Jewish Atheist

Until the BP oil spill is stopped, every entry will have the following preface:

America’s thirst for oil has created a disaster. Before the spill is stopped, the entire Gulf of Mexico could be ecologically exterminated. I hope I am wrong. But until this disaster is fixed, I hereby call for an immediate moratorium on the recreational use of fossil fuels. A million race cars, boats, Cessnas, jetskis, and other gas-guzzling gadgets will be silent, starting today. To continue to burn fossil fuels for our amusement while the costs of getting it are so disastrously obvious is unconscionable.

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“Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”

Mark Twain

Today hearings begin on a Supreme Court nominee who has not logged even an hour in Traffic Court.

When I first heard that she had no experience on the bench, I thought they were exaggerating: surely she had a little.

No experience!!

Then I found out the truth. She has none. This could be a plus, as I’ll explain. But on the face of it, it is identity politics run wild. Continue Reading »

Until the BP oil spill is stopped, every entry will have the following preface:

America’s thirst for oil has created a disaster. Before the spill is stopped, the entire Gulf of Mexico could be ecologically exterminated. I hope I am wrong. But until this disaster is fixed, I hereby call for an immediate moratorium on the recreational use of fossil fuels. A million race cars, boats, Cessnas, jetskis, and other gas-guzzling gadgets will be silent, starting today. To continue to burn fossil fuels for our amusement while the costs of getting it are so disastrously obvious is unconscionable.

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“I find it necessary to wash my hands after I have come into contact with religious people.”

Leo Tolstoy (refusing deathbed conversion to the Russian Orthodox Church)

The following was sent to the Chicago Tribune:

Dear Voice of the People:

I am writing to respond to the letter by Bishop Demetrios Mokissos, a local Greek Orthodox bigwig. The letter contains misconceptions, misstatements, and adroit verbal tricks to discredit secular humanism/skepticism/atheism. Specifically: Continue Reading »

Until the BP oil spill is stopped, every entry will have the following preface:

America’s thirst for oil has created a disaster. Before the spill is stopped, the entire Gulf of Mexico could be ecologically exterminated. I hope I am wrong. But until this disaster is fixed, I hereby call for an immediate moratorium on the recreational use of fossil fuels. A million race cars, boats, Cessnas, jetskis, and other gas-guzzling gadgets will be silent, starting today. To continue to burn fossil fuels for our amusement while the costs of getting it are so disastrously obvious is unconscionable.
______________________

“‘Get down!’ is a slang expresssion that would have been really useful in World War II. If soldiers had known this expression at the time, a lot of lives could have been saved.”

George Carlin

As a staunch atheist, Carlin has often denounced the idea of a god in interviews and performances. In mockery he invented a fake religion called “Frisbeetarianism” for a newspaper contest. He defined it as the belief that when one dies “his soul gets flung onto a roof, and just stays there,” and can’t be retrieved.

(George Carlin biography, at BiographyBase)

“There are scores of human insects who are ready at a moment’s notice to reveal the will of God on any possible subject.”

George Bernard Shaw

Today we celebrate the death of a mighty voice for skepticism and truth, George Carlin, who died on June 23, 2008, of heart failure. Take that medically or metaphorically. Continue Reading »

Until the BP oil spill is stopped, every post will have the following preface:

America’s thirst for oil has created a disaster. Before the spill is stopped, the entire Gulf of Mexico could be ecologically exterminated. I hope I am wrong. But until this disaster is fixed, I hereby call for an immediate moratorium on the recreational use of fossil fuels. A million race cars, boats, Cessnas, jetskis, and other gas-guzzling machines will be silent, starting today. To continue to burn fossil fuels for our amusement while the costs of getting it are so disastrously obvious is unconscionable.

_________________________

“Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.”

Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, 1629

Emerson, Journals, 1857

The oil spill is in Day 57, and no one has a handle on it. The Gulf of Mexico is connected to the rest of the world’s water — how could there not be a world-wide effect eventually? Continue Reading »

Until the BP oil spill is stopped, every post will have the following preface:

America’s thirst for oil has created a disaster. Before the spill is stopped, the entire Gulf of Mexico could be ecologically exterminated. I hope I am wrong. But until this disaster is fixed, I hereby call for an immediate moratorium on the recreational use of fossil fuels. A million race cars, boats, Cessnas, jetskis, and other gas-guzzling machines will be silent, starting today. To continue to burn fossil fuels for our amusement while the costs of getting it are so disastrously obvious is unconscionable.
______________________

“It’s clear that there is a steady trend, [and] if the trend continues, there will be a time, probably not so far in the future, when the average person’s typical identification is with the human species, with everyone on earth.”

Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience

As usual, Sagan’s thinking is a bit ahead of reality. Our common humanity is the last thing on people’s minds, as we slice and dice ourselves into countless artbitrary groups; the need to belong and feel superior overwhelms Sagan’s simple truth, now and for the forseeable future.

Nowhere are the divisions more spurious and arbitrary than in sports fandom. Continue Reading »

Until the BP oil spill is stopped, every entry will have the following preface:

America’s thirst for oil has created a disaster. Before the spill is stopped, the entire Gulf of Mexico could be ecologically exterminated. I hope I am wrong. But until this disaster is fixed, I hereby call for an immediate moratorium on the recreational use of fossil fuels. A million race cars, boats, Cessnas, jetskis, and other gas-guzzling gadgets will be silent, starting today. To continue to burn fossil fuels for our amusement while the costs of getting it are so disastrously obvious is unconscionable.
______________________

Amidst natural disaster, celebrity disaster and media overkill, it behooves us to fix what we can fix. And certainly the indefinite prounoun problem is one of those things.

Pronouns are among the most change-resistant language elements. Words come and go, but pronoun systems change slowly over time. At one time, English used heo for the feminine pronoun, but eventually the ancestor of modern she replaced it. Maybe heo was too much like he.

For a long time, English had no problem using masculine pronouns when the word the pronoun referrred to (its antecedent) was indefinite. Thus A doctor may treat his patients…. The same applied to indefinites like any/no/every + some + body/one, e.g., Anybody who knows his business…. Continue Reading »

“Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns.”

“Ain’t gonna study war no more…”
Folk song

Today is the anniversary of D-Day (just a week after Memorial Day — seems we have a lot of war holidays, doesn’t it?), and the celebrations, if any, will be solemn — and sterile. The death and suffering of war are a well-kept secret, of which we get only occasional glimpses. Not that it matters. If there were a War Channel, which broadcast only live reports from the world’s numerous killing fields, viewership would soar and sponsors would get rich. Why should Americans care about war except as entertainment? Watching war and being in it are very different things. Besides, there’s NO DRAFT, so let’s PAR-TEE!! Continue Reading »

“To lead an uninstructed people to war is to throw them away.”

King Baudouin I of Belgium

Another Memorial Day, another orgy of mattress sales and of reveling in the glory of war and sacrifice for freedom.

What a steaming crock of shit! As George Carlin would say, fuck military glory.

For the government and the media to link war death with something glorious is to maintain a cultural propaganda system that has sent young men (and now women) to horrible fates…to hell and worse. Continue Reading »

“Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them.”

Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Ghandi

We come now to another Memorial Day, a tangle of themes and emotions. They’re going to run the Indy 500 for the 94th time. (This year the cars will run on a blend of 90 percent methanol, which is distilled from wood, and 10 percent ethanol, the alcohol fuel made from the sugars found in corn, but this merely replaces one problem with another, since ethanol takes so much energy to make and is thus not a cost-effective alternative to gasoline for our everyday motor vehicles; besides, the consumption of fossil fuels for recreational use continues all across this great land of ours. They stopped using gasoline in 2006, 30 years after the first oil crisis. Nice catch, guys.)

Ninety-four years ago, you could just sink a drill into Texas or even Pennsylvania and get a gusher. Now we have to go to great lengths to get it, with risky drilling methods. The Gulf oil spill is now the nation’s worst ever, according to the Washington Post. And there’s no immediate hope of stopping it. Congratulations, America! So much oil has spilled that the entire gulf ecosystem is fucked, even if the latest never-before-tried method does stop the muck. What’s out there already is a disaster. Continue Reading »

“A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government…

Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address

Rand Paul is having a hard time trying to square our precious doctrines of free association, equality before the law, liberty, and private property…with “we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone,” the rallying cry of the old-time (and maybe even present-day) segregationists. His refusal/inability to answer convincingly or politically correctly has drawn plenty of flak, from Chicago Tribune columnists Eric Zorn and Clarence Page…and most recently by columnist Leonard Pitts, who writes eloquently of the horrendous pre-civil-rights era of exclusion, humiliation, persecution, lynching…the list goes on and on.

No one who loves America can in good conscience apologize for that shameful history. As a jazz musician, I am particularly outraged at the way great artists from Louis Armstrong to Miles Davis were treated by a racist society. Continue Reading »