This seems as good a time as any to examine the tendency of nut-jobs (religious and otherwise) to grab onto minor controversies within the ranks of their opposition and distort them out of all proportion.

The inspiration for today’s posting comes from Jerry Coyne, who pointed me in the direction of this article in The New York Times, with a further reinforcement from a favorite Youtuber of mine, Coffee With Claire.

The NYT story highlights a case of recently discovered academic fraud within the field of social psychology and the faked data of a Dutch researcher. Claire’s latest YouTube offering reminded me of how it will be misused by anti-science zealots as proof that all of “science” is just one big scam, by invoking the logical fallacy of composition (what is true of the part is necessarily true of the whole). Claire does an excellent take-down of this knuckle dragging God slobberer. His YouTube handle is noimplant4me and his video exemplifying the well worn logical fallacy of composition is here.

Claire rightly notes that noimplant4me fails to mention that in every instance of scientific fraud, it is other scientists who are responsible for policing and catching the miscreants. In the case of noimplant4me, this misuse of logic is aimed at supporting the house of cards that is young earth creationism, but I’ve also seen similar scientific shenanigans leveraged in support of global warning denial.

My noting this tendency will likely have little effect on those who continue to misuse it. That said, I think it is worth mentioning that in this latest example of fraud within the field of social psychology, not much of consequence was really affected. The studies under scrutiny were of the touchy-feely variety and the results, much like religious texts, were manipulated by a man of ignoble character into a framework that fit social convention.

I don’t want to pile on the social psychologists too hard. Sure, most of what they study looks to be about as useful as the beard on my Aunt Bess, but at the end of the day, it’s experts in this field who are responsible for having to make a comprehensible analysis of crazy cultural shit like #atheismplus, so I’ll cut them some slack.

Evolution has not been proven false.

Enjoy.

Click photo to be transported to AudioBoo where the calming sounds of screeching zoo birds will transport you into a world away from the mundane trappings of your tiny office cubicles.

Enjoy.

I was unable to stay awake over here in Germany long enough to hear the live capture of the second Boston bomber suspect.  I had spent most of Friday listening in on the live feed of the Boston police department (thru a link on Twitter that led to a live UStream police scanner feed).  I hit the sack about the time the Boston police were shutting down their city wide dragnet.

There were so many reports of suspicious vehicles that I began to wonder if I was really listening to a live feed from the police in Boston, or if they had just put previously recorded conversations from troops stationed at Iraqi Checkpoints on continuous loop.

But I digress.

As I listened to the stream and followed Twitter hashtage #bostonscanner, it was obvious that the authorities were busy trying to disable the live feed.  I started seeing tweets from people watching the UStream via mobile phone apps that were finding their scanner apps shut-down.  There were tweets from the authorities imploring citizens not to retweet the very same information they were BROADCASTING all over the city (as if the suspect would read a Twitter feed instead of just listening directly to the cops themselves if so inclined?) The direct http feed from UStream that I was listening to on my computer never suffered from such blocking.

So let’s do a quick recap here. Homeland Security has spent billions of US taxpayer dollars in an attempt to “make us safe(r)’. We’ve seen countless stories and photos from every Podunk county sheriffs office in the US sporting military grade machinery and weapons.

Buying at all those fancy weapons, and seeing all those highly polished black boots obviously helped loosen the constricted sphincter muscles of a decidedly nervous nation, (while simultaneously enriching the military industrial arms dealers).  But as the incident with the Grand Theft Auto/Boston Bombers scanner feed on UStream shows, our intrepid terrorist warriors overlooked at least one MAJOR GAPING hole in the system.

Somewhere along the way, they forgot to upgrade the police radios of a major American city with police communications gear that can’t be intercepted by any 14 year old kid (or terrorist) with a $99 Radio Shack police scanner.

And to top it all off, this just popped into the picture : Boston Bomber Bin Laden Determined to Attack America.

The FBI and Homeland Security apparently STILL don’t have the manpower to track KNOWN targets of HIGH probability of terrorism or enough money to upgrade Boston police radios? We know they spent bazillions of dollars of Homeland Security money on tanks for the tri-county area of Tuscaloosa (and the like), but not properly following the trail of IDENTIFIED THREATS is WAY over the top.  The FBI, like the town of Waco, must have been lulled into a false sense of serenity as they sat in the cool shadow of their local fertilizer plant.

