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They were the only girls I could find who were liberated and twisted enough to be interesting.

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"Catholic girls
at the CYA..."

Frank Zappa, aka, John the Baptist of Rock N Roll.

OK, I'm really not sure I want to post the link in this thread, but a choice quotation:

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Catholicism is an S&M cult masquerading as a religion. It is the largest, longest-running Fetish Ball in history.

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Originally posted by digitalprimate:

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Catholicism is an S&M cult masquerading as a religion. It is the largest, longest-running Fetish Ball in history.

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I love it.

I'll email you the NSFW link.

Frank got a lot of things right, that's the truth. And I don't have a single one of his albums. (actually I do, but seeing as it's an album, and I don't have a turntable, it hasn't done me much good)

....and who says that monkeys can't count?

And, for the record, I officially ditto MOM's remarks. Good on you, Mr. Gibson.

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What do you do when faced with someone who won't talk?


That is my speciality. I know how to do that. It has happened a lot.


How do you do it?


I have many systems. But I do it without using any kind of physical pressure.


Can you tell me about these systems?


No, I cannot.

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Egg-zackly.

RE: Toffler vs Orwell. The quote really struck a chord. Reminded me of a passage by Orwell I came across recently:

Indifference to objective truth is encouraged by the sealing-off of one part of the world from another, which makes it harder and harder to discover what is actually happening. There can often be a genuine doubt about the most enormous events. For example, it is impossible to calculate within millions, perhaps even tens of millions, the number of deaths caused by the present war. The calamities that are constantly being reported -- battles, massacres, famines, revolutions -- tend to inspire in the average person a feeling of unreality. One has no way of verifying the facts, one is not even fully certain that they have happened, and one is always presented with totally different interpretations from different sources. What were the rights and wrongs of the Warsaw rising of August 1944? Is it true about the German gas ovens in Poland? Who was really to blame for the Bengal famine? Probably the truth is discoverable, but the facts will be so dishonestly set forth in almost any newspaper that the ordinary reader can be forgiven either for swallowing lies or failing to form an opinion. The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs. Since nothing is ever quite proved or disproved, the most unmistakable fact can be impudently denied. Moreover, although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge, the nationalist is often somewhat uninterested in what happens in the real world. What he wants is to feel that his own unit is getting the better of some other unit, and he can more easily do this by scoring off an adversary than by examining the facts to see whether they support him. All nationalist controversy is at the debating-society level. It is always entirely inconclusive, since each contestant invariably believes himself to have won the victory. Some nationalists are not far from schizophrenia, living quite happily amid dreams of power and conquest which have no connection with the physical world.

- George Orwell, "Notes on Nationalism" (1945)

I'm doing a final project for my liberal studies M.A. based on the Victorian writer Margaret Oliphant's ghost story "The Open Door" http://gaslight.mtroyal.ca/opendoor.htm

It's got most of the hallmarks of gothic fiction: someone takes on an estate just outside of Edinburgh; his son starts "hearing things" out in the grounds; the father investigates with the local doctor and priest; they find a disembodied voice in the ruins of a cottage crying "Mother let me in!" The priest recognizes it as a deceased parishioner and performs a hasty exorcism, re-uniting the voice with its mother.

Reading Mr. Gibson's excerpt of Edward Lenthal Swifte's account of the sepulchral floating cylinder, made me wonder about these manifestations as glimpses into a Schopenhauer noumenal realm"”the synonymous system lurking behind our phenomenal existence (which is sort of the thesis of my project). Or am I on suspect ground with this?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Thunderbird 2,

Re.: Historical high weirdness, Nov 23:
Mr. Swifte's cylindrical figure is of course a visiting drone from The Culture

Our own thread of the conflict, and specially Lithos excellent take on the fights is here.

