Don't Vote

(hat tip Michael at Wishydig)

Donors Choose Bloggers Challenge: THANK YOU

My blog is part of this year's Donors Choose Bloggers Challenge, which ends today. So far three projects have been funded - by several very generous donors, one of whom anonymously dedicated their donation to my mother, which I truly appreciate. I might be able to guess who you are, but I won't try. I cried a little, though... Here's the first feedback from that

WOW! Thank you so much for helping me to get this project up and running! I am so excited to get the materials and start working with my students to help them reach their goals and be comfortable within their new learning environment. Thank you for being part of this and making something so amazing happen for my students!

So only one project isn't funded - and really, that's fabulous. My little blog's readers came up with almost a thousand dollars. Just in case one of you feels a bit generous after the election, here's the link to that last project.

Thank you so much to those who donated.

The maps make me happy...

FiveThirtyEight.com and Electoral Vote.com:





This doesn't, exactly:


I can't fathom why he's only winning 52% of the popular vote. Or rather, I can, and it saddens me.

So I look at the maps instead.

Please vote on Tuesday if you haven't already. And be happy.

Happy Birthday, John

John Keats was born today in 1795, and died 25 years later of tuberculosis.

"Here lies one whose name was writ in water," he asked for his tombstone, but as time passed that became less and less true... Look here for his life and poetry in context of his times.

Cat! who hast pass'd thy grand cliacteric,
How many mice and rats hast in thy days
Destroy'd? - How many tit bits stolen? Gaze
With those bright languid segments green, and prick
Those velvet ears - but pr'ythee do not stick
Thy latent talons in me - and upraise
Thy gentle mew - and tell me all thy frays
Of fish and mice, and rats and tender chick.
Nay, look not down, nor lick thy dainty wrists -
For all the wheezy asthma, - and for all
Thy tail's tip is nick'd off - and though the fists
Of many a maid have given thee many a mail,
Still is that fur as soft as when the lists
In youth thou enter'dst on glass bottled wall.

more Keats here

Sky Watch: Halloween

more Sky Watchers here

Better than the print version

In the print version of today Washington Post, it said "McCain hits Obama on ties to Palestinian". That's buried in the subhed, now. And in the lede, they call him a Palestinian-American.

But honestly. He was freakin' born in New York. He's a Palestinian the way Giuliani is an Italian or McCain a Scot or Obama a Kenyan or Kucinich Polish. Headlines like that are lies. C'mon, guys, at least use scare quotes.

JTA on Khalidi

Here's a piece from the JTA on Khalidi and the PLO, with a pretty blunt deconstruction of the assertion that he was ever a "PLO spokesman.

Now, however, in the dying, damning days of an election campaign, we’ve somehow been DeLoreaned back to the 1980s and contact with the group has become radioactive, even though the Israeli government, with full Bush administration blessing, is scrambling to come to a peace agreement with Mahmoud Abbas, who is still the PLO’s leader....

What everyone acknowledges is that Khalidi was an adviser to the Palestinian delegation to the 1991 Madrid talks. That delegation - to a person - could not have had any formal affiliation with the PLO. Israel regarded the group as terrorist and its laws banned contact with its members; then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir made NOT being affiliated with the PLO it a condition of Israel’s agreement to participate. The names of the Palestinian team would have been vetted by Israeli intelligence.

I like some of the comments, too, particularly (on the serious side)

The McCain campaign has now essentially condemned academic freedom (Khalidi’s research into his major interest, the history of Palestinian nationalism) and the inclusion of Americans (even if their parents were born somewhere else) into the mainstream of American politics, which includes, sometimes at least, discussions of American foreign policy towards the Middle East.

and (on the lighter)

Pallin’ around with University professors…small potatoes. Giving Palestinian “terrorists” $500K of your grant money…priceless.

Bottom line, though is this one (from Doctor Biobrain, so it's both):

This kind of thing always cracks me up. For as much as Obama’s critics always pretend there is some LOOOONG list of bad people Obama associates with, they always cite the same two or three people. And even those people aren’t nearly as controversial as his critics pretend they are.

Precisely.

(hat tip (TPM)

Happy Birthday, John

The Atlas of Independence, the Sage of Braintree, John Adams, born this day in 1735 (if you don't count the 11 days 'lost' to the Gregorian calendar in 1752; his birthday was October 19, 1735 by the Old Style, Julian calendar. I don't know what Adams thought of that, but Washington is on record as feeling as though those days had been stolen from him). (On the other hand, these were people who could handle New Year on 25 March.)

Adams defended British troops charged in the Boston Massacre in 1770 (and got most of them off and two convicted of manslaughter only) - an action he later called "one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested actions of my whole life, and one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country." Contrary to the 'obnoxious and disliked' image fostered in the play 1776, Adams was one of the most respected advocates for Independence in the colonies; Washington's nomination as general and Jefferson's as writer of the Declaration were both his ideas, and it was Adams who stood up on July 1, 1776 and spoke in favor of independence, extemporaneously, for two hours . Unfortunately, because he spoke without notes and no one took any, we don't have a record of this speech, but Jefferson later said that Adams spoke "with a power of thought and expression that moved us from our seats."

But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
—'Argument in Defense of the Soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trials,' December 1770

There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.

(And Writer's Almanac today featured a pessimistic quote we must prove wrong:) Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide.

I highly recommend Passionate Sage by John Ellis, and then John Adams by David McCullough, for those who want to know more about this least known of the great Founders - or Ellis's Founding Brothers for an overview of that remarkable group of men.

Donors Choose challenge ... deadline approaching

My blog is part of this year's Donors Choose Bloggers Challenge. So far two project has been funded - by two generous donors. I told them I didn't have a big readership, but I was hoping for more donors than one... I know it's a dicey economic period, and maybe all your spare cash is on its way to a politician, but ... think of the children, won't you?

It's easy: go to My Giving Page and pick a project, and then donate money. You can donate a little or a lot - whatever you feel comfortable giving. After you give, you'll get something like this almost right away:

My project has been funded!!!! I am so excited about the limitless opportunities that these new vocabulary materials will bring to my classroom. I have a large ELL (English language learners) population and these materials will help me focus on vocabulary which will in turn help my kids be strong readers. A million thank yous for your kindness and generosity. My kindergartners are going to LOVE the new materials! Continued blessings and many thanks

Again, you don't by any means have to fully fund anything. $10 is a great first step. Please think about it - and give what you can.