In the old days (before torture was “enhanced interrogation”) there would probably have been some sort of oversight or review set up to examine these failures, but since Obama decided on a FAIL FORWARD strategy of leadership, that seems highly unlikely.

Enjoy

Enjoy

The individual invoking the same type of vituperative invective against Thatcher as I did to Mark Krebs is none other than George Galloway, a long-time politico and current member of the British parliament. A brief pause is in order to allow for a standing ovation for Mr. Galloway!

The tendency to gloss over even the most blatant public vulgarities of our dead on the event of their demise is highly over-rated and counter productive to society. It also gives a warm and fuzzy feeling to the living monsters among us that their legacy (of torture and death) won’t become the highlight reel for their remaining kin and countrymen. Screw that.

Here are a few tasty bits on Thatcher from Mr. Galloway. The whole post is here at this link.

On one of my first political demonstrations – against the Conservative government of Edward Heath (1970-74) the slogan of the day was “Margaret Thatcher- Milk snatcher”. It was the first but not the last time I spat out her name in distaste.

She destroyed more than a third of Britain’s manufacturing capacity, significantly more than Hitler’s Luftwaffe ever achieved.

In the infamous sermon on the Mound in Edinburgh addressing the Church of Scotland she opined that there was “no such thing as society”…”only individuals”

Enjoy

Don’t let the confluence of the headline picked, juxtaposed against the background of the graphic chosen, mislead you into assuming this is a post reflecting on the diminishing popularity of religion or the shrinking cadre of pedophile priests. Those are not lamentable losses like the actual subject of today’s discourse.

Kissing Your Switches Goodbye

This post is an ode to my love of switches. They will never truly be gone as long as there are those of us dedicated to keeping their memories alive.

If fantasies of wild west shoot outs drove the desires of such notable Americans as Ralphie into an unquenchable lust for a Red Ryder BB gun, it was the lights, bells, buzzers and switches in the early electronics era that propelled many a young lad into a lifelong love of electronics (computers & space).

In my youth we watched the Buck Rogers Channel (/s) and pictured ourselves as the lab-coated technicians tinkering with a fascinating array of electro-mechanical devices, almost always in an attempt to solve the ultimate questions of existence or at a bare minimum, kill the monster. It was a job that could only be accomplished by a highly competent switch-turner or button-pusher. Many a poor laborers son were lured into the promises of a button pushing, back saving future and proceeded to follow an educational path consistent with that scenario. Well I can’t testify as to the veracity of “many”, but it was certainly true in my case, and statistics bear out the rush to math and science in the late fifties and early sixties, so it’s a safe assumption I wasn’t unique in regard to the opportunity presented.

Getting Acquainted With Switches

Some general rules on the hierarchy of switches: The best switches always light up when they are activated. Rocker switches are more high tech than simple lever (pictured above) switches. Big ass switches, like those used on industrial circuit breakers have their own special gravitas. Covered or protected switches like those used in self destruct scenarios are the undeniable Billy Badass of all switches. Highest honors go to those in the latter category which are also highlighted by some form of protection warning graphics, often in the format of yellow police crime scene tape.

Cinematic Law of Computational Equivalency

The more confusing and crowded any randomly assembled melee of blinking lights, assorted switches and hypnotic panel graphics appears on camera, the more powerful the computer. Size matters. It was a precursor to Moore’s Law, only for cinematic computer purposes. Real computers of the day were actual behemoths, affording wide latitude to fertile imaginations Hollywood set designers. As you can see in the photo below (a 50′s look at what a home computer might look like) they were extremely complicated looking bits of steampunk. Is that a ships steering wheel in the lower left, or is there a ’57 Chevy missing it’s steering wheel out there somewhere? And why is that steering wheel looking thingamabob there in the first place? If I didn’t know any better I’d suspect this was a contemporary photo of the logistics control room of a Carnival Cruise liner.

Switch History in the Twentieth Century

In the sixties era, back when Siri was just as much a fantasy as Roomba Rosie the talking robot maid on The Jetsons, switches ruled the day.

The lowly electric switch, born in the century of Edison’s light bulb, dominated the control circuit market in the century to follow. Reconstituted in many elaborate forms over the next half century, the magnetic control contact relays of the 1960′s Bell telephone system showcased the epitome of mechanical switch integration into our high tech lifestyles.

