Randomfactory - randomfactor's Blog - Bakersfield.com

Don't Forget the Perseids

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 10:03:44 PDT

Could be a good show for those of us lucky enough to be up past midnight. Will have to take a peek during my break.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20090811/sc_space/strongmeteorshowerexpectedtonight

"Jerks" make the traffic flow?

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 08:41:50 PDT

Scientific research shows that the guy you just cussed out on the freeway may have gotten you home from the commute earlier.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/uptospeed/

(Of course, we probably have more jerks than we need. Ain't *THAT* always the case...)

How to lose your health insurance at the beauty shop

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 14:01:21 PDT

Posted elsewhere but deserves its own thread.

http://www.progressivefox.com/?p=721

Why America needs single-payer government-run health insurance.

Since it's been days...

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 13:04:32 PDT

...since we've had a good, rousing same-sex-marriage fight, it's not looking promising for those defending the last shreds of Proposition 8. The judge is going to make them use evidence and stuff to prove their case.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/06/30/BANM18GRLU.DTL

Of course, it could all be a bipartisan trick:

The couples, represented by Theodore Olson and David Boies - the lawyers for George W. Bush and Al Gore in the case that decided the 2000 presidential election - say Prop. 8 violates the U.S. Constitution by denying equal treatment to gays and lesbians. Gay-rights groups did not raise that issue before the California court, unwilling to risk a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the right to marry.

Han Solo, P.I.

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 11:53:20 PDT

A little something light on a Sunday...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEigvdbzia8&feature=player_embedded

*THAT'S* what Han Solo needed...a mustache!

Not so much

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 17:10:07 PDT

http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/prayernation.asp

Because I'm locked out of another blog

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 17:36:24 PDT

Let me mention that Pax is full of baloney again with his most recent posting:

Indeed, Wayfarer, and the same can be said for Ann Coulter, who, in addition to announcing the halftime score of 49 million to 5, reminds us that the same church that Tiller went to is the same one that the notorious BTK killer went to: http://www.wnd.com/index.ph...

What's that they say about birds of a feather again ?

Apparently Pax's point is that Lutherans are killers (wonder what church St. George Tiller's assassin went to). He's allowed to slur Lutherans because neither nor Buffoo are that particular flavor of Christian, I guess.

Oh, and let me add in passing that Coulter's full of baloney as well. And the sun rose this morning, and water is wet...

So, is it *ALL* Christians who should be suspect, or just Lutherans, Pax?

A happy-ending story

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 12:02:36 PDT

Without comment:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/6/21/171323/276

Kern City is Among State's Ten Reddest

Mon, 18 May 2009 16:46:06 PDT

No, it's not Bakersfield. And they get in a few zingers along the way. By the way, the picture perfectly captures my memories of the place, but for the lack of heat-shimmer over the asphalt.

http://www.sacbee.com/photos/gallery/1852936.html

Poor Anthony Flew

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 08:11:59 PDT

Like Blaise Pascal, a valuable thinker who did important work before his decline, whose mistakes are seized upon and misrepresented by folks who most likely don't understand them in the first place. Flew's "conversion" cited by religious cowards does *NOT* support anything like organized Christianity.

Six Years

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 09:37:30 PDT

Today is the sixth anniversary of the worst mistake in United States History.

Lest we forget.

Two from Wired

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 11:22:33 PST

Entertaining stuff. First, the formula that eated Wall Street:

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_quant?currentPage=1

And the Great Converter Box Camera Hoax:

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/02/dtv-converters.html

In future, TV watches *YOU*. Infowar, why didn't you *TELL* us?

The Two-California Option

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 08:24:10 PST

How to resolve the budget mess when "those Democrats" won't stop talking about actually raising taxes?