Palin the Socialist

Yowza. And no kidding. Hendrick Hertzberg writes in the New Yorker (my emphasis):

Sarah Palin, who has lately taken to calling Obama “Barack the Wealth Spreader,” seems to be something of a suspect character herself. She is, at the very least, a fellow-traveller of what might be called socialism with an Alaskan face. The state that she governs has no income or sales tax. Instead, it imposes huge levies on the oil companies that lease its oil fields. The proceeds finance the government’s activities and enable it to issue a four-figure annual check to every man, woman, and child in the state. One of the reasons Palin has been a popular governor is that she added an extra twelve hundred dollars to this year’s check, bringing the per-person total to $3,269. A few weeks before she was nominated for Vice-President, she told a visiting journalist—Philip Gourevitch, of this magazine—that “we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.” Perhaps there is some meaningful distinction between spreading the wealth and sharing it (“collectively,” no less), but finding it would require the analytic skills of Karl the Marxist.

Come into the 20th century...

How long will it take to sink in? Your words are recorded now, guys. From the McClatchey Papers, another politician who forgot about the mike:

North Carolina Congressman Robin Hayes, reeling from recent remarks about "Liberals hating real Americans," has lost his lead in North Carolina's 8th Congressional District race. Hayes trails Democrat Larry Kissell 51-46 in a poll released Tuesday by Raleigh's Public Policy Polling. In its last NC-8 poll in August, PPP had the incumbent Hayes leading by five points.

Hayes, in a warmup to John McCain's speech Oct. 18 in Concord, told the crowd: "Liberals hate real Americans that work and accomplish and achieve and believe in God."

The Hayes campaign initially said the congressman denied making the remark, but after being confronted with tapes of the remarks, the campaign released a statement acknowledging the remark.

Jon Stewart has been living off this phenomenon for a while now. How can they not understand it?

What's Important 57

Fifty-seventh in a series.

From fev at headsup discussing Fox, cnn.com, and the McCain campaign:

The McCain spokesman counters: "Barack Obama expressed his regret that the Supreme Court hadn't been more 'radical' and described as a 'tragedy' the court's refusal to take up 'the issues of redistribution of wealth." Both predicates are out-and-out lies. There is no other way to describe them. Fox (and the McCain camp) must hope that anyone who bothers to listen to the recording is too stupid to know what it says. But -- claim, counterclaim, and independent assessment by a journalist (who's also, oddly enough, a Fox contributor); it must be a news story!

Is there a takeaway point for editors? Sure. When your foamy-mouthed readers demand to know why this story isn't all over the front page, tell 'em you don't run made-up stories from news organizations that lie so often and so casually that they can't even remember where the true part ends anymore.

UPDATE: Lest you think we wax alarmist about the possibility of any professional news outfit falling for this stuff, here's cnn.com:
The Arizona senator pointed to a 2001 radio interview in which Obama said that one of the failures of the civil rights movement was that "the Supreme Court never entered into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society."

This may not be a lie in the intentional sense, but it's completely false. That sequence does not appear in the interview. If that's how McCain phrased it, the appropriate journalistic thing to do is to note that McCain was lying like a cheap rug.

Happy Birthday, Valerie

Today in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1933, Valerie Worth was born. I love her Small Poems.

Stars

While we
Know they are
Enormous suns,
Gold lashing
Fire-oceans,
Seas of heavy silver flame,

They look as
Though they could
Be swept
Down, and heaped,
Cold crystal
Sparks, in one
Cupped palm.

Happy Birthday, Boswell

Today in Edinburgh was born, in 1740, the man who invented modern biography and became a noun - Boswell, author of "Boswell's Life of Johnson" (The Life of Samuel Johnson). "I will not make my tiger a cat to please anybody," wrote Boswell, and made Dr. Johnson better known to us than any man before and most since. It's not the only thing he wrote (his Account of Corsica was deservedly famous), but it's the one he'll be forever remembered for.

Digital TV - people aren't going to be happy

I hate digital television. Every time the signal glitches you lose it all - picture goes all pixelly and sound is just gone. With the old broadcasts, you could still hear the audio. Four times tonight - three in House and once in the first four minutes of The Mentalist - we've lost dialog. (Some commercials, too, as far as that goes.) Missing a plot point is going to become very common.

Progress isn't always.

McCain on Rich People and Taxes

Hendrick Hertzberg writes in the New Yorker :

But the federal income tax is (downwardly) redistributive as a matter of principle: however slightly, it softens the inequalities that are inevitable in a market economy, and it reflects the belief that the wealthy have a proportionately greater stake in the material aspects of the social order and, therefore, should give that order proportionately more material support. McCain himself probably shares this belief, and there was a time when he was willing to say so. During the 2000 campaign, on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” a young woman asked him why her father, a doctor, should be “penalized” by being “in a huge tax bracket.” McCain replied that “wealthy people can afford more” and that “the very wealthy, because they can afford tax lawyers and all kinds of loopholes, really don’t pay nearly as much as you think they do.” The exchange continued:

YOUNG WOMAN: Are we getting closer and closer to, like, socialism and stuff?. . .
MCCAIN: Here’s what I really believe: That when you reach a certain level of comfort, there’s nothing wrong with paying somewhat more.

I guess he's redefined that "certain level" upwards.

Humanist Symposium

The Humanist Symposium is posted (aptly enough) at This humanist. Head over for posts on the positive and affirming side of atheism, humanism, and agnosticism. Good stuff.

Only when it's on his side

Wayne Besen's latest column contains this:

Meanwhile, in California, a jowly Rick Warren of Saddleback Church, literally morphed into the late Rev. Jerry Falwell. In a video that distorted history and stretched logic, the phony "moderate" strongly urged voters to pass Prop. 8 because, "we should not let two percent of the population determine the change of definition of marriage...that has been supported for 5,000 years."

Of course, this is roughly the same percentage of people who identify as Christian in China. Based on Warren's mob rules philosophy and respect for historical precedent, he should find China's persecution of Christians acceptable in the nation's efforts to uphold and protect thousands of years of Asian history.

If you live in California, vote NO on 8. If you know someone who lives there, call them and urge them to.

Rule of law? Don't make U.S. laugh

From the McClatchey Papers, the US shakes down Iraq:

If no new mandate or agreement is in place on Jan. 1, the U.S. would stop sharing intelligence with the Iraqi government and would cease to provide air traffic control, air defense, SWAT team training or advisers in government ministries, according to the document. The list also says that there'd be no "disposition of U.S.-held Iraqi convicts" without a security agreement.

