messiestobjects

What ARE They Teaching Them In Schools These Days?

    As part of my month in California, I spent a couple of weeks in Barstow where there is... not much. A lot of pretty desert rocks, a tiny portion of kitchy Route 66, and a drive-in movie theater. Which, in the desert, is a pretty spectacular thing to do. Also, Fort Irwin; that's where my job was, hence the astounding tank crossing sign. Anyway, I have more pictures and not much else to say about the trip so, enjoy some blogfill on using critical thought in History class.

    Please post at least two paragraphs on the role of Native American Indians in the early history of the American Republic, particularly with regard to the rise of Tecumseh and Indian Nationalism. Consider as well the role of the tribes in the War of 1812.

_____________________________________________________________________________

 

It seems to me that Native Americans primarily played the role of an annoyance who were in the way of white men taking what they wanted, with regards to the way they are described in the histories of America at the time. At best they were portrayed as “noble savages” by the likes of President Jefferson, deserving of white education and civilization with the lofty and smug goal of eventual assimilation. At worst they were demonized as simply murderous savages, and there seemed to be a great big blind spot with regards to why, exactly, the Indians were always attacking white settlements, or at the very least a shameless lack of guilt. Imagine if I came over to your house, uninvited, took all your stuff and then said I was doing you a favor by letting you stay in the basement! This is what the colonists did, in effect, and we shouldn’t be the least bit surprised that they sometimes got a bit pissed about it.

During the lead-up to the war of 1812, Tenskwatawa, a Shawnee, had a religious revelation after giving up alcohol. He saw the influence of the whites in his homeland as a great evil, and he and his brother Tecumseh worked to make a confederation of Native Americans in order to stop the invader’s gluttonous westward expansion into their lands. They were helped in this by the British, who were trying to harry and distract American troops in aid to their own war. Once the Americans had secured several important and bloody victories over the Indian Tribes, they were free to direct their fuller attention toward the British.

 

 

 

Author: Jenna

Posted Date:

Tuesday, February 26, 2013 4:26:28 PM EST

Something I'm curious about, with the slaughtering of women and children at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend...that part seemed to me to jump out the most in the chapter, and it seems like it also did for you. Maybe because it seemed that they had possibly gotten past these ways, but I'm curious if the Native Americans also used these tactics when raiding white settlements. My guess is yes, they did, and I might have overlooked if the book had ever pointed out a case in which they did. And if the book didn't say anything about it, and it did happen, I'm wondering if they chose to leave it out in order to make Americans during that time seem more barbaric than the Native Americans to people today. While I agree that the Native Americans had a right to be angry for the white settlers driving them off their land, it seems to me that both sides were guilty in that aspect. Maybe this is one of those cases where, since we were not there at the time, history can be a bit biased, when in reality showing both sides may spark a different reaction. The way I see it, it seems that Native Americans and white settlers were both hostile from the very beginning, and both sides were equally responsible for the way things turned out. I'm also curious if the warriors in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend tried to use their women and children in battle as some people do today, with whom America is in conflict with...as human shields. Maybe there was slaughtering of the women and children in general, but I might have to do some research (or maybe the Professor can clear this up for me), it seems that this situation might not be so black and white. Either way, yes, it is not right that women and children were killed in the battle. But it might not have been completely the American's fault.

And to clear up the "human shield" part, I'm talking about people using their women and children basically as canon fodder in their battle, maybe not literally using them as a shield.

Author: messiestobjects

Posted Date:

Tuesday, February 26, 2013 7:39:27 PM EST

      You pose an interesting point Jenna, but there are some unpleasant matters to consider when you ask if American Indians are also guilty of murdering women and children. The first point is that the colonists were the aggressors: they came here, took lands, and continued to push the Indians out of the lands of their ancestors.
      The second point is that the Natives were a nomadic tribal society. They traveled the continent as need dictated, hunted, gathered, and survived as a warrior society, and lived in large but diverse family units. When they were threatened, they fought or ran. Killing women and children in what they saw as the defense of their home, their very way of life was not hypocritical or immoral in their world view, it was simply what they had to do to survive, to keep the whites from stealing any more from them.
     The third point is that, for a nation claiming to be democratic, where everyone is equal, it was simply another hypocritical evil act—in addition to being slave-owners—to kill women and children who simply refused to accept our tyranny.
     I am not trying to debate the relative morality of killing defenseless women and children, and that is not what Native American "apologia" is trying to do. Rather, it is the attempt to point out that these kind of blatantly greedy, self-serving- and utterly hypocritical acts of the United States should never be accepted as justified, or we risk continuing the acceptance of evil committed in our name for now, then and any future acts which fit such apologetic criteria. In other words, if we really desire to be the bastion of freedom, a democratic gold standard for justice and blah blah blah, then we can't be blind to our own mistakes, or we will never really be worthy of anything other than destruction at the hands of other rebellions trying to slay a wicked dragon.

 

 

 

Author: Jenna  

Posted Date:

Tuesday, February 26, 2013 9:36:35 PM EST

I can definitely see your point, they would want to point out that what Americans did was not right, but my point is how history can be a bit biased. And not saying that is wrong, maybe it is probably a case of that information having never been recorded. While yes you can consider us coming to the New World a mistake, others may not think so. I think it would have been inevitable. Now some of the ways that Americans went about things (slavery, converting, raiding, etc) were wrong, but some of what happened was inevitable and needs to be seen from their point of view, and the book does not do much of that. Now, the way I see it, Americans had the hostility and were pushing them back because they did not trust them, for the most part. And I don't think that's crazy...is it right? No, but this is where I point out that it isn't a black-and-white situation. The Native American's were not a completely civil people when we arrived here, and people became prejudiced against them. And that is why I think both sides are at fault, and personally I'd like to hear more of the wrongs on both sides, not just the Americans. I think the Native Americans could have done things differently in the beginning too, and things like this could have been avoided, just like if Americans had done things differently. Now specifically about the Battle of Horseshoe Bend...I would have preferred to read about both sides, and maybe the other side isn't there to read...but I'm thinking that if the Indians had in fact stood behind their innocents in the battle, who is really at fault here? In my mind, it's both. Definitely a messed up situation, but the Americans were also fighting to protect what they believed in...so are they more wrong for doing it, or are the Indians more wrong for allowing their women and children to stand in front of them? I guess we'll never know the whole story, but in my opinion they were both wrong.

 

Author: History Professor  

Posted Date:

Wednesday, February 27, 2013 1:52:03 PM EST

Jenna, you are correct in arguing that history is frequently subjective (but I don't think biased) in that historians interpret evidence in different ways.  It is certainly true that not all Indian societies were alike.  Some were nomadic, others sedentary, some hunters, others farmers.  In addition, some were relatively peaceful and others more war like.  The Comanches and Teton Sioux (Lakota) were particularly violent societies, protective of their land and willing to fight back and remove those who tried to take it.  Like other human societies, Indians were territorial and protective of their homelands,

That said, it is difficult to argue that both "sides" take equal responsibility for atrocities committed during the Indian wars.  What were sometimes described as 'battles' in the common lexicon and the press were more often punitive attacks against Indian villages to demoralize and exterminate them.  Horseshoe Bend is a good example of that type of assault.  It was a brutal attack on the Creeks and their allies, and as far as we know, the Indians never used their children and women as "human shields."  Jefferson, Jackson and others of that time were intent on removing the Eastern tribes from their ancestral lands to make room for white settlements.  They enjoyed a superiority in numbers and weaponry that made that removal all but certain.  Very few Americans at that time objected to whatever tactics were used to accomplish that goal.  In the long run, the Eastern tribes (and later the western tribes) never had a chance.

Author: messiestobjects

Posted Date:

Wednesday, February 27, 2013 9:42:16 AM EST

 The problem though Jenna is that you are trying to ascribe equivalent moral value to any atrocities that the Indians committed vs. the same ones that whites committed. Look at it this way:

         My neighbor Tom and his wife Diane invite my family over for dinner. They have a 6 year-old daughter, we have a 6 year-old boy. We go over, have a nice dinner, notice that they have an old tiny black & white TV. After dinner, we attack them, slaughter the daughter, rape and murder Diane, and then tie up Tom and throw him in the basement. My wife and I say to each other, "Can you effing believe it?! Black and white TV?!!" As we move into their house, and bring in our glorious 60-inch HD Internet ready TV and surround system, Tom manages to escape from the basement and go get some friends. They come back and murder my son, rape and kill my wife, and I get away. Then I cry for justice because hey, they murdered women and children too.

         You see, there's a difference. Maybe not a great one in the sense that rape and murder are never "moral," but there is one in that it does actually matter who is the aggressor and who is the defender. In regards to your situation where the Indians stood behind their innocents... Well I wasn't there but maybe they thought that even the white devil couldn't be so depraved as to murder women and children in battle, or perhaps they were sending a message to the white man that if you are going to take our lands, you must be forced to face the cost of what you are really taking from us, our very lives, and families. Indians often had an odd sense of honor that way. In any case, the Americans were fighting because they believed they had a right to land that belonged to a people who were already living on it. If you can equate "what they believed in" to what the Indians believed in, then I'm afraid we will never come to an agreement on this.

Author: Jenna  

Posted Date:

Wednesday, February 27, 2013 1:13:24 PM EST

 Well I think we just have different views on who provoked the violence, and yes it is a valid assumption that it was completely the fault of the "white devil" since Native Americans were here first. But Native Americans also had a chance to coexist with the Americans, and instead they would not accept their ways just like the Americans wouldn't accept theirs. Now thinking that whites were horrible for taking land means you should probably think that the tribes that waged war over land well before whites came to America were horrible too. So in reality it's just humanity in general that gets this way. I think we can agree on that.

Author: messiestobjects

Posted Date:

Wednesday, February 27, 2013 2:00:04 PM EST

 I understand your position, but my main problem here is that you are trying to ascribe a moral system to the Indians that simply doesn't exist. The Indians never claimed to be Democratic, or to have a bill of Rights, or to be particularly moral according to any definition that the whites were trying to impose. They were a free people, and their only code of morals when dealing with the invaders was one of survival. The fact that the natives were willing to welcome and even help the first settlers says a lot about their overall human morals. They did not begin the aggression, the colonists did, and it's not the case that the Natives wouldn't accept American ways, just like it's not the case that my neighbor Tom wouldn't accept my gift of an HD TV.

     I agree that human nature is generally monstrous, but that's only an excuse for the Colonists in this case. All else being equal, it was the Americans who broke the peace, and behaved in a monstrous manner towards the Natives. Acting in defense does not have the same moral failing.

 

Author: Jenna  

Posted Date:

Wednesday, February 27, 2013 8:16:53 PM EST

So I can see what you're saying except for the moral code part...so just because they weren't as advanced as the whites were, they should have gotten a free pass for any violence they would have shown? And I'm definitely in no way saying that the Americans were not horrible for the things they did, I'm trying to point out that neither side was completely innocent. Having the morals we have now and how that seems completely barbaric to us, it may not have been that way back then. I'm trying to put myself in their situation (the Europeans/Americans)...what would have made them snap at the Indians like that? I mean personally, if I showed up in America and saw some of the tribes actually sacrifice their own people, I probably would have been a little cautious too. And I understand that wasn't all of them and some Europeans might have just wanted the Native Americans gone because they were different, but sometimes there are just horrible people that do horrible things (and so we learn to not do those things when we look back). Now the Native Americans aren't wrong for defending their land, that's not my point either...basically I'm just saying that it's people, some people can be horrible in general. And since we are just learning about American history, obviously we are going to be taught what the Americans did and what they did wrong, but in some parts I think having knowledge of how the Native Americans had acted or did would have been helpful in understanding the past even more.
        I don't think we'll ever come to an agreement because you think that it was absolutely the whites that started the violence, I think it could have been the Native Americans (you're kind of reinforcing it by saying they basically had no moral code), but we'll never really know...and Europeans are not any less at fault if the Native Americans had started it, they could have just left...but that's the point, they weren't going too, they saw things differently than the Native Americans did. You say it's okay for the Native Americans to have a certain frame of mind and that excuses their actions, but so did the Americans, and yet they are the ones you find completely at fault. That's why I'm trying to think of how all of this could have happened, what could have made them tick...to me it seems both are at fault, it's just one of them was more advanced and gained control in the end. Yes, it's horrible, but it's history...it's messy with everyone, not just Americans. And of course, knowing what was wrong with your specific country's past is good to learn so that it is not repeated, and I don't have a problem with that, I think that is a great thing. Just kind of wondering about the things that are left out, which we will probably never know.

