Both of them are reallllllly well spoken and can get to the heart of an issue so beautifully and succinctly. Truly impressive. It’s on the level of Skeptics’ Guide To The Universe (before the political correctness ruined it) and, like SGTU, is mainly positive in the approach. Many Libertarian podcasts are negative and whiny or just plain combative. I understand why. It’s fun to whine and complain sometimes, but it’s tiresome and doesn’t win any new ears. These guys are funny and cool and it was really great to hear.

So, I fire off an email to one of ‘em saying how much I enjoyed it and the positive spin, etc. I briefly explain my Bill of Rights – Security Edition cards and aks for a mailing address as I figure they might appreciate the cards.

I get an email back saying… and I block quote:

I appreciate the offer of some Bill of Rights cards, but we are into Natural Rights, have kind of passed beyond being Constitutionalists, so wouldn’t hand them out. I also don’t fly, so won’t be going through any airport metal detectors.

He did say it was “a good idea” and signed off with the internet version of “have a nice day” which is “thanks!”. (I think I’ve written about that somewhere else. “Thanks!” with the exclamation point generally means “FUCK OFF” and specifically means “I don’t want to appear aggressive with you, but I don’t want you to think we’re friends, but I don’t want to get into any sort of argument with you as you are not worth my time so I will write “thanks” with an exclamation point to appear nice.” It’s a big emoticon for FORCED ANGRY SMILE.)

Before ending the letter, he said, and I block quote:

Please turn some folks onto [our podcast]. If you’re into handing things out, we have some printable handbills, here: ]

and was nice enough to give me the url to the handbills I would be lucky enough to hand out. Because that’s what I’m into.

Then he pitched me some online SEO course he wrote.

Classic.

I wrote back something equally condescending and sent further correspondence to spam.

This is why the people who are so intimidated by Ron Paul and freedom lovers like us have nothing to worry about: We are complete social retards.

What the hell am I talking about?

I’m talking about a genius, people. I’m talking about a charlatan who doesn’t even fucking talk. He “gazes”. People pay to stare.

Here, you’ll get to see an actress getting an opportunity to cry on camera:

He’s a genius.

Since he says nothing, he makes no claims. All of the claims are made by his followers. He just stands there while other people collect the cash.

Genius.

Holy fucking shit, people. Holy, fucking genius fucking charlatan shit.

*edit*

I can’t stop!!!

WARNING: DO NOT PIRATE BRACO! 7 SECOND RULE IN EFFECT! DO NOT PIRATE BRACO!!!

The “situation in Japan” is terrifying and confusing, especially because of the nutty bias against all things nuclear. Digression: I had an episode this past weekend listening to a reporter from CNN actually say “There’s nothing happening now, but some believe there could be a meltdown!” Last night, as I was torturing myself with Rachel Maddow, she was (condescendingly… go figure!) ‘splaining how nuclear reactors work – “…instead of an explosion, the rods create heat, which creates steam…” Because, as we all know, nukes are only capable of those two things.

Instead of being able to DO something – Instead of being in a position to help, we scare ourselves with stories that big bad radiation is coming and that we need to stock up on iodine or iodide or kelp or kelp iodine or… SOMETHING… ANYTHING… from Whole Foods. It can only be from Whole Foods because, well, it’s Whole Foods. After discovering that, OH, SLUG ME IN THE CUNT! WHOLE FOODS HAS BEEN SOLD OUT OF KELP IODINE SINCE SATURDAY AFTERNOON!!!!, we too, can now be (big sigh of relief) victims of the earthquake and tsunami. We can take part. We can suffer, too. “Hey, Japanese people! Lookie here… I’m in peril, too! See, I can’t get kelp iodine!!!” It’s also a way to inject some order into a weird, random event. Instead of not knowing what is going to happen. Instead of uncomfortably drifting in the wind of wait and see, we now have a task: GET ME SOME FUCKING IODINE!! STAT!!!!