Odierno's letter adds that American forces would stop training Iraq's Security Forces and its barely functioning navy and air force, patrolling its borders and protecting its waterways. The U.S. military would stop employing some 200,000 Iraqis and wouldn't refurbish 8,500 Humvees it's given to the Security Forces. Nearly every Iraqi unit works in tandem with the roughly 151,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, and American training teams are training Iraqi Security Forces nationwide.

And what is it the Iraqis want that's so outrageous?

Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki wants an extension of the U.N. security mandate, but with changes that would allow Iraq to prosecute private contractors in Iraq. The U.S. would veto any changes to the mandate, however, which provides immunity from prosecution for American troops and contractors.

Yeah. They want to be able to prosecute the private armies that routinely break the law and kill Iraqi citizens, immune from any punishment. How dare they?

I mean, they got a nice a country. It would be a shame if anything was to, you know, happen to it.

With Honor

I wrote this last year, but it's still all too relevant...

"I want us out, too, but I want us out with honor." - John McCain

Too late.

If you don't go in with honor, you can't find honor there to get out with. You can't find it by lying about how it all started and why you're still there. You can't find it by parading around in full body armor surrounded by guards and gunships. You can't find it by making up progress reports and then lying about whether the benchmarks you also made up have been met or not. You can't find it on Fox News, and you can't find it in orchestrated appearances in front of friendly audiences, and you can't find it in the words of generals who have sold themselves to the powers that be. You can't find it in columns by people who have changed their story a dozen times and still been wrong every time, and you can't find it in slaughtered civilians, cleansed city blocks, or blown up army vehicles. And you can't find it in wards of injured and neglected soldiers.

Honor isn't lying around the desert waiting to be found. It's not buried in treasure vaults, or hidden with mythical weapons, or scattered across the sands with the looted treasures of the ages.

If you don't take honor in with you, you can't leave with it.

You won't find honor until after you leave. It's back home, where you left it. And it badly needs polishing.

Happy Birthday, John

John Hollander was born today in New York City in 1929. He is currently the Sterling Professor emeritus of English at Yale, and still writing (his most recent collection, A Draft of Light, was just published in April).


An Old-Fashioned Song

No more walks in the wood:
The trees have all been cut
Down, and where once they stood
Not even a wagon rut
Appears along the path
Low brush is taking over.

No more walks in the wood;
This is the aftermath
Of afternoons in the clover
Fields where we once made love
Then wandered home together
Where the trees arched above,
Where we made our own weather
When branches were the sky.
Now they are gone for good,
And you, for ill, and I
Am only a passer-by.

We and the trees and the way
Back from the fields of play
Lasted as long as we could.
No more walks in the wood.

What's Important 56

Fifty-sixth in a series.

From the McClatchey Papers (with my emphasis):

Years after he resurrected his political fortunes from the Keating Five savings and loan investigation, John McCain promoted an Arizona land swap that would've benefited a former mentor and partner of the scandal's central figure.

The owners of the Spur Cross Ranch, a dramatic 2,154-acre tract of Sonoran desert just north of Phoenix, in the late 1990s sought to sell it to a developer who planned to build a premier golf course surrounded by 390 luxury homes.

Nearby residents and environmentalists, however, wanted to preserve the area's unusual cacti, stone formations and hundreds of Hopi Indian tribal artifacts.

After opposition surfaced, the developer sought McCain's help in forging a land swap with the U.S. Forest Service — a deal that also would benefit the owners of the ranch, including a company controlled by billionaire Carl H. Lindner Jr., an associate of S&L chief Charles H. Keating.

McCain and an aide pushed for the exchange in more than a half dozen sometimes-testy letters and phone calls up and down the Forest Service's hierarchy, according to former agency officials and correspondence. McCain's office even circulated draft legislation that would have overridden the agency's objection to surrendering national forest land. Ultimately, the deal fell apart.

McCain's behind-the-scenes maneuvering on Spur Cross contrasts with his image as a congressional ethics champion and his pledge — made after the Keating scandal in 1991 sullied his reputation — never to intervene with regulators again.

McCain's actions, which went on for nearly two years, also appear at odds with boasts in his 2002 book, "Worth the Fighting For," that he'd never pressured regulators at any time since 1991 and acted only on matters that "serve an obvious public purpose."

As the man himself has said, fundamentally he's against regulation. That may be the only thing that he never changes.

Farewell, Tony

Tony Hillerman has died at 83, in Albuquerque where he lived and wrote for so long.

I love his books.

He will be deeply missed.

"Everything is connected. The wing of the corn beetle affects the direction of the wind, the way the sand drifts, the way the light reflects into the eye of man beholding his reality. All is part of totality, and in this totality man finds his hozro, his way of walking in harmony, with beauty all around him." Ghostway

Monday Science Links

This week's science:

• Chris at Highly Allochthonous asks how you tell a dinosaur footprint from a hole in the ground?: If they weren't being mentioned all over the place, these things would make a fine geopuzzle; I certainly wouldn't guess that these things were dinosaur tracks. They look much more like potholes to me, and if If I came across this in the field, that would probably be what I'd call them. Which shows how much I know.


• Carl Zimmer at The Loom talks about dinosaurs with feathers: In recent years, dinosaurs have gotten awfully cute. They’re no longer Victorian lumps of saggy muscle. A lot of them are not even frightening. They’re fuzzy, feathery little critters. But, as I’ve written before, cuteness is not what drives paleontologists to hunt for these fossils and spend years poring over them in laboratories.
  


• Darren at Tetrapod Zoology also talks about those little feathery dinosaurs from China: Today sees the formal publication of the bizarre little Chinese maniraptoran theropod Epidexipteryx hui Zhang et al., 2008 from the Daohugou Formation of Ningcheng County, north-eastern China. Unfortunately the publication of this new species is not quite the surprise it should be, as the authors inadvertently submitted their manuscript to the wrong venue a few weeks ago, thereby making the article visible to the whole world some time before it was ready to be published. Anyway, we'll just have to pretend that never happened. Belonging to a recently discovered group called the scansoriopterygids, Epidexipteryx is tiny (less than 20 cm long I think), and very, very weird (Zhang et al. 2008). Its skull is short-snouted with a truncated antorbital fenestra, a nostril positioned in a relatively high position, and strongly procumbent, proportionally large anterior teeth (the teeth get smaller further back). Its arms and hands were very elongate (see figure below, from Zhang et al. 2008).