Author: messiestobjects

Posted Date:

Wednesday, February 27, 2013 11:23:00 PM EST

      I think you're mixing up the American Indians of the north with the Aztecs... American Indians didn't perform human sacrifice, to the best of my knowledge. Also, I did not say that they had no moral code, I said that you can't judge them based on what your own morals are, and that their morals were, in the 1812 era, entirely survival based.

      I will agree with you that a more detailed history of the Americas written from the Indian's perspective would be great, but I don't think that it would contain what you're looking for. I do find the Colonists entirely at fault for the genocide of the Indians, the same way I find the Nazis entirely at fault for the genocide of European Jews during WWII.
 
     Rather than continue on in this vein however, let me ask a question. You say that it seems to you that the Natives are as much at fault for their own destruction as the colonists, but what is this feeling based on? Where is your evidence for this claim? As far as I can see, there is no factual evidence that supports your interpretation.

 

Author: Jenna

Posted Date:

Thursday, February 28, 2013 12:22:03 AM EST

 

My point of this entire thing was to say that I'm curious about the whole story. Simple as that, and if what I found if we knew the whole story was that the Native Americans were completely innocent human beings who absolutely accepted the Europeans when they came here, then I'd 100% agree with you. I'm saying as far as accepting one another, neither side did a good job of that, that is why this happened, and I'm curious about exactly why neither side would compromise. That is what I'm basing it on.
        I think we are here arguing because you are telling me what happened as far as history knows, and I'm telling you that I'm curious about why those things happened the way they did, the things that history wouldn't necessarily know. This seems a bit silly...lol.

 

Author:  History Professor

Posted Date:

Friday, March 1, 2013 8:41:08 AM EST

These events and their causes are pretty well documented, Jenna.  What you are saying relative to shared responsibility makes sense; atrocities were committed by both sides.  However, the Native American population throughout the hemisphere was decimated (literally--perhaps 90% of them had died following the European settlement).  They had a very strong moral code, but couldn't understand and would not accept the notion that the US was entitled to their lands.  It's a classic case of a clash between civilizations with very different definitions of what it meant to be human and civilized.  To the Indians, the American were barbarians; to the Americans, the Indians were savages, and heathens (non-Christians) as well.  Given those mind sets, there was very little room for compromise or a peaceful permanent resolution to their differences.

Author: messiestobjects

Posted Date:

Saturday, March 2, 2013 9:14:10 AM EST 

      Ok Jenna, but here's the problem. Your initial statement that started this whole thing off was this:
     "I'm curious if the Native Americans also used these tactics when raiding white settlements. My guess is yes, they did, and I might have overlooked if the book had ever pointed out a case in which they did. And if the book didn't say anything about it, and it did happen, I'm wondering if they chose to leave it out in order to make Americans during that time seem more barbaric than the Native Americans to people today."
     This is why I finally asked you for the evidence that you were basing your suppositions on. You can't just say something like, 'there's no evidence for what I choose to believe, but I'm going to guess that there is evidence out there somewhere, and then build a wild theory on top of it.' Without evidence as a starting point, you've got nothing, you've built a tower on quicksand. That's not to say you're necessarily wrong in your suppositions, but until you can come up with something tangible to back up your claim, your idea that Indians might share as much blame in the atrocities of that time period as the colonists is then simply a religious belief, in the sense that you're basing your claim on faith rather than reality.

Author: Jenna

Posted Date:

Sunday, March 3, 2013 6:19:43 PM EST

 I am definitely allowed to have my own opinion, and you saying the they have a "survival" moral code tells me you think they were capable of it too. This is not a wild theory, I'm saying that I'm curious about the Indians having committed some of those acts, whether or not you think they're actions were justified (and I'd like to point out I never said EITHER sides actions were justified, or that the Native Americans were not). Like the professor said, this was a collision of cultures. And I never said that evidence was out there, it is something I was curious about. My theory (or rather a question, not a whole theory) came from the (very few) comments in the book on the hostility from the Native Americans. If you want to take everything as it is shown and not question whether there are other sources out there that may have better insight, I'd say you're argument against me is more based on faith. I think what you're trying to say is I'm religious (I'm not) and that I'm trying to act like my statement is fact. And by the way, in reality we do not have ALL the facts, so arguing with me about something I'm curious about when you can't even prove it wrong is going to get you nowhere.

  Author: messiestobjects

Posted Date:

Sunday, March 3, 2013 8:24:34 PM EST

  I am definitely allowed to have my own opinion,
Absolutely. But opinions are only as good as the facts they are based on.

and you saying the they have a "survival" moral code tells me you think they were capable of it too.
What?

This is not a wild theory, I'm saying that I'm curious about the Indians having committed some of those acts, whether or not you think they're actions were justified
Which acts? The ones you made up about them using women and children as shields, or the murders they committed in the defense of their way of life?

(and I'd like to point out I never said EITHER sides actions were justified, or that the Native Americans were not).
No, you just said that the Indians may be equally as culpable as the settlers for the war between them.

Like the professor said, this was a collision of cultures.
Agreed, but this has no bearing on our discussion.

And I never said that evidence was out there, it is something I was curious about.
Well that's part of your problem right there. I am curious whether or not there are alien life forms living beneath the icy surface of Europa, but I'm not about to argue with anyone about what color they are. What I mean is, arguing about the nature of something (whether the Indians committed certain atrocities) when you don't even know whether it exists or not (no evidence for such a supposition exists) is rather like flogging a dead horse.

My theory (or rather a question, not a whole theory) came from the (very few) comments in the book on the hostility from the Native Americans.
These comments in the book would count as evidence towards your theory... when I asked what your evidence for your suppositions is, that would have been a good time to quote them, so we could discuss their relevance in regard to your proposal.

If you want to take everything as it is shown and not question whether there are other sources out there that may have better insight, I'd say you're argument against me is more based on faith.
Nonsense. I am always open to new evidence, and I will gladly change my opinion if such evidence that I was previously unaware of suggests that I should. That's why I asked you for some. You've created what is known as a straw man argument here by suggesting that I don't want to hear any information that might go against what I believe in, and this indeed would be a faith based argument. But simply wondering aloud whether any evidence exists which might back up a claim that YOU made, and then saying that I am the one making a faith-based argument because I won't go out and find it is disingenuous. It is up to you to find evidence to support your claim, not me, and in any case if it is an authoritative argument that you want, the Professor also said that the facts from the time are pretty well known and he didn't seem to think that your supposition had any merit.

I think what you're trying to say is I'm religious (I'm not) and that I'm trying to act like my statement is fact.
No. I was using religion as an analogy. Also, you are not acting like your statement is fact, you are acting like your supposition has merit (which is different), and what I am saying is that without any evidence, your supposition has no merit.

And by the way, in reality we do not have ALL the facts, so arguing with me about something I'm curious about when you can't even prove it wrong is going to get you nowhere.
You keep saying that you were only saying that you were curious about this, but that isn't really how this whole thing went. You did ask a question in your original response to me, and I disagreed. You disagreed right back and so on... That's the nature of a debate. If you want to bow out because this argument is getting you nowhere, that's fine, but I actually quite enjoy debates of this sort as muddy thinking bothers me, and I get a kick out of pointing it out whenever someone engages in it. But to really drive the point home, you are saying that I can't prove you wrong because we don't have all the facts. How about this? I believe that there is a tiny bright green elephant who orbits a planet in a galaxy 30 billion light years away who sends people to hell for all eternity for saying that the American Indians share equal blame in their own genocide. You can't prove that I'm wrong to believe this, therefore my belief has merit. You might as well not even argue with me because it's just something I'm curious about. Now, you might think I'm being ridiculous for being curious about something so... ridiculous, but that is exactly what you or anyone else is doing when they try to assert an opinion or a supposition without any reason backing it up. As Christopher Hitchens so famously said, what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

 

Author: History Professor

Posted Date:

Monday, March 4, 2013 8:28:00 AM EST

Edited Date:

Monday, March 4, 2013 8:28:00 AM EST

 

Interesting rebuttal,  messiestobjects , but there is a line between a spirited discussion and a cross examination.  I'm not saying that you crossed it, but you're close.

 

Author: messiestobjects

Posted Date:

Monday, March 4, 2013 11:31:56 AM EST

 I'm sorry that you think so, Professor. My motive is simply that I enjoy a spirited debate, but when bad logic enters the discussion it has to be pointed out, or the debate can't go anywhere.

 

Author: Jenna

Posted Date:

Monday, March 4, 2013 12:46:17 PM EST

Well this is just laughable now.

 

Author: messiestobjects

Posted Date:

Monday, March 4, 2013 1:26:59 PM EST

 On that, at least, we can agree.

The Prison Of Modern Life

    It's gotten to the point where a trip to California doesn't get it's own blog post any more. I think that may mean that I'm getting to be a grumpy jaded traveler. Alcatraz? Humbug. Desultorily snap a few photos, move on. I was in the San Francisco area for two weeks in a row. Alcatraz seriously made me grumpy.

    Oh looky, a notorious piece of American History! "Isn't it fascinating?", the boat and tour guides insist. A prison! Where some famous criminals were incarcerated like so much animal meat. Yay America! Bah.

    I admit, I was drawn to go see it by all the hype. "You gotta see Alcatraz while you're in San Fran, it's famous!", pop culture insists. But of course, once I paid my 20 bits and took the boat ride, I realized that I had just spent money to go see a bunch of rotting old buildings which once upon a time housed nothing but human misery and I am somehow supposed to believe that it is a worthwhile expenditure. "We don't know exactly which cell was Al Capone's but hey look, they're all the same!"

    Al Capone, the "Birdman" of Alcatraz... these are a part of some sort of mythic pantheon of America's recent rough-and-tumble past. But you know what? They were murderers and thieves, and our answer was to treat them like animals rather than men. Isn't it cool? Isn't it fascinating? Isn't prison worth preserving? America, fuck yeah.

    Escape from Alcatraz! You can see the Golden Gate Bridge through the door in the bay there, even though it's really red, not gold. My drive down to the Big Basin Redwoods State Park was much more pleasant.

    Big, giant, man-eating trees! Well, big giant trees, anyway. And gnarly. The shots I took of me standing in front of this next one--in order to show the scale--turned out pretty lousy. But if I were standing in front of it, my head would come up to just above where those two little nubbins hanging down from the big knob in the center of the photo are.

    Ohmygod, they really are man-eaters! Standing inside of a big tree is neat-o.

    This next tree is called the Father of the Forest. Probably because it's really big. Like, really really big.

    And this last tree is called the Mother of the Forest, although they placed the sign that tells you so on the face opposite of it's most distinguishing feature. I wonder why?

    Anywho, my job was actually situated in Menlo Park, which is in Silicon Valley. Our client was SRI, the Stanford Research Institute, who not only sent the very first communication ever over the "internet" back in the 1969, but is essentially the grandfather of Silicon Valley itself, being responsible for encouraging students (when it was still a branch of the University, and had not yet been pinched off as a private company) to open computery-type businesses in the area... And they hired us to teach them how to get certified in some computer program. My job is pretty cool sometimes. So, I got to see a bit of where the modern era began, although the area isn't much to look at. It's all big buildings with locked doors and security guards because they're busy inventing big important world-changing technology there all the time, and no they don't have time to give you a tour. Go away now please. Humph. But I did find an Easter Egg.

    No, me being grumpy in front of facebook is not the Easter Egg. Although hey, pretty meta, right? If the tree on the left was a bit more rounded, it would look like the facebook thumbs-up icon is being shoved up someone's butt. Ha! But no, the Easter Egg is what's behind the facebook sign. Apparently, facebook leased or bought their corporate headquarters building from Oracle, who own a piece of Silicon Valley history.

