ANNOUNCEMENT

(O)CT(O)PUS will be away for the rest of the month … visiting my cephalopod brood and celebrating Fishmas.

Bloggingdino gave me permission to open my presents early, and this is what I got. It means I will be able to keep in touch while away, although posting and comments will be light.

Since I am pressed for time (packing the OctoMobile and getting ready to leave), here is a brief message from MoveOn.Org:

Jesus laughed

"How dangerous it is in sensible things to use metaphorical expressions unto the people, and what absurd conceits they will swallow in their literals."

-Thomas Browne - Pseudoxia Epidemica-

Making sense out of someone else's religion is a bit like looking at a jigsaw puzzle where the pieces don't all fit and some are taped in place or hidden under others. Take the Mary and Joseph story. We're supposed to believe that since Joseph was too old to have sex with his obscenely young bride Mary, her pregnancy was a bit of a surprise - until of course she told him that God, in the form of a bird, did the deed. The subsequent pregnancies resulting in brothers and sisters might have been harder to explain, unless the bird left some blue pills for the old man -- or unless we ignore old Occam: "entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem" which means don't make shit up just so people won't laugh at your bogus story.

That of course would have Jesus' brother Jacob the true heir to the throne of David, making him the Messiah; because after all, Joseph, from whose family the title was inherited, wasn't his real father. OK, so we don't ask and we just tape that piece in place and ignore what is underneath.

Anyway, one can choose to treat the alleged divinity of Jesus as a metaphor, which makes sense, or literally, which makes absolutely none. If you're of the latter persuasion, which didn't approach universality for many centuries into the Christian Era, (if it ever really did) the flimsiness of your construction is likely to make you touchy and humorless if not aggressively pugnacious. Imagine the fundamentalist's reaction to a poster showing A young Joseph in bed with a frustrated looking Mary and titled "Poor Joseph, God was a hard act to follow."



The Church that put up the billboard in Aukland, New Zealand simply wished to point out the absurd conceit of swallowing this literal fundamentalist interpretation. Archdeacon Glynn Cardy of The St Matthew-in-the-City Anglican church said he wanted to inspire people to talk about the Christmas story: to challenge a fundamentalist interpretation that's obviously pasted together from pieces torn from other religions, rather than swallowing the cocktail.

"What we're trying to do is to get people to think more about what Christmas is all about. Is it about a spiritual male God sending down sperm so a child would be born, or is it about the power of love in our midst as seen in Jesus?"

Predictably, it wasn't well received by those who demand that everyone else swallow the same mind numbing potion and within hours an irate man was trying to paint over the image. Local Catholic spokesmen were up in arms and a "conservative" group called Family First was calling the whole thing irresponsible. It's nice to know that "conservatives" despise religious freedom in New Zealand as much as they do here. I mean it's one thing to be able to speak out against secular authority, but suggesting that God's own sacred chicken doesn't make half breed, wholly God children with young girls who somehow remain virginal throughout multiple pregnancies and births! What fools these mortals be!

If only I could claim such protection against people who disagree with me.

GIVE ME A HEAD OF ICE HAIR!

I am working on a slightly more serious post but my mother, who is visiting for the holidays, came in from a morning walk all excited about a discovery in the new dirt on the sides of my driveway and I just had to share.


We recently had work done to widen and regravel our driveway. If you live in the South, the bright red clay soil will come as no surprise to you. If you don't live here, then what we call dirt you would probably identify as pottery clay. Seriously, they make bricks out of this stuff.


Anyway, we have not planted anything on the banks yet since it has quickly turned unseasonably cold. Last night is got down into the 20s and the result is the pictures you see here. I apologize for the poor quality since this is a cheap camera but I had to snap pix in a hurry since the ice is quickly melting now that the sun is out.

It is spread out over the whole area and consists of long strands bunched together. The strangest thing is they seem to have grown up out of the soil, pushing the dirt up so that it rests on the tips of the ice hair. Don't know what causes this and I'm sure one of you more scientific types will be able to explain this phenomenon, but until then - I will think of it as a marvelous gift from nature.

Happy holidays!

First, thanks to (O)ct(o)pus for inviting me to participate at The Swash Zone.

It's barely a week to Christmas, and the holiday spirit is upon us. I haven't heard of any Wal-Mart tramplings yet, but I have heard of two separate incidents of police being called to deal with customers fighting over robot hamsters. I had no idea that there is even such a thing as robot hamsters. What on Earth do people use them for? (Actually, considering those rumors about Richard Gere and the gerbil, I'm not sure I want to know.)

This is also the time for a certain type of Christian to whine endlessly about the secularization of Christmas, usually by complaining that they can't say "merry Christmas" any more because somebody might object to it. Now, curiously enough, I've never heard anyone actually object to this. I've never objected to it myself. What I have heard, pretty much every Christmas, is Christians objecting to people saying "happy holidays" -- including, a few years ago, a woman I know to be quite religious yelling very rudely at a younger woman who had uttered the offending words to a decidedly mixed group of people.

