Thursday, March 30, 2006
The Rites of Spring.
Posted a couple of years ago ...
Dear Pookie,
Okay, I know that as a four-year-old, you can retain and synthesize certain types of information in interesting ways. I know they’re teaching you something about spring holidays at school, and I know your grandmother has been slipping you little tidbits of Jewish lore alongside those enormous chocolate chip cookies. Still, you appear to have developed a unique view of what’s supposed to be happening at this time of year and why. Let me see if I can clear some of this up.
Spring is a time for renewal and rebirth. Well, okay, at least it is in the Northern hemisphere right now; in the Southern hemisphere, in Australia, where the Wiggles are, they are not watching new leaves and flowers growing. But here in Texas we are watching the weather get warmer. And so we talk about things growing and being reborn again. No, the dead leaves that fell on the ground are not reborn. At least, I don’t think they are. There’s this one guy who died and was supposedly reborn, but I don’t think he came out of the ground along with the flowers.
Back to the rebirth and renewal. See, that’s why we have eggs. Eggs are an ancient pagan symbol of rebirth because they’re round. Ish. Roundish. Like a circle, see? And they represent things being born, like little chickies. And snakes. So we go look for eggs in the back yard. In fact, we go look for a lot of things in the spring. We look for the Afikoman at the Passover seder. We do spring cleaning and we look for all the things we haven’t been able to find all winter, like Mommy’s maternity belt. We already know Mommy still has eggs, at least one of which was functioning perfectly last fall. But I digress.
We look for eggs, and then we roast them and put them on the Seder plate. No, that bone next to the roasted egg is NOT part of the Easter bunny. It’s a shankbone, and it’s supposed to represent the paschal lamb. We like to roast little lambies for spring. Lambies, bunnies, and chickies. This dates back to when we did a lot of animal sacrifices and did things with their blood, like put it on our doorposts. This was to keep God, that rascal, from making off with the firstborn. (That would be you, punkin.) Well, okay, it was to keep him from smiting the firstborn. Smiting is something not very nice that you wouldn’t want to have happen to you. We don’t put blood on our doorposts in the spring any more, of course. We just have garage sales.
Back to eggs. Here in Texas we have a spring festival, called a Fiesta, where we take eggshells filled with confetti and smash them over each others’ heads. See, there are the eggs again. This represents all the people that take their personal beliefs and hit each other over the head with them. This makes a big mess and it takes a long time to clean it all up again.
So yes, we do get to find chocolate eggs, and marshmallow chickies, and chocolate bunnies, and eat them all, and get fat on Tuesday, which is where we get Mardi Gras. Then we all eat Lentils to get thin again, or something like that. This is also where girls practice showing their breasts in parades, because they’re practicing for Spring Break, where they all go to the beach and do it all day and all night long, usually for camera crews that make videos of Girls Gone Wild. This causes them to have S-E-X, which causes them to get pregnant, which is where we come back to the whole spring birth thing, and the Circle of Life, in which March comes in like Simba the lion, lies down with the other part of March, which is like a lamb, and then gets to roast and eat the lamb. All except for the one bone, which we put on the Seder plate next to the parsley. See, Jews invented the first garnish, more than 2,000 years ago.
You got all that? Good, now ask your father about the rest. Mommy has a headache and has to go lie down now.
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
fucking spammers
I’m getting increasingly annoyed with these bastards. It’s not that they’re currently getting through, necessitating a cleanup effort, but they’re deploying a new toolkit that completely clutters up my logs. So far, I was content to do the bare minimum to keep the server afloat, but now I’m thinking hard about tarpitting them. This and other countermeasures will eat into what little spare time I have, but enough is enough.
He loves me, He loves me not.
Seeing as how you can pretty much interpret everything that happens to you any old way you want, I thought I would try out the arguments for God’s love and/or hatred of me.
Proof that God loves me:
Great hubby.
Two kids, relatively defect-free.
Practically none of my Usenet postings from the mid-‘80s have come back to haunt me.
Three years in Switzerland, Land of Chocolate.
Today is a sunny day.
Molly Ivins.
Proof that God hates me:
Parents who fall down more often than my kids do.
That whole timing thing with my Cisco investments in 2000.
This here cold I’ve got right now.
Three years in Switzerland, Land of Unctuous Xenophobes.
I can’t sleep when the baby does.
Rush Limbaugh.
Hmmm. No verdict yet. I’ll keep rolling the dice and making lists and I’ll keep you posted.
No Stars For The Eclipse
One weathercaster called it a must-see light and shadow show by the Old Master Himself,
Monday, March 27, 2006
just about losing it ...
So, I’ve been trying really hard for years not to let the actions of violent Islamists color my views of Islam in general and people from heavily Islamic countries. I worked at it throughout all the Prophet Muhammad cartoon protests. But this is just trying my resolve to the limit:
http://www.cnn.com/200…
“He is not crazy. He went in front of the media and confessed to being a Christian,” said Hamidullah, chief cleric at Haji Yacob Mosque. “The government is scared of the international community. But the people will kill him if he is freed.”
Raoulf, who is a member of the country’s main Islamic organization, the Afghan Ulama Council, concurred. “The government is playing games. The people will not be fooled.”
“Cut off his head!” he exclaimed, sitting in a courtyard outside Herati Mosque. “We will call on the people to pull him into pieces so there’s nothing left.”
He said the only way for Rahman to survive would be for him to go into exile.