• Pamela at Star Stryder reassures us that super-massive black holes can only grow so large: So, first, I’d like to say there are two ways to look at this: 1) In reality, 2) in make-believe land. Make-believe land is oh so much more fun. So, lets imagine that somehow we are able to grow a very large blackhole in isolation. Then, using imaginary technology (we are in fantasy land, afterall), we throw a star at the supermassive blackhole (SMBH) so that it’s goes on a straight, uninterrupted path toward the SMBH. So straight, so perfect, infact, that if we could watch we’d see it hit on a line connecting the star’s center of mass with the SMBH’s center of mass. Now, the SMBH will simply slurp up this perfectly thrown star. Burp. No more star and no accretion disk. Now, If you, using your super duper, impossible, imaginary technology could throw a star with dead on aim over and over every second across all the epochs of time, you could pretty much build a SMBH as big as you wanted.


• Sean at Cosmic Variance takes on explaining quantum mechanics at the macro level: One of the annoying/fascinating things about quantum mechanics is the fact the world doesn’t seem to be quantum-mechanical. When you look at something, it seems to have a location, not a superposition of all possible locations; when it travels from one place to another, it seems to take a path, not a sum over all paths. This frustration was expressed by no lesser a person than Albert Einstein, quoted by Abraham Pais, quoted in turn by David Mermin in a lovely article entitled “Is the Moon There when Nobody Looks?“: I recall that during one walk Einstein suddenly stopped, turned to me and asked whether I really believed that the moon exists only when I looked at it. The conventional quantum-mechanical answer would be “Sure, the moon exists when you’re not looking at it. But there is no such thing as `the position of the moon’ when you are not looking at it.”.

Enjoy!

Hubble: Pismus 24 and NGC 6357

Here's a simply stunning photo from Hubble (courtesy Astronomy Picture of the Day). It's of massive stars in open cluster Pismus 24 and the stellar nursery of the nearby NGC 6357 emission nebula.

It's just breath-taking, isn't it?

Look. Look at what we can see.

Happy Birthday, Dylan

Dylan Marlais Thomas was born in Swansea, Wales today in 1914. Here's his Poem In October photo ©Jeff Towns/DBC

It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.

My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.

A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
Blackbirds and the sun of October
Summery
On the hill's shoulder,
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
To the rain wringing
Wind blow cold
In the wood faraway under me.

Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
With its horns through mist and the castle
Brown as owls
But all the gardens
Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
There could I marvel
My birthday
Away but the weather turned around.

It turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
Streamed again a wonder of summer
With apples
Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sun light
And the legends of the green chapels

And the twice told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
These were the woods the river and sea
Where a boy
In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
And the mystery
Sang alive
Still in the water and singingbirds.

And there could I marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around. And the true
Joy of the long dead child sang burning
In the sun.
It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
O may my heart's truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year's turning.

Happy Birthday, Katherine

Today in Birmingham, England, in 1846, Katherine Harris Bradley was born. She wrote, along with her lover, Emma Ward Cooper, under the name of "Michael Field".

Iris

The iris was yellow, the moon was pale,
In the air it was stiller than snow,
There was even light through the vale,
But a vaporous sheet
Clung about my feet,
And I dared no further go.
I had passed the pond, I could see the stile,
The path was plain for more than a mile,
Yet I dared no further go.

The iris-beds shone in my face, when, whist!
A noiseless music began to blow,
A music that moved through the mist,
That had not begun,
Would never be done,—
With that music I must go:
And I found myself in the heart of the tune,
Wheeling around to the whirr of the moon,
With the sheets of the mist below.

In my hands how warm were the little hands,
Strange, little hands that I did not know:
I did not think of the elvan bands,
Nor of anything
In that whirling ring—
Here a cock began to crow!
The little hands dropped that had clung so tight,
And I saw again by the pale dawnlight
The iris-heads in a row.

The Week in Entertainment

DVD: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, plus extras.

TV: House - last week's was good, and Wilson knew he was coming back, 'cause otherwise the very least he would have done is make sure Cuddy knocked House out for the whole trip. This week - didn't we see this, sort of? Except it was Doug Ross's one-night stand... Plus, I hate Hadley/Thirteen - she makes me long for Cameron. So I had this ambivalent reaction to her being fired - like, to be precise, "they can't possibly be getting rid of the one I really hate." Instead, they'll let her actually be competent for a change and House will relent and keep her. And sure enough. Bleah. I want a Kuttner-centered episode! Eleventh Hour - the little hints about the Patriot Act, used to help solve the case and yet clearly over-the-top, I think they're a nice touch. And I really enjoyed the dig at "all-natural foods" in the tag. Sanctuary - this show is nothing special yet, oddly enough. This time it was pretty obvious who the monster was - you could eliminate people pretty quickly (not the big loud guy, not the sherpa, not the two people with their names in the credits ...) and so they never really ratcheted up the tension. Ah, well... I also watched Bridge to Terabithia which was much better than I had thought it would be. Quite well-done, in fact, and I recommend it.

Read: The Blood Spilt by Åsa Larsson, another excellent book. Larsson has made me order the third one now.

Carnivals!

Check out the Carnival of the Godless at Enshoku's Weblog, and the Carnival of the Liberals over at Pharyngula (cripes; for some reason I had to type that six times to get it right; you'd think I'd never typed it before!).

Two great carnivals - enjoy!

Mimas near

Cassini turns its gaze from Enceladus and Dione to take a picture of Mimas and, 180,000 kilometers (112,000 miles) further on, Saturn. (Compare with Mimas beyond Saturn here. And, as always, see Cassini's site for details.)

Flora making dresses?

In the dawn, the rising sun turns an utterly prosaic cloud of smoke into something out of a Disney film...

Adam Smith and Ronald Reagan, Socialists

Joe Conason writes in Truthdig:

Now let’s address the ignorance of his rant. Progressive taxation is a tradition of Western economics that dates back considerably further than Marx and the Communist manifesto, with all due respect to the wingnuts who seem to be writing McCain’s speeches. He admits that he has neglected his economic studies, so perhaps he isn’t aware that Adam Smith, revered philosopher of market capitalism, advocated tax fairness as far back as 1776, the fateful year when he published the first edition of “The Wealth of Nations.”

Although there was then no income tax, Smith’s principled judgment on the justice of higher taxes on those who could pay more, enunciated on several occasions, could not be clearer. He favored property taxes and luxury taxes because they would fall most heavily on the wealthy. He would have levied a sizable tax on all seven of the McCain homes plus an additional chop at all of Cindy McCain’s credit card binges.