Split the state into two Californias. The good news: we're in the big one. The bad news: Morro Bay isn't. The other bad news: we get the state debt.

http://firedoglake.com/2009/02/15/downsize-california-the-chile-option/#Respond

1500 Megapixel Photo of Inauguration

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 15:21:32 PST

This fellow stitched together 220 digital pictures of the Inauguration crowd to make one big, pan-able, zoom-able image. Cool.

http://davidbergman.net/Obama.html

I Can Has Cheezburger, Amen

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 08:23:22 PST

Religion as junk food:

http://www.richarddawkins.net/article,3534,The-Evolution-of-Religion,J-Anderson-Thomson-MD

(Or more seriously, how religions evolved as human beings did.)

"Clean Coal"

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 14:03:18 PST

The "clean coal" myth ignores a rather nasty problem: a toxic waste spill of 500 million gallons is underway in Tennessee and has swallowed 15 houses. Is CNN covering this? Of course not--they've got to save time for the War on Hannukkah.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=toxic-ash-pond-collapses

For Ling: The GM EV1

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 10:02:01 PST

Since I'm locked out of the blog he mentioned this on:

Was reading in this mornings paper and it said that GM built 500 ELECTRIC cars that WORKED...but later destroyed...I quess this didn't sit well with the oil companies.....

If you want to cry over lost opportunities, rent the movie "Who Killed The Electric Car," which details exactly happened to the EVI, a plug-in electric car that developed a wildly fanatical following--but GM refused to sell them.

And I thought AMERICAN politics were weird

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 14:54:02 PST

Near as I can figure it, the Canadian Conservative Prime Minister is going to ask the British Queen's representative to shut down the Canadian Parliament so he won't have to undergo a vote-of-no-confidence on Monday which would likely kick him out of power in favor of a coalition partially made up of folks who want Quebec to be an independent country.

Kinda like if Obama asked Sarah Palin's support (and that of the Alaska Independence Party) to get Shrub out of office before January 20--and for the same reason. The Conservatives are blocking efforts to stave off economic problems in Canada.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081203.wPOLcoalition1203/BNStory/National

BLT, wanna chime in here?

Researchers create out-of-body experience in lab

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 09:39:06 PST

It's been some months since we discussed the "out-of-body-experience" illusion. This lab has taken a previous experiment (in which people are tricked into thinking a rubber hand on the table is their own) and scaled it up to produce a full out-of-body experience in the lab.

http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2008/12/the_bodyswap_illusion.php

Afterwards, the participants were interviewed, so that their perceptual experiences could be established. They reported that in the synchronous condition they had perceived the researcher's arm as their own, and that they sensed their entire body behind it. Some even spontaneously remarked with comments such as "Your arm felt like it was my arm, and I was behind it", "I felt that my own body was someone else" or "I was shaking hands with myself!". Remarkably, they also reported that the sensations evoked when the researcher squeezed their hands seemed to originate from the researcher's hand and not from their own. This illusion was vivid and robust - it persisted even though their own body was in full view, and regardless of either the sex of the researcher or the shape of their body. Furthermore, the participants exhibited anxiety when a knife was placed just above the researcher's wrist, but not when it was placed near their own.

(OK, well, *I* think it's cool...and it explains quite a bit about "near-death experiences" too.)

DFZ: Assault on Gay Activists

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 10:14:15 PST

Deletion-Free Zone

Moral Tradition and the Assault of Gay Activists

Fr. Johannes L. Jacobse

-->

It used to be that when the voters settled on something — even twice, the matter was decided. No more. Proposition 8, the bitterly fought constitutional amendment restricting marriage to one man and one woman that squeaked by in California recently, needs to be "overturned" — or so the homosexual activists tell us.

Overturn a constitutional amendment? If judges can overturn the amendment, then effectively we have no constitution and we will be governed by the whims of a non-elected judiciary. Say goodbye to the constitutional republic.

The call reveals something that the critics of homosexual activism see clearly: many in the movement embrace lawlessness. They are, to use a modern twist on an old philosophical term, anti-nomian — (against the law). But it's not merely the legal culture they hold in contempt. It goes deeper.

