How Do We Topple The Great Wall Of Ignorance?

The right has continued it's relevance not through good ideas and sound policies, but through polishing an image of itself as America loving, commie Muslim hating patriots. It has made obstructionism and Nancy Reagan's "Just say no" it's mission statement. Straight, from the heart answers are big no no's for them.

In my city these is a republican alderman who I can't remember ever giving a straight answer on anything. He has made saying "I have concerns" his catch phrase. It's won him two elections. In my area republican is the voter's default setting. "They're for low taxes, more guns, God and less government. Aren't they?"

How do you sway people who think in these terms? They believe if you're a Democrat then you're a baby killer. And these people are easily worked up into believing ridiculous accusations enough to vote against whomever they're made against.

They voted against John Kerry because he was an "egghead, elitist Ivy Leaguer." Unlike Bush who was an average Ivy Leaguer we'd drink beer with.

This may sound sneaky and unpatriotic but I'm thinking instead of busting our asses trying to reach these people through facts, logic and a history of republican hypocrisies, maybe we should either try appealing to them through meaningless rhetoric as the republicans do. Or even better, convince them their votes won't matter anyway. Far easier to appeal to apathy and laziness then actually make the closed minded think and act.

The more I think about it, this looks like the best strategy. Convince the closed minded to stay home on election day. Tell them that's how they can send their message. Not that they know what their message is.

America's "Toughest" Sheriff One Mean Machine

Writer Aura Bogado spent five months investigating how Phoenix Sheriff Joe Arpaio's tactics affected Latino residents who make up 31 percent of Maricopa County's population. She interviewed citizens, legal immigrants and undocumented residents about encounters with deputies and police. "It got to the point where I raced home in a panic one morning after heading out for a jog without ID—what if a deputy, seeing a Latina running down the street, decided to haul me in?"

Arpaio doesn't count sheep at night. He counts Latinos and three Latinos are three Latinos too many. His ego is bigger than his paunch, so even after a restless night's sleep with nightmares of brown men refusing to shine his patrol car, he still has the energy to do a cheap imitation of John Wayne for the media.

But Arpaio is no Grade B actor in a Grade B movie playing the part of the bad guy. He is the real thing - a malicious brute. He uses chain gangs, deliberately humiliates inmates by forcing them to wear pink underwear, houses prisoners in tents with temperatures of over 110 degrees,  and, he makes sure medical care is only a dream.

To say that Arpaio is obsessed with immigration is to say that a ballet dancer is obsessed with staying fit and trim.

Before SB 1070, there was Arizona's "coyote statute," which made it a felony to smuggle people for profit in the state. Just like a western of days gone by, Arpaio organized posses of citizens and lawmen to roundup undocumented immigrants. "I'm not going to turn these people over to federal authorities so they can have a free ride back to Mexico," he told the Washington Times. "I'll give them a free ride to my jail."

Besides being innately cruel, the sheriff is astonishing arrogant.

Last fall, without explanation, the Department of Homeland Security rescinded Arpaio's authority to arrest people under section 287(g)—although deputies can still check the immigration status of people arriving at the jails. In anticipation of the crackdown, Arpaio held a press conference. "We have arrested 1,600 illegals that have not committed any crime other than being here illegally," he boasted. "The secret is, we're still going to do the same thing—we have the state laws, and by the way, we'll still enforce the federal laws without the oversight, the policy, the restrictions that they put on us." 

Bogado tells the story of Native Americans who told her that they were often mistaken for Latinos. Alex, not his real name, was at a Circle K while his parents waited outside.

He ran out when he heard a group of Arpaio's deputies yelling at them to produce their papers. Then, Alex said, they demanded to see his ID, too, explaining, "The law says everyone here has to be legal."

Alex is a third generation US citizen.

Then there was Celia Alejandra Alvarez, who told Bogado that sheriff's deputies broke her jaw when they raided the landscaping company where she worked.

Álvarez said she was denied adequate medical care during her three-month detention—a common complaint that has been the subject of hundreds of lawsuits against Arpaio. Even after surgery, she added, her jaw still isn't back to normal—during our interview she paused periodically to readjust it. (In 2008, the National Commission on Correctional Health Care yanked (PDF) Maricopa County's accreditation, saying its jails failed to meet national standards.)