Even as the computer era continued to encroach upon us, the era of the switch looked keen to prosper into the next generation. A quick glance at the first home computer ever offered for sale, the Altair 8800, belies the fact that switches would soon be going the way of the dinosaurs.

It’s kind of hard to imagine what a big deal just having a keyboard was for people back in the late 1970′s. From the introduction of the Altair in 1975 to the introduction of keyboards was a short few years. It was a net wash for the fate of switches, with the confusing array of programming switches shown above merely shifted to a more convenient arrangement in the form of a QWERTY keyboard. Keyboards actually pumped a shot of adrenaline into the product life cycle of switches, but they’re now in rapid decline. Their ghosts still haunt the virtual QWERTY keyboard layout on your smart devices.

The Coming End for my little Friends

This ultimately brings me around to the leap of technology that is ultimately killing my beloved switches. The ubiquitous cheap ability to put an entire computer in the place a single mechanical switch and then use it for something inane like simple on/off touch control (soft switching).

I’m reasonably certain there will be at least a few switches that last long enough for my aging bony fingers to cling to, but I would bet that a baby born today won’t have any memory of switches by the time he/she gets old enough to scope out the most popular hair care products in his/her peer group.

The future youth of the world need only know one switch, and that isn’t even assured. Which one? The power switch. After that you’ll just be talking to your devices. Are you ready? For what it’s worth, Siri and Google Voice already have me enunciating like a sixth grade English student as I valiantly attempt to get my device to comprehend my southern infected Yankee dialect. The fact that it works more often than not already, has given me the confidence to broadcast this glimpse into the immediate future as a near certainty and not just a rambling delusional vision of the sort offered by Harold Camping.

Enjoy

I can’t be the only person on the planet who is susceptible to being hypnotically transfixed by the motion and dispersion of things like dust, seeds, snow and ash.

Seeds

I suspect my particular awe for the visible suspension and movements of heavier than air particles may have been exacerbated early in my youth, when it was easy to lose oneself on the wings of an errant dandelion seed gently floating in the window, instead of fully embracing the return to classes at the secession of summer vacation.

Snow

As the days shortened and the chill set in, the wind-swept American prairies around longitude Omaha and latitude Interstate 80 are a vast stage for snow to dance on. Many winter days were spent watching the snow twist and swirl, in direct violation of my teacher’s desired wishes to memorize the five stages of cell division or learn the proper conjugation of Spanish verbs.

Pollen and Dust

Spring unleashes a mostly invisible universe of pollens, though while living down south, I endured the annual waves of yellow-tinged tree jizz (from Mississippi’s mono-cultured loblolly pines) wafting through the air and choking the local atmosphere with a veracity not seen since the Dust Bowl of the 1930′s (For my expanding Anglican readership, substitute the Great Smog of ’52).

Adding to the hypnotic sui generis of the threatening yellow clouds, are honey bees, whose abdomens are overburdened with the sudden windfall of pollen. Looking as bloated as Elvis a week before his last unfortunate trip to the loo, many have trouble even keeping airborne with their bounty.  The ones forced to stagger home walking, looking like Mel Gibson after a late night encounter at a police checkpoint, are the lucky ones.  Those managing to keep themselves aloft are unwittingly involving themselves in a real life version of Angry Birds-Hunger Games edition, and the bee eating birds are busting a gut nearly as big as the bees.  Whoever says you can’t watch evolution in action must be Ray Comfort, but I digress.

Perhaps the most transfixing of the group of dazzlingly suspended particles are the smoke and ash selections.

Ash

I have a special fondness for the tiniest bits of solitary suspended ash.  Nearly invisible to the naked eye, their joyous arrival is often announced only as a brief tiny glint, as delicate as the soft twinkle of a faint star . Once identified, they can then be individually tracked if one is lucky enough to quickly triangulate their original location.  Like dandelion seeds, they often move very slowly (at least the ones you can track) and hang in midair suspended by the most gentle of currents.  The battle between loft and gravity is never more intriguing than when you get to watch it mano v mano in this fashion.

Smoke

When my mom finally decided it was time I could handle it, I negotiated the privilege of watching my first SciFi horror show on TV.  It was an original episode of The Outer Limits.  The details of her agreeing to letting me watch it included a discussion over “real life” and “TV fantasy” as well as my promise not to have nightmares if she let me watch.  Upon reflection, that would appear to be a promise one might have a real problem in keeping, but it seems to be the in the nature of motherhood to believe nearly any promise emanating from their progeny.