In “Wealth of Nations,” Smith wrote: “The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state.”

Few legislators are more familiar than McCain, in his maverick incarnation, with the enormous fortunes raked in by oilmen, defense contractors, bond holders and the whole host of modern capitalists under the protection of the American state. The notion that those fortunes, often gotten in a parody of the free market, should be taxed at the same rate as the earnings of a plumber would strike Smith as monumentally unjust and an attack on the moral foundations of society.

And, he points out, casting

socialist aspersions on a tax refund to working families whose incomes are too low to pay income taxes is to paint a big pink stripe onto McCain’s supposed idol, Ronald Reagan. In 1986, Reagan signed legislation greatly increasing the earned income tax credit, a credit for low-income workers that reduces the impact of payroll taxes in order to boost take-home pay above poverty levels. When the credit is more than the amount of federal income taxes owed by an individual, that person receives a tax “refund.” Reagan praised the earned income tax credit as the best “anti-poverty” and “pro-family” legislation ever enacted by Congress.

In other words, there's no indication the John McCain has the faintest clue what "socialism" means. It's just a bad word he can throw at Obama in a desperate attempt to scare those people who are scared of him because he's black. (What? Why else does he call Obama's income tax rebate for the working poor "welfare"?) And let's never forget the fundamental dishonesty of saying those people "don't even pay taxes". Has McCain never heard of sales tax or property taxes or payroll taxes? Okay, maybe not the latter... but even the wealthy elite like the McCains who've never held a non-government job if they work at all still pay the other two.

And sales taxes are the worst, most punitive and regressive form of tax there is. My home state (not where I live now) has no income tax. So its sales tax is 7% which goes up to almost 10% in most jurisdictions with locas add-ons of between 1.5 and 2.75%, with the latter almost the rule. No matter who you are or how much money you make, you have to buy food and clothes and gas. And that 10% extra hits the guy making $13,624 (minimum wage full time) a helluva lot harder than the guy bringing in $250,000. So that minimum-wage worker isn't paying income tax, but "not even paying taxes"? Ha ha. So funny.

I had a student earlier this year, rather right-wing, who kept calling Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama - and Dennis Kucinich and John Edwards and Ted Kennedy - "fascists". Turns out he didn't really know what fascism was; he just wanted a label for the left... Problem is, while we got that he didn't like them, we also got that he didn't know what he was talking about. Obama may be closer to socialism than fascism, but McCain might want to reconsider sounding like a 19-year-old with more anger than knowledge. Not very presidential, that.

Out and about

October days pass, and winter grows ever closer. The oaks are dropping their acorns, and squirrels know the cold is coming. In the slanting late afternoon sun they scurry about, dashing across the grass when the children chase them, and rustling through the fallen leaves, hunting for the food that will sustain them in the months to come. But all that hunting burns calories, and the squirrels have to eat much of what they find. It's a hard-scrabble life, even for suburban squirrels.

Happy Birthday, Anne

Born today in 1941, Anne Tyler - Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who celebrates the minutae of ordinary lives lived by ordinary people who are splendidly not ordinary in the narrow sense. I love her books - she's one of the few authors whose new novel I pre-order, in hardback, and who never disappoints. A private person, she makes no tours or public appearances, and I honor that here by not showing her face - only her latest three novels. May she write many more.

Options?

Someone writes to Carolyn Hax today:

Hi Carolyn, You write "You can't have a baby your spouse doesn't want . . . the veto means you have to decide whether you're going to do this spousally-vetoed thing, or leave the marriage."

So if a woman in a marriage gets pregnant accidentally and the husband doesn't want the child, her only options are having an abortion, giving the baby up for adoption, or getting a divorce? Is this actually what you mean? If so, I am shocked you would hold such an uncompromising view.

I'm having trouble understanding what the writer thinks is a fourth option. Sure, if the husband changes his mind, that's one thing, but if he really doesn't want a baby, he's going to leave. Or be a bastard of a father.

(Carolyn asks if the wife should force the husband to stay in the marriage at gun-point... Yeah. That would work.)

Wolf? Oh, wait...

One of those ambiguous headlines, this one from the Washington Post:

Wolf Advocates Protest Move

I figured it was about somebody named Wolf advocating some sort of protest. But it turns out to be advocates for wolves protesting their move - that is, the advocates protesting the wolves' move - off the endangered species list.

Sky Watch: One Cloud, Three Views

I had thought I wouldn't get any more dawn shots for a while, but then the sun lit up this cloud last Friday... the pictures are along my walk in to work. I think my favorite is the second one.









more Sky Watchers here

What the who now?

Is he serious? Does he really believe this? Krauthammer writes:

Or do you want a man who is the most prepared, most knowledgeable, most serious foreign policy thinker in the United States Senate?

And yes, he's talking about McCain.

Happy Birthday, Antonie!

Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek was born today in Delft, the Netherlands. Now known as the Father of Microbiology, he was a master of the microscope - which he perfected - and the first to observe and describe single celled organisms, which he referred to as animalcules. He was also the first to record microscopic observations of muscle fibers, bacteria, spermatozoa and blood flow in capillaries

When Elite becomes Regular

The only truly revealing thing about the RNC's Sarah Palin shopping spree is where they went. Of course they spent money on her (which is not to say I have any idea whether it's a legitimate campaign expense; maybe we can ask John Edwards?).

But she's supposed to be this Joe Six-Pack, this "regular American", this (dare I say it?) "real American". They could have dressed her nice from JC Penney or the Hecht Company (are they still around?) or Proffit's.

Instead, they went to Nieman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Barney's New York.

Those are not stores where Ms. Six-Pack shops. And it's typical of the GOP to think that she can stand there in a $3,000 outfit and claim to be average. It's like McCain and his seven houses, eleven cars, and private plane: average for the elite, not for the country.

Happy Birthday, John

Today in 1805, John Russell Bartlett was born. He was a co-founder of the American Ethnological Society and author of that invaluable book, A Dictionary of American Regionalisms (on line here). Some entries:

AMBITION. In North Carolina this word is used instead of the word grudge, as, "I had an ambition against that man." I am credibly informed that it is even used in this manner by educated men.

TO BEAT. To excel, surpass in a contest. Thus we say, one racer or steamer beats another.

Also, to overcome with astonishment, to surprise. We sometimes hear, especially from the mouths of old people, such expressions as "I felt beat," "I was quite beat," i. e. utterly astonished.