It happened after 9/11 – An actress on a t.v. show hired private security guards because “they hate our media”. For weeks after the attacks, a Jewish community center down the street from where we were living at the time, used pylons to block off a lane of traffic in front of their building because they felt they were a possible target. People wouldn’t go to work in tall buildings across the country because, not only did they work in the tallest building in their city, there was a reason for terrorists to fly planes into their business, too. The movie studios “got tough” about identity and made actors miss auditions. Everyone began playing “If I were a terrorist…” You can tell when there’s a game of “If I Were A Terrorist” being played: Someone says “A terrorist could just…”

My most excellent acting teacher, Howard Fine (not the stooge, no) used to harangue us with “comfort is a false god: don’t pray to it!” (I suggest adding “don’t pray to anything” for good measure, but…) It’s a great thing to remember when we are made aware of random events. I say “made aware” because random events are happening so often that referring to them as random may be a mistake. We have literally awesome technology that allows us to be aware of things that are happening anywhere and everywhere in the world. There are always nutty, horrible, unexplainable and scary events going down. It’s a great tool, but we often forget that there was 24 hour news before 24 hour news channels. Plus, because we are now used to receiving immediate and accurate information, as Tom Petty once told me: The waiting is the hardest part. If there is no resolution within my attention span, I’m going to create some resolution, by gum!

Me and my SAG member buddies are especially self-centered. Not necessarily a bad thing. Along with chiseled abs for guys and, um, chiseled abs for the ladies, being aware of feelings is one of the main job requirements. We have to self-examine and figure out where we are emotionally, not only because it’s good for the “art” but because everyone around us lies. (Great job… Fat? You? No… That was your best work… We are behind you 100%… The guys at network are talking another season… etc.) Also, since we’re never working, we create these little tiger blood dramas for ourselves to star in. Convincing yourself that you can only eat a type of chicken sold at one store keeps oneself distracted from the fact that you haven’t been on a set in 10 months. This is all yet another episode to convince me that things were easier when religion and the religious were clearly defined. The downside to fewer people believing in that stuff is figuring out who is doing something because of “faith”.

Unfortunately for the cynics, people are basically good. Even without a man in the sky. Thanks to humans, life is better now than it’s ever been.

The sky will fall when it falls. Every generation believes they’re the last generation of humans to walk the earth. It’s sexy. “Hey, my generation destroyed humanity! How rad is that?!”

(rad, get it?)

Of course she’s insane, probably schizophrenic as they often have lots of wacky god stuff and voices going on, and the bible really only helped her get the idea to kill her child but….

Imagine if she’d done something “good” for the kid or something positive and then said it was the jesus who made her do it. We wouldn’t stop hearing about it. There would be feel-good pieces on the news and in the papers all about the sweet woman with the two kids who feed all the stray cats and horses on her block because the jesus is telling her to do it.

Right? Right.

We can’t have it both ways, can we?

“There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.”
Ayn Rand

*the three year old was murdered slowly and painfully, over many days.

Apparently, if you don’t HATE GLENN BECK BECAUSE HE IS THE DEBIL!!!! it means you are some kind of right-wing-evil-type-person.

A guy at work sneers at me because I mentioned that I actually LISTENED TO AN AUDIO BOOK BY THE EVIL GLENN BECK!!! And, since I didn’t listen to it to confirm to myself that GLENN BECK IS THE DEBIL AND EATS CHILDREN!!!! it means that I want to LOVE GLENN BECK AND THE JUNK BENEATH HIS FUNNY UNDERWEARSS!!!!

Butt seriassly. I don’t care about glenn beck at all. I think that he has become shorthand for “right wing wacko reactionary nutjob” and was, until BP took over, “two minutes of hate” for many people. I wrote about him once before and I find the whole thing truly fascinating.

I don’t get it, really. A friend has sent me clips of Beck’s tv show where he cries. There are also clips of him contradicting himself and also saying outrageous things. It’s not like he promised to end the war or close gitmo and then backed off on that, but I guess he says really outrageous stuff. A guy on t.v. saying outrageous stuff?!? No way!!!

But, because I don’t really care enough to watch his show, I um… don’t watch his show. The guy loves the jebus and I don’t care for that so much, so if I’m going to watch the child killing network (fox) I’m going to watch the John Stossel show, because he’s not a republicrat… he’s a Libertarian and that’s how I roll.

I listened to a Glenn Beck audio book (which I downloaded illegally by the way) because I wanted to hear the evil that everyone was talking about. I didn’t hear any evil stuff. It was written a few years ago, I think, so maybe it was pre-evil. There was a bit of religion, yep, and I have gotten used to replacing any talk of religion with a droning Gmaj chord. Mainly, it was limited government stuff with your basic republican fucking up of the concept of limited government. “Keep government out of our lives… except for gay people and immigrants!!!” which is not limited government. It’s the republican line.

