Put Down the Science Before Someone Gets Their Quarks Poked Out

The desire to "prove" that events in the Bible were actual, historical events has always seemed at odds to me with, what's that other thing, oh right: faith. Why run around digging up Mary's shekels and superhydroatomatizing or whatever the Shroud of Turin when you know it had to happen that way because God said so? God's word isn't good enough for you people? You believe Glenn Beck without proof, but God, him you've got to check up on? Can't you leave all this "proving" business to those geeks who ruined the curve for you in high school?

This is brought up by the (from Fox News via Wonkette, so take it as you will) finding of some wood chunks on some mountain in Turkey that they think was Noah's Ark. They determined that these wood chunks are 4,800 years old. How did they determine this? Divine revelation? ISBN codes? No, they used carbon dating. This is funny, because when other scientists use carbon dating to suggest that there are many things on earth more than 6,000 years old, that is taken to be The Devil at work. But if it proves that Noah's Ark existed, then it's totally incontrovertible fact.

It must be awesome to be an "evangelical explorer," though.

Goldman Sigh

I enjoy a farce as much as the next person, but these Goldman Sachs hearings are a bit much. The routine of sitting Wall Street down for a Stern Talking To, Young Man, What Do You Think Your Mother Found In Your Room Today?--it's getting a little stale, no? To continue the analogy, it's like telling a teenage boy who has already knocked up a couple of girls that he should Be Responsible and Careful from now on, and here are the keys to the car, your mother and I will be out late.

States Which Should Be Given Back to Mexico

Not that Mexico would take them, but add Arizona to the list. I'm more than willing to give them Texas, as well. But then we'd have all these Texans trying to get into Louisiana and Oklahoma, desperate for low-paying agricultural jobs, and then we'd have to pass a law that authorized police to demand identification and residency papers from anyone with a drawl or a Stetson or a "Don't Tread On Me!" flag, tiresome.

Anyway, you have to just love a state--that only exists because of massive federal subsidies on water, the Hoover Dam didn't build itself, nutheads--which spends all its time voting against taxes and Martin Luther King Jr. day and daylight savings time and I don't know what. It's a goddamn crime that anyone in Arizona even has a lawn for illegal immigrants to mow.

Then again, isn't Arizona full of retirees living on Social Security and enjoying their socialized healthcare? You know, if this bill actually was effective in deporting illegal immigrants, then a state full of lazy bastards living off the welfare state would have to get out there and do some honest work for a change.

Sarah Palin's Voice Violates the Geneva Conventions

I wanted to find a clip of Sarah Palin making a joke, in order to further explore my deep and profound insight about the connection between conservatives and humor, or lack thereof. But 5 seconds into the first clip, I thought, "So that's what a Pomeranian put through a wood-chipper sounds like" and abandoned the project.

So I typed "Sarah Palin 'community organizer'" into Godggle and put up the most recent clip that came up. No idea if it's actually applicable, but feel free to watch it and let me know. "Community organizer" is a phrase Palin frequently uses as a laugh line, and her audiences do, actually, laugh at it. While teh nutz may find the idea of community organizing hilarious, it is not actually humorous. There is a difference between the way we laugh when someone falls down (cf. "America's Funniest Home Videos") and the laughter that comes out of a kind of "Oh, shit" moment when a boundary is crossed. Humor reveals those hidden social conventions, arbitrary beliefs, truisms and cliches that pass for 'common sense.' Really good humor makes skeptics out of the audience; it should shift them from in the group mind to out of the group mind. This is antithetical to the conservative project, which is to make conventionality comfortable and invisible.

Things I Did Not Know.

We (by "we" is meant: Wal-Mart) are importing potatoes from India.

Don't they kind of need those potatoes themselves? Don't we have an entire state dedicated to potatoes? We must end our dependence on foreign potatoes!

