This study isn’t coming out of a research institution manned by scientists, it’s a f*cking public policy think tank conducting what amounts to a statistical survey on correlation having little to do with causation. Anyone who makes any sort of claim at all is now a “scientist,” which explains why so many think so-called Intelligent Design to be “scientific.”

3. Even our illuminati are dumb as rocks, lacking in critical thinking skills and reading/listening comprehension. We are a fundamentally undereducated population. It is not possible for Americans to work or vote in an informed manner, they are all retards who are so far behind the cultural, historical, and scientific literacy curve that they are essentially unsalvageable as people.

4. The press has a lot to answer for, since they’re the ones that ran the God damn study under headlines that tempted people to hear “Scientists find that fat doesn’t matter! Eat as much as you want! Woohoo!” despite the fact that the study says nothing of the sort. They should realize that Americans read nothing but the headline, and that if you bury information in the actual story, they’re never gonna know. It’s set back Americans’ understanding of dietary health by decades. Twenty years from now our pitiful college students will be sitting in classes debating each other and saying (as they always do, without details or attributions or any hint of a clue-stick-mark on their skull), “but you’re wrong because all the research says that fat has no relationship to death, you can eat as many fries as you want and it won’t make you die.”

4a. Of course, given the quality of the press these days and the fact that it’s filled with these same idiots who have graduated without grammatical or critical thinking skills and are now in charge of informing the public, it’s likely that they didn’t understand the information enough to report accurately on it anyway.

5. Americans have no relationship with mortality or the human life-cycle. The fact that people still talk in tropes like “it doesn’t reduce your risk of dying” without qualifying it with a “from cause xyz” shows that people do not understand that THEY WILL DIE. Everyone has a death-probability of 1.0, 100%, certituuuude-duuude. Not only that, but every single health risk gets rolled into “your chance of dying.” Cancer = heart disease = appendicitis = bird flu = “things that might make me die,” and people get lost in any deeper details than that, i.e. “Scientists say that consuming too much fat leads to heart disease, so I’d better not eat much fat if I don’t want to get bird flu or appendicitis.” They’re unable to differentiate between them, since all are simply cultural synonyms for dying in a nation full of people lacking in any understanding at all of what these things actually are or what causes them on the mundane physical level.

This is why Bush got elected, why evolution is getting booted out of classrooms, why companies prefer to outsource to India rather than hiring American graduates, why politicians lose thousands of people in hurricanes, and why Ford is going out of business due to cars that suck.

It’s because **Americans are stupid, woefully undereducated/miseducated (or is that ‘misundereducated’), and willfully ignorant.**

of the vicious cycle. I don’t know what I’ll do tonight, but it’s got to be something else. Maybe I’ll watch a film or something. Something.

So I walked to the bridge and stood out over the river, because lore says that Water, when it runs, should erase any magic, and I want so very bad to be free of a certain magic that has had hold of me for a time. I am so very experienced in all of this — more than I had ever wanted to be — and by that mark I should find all things easier, but I don’t.

I somehow suspect that it is never easier, and that there is nothing to wash away the magic. You can’t undo the parts of your life that you have lived; they are written, and they will remain. Historical.

I will not let the f*cking dog into the room tonight. I don’t want to see any f*cking dogs today.

—

No, I take it back. I will let the dog in. They say that when no-one else loves you, the important thing is to love yourself. I always have done, and still do. But it is not enough. It is at least as important, if not moreso, to know that other people love you.

This dog at least wants to come in.

I begin to feel again as though the blog is too public and too private at once, which means, essentially that I am not bold enough to say what I ought to say when I ought to say it. Not good. I need to be honest with people. We will have to see how things evolve.

I really hate living in such a way that I just have to sit around and see who does what and how things play out. It goes against my nature as a man, I suppose. I feel like I want some sort of control, like I need to take some sort of action. My experience as a long-time person, though, tells me that in this case, any attempt to do anything would just be counterproductive. 😐

So it is time to edit photos and work and play nethack and wait and prepare for whatever may be.

I’ve become supremely jaded. Experience has taught me that nobody, no matter how trustworthy or how close to you, ever tells the truth, ever. Everyone will hurt you someday. Everyone. We are a race of liars acting in our own emotional self-interest, and we realize this about one another. So why do we always feel so shocked when we find out that people are yanking us around, when we knew they were to begin with? Is it the specificity of the moment, or is it something deeper?