Bogado tells about "Maruillo,"  a construction worker who has lived in this country without papers for 21 years. His two children are US citizens.

He said his family was camping at a lake over the Fourth of July weekend in 2008, when a fellow camper started yelling something about "too many Mexicans" and called the sheriff's office. The deputies, Maurilio and his wife told me, threw him down in the presence of his six-year-old son and shoved his face into the ground. They then yanked his head up by his hair and pepper-sprayed him as they cuffed him. After a few weeks at Durango, he was deported—and immediately headed to the desert to walk back north.

Perhaps the most gut-wrenching story of all is the one about David de la Fuente who was arrested for driving with a fake licence and no documents. He was hauled off to Arpaio's notorious Durango Jail where he was charged with a fake ID. A short month later de la Fuente was dead.
When he arrived at Durango, de la Fuente became ill and began deteriorating rapidly. He told his cousin and sisters that "the guards kept dragging him back and forth between the prison yard (where temperatures reached 107 degrees) and the frigid jail—leaving him queasy and disoriented."

He also complained of severe chest pains, but fearing the guards might retaliate, told his family not to press the authorities about his condition. Eventually, de la Fuente was hauled before a judge, who fined him and put him on probation for giving an alias to the police. After three weeks in custody, he was turned over to federal immigration authorities, who delivered him the next day to Nogales, Mexico, about 700 miles north of his hometown. By that time, he was gravely ill.

He arrived in Colonia Emilio Carranza three days later, stumbling and barely able to speak. His family got him to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with acute pneumonia. Based on the stage of his illness, the doctors determined that de la Fuente had contracted it about 15 days earlier—roughly a week into his jail stay—according to medical paperwork and an interview with the hospital director. The doctors did what they could, but de la Fuente was too far gone. His cousins and a sister stood vigil as he dwindled and eventually fell into a coma. He was pronounced dead on June 23—exactly four weeks after the traffic stop.

De la Fuente's cousin, Norberto Alvarado Santana, fights tears and stares out into the vast horizon near his cousin's grave.

This past September, during my visit to Colonia Emilio Carranza, Norberto Alvarado Santana said littleas he showed me his cousin's grave, in a humble cemetery adorned with plastic flowers and Virgen de Guadalupe figurines. A stout, reserved man, he measured his words cautiously before finally breaking the silence. "There's a word for what happened to my cousin David," he said. "It's homicide."

Yes you can, no you can't

Private morality does not seem to me to be the state’s business unless it compromises the public welfare.

-Bishop Shelby Spong-
_________

Yes you can, no you can't, yes you can, no you can't. It must be infuriating for California's same sex couples looking for stability and security in their lives. Gay marriage opponents have again succeeded in blocking further unions pending yet another appeal for reasons known only to themselves -- although most seem happy to tell you why they're against it.

Do the objections make sense or are they simply a reflection of a selective morality with perhaps a bit of personal anxiety adding a note of passion? The appeal that came quickly after the judicial decision to overturn the ban tells us that

"California, 44 other states, and the vast majority of countries throughout the world continue to draw the line at marriage because it continues to serve a vital societal interest."

And what would that social interest be? Why,

"to channel potentially procreative sexual relationships into enduring, stable unions for the sake of responsibly producing and raising the next generation."

Astonishing, isn't it that the conservatives behind this can still make a living challenging the right of the State to serve social needs while advocating it so vociferously in this instance. Doesn't Social Security and Medicare and welfare and don't income taxes serve a societal interest? Is there any evidence anywhere of a negative effect on the public welfare of allowing gay marriage?

Sure, I could ask silly questions about why older couples past child producing age are allowed to marry or people who don't want to or are unable to have offspring are exempt from the Biblical mandate to go out there and get pregnant. I could ask why the State of California can find a right anywhere in its constitution or the Federal Constitution to promote Christianity and I could snicker at the fact that it really doesn't matter whether people are married -- they make babies anyway and I could point out as well that stable, married gay couples seem to do as well if not better at raising children, but we both know I wouldn't get a sensible answer because the position isn't about any of those things. It's about a personal repugnance concerning the private behaviour of other people with its origins in a religious tradition not recognized or supported by the government of the United States. Preventing a social contract between same sex couples serves no more legitimate a societal interest than outlawing interracial marriage, segregating public facilities, keeping Jews out of Palm Beach hotels or preventing women from voting. Yet that same rhetoric was used to defend those things and worse.