Thought Roulette

~ A while back someone friend requested me on Facebook. Their name sounded vaguely familiar--I thought they were a friend of a friend with whom I'd gone drinking a couple of times--so I accepted. Now I'm increasingly sure I don't actually know this person, but I haven't unfriended them. Somehow, a stranger's life (or, anyway, their status updates) are almost as interesting as those of people I do know. Draw your own conclusions.

~ The depths to which we have sunk: hallucinogens are being studied for their possible therapeutic effects, under "rigorous protocols and safeguards," of course. As long as it's happening in a lab, with scientists, then it's real. Otherwise, it's just a bunch of goddamn hippies making excuses for not being Good Americans. George Carlin says:

~ You know, the really unforgivable thing about conservatives is that they are so rarely funny. (Funny on purpose, I mean, but even when they're funny in a "Like such as what, Katie" way, it's only funny in the same way watching someone fall down is funny--monkey funny, primal funny.) I think it is because the true foundation of humor is the tragic, and conservatives generally respond to tragedy with sentimentality. Perhaps this will be the topic of my seventh unfinished dissertation.

~ By the way, if you have a bottle of Scotch you'd like to trade for a dissertation topic, email me.

On Decency

Classy, compassionate woman in Tennessee finds adopted child not up to her standards, returns to sender. Bonus: she put the 7-year-old boy on a plane to Russia by himself. Because that's how she returns things to Amazon, right? (2 stars, Child not as described, somewhat damaged, still defective after 6 months!)

On Anger

There are so, so many things in the world to be angry about, that allow one to go about filled with righteous, life-giving rage. One could be angry about unjust wars (pick one!), children dying of preventable diseases, children dying of starvation, various and sundry experiments with genocide, and, really, let's not even get started on Infuriatingly Awful Things That Happen to Women Everywhere, or The Environment, or Animals, because the anti-depressants are just starting to work over here. So there are these big, enraging things, and then there are the little daily outrages, the kind that make you mutter "Motherfuckers" in the library and disturb the girl who's like, totally trying to post a clever status update on Twitter ("In Davis lib! So boring!").

The news that the top hedge fund managers made a collective $25 billion dollars last year (in case you're wondering, no, there are not 25 billion hedge fund managers; in fact, this was the combined income of just 25 men) was of the latter variety of anger (if it had a flavor, it would be nuts, surrounded by bitter nougat). To add a topping to my anger nougat, it turns out that hedge fund managers only have to pay 15% income tax on that income! Know why? Because income made from managing other people's money is taxed at a lower rate than regular income--treated as long-term capital gains (which, by the way, up there on the Scale of Outrage is the fact that capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than regular income anyway, because I think money for which people actually WORK should be taxed at a lower rate than money that your other money earned for you, while you were summering in Mauritius). Hahahahahaha, motherfuckers.

So while these Tea Bagging Lunatics eat an outrage sandwich comprised of racism (Obama is a muslin kenyan witch doctor!), fearmongering (death panels! kill grandma! take our guns!), and falsehoods (see above; also, health care reform=socialism, Sarah Palin=Real American, &c.) they don't pay any attention to the fact that someone who made 2.3 billion dollars last year--during the worst economic recession since the Depression, while the unemployment rate topped 10%--paid taxes at a rate half what a middle-class American pays. Or the fact that no one in the world needs 2.3 billion dollars a year in income anyway, goddammit. They know they're being manipulated, that something is not quite what it seems, but they are so gullible that they blame the brown people and the government and think that corporations are on their side somehow, and big business needs defending. They honestly think that their interests are the same as the interests of rich people. Because everyone will be rich, someday, in America.

Newfangled Ingredients to Add to Your Arugula

Today in the Times--and in the most read articles list, yet: an entire article about growing horseradish. Bonus "Classic NYT Ridiculosity" points:
+2 The author's boyfriend is named "Rock."
+5 The author talks to someone who wrote a dissertation on horseradish.
+2 Horseradish is praised for it's "anti-cancer properties."
+1 The article mentions the Oracle at Delphi.