Brains du jour...

At the Forest's Edge

Simon Leys recounts an incident in a cafe. The radio was playing popular music when, suddenly, Mozart came over. "Mozart took possession of our little space with a serene authority, transforming the cafe into an antechamber of Paradise." The other people in the cafe, who until then were chatting, playing cards, or reading the newspaper, were not deaf to the radio after all. The music silenced them, they looked at each other, disconcerted. "Their disarray lasted only a few seconds: to the relief of all, one of them stood up, changed the radio station and re-established the flow of noise that was more familiar and comforting, which everyone could then properly ignore." Leys concludes:

At that moment, I was struck by an obvious fact that has never left me since: that the real philistines are not those people incapable of recognizing beauty-- they recognize it only too well, with a flair as infallible as that of the subtlest aesthete, but only to pounce on it and smother it before it can take root in their universal empire of ugliness.

I have a suspicion that somewhere between Simon Leys and Ayn Rand lies an important truth about art. I also suspect that that truth can be appreciated without having to jettison the insights of Picasso and Pollack.

The essay is about much more than just art; it's about how we all verge on barbarity, and how little it takes to push us there. But Leys' insight into the human willingness to drag down those who are more elite has stuck with me since I read it.

Bush Administration seeking tinfoil hat status in Iraq

With little U.S. presence in the south, and British forces in Basra confined to an air base outside the city, one administration official said that "we can't quite decipher" what is going on. It's a question, he said, of "who's got the best conspiracy" theory about why Maliki decided to act now. [Emphasis mine]

"Sorry you're in jail. Get out soon."

Greeting cards for inmates. How about "Rot forever, you bastard, for the trauma you caused me and my family?"

Saudi King calls for Jews, Christians, and Muslims to unite against secularism.

See yesterday's lesson about faith.

Christian news outlet notes drop in divorce rates.

While this is excellent news, does anyone over there realize that this is happening at the same time we're curing more STDs than ever before and giving gays the right to marry and adopt?

Indiana Law may require all bookstores to register as a "business that sells sexually explicit material."

Yeah, that's not thinking things through too clearly. Reminds me of the law some fool tried to pass in Georgia last year banning libraries from carrying any book that happened to discuss homosexuality. No Greek history for you!

The citizens of Honesdale, PA, are ill-served by its school district

"We don't teach evolution as 'this is the definitive way it happened.' We teach it as the current scientific theory. Like global warming, we teach it as prevailing science. We do not promote one over the other," said district superintendent Thomas Jenkins

An Iraqi University Astronomer argues that the Earth is Flat because the Quran says so.

I saw this about a month ago on MEMRI and thought it was so damn insane I just couldn't believe it. But apparently it's come around again. I love the part where the physicist holds up a book with pictures from satellites, and asks to know why we see ships come "over" the horizon:

When you stand on the beach and look into the distance, everything you see is in the visible distance. In the blurred distance, you cannot see a thing. Later on as the ship gets closer to the shore or the harbor, you see the upper part. How do you see it? No doctor has succeeded in understanding how the eye works.

This guy supposedly has a university degree! We invaded this country... why?

A hearty "Fuck you!" to Amazon

I don't pay enough attention to the business of writing as I should, but now I'm just completely furious at Amazon for it's latest trick. As most of you know, I don't go through a traditional publisher, instead Publishing through Lulu, a print-on-demand (POD) service, which is at least honest about what I'm doing.

Amazon has announced that it will no longer provide sales services for POD books... unless you use their print service, BookSurge. They will not sell books printed by Lulu or Lightning. Writers Weekly has confirmed this, and supporting articles have appeared in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.

I'm not buying a damn thing from Amazon until they back off this punk stupid stunt.

Photography, March, Week 1

Great photos the first week: Kouryou-chan in costume for her play, the end of Liberal Facism (please!), vandalism, animal protestors and the cops who must love them, and one giant pink slug.

( Cut to avoid offending delicate sensibilities. )

Lies, damned lies, and hellish lies

Gary Bauer, who was disgraced from his role in partisan politics almost a decade ago, has a bizarre article in World Net Daily (ah, the psycho gift that keeps on giving) about how conservatives are more "pro-science" than liberals. He cites a rather strange list of what he considers "scientific facts" that bolster his conservative position, some of which are simply skewed and have little to with actual science, some of which one must have drunk his flavor of kool-aid to accept, and one of which is raw politics, but it's this one that makes me want to jump up and down, preferably on the throat of the entire conservative "sound science" movement:

On stem cell research, too, the conservative position is winning. While the left chastises conservatives as "anti-science" for opposing embryo-destructive research, ethical adult and umbilical cord stem cell research have proved much more promising. Recently, independent teams of researchers successfully reprogrammed adult cells to behave like embryonic stem cells, allowing them to grow and potentially turn into any type of body tissue. By all accounts this new research should eliminate demand for destroying human embryos for research.

Does he realize just how baldface this lie is? Let's start with the basics: the teams that made the breakthrough discoveries regarding adult stem cells were not in America. They weren't subject to our laws. They were in the UK, Korea, and Japan. A follow on research program was done at University of Pennsylvania, but it relied on data taken from the Japanese team, data which the Japanese team initially generated using embryonic stem cells! None of this research would have been possible without embryonic stem cells seeding the initial research lines. You just can't get there from here without studying how embryonic stem cells work. All four teams working in this field admit this openly. Yet Bauer wants to hide it, wants to lie about it to the WorldNut readers who lap this crap up with their mother's milk, because he wants to claim that, somehow, he's on the side of "science," and "science" is on his side.

Man, I am just furious this week at all the nonsense.

It snowed! WTF?

Snow in Late March, up Queen Anne

WTF? It's not supposed to snow in March! Not in Seattle. Rain, maybe. Usually lots. Really. This is uncalled for.