Pace the nauseous nattering of people like Sarah Palin and a large number of Republican hypocrites, there is no clause in the constitution saying "insert the Bible here." The objections are an excuse and nothing more and they are neither supported by facts or reason.

Another frequent argument is that the court which overturned the ban was " ignoring the will of the people" which of course is part of the job description of the legislative branch; that being another bulwark against the mob rule our founders were so rightly worried about. That is, or should be embarrassing to those who have made careers bloviating about "activist judges" since what they're calling for is a judge who rules on personal and political sentiment rather than a strict interpretation of the law. Is this hypocrisy or duplicity? Does it matter?

Marriage isn't about breeding, it's about property and responsibility and the right of one person to care for another without legal hindrance. The law isn't about bringing a Christian or Jewish or Muslim utopia to the world in preparation for it's destruction. I agree with bona fide Libertarians that the role of government in promoting some vision of public good needs to be limited and its ability to intrude into the most private and intimate parts of the human experience needs to be restricted to matters of the utmost need. There is no need or evidence of need here. There is no logical or factual consistency here and the allegedly conservative position isn't conservative. It's everything conservatives tell us they hate: an intrusion into life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness by a self appointed group of moralizers. Morality is not the government's business. Sin is not the government's business: It's God's business. God can handle it.

Democrats and the Art of the Impossible: Mosques and Morons

RE Sam Stein's article "Harry Reid: Mosque Should Be Built Somewhere Else" 

See, this is why it's sometimes hard to respect Democrats, even if you are one as I am, and you're trying so hard to respect them that you're burning lean muscle, not just fat.  I thought the President's remarks on the near-Ground Zero mosque issue were acceptable -- after all, it isn't his job to pronounce sentence on the "wisdom" of building any kind of house of worship anywhere.  There's a good constitutional basis for the attitude he's struck up.  But I can't be that generous about Harry Reid's remarks -- I rather like old Harry Reid and the word "moron" in my post title doesn't refer to him but rather to mosque-haters, but to me, the statement cited in the article just sounds like caving in to idiocy and xenophobia. 

Democrats do that a lot -- they never seem to learn that when you compromise with utter knaves and raving imbeciles, there's no arriving at a middle ground that makes you look like a practitioner of the fine art of the possible that is politics.  You end up tumbling down the rabbit hole and into the abyss, where your only consolation will be to recollect ad infinitum Sam Johnson's wonderful line, "Delusion, if delusion be admitted, has no certain limitation."  If I didn't enjoy reading the Inestimable Dr. Johnson so much, I'd say that's pretty poor consolation.

Hört die Stimme

Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme.

It's calling, but in dreaming's other kingdom, you do not hear.



Wachet auf, weil in diesem kleinen, hervorragenden Moment, hören Sie die Stimme.

Born Again Christian Says Tea Party is Un-Christian

Claims to the contrary, the Tea Party is not Christian. Every time I've said this over the last few years a "believer" would look at me with shock and horror. I could hear whispers of "blasphemy" as this cold, hard, withering stare washed over me. I was almost forced to look down to be sure the buttons on my blouse hadn't popped open to expose a bare mid-section. (More text follows)

Tea Party Jesus

Writing for the Texas Observer, born-again Christian Katherine Dobay explains why she believes the Tea Party is un-Christian and exposes the "hypocrisy of Tea Party members who claim they are defending Christianity -- a way of life they don't follow."

Nowhere in the New Testament does Jesus exhort his followers to be nationalistic. All that Jesus said regarding the political state was that we must pay our taxes. Believers ought instead to be patriots of heaven, as Paul explains in Philippians 3: 20 "For our citizenship is in heaven..." Nor did Jesus instruct his followers to stem the tide of what the world considers progress by force . . . . For the end times we are told only to prepare for Jesus' return by keeping ourselves in fit spiritual condition. In fact, Jesus reserved his direst warnings for members of the church themselves, whom he warns against false teaching and ear-tickling;* even love of country can be an idol or a kind of heresy if placed before love of God and fellow man. (emphasis mine)

. . . Jesus clearly states that only those of his children who do his will, that is: feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked and visit prisoners and the sick, will receive the reward of eternal life. The good news we are told to spread in the Great Commission is not the gospel of economic doctrine or political philosophy. . . . Some of the fruits we can expect when we do God's will include love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. That sure doesn't sound like the Tea Party rally to me! When we disobey God's will in favor of our own however, the results can be anger, greed, division, strife, gossip, ugly speech, hatefulness, and every manner of uncleanness.

