LinkDump

"A group proposes to build a religious establishment on their own property near a site associated with great pain and significance for some people. These people, rightly or wrongly, associate that religion with the many deaths that were caused and so raise a great ruckus in protest against the said establishment. For their part, the religious establishment pleas that they intend to pray for all who died there, including their own co-religionists. But this plea is dismissed," writes philosopher, statistician, physicist, historian, SF author extraordinaire, and all-around cool guy Mike Flynn.

"I pause while you assume the proper attitude," he continues.

"I write, of course, of the Polish sisters who wanted to establish a convent near Auschwitz, which created a great outcry that it was insensitive to Jewish concerns. The Pope intervened and told the sisters to place their convent elsewhere, since if they remained intransigent they would do more harm than good. That they had a right to do what they planned did not mean it was right to do it."

We haven't discussed the ground-zero mosque in this space, and I am curious what my readers think. Me, personally? I am in favor of it, so long as they build a chapel to Our Lady of Victory right next door.

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Delusions of Reality

Do you know what the definition of insanity is? No, it's not doing the same thing expecting different results. That's called practice. I do it every day with the piano and, sure enough, the results are slightly better each day.

No, insanity is when one's perception of reality is different from reality itself. For instance, a man who believes himself Theodore Roosevelt, or thinks himself a cat, or that he hears voices. In each case, the person's idea of what is real is different from what is really real. The man is not Theodore Roosevelt, or a cat, and the voices are mere hallucination.

Increasingly, I've been feeling that the whole world has gone, by this definition, completely insane. Totally loony. Off their rockers. Large swaths of the population seem to be totally given over to ideas that have no bearing in reality. It's like everyone is playing a children's game where we all pretend we're monkeys in the zoo, or astronauts in outer space, or cowboys and Indians. But when I don't play along, or return to reality and stop pretending, everyone gets mad and indignant with me because they really believe they are monkeys or astronauts or cowboys. It's really quite surreal.

What brought on this feeling most recently was an article my Google reader recommended items pointed me towards (it recommends weird things). Apparently a school in Michigan has refused to allow a girl to be homecoming king because she's a girl, not a boy. This is, apparently, a problem because the girl is playing a make-believe game in which she pretends she's a boy. But the weird part is that so many other people are playing along and pretending the same thing. The news item itself refers to her as a "him", despite the fact that it even mentions towards the end that she hasn't even had the cosmetic surgery to add boy-parts. So in no real, objective way is this girl a boy--only in her mind and the minds of those playing along with her. She has no Y-chromosome, or male genitalia, or a prostate, or any of the biological capabilities that set men and women apart, yet many people seem totally willing to give themselves into the fantasy that she is somehow a boy.

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Come to the Dark Side. We Have Cake.

Dark chocolate cake, no less.

Pavlovian Babby

So a while ago, I was trying to get a picture of Damien's "Angry Baby Face". Pretty simple. I would just make the face at him until he did it, then pull out the camera and snap the picture. Repeat a few times to make sure I got a good picture.

Just one problem. Now he associates the camera with that face and makes it whenever he sees it. It's very hard to get a picture where he's not grimacing. They tend to come out looking like this:



Also, he has a toy where you put a ball in at the top and it rolls down to the bottom. While The Murloc was teaching him how to use it, she would put one in then clap while it rolled down. Now he claps whenever he plays with it.

Also, he now knows to wave "goodnight" to mommy each night when she leaves the nursery.

He's forming mental associations! He associates the sound of the garage door opening with "daddy coming home" and the words "Isis," "Bastet," and "kitty" with the cats (you can get him to make the "kitty recognition noise" just by calling to the cats).

Teeth!

Also, Puppy Butt!



(Babby Feed updated, starting here.)

It's Just Too Easy

Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine made a MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT! on Wednesday, which was touted as something to EXCITE! Democrats across the country and get them ready for November's elections.

Their big announcement? A new logo!

They make it too easy.

Isn't that exciting? Doesn't that just get you pumped? No? You're weird. It gets me excited. In fact, I was so excited I nearly fell off my chair. It's just an amazingly exciting logo. But perhaps it could stand some improvement. Let's see how we can fix it.

Frank, yet candid.

How about that? Think it gets the point across? In an exciting fashion? No? How about:

When you paint a target on your back....

Bullet holes are exciting, right? But oops! Now we're advertising the wrong organization. Let's try again:

Alternate caption: "Better than an F++."

This will certainly appeal to the teachers' unions, right? Aren't they democrats? Lastly, how about:

Dopey indeed.

So there you have it. An exciting new logo for these exciting times! I wonder how long it took the Democrat Party to come up with that! Good thing they have plenty of time to spend on making silly logos! I mean, it's not like there's anything else they need to be doing. No sir. This country is squared away! No problems here, nosiree.