I don’t have enough time to watch the glenn beck t.v. show. But, I do have XM radio and I do have my 10-15 minute drive to the subway each morning on my way to work so… this week, I’m devoting 10 minutes in the morning to listening to the grandmother-eating-nazi you know as Glenn Beck and I’m going to write up a brief summary each day of what he talked about and how evil it was.

There is a point on the way where I stop at 7-11 to get the greatest coffee ever made.

Monday, June 21
I tuned in to the middle of an interview with a senate candidate from Utah… I think. Beck didn’t seem to agree with him about a prescription drug bill that had been passed. I think the candidate was a republican. The candidate said that the system was broken and small steps need to be implemented. Beck’s position was that the small steps were just making it worse. As I was heading in to 7-ll, I think I missed some talk about religion but it was over by the time I got back in to my car. As was the interview.

After the interview, Beck said that he didn’t want to have any more candidates on his show because he felt like some of his listeners might consider his opinion an endorsement and he didn’t want that to happen as the interviews were short and that was usually the only information he had about the candidate.

Then, he and his co-hosts talked about the enumerated powers of the united states constitution.

Then, I was confronted with about 20 bazillion people heading downtown for a parade. That seemed worse than anything glenn beck said on his show WHILE I WAS LISTENING.

Maybe tomorrow, he’ll say something racist and horrible. Today, it was a lot of enumerated powers. I guess, if you hate him, you could say that he was being arrogant about how much power he had over his listeners, but it seemed to me that he was aware of that and was trying to not come off as someone who has a lot of power over his listeners, which I’m sure he does.

One of my worst traits is that I think that if something is funny once, it will be funny 1,000 times. To stay married, I stopped saying “Why are you angry?” when the bride says “I’m hungry”. (I still think it, though.)

A truly smart friend of mine, who is also my doppelganger (thanks for nothing, spell check), Emery Emery, came up with one great idea and, with his friend – famed band leader Tommy James – happened upon another.

The first one is an iPhone app that shows the most violent verses of the Koran, (Qu’ran? Qowoaaran?) along with pictures of the Allah.

But the really clever thing he passed along to me is adding the letters “B” and “R” to either side of the “ONE” on the back of the One Dollar Bill to spell every 4th grader’s favorite punch line: BONER.

Ass I’ve mentioned before, I don’t spend my one dollar bills. So last year, after crossing out “In God We” about 500 times, I’ve begun doing it the same night I put my one dollar bills in my one dollar bill box. (I’m pretty sure Penn Jillette started this, but I *think* he crosses out the entire phrase. I like leaving “TRUST” on the back of the bill.)

I have fewer bills saved this year, because we have the youngster and, when we have it, I pay his “help” with the ones. Regardless, at the end of the year, I’m going to have a bunch of bills that some folks may think read “Trust Boner”.

Where’s George, indeed.

click him!

duncan @ five minutes

This past August 1, 2009 at 10:45am, my son, Duncan Huxley Cameron was born.

Not only is he quite a bit bigger now than he is in that photo, his ability to melt me with a look, has increased.

We are raising him as rationally as possible. Obviously, he’ll make his own decisions about how to interact with his world, but we’ll tell the truth as we see it and let it go. There’s plenty of woo out there for him to encounter and deal with on his own, so we don’t need to burden him with more at home. It’s going to be intersting as, even before he was born, people I consider rational were saying really weird and irrational things.

It makes sense, I suppose. There’s so much about having a child that is completely out of ones control that, like the rest of life, we tend to look for patterns to apply to random things. Here in the west, where we have an abundance of food and nutrition, once you’re out of the first trimester of pregnancy, if you’re not behaving like an idiot, your kid is probably going to come out just fine.

But… because that stuff is out of our control, people start making up rules to follow. Sure, some of ‘em might make sense and actually keep you healthy, but, again… as long as you’re not being an idiot, that kid is going to come out and, most likely, come out fine.

Childbirth as an Extreme Sport
Extreme Sports came about because of great medicine and the boredom of practice. Back in “ye oldene tymes” no one, except for inventors, had the time or inclination to go hang gliding because a) broken bones meant death or worse, suffering and disfigurement for the rest of one’s life and 2) life already had enough fucking terror, what with everyone dying because of disease and war.