But Said Mirhossain Nasri, the top cleric at Hossainia Mosque, one of the largest Shiite places of worship in Kabul, said Rahman must not be allowed to leave the country.
“If he is allowed to live in the West, then others will claim to be Christian so they can, too,” he said. “We must set an example. ... He must be hanged.”
Please, can anyone out there convince me why I shouldn’t view these people as irredeemable barbarians? Can anyone convince me not to see religion as the most dangerous threat to the existence of the human race?
Saturday, March 25, 2006
musings on religion
I have probably said it before, but I’m deeply conflicted about religion. I firmly believe that religion has directly and/or indirectly caused more harm than good over the course of known history and I don’t see this changing. At the same time, religion per se isn’t necessarily bad, even if I regard it as somewhat irrational and deluded (depending on the believer, I would used stronger language). There is no shortage of dogmatic atheists that want to see religion wiped off the face of the earth and while I see their point of view, what they are doing is counterproductive. The problem isn’t religion in general or in particular, but human nature. No appeal to faith or reason is going to change this - unless you talk about a sustained effort over geological time frames.
A question that’s asked with some frequency on religious forums is what atheists not believe in deities. There are answers that don’t even fail to pass the laugh test and other answers that dig deep into philosophy. The short answer, however, is that some people simply aren’t receptive to religion and that’s just the way they are.
Thinking back, I was never religious in any meaningful sense. I can also see how I don’t fit the mold, such as it appears. For one thing, I was never a follower. Kids growing up tend to look for validation within their peer group and I didn’t play that game. By choice and by circumstance, I neither wanted to follow herds, nor could I had I wanted to. To this day, peer pressure only makes me push back - the more people push me in one direction, the faster I go towards the other. Rather unsurprisingly, organized religion wouldn’t be for me even I had any spiritual yearnings.
To get back, sort of, I believe folks like Nunya on SEB do the nonreligious a disservice. Pitting reason against faith is not a battle that can be won, nor is a battle that need be faught. Instead of launching an all-out attack on religion, using the whack jobs as poster boys, a better strategy would be to co-opt the calmer religious voices and to isolate the wackoes from their support base. It’s still a tall order, but not as steep a hill to climb.
My personal problem is that the True Believers as encountered in the U.S. make it hard to practice what I preach…
tolerating torture
Found via Pharyngula, I think. The National Catholic Reporter (whoever this outfit is) reports on a survey by Pew Research Center: Americans, especially Catholics, approve of torture
| Do you think the use of torture against suspected terrorists in order to gain important information can often be justified, sometimes be justified, rarely be justified, or never be justified?
|
Total public
|
Total Catholic
|
Secular
|
| Often
|
15%
|
21%
|
10%
|
| Sometimes
|
31%
|
35%
|
25%
|
| Rarely
|
17%
|
16%
|
16%
|
| Never
|
32%
|
26%
|
41%
|
| Dont know/refused
|
5%
|
4%
|
4%
|
Taking all of this with the usual heaps of salt, this is still surprising.
observe the trainwreck
This is one hilarious exchange between a clueless city staffer and an exasperated developer: It’s L-i-n-u-x, that is an Operating System.
Some background information: By default, the apache webserver package installs a default page reading something like “Welcome to your spanking new webserver. Replace me with your actual content.” Often, admins don’t remove this default page and usually, this page will be displayed if no other site has been defined for a webserver name or IP address.
Clearly, whatever computer literacy the city staffer might have acquired in his purported 22-year career in “computer systems engineering and operation”, it does not extend to apache and Linux or Unix.
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
a cute take
When Religion is an Addiction
Something to keep in mind: I quote stuff because I find it interesting (even though I overuse that term), not because I’m frothing at the mouth agreement. Does the author accurately portray the subjects of the article, the religious right? I wouldn’t dismiss it out of hand,
As the religious right pushes its anti-gay, anti-womens reproductive rights, anti-science, pro-profit agenda nationally and in state capitals across the nation and wins, that high is a sweet fix for the addicted. It gives them a comforting feeling of relief that theyҒre really right, okay, worthwhile, and acceptable.
I have long held the opinion that one can overdose on religion and it’s just a small step to take the analogy farther. I also firmly believe that it’s easier to point out real or conceived flaws in others and thus avoid facing one’s own.
Like all fixes, though, it doesnt last. So, the addict is driven to seek another and another Җ another issue, another evil, another paranoiac threat to defeat. It cant ever end. Like the need for heavier doses, the causes have to become bigger and more evil in the addictҒs mind to provide the fix.
I’ll go along with that. If the religious right gets all that it wants today, it’ll need a new agenda.
This mind-altering fix of righteousness covers their paranoid shame-based feelings about the internal and external dangers stalking them. The victim-role language of their dealers, right-wing religious leaders, feeds it. Like alcoholism and drug addiction, the fix numbs the religious addict against any feelings about how their addiction affects others.
Lack of empathy and suck it up attitude. Check.
Religion doesnt have to be this way; it can be healing. But what we see in the dominant religious/political right-wing fundamentalism thatҒs driving the debate on most conservative issues (political, social, economic, international) is anything but healthy. Its what addiction specialists call a process addiction, like sex or romance addiction, or workaholism. In an addictive society, such addictions are encouraged.
Okay.
Like substance addictions, it takes over, dominates life, pushes other issues to the background, tells them how and what to feel to prevent them from facing their real feelings about themselves and life, creates a mythology about the world, protects its ғstash,
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