We have seen some fruits of the Tea Party movement which many consider a dangerous faction exploiting tough economic times and the fears of suffering people to prosecute a political agenda. In seeking to control and manipulate a society they claim to be "saving", they are only succeeding in tearing it apart. Individuals in the Tea Party who claim to be Christian have a lot of explaining to do, for biblical teaching is full of calls to submit to secular authority, trust in God, and to pay taxes. "Pay everyone what he is owed: if you owe the tax collector, pay your taxes; if you owe the revenue collector, pay revenue; if you owe someone respect, pay him respect; if you owe someone honor, pay him honor" (see Romans 13: 1-7). No exceptions were allowed. Paul did not say to pay only as much as you feel is right. He did not say you could feel sorry for yourself to the point of open rebellion. He did not say submit only to those authorities of whom you approve, but said to give respect where it is due. The president of the United States is owed the respect of all Americans.

. . . Isn't it ironic that early Christians under pagan Roman rule flourished in holiness and martyrdom, yet today some Christians manage to feel persecuted while living in the greatest democracy in history and enjoying material blessings undreamed of by their distant kin? . . .
Now, I am the first to admit that I get very uncomfortable when anyone claims "Jesus said" for the same reason I am uncomfortable when someone says "Shakespeare meant." How do we know what someone said or meant based on writings that are centuries old, and in the case of the Bible, have eight to fifteen different versions? How do we know which writer's account is accurate?

For the most part, members of the Tea Party do not under any circumstances represent what I was taught and what I consider to be Christian. I was instructed in tolerance, forgiveness, love, peace and helping those less fortunate such as those who have experienced a major catastrophe - an earthquake, hurricane or tornado. Above all I was taught that God loves all his creations.

My grandmother, an unusually intelligent and independent southern woman, and a Methodist minister cousin of mine, always opined that people who wear their religion (and patriotism) on their sleeves are anything but. I believe it's called hypocrisy.

Having said that, I respect Dobay's opinion and applaud her courage to denounce the Tea Party's hypocrisy - especially since she lives in a little town of 7,000 in the Texas Hill Country. As we've seen all too often, people in that part of the world can get hurt if they don't think right.

*ear-ticking myths: "Once saved, always saved." "No sin or doctrinal heresy will keep you out of Heaven. Fornication is permissable." Remember that Newt.

Another final solution?

During WW II the Germans were the bad guys and the French were the good guys, right? Well, some of them certainly were and some of them certainly still are, but if we're looking for another example of the banality -- and universality -- of the hidden but still present nastiness in apparently civilized nations, the examples are everywhere. Examples of the kinds of sentiments that brought us the persecutions, deportations and atrocities my parents' generation went to war over.

No, I'm not talking about the increasingly hostile attitude toward non-aryan immigrants in the American South, but about France and the European Union of which it's part. The Nazis ( and the Inquisition in its time) were less successful in eliminating the Roma, or the Gypsies as it was once more common to call them, then they were in eliminating the Jews or Europe.

Now that travel within the EU has been made so much easier; a basic right of European citizens, France has many Romani camps and that bothers many Frenchmen who are eager to attribute all kinds of mayhem in good old Lou Dobbs fashion. French President Nicolas Sarkozy seems happy to raise his poor ratings by pandering to that good old European Family Value of racism and ethnic prejudice. He plans to break up some 300 camps in the near future and send the Roma back to Romania because of "security problems." As yet, I haven't heard talk about re-establishing them in their ancient homeland in Rajasthan, but maybe that's still too touchy a subject just now.

France isn't the first to expel this wandering group who have appeared as bogey men in a thousand years of European folk lore. Germany Denmark and Italy, for example are instituting similar policies of attributing selected offenses to a group and punishing that group with expulsion rather than individuals actually accused and found guilty. It's doubly disturbing because, of course, Romanian citizens are normally free to reside in EU countries, or so I'm told.