The legitimacy of Christian possessiveness about the holiday is in any case tenuous. Christmas is an adaptation of Saturnalia, the pagan Roman festival of gift-giving and revelry celebrated in late December, which early Christian leaders co-opted to make Christianity more palatable to the pagans by merely changing the pretext for their most popular holiday rather than abolishing it. Other associated customs such as the Christmas tree originate from other pagan traditions. No element of modern Christmas -- not even the claimed association of December 25 with the birth of Jesus -- has any basis in the New Testament. I rather doubt there's a Biblical passage in which Jesus instructs his followers to get snotty with people who say something as innocuous as "happy holidays", either.

Nevertheless, I am more than willing to concede that Christmas today, regardless of its history, should indeed be regarded as a Christian holiday. After all, considering what it has become -- all the crass consumerism, mob scenes, greed, squabbling, stress, and those godawful "carols"* -- who would want it back from them? They broke it, they own it.

I just wish they'd refrain from taking out their understandable frustration with all those shopping-mall lines on people who use greetings they disapprove of.

Afterword: If you want to express "Christmas spirit" in a positive sense, please see (O)ct(o)pus's posting just below this one.

*The only Christmas music I like is "Winter Wonderland", which someone once told me isn't even a "carol", and the Mannheim Steamroller version of "Good King Wenceslas", which I'm sure would never be played in any church. The versions of carols played over store Muzak systems every December ought to be used instead on the captured terrorists in Guantanamo to extract information -- I'm sure they'd be more effective than waterboarding.

AN APPEAL FOR HELP

Our good friend and colleague, Matt Osborne, has just posted this appeal:

Some of you already know that my girlfriend's mother was in a very bad wreck at the end of November. She's still recovering at Vanderbilt Medical Center in Nashville, a two-hour drive from where we live. We're all counting out blessings that she's alive, despite severe injuries. She won't be home until the week of Christmas.

It would be bad enough that the holiday is upon us, but Ramona was also supposed to start a new job the day after the accident. She had spent months looking for this position while unemployed and has very little savings left -- the accident literally could not have happened at a worse time. Now, she's discussing long-term disability, which means at the age of 55 she could be at the end of her working years.

Her family is scrambling to pay the bills. Everyone is paying for gas to drive back and forth and help her with physical therapy and rehabilitation (which helps explain the sudden irregular frequency of posts), while unopened and unpaid bills are beginning to stack up. Anything you can give, even a few dollars, is a huge help to her and us ...

If you are in a position to help, there is a PayPal button after Matt’s post.

(O)CT(O)PUS Caught on Video

Yes, our own dear eight-legged denizen of the Swash Zone was recently caught on camera by Australian scientists using a human-discarded pair of coconut half-shells as temporary shelter. This is the first recorded use of tools by an invertebrate species (our companion's able keyboard-handling skills notwithstanding).

Watch:


Click here to learn more.

Let only one flower bloom

According to the Foxspeak dictionary, a school of thought is defined as a scheme, usually by Roger Ailes or Rupert Murdoch that they wish to attribute to a broad segment of the public. People say, or Some people are saying are alternate disguises for propaganda. If there really is a school of thought that believes cutting the minimum wage will be good for workers, I would like to see its accreditation and I suspect it's a school where employers such as McDonalds and Wal-Mart are heavily represented.

"One school of thought says lowering the minimum wage will actually create more jobs,"

pronounced anchortwit Juliet Huddy from the Fox News Podium in an attempt to give credit to the idea if not to the school of one promoting it.

As Raw Story describes in detail, Fox reduces the entire concept of a minimum wage to "social justice" which sounds sufficiently close to Socialism that they deemed it unnecessary to point out any contrary ideas, no matter how credible. Blind slogans and doctrines being so much easier to sell than truth in all its complexity -- or justice for that matter.

At one point I was foolish enough to think that the failure of doctrine driven economic, social and military policies would be an embarrassment to Fox and its friends, but it seems now that with America down and out, the opportunity to kick us while we're down is irresistible. It seems that their dream of building a new, invincible corporate oligarchy from the ruins of our country, is the only school of thought that isn't a strategic fraud.

(O)CT(O)PUS IN THE NEWS

This video of an octopus commandeering a coconut appeared tonight on all major news networks, including ABC, BBC, CNN, MSNBC, and WTFNN. What's the big deal? Shall I consider this an affront? An insult to my intelligence? Have you never seen an octopus commandeer a coconut before?

How ridiculous! But not as ridiculous as this:

Q: Why did the octopus cross the road?

A: To enslave humanity and save it from itself!

Considering the Source

As you may have noticed, I'm ambivalent about global warming and reluctant to argue for or against it. Whether or not it's an ongoing process subject to random variations lasting a decade or a century or many, many centuries; whether burning fossil fuels and deforestation are a major factor in any trend or whether or not much can be done about it are moot questions once one realizes that the human race won't do any more about its behavior and its environment than yeast fermenting in a vat will do to prevent the alcohol it excretes from poisoning it. We won't do a damned thing until we have massive famine and drought and huge uncontrollable migrations and bloody wars to stop it. Even then we will not spend any money on change because there will be " a war on" and we won't allow ourselves to afford it.