NOT BORN IN THE WOODS TO BE SCARED BY AN OWL. Too much used to danger, or threats, to be easily frightened.

CATAWAMPTIOUSLY CHAWED UP. Completely demolished, utterly defeated. One of the ludicrous monstrosities in which the vulgar language of the Southern and Western States abounds.

DIME. (Fr. dixme or dime, tenth.) A silver coin of the United States, in value the tenth of a dollar, or ten cents.

This term, peculiar to our decimal currency, is now in common use at the South and West; but in the Eastern and Northern States, where the Spanish real and half-real have long formed a large portion of the circulation, and where the dime is only now beginning to be common, it is usually called a ten-cent piece, and the half-dime a five-cent piece.

Happy Birthday, Ivan Alekseyevich!

Иван Алексеевич Бунин (Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin) was born to a once-wealthy but impoverished land-owning family in Voronezh, Russia, on this day in 1870 (it was Oct 10, Old Style).

He was a poet, short story writer, and novelist. He wrote poetry first, including the collections "Под открытым небом" (1898 Pod otkrytym nebom, Under Open Skies) and "Листопад" (1901 Listopad, November (Leaf-fall)), and then short stories, the most famous of which include Господин из Сан-Франциско, Gospodin iz San-Frantsisko, The Gentleman from San Francisco), Антоновские яблоки (Antonovskiye yabloki, Antonov's Apples), Сосны (Sosni, Pines), Новая дорога (Novaya doroga, A New Road), and Чернозем (Chernozem, Black Earth), won him great acclaim.

But after 1905, things became darker in Russia and in Bunin's work. His first novels, Деревня (1910, Derevnia, The Village), and Сухдол (1912, Sukhdol, Dry Valley), written before he left Russia after the Revolution, portrayed a decaying countryside which destroyed the image of idealized peasants and garnered more criticism in his native country than praise.

Works written in exile in France include his diary, in which he attacked the Bolsheviks, Окаянные дни (published in 1920, Okayannye Dni, Cursed Days); Жизнь Арсеньева (1933, Zhizn Areseneva, The Life of Arsenev) - first in a projected but unfinished trilogy, Митина любовь (1925, Mitina Lubov, Mitya's Love), Тёмные Аллеи (1946, Tyomnyye Allei, Shadowed Paths) written during the Nazi occupation, and Воспоминания (1950, Vospominaniya, Memories and Portraits). As a translator Bunin was highly regarded. He published in 1898 a translation of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha, for which he was awarded the Pushkin Prize in 1903 by the Russian Academy of Science, to which he was elected in 1909. Among Bunin's other translations were Lord Byron's Manfred and Cain, Tennyson's Lady Godiva, and works from Alfred de Musset, and François Coppée.

Bunin was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1933, but he had become an unperson in the Soviet Union: not only were his books not to be found, his name was unspoken and certainly unwritten.

Here are a few of his poems with my translations:


Неуловимый свет разлился над землею,
Над кровлями безмолвного села.
Отчетливей кричат перед зарею
Далеко на степи перепела.

Нет ни души кругом - ни звука, ни тревоги...
Спят безмятежным сном зеленые овсы...
Нахохлясь, кобчик спит на кочке у дороги,
Покрытый пылью матовой росы...

Но уж светлеет даль... Зелено-серебристый,
Неуловимый свет восходит над землей,
И белый пар лугов, холодный и душистый,
Как фимиам, плывет перед зарей.

1894

The elusive light spills over the earth,
Over the roofs of the silent town.
And before the dawn the quails' clear cries
Can be heard from across the steppe.

Not one soul is about - not a sound, not an alarm...
Untroubled dreams keep the sleeping oats...
Head tucked, the falcon sleeps on the hillock,
His tousled feathers covered in dull, dusty dew...

But light is in the distance now... Silvery green,
The elusive light covers the earth,
And white steam off the meadows, cold and sweet
Like incense, wafts before the dawn.

* * *

РОДИНА

Под небом мертвенно-свинцовым
Угрюмо меркнет зимний день,
И нет конца лесам сосновым,
И далеко до деревень.

Один туман молочно-синий,
Как чья-то кроткая печаль,
Над этой снежною пустыней
Смягчает сумрачную даль.

1896

HOMELAND

Under a sky leaden like death
The wintry day fades into murk;
There is no end to the piney woods
And any villages are far away..

Only fog, milky blue,
Like someone's gentle grief
Thrown over this snowy emptiness,
Softens the twilit distance.

* * *

Все лес и лес. А день темнеет;
Низы синеют, и трава
Седой росой в лугах белеет...
Проснулась серая сова.

На запад сосны вереницей
Идут, как рать сторожевых,
И солнце мутное Жар-Птицей
Горит в их дебрях вековых.

1899

More forest, and more. The day darkens,
Blue grows beneath, and in the meadows grass
With frosty dew grows pale...
The gray owl awakens.

To the west the line of pines
Stretches like an army of guards,
And the sun, smoldering like the Firebird,
Burns their ancient wilderness.

* * *
Не видно птиц. Покорно чахнет
Лес, опустевший и больной,
Грибы сошли, но крепко пахнет
В оврагах сыростью грибной.

Глушь стала тише и светлее,
В кустах свалялася трава,
И, под дождем осенним тлея,
Чернеет темная листва.

А в поле ветер. День холодный
Угрюм и свеж - и целый день
Скитаюсь я в степи свободной,
Вдали от сел и деревень.

И, убаюкан шагом конным,
С отрадной грустью внемлю я,
Как ветер звоном однотонным
Гудит-поет в стволы ружья.

1889

No birds can be seen. Subjected,
The forest withers, emptied and ailing;
Mushrooms are gone, yet in the copses
Lingers still their strong damp scent.

The thickets grow more still and bright,
Grasses tangle in the bushes,
And, moldering under autumn rains
Dark leaves turn ever darker.

But a wind is on the field. A cold day
Both gloomy and fresh - the whole day
I range across the open steppe
Far from village and town.

My horse's steps are a lullaby,
And in a pleasant melancholy
I hear the wind's single unchanging note,
Singing and piping into the barrels of the gun.

A portrait in ice

Cassini takes a gorgeous portrait of Saturn's second-largest moon, Rhea, with the unilluminated rings and Saturn itself in the background. Gorgeous. Simply gorgeous.


As always, visit the Cassini site for more

Dawn...

Until the time change - and maybe even then - it's about over for sunrises and me. It's quite dark now when I get to the bus stop - dark enough to see all of Orion, and his dogs, not just Sirius and Rigel. This may be the last good sunrise picture till spring.