Perhaps enough time has passed that the embarrassment of being caught at the same old Collective Guilt by Ethnicity game isn't enough to make EU member countries circumspect. Certainly that's true in the US where most citizens can't clearly remember as far back as the Bush administration, but equally certain is that looking for ethnic scapegoats in times of economic trouble is not something that died in a Berlin bunker in 1945.

Becoming the monster

I'm old enough to have learned to delay anger at any reports about or coming from the area formerly known to some as Palestine. Initial reports are so often untrue or exaggerated that caution is always advised. If it is true, of course, that the government of Israel has caused part of a Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem to be bulldozed, my anger is going to be well into condition red -- the more so if, as has been reported, the demolition is related to the construction of a Museum of Tolerance planned by the US based Simon Wiesenthal Center.

So I'll hold my temper a while longer although I fear that Nietzsche's warning about becoming the monster you set out to fight may be waiting to make a comeback.

Terrorists win! Terrorists win!

It's hard to say they didn't and their victory has nothing to do with the incompetence that let Osama bin Laden escape from Afghanistan. What can you call it but a victory when we've borrowed and wasted trillions on wars that we simply can't afford and we've been torn apart politically and culturally to the point where we will defend the indefensible, accept the unacceptable and every passing cloud seems like a piece of the sky falling.




Nearly nine years after the attacks on New York and Washington, the World Trade Center towers have become like the relics of some saint to be preserved in some myth if not in a jar while the contrived phrase "they hate us for our freedoms" echoes in mockery while one by one, the freedoms we pretend are a reason for their resentment are put against a wall and shot -- by us.

Any war, just or unjust, aggressive or defensive, necessary or the result of lies, is a test of the freedoms of speech and of the press. This alleged war has been a test of freedom from unreasonable searches as well, but now even freedom of religion is being tested both in the legislature and by the propaganda organizations with seemingly unlimited money, power and influence over the rage addled minds of the public. The millions of riders on the New York Transit system will soon be reading ads showing yet another picture of the twin towers and an airliner along with a crescent. Why There? it asks. Because we have freedom of religion, I answer. Because the government may not legislate against the free exercise of a religion or determine that one religion is to be preferred over another, I say to the ignorant, uncaring mob and the sinister forces that play them like pawns.

Does anything support the myth, popular in Islamic countries, that the US is out to destroy them and to kill Muslims better than this ad, this attitude, this anger? Of course we're eager to engineer Armageddon and so are they. Of course the Terrorists have won, since to bankrupt and confuse us and weaken us and set us against our principles and best interests was exactly what they set out to do. A popular uprising against justice and the rule of law has been the goal of many but none has been so successful in my lifetime as what has been accomplished by bin Laden and the Neocon Republicans with the aid of various radical supremacist groups foreign and domestic.

Why there? Well to be truthful it isn't there, only near there, but the answer is the same as it is to the question of why we didn't forbid radical Christian churches in Oklahoma City or the political anti-government speech that brought about the Federal Building attack and continues to fester. Because we all have the right to worship without interference from anti religious groups and from the government. That would be the government that's supposed to stay out of our lives, but only if we're of an approved religion.

We don't forbid KKK meetings even in neighborhoods full of people the Klan hates. We allow Tea Party extremists to wave guns at political rallies and threaten the lives of the president's family and to overthrow the government by force. We allow Christian churches to preach about the coming destruction of the Jews, the infidels and the end of the world anywhere they damn well please. But they're not Muslims, as a rule.

Our founding fathers offered praise for Islam, told Muslim leaders this was not a Christian country. There have been Muslim citizens in this country for centuries. There are millions of born in the USA Muslims in civilian and military life. When you take away the rights of one citizen for illegal reasons, you take away the rights of all and indeed if "they" hate us for being free, they're effective in making us less so and with our eager cooperation.

There's a bell tolling for us, for our freedom, for our souls and that thing up there in the steeple, wrapped in the flag and ringing it doesn't look anything like Osama.

PP13B and The Skeptic's Question

I adore Scientific American magazine. I try to read it from cover to cover, even if I don't always understand what I'm reading; when it comes to certain arcane, formula-heavy articles on string theory or particle physics, I keep hoping exposure will work a miracle in my brain. So far, nothing on that score, but it's been a SciAm-rich day and I just had to share it with you...big questions, and all.

