Mon Dieu!

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death

Just the other day I decided to take the scenic route home in the evening. Rather than zipping home on the highway, I meandered along the back country roads, mooed at some cows, and generally enjoyed the breeze and the sway of the trees. The journey was lovely and relaxing but for one blemish--the endless stream of churches. There are loads of them along the way, but one church message board particularly caught my eye; it mentioned the usual schedule for Sunday service, but added this vapid pearl of pseudo-wisdom, "BOWED KNEES SAVE FAMILIES". Firstly, it is difficult to take anything seriously that has been written to rhyme. Secondly: Huh? Are they really trying to say that the way to help mankind--to save the world--to ease suffering is to talk to their invisible mutual friend? It's such a ridiculously trite sentiment that I can't understand how anyone could express it without being nauseated. This particular church is essentially saying, "Don't worry about volunteering or service work. Just pray to G-d to make it all better. Think happy thoughts and your work is done here". It is absolutely appalling for anyone who sees a point to the conservation of humanity to say that they're just going to sit on their asses and hope things get better. They're going to to feel self-righteous for having wished for sunshine and daisies? That's their strategy?

On a more lighthearted note:

Prescience?

I was flipping through a book of New Yorker comics through the ages when this one caught my eye:
It was captioned "Fundamentally, the ship was sound." It was published in 1932.

Can't Buy Me Love pt. 1

D'y'know what's funny? There are books being sold on the topic of decommodification. I don't know if that makes me happy for its sheer ridiculousness or sad like when I see stagnant, established "Anarchist symbols". Oxymorons and contradictions have a beautiful unity, perfect irony, and somehow a structural integrity. There is a tension that cannot be resolved, and it always on the brink of collapse, yet is too lusciously balanced to fall. That's not what I want to talk about, though. Decommodifying. The tragedy of the commons. I find it terrifying that in modern society, if things aren't assigned some sort of economic value and purchased by someone, we either are or think we are incapable of taking care of them or valuing them. Non-monetary value can be expressed in economic terms, which is a step forward of sorts (looking beyond GDP), but it still feels horribly wrong. It's mercenary and cynical. Yes, that's why I don't like it. It's like characterizing a throbbing, emotional, human relationship in terms of gains and losses--costs and benefits. It makes it easier to imagine it ethical to exchange goods and services for intangibles like love, trust, and respect. We already make some of these trades, but unwittingly, and in a sense: innocently.

Decommodify: to take the trade and barter out of basic human essentials and return common resources and intangible human assets to their natural--noncommercial--state. In other words: stop selling things like environmental quality, health, happiness, education etc. In a technical and cold, calculating sense, one most certainly may put a price on these things, but it is deeply unethical and should be stopped.


More on this later.

Letter to the Editor

Yesterday I was reading the newspaper and getting angry as usual, but for some reason, a letter to the editor motivated me into action: I'm writing a response.

Here is the ridiculous letter:

Minority Rule

Here we go again. The UNC-CH library is not putting up a Christmas tree for fear of someone being "offended." Are we offended when someone wears a yarmulke? Are we offended when someone wears a turban? Are we offended when someone wears an abaya? Are we offended when we hear someone say, "Happy Hanukkah"? Do we insist that Muslims not fast during Ramadan? Of course, we don't. These are all public displays of religious beliefs. Christians wear no special clothing or badges to identify themselves, and the only public display of their religion is twice a year: Easter and Christmas.
Over 80 percent of Americans "profess" to be Christians. ARe we going to allow the minority to rule the majority? Emblazoned on office buildings in Washington and in courthouses throughout the nation are the words "In God We Trust." How can we continue to be a strong nation if we don't stand up for our beliefs? When we allow this to happen, we become weak and trampled upon.
What's next? Thank God, Congress still opens its session with a prayer.
God bless America and Merry Christmas.
-Richard Pinkard
Apex

My first response, unfortunately, was a blind "Whathakljhiosjhti;hioh o e", but I've recovered. Here's my draft in response:

Richard Pinkard's Dec. 13^th Letter, “Minority rule”, complaining of the lack of representation of Christianity at UNC-CH, namely a Christmas tree, is absolutely ludicrous. Mr. Pinkard sets up several remarkably misleading parallels regarding the expression of faith in public—making the specious claim that personal/individual expressions like yarmulkes, turbans, and hijabs are essentially the same as that of a public university displaying a Christmas tree. It is astounding that Mr. Pinkard cannot see the difference between a state school specifically endorsing a particular religion and an individual expressing his/her faith. Further, he portrays Christians as a persecuted class by failing to mention that there are no regulations preventing Christians from wearing crucifixes, affixing the Ichthys to their cars, and putting up their own Christmas trees. There is a strange argument implicit in his insistence that Christians are being prevented from showing their beliefs publicly: one's faith is somehow being disrespected if it is not at center stage in the public square.