Here in the future, if you survive a hang gliding crash and break your legs and crack your spine, the worst part is your drunken friends driving you to the hospital in the back of the 4-Runner. After that, it’s 6 weeks off of work, Fentanyl Patches and 150,000 hits on YouTube. As far as skill goes, it’s a matter of being able to buy the gear. The wealthier you are, the more three day weekends you can spend hang-gliding and the better gear you can buy. You can’t buy the skill that comes spending 4 hours a day doing boring tennis drills for your entire youth.

So, like extreme sports, unless there is a rare complication, the sheer terror of having a child is gone. Western Infant mortality rates are extremely low and mothers dying in childbirth is almost non-existent so, to shake things up, we make it exciting by having a kid at home or with people beating drums or standing up in the shower or in a hot tub with your family there or in a dumpster behind chuck e. cheese. If something goes wrong, you’re a quick ambulance drive away from the hospital and all is well.

(A side note… We had our son at Cedars Sinai here in L.A. Our hippie friends told us that it’s a bad place to have a child because they have such a high record of emergency births. We aksed (yes, aksed) the doctor about it and she said the emergencies were mainly home deliveries gone haywire and since Cedars has the best Natal Intensive Care Unit, the botched home births are rushed to Cedars.)

“Pitocin is Evil!!!”
Because we wanted to feel like we were “doing something”, the bride and I went to a Lamaze class. I made it through the three hours without having an episode. I’m not sure why; perhaps it’s the extreme sports thing, but we encountered quite a bit of anti-science bias associated with having a baby. The point of the Lamaze method is to have the baby “naturally”. Since we’re living in the future and having the baby at a hospital “natural” really just means “without an epidural”. This is fine, if that’s how you roll, but there was no reason for it. The instructor hinted, quite strongly, that it’s better for the baby if it’s “natural”, but wouldn’t come out and say as much (because it’s not true). She made the claim that medical students today aren’t shown “natural” child births. When I questioned her about this; pressing her for a source for her claim, she said she learned the med student facts from “articles”. The larger subtext was that women who chose to receive epidurals were less woman than those who went without because they weren’t completely experiencing the delivery. Not only that, it is, somehow, better for the child if it’s “natural”.

Yep, after a full term of pregnancy what’s really going to have an affect on junior is that final few hours.

We were told “don’t let them give her any drugs!!!” a couple of times. One of the drugs that the bride was given was Pitocin, a drug that induces labor.

Back in the “good old days” one of the many ways a woman could die in childbirth was bleeding to death after being ripped open by a too large baby.

Duncan was full term and ready to come out, but the bride’s body wasn’t ready to let him go. Instead of waiting another two weeks and getting a Caesarian, or worse, a drip of Pitocin induced labor and we were on our way. (Before you say “body knows best”, aks yourself if cancer is the body knowing best?)

When you google Pitocin, the very first result is an anti-science web page, childbirth.org. It’s so sad. It looks official, but it’s just some anti-science people picking and choosing their facts and scaring people.

We were told that Pitocin keeps the mother from producing milk. Once the bride had the epidural she was able to calm down, as she didn’t realize how freaked out she was. It was only a matter of minutes after the Pitocin kicked in until she began pushing. Duncan was born within the hour. The bride was breast-feeding almost immediately. So much for the horror stories.

(I know, personal experience is one of the worst ways to come to an understanding of how the world works. I’m just saying that our experience with Pitocin and the epidoodle was aces! )

The bride is a genius. She made the point that people now use bleeding edge science to get pregnant; in vitro pregnancies are so common now, and that is, rightfully, considered a beautiful and excellent thing. BUT, using science for the delivery cheapens the experience. If someone is of the mind that “nature knows best” then why take the shortcut around nature and go in vitro? Hmm?!?!

Genius, I tell you. Genius.

Infants as Unemployment Insurance
Since the turn of the century (I love saying that!) I was fortunate enough to have a nice career doing voice overs for radio and television. I began the century writing front end code at an online games web site. I also helped a friend develop a web service, Tightcircle.com, which he later patented and sold to an “unnamed company in Mountain View, California”. My main income was voice overs and I would, occasionally supplement it by doing web work.

About two years ago, the voice overs began slowing down. Thanks to strikes and technology, fewer people were needed to do voice overs. Finally, the work seems to have dried up almost completely. I had been averaging a couple of gigs a month. At this point, I haven’t had a VO gig since early 2008.