I feel forgotten and alone, like I have outgrown most of my surroundings and my people and myself and they aren’t catching up. The others, the ones that I haven’t outgrown, are different from me. They have kids and homes and spouses and jobs.

I’m going to be 30 in a moment. I’m ready to be an adult — a boring adult. An adult with a sportcoat and a briefcase and a desk. I feel silly walking around in a hoodie and jeans. I’m not a Californian or an East Coast club kid. I’m a scholar. I’m a scholar because I say I am and because my work is sound and my ideas are deep and can add something to the world. I’m brilliant and I have real achievements and experience. I have to be careful not to sell myself short.

I think innocent childhood and wacky youth and fashion and rock concerts look silly on some grown men of 30 and can only look sillier on me as I get older. There are things that I want to do, and things that I want to contribute, that are closed avenues to hoodie-wearing, keg-party-going jeans-wearers.

I also feel alone just now, like nobody who knows me is noticing me right now, just my muddy footprints and leftover pizza crusts. They’ll notice me later, and by then they’ll be surprised at where I’ve gone, because they won’t realize that they haven’t been paying attention, or even that they had me all wrong to begin with.

As I’ve said so many times before here, I’m going to bed.

I feel as though I could write a dissertation until I actually log in and wonder what to post. At that point, the requirement for actual lexical specificity hits me, and I realize that there is no linguistic method by which all of “my personhood, right now, please empathize” can be conveyed. Everyone experiences this. It’s rough on us all, particularly when we feel alone and bewildered.

My years at university thus far have been the best of my life, much moreso when I was struggling deeply to make a go of it (versus the moments during which the work was more or less automatic and brainless). The sense of achievement I’ve felt at times is truly majestic — and oddly enough, I’ve never felt such things at the moment of earning a degree. Instead, I’ve always felt it when I’ve been able to articulate an argument in just the way that I conceptualize it, or when I’ve managed to produce a paper that I’m proud of, or a body of work that I feel has changed someone’s mind or opened new avenues for instruction for future students.

I’m hoping that all of this continues when I get back into school once more. It’s a very conscious decision I’m making, and like (I suspect) nearly all individuals who pursue this avenue in their lives (and make no mistake, it does take over one’s life at some point), I’m not all all positive that it’s the “best possible choice.” Instead, I’m operating on a lot of intuition and gut feeling and experience that suggests prudent courses of action, rather than deeply logical or wise ones, to me.

There remains, however, a large part of me that is starved for something much simpler, which I do not pursue simply because most indicators suggest that it is not easily guaranteeable, regardless of the amount of labor invested. Thus, I do what I am sure I can complete, rather than sacrificing all to pursue what fate must ultimately grant me, if it is willing.

Forks in the road. Frustrating in a short life. Frustrating indeed, and lonely, too.

So CNN and most of the western media are reporting that the cartoons were created by Danes in response to the Danish press’ request for depictions of Muhammed, as someone was writing a children’s book in Denmark and couldn’t find Muhammed pictures. They further report that Imam(s) in Denmark, outraged at the printing, took these cartoons to Egypt to ask authorities there for political support in the Muslim world, and that Egypt gave it. They suggest that the reason for the delay in uprising was the season of the Hajj, before whose end no Muslim authority would look at them or consider the issue… and that once the Muslim world saw them, the game was on.

Only now it comes to light that these cartoons were first published in a mainstream paper in Egypt in 2005 (see also here and here), without riots, without protests, without even too many “letters to the editor,” it would seem. Then in recent days, only when the U.S. has brought the Iran nuclear issue to a head and referrals to the security council have been made… now that the U.S. is beginning to make noises about invading Iran and Syria… we get Iran and Syria supporting an explosion of violence and rioting that warrants international condemnation?

I don’t think of myself as a conspiracy theorist for the most part, but something does not compute. The Arab free press right now is going nuts over their own conspiracy theories about the governments in the region and why it is expedient for them to foment violence over these cartoons just now, but I can think of a bigger, badder government that could use a similar show of radical extremism in the western press just now… and this bigger, badder government, oddly enough, is responsible for propping half of those despotic regimes anyway (the ones we prop up or have created ourselves would generally be the ones we don’t plan to invade, I suppose… oh, wait…)

Tinfoil hat time.