On top of his strange logic regarding the expression of faith, Mr. Pinkard entirely disregards the separation of church and state by using the percentage of the population who are Christian to justify his outrage. Not only is it irrelevant, but his apocryphal statistics are incorrect: according to the CIA World Factbook, only 68.5%, not the 80% he claims, of Americans are Christian (Protestant, Roman Catholic, Mormon, and “Other Christian”).

-Jessie

Apex

There are so many things wrong with his thinking that I couldn't possibly fit them into one letter, but I certainly tried to hit the worst offenses. I didn't even try to touch the congressional prayer issue...

Thoughts?

AAAAAHHHH!!!

Okay guys.... ahem...

I'VE BEEN ACCEPTED UNCONDITIONALLY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH!!!!!


*grin*

Physics Faeries

Webassign makes me feel magical: there--I said it. I know it sounds odd, but it's true. Most of the time, it is a torturous task untaken around midnight and no matter how logical and careful you try to be, you end up with a page full of those infuriating red crosses glaring at you, yet the days when it works, it really works. Today doing the Work & Energy assignment I felt like a wizard. I don't mean wizard as in clever. I mean wizard as in magical powers and things contrary to reason occuring. Despite having carefully worked through each problem and understood it, it still appeared to be magic when the happy little green checks appeared.

Obviously I've chosen to take physics rather than psychology, but I think there should be some sort of research put into what I can only call the conditioning of webassign. There is some serious potential here for mind control. Webassign has caused me to think of things with clear rational explanations as supernatural! Computers in general, even, seem to be agents of regression towards superstition. We are much more credulous and we undertake the same action again and again expecting different results each time---it's clearly insane. Technology, the reflection of the future, is actually leading us backwards. How twisted is that?

Parsnips-a-Plenty

I know that one ought to only have righteous rage regarding the important issues in life: injustice, violence, and poverty should make us angry, but at the moment, I'm quite angry about veg. I hate parsnips, turnips, and celery with a fiery and all-consuming passion. I've always felt this way, but the soup I'm desperately trying to eat at the moment has brought it to the front of my consciousness.

Parsnips and turnips are similar in that they both have miserable flavors and textures--they're like horrible imitations of potatoes that simply haven't got it right. They are the rubbish covers of Beatles songs of the vegetable world. They're somewhat similar in appearance to the real thing, and if you're not paying attention, you might be fooled, but ultimately they're an unpleasant surprise. There is nothing worse at the dinner table than biting into what you thought was a lovely potato and discovering it to be none other than the dreaded parsnip.
There is no situation where someone could hand you a parsnip, and you could not say, "Hey-- lemme do ya one better: here's a potato!" Parsnips, however, have one redeeming trait: they are the subject of one of my favorite idioms:

"Fine words butter no parsnips."

World Wide Words has an interesting discussion of the origins of this expression here.

On the topic of celery, which is a vile form of veg if I ever unintentionally ate one, I can only say this: there are two kinds of people in the world--people who hate celery, and people who cannot taste celery. If you complain about celery, non-celery-detesting-people invariably claim that it has no taste. They are horribly wrong: I can genuinely smell it from the other side of a room, and it is instantaneously recognizable in any sort of a soup, stew, or salad. Apart from it's polluting flavor, it has a shockingly disgusting texture that ought to put any right-thinking person off their food for several days!

How do people consume these horrifying vegetables? I do not know.

Le Français!

I've been speaking french rather obsessively since I got home several hours ago, so to get it out of my system, I'm going to share my favorite french phrases!!
"C'est d'enfer!" -- lit. It's from hell! It actually can mean either "it's awesome" or "it's awful"

"Bédéphile" -- means someone who loves comics, but it sounds almost exactly like pédéphile, so be damned careful to stress that 'b'!

"Vachement" -- lit. cow-ly, but it means 'very', 'bloody', 'really', or 'damned'.

"Je suis chocolat!" -- I've been tricked, fooled.

"Tais-toi!" -- This is the rudest way you can possibly tell someone to be quiet.

"Le pinard, le picrate, le jaja, la bibine" -- all of these mean 'bad wine'. Getting a sense of french values?

One of the coolest things about modern french slang is Verlan. Verlan is a sort of slang where they invert syllables, basically saying everything backwards. In fact, Verlan IS verlan:

l'envers (reverse) ... l'en vers... vers l'en... versl'en... verslen... verlen... verlan

Par exemple:

Verlan: un keuf | zyva! | barjot | chelou | la siquemu | céfran
Français: un flic | vas-y! | jobard | louche | la musique | français
English: a cop | Go! | crazy | sketchy | music | french