Vitamins B(ald) & E(agles) Are Recommended By Crying Chief

    Eagles! Four of us drove up to Lackawaxen, PA several weeks ago to hit a spot where the Lackawaxen River meets the Delaware River on the New York border and bald eagles like to congregate. For the fish. It wound up being pretty exciting because I was thinking about how, growing up in the 70s and early 80s, the word on the birds was that they were disappeared, very rare, nearly extinct. To actually see them around now is exciting and probably worthy of some sort of American Indian quote about soaring hearts or summ'at, but no. We saw about seven of them. My pictures are lame though, because I need a better telephoto lens. Mine is cheap-o. Also, that's all I have to report. So the rest of this blog will be other bad bald eagle pictures, and a response I had to write for English class last year on an article in the NY Times by Michael Pollan. Yup, I'm scraping up the dregs.

    Michael Pollan artfully defines “food” as anything your great-great-grandmother would recognize as such, and his point is that in modern times the industry has drastically altered our perception of what qualifies as real food. Pollan says that part of the reason people have a difficult time eating real food is that when you walk into a grocery store the “most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over, the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming about their newfound whole-grain goodness.” He has a decidedly sneering attitude about such health claims, and with good reason; in 1977, George McGovern “prepared what by all rights should have been an uncontroversial document called ‘Dietary Goals for the United States’… calling on Americans to cut down on red meat and dairy products.” The red-meat and dairy industry bellowed, and this very practical advice was drowned out. In Pollan’s view and in mine, the food industry has since waged a campaign of misinformation about American health.

    In 2007, at 35 years old, 5’ 11” and 220 lbs., my doctor told me my cholesterol was high and wrote a prescription for Lipitor. Concurrently I had seen a specialist about my arms frequently going numb during sleep and was told that I had pre-carpal tunnel syndrome, meaning that it wasn’t full-blown and not too late to fix it with arm braces and some other types of treatment. I had a brief conversation with myself at that point that went something like this: “Self, you’re 35. You’re falling apart. You’re too young for this shit.” I decided that I needed to get in better shape. I never filled the Lipitor prescription because of my personal conviction that it is a junk drug, meant to treat a symptom but not the actual problem. I never wore the arm braces because I couldn’t bear the idea of starting down that path towards riding a jazzy with a big-slurp in Wal-Mart. I got a gym membership and lost 35 pounds in about a year. I slowly began changing my diet to whole foods, which became easier the more I exercised because I didn’t want to ruin a good workout with empty calories. I also started getting into vitamins.

    Pollan believes that separating individual vitamins and nutrients from food is missing the forest for the trees. I agree with this to an extent in that I strongly believe that vitamins are not a substitute for healthy food. However, since I began taking natural, non-synthetic vitamins in addition to my healthier diet and exercise, I haven’t had a single cold. I have felt a bit run-down on occasion, which I strongly suspect were cases of my body fighting off what would normally be some such common sickness. I did get bronchitis once, but it only lasted about two days which is unusual for such a normally debilitating condition. While I could attribute this to exercise and healthy eating, and I’m sure that’s a part of it, I know plenty of people who eat well and exercise and yet still get regular illnesses.

    While my evidence for the health benefits of vitamins is anecdotal and hardly scientific, I am wary of ending my vitamin regimen as Pollan, while offering much sage wisdom, had little in the way of science in his opinions on individual vitamins to offer either. My own feeling from reading various sources is that today’s farming practices have reduced the amount of minerals and nutrients in our soil, therefore reducing the health benefits of even the most naturally grown whole foods, which is why I feel that supplementing a healthy diet with natural vitamins is still important.

    Pollan seems to fall into the same trap that he warns us of, asking that we take so-called scientific studies done by nutritionists with a grain of salt and yet at the same time citing a study that says “in the case of beta carotene ingested as a supplement, scientists have discovered that it actually increases the risk of certain cancers.” The error in this stance lies in what he leaves out; that many such negative vitamin studies are done using synthetic vitamins. Synthetic vitamins have been shown in fact to be very bad for you, however when the naturally occurring forms of these vitamins are used in more honest studies, no such negative health consequences are found. Therefore it seems obvious to me that the hype surrounding the supposed danger of vitamins is simply more misinformation from the industry.

Shooting Fish In A Barrel In Prague

    It's time for one more of my audience-killing school-related posts. It's another Philosophy class discussion board from last year; I'm taking American History and some micro-computing class this semester, so I'm not anticipating many lively conversations coming up. But the topic for this one was: "Freud said that an irrational belief is believing in something that is not reasonable.  He was talking about the belief in God.  Do you find it irrational to believe in God?  Do you think it could be an illusion?" Haha! Easy one for me! Many fun hijinks ensued, where one or two people gamely tried to debate me for a minute, then gave up. Accompanying my awesome debate skillz this post will be old pictures from three different excursions to Prague, in the Czech Republic.

_______________________________________________________________________

    Author:

    messiestobjects

    In order for God to be an illusion, there would have to be something to see first. Since no one has ever verifiably seen God, he doesn’t even qualify as illusion. Whether believing in God is rational or not depends on why someone believes in God in the first place. If someone claims to have seen God, they are either telling the truth, lying, or delusional.

•     If they are telling the truth, they still may be delusional, but for the sake of argument if someone actually did see him and was able to provide evidence, then they would be rational. However this has never happened. If they are telling the truth but are unable to provide evidence, they are either delusional, or useless. The world doesn’t need a powerless God who can only make his wishes known to select individuals, who are usually the type of people you wouldn’t buy a used car from. And God is a much bigger commitment than a used car.
•     If they are lying about having seen God, then they still might be rational because they most likely would be lying about it in order to gain money/power/followers/whatever. This has demonstrably happened in the past in such cases as Joseph Smith. Mormonism is clearly a fraud. So Joe was an evil con-artist, but perhaps not entirely irrational given that a huge cult has risen up to follow after him. This is the danger of believing in something without evidence: You are probably being conned. Enjoy that shitty car until the engine falls out next week!
•     If they are delusional, well then by definition they are not rational.

    For me personally, yes I think the belief in God is completely irrational. I’ve argued my case extensively on this subject in this class several times, so I don’t need to add too much here except to say that there is ZERO evidence—solid, verifiable evidence—that a God or Gods have ever had any interaction with the world. Believing in something without evidence isn’t always necessarily irrational, but the bigger the claim, the more evidence you need for it. And God is a pretty big claim, whose followers routinely murder, coerce, and marginalize those who don’t believe in what they believe in. So to make such a claim, yet to have such non-existent evidence to back it up… yes this is irrational.

Author:

Robin 

Posted Date:

Sunday, November 11, 2012 4:56:12 PM EST

    Don't you realize you're making an overgeneralized statement to say that God's followers "murder, coerce, and marginalize those who don't believe in what they believe in?" You sound like a God hater to me and hateful and disgusted by people who believe in God. Can't you keep your insults out of this difference of beliefs?

Author:

    messiestobjects

Posted Date:

    Sunday, November 11, 2012 5:15:31 PM EST

     It is not an insult to state a fact. Do ALL believers murder, coerce, and marginalize? No. But I never claimed that they all did and therefore it is not an over generalization. But many many many do. Look at Islamic terrorism, or the Christian crusades, inquisition, witch hunts, etc, or the religious right trying to make Biblical morals into law right here right now in the US. I'm not a God hater, simply because you can't hate something that you don't believe in. I am certainly disgusted by people who murder, coerce, and marginalize in the name of their God, as should you be. If you're NOT disgusted by that, well, I can't wait to read about you in the papers.

     I'm not insulting anyone by saying that believers are delusional. I mean, that was the question of the week. Are you saying I should just shut up and keep my opinion to myself, even though I've been asked for it? Even if I hadn't been asked for it?

Author:

    Robin

Posted Date:

    Sunday, November 11, 2012 7:42:34 PM EST

    No messiestobjects, I don't want you to shut up, sorry for this. It's just that those "Christians" that are very hurtful to others that you mentioned are not doing what God wants, (I'm with you on this, it is awful) even if they say they're doing it in God's name. There are more types of Christians and people that believe in God, just wish you would include the ones that are good too and not bring up the bad ones as the only example for people that believe in God.

Author:

    messiestobjects

Posted Date:

    Sunday, November 11, 2012 7:57:20 PM EST

    I understand, but at the risk of being combative I want to say that it is not up to me to defend the "good" side of religion against the "bad" side of religion. I personally feel that all religion is bad. Not religious people, per se, but religion itself. I've always thought that, when people commit atrocities in the name of God, that "good" religious people ought to be the first to speak out against it. Instead, they tend to attack atheists who say that religious belief is the problem that caused the atrocity in the first place and keep silent regarding the atrocities. As an example, where is the Catholic outrage directed against the ongoing pedophilia scandal in the Catholic Church? Sure, there is some, but the overwhelming majority of outrage about priests diddling children is coming from people outside of the catholic faith, and mostly from atheists.

     The problem is that when you are willing to accept religion without evidence, then you are trained to accept a lot of faulty ideas without evidence, which is why so many Christians in America fall for the Republican talking points.

    Also, how do you know that they aren't doing what God wants? Does God tell you what he wants? God sanctioned some pretty horrific things in the Old Testament. What I mean is, why should I believe that what you say God wants is any more valid than what Pat Robertson or Joseph Kony says God wants? The Bible is full of enough sayings and contradictions that confirm that God can want whatever the particular interpreter wants him to want.

Author:

    Jason

Posted Date:

    Sunday, November 11, 2012 6:31:34 PM EST

    Why then is rational to believe science. Were you there to see the big bang happen, can you provide any evidence that the big bang actually happened and that the universe is 13.7 billion years old? The big bang theory also has a "big claim" with absolutely no evidence.

Author:

    messiestobjects

Posted Date:

    Sunday, November 11, 2012 6:56:28 PM EST

     Actually, you are totally, 100% wrong. There are mountains of evidence for the big bang. The earliest and most direct kinds of observational evidence are the Hubble-type expansion seen in the redshifts of galaxies, the detailed measurements of the cosmic microwave background, the relative abundances of light elements produced by Big Bang nucleosynthesis, and today also the large scale distribution and apparent evolution of galaxies predicted to occur due to gravitational growth of structure in the standard theory. These are sometimes called "the four pillars of the Big Bang theory".

     If you don't understand why these count as evidence, then you should take a class in astrophysics where these ideas can be further explained. "Belief in science" doesn't actually make sense. Science doesn't believe in anything for which there is no evidence. If there is evidence, you can put together a scientific theory which would explain the evidence, and test it further through prediction and experiment. You can "believe" in science because every modern comfort, from your dishwasher to your laptop to your iphone, is evidence of how scientific theories can be proven. If you don't understand the evidence, that is your issue because science is verifiable, and can be learned by anyone who bothers to make the effort.

Author:

    Jason

Posted Date:

    Sunday, November 11, 2012 11:08:52 PM EST

    I like how you always ramble on to try and make a point but end up not making a point. I also like how you always talk about not being combative but you actually are, just like the republicans you are talking about. I like how you always come off as being very condescending, which you are. For your information I am taking Astronomy and I have not read a chapter that explain any evidence.

    Theory: 1. A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena.

    2. The branch of a science or art consisting of its explanatory statements, accepted principles, and methods of analysis, as opposed to practice: a fine musician who had never studied theory.

    3. A set of theorems that constitute a systematic view of a branch of mathematics.

    4. Abstract reasoning; speculation: a decision based on experience rather than theory.

    5. A belief or principle that guides action or assists comprehension or judgment: staked out the house on the theory that criminals usually return to the scene of the crime.

    6. An assumption based on limited information or knowledge; a conjecture.

 Big bang theory, evolution theory. I kind of miss the part of the definition that mentioned that a theory is 100% fact, but obviously because you are the smartest man on earth you did not.  The mountains that were blown up to make roads, the roads did not form from the mere explosion and will never be formed from an explosion someone created the roads.