José

I spent the weekend mulling the whole creation vs. evolution being fought over textbooks. Giving it some spare thought when all at once it hit me: Any juristiction which imposed creationism and/or removed evolution from its textbooks? Straight penicillin for antibiotics in their pharmacies. Nothing stronger. Yeah, that might get people's attention. Maybe something like:
"My daughter needs something stronger, penicillin isn't working."
"How is that, again?"
"Well, her infection hasn't gotten better and seems to be taking a turn for the worse and the penicillin isn't working anymore."
"Well, ma'am, I surely can't comprehend what it is you're trying to tell me. But it sounds like you're implying that penicillin worked on all but a tiny number of bacillium, which, for some reason managed to pass on whatever "trait" facilitated their survival and, somehow, your daughter's infection has "evolved" into a slightly different version of itself that's immune to penicillin? I don't think you quite undertsand how things work in the universe. Your daughter has a plague, ma'am, which God is visiting upon your daughter."
Well, it was a fun little morality play to spool through my head in either case. But I wonder if people who grow up not learning about evolution, or believing it's wrong might one day be in a position to make such a policy...
But in the end, I think I fear a scientific community devoid of moral principles. That people might be more concerned if we can do something than if we should do it.
But as WG pointed out, the real opposition to Darwin was the result of ingrained racism in many communities. As much as I hate to think that's still the case, perhaps it is. If so, then I have even more respect for the Warren Court handing down a 9-0 decision in Brown v Board of education. Because that ended the legal discussion of state-sponsored segregation. Nobody's counting the justices to see how many it would take to overturn Brown v Board of education, they never have, despite what may well be a sincere desire to do so.

Still I'll bet textbooks would be more evolution-friendly if you forced a community to practice what it preached by restricting access to antibiotics stronger than bread mold. But doing that deliberately? I feel certain God would not be amused by the irony, or the needless suffering caused in His name. If He's not desensitized to it by now.

I think it's pretty simple. Creationism and evolution are both just theories. One is based on facts and the other on wishful thinking. Which is which seems to be the main debate. I think it's much easier to make a strong case for evolution, since we've never managed to dig up old, fossilized Deity feces, but, what the hell do I know?

Oh, but creationists of the Biblical literalist type dispute evolution for lower orders of life as well. As for the issue of bacterial immunity, the argument they would use against a Darwinian explanation would probably be the same one they use for the peppered moth: both types were around before the environmental change, it's just that now there's more of one kind because more of the other kind have been wiped out. No evolution there; just a change in relative populations.

Bacteria aren't great poster boys for natural selection, anyway, as they play the hereditary game by their own rules.

Bacteria share enormous amounts of DNA. They not only share DNA among members of their own species, through conjugation and transduction, but they will encode DNA in plasmids and transposons and packet-mail it to other species.They can even find loose DNA lying around from the burst bodies of other bacteria, and they can eat that DNA like food and then make it work like information. Pieces of stray DNA can be swept all willy-nilly into the molecular syringes of viruses, and injected randomly into other bacteria. This fetid orgy isn't what Gregor Mendel had in mind when he was discovering the roots of classical genetic inheritance in peas, but bacteria aren't peas, and don't work like peas, and never have. Bacteria do extremely strange and highly inventive things with DNA, and if we don't understand or sympathize, that's not their problem, it's ours.

I found this article while looking for the above Sterling piece. It's not relevant but...

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Last year, Bassler and her colleagues unlocked the structure of a molecular language shared by many of nature's most fearsome particles of mass destruction, including those responsible for cholera, tuberculosis, pneumonia, septicemia, ulcers, Lyme disease, stomach cancer, and bubonic plague. Now even Big Pharma, faced with a soaring number of microbes resistant to existing drugs, is taking notice of her work.

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Chemical warfare is going to get downright evil over the next few decades.

CBRN, actually!

And the suit is important, but good weather is even better!

yay misty, you made the blog!! class of dragons rulex!!!!

Some people say "don't look at this; I'm serious" to get you to look at something which you will find amusing or gratifying.

Note to self: Warren Ellis is not one of those people.

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"...simultaneous breast implant procedures last valentines day"

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Reports of the death of romance have been greatly exaggerated, clearly.

Gotta agree with Splitcoil on the Ellis thing...that's another one in the wrong category (along with goa' and tubgir').

yikes.