What's Important 55

Fifty-fifth in a series.

From John McCain himself, via the Washington Post's "The Trail":

The brochure, which is being sent to voters in Virginia and Missouri, features a picture of what is either a plane about to crash into a building full of people or an airport departure gate, along with the words: "Terrorists Don't Care Who They Hurt."

The other side of the mailer says: "Barack Obama Thinks Terrorists Just Need a Good Talking To."

Controversial? Yes. But is McCain proud of it? Absolutely, according to an interview McCain gave to KDSD, a local television station in Missouri.

In the interview, McCain is shown the flier and asked if he's proud of it. "Absolutely," he said.

McCain went on to say that the point is that "Obama would sit down and meet, unconditionally, with the leaders of nations that sponsor terrorism." But no one could possibly glean that stand from that brochure. "Leaders of nations" aren't mentioned, only "terrorists".

John McCain doesn't care who he hurts, either.

Happy Birthday, Ursula

Today in 1929, Ursula K. LeGuin was born. I've read much of her work, but never knew the K was for Kroeber, or that her father was Alfred Kroeber, the "dean of American anthropology" and the man who studied Ishi, the last Yahi.

Throw mama from the yacht...

Here's a nice headline:

Man convicted of killing couple thrown off yacht

Who threw him off, I wonder...

Update: A friend suggested "Maybe he was sentenced to be thrown off the yacht. Like the Tarpeian cliffs only milder."

Missing the point. Missing the whole barn, in fact

So, the New York Post wishes Cheney well after his heart problems. And they add:

That not all Americans would wish Cheney a quick recovery is a sad commentary on a currently polarized society.

Yes, Cheney is one of the most controversial VPs in US history, but he is also an extraordinarily dedicated public servant.

During a period of profound international instability and danger, Cheney has been unafraid to make tough decisions. Indeed, he's been a forceful presence in the Bush administration.

In return, he has been demonized by Democrats, liberal activists and the media.

You know what? Cheney has been a "forceful presence" "unafraid to make tough decisions". I'll even grant that he's "extraordinarily dedicated". But the decisions have been dangerous, illegal, and possibly even genuinely evil. His forcefulness has caused not one country in a major survey to call relations with the US "friendly"- including the UK.

Being unafraid to do the wrong thing is no virtue.


(hat tip to Dan Froomkin's White House Watch)

Monday Science Links

This week's science is all about the old:

• Mike the Mad Biologists points us at the oldest bug ever discovered: The exquisitely-detailed fossil has been identified as the imprint left 310 million years ago by a primitive mayfly that lighted briefly on a muddy outcropping in what was then a steamy Carboniferous Period flood plain.


• Scicurious at Neurotopia (v 2.0) also has something really old: If you're a history geek like myself (and I assume some of you reading this blog must me, and if you are, I salute you!), there's a few diseases that really pop into your mind when you think of big diseases in history. The Black Death, smallpox, the Influenza epidemic of 1918, polio, etc. And you can't forget tuberculosis. Formerly referred to as "consumption", tuberculosis (or TB) has been found in humans since antiquity. There are Egyptian mummies with evidence of TB. A form of TB which infected the lymphatic system used to be known as scrofula, "the king's evil", and in the middle ages, kings and queens would hold touchings where they would touch scrofula victims in order to heal them. There are tons of references to TB in literature and film. In the film Moulin Rouge, Nicole Kidman dies of consumption, and I always remember those books I used to read as a child that had ghosts in them of children who had died of TB in the Victorian era. And of course where would literature be if it weren't for the delicate consumptive Romantic poets. Even now TB is pretty common, everyone in my department has to get TB tests twice a year at least in order to conduct animal research.


• GrrlScientist at Living the Scientific Life, too, on something pretty old: new research on Tiktalik: Based on the based on the lack of transitional fossil forms, it has been widely assumed that the transition from an aquatic animal with fins and gills to a terrestrial animal with limbs and lungs was an abrupt event. However, meticulous studies of the internal structure of the cranium from the fishapod, T. roseae, reveal the necessary morphological changes that underlie terrestriality actually occurred in a stepwise process.
  


• Judith at Zenobia: Empress of the East talks about something not quite so old, Classical Athens - and a woman's place therein: An exhibition at the Onassis Cultural Center in New York will soon explore the many ways in which women’s religious worship contributed not just to their personal fulfilment but to the civic identity of the leading city of the Classical Greek world as well. Worshipping Women seeks to correct "the unremittingly bleak picture that the lives of Athenian women were highly restricted when it came to the public sphere and participation in the political process. The involvement of women in cults and festivals ... was as essential for the successful functioning of the polis as that of any member of society." I wish them luck. Of course, a woman's life wasn't 'unremittingly bleak' but it was certainly unremittingly patriarchal. The idea of women taking part in the public business of the polis would have seemed inherently comical to Athenian citizens (males only, of course). That's what's behind Aristophanes, in some of his surviving plays, where he chuckles, gurgles, and snorts at women pretending to take on the roles of men instead of staying at home.
  


• And finally, Martin at Aardvarchaeology talks about how we know old: Recently I organised a few days' excavation that didn't turn up the kind of stuff I was hoping for. Still, I brought some materials home that may serve to shed some light on what exactly it was we dug into. All those nondescript little pits, all those sooty hearths full of cracked stone -- when were they made and used?how Enter radiocarbon. This dating method works on anything organic, that is, anything with carbon in it. Running one sample costs about $500, so you have multiple reasons to be smart about which samples you send to the lab. I thought my thinking about this might interest you, Dear Reader. We dug 175 sunken features, but I don't have 175 samples. Most features yielded no datable material (in these situations, usually charcoal, other charred plant remains or bone). Of those that did, many also contained modern junk identifying them as recent refuse pits. I don't want to spend any money dating them.

Enjoy!

The Week in Entertainment

Film: Rachel Getting Married - highly recommended. An engrossing, well-acted look into a family almost destroyed by - I almost said a single act, but it's more like one shocking high (or low) point in the slow self-destruction of the middle child. And yet, the movie makes you laugh as well, makes you feel good, and ends on a note of painful hope. This film is well worth watching.