Once we discovered the bride was with child, I began looking for web work in earnest. Thanks to technology, I found myself a bit behind the curve as far as front-end coding goes. I’ve been on all the tech job boards for years so I started scouring those and other resources and by January of this year started sending out at least 2 resumes a day and doing tutorials online on the stuff I’d missed.

Our plan had been that by the time the bride finished her latest editing gig, I would either have some foot back in showbiz or a web coding gig. Unfortunately, that wasn’t happening and it began getting hairy.

I kept hearing “babies bring luck” and it only pissed me off more. What is the method? How does it work? Gravity? Hmm. The week before Duncan was born, I received two job offers. Some poor soul on MyFaceSpaceBook wrote “babies bring luck!!!” and I kinda/sort jumped down her throat. See… by saying that not only are you simply being an idiot, unaware of confirmation bias, you are discounting the work I did to get those jobs. If a baby is born every minute, wouldn’t there be more “luck” in the world? I can’t even begin to start deconstructing this…. The week before he was born, I had to put a new radiator in my car. Lucky? As Linus Van Pelt often said: Aaargh!

Pisces Virgo Rising is a very good siiiiignnnnnn
Racism is just lazy. Instead of investigating cultural differences, racism just lays down blanket statements about large groups of people. The only criteria is how they were born. Not who they are. People are different through their cultures, but it’s more about geography than biology. But, even then, I realllly hate it. It makes me so sad when I hear someone describe themselves based on their race. “I’m Italian, I can’t help being jealous!” Well, you were raised to think that. It has nothing to do with you being Italian, except everyone you know who is Italian has told you that you can’t help but be jealous. There are lots of Italians who aren’t. I bet there are Italians at swingers clubs.

The worst manifestation of racism is astrology. Because of the date and time of your birth, you are endowed with personality traits that are inescapable.

I think this is so maddening to me because I’m a Taurus.

duncan y bride @ one minute

But seriously… This country was created so we can be free. We are free to try to do whatever we want and be whoever we want. We are free to choose our own identity and make our own lives and yet people voluntarily yoke themselves with zodiac signs, shrug and say “I can’t help that I’m clumsy, I’m a gemini”.

Obviously, you are absolutely free to do this in this free country. You’re totally free to hamstring yourself or create excuses based on your deep misunderstanding of the gravitational effects of the planets. Please don’t do it to my son. Please don’t tell him how he is before he can walk. Please don’t make up your mind how he is before he can walk. Let him find out who he is and how he is. It’s going to take a long time and, this is important: it will change. Duncan may start out shy and become an extrovert, but let’s not keep him one way by telling him it’s preordained. It may be. But it’s not because of the moon and jupiter. As William Shakespeare wrote: “I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.” (Edmund has a great deconstruction of astrology in King Lear.)

There are so many real mysteries and phenomenon, both explained and unexplained, associated with infants. When does he begin recognizing us? Is he thinking abstractly? How does language happen? The nature/nurture question. All of those things. They are fascinating, vexing and beautiful. Why throw crap in there like ass-trology, babies bringing luck and anti-science? I loved him before he was born. Isn’t that enough?

The Palin episode of Skeptoid points out how those of us who pride ourselves for being critical thinkers have to remember to refrain from ad hominem attacks, especially against those who have different beliefs than ours. It’s great stuff.

My other favorite, which I may have mentioned here, is the Skeptics Guide to the Universe. Steven Novella and his brothers, Jay, Bob along with Even Bernstein and one of several “skepchicks”, Rebecca, are the skeptic superfriends. Each week, they sit around and wax poetic about things skeptical. I was interviewed by them last week at TAM7, which is a true honor. Steven Novella has got to be the busiest man in the world. He blogs daily at Science Based Medicine as well as his own, Neurologica blog. Plus, he’s a neurosurgeon and does legwork for the Skeptics Guide podcast. The man is smart. Crazy smart.

I also listen to three tech podcasts: the Zend php framework, Ruby on Rails & JQuery. It sounds a lot like English. I’m pretty sure it’s English.

There’s also a guy who decided to read all of the Robert Ingersoll writings. Great. Nutty.

I put the new ones in the “Sleep” playlist and listen to that as I fall asleep. By the end of the week, from waking up in the middle of the night, etc., I’m pretty sure I’ve heard everything.

Fascinating, isn’t it?

I’m going to write about TAM7 real soon. No, really.