Everyone is wondering why it took five months for the Islamic world to get upset about the Danish cartoons. “Why now?” they ask. Everyone is wondering why western media outlets, some big, some small, keep reprinting these things. Everyone is also wondering why, when the U.S. is finally not at the center of an international policy nightmare, Condoleezza Rice has decided to insert the U.S. into the center of the firestorm by blaming Iran and Syria for the ongoing violence. Several conservatives have also pointed out that the Danish flags being burned by the protesters must have come from “somewhere,” and they suggest that this somewhere is a government. They mean Iran and Syria, but…

Maybe, just maybe, we have another conspiracy theory candidate on our hands. After all, the U.S. is looking for a pretense for attacking and occupying Iran and Syria, especially in recent weeks. Well, if Rice & the rest of the neocons spend a few weeks putting the “Iran and Syria supports the riots” sound byte out there… and the cartoons just happen to keep getting reprinted, and the riots just happen to continue, and just happen turn into general uprisings that spill over national and international borders and infrastructure, maybe even taking down planes or ending up in repeated bombings… then the Bush administration will have found its reason to invade and occupy.

Think about it. Given what we all know about the Bush administration, Afghanistan, Iraq, 9/11, and even in some ways Katrina, just think about it. Would anyone be surprised if planes were downed, bombs blew up, and the “Iran and Syria-supported” violence spread and turned into a regional movement that led U.S. to invade these countries? And would anyone really be surprised if twenty years from now, we find out that the planes were hijacked by CIA agents, the bombs were set by the Pentagon’s special forces, the riots were sustained by State Department operatives, and the rebuilding of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Iran, and whoever else we decide to invade ultimately results in wildly orgasmic amounts of money for federal contractors and ownership of half the land in the Middle East (including umpteenzen oil fields) by a few familiar rich white Old Boys?

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm… Think about it. And if I’m not back in twenty minutes, don’t call the police, because then you’ll be missing, too.

Something of an optimistic morning, though there’s no measurable reason for that to be the case. I’ve been badmouthing 2006 a lot so far, because so far 2006 has been punching me pretty hard in the mouth. But the upside of all of these major changes and hurdles is that two or three years from now I’ll be able to look back at another “turning point” year like 2000 was — a year I now recognize to be a great one, though at the time is was a very difficult one for me.

Here’s to the smooth patches in between the rough patches, and the way that the rough patches help you to enjoy the smooth patches when you get there.

(Caveat: assuming you get there.)

I spent five months at her mom’s house in a town I often couldn’t stand just to be with her. I agreed to move there even, took a job because she wanted to be there, and then stayed another seven months despite her unexpectedly having left once I got it. I waited for her to come back, all because I believed in the relationship that much. Twelve months I sat in Santa Barbara, trying to make it work.

She finally came back in October after a trip two months longer than last year’s, once I’d finally given up in a panic and decided to leave the area. She asks me to spend an extra month in Santa Barbara, which I do, and then spends just over seven weeks in Salt Lake City before leaving — without my even knowing she was leaving for good until afterward. She says she doesn’t like it here.

She was gone for six full months in 2005 and barely three months after I see her again, she’s gone again and there’s every possibility I won’t see her for ten months this time, if even then, unless I am willing to go right back to Santa Barbara, even though I just barely f*cking left it in November, have no work there, can’t really afford to live there right now, can’t really stand to see the f*cking place right now, and even though I suspect there’s every chance she’ll leave again in March once I manage to arrive again.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaugh! What gives? Does she hate me? She certainly seems determined to keep leaving me behind in such a way that I can’t accompany her, while I try to follow somewhere behind. This is driving me f*cking crazy. F*CKING CRAZY. I can’t do this anymore. I am physically ill. I cannot function. I refuse. I am going to bed.

listen to neil young

– don’t like Santa Barbara
– can’t afford Santa Barbara
– already got stuck there once
– no particular reason to stay in Salt Lake City once I have money
– don’t have money yet
– won’t have it until maybe March or April at the soonest
– will know about schools by then
– will have to move to school by fall regardless
– only a few short months between having money and moving to school
= move directly to school’s area in March or April?

Seems like the wisest course of action. Damn emotions for getting mixed up in it all. And damn everyone and everything while we’re at it.

There are still some layout bugs, most notably with the photo stuff I’ve posted over the last year (some container or other is not behaving the way I want), but who cares, I’ll worry about it later, if ever.

The navigation is hopefully clearer and more sane. The editorial business page will come shortly. I’ve thought about changing the color, but nothing else really looks good, so for now it stays.

Somehow I can’t believe that my life looks like this right now. It’s all just so f*cking… off from what it should be.