TV: The Mentalist - still good. Pushing Daisies, also still good, and at last Olive's coming home! And I hate the DVR, which occasionally just decides it doesn't like a series. Last year, SG Atlantis - this year, much worse. House. Argh. Must wait a week to find it online. Must program individual shows...) Eleventh Hour. Still liking this one, too. Finally saw Se7en - don't know why I hadn't seen it before. I think I thought it would be graphically violent. It's not - it's almost all in your own head. Damn, it's brilliant. "You know this isn't going to have a happy ending," says Morgan Freeman's character, and he's so right, but it ended the only way it could have. Chilling.

Read: Sunstorm (released in the UK as The Savage Altar though it's Solstorm in Swedish) by Åsa Larsson (had to look up how pronounce Swedish names). Very, very good. I'll be reading more by her - in fact, I just picked up her second one. And how odd that "Grill" is consided "an elegant surname"; I suppose it's because it isn't a patronymic. Another terrific Swede, Steig Larsson (no relation) - The Girl With the Dragon Tatoo (Män Som Hatar Kvinnor - Men Who Hate Women - in Swedish). An excellent first novel; unfortunately Larsson died before it was published, leaving two more completed manuscripts. As one reviewer said, we mourn and praise at the same time.

Carnival of Maryland

The latest edition of Carnival of Maryland is up at Prince Georges Journal.

UU Mom has put together a good selection of posts from bloggers around the state. Something there will appeal to you, so check it out.

Pronouns and tense?

And speaking of the Unbound Bible, I just spotted this puzzling statement at the end of a search result:

Pronouns referring to God are not capitalized in the ASV, as they are not in the NIV and some others, breaking the tradition of the KJV. Since Hebrew has no such thing as tense, and the oldest Greek manuscripts are all upper case, anyway, this tradition was based only on English usage around 1600, anyway. Not capitalizing these pronouns solves some translational problems, such as the coronation psalms, which refer equally well to an earthly king and to God.

In the first place, Hebrew most certainly has tense (past, present, and future). All languages have some way to indicate tense; even non-inflectional ones like Chinese use particles to show if the action already happened or not. But Hebrew inflects its verbs (boy, does it inflect its verbs.)

But even if it didn't, what on earth would that have to do with whether or not the ASV chose to capitalize a pronoun?

Somebody needed to edit that paragraph.

Sun Day

To make the truth inaccessible

So I was reading a review of "Frank and Casper Go To Church" at amazon.com, and one reviewer said this:

If the aim was to increase the church's sensitivity in making things more accessible to the masses of un-churched, we must take into consideration that not even Jesus was understood by all his contemporaries. He used parables to make truth accessible, and they still did not understand (Matt. 13:14, 15).

Except that if you read Matt. 13:11-13 you get a very different story. Jesus used parables not "to make truth accessible" but rather to hide it from those unworthy of hearing it. He explicitly says so when asked why he uses parables and, in fact, this is the place where the infamous "For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath" is spoken.

Jesus had the secret of how to get to heaven, but he chose to speak (like some oracle or wizard in a bad fantasy novel) in parables and riddles to prevent the wrong people from finding it out. And then he damned them to hell for not getting it...

This attitude is, of course, mirroring that of the Old Testament, where God would routinely harden someone's heart and then kill them because their heart was hard. (Or kill others, like, oh, all the Egyptian babies.) Knowledge of God is a gift and God decides who's worthy and who isn't. And hey, that's fine. Assuming God exists, who's going to tell him how to run the universe? It's not very nice, it's not fair, it's not exactly good, but it's his game.

What gets me is the way Christians try to pretend that this isn't the way God works - even to ignoring the plain meaning of the words they quote Jesus saying.

Matthew, Chapter 13 (from the Unbound Bible:

10. And the disciples came and said to Him, "Why do You speak to them in parables?"
11. Jesus answered them, "To you it has been granted to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been granted.
12. "For whoever has, to him more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has shall be taken away from him.
13. "Therefore I speak to them in parables; because while seeing they do not see, and while hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.
14. "In their case the prophecy of Isaiah is being fulfilled, which says, `You will keep on hearing, but will not understand;
you will keep on seeing, but will not perceive;
15. for the heart of this people has become dull,
with their ears they scarcely hear,
and they have closed their eyes,
otherwise they would see with their eyes,
and understand with their heart and return,
and I would heal them.'
16. "But blessed are your eyes, because they see; and your ears, because they hear.
17. "For truly I say to you that many prophets and righteous men desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it.

A little knowledge ...

... can ruin a joke. Over at Sinfest today Tatsuya gives us State-Sponsored Comic Strip #2. Here are the opening and closing panels:

People do this all the time to achieve a stylistic effect. A friend of mine once suffered what he describes as the most amazing feeling of dyslexia trying to read the credits for Red Heat, with the English words and the Cyrillic characters. That's what happened to me today with Sinfest.

I actually read the first two words as "aeed eeosh" before realizing what he was doing. The substitution of Я (ya) for R is old stuff, and so is И (which is (continental) I) for N - but the others... he used the Ё for E, but that letter is pronounced YO. This one Й is a consonantal Y. СОМІК is good in Ukrainian Cyrillic, a kind of fish (СОМИК in Russian), but it's pronounced someek. Ш is SH, and Ц is TS. Ч is the CH of 'church', and unfortunately ЧОЦ is completely pronounceable - as CHOTS. Also, he picked Ч instead of У for his Y (У is U) which is what I'm a bit more used to seeing in this pastiche alphabet. Still, by the end of the strip I wasn't really having trouble. H is a good Cyrillic letter - it's N - as is Д (D), so НД took me a bit, even in context, to figure out: HO HO HO HA HA HA, not ND ND ND...

But I got it all figured out without much trouble. Except for this: ФВЁЧ

ФВЁЧ is FVYoCh. But trying to get Latin letters - and going back from ЧОЦ = YOU - all I could come up with was ?BEY. I couldn't get FBEY out of my head for the longest time, since there was no Latin letter I could think of that resembled Ф. (There's theta, of course - Ф is often used to go in Russian from a TH, since that sound doesn't exist in Russian, hence all the Fyodors from Theodore, but ThBEY (or TBEY) didn't make any sense, either, even if it had fit the pattern.)

It was probably five minutes before I figured it out. Some of you are laughing at me. But in case you are, instead, still wondering - obviously Tatsuya wanted that whole word to look "Soviet", and instead of the perfectly good Cyrillic letter that actually matches the Roman one perfectly, he selected one that sorta kinda matches. But not the one he used in COMIK! Damn you, Tatsuya! Can't you be consistent? OВЁЧ would have been easier to decode ... into OBEY.

I'll bet it was much funnier and much more comprehensible to people who don't know the Cyrillic alphabet(s).