Author:

    messiestobjects

Posted Date:

    Sunday, November 11, 2012 11:48:03 PM EST

    I did not say that the Big Bang was 100% fact, I said that there were mountains of evidence for them, which you asked for, and that you were 100% wrong in your assertion that there was no evidence. Also, I didn't say I was not combative, I said "I hate to be combative, but..." but sometimes it is necessary to be combative when the people I argue with try to act as though I've said something that I did not say.

    As far as your definitions of theory are concerned, the only one that matters as far as a Scientific Theory goes is number 1. A scientific theory is not the same as speculation. I'm sorry that you missed the part of the definition that mentioned that a theory is [considered to be] fact, but clearly you breezed over that very first definition. Scientific Theory is not the same thing as the common usage of the word 'theory.'

    So you are taking astronomy. Have you gotten to the part yet where they explain the evidence for the Big Bang? No? I guess that means that no evidence must exist.

    Also, Astronomy is not the same thing as Astrophysics. Also, your claim that I am not making a point is false. Please demonstrate how I in any way have failed to make a point. Also, yes, sometimes I am very condescending.

Author:

    Jason

Posted Date:

    Sunday, November 11, 2012 6:51:54 PM EST

    “Whose followers routinely murder, coerce, and marginalize those who don’t believe in what they believe in.” clearly generalizing all those who believe in GOD. Where are all these murders taking place, in your atheist mind?

Author:

    messiestobjects

Posted Date:

    Sunday, November 11, 2012 6:59:10 PM EST

    Islamic terrorists who behead infidels are murdering in the name of God. Salem witch trials. Crusades. Spanish Inquisition. That lady who murdered her children because God told her to. There are plenty of examples.

Author:

    Jason

Posted Date:

    Monday, November 12, 2012 1:30:36 AM EST

    How many billion or million or thousand years ago did reproduction replace evolution?

Author:

    messiestobjects

Posted Date:

    Monday, November 12, 2012 10:59:25 AM EST

    Reproduction never replaced evolution because evolution is an ongoing process; it's still happening today.

Author:

    Jason Manhertz

Posted Date:

    Monday, November 12, 2012 11:33:05 AM EST

    So how did you come to be, through evolution or reproduction?

Author:

    messiestobjects

Posted Date:

    Monday, November 12, 2012 12:26:56 PM EST

    Both. Evolution describes how complex organisms evolve from simple ones through the process of natural selection. Reproduction is the separate yet intertwined method by which individuals pass their genes onto the next generation. There is no discrepancy between the two things.

Author:

    Kendra

Posted Date:

    Monday, November 12, 2012 11:03:30 PM EST

messiestobjects,

     I do agree with your post. There is no evidence of God, but it doesn't make it irrational to believe in him. It's people's religion and their beliefs and you can't bash it and say everyone is nuts. No one will ever know whether or not God is or ever was, real. If there was evidence it would change the whole religion and belief forever, but there isn't. It's just like any other religion. Can they prove that there is a real person they worship or is it just in books? I don't think any of it is an illusion because like you said, no one can see anything and I don't think anyone is irrational for believing in God.

Author:

    messiestobjects

Posted Date:

    Monday, November 12, 2012 11:33:23 PM EST

     But technically, it IS irrational to believe in something for which there is no evidence. The fact that a lot of people believe in God doesn't qualify as any sort of evidence that he just might exist. For instance, which Presidential candidate did you believe would win? A lot of Democrats believed that Obama was the right choice, because Romney is clearly a corrupt maniac. Conversely, a lot of Republicans believed that Romney was the right choice because Obama is clearly a Muslim socialist bent on destroying all the values America stands for. Both sides obviously couldn't be right, yet each candidate got around 60 million votes apiece! This is not a small number! 58 million people believed that Romney was the right choice, but 62 million believed that Obama was. Either way you look at it, at least 58 million people were wrong in their beliefs. Karl Rove, for instance, was clearly deluded about Romney's chances of winning. My point is, if 58 million people can be wrong about something, then clearly it doesn't stop something from being illusory just because a lot of people believe in it.

Author:

    Dana

Posted Date:

    Monday, November 12, 2012 11:26:18 PM EST

Hey messiestobjects,

    Great post and although I am a Christian, I appreciate your thoughts. I actually agree with you on most points. Belief in God is very irrational on many levels. However, in my humble opinion, irrational doesn't necessarily mean wrong. There are many things that I have come across in life that aren't rational but that doesn't mean that they aren't real. An example I gave in post is feelings. Feelings are rarely if ever rational. When people fall in love, rationality tends to get thrown out the window (at least for a time). God may be an illusion, but if that is the case, the only fault in my beliefs is mine. (since I am not a murderer or marginalizer). Thanks again for an interesting post!

Author:

    messiestobjects

Posted Date:

    Monday, November 12, 2012 11:45:24 PM EST

     That is exactly the appropriate stance to take as a religious believer, Dana! Thank you. If someone wants to believe in God, that is of course their business. But trying to convince other people to believe in him too without any evidence is where so many believers go wrong and you are entirely correct to say that any fault in your belief lies solely with you. The only thing I have to argue with you about is when you say that feelings aren't rational. Of course, people do behave irrationally due to emotions beyond their control, but in fact there are perfectly rational reasons why people have emotions in the first place. Chemicals in the brain. It's science! So, being irrationally in love is real, I agree, but so is irrationally believing in God. The difference is that, being in love has an object, an actual person that your irrational feelings are directed towards. You can touch him or her, speak to them and, most importantly, so can other people. The fact that there is such evidence that your boy/girl friend exists means that your love is only irrational in the sense of which particular actually existing human you chose to love. God, on the other hand, is a completely unverifiable object of irrational belief, and therefore illusory.

Author:

    Dana

Posted Date:

    Tuesday, November 13, 2012 7:13:48 PM EST

messiestobjects,

I completely agree with you that feelings are created by something rational (chemicals in the brain) but the exact nature of WHY those chemicals behave the way they do is unexplainable in the human psyche... meaning why something can trigger one person to feel a certain way about something while someone else does not. There are many valid theories but none that can completely and perfectly explain everyone's feelings/reactions. Most feelings are based on early experiences. With that being said, one can also argue that belief in God is also based on experiences. My personal feelings on certain things can sometimes fall into the category of irrational/illogical. Even with years of therapy some people can never fully justify(rationalize) why they feel the way that they do.

Author:

    messiestobjects

Posted Date:

    Tuesday, November 13, 2012 9:31:11 PM EST

     That's true: Science doesn't yet know everything. The key word being "yet." Neurologists may not know everything about what makes the brain tick, but they know a lot more than they did even 10 years ago, and they learn more all the time. The thing is that brain science is testable: you can ask questions, perform experiments, make hypotheses, and gain knowledge in order to ask more questions, perform more experiments, narrow down your hypotheses... etc. The God question, however, is not testable. There is no possible way that you can test the God hypothesis because he is by definition (according to the big 3 religions, at least) outside of nature. This winds up being the reason why atheists ultimately say that it is pointless to believe in God: something that is outside of nature can never be detected, proven, or disproven, and personal anecdotes of people having God experiences are completely unverifiable in any way. I have never had an experience that could not be explained except by a God of some sort, so I have no more reason to believe in him/her/it than I do in Santa Claus. Neuroscience, on the other hand, has learned many things about the brain and has bettered mankind in verifiable ways, so even though I have never studied neurology, I have more reason to trust in it than I do in a God who has told his followers that they will go to hell for not believing in him despite being a jerk and not providing any evidence that he actually exists.

Author:

    Samantha

Posted Date:

    Monday, November 5, 2012 5:31:10 PM EST

    I do not believe it is irrational to believe in God and I do not think it is an illusion.  I think Freud is looking for scientific fact that God does not exist.  I believe Freud and his followers are hoping there is no God and therefore, they will not be judged at the time of death.  I believe Freud and his followers are delusional by their beliefs and their statements.  However, everyone is entitled to their thoughts and beliefs as long as they do not harm or hurt anyone.

    I have seen some people who are elderly such as my grandfather who did not believe in God and as he was aging and knew he had a limited time on this earth started accepting God.  He actually started talking to a minister at his part time job and attended his church in the last several years of his life.   My mom tells me he never attended church for the time she knew him.  However, as we get closer to our immortality our views and beliefs change for believing in God or NOT.  It really comes down to your choice and your belief! I choose to believe there is a God  so according to Freud call me irrational and delusional….

Author:

    Jason

Posted Date:

    Thursday, November 8, 2012 2:02:10 PM EST

    I agree with the views that you have presented here, Samantha. I would just like to add that I find it quite fascinating that most of these men who do not believe in God and call believers like you and I irrational and delusional were men who had been declared mentally ill at some point.  It only makes me wonder why do sane people have to study and make sense of what people who were not in their right mind had to say...

Author:

    messiestobjects

Posted Date:

    Sunday, November 11, 2012 3:50:12 PM EST

    Christopher Hitchens died an avowed atheist. He never not once started quibbling about his own mortality. Neither did Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Carl Sagan, or my Uncle. And for the record, not one of them were ever "declared mentally ill at some point."

    Most atheists aren't looking for proof that God does not exist--you can never prove that God does not exist in the same way that you can never prove that there isn't a teapot the size of a gnat orbiting the smallest star in the Andomeda Galaxy--they simply demand proof that he does exist before believing, without reason, that he does.

Author:

    Stefani

Posted Date:

    Tuesday, November 6, 2012 10:56:08 PM EST

    Personally I do not believe it is irrational to believe in God. Everyone has the right to believe what they want to. Since Freud was a scientific man, he was probably just looking for specific and concrete evidence that God exists and since he didnt really find that, he would say it is an illusion. For many, they allow the presence of God to create an illusion, but I do not think believe in him is irrational or can be considered an illusion.

Author:

    Tracy

Posted Date:

    Wednesday, November 7, 2012 11:39:05 AM EST

    Hey Stefani,

    I would have to agree with you on this one. I think calling people who believe in God irrational is a bizarre considering most of the world believes in a God.

Author:

    messiestobjects

Posted Date:

    Sunday, November 11, 2012 3:56:31 PM EST

    So... by this logic, if most of the world believed that owning slaves was moral, then it would be bizarre to call slave-owning immoral? See, the world was like that, not so very long ago. Just because 100 people think that committing suicide by drinking poisoned kool-aid to jump on a passing comet is rational, doesn't make that one guy who said "fuck this!" and ran away from Heaven's Gate irrational.

Author:

    Robin

Posted Date:

    Wednesday, November 7, 2012 8:01:56 PM EST

    I don't think believing in God is irrational, but I do think it depends on how you believe in God. I think that being legalistic is irrational and is harmful to yourself and even others around you. I don't think it is an illusion, I've seen proof in my life and I put my trust in faith. I wonder if why we can't prove God in a scientific way to people is because it would not give people a chance to find God with their hearts, which is what is important to God. What we know by proof in life and what our minds reveal to be rational, is not enough to proove if God is an illusion or not.  We have free-will, the power to choose, which is something that can only be done alone in a person, no one make you believe or not believe it. We can influence each other though, good and bad on the matter. Again- we have free-will.

Author:

    Paulette

Posted Date:

    Wednesday, November 7, 2012 10:12:15 PM EST

    I just loved your statement "wonder if why we can't prove God in a scientific way to people is because it would not give people a chance to find God with their hearts" excellent. Yes we have free will, but because our free will is supposedly given to us by god then is that real or the illusion?

Author:

    messiestobjects

Posted Date:

    Sunday, November 11, 2012 4:07:42 PM EST

    Some people found the Wiccan Earth-Mother with their hearts. Others found Mormonism. Yet others believe with all their hearts in Mohammed, or Krishna, or even in the power of Satan. Don't you think the real God has a duty to leave some sort of a road-map to him so that innocent people who only happened to be born into a family who believed in the wrong God don't get sent to Hell and torture and damnation for all eternity? Otherwise, he's either powerless or just an asshole.