It was a cold winter night.  As if to enhance the gloom, the eerie grayish glow of the large black and white cathode ray tube was the only light in the room.  I laid in a prone position tucked on the sofa next to my mother as we shared a hand-crocheted blanket to ward off the drafts (and for me at the time….monsters.  lol).

As was her custom, my mother had an unfiltered Pall Mall cigarette burning in the ashtray emitting copious amounts of bluish smoke into the room (and setting the stage for my long term addiction to nicotine).  The episode of Outer Limits she’d agreed to let me see centered around a set and story involving the use of ground hugging fog.  The blue smoke from my mom’s cigarette migrated into the thin boundary layer created by the differential in temperature between the warm ceiling and cold floor, finally settling in at a level consistent with the bottom of the picture tube and creating the conditions for a perfect mirage as I laid on the sofa parallel to the TV.

My active imagination quickly embraced the idea that the fog had left the TV set and starting engulfing the room, my room!  To heighten my increasing sense of self inflicted panic and confusion, the light from the TV was in a perfect position to reflect off the underlying azure haze of the cigarette smoke and was casting ghastly dancing reflections about the room as the show cut from scene to scene.  I was freaking out (internally) worse than Ralphie on A Christmas Story, right after catching the inevitable BB in the eye.  My brain was looking for answers.  I’m wondering why my mother hasn’t yet keyed in on what I surmise to be an eminent takeover by hostile alien forces.  Is she asleep?  No, she looks like she’s awake. The veins in her neck are relaxed.  The details of my ultimate decision not to go into a maniacal screaming panic on a search through my toy box for my ultimate alien destroyer gun (red ping pong balls) escapes me.  It is lost in the adrenaline and fear of the moment, but I know I made the right choice in hunkering down and riding it out to the commercial break.  Mom always told me I was special and I believed her.

Enjoy.

If you find it morbidly inappropriate to speak ill of the dead, click away now. If you’d have enjoyed getting the chance to drag the remains of Hitler’s smoldering corpse though the streets like the Italians did with Mussolini, please proceed.

I find it morally reprehensible to gloss over the damages done by morally reprehensible people who publicly propagate the most vile sorts of ideas into the public domain. I am moved to displays of public outrage like this blogpost when the people doing the damage claim to be working under direct contract with God.. Expect a much more scathing eulogy on the occasion of the deaths of all those monsters who promulgated legal torture and shamed us as a nation.
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I have been receiving a lot of questions regarding the whereabouts of Mark Francis Krebs. His prolific trolling on Facebook feeds (mine and others) suddenly went silent and it left many people wondering what happened to him.

Facebook might know more about you than the NSA, FBI and CIA combined, but one thing they haven’t yet mastered is the concept of death. In real life people actually die all the time, but on Facebook your electronic soul can exist in an amorphous cloud of bits, ready to be called upon to hawk any brand or any cause you intentionally (or accidentally) clicked a “like” button when your finger still had a pulse.

Such is the case for Mark Francis Krebs, dead at age 52 of bloat and self-neglect (see pic). Sad, lonely figure of a man, laying dead in his Texas apartment for ten days, rotting away unnoticed in his Lazy Boy until the stretch of his decay invaded the physical space of his neighbors invoking calls to the authorities.

Mark was an underachieving underclassman from high school that I ‘reconnected’ with thru Facebook awhile back. His academic acumen was so sub par it left him wide open for a life addicted to Fox News propaganda and Pentacostal wing-nuts alike, which resulted in his stalwart support of the kind of idiotic thinking that favors “rapist’s rights” over the dignity of our wives, mothers and daughters. Krebs was a shadow member of “Zygotes over People”, and a persistent right wing troll on my Facebook feed. If he were alive today Krebs would be pimping shotguns for babies as a solution to gun violence. He was the sad, bloated, living stereotype of every Tea Party lunatic, NRA slobbering gun nut and Jeebus freak you ever encountered, all rolled into one apparently corpulent soul.

I did my best to try and council the crazy out of him but given the limitations on what can be accomplished through Facebook, I was unable to move Mark from the extreme rightwing category on religion or politics.