If, in 200 years, we're all baking and the tundra is a rain forest and Kansas covered with sand dunes, the "conservatives" will find or invent some scapegoat, invoke some hoax or alternative explanation. On the other hand, if things haven't changed much, change, like Armageddon will still be a dire threat, just around the corner, lurking in new technology and demanding that we go back to riding horses, living in the dark and taking cold showers once a week.

Face it, not only are we thoroughly irrational, self centered and dishonest apes who love our opinions above all else; not only are we not very smart, but we simply can't deal with the immensity of time and the transience of our species. We've all got to go sometime and we all will -- and if you're one of those people who likes to talk about our planet as a living entity that needs to be saved, perhaps the sooner, the better.

I have too much respect for science to indulge in the certainties and partisan bravado both sides have barricaded themselves behind. Nobody is completely right and all projections become blurry as they are extrapolated or trimmed to fit the opinion and it's all very obvious that the certainties seem to swarm most heavily around those with no background whatever in atmospheric or Earth sciences. Why this should be such a political dispute, I do not know. I remember well the Geological dispute between Static isostasy and plate tectonics but I doubt it ever came up on the Senate floor or that Joe the anything had any awareness much less a militantly expressed opinion -- even though it was heavily disputed and careers began and ended over it. It was settled, in the end, by irrefutable data, not by politics or by gyrating TV pundits bellowing like blue-assed baboons about conspiracies.

My inner suspicion is that the apparent lack of facts, the apparent contradictions and the apparent conspiracies appear sharpest through the glass called "I don't want it to be true" but I know full well that cataclysmic predictions have had a very, very poor record of accuracy.

While other popular disputes can be better understood by looking at the demographics; the viral etiology of AIDS, for instance. The origin of species through natural selection, the great age of the Earth: these things after all are threatening to some religious certainties. Climate change may be more independent and may even fit into apocalyptic molds. I'd venture to speculate however, that those who become most irate at the suggestion that the post industrial revolution climate has been altered by that human factor are those who fear government itself -- and that those who feel an imminent threat and want something done right now are those whose fear of industry and the political power of industry feeds an opposite attraction to government action.

None of us can really handle the truth, nor do we want to. What we do instead is to vilify, to deny, to attack. Is Christopher Monckton, one of the loudest UK naysayers indulging in neurotic denialism or are his opinions driven by rigorous scientific investigation? Does the fact that he also thinks we should round up all HIV positive people and imprison them for life argue for his intellligence? Does his comparison of those who find evidence of man-made climate change to Nazis really inspire confidence in his objectivity? Then again do the kids carrying signs and painting themselves green really have any background making their opinions worth listening to -- or do they just believe what is fun to believe, what people of their social class believe and is useful for picking up girls of like opinions?

One thing that I'm pretty certain of and the evidence supports, is that environmental change drives biological evolution. It also drives cultural evolution and technological evolution. If anything now alive has massive potential for opportunism, for adaptability, for evolution, it's us -- some of us.

The climate is going to change over time -- a very big change. Something will fall on us from space, vulcanism will come and go, the Earth's magnetic field absolutely will fail and then slowly reverse with potentially dire but unknown consequences, a gamma ray pulse may blow away the ionosphere, the continental ice sheets will eat up most of North America and Europe once again. None of these things depend on our politics and prejudices or prayers. Our adaptability and survival however does depend on abandoning the ape-like tribalism, the ape-like confidence in things we have no business being confident in and the ape-like resort to chest thumping, shit flinging and hooting that are more likely to accompany the end of the world than any whimper.

Mixed Nuts

I just sent this letter to my local fish wrapper. I've included a link at the end to my most recent Huffington Post essay:

I just read the AP story about Conservapedia.com, the Bible rewriting project proposing to erase the effects of "liberal academics" who have "watered down" Jesus by studying the ancient languages of the Bible. The linguists, one supposes, are all secret Satanists and cannot be trusted.

The group's founder, Andy Schlafly, is the son of Phyllis Schlafly. The apple has not fallen far from the tree; these are the same John Birchers and reactionary right-wingers of yore. Conservapedia is just a new offshoot of that poisonous tree, and Schlafly is the fruit of fringe insanity. The poor kid was raised to believe this gorp.

Over the decades, a nebulous root-system of direct-mail lists fed the paranoia of the stupid and "informed" the world of AM talk radio. Toxic to democracy, this monster has flourished in the age of the internet and media consolidation. Its tentacles pull the mixing-board levers of Fox News Channel, where Glenn Beck spews that same pollution into the mainstream of public opinion.

Birthers, death panels, black helicopters, lizard people, secret UN armies in Nebraska...where do you think these idiots come from? A majority of Republicans today actually believes the president was born in Kenya. How do you think that happened?

Now they want to turn the Bible itself into a weapon of culture war. This was exactly what Jesus meant when he said there would be many who cry "Lord, Lord!" that are too wicked for him to recognize.

But what I want to know is: given their long record of tinfoil-hat bizzarro fearmongering, how do these wackaloons and hoopleheads still merit the fair-handed attention of "liberal" media?

I would like to see journalists call them by their proper names: shills, hacks, and mixed nuts.