Author:

    Yohance

Posted Date:

    Thursday, November 8, 2012 1:11:27 AM EST

    I do not think that it is irrational to believe in god. As I have said in numerous posts before, I do not think that God is what the religions make it out to be. To believe in God, and by this I mean the entity or existence that is, or the concept that keeps everything together, One must take a leaf of faith or an abstract understanding of something that cannot necessarily be put into words, but only understood. I constantly reiterate that science, and god/religion, are two sides of the same coin. In science and mathematics we take leaps of faith almost in every scientific calculation we make, The concept of zero and infinity is something that cannot be explained, It can only be understood. To the right of zero but before one on the number line there are an infinite amount of values And to the left of zero but before negative one there are also an infinite amount of value. The number zero somehow bridges the gap between negative and positive values that have an infinite source. This in itself requires a leap of faith to believe. Scientifically Speaking numbers are an illusion used by mankind, used in complete belief that has propelled our civilization to where it is today. I do not think that God is an illusion, I think God is a concept that the majority of us have not yet understood.

Author:

    messiestobjects

Posted Date:

    Sunday, November 11, 2012 4:14:52 PM EST

    Numbers aren't actually an illusion though. They represent actual values. Saying that numbers are an illusion is like saying that words are illusions, but they are not because words represent ideas, real things even though they may not have physical substance. The difference between things that are real yet do not have physical substance and God is that you can see the evidence of ideas at work in the world every day in everything you do. Anything that people attribute to God, however, can be explained by other, more rational means. In any case, no one is claiming that numbers or words have an independent intelligence of their own, and so they are not even in the same class as an all-powerful, all-intelligent creator.

Author:

    Brittany

Posted Date:

    Monday, November 12, 2012 12:55:03 PM EST

    I think Freud was correct in his assertion that believing in God is irrational. I don't think this really applies to the people who just use religion as a way to remember to be nice to their neighbors and such, because they are just using the idea of a vengeful God to help guide their moral compasses. The people that I have an issue with are those who take everything in the Bible to be literal, and shut out the idea that science is fact. For example, people commonly refute the theory of evolution, and laws have to be passed so that it can be taught to school children. It doesn't make sense to me that some people would rather have a clouded view of the world, instead of questioning what they have been taught in church. I also think that people who only pray about their problems, instead of actively seeking out a solution are being irrational. Prayer alone never solved anything, because you have to be in charge of your own life. Personally, I believe that religion was socially constructed to keep people “in line” morally and limit questioning of authority, therefore, I do think that it is all an illusion.

Author:

    messiestobjects

Posted Date:

    Monday, November 12, 2012 1:00:44 PM EST

    Totally! Also, it's extremely disturbing that religious people keep trying to get Creationism, or "Intelligent Design" taught in public schools. This is wrong in so many ways but my favorite retort to people who want science teachers to "teach the controversy" in public schools is, "Fine. Can I come to your church and teach evolution in Sunday School? Teach the controversy!" There's a reason why church and state are meant to be separated.

Nostalgia And Speculative Fiction Go Hand-in-Tentacle

    Still a very slow work period. It's getting on in 2013, and no trips yet. Things are looking up though: I have a few jobs coming up, so we'll see. In the meantime, here's another post in my series of school papers interspersed with old photojunk. This time the pictures are from the ski town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen in the German Alps, where I lived from 1997-2000. Hover over them for delightfully nostalgic descriptions. The paper in question is my English II final, where the assignment was to take any three short stories that we had read from our text and compare and analyse them. I chose 'The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,' which I'd already written a paper on so, yay. Easy. Also, Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut and The Lottery by Shirley Jackson. If you intend to read this post—and I don't blame anyone at all who doesn't want to—and you haven't read any of them, then you ought to follow the links and read them first. Otherwise reading my paper will be even more painful than it has to be.

________________________________________________________________

Zen And The Art of Speculative Fiction

    Speculative fiction is an extremely broad genre. In researching the term online, I found many essays which attempt to define what it is and what it isn’t. I even found one person who thought that the film ‘JAWS’ could be considered a member of the genus, but I disagree with that on the grounds that a world in which everything is exactly the same as in ours with the exception of a ludicrously giant man-eating shark who has a taste for beach bunnies is hardly an imaginative or insightful enough scenario to earn the title of Speculative. Horror, yes. Fiction, fine. Speculative, no. So here is the definition I’ve found that I most agree with:

    Speculative fiction is a world that writers create, where anything can happen. It is a place beyond reality, a place that could have been, or might have been, if only the rules of the universe were altered just a bit. Speculative fiction goes beyond the horror of everyday life and takes the reader (and writer) into a world of magic, fantasy, science. It is a world where you leave part of yourself behind when you return to the universe as we know it, the so-called real world. Speculative fiction defines the best in humanity: imagination, and the sharing of it with others. (Bowlin)

I would add two things to Bowlin’s definition. First, I would say that while Speculative fiction (Spec-fi) may frequently go “beyond the horror of everyday life,” it equally as often dives right into it, delving human nature for insights both illuminating and shocking. Thus I would say that the essence of good Spec-fi is that it tweaks reality in order to reveal a previously hidden aspect of it. Second, I would make the distinction that although writers of science fiction, horror, and fantasy regularly dabble in Spec-fi, not all sci-fi/fantasy/horror stories qualify as Speculative and not all Speculative necessarily has to belong to one of those genres. Perhaps Spec-fi became a genre in order to award distinction to those stories from each of those categories that aimed for something higher than mere escapism, though some would argue that important science fiction writers were aiming that high all along.

    The three short stories I will talk about are such speculative fictions. ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’ by Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘Harrison Bergeron’ by Kurt Vonnegut, and ‘The Lottery’ by Shirley Jackson each describe an undignified aspect of human nature. They have each chosen to illustrate these aspects through the useful lens of dystopian societies. In ‘Omelas,’ Le Guin uses a science fiction world as her setting. In ‘Bergeron’ Vonnegut uses a society vaguely set in the future, which is also a staple of science fiction. The world of ‘The Lottery’ is less definable. It could be our world, if not in the present day then in the near past, except that the eponymous social event is so horrifying that it doesn’t really seem to have a place in any known society similar to the one that it otherwise portrays. It could therefore be a science fiction world, or a far post-apocalyptic world, or perhaps even simple allegory, similar to the hellish night of Young Goodman Brown who had a vision of the secret, sinister natures of his neighbors in the Puritan village of Salem. In any case, the inventive nature of the lottery itself in a setting that is still somewhat familiar more than qualifies the story as speculative in nature.

    ‘Omelas’ is a deep story which hints at many ideas, but as I wrote in a previous paper I believe that Le Guin uses the device of a captive child, kept in squalor and degradation, abused and friendless, as a symbol for the dark psychotic id at the center of humanity’s collective consciousness. The story seems to say that although the face we put on for each other in public may be one of civilization—the love of peace, the arts, humanities, progress, and everything positive and hopeful about it—behind it all is the wretched animal at the center of all human endeavor, the monster within ourselves that we try to ignore, but can’t. In the end there are several different ways that one can look at the people who choose to walk away from Omelas after contemplating the child, but the suggestibility of the imagery there only confirms that Le Guin is a master storyteller who has succeeded at making the readers ask themselves what it all might mean, and forces them to look inside themselves for the answers.

    ‘Bergeron’ is perhaps the most pointed, least allegorical of the three. Vonnegut wrote it as a way of taking a certain philosophy to its logical extreme—the idea that natural advantage is unfair and leveling the playing field for everyone in every activity is the way to bring about equality. For example, my young nephew plays in his district T-ball league. The league organizes the players such that every player gets to bat, during each inning, no matter how many outs are accumulated. I found it absurd because T-ball to begin with was meant to be an equalizing force for young children learning the physical aspects of baseball. When I was a young boy I played in little league and we had great derision for the new T-ball league that had just begun for younger kids. But even then, T-ball was played with otherwise regular baseball rules—three outs per team per inning. Perhaps younger kids needed help learning to hit before swinging at live pitches, but they were never too young to start learning and dealing with the rules of the game. Unlimited hitting and playing were for practice, not game day.

    Fast forward to the present and they’ve dumbed the sport down even further. According to Teeballusa.org, here are some of the most Harrison Bergeron-like rules: “There are no walks or strikeouts. Every player bats and plays in the field. An inning is over when all the players have batted once. Scores are not kept for the younger players” (T•BALL USA Association). The rationale for all of this is that it is supposed to build self-esteem, so that everyone can feel like a winner and have a chance to play. The problem, of course, is that life isn’t a game of “organized fun” like that. All that these rules are really doing is preparing children to be unable to deal with failure and teaching them how not to strive to be better; it’s easy to play and pointless to play harder when everyone is a winner.

    Vonnegut takes this kind of trend into a future where everyone must be equal so that no one feels bad about themselves. ‘Bergeron’ shows how when the playing field is leveled, even for those unqualified to play, you wind up exemplifying the lowest common denominator. Different people are talented in different ways, and if you force everyone to be equal in every arena, not only will individuals never find out what they are best at, they will also never know that they are truly bad at something and thus be forced to explore other, better options for themselves. The possible heights of human achievement are thwarted forever in this manner.

    ‘The Lottery’ is a metaphor for blind slavishness to tradition. Jackson is skewering the bovine mentality of the mob that perpetuates certain myths and traditions, beyond the point where they are logical or relevant to the present time. She does this by taking what appears to be an ancient fertility rite—human sacrifice meant to secure a bountiful harvest from the gods—and places it in an inappropriate time period where once again the logical extreme exposes the inherent absurdity of the philosophy in question. The villagers don’t seem to fully understand the purpose of the lottery, except as a vague idea from a saying that seems to have slipped from common usage. A line spoken by one of the characters implies the forgotten nature of the adage, which in turn hints at the fertility aspect of the lottery. “Used to be a saying about ‘Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.’” This illuminates for the reader the general uncertainty regarding the tradition. The villagers in truth only continue participating because “there’s always been a lottery.”

    My personal take on the story is that she is talking about the folly of religious tradition; a system of belief based on ancient “holy” books written by goat herders who knew less about how the world works than most second graders do today. People and communities still slavishly devote their lives to the outdated traditions of these religions, and they usually do not truthfully understand where these traditions came from, nor why or how they arose in the first place. Considering the vast gap in time and culture between when they originated and now, it is a wonder that anyone still considers the reasons for them to be valid. However, both the nature of belief itself and the human tendency to blindly observe tradition as illuminated by Jackson help to explain the phenomenon. It is possible though that the story could be lampooning any number of other bizarre traditions. Jackson uses the Spec-fi device to expose the irrationality of this tendency that people have to instinctively follow the strictures of society while abandoning critical thought. The organized annual murder of a neighbor may seem extreme—it is unlikely that in reality any such tradition could carry on into the present day—but it does make a striking argument about the idiocy of maintaining rituals simply for the sake of tradition. There is nothing wrong with examining them more closely to determine if they are actually still relevant in modern life.

    The aspect of human nature which each of these stories reveal through a speculative twisting of reality are truths which are not always simple to talk about in other formats. Trying to make the point in a thesis statement that unexamined traditions can be harmful to society, for instance, might need an entire book of material including exposition, facts, and references. But Spec-fi has the unique ability to cut through the empty talk in favor of tradition by using reducto ad absurdum to illustrate its point. By taking real ideas and putting them in an organized setting, reality is exposed. This is how science and philosophy test their hypothesis: by pulling a test subject or idea out of its element and subjecting it to different experiments in order to discover its boundaries.

    Speculative Fiction, then, is the literature of abstract concepts. It is the preferred storytelling method of philosophers and scientists. It is reading material for those who wish to understand something larger and more insightful about everyday experience. It is also material for communicating complex or heretofore invisible truths in a symbolic—i.e. brief and profound, manner. It differs from most forms of literature in that it isn’t trying to tell a story about a time and a place, a person or an event, per se. It instead—at its best—is telling a story about a way of looking at the world.