All surviving family should be joyously consoled with my testimony that he went to his grave fully believing every bit of religious tripe ever fed to him, so he should be safe in the arms of imaginary Jeebus by now and insulated from my necessarily savage review of our online relationship

Mark was my most dedicated Fundamentalist Facebook troll. I figured he must have been getting paid a few pennies per post from Rove’s 350 million dollar wingnut welfare machine just based on the amount and intensity of his efforts, but that’s just a guess.

Though his extremism and Christian delusion knew no bounds, I never thought to block or unfriend him. My theory is that the best defense against people that far off the map of common public sense and decency Is to make sure they are seen. The more people see of these types of lunatics, the better off for the rest of us. Sunshine, disinfectant,

Enjoy.

The Lady

Here is Julia speaking about Peter in a public YouTube video taken at one of the many rallies, conventions or speaking (and singing!) venues she attends.

The Scamp

The many uplifting stories of Peter, as well as his accompanying trials and tribulations, are too broad to relate here. I know I would feel blessed to have my own wikipedia page, let alone a youthful cheerleader like Julia, so long after my ashes are scattered. FWIW, I have chosen to honor my personal memories of Peter by ending all my correspondences with Enjoy. But I digress. Let us move on to my personal account of this energetic young lady.

Getting to Know Her

The first time I spoke with Juila was when she contacted me thru Facebook after seeing my New Year’s tribute to Peter here in this blog. She indicated that she was in contact with Peter’s mother who had inherited a great deal of Peter’s literary memorabilia, some of which she was letting Julia share on the web.

We chatted on Skype a couple times times after that. We communed over the ghost of Peter, his legacy and his works. She probed my calcifying neurons for first person recollections and stories from my calls and correspondence with Peter, the majority of which (sadly) came during the hectic months of his arrest and deprivations under the thumb of America’s fascist drug warriors.

Julia shared with me that Peter’s mom was reluctant to publicize the more risqué or controversial aspects of Peter’s political life. Julia’s main interest in honoring Peter was his poetry and self-help writings.

All that touchy-feely emotional hoodoo is just fine by me (and the 32.4% of me that is gay), but the rest of me negotiated stridently with Julia for a much more prominent emphasis on the politics of the subject that cost Peter his life. She agreed and promised to discuss the issue with Peter’s mom.

She seemed a rather shy and reluctant spokesperson at first, but as the last couple years have shown, her message and music have bounced to one event or the other all over the planet (or at least a tri-country area).

She’s some kind of a hippie-chick rock goddess guru within the medical marijuana community these days now that she’s embraced my early mentoring. I’m too old to even keep up with her frenetic pace on Facebook, but I proudly point her out as a protege and someone I knew before they got famous.

Enjoy.

Here’s a spring gift that I hope my aging tech, geek, atheist, skeptic, and nimble-minded Euro-youth niches will all appreciate.  I’m pretty sure I’ll offend, applaud or confuse quite a few other niches along the way.  As always, join at your own risk. I don’t want to read or watch whiny Youtube videos about a bunch of hurt feelings when everybody laughs at you for falling off the back of the skeptic’s hay wagon.

If there isn’t enough hay to begin with, there’s a good chance I might be able to stir up a little extra along the way.  Hold the horses!! Heretic HQ just called to tell me that if there are no rules of conduct, then the ride cannot be certified by the head of the Atheistplus Action committee, the formerly estimable Dr. Richard Carrier (aka Debbie Downer).  Since this blog insists on inclusiveness and I have been accused of being something a tad south of totally gracious, here goes:

The Heretic Hayride rules of conduct are as follows:

Leave your pets at home (no #carrierpigeon allowed).  Be aware that our path crosses the known territory of a doughy looking, blue-haired Siren, as well as a cinnamon skinned fuzzy-haired monster.  DO NOT attempt to approach either one. The latter is known to have hair trigger rage issues and an incredibly acute sense of hearing. Snap a PIC, Tweet to World, Call security, write blogpost, but DON’T be foolish enough to confront either of them directly if we have the misfortune of making their encounter.  Keep your arms inside the wagon at all times and avoid loose or dangling jewelry.  Dongle type earrings are known to be specially prone to snagging.

Having to construct and conform to arbitrary rules of conduct took all the fun out of the adventure, so the ride has been officially cancelled for today.

Enjoy.