And things in the Iraq and Afghanistan are just continuing to fall apart. The decline speeds up.

In Afghanistan there are riots and Kabul is under martial law after a second day of rioting.
In Iraq, there's yet more chaos and the civil war proceeds apace.
One is left to wonder how long the administration will continue to pretend that everything is going just hunky-dory.

On another note, today is the 25th anniversary of the first reported cases of HIV/AIDS. A quarter century we have lived with this disease. Tonight Frontline is doing a special on the epidemic which will air tomorrow. Turn off whatever is on commercial television tonight, leave the Netflix movies for another time and watch this. If you are too young to remember what we've been dealing with for 25 years, then this is history you need. If you had your head in the sand, you need to understand what you missed. If you buried friends, protested for treatment, covered the epidemic or just watched then you already know the history but watch anyway. Frontline, by the way, is on your local PBS station and is some of the best documentary filmmaking available.

On a personal note, things with my new girlfriend have hit a snag. Not a big one. Not a deal breaker, I don't believe but one of those inevitable complications that arise when you take two powerful, intelligent and competent women, toss them together and stir well. We'll work it out, we love one another too much not too.

That's all for today.

Good night and good luck.

The human capacity for self-delusion is boundless, and the effects of belief are overpowering. (Michael Shermer)

I am involved in the FOSS/Linux movement in Portland. Primarily my involvement is with Freegeek although I am also looking at creating a program to teach local teachers the basics of using Linux so that they can use it in the classroom. Tomorrow, (Memorial Day 2006) I will be interviewed on local community radio station KBOO about Linux and the Free/Open Source Software movement. I will confess to a small bit of nervousness. I've been on radio talk shows before as a caller but never as the guest. I don't know exactly why I am nervous about this but there it is. It's not as if I am a somebody in the movement. I'm a teacher at a non-profit where I give students an introduction into Linux after they have volunteered their time at Freegeek and earned what we call Freekboxes. These machines run Debian although I have used SuSE Linux for years now. I've been using Ubuntu for a few weeks now (the new version code-named Dapper Drake) and am most impressed with it. I now use Linux on my laptop as well as on my desktop machine now. I am on the verge of moving my laptop entirely to Linux although I still maintain a small Windows partition.

And the saga continues...

So in the continuing saga of the 'Evil Elitist Scientist' versus the innocent, forever humble New Agey theists on Butch-Femme.com there is a new chapter. So having apparently taken precisely the wrong lesson away from having it demonstrated that Einstein was no more a theist than Jerry Falwell is a member of the ACLU, one of posters decided that the way to prove her point was to post yet *more* quotes from Einstein, taken out of context. It is amazing how people can take a sentence and decide that the words, removed from anything that remotely resemble context, bolster their position. If I thought it would do a damn bit of good, I would post the sentences *in* context, but that would probably be considered elitist because I believe that things have context. Short quotations as signature lines are one thing, I love clever ones and I enjoy them quite a bit. This is something that will drive me nuts because the people who do this invariably--and I do mean without exception and with no hyperbole meant--no nothing of Einstein other than e=mc2.

This brings me to the crux of todays' rant. Why is it acceptable to be utterly ignorant of science? People who are spewing foolishness, I mean rants of such simplicity that a developmentally delayed chimpanzee can see through the problems, are doing so on computers and they see no inherent contradiction in their daily utilization of applied science and denial that science says anything about the world. Yet, given half a chance they will rope in some scientist if that person mentions god. I would love to see the entire scientific community eschew using the word 'god' in their writings. We'd need to come up with some other verbiage to communicate 'overarching Universal Glue' but for the love of Pete please, not the word God. Not Goddess either because there are a bunch of monotheists walking around in Wiccan ceremonial robes. I'm not making this up. Talk to some of your more Dianic Wiccan friends. It won't take long to start hearing the same kind of superstitious silliness that one hears out of more patriarchial monotheists. 'The Goddess' is just Jehovah in drag with a slightly longer fuse but to some folks out there, God(dess) is still a person, this person really has a gender--for reasons that are never adequately explored--and this person really has likes and dislikes. So if we who are rationalists want to keep our blood pressure down and keep our partners, lovers or housemates from murdering us in our sleep, we need to avoid anything that smacks of theistic language. Which is a bit of a shame but it would seem that those who behave as if the human brain were there for not much more useful than providing body-direction and keeping the ears from collapsing in on one another have completely got the market-lock on spiritual language until those of us who are open-minded but prefer keeping our brains from leaking out our noses can find some other verbiage to use.