The tradition of American civil rights is a noble — and fragile — enterprise grounded in the belief that all people have inherent rights. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…" Truths? Created? Creator? Almost makes you think the American Founders believed that God exists and that rights flowed from Him.

This declaration is a moral precept grounded in centuries of Western history. But as the Founders and countless others understood, any claim of rights must have at their source the belief that man indeed possesses "inalienable rights." Religion, in other words, is the wellspring of the morality that shapes and guides the culture. In our world, Christianity (and Judaism through it) is that wellspring.

Human rights then, depend on a religion that serves as the source of a shared moral tradition and shapes a consensus on basic matters of right and wrong. If that tradition is abandoned the consensus shatters, and our ideas of what constitutes a human right are shorn from their moral moorings. (Think a moral tradition doesn't matter? Reflect on Islam and see how its notions of rights differ from ours. Not religious? Think of the blood spilled over Nazism, Marxism, and other utopian replacements.)

Homosexuals are, of course, afforded the same rights as any other American. What makes the American experiment so valuable is that one need not be a practicing Christian or Jew to be accorded these rights. One can be a hostile to all things religious and still make a claim to "inalienable rights," and still be protected by them.

So what explains the aggression of homosexual activists especially toward churches in California and elsewhere? Is it just because they lost the vote or is something else at work?

The homosexual lobby argued that marriage is a fundamental right denied to homosexual couples. They overlook the fact that homosexuals already have the "right" to marry. They just can't marry a member of the same sex, just as a man can't marry multiple women, a woman multiple men, a father to a daughter, a brother to a sister, and so forth. Nothing is "denied" to them that is not denied to everyone else.

"Unfair" they protested and indeed it is. But fairness to those who seek new definitions of marriage is not a concern of the moral tradition. There are compelling reasons why the convention is what it is (children need both a mother and father being one of them), and tinkering with it fosters even greater instability and suffering — as the epidemic of broken heterosexual marriages attest.

The fact that the prohibition against homosexual marriage is grounded in the moral tradition is not lost on the activists. That's why they attack churches. Churches are the cultural institutions that represent that enduring tradition. (It's not lost on the Black community either. Most Blacks resent that the language of the Civil Rights Movement was hijacked by the homosexual lobby — 70% voted to uphold traditional marriage.)

Moreover, the aggression against these religious institutions reveals the dark underside of the movement and forces cultural "moderates" to face a stark truth: the homosexual marriage movement is not really about marriage. It's not even about "fairness." It's about forcing moral parity for homosexual behavior in the culture. Wear down the institutions and you can homosexualize the culture, the activists believe (taking a page from Gramsci's playbook). Sound far-fetched? Ask yourself why they attacked the Boy Scouts.

The attacks against the churches reveal a deep antipathy towards the moral tradition. It's anti-nomian in the deepest sense of the term: a revolt against the moral ground of culture and thus against the culture itself. This chaotic disordering — this demand that the moral and civic order be subjugated to homosexual desire — is of the same spirit that we see in the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah.

On a more fundamental level, the revolt is an internal antipathy externalized. The activists believe that their interior disquiet arises from prejudice in the society, rather than from within themselves (thank you Jean-Jacques). Silencing the churches attempts to silence the tradition that regards homosexual behavior as sinful. This, in turn, might silence the "this is wrong" that still rings deep, if dimly, in the conscience.

Unbridled sexual desire often drives anti-nomianism, especially in our age where the desire is defined as a constituent of self-identity ("I rut, therefore I am" — just ask Madonna and cohorts; "I am what I feel" — just ask Oprah and cohorts). In this climate, any talk about homosexuality as "sin" is strictly forbidden. When the unlawful becomes lawful however, watch out. More comes crashing down than what you bargained for.

Fr. Johannes L. Jacobse is a priest in the Antiochian Orthodox Church. He is president of the American Orthodox Institute and edits the website OrthodoxyToday.org. Fr. Jacobse is available for talks through the Orthodox Speakers Bureau.

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