(Of course, the more time they spent working on the logo, the less they spent messing up anything else.)

Got any other ideas for their logo? Post 'em in the comments!

[UPDATE]

Thought of a couple more for ya:

Tilt your head to the right.

A lot of other things could work here "–NIED", "–FEAT", "–UH", "–CIET", "–CEPTION", "–LUSIONAL", "–PRESSION", to name a few.

Just Another Day in Laguna Hills

http://www.ocregister.com/news/home-264712-drive-swat.html

So there were two SWAT vans parked in front of our house for... nothing.

Logically Sound

Mr. DeLay, the Texas Republican who had been the House majority leader, crowed that he had been "found innocent." But many of Mr. DeLay's actions remain legal only because lawmakers have chosen not to criminalize them.

-- New York Times editorial on the Justice Department's decision to drop its investigation of Tom DeLay

Who can contest such insightful logic?

"This blog is only active because Google has yet to shut it down."

"The only reason we're out of milk is because someone drank it all."

"Obama is president merely because the Electoral College voted for him."

(H/T Michael Flynn)

Logic Problem of the Day/Week/Month

Proving once again that Futurama is the best adult-oriented cartoon on TV. Family Guy has never required more than two brain cells to enjoy. Actually, the more you have, the less enjoyable it is.

This problem comes from last week's episode of Futurama, which is actually one of my favorite episodes of all time. Professor Farnsworth has invented a body swapping device that swaps two peoples minds into each other's bodies. He and Amy Wong initially use it, so that Amy can eat as much as she wants without ruining her figure, and the Professor can enjoy a youthful body.

Neither of them is satisfied with the swap, however. Farnsworth's aging body's colon and teeth don't satisfy Amy's gluttony, and Amy's body is just too weak for the Professor. They try to swap back, but as they discover, once two bodies have been swapped, those same two bodies can never be swapped with each other again. Bender, who needs accomplices to steal the crown jewels from the Robo-Hungarian Prince, talks the Professor (who is occupying Amy's body) into body-swapping with him.

Meanwhile, Leela sees Amy in Farnsworth's body complaining about her inability to enjoy food. Leela complains about expensive movie tickets, so Amy convinces Leela to swap, so Leela can get a senior discount at the theater.

Meanwhile, Bender uses Amy's body to attempt to seduce the guards of the crown jewels. When it doesn't work, and he finds himself face-to-face with the Robo-Hungarian Prince, he convinces the Prince that he's actually just a lowly bending robot. The Prince, tired of his pampered life, thinks it would be all in good fun to switch bodies with a lowly commoner robot for a day. Bender rushes him back to Planet Express to swap into his Bending body, so he can have the Prince's body, rich life, and (most importantly) hot robo-fiancée.

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Oddly Relevant

Can you guess the author of the piece and the year it was written?

There is one view very common among the liberal-minded which is exceedingly fatiguing to the clear-headed. It is symbolised in the sort of man who says, "These ruthless bigots will refuse to bury me in consecrated ground, because I have always refused to be baptised." A clear-headed person can easily conceive his point of view, in so far as he happens to think that baptism does not matter. But the clear-headed will be completely puzzled when they ask themselves why, if he thinks that baptism does not matter, he should think that burial does matter. If it is in no way imprudent for a man to keep himself from a consecrated font, how can it be inhuman for other people to keep him from a consecrated field? It is surely much nearer to mere superstition to attach importance to what is done to a dead body than to a live baby. I can understand a man thinking both superstitious, or both sacred; but I cannot see why he should grumble that other people do not give him as sanctities what he regards as superstitions. He is merely complaining of being treated as what he declares himself to be. It is as if a man were to say, "My persecutors still refuse to make me king, out of mere malice because I am a strict republican." Or it is as if he said, "These heartless brutes are so prejudiced against a teetotaler, that they won't even give him a glass of brandy." 

The fashion of divorce would not be a modern fashion if it were not full of this touching fallacy. A great deal of it might be summed up as a most illogical and fanatical appetite for getting married in churches. It is as if a man should practice polygamy out of sheer greed for wedding cake. Or it is as if he provided his household with new shoes, entirely by having them thrown after the wedding carriage when he went off with a new wife. There are other ways of procuring cake or purchasing shoes; and there are other ways of setting up a human establishment. What is unreasonable is the request which the modern man really makes of the religious institutions of his fathers. The modern man wants to buy one shoe without the other; to obtain one half of a supernatural revelation without the other. The modern man wants to eat his wedding cake and have it, too.

Give up? Highlight to read: G.K. Chesterton, The Superstition of Divorce, 1920.

It is stunning how relevant the piece still is if you simply replace "divorce" with "same-sex marriage".