It's amazing what one can get away with if one wraps oneself up in populist/egalitarian rhetoric and pretends toward spirituality. On one of the online forums I participate in, someone started a thread asking whether people believed that God created the Universe or was Big Bang cosmology correct. I immediately responded to the poll and entered into the discussion knowing that, chances were, there would be the kind of typical responses and lo and behold, I was not disappointed. While the overall responses to the poll largely broke half believing in some version of Genesis and the other half saying that we accept the findings of physics, those numbers only tell half the story. Most of the posters--with a few exceptions--went off on a typical theistic bent. "God created the Universe", "I believe in God", etc. All fine and good as far as it goes but then they went further and started trying to wrap their theistic fantasmagoria in science and this, of course, is where the trouble always starts.

The problem with trying to make your belief in Gods, Flying Spaghetti Monsters, or Invisible Pink Unicorns into a scientific statement is that inevitably, you will run up against someone who actually knows something about the scientific method and find yourself having to answer a lot of very good questions which you aren't going to have answers to. Religious belief simply does not hold up well under scientific scrutiny. This, of course, tends to make people very uncomfortable and they will go to heroic lengths to explain to the non-believing scientist just *why* their belief, unlike all those other clearly non-sensical ideas such as, oh, Persephone spending part of her time in the Underworld with Hades just to take an example, is scientifically valid. At some point the believer in mythology, superstition or other species of hokum will then invoke Einstein because Einstein was a really smart guy who said a lot of things, some of which get quoted. On the forum, someone brought up Einstein's statement about quantum indeterminancy 'God doesn't throw dice' as if this were in support of her belief that god could be studied scientifically and mathematically. In case you are unfamiliar with the quote, it doesn't. Einstein was making clear that he just could not countenance that the sub-atomic world doesn't behave in a deterministic fashion. The fact of the matter is, the sub-atomic world is not deterministic and all manner of really interesting strangeness happens once you start talking about the constituent parts of matter.

If you are a budding scientist or an amateur one, take my advice. When someone invokes Einstein, if you cannot resist the temptation to correct the person for misquoting the man, be prepared for what is coming next because it isn't going to be pleasant. You can state that you think that stock market crashes are caused by astrological fluctuations of baristas on Wall Street and people will more or less let you alone, state that Einstein didn't say what someone thinks he did or that it didn't mean what they believe and you will be faced with a faux populism. The person in question started talking about how she liked to hear the opinions of 'all people'. No she didn't! She wants to hear the opinions of people who have no more thought through some weighty issues as my cats have! But it's all okay because she's speaking out of her 'heart'. You can be mightily wrong, state something that is riseably inaccurate and that's okay as long as you pretend to some kind of 'deep' spirituality, invoke the Buddha and Einstein to show that you are ecumenical (who would've thought that a Hindu prince would be talking about the Christian god long before Christianity was even founded) and know about science (because as everyone knows, Einstein was THE scientist so whatever he said must be true). You needn't worry about knowing what you're talking about, you're 'spiritual' and it's 'what you believe'. On the other hand, if you are at all rationalist and you are talking about science from a scientific viewpoint (as opposed to a pseudo-scientific one) then you are going to be castigated as an elitist.

End rant for now.

Lovely days of falling in love

This is going to very quickly descend into gushing so if you read-on you were forewarned!

I am falling in love. Really and truly having the experience of my socks being knocked off and turned into ballistic objects! I'm not going to get into any major details of her that will point to her but I have to say something about this.

Firstly, it has been a decade since I have opened up like this. I've been in love since my partner died in 1997, but I have not let go and let the experience fully wash over me! I have kept my distance, stayed safe, played it cool and reserved and in doing so have caused unnecessary pain to two women who deserved better than I was able to give them at the time. I learned, they learned, we all move on. The irony of this experience happening now is that not two months before I met A I was talking with my therapist and told her that I realized I'd stayed closed off behind walls for nine years. The ex of mine who still lives in town pointed that out to me. I realized that I had caused B pain because I took my eye off the ball and because I wouldn't be present with her on a day-to-day basis and told myself that, sometime before the Sun went nova, I would probably be in another relationship and when that happened I was bound and determined to do it differently. To be more human with my beloved and to allow her to be beloved to me. For to be beloved is more than just being loved or being a lover. It is being enveloped in the warmth of a comforter of love.

A could very well be my beloved. It is funny as we both attempt to keep our wits about us while at the same time, we luxuriate in this growing bond. I have hopes and visions of a future that I cannot speak to her yet. It's been two weeks and already I find myself thinking "I wonder what she'll look like when she gets her first grey hair" or imagining us having a weekly dinner with friends, or younger lesbians who we take in and mentor. Did I mention that it's been twelve-days?! I even--gasp!--think about the idea that maybe I could have a child with her although I am still in a place where I don't want any more kids right now.

It's almost a shame that this phase of love-induced insanity diminishes over time but it is a necessary happening because it does take a lot of energy and as I approach forty my sleep becomes more and more important. But tonight is not the night to think of sleep. I'm leaving the office and A will be coming over soon to join my housemates and I in a potluck.

More tomorrow.