    Some of these truths may be ugly. But that only makes them even more imperative to communicate. If the Vonneguts and Jacksons of the world don’t thumb their noses at moronic human behavior, and if the Le Guins of the world don’t expose the beasts at the bottoms of our wells, then these dark aspects of humanity will remain unexamined. Only in investigating them will we learn how to overcome them within ourselves. Speculative fiction is a uniquely Zen-like literary format. In altering the nature of reality for a brief moment, like a Zen slap, it teaches the reader something about unaltered reality. It is for this reason that I say that Speculative fiction has a place among the highest forms of literature, and is uniquely capable of communicating big ideas to empty heads.

 

Works Cited

Bowlin, David. greententacles.com. March 2002. http://www.greententacles.com/articles/5/26/. 12 December 2012.

T•BALL USA Association. teeballusa.org. 2012. http://www.teeballusa.org/rules.asp. 12 December 2012.

 

Philosophy Needs Science The Way That Blogs Need Pictures

    It's been a slow end-of-year for work... nothing since Portland. I'm in Dallas Texas right now, but trust me, there won't be any exciting photos from here. I'm stuck right next to 6 Flags. What a horrible place. So I'm going to intersperse some really old photos I took while living in Europe, and have never posted. Hover over them for a brief description and as always, if you click on them you can see a larger version for all those little details.

    I have a ton of old photojunk like that, so I figure I ought to use them for these wordy posts... and this is going to be a wordy post because: I'm finished with another semester, hoo-rah! And I've got more accolades under my belt. My Philosophy professor loved my final paper. So guess what? Here it is. We had to make up our own topic, based on what we got out of the material we covered in class, and so mine was "Why Philosophy needs science." There's a little bit of bullshit in there—I have trouble both getting started and wrapping things up in my writing—and by the time I got to the end, I realized that this subject is much bigger than an 8 page assignment.

_________________________________________________________________

From Philosophy To Philoscientia: Escape From Aether Mountain

    Though the literal definition of Philosophy is ‘the love of wisdom,’ that is no longer what Philosophy represents to people. It has come to signify man’s search for meaning in the Universe, which is not always the same thing as wisdom. It is a discipline of thought where the natures of things are pondered, values are ascribed to ideas, and those ideas are then used to ask bigger questions. In this historical hunt for truth and meaning, there is often an essential component missing; the critical evaluation of evidence. Assuredly, the great philosophers do not usually ignore evidence—and here I will use bow hunting as an analogy—but in the pursuit of knowledge, it has not always been deemed necessary for them to be one hundred percent sure of their footing or the current wind speed before aiming at a truth. When Aristotle posited the existence of a fifth element, which he named the aether, the only evidence he had to back up his claim was a personal conviction that there needed to be a substance which made possible the movement of atoms in a void, otherwise nature would have made no sense to him. The aether became a part of man’s understanding of nature for two thousand years and became the root of all manner of chicanery from alchemy to all-purpose elixirs. As Professor Smoot of UC Berkeley puts it:

Although there was some degree of experience and observation in the physics of Aristotle, at its heart was a philosophical approach to science where the laws of nature are constructed to conform to a particular philosophical outlook. This basis for the investigation of nature led to some strange statements by Aristotle - for instance, that women have fewer teeth than men. Either Aristotle was not a very accurate observer, he couldn't count, or he had odd taste in women.  (Smoot, 1996) 

So if Philosophy is the bow hunt, then Science is the act of observing the arrow. If your shots are missing the target, figure out why, adjust your aim, and shoot again. Philosophy needs Science.   

    In a very real sense, Philosophy is the evolutionary forerunner of Science. “The word ‘Physics’ derives from the Greek word for natural philosophy, physikos, and the early physicists were, in fact, often called natural philosophers” (The Ultimate Visual Dictionary of Science, p. 14). According to Reference.com, “natural philosophy (from Latin philosophia naturalis) is a term applied to the objective study of nature and the physical universe that was dominant before the development of modern science. It is considered to be the precursor of natural sciences such as physics.” Additionally, “the word ‘science’ comes from the Latin scientia, meaning knowledge” (The Ultimate Visual Dictionary of Science, p. 8) .

    Therefore it seems that the definition and purpose of Philosophy had evolved, from the mere asking of rational questions about the nature of the world, into the collection of knowledge gained from testing the validity of such questions through physical experimentation. In other words, the early philosophers were simply scientists who hadn’t yet figured out scientific principles. Once those were better understood—for example that in order to propose an explanation for a natural phenomenon (make a hypothesis), you had to fully understand your starting assumptions and whether they were valid—the discipline of Science split off from Philosophy and became something new and more powerful. Philosophy, for better or worse, was left behind.

    So now it would seem that Philosophy, in the minds of most people, is something completely other than what it was when it began. Statements that begin “My own philosophy is…” indicate that in common usage, a philosophy is a personal belief system. Even in modern Philosophy classes, students discuss different philosophical ideas as though they are a matter of opinion, or personal taste. But this forgets the fact that as a branch of study, Philosophy originated as a search for truth, a method of rational investigation for understanding the Universe and one’s place in it. When people became so good at it that they were using it to invent telescopes and predict natural events such as eclipses, they had to rename it and relegate philosophical query to strictly humanistic concerns. Is life a dream? What happens after death? What is the meaning of life? And other objectively unanswerable questions. But it shares deep roots with the scientific method, and perhaps the most important aspect of Philosophy is that it is all about asking questions.

    The Greek Philosopher Thales made a claim that exemplifies both the strongest and weakest aspects of Philosophy and in the process invented Natural Philosophy:

Thales believed that the Earth floats on water and all things come to be from water. For him the Earth was a flat disc floating on an infinite ocean. It has also been claimed that Thales explained earthquakes from the fact that the Earth floats on water. Again the importance of Thales' idea is that he is the first recorded person who tried to explain such phenomena by rational rather than by supernatural means. (O'Connor & Robertson, 1999)

The weakest part of his earthquake explanation is of course that he is dead wrong. It illustrates the dangers of stating a philosophical belief without having any evidence for it other than some sort of idea arrived at by rationalizing a limited amount of knowledge. The relative strength of it, however, is as O’Connor & Robertson state; he tried to provide a rational, natural explanation rather than an irrational superstitious one. Moreover, his hypothesis is testable, in principle—sail out into the ocean and see if it is infinite, dig down deep enough and find out what is holding us up—but simply claiming that the Gods cause earthquakes is not.

    So, in asking a testable question about the nature of earthquakes, Thales provided humanity with a framework for investigating the world. In asking the question, he provided the groundwork for finding the answer. This is the strength of Philosophy, and its most important function, even in the modern world. It is important to note that not all philosophical questions are equal. It will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me that I will claim that the question “Is there a God or Gods?” is among the most useless. There is simply no way to ever answer that question. “Is there a teapot orbiting the smallest star in the Andromeda galaxy? Do leprechauns, unicorns, and angels exist? How deep is the well of human gullibility, anyway?” These are the equivalents of mental masturbation in that they are not testable, and serve no greater purpose than to distract the masses from questions of greater import.

    Some might argue that this is exactly why people find Philosophy so fascinating, that it is in the very discussion or argument of such questions that truths can be found, even if rational explanations cannot. To this I would reply with another query; of what use are such truths? When two people disagree about the nature of something that has no basis in verifiable evidence—for instance when Muslims and Christians discuss their differing views of God—isn’t that the same as two people disagreeing about the color of the teapot in Andromeda? I cannot prove that the teapot, or God for that matter, don’t exist (let alone what color they are or what type of sexual behavior they condone), but do I really need to? There are an infinite amount of things which may exist, and disproving any one of them is not simply a waste of time, it is an infinite waste of time.

    The human imagination can come up with any number of monsters, fairies, gods, teapots, or endless other scenarios, and thus rational inquiry must restrict itself to that which has measure. This is why Philosophy needs Science. Science is a natural extension of Philosophy which demands critical thought and verifiable facts from any statements that its progenitor may make, from which it learned how to use them in the first place. Philosophy is the train and Science is the track. Philosophy, as I have shown, tends to go off the rails when it ignores such Natural Philosophical strictures.

    The Age of Enlightenment is significant in regards to two of my purposes in writing this paper. One—it is when Science finally reached its age of majority. Thanks to Isaac Newton’s classical mechanics, a new world of thought became available to mankind and it definitively demonstrated the most accurate system for understanding and explaining how the Universe operates: Aristotle’s physics were replaced with non-teleological explanations discerned using the Scientific Method. Two—a most interesting correlation occurred in the remaining branches of Philosophy. In the period known as Early Modern Philosophy, philosophers began to abandon traditional authorities:

During the Middle Ages, philosophizing took place in the arts faculties […] and in the theological faculties of the universities. It thus came under the direct and censorious scrutiny of the Church. By the seventeenth century, however, [...] it had become more common to find original philosophical minds working outside the strictures of the university—i.e., ecclesiastic—framework. [...] by the end of the eighteenth century, [philosophy] was a secular enterprise. (Nadler, 2002, pp. 1-2)

    When philosophers emancipated themselves from the yoke of authoritarian “thought,” they ceased looking for truths and causes that had their basis in religious or Aristotelian assumptions, and began focusing their attention towards more humanistic concerns such as the nature of the mind, free will, and secular morality. I believe that these two intertwined occurrences—the parting of ways between science and philosophy, and the more deterministic direction which philosophy itself then took—illustrate the power of philosophical inquiry and its dependence upon testable facts—i.e. the Scientific Method.

    As I asserted earlier, the most vital aspect of philosophy lies in asking questions. That is its ultimate strength, and when philosophical questions are asked properly they can lead to astounding discoveries. What causes Earthquakes? Gods? No! Water? No! Tectonic plates bumping into each other and generally sliding around like a bunch of drunken Greeks? Yes! Next Question! The fact that asking simple questions led to finding the method for asking better questions, and in turn led to finding the ways to then answer those questions is perhaps the most dramatic quest in the history of humanity. In other words, if Philosophy is the question—How do I find answers to my questions and know that I’ve found a truthful answer?—then Science is the How. Ask a testable question, experiment, revise your assumptions and make a prediction, experiment again. Revise again. Ask again. Philosophy is thus most successful when Science can prove that it has asked a good question.

    The danger of Philosophy then is of course when you ask a question that you are certain that you already know the answer to, based especially on feelings of how the world “ought” to be. Socrates was the earliest recorded human to realize this and he made it his life’s work to instill in his students, and thus in humanity, the humility of never assuming too much self-certitude. In Plato’s Apology, Socrates says:

I am wiser than this man; for neither of us really knows anything fine and good, but this man thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas I, as I do not know anything, do not think I do either. I seem, then, in just this little thing to be wiser than this man at any rate, that what I do not know I do not think I know either. (Plato, p. 21d)

    What he was communicating is that it is folly to claim knowledge that is unearned; if you assume that you know something without having subjected it to rational dissection first, then further questions that you may ask based on this assumed knowledge will be faulty. His famous technique of questioning his opponents has come to be called the Socratic Method, but with a little age and maturity the Socratic Method begins to look quite a lot like the Scientific Method. When Aristotle assumed that there must be something like aether holding up the heavenly bodies, every question that future Western philosophers asked about the nature of the Universe afterwards was supposed on the basis of this false knowledge. Two-thousand years were wasted trying to find a way to turn lead into gold using Aristotelian principles. It is a shame for humanity that Aristotle didn’t heed his grand-master’s teaching more closely.

    Another example of reading your own presuppositions into philosophy and the danger this can lead to are the Nazi interpretations of Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s philosophy seems diabolical and radical when taken at face value, and his harsh German writing style doesn’t help. But he was anti-Judaist, not anti-Semitic or in other words, he was anti-religious and anti-authoritarian, not racist. His idea of the coming master race did not involve singling out any particular race, Aryan or otherwise, for the honor. Instead, it involved the eventual evolution of all mankind in a similar manner as when Homo Erectus evolved into Homo Sapiens. However, he envisioned the Übermensch as the end result of a more spiritual or mental evolution, perhaps even as a goal which humanity can set for itself purposefully.