This morning, as I hacked away at the biomass in our yard in the fast-rising heat and humidity, I listened to a SciAm podcast of the July 28th Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism's panel discussion entitled, "Arguing With Non-Skeptics." While it probably doesn't sound it, this two-part podcast is funny. Smart and funny. A distinguished panel of skeptics (a.k.a. atheists), including James Randi, D.J. Grothe, George Hrab, Steve Mirsky (my SciAm back-page fave), is moderated by Julia Galef. They discuss whether they ever enter into arguments, discussions, or debates with non-skeptics and how they handle it. Back to this in a moment.

A shower later, I finished Curtis Marean's SciAm piece, "When The Sea Saved Humanity." Armed with the knowledge that our global human DNA points back to common ancestry that is traced to Africa a little over 195,000 years ago, Marean went looking for an area on the continent where a small group of the first humans might be able to survive the long glacial age, which began at about 195,000 years ago and lasted until roughly 123,000 years ago. Where could a few hundred Homo Sapiens have stayed alive and continued to reproduce successfully when most of the continent of Africa had turned too dry and cold to support them? A new species already endangered; what were they like?

In a cave named PP13B on the coast at the tip of South Africa, Marean and his team found not only a perfect spot, rich in shellfish and edible flora year-around, but also answers to questions they hadn't known to ask. They found fossil evidence of compound tools, including spear points that required heat treatment to produce, at the deepest levels of the PP13B dig--demonstrating at least intermittent use of fire for tool-making dating back to 164,000 years ago. Previously, the earliest heat treatment had been attributed to France and was believed to have arisen only 20,00 years ago...a mere 144,000 year update.

The complexity of the steps required to produce the sophisticated tools indicate that language was needed to pass the technology along from generation to generation--another date pushed back. And there was also evidence at the deepest layer of the cave of shells collected for their decorative qualities and of red ocher "paint." Art, in other words. Merean writes,

"For years, the earliest examples of these behaviors were all found in Europe and dated to after 40,000 years ago. Based on that record, researchers concluded that there was a long lag between the origin of our species and the emergence of our peerless creativity.

But over the past 10 years archaeologists working at a number of sites in South Africa have found examples of sophisticated behaviors that predate by a long shot their counterparts in Europe....These sites, along with those at Pinnacle Point, belie the claim that modern cognition evolved late in our lineage and suggest instead that our species had this faculty at its inception. " (SciAm 08/2010)

We could say that H. Sapeins was born sapient and used that cognitive potential to survive the long ice ages, rear children successfully, and eventually thrive once the glaciers began to retreat. Returning to the DNA evidence, it now makes more sense that the entire global species could have arisen from a small genetic base in Africa. And it is conceivable that they eventually encountered their own differently-evolved number amongst the Neanderthals in Europe--who may not have been of a different species at all, but that's another article in this issue of SciAm, and another blog post.

Now, back to those funny skeptics at the Science and Skepticism conference.

As I read these SciAm articles about the Pinnacle Point people, I had that rising bubble of excitement we get when a eureka moment makes us want to tell everyone what we've learned. And then I remembered how I handle it--or rather don't handle it--when I encounter folks who believe humans were created around 6000 years ago. Or, for that matter, when I encounter folks who believe all kinds of unscientific fantasmagoria. 

I'm a Backer-Off-er. Especially now that age has tarnished my silver tongue and concepts flee as fast as the names of celebrities, I consistently fear that I won't represent my own knowledge or the scientific perspective well. I'll dummy up just when I want to sound my most rational, logical, and knowledgeable. I'm also afraid that my Southern upbringing, which taught us girls to button our lips in order to survive, will kick in just at the moment when I need it least...or won't kick in when I need it most.

So, how do you handle it when you find yourself in real conversation with creationists? Or with folks who believe in woo-woo stuff? Do you ever try to convince that person to question their certainty? Do you shut up and go all polite and distant, visions dancing in your head of Thanksgivings yet to be spent in the company of this idiot?


And how, if we've been cognitively sophisticated for 164,000 years, can some folks still be so unintelligent?

Check out that podcast for tips, comebacks, and the very best in great nerd humor. Makes me think I might be able to help someone see things differently.

The view from Pinnacle Point Cave 13B