    Unfortunately, Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth was anti-Semitic, and she had total control over all of his manuscripts for many years. It is well documented how she used and changed them to her own purposes. Thanks to her meddling, “Nietzsche's philosophy had been made ambiguous and incoherent, allowing loose interpretation. This ambiguity prompted Nazi interpreters to choose a context that supported Nazi literature and prophesy” (Kalish, 2004). When you think you know the truth, you will go looking for something to support it even if what you find must be altered—or conflicting evidence ignored—in order to do so. This is called confirmation bias and needs to be just as assiduously avoided in Philosophy as it is in Science.

    Therefore in order to avoid the appearance of confirmation bias myself, I wish to make one final point whose distinction I may not have made clear until now. When I say that there is danger in philosophizing without a scientific license, so to speak, I am not mainly talking about philosophical speculation. Although any philosophical speculation can be strengthened with a more firmly logical, scientific footing, there is no harm in sitting around the dorm room and wondering if the Universe is an atom in a giant cheese pizza. Nor is there any harm in writing a philosophical paper, treatise, or novel based around uncertain principles—whether by a stoned college undergrad or a tenured Ivy League professor—so long as it’s speculative nature is made unequivocally clear. As a matter of fact, such speculation is the cornerstone of much progress in all of the Arts and Humanities. If you are too afraid to ask absurd questions, you will never learn how to ask the good ones and in any case, the truth is often found out to be more absurd than could have been believed in the first place.

    No, I am mostly talking about making policy based on such speculative philosophies. As in the case of the Nazis who based many of their actions on a misunderstood reading of Nietzsche, there is danger in claiming that you have found a woman’s,  Jew’s, or homosexual’s place in society, or the meaning of life, or the one true God, all based on a logically flawed philosophy. It is mostly a given among scientists and philosophers nowadays that you must be certain of your footing before you aim for exciting new questions, but it is almost never a given among the less educated. Philosophy in the hands of a politician is often a tool for suppression. If people demanded that the philosophies of the powerful lived up to well understood facts and not to simple ideology, it would be infinitely more difficult for the atrocities of population marginalization and genocide to occur.

    If Philosophy then is the love of wisdom, and Science is knowledge, it must be understood that there can be no wisdom without the love of knowledge. It is far easier to convince an ignorant population to commit atrocities in the name of an ideology or a deity than it is to convince an educated one that recognizes the difference between a well-reasoned position and a scatterbrained dogma. If a philosophy is to do no harm, it must be understood in its entirety by an educated population before decisions of policy are based on it.

    Conversely, in an age of nuclear and biological weapons proliferation, it would seem that knowledge is also in dire need of some wisdom. How do you then gain the wisdom to use knowledge? It is not so much a chicken and egg situation, but a male and female one. So, while my main assertion is that Philosophy needs scientific back-up in order to be valid, the reverse is also necessary. The two must be learned hand-in-hand; they each need the validation of the other in order to survive.

 

 

Works Cited

Dorling Kindersley Limited, London. (1998). The Ultimate Visual Dictionary of Science. New York: DK Publishing.

Kalish, M. (2004, June). Friedrich Nietzsche's Influence on Hitler's Mein Kampf. Retrieved December 07, 2012, from UCSB Department of History: http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/classes/133p/133p04papers/MKalishNietzNazi046.htm

Nadler, S. (2002). A Companion to Early Modern Philosophy. Blackwell Publishers.

O'Connor, J. J., & Robertson, E. F. (1999, January). Thales of Miletus. Retrieved December 03, 2012, from School of Mathematics and Statistics University of St Andrews, Scotland: http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Thales.html

Plato. (n.d.). Apology. http://perseus.uchicago.edu/perseus-cgi/citequery3.pl?dbname=GreekTexts&query=Pl.%20Ap.%2022a&getid=1.

Smoot, P. G. (1996, December 21). Professor Smoot Courses' Page . Retrieved December 03, 2012, from CMB Astrophysics Research Program : http://aether.lbl.gov/www/classes/p10/aristotle-physics.html

Covered In God Poop In Portlandia

        I am way behind on my travel posts. I went to Portland Oregon in October, after getting back from Hawaii. I don't have much to say about the trip though... I didn't see or do anything particularly noteworthy because it was actually a busy week of work, plus a busy week of school work, plus some old friends from Chiemsee live there and I spent the small amount of free time I had at a Halloween wig party they were having. Not much to blog about really, because I'm not going to tell the story of how I wound up passed out in my rental car, covered in vomit and dog poop, trapped in the wrong rental car lot at three in the morning just hours before my flight. It's just a typical Chiemsee sort of thing. Good times. And since I'm not going to tell that story, and the only pictures I got were of the Portlandia statue, I'm going to post a discussion from my Philosophy class discussion board. The question on the table was—"What is your philosophy? Do you believe in God, and if so, for what reasons? How would you prove to someone who does not believe in God that God does indeed exist and your belief is true?"—And since I tend to have one sided atheist rants on my blog, I thought it might be fun to show me in action when people talk back to me. Last names are left out to protect the ignorant innocent.

Author:

messiestobjects

Posted Date:

Monday, August 27, 2012 11:08:16 AM EDT

Edited Date:

Monday, August 27, 2012 11:08:16 AM EDT

    I am an atheist. Not only am I an atheist, but I will state outright and argue with anyone who wants to argue rationally about it that religion is the greatest evil that humanity ever invented. I am also a humanist, in that I am concerned for people suffering under the delusion of religion. I respect their right to believe whatever they wish, but I do not respect the belief itself that was not arrived at with critical thought backed with evidence, nor do I respect the right which all religions seem to claim of forcing their beliefs onto the populace through moral legislation.

    Since I would never try to prove to anyone that God existed, as there is no evidence that he does, I suppose I should turn the question around. However, neither would I try to prove that God does not exist. That is not what atheism means. I would never state categorically that there is no God for the same reason that I would never unconditionally declare that there is not a race of hyper-intelligent shrimp living in the oceans of Europa. There probably isn’t, but it’s an unanswerable question at the moment. It is not up to me to prove that something exists for which there is no evidence; instead, it is up to those who want others to believe in their God(s) to prove to me that he/she/they do exist. There are an infinite amount of ideas of things which might exist out there somewhere, but it is ridiculous to expect us to have to go around actually disproving each one of them.

    There is plenty of scientific evidence which proves that a creator is unnecessary, however. Evolution has shown that life can evolve from simple single-celled organisms without divine help, and modern cosmology is rife with ideas on how the Universe itself may have got its start. We may not yet actually understand how life got started in the first place, but I am far more comfortable with saying “I don’t know” to the ultimate answers of these questions than I am in trusting to the ridiculous claims from some musty old books, which were written by goat farmers and compiled by scribes and rulers with political agendas in a time before anyone on Earth had the smallest idea of what was really going on in the Universe. Science has shown that it is quite capable of understanding the world around us, and in a far more accurate way than any single religious claim has ever been able to.

Author:

Jason

Posted Date:

Sunday, September 2, 2012 1:07:37 PM EDT

Edited Date:

Sunday, September 2, 2012 1:07:37 PM EDT

     I understand and respect your belief.  I do belief in God.  I see that you have quite a problem with religion...which is the same sentiment of a lot of people.  I was wondering do you belief that there is a difference between religion and having faith? Also you said that "There is plenty of scientific evidence which proves that a creator is unnecessary, however. Evolution has shown that life can evolve from simple single-celled organisms without divine help, and modern cosmology is rife with ideas on how the Universe itself may have got its start", my question to you would  then be have you ever wonder where did that single- cell organisms came from?  

Author:

messiestobjects

Posted Date:

Sunday, September 2, 2012 2:12:45 PM EDT

Edited Date:

Sunday, September 2, 2012 2:12:45 PM EDT

     Well, faith is the belief in something for which there is no evidence, and religion is simply the codifying of those beliefs. So no, I don't see a huge difference. They both involve a lack of critical thought.

     And yes, I do wonder how life got started in the first place; that first single-celled organism. It's true that science has not yet discovered the truth behind the beginning of life on Earth, but that's not to say that there are not some very reasonable theories about it. There's even a name for the scientific branch of the study of how biological life could arise from inorganic matter through natural processes: Abiogenesis.

     However, the important thing about this is that it shows the difference between the religious mind and the scientific mind; Scientists have no problem looking at a question, and saying "I don't know" as an answer. In fact, a good scientist views such questions as exciting challenges, and will attempt to find the answers through further questioning, experimenting, revising, reframing the question, experimenting again and so on until an answer is found. Religious folks delight in pointing out areas where science has not yet found the answer and saying "We can't know! God did it!" But this is a dangerous game that religion has been playing for centuries. Every time Religion has tried to use God to explain something which we don't yet understand, it has had to backpedal when science eventually has explained it. In light of this, God is merely an ever-receding pocket of ignorance.

Robin

Posted Date:

Sunday, September 2, 2012 4:57:53 PM EDT

Edited Date:

Sunday, September 2, 2012 4:57:53 PM EDT

    It says in the bible Proverbs 3:5, "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding." I quote the bible and I realize that not everyone believes in it. What makes this useful to the - "Religious folks delight in pointing out areas where science has not yet found the answer and saying 'We can't know! God did it!' But this is a dangerous game that religion has been playing for centuries. Every time Religion has tried to use God to explain something which we don't yet understand, it has had to backpedal when science eventually has explained it. In light of this, God is merely an ever-receding pocket of ignorance.", is that this is a overgeneralized statement with a hint of disgust -"ever-receding pocket of ignorance." Not every person that believes in God writes off their lack of knowledge for the world and our existence to God's doing due to ignorance. It is that obviously we have only the capability to think for ourselves and not others, and yet we have the choice to think of others. It is a humble choice that we put someone before us, especially God. We trust God's ways before ours, there is no room for pride or ignorance if we do this. Then what is ignorant in a person who in their own life acknowledges God's existence, where as another person would hope to dissuade that person to believe in God by only having physical facts to show for proof towards a spiritual matter and of course without the ablity to completely know what that person knows for themselves?

Author:

messiestobjects

Posted Date:

Sunday, September 2, 2012 5:56:59 PM EDT

Edited Date:

Sunday, September 2, 2012 5:56:59 PM EDT

     Proverbs 3:5, "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding"

     This is a wonderful Bible Verse which illustrates another critical difference between Religion and Rationality. You'll get no argument from me about the meaning of this verse, and in fact it is a major reason why I am an atheist.

     Please explain exactly how "God is merely an ever-receding pocket of ignorance" is an overgeneralized statement, especially in the context in which I used it. I don't think you are using that phrase correctly because it is a very specific statement which means that all throughout history, whenever man has not understood something, he has attributed it to God. Priests used to preach that Angels kept the Sun and the Moon in the sky and moving about. Now they do not, because we understand the mechanics of gravity regarding bodies in motion. People used to think that insanity was a sign of demonic possession and subjected the afflicted to unspeakable tortures, such as drilling holes in their head to get the demons out. Now even the most fundamentalist among the religious understand that human psychology is prone to certain neurosis and understand that demons have nothing to do with it, or at least understand that these people require actual medical treatment rather than torture.

     I used that phrase which you found offensive, but was not meant to be, in response to Jason who asked me "have you ever wonder where did that single- cell organisms came from? [sic]" because this is an argument that religions like to use often when trying to prove in God. If we don't know how life began, then God must have done it. But this is what they used to say about the reason for the sun shining before we understood Nuclear Physics.

     "It is a humble choice that we put someone before us, especially God. We trust God's ways before ours, there is no room for pride or ignorance if we do this." This statement is of course a matter of personal opinion, one with which I strongly disagree. Is it humble to think that an all-powerful creator who created the entire Universe is personally concerned with you and your relatively insignificant lifestyle choices? Or is it more humble to realize that you are one tiny insignificant human on a tiny insignificant planet of billions of humans orbiting a tiny insignificant sun which is in a tiny insignificant Galaxy composed of billions of suns, which in turn is one galaxy among billions?

    Lastly, when you say that "only having physical facts to show for proof towards a spiritual matter and of course without the ablity to completely know what that person knows for themselves"[sic] please understand that this is a meaningless statement to me. In October of 2008 James Randi offered a one million dollar prize to anyone who can show, under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, spiritual or occult power or event. To date, no one has claimed this prize, or even been able to pass the preliminary test. People may have experienced personal spiritual events in their lives, but this is meaningless to all those who have not personally experienced any such thing and furthermore is absolutely not a claim for the existence of God, much less for making laws based on said claimant's morals.

Author:

Robin

Posted Date:

Sunday, September 2, 2012 8:49:04 PM EDT

Edited Date:

Sunday, September 2, 2012 8:49:04 PM EDT

    The question that if we believe in God and how would you prove it to someone is all that I am trying to share. There is way too much we both have to say on this and although we're not here to prove each other wrong, I was curious if my thoughts would make any difference to yours that maybe no one has said to you before. No big deal, it's a good discussion no matter how much we agree or disagree because it has substance from both sides and if you think of it like math when you're finding the lowest common denominator, it goes as far as it can and I think that's interesting and is good critical thinking on both sides of this, and I think we're there. :)

Author:

Tracy

Posted Date:

Sunday, September 2, 2012 8:13:47 PM EDT

Edited Date:

Sunday, September 2, 2012 8:13:47 PM EDT

 Hey messiestobjects,

    It was very nice reading your views on religion. I am not an atheist but I also don't consider myself to have any religion right now. All I know is that I have faith, not sure in who or what...but it keeps me going each time I struggle with something. I can say that I never met an atheist and when I first started reading your post I was nervous, but you made some great points. I like that you would never force your belief on anyone just as well as people should not force their belief on you. Can't wait to read more of your posts in the future!

Tracy

Author:

messiestobjects

Posted Date:

Sunday, September 2, 2012 11:41:24 PM EDT

Edited Date:

Sunday, September 2, 2012 11:41:24 PM EDT

     Atheism does tend to make people nervous and/or angry. It's strange that it is that way... after all is said and done atheism is simply the declination to believe in something for which there is no evidence. The nature of religion is such that its followers need for as many people as possible to share their own beliefs in order to obscure the idea that there is actually no other reason to have faith in such ideas other than the reasoning of popular opinion. When a jerk like me thumbs his nose at such beliefs, it rattles the false idea of the self-evidency of those beliefs.

Author:

Jason

Posted Date:

Monday, September 3, 2012 2:00:40 PM EDT

Edited Date:

Monday, September 3, 2012 2:00:40 PM EDT

    Messiestobjects, as I read through all you responses it appears that because you don't believe in God you are trying your best to have everyone else believe what you believe. I am not convinced and you have not showed us that God does not exist. You talk about science but the same things you are saying that religion does not prove no science has proved it either. I not saying that in every instance majority rule is right, but 82% of Americans believe in God. Are you saying that we are all wrong and you and your science is right? By the way if God does not exist and science can explain and prove everything as you a making it out to be ...... why haven't they proved to the 82% of Americans and the rest of the world that God does not exist? One last thing, this country was founded on God! our forefathers used the Bible to aide them in writing the constitution that you and the  rest of us abides by. You spend the American dollar "In God we trust".

Author:

messiestobjects

Posted Date:

Monday, September 3, 2012 4:11:53 PM EDT

Edited Date:

Monday, September 3, 2012 4:11:53 PM EDT

     Jason, apparently you haven't actually read my other posts, or at least you haven't comprehended them. As I've stated at least twice, as well as stated outright in my original post, it is not up to atheists to prove that God does not exist. That is not our claim. I am not making out that science has proved he doesn't exist. I am making out that truths which science has uncovered have simply made him unnecessary as an explanation for life, the universe, and everything. Atheism is simply a LACK of belief in theistic claims for which there are NO EVIDENCE. There is no evidence that God exists, period. Therefore, I don't believe him. And you are correct, the fact that 92 percent of Americans believe in him is meaningless. 73 percent of Americans also don't know the reason behind the Cold War. More Americans know who Kim Kardashian is and what she is up to than who Richard Feynman was and what he did for this country. By and large, the larger the number of Americans that believe in something, the more wary you should be about the veracity of it.

     Also, you are 100 percent wrong; our country was not founded on God. "In God We Trust" was added as a motto to the American dollar in 1956, many years after the country was all done being founded. Also, there's this: The 1796 US Treaty with Tripoli, Article 11 reads: "As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen [Muslims],—and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan [Muslim] nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries." Additionally, none of the founding fathers were Christians, especially not Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, or Madison. This claim that we are a Christian Nation, founded on God, is completely false and revisionist. They despised the Christian religion, in fact, and left behind many writings to attest to that fact. Have you ever heard of the Separation of Church and State? A concept introduced by Thomas Jefferson.

     I am not trying to have everyone believe what I believe, Jason, far from it. I leave that sort of behavior up to the religious inquisitionists and Republicans who want to dictate laws based on so-called Christian morality. All I want is for people to understand the difference between fact and opinion, evidence and belief, knowledge and faith.

Author:

Dana

Posted Date:

Monday, September 3, 2012 11:16:28 PM EDT

Edited Date:

Monday, September 3, 2012 11:16:28 PM EDT

    Messiestobjects, that was a very well thought out and well written argument and it is apparent that you have taken the time to draw the conclusions that you have. Interestingly enough, I was also 'indoctrinated' at a very young age into religion and due to many unfortunate circumstances spent many years resentful at churches and the idea of God. My views have since changed with age and life experience and although I am not here to force my beliefs upon you (something I still abhor), I do have a few things to say in response to your post. I was at one point a nursing major and took several science classes in order to  get all my prerequ's for the program. I have a friend who is a nurse and is athiest and felt that his science classes helped him in that direction. At times he would ask me while I was in these classes how I could still believe in God and I would answer him, how can you take these classes and not believe in God? The human body is made up of so many complex systems that all must work together perfectly forr us to exist. Additionally, the world around us must operate in a certain way as well to create a balance for the environment and for us. It is a hard pill for me to swallow that these complex systems just evolved over time without some sort of divine guidance. I agree with you that people's faiths are their own and should never be forced upon others which is why I would never be associated with people that live as such. However, I have personally lived through many life experiences that have given me a firm foundation for a belief in God that science can never explain. Also, interestingly, science itself is based soley on theories. Theories that when retested are often altered and changed. The theory of evolution is just that, a theory that began with the observations of some guy in 1859... over 150 years ago. Their are many aspects of Darwin's original theory that have been discredited by scientists over time. The point I am trying to make is that nothing is absolute, which you agree with. Everyone has a right ot believe whatever they want and it is harmful to try to force those opinions on others.

Author:

Messiestobjects

Posted Date:

Tuesday, September 4, 2012 12:01:33 PM EDT

Edited Date:

Tuesday, September 4, 2012 12:01:33 PM EDT

HI Dana,

    I appreciate your viewpoints on God and your willingness to accept differing beliefs in people. I agree that you should never force your beliefs on anyone through say, legislation or the brainwashing of children. However, this idea that simply debating for your own point of view is the same thing as forcing your opinion on others is false. Merely having to hear about the reasoning and logic behind science and evolution vs. creationism in a school is not an act of violation! I find it amusing that certain Christians can’t read my views on atheism in a philosophy class without gasping in fear that I am forcing them to hear that not everyone agrees with their own views on the existence of God, and with good reason. Especially since this is actually exactly what they are attempting to do when they are happy to tell me all about how I am in the minority in America, and how 92 percent of Americans believe in God, so I must be wrong and should stop trying to force my views on others through, say, a debate as assigned by the class professor! Clearly, you are not one of those types, and so I am grateful to have the opportunity to debate you in a rational manner.

    So with that in mind, I will first address your statement that “The human body is made up of so many complex systems that all must work together perfectly for us to exist. Additionally, the world around us must operate in a certain way as well to create a balance for the environment and for us. It is a hard pill for me to swallow that these complex systems just evolved over time without some sort of divine guidance.”  The fact of the matter is that just because you personally find the human body to be so complex that you don’t understand how it could have happened without some kind of a creator is meaningless. Perhaps you studied evolution in school, perhaps not, but it is clear to me that either way you haven’t fully grasped the power of natural selection. I don’t hold that against you because the fact of the matter is that very few people seem to understand the Theory of Evolution, which is because it is a complicated idea and requires concentrated effort and will to study it and completely grasp it. But anybody can do so if they want to and so I suggest you spend some time studying books and lectures on the Theory of Evolution and fully coming to grips with how it works before you decide that it can’t possibly explain complex life forms.

    Which brings me to my next point; you state that “The theory of evolution is just that, a theory,” which is a common statement by creationists who don’t understand what a scientific theory actually is. Did you know that gravity is also “just" a theory? However, you don’t see many creationists trying to prove their point by stepping out of 12th story windows! Most people tend to confuse a hypothesis, which is an educated guess about the outcome of an experiment, with a Scientific Theory, which is the framework of ideas which explain an interrelated set of facts and observations. In fact, the Scientific Theory is the strongest and best explanation of the natural world that currently exists! When you say that “Their [sic] are many aspects of Darwin's original theory that have been discredited by scientists over time,” what you actually mean is that a good scientific theory must be falsifiable, which in turn means that they must be able to adapt to new information, i.e. observations, evidence, and facts. So it is true that the Theory of Evolution has changed over time, but rather than being discredited it has only become stronger. It is currently the strongest explanation for how life has organized itself on this world, and you are dead wrong to say that it has been proven incorrect in any meaningful way.

    Lastly, I would like to direct you to two excellent videos by Qualia Soup which explain very clearly how Science and evolution work. The first one is called "Skewed Views of Science" and is self-explanatory. The second one is called simply "Evolution" and is an excellent primer on the misconceptions surrounding evolution. They are ten minutes each and well worth your time.

Author:

Samantha

Posted Date:

Monday, August 27, 2012 4:56:16 PM EDT

Edited Date:

Monday, August 27, 2012 4:56:16 PM EDT

    I do believe in God and attend church when I can.  I was raised Catholic and then changed to Lutheran.  The reason I changed I attended church with my cousin and I enjoyed her listening to her Pastor and Youth Pastor who talked about you making a change in the world.  Whether it be big or small everyone can make a change.  While some people believe there is no God how can that be with this earth as beutiful as it is.

    In trying to prove to someone there is a God I would not be the person to do that, as I am one person and how do they know what I say is true or false.  I believe that people accept or deny someone or something for different reasons, and if they want to change they can but on their terms or something in their life has made them change.  Just like when I reading Tracy posting that he started questioning the beliefs of the Catholic Church and did not take everything they said at face value.  The reason he changed his beliefs was because of when he was sick and it made him start questioning things. 

Author:

Messiestobjects

Posted Date:

Thursday, August 30, 2012 11:04:39 AM EDT

Edited Date:

Thursday, August 30, 2012 11:04:39 AM EDT

 

"While some people believe there is no God, how can that be with this earth as beautiful as it is."

 Hi Samantha,

      I just want you to know that I'm not picking a fight, but I want to respond to this statement of yours. The fact of the matter is that beauty does not imply a creator. Evolution can actually explain why we find the earth beautiful because 'survival of the fittest', as Natural Selection is otherwise known, does not mean survival of the strongest, as is often misunderstood. It means survival is awarded to the organism that fits its environment better than other organisms. This means that we have evolved and flourished on this planet because we adapted to the environment extremely successfully, in large part thanks to our brains (and a very enthusiastic 'thumbs up' to our opposable digits). Is it really a surprise, then, that our minds find this world in which we grew up to be beautiful?

     You don't personally have to accept evolution as true in order to see how my argument shows why beauty is not an argument for God. The fact that evolution has a perfectly logical explanation for beauty simply shows that there is an alternative possible explanation for why we find the world to be attractive, and why beauty in and of itself is not proof of God's existence.

Paulette

Posted Date:

Wednesday, August 29, 2012 9:45:58 PM EDT

Edited Date:

Wednesday, August 29, 2012 9:45:58 PM EDT

    In my youth I would have to say that my belief in God was force fed to me. As I grew older and saw more terrible things I would come to believe there is no God. For if there was a God and if he was so good why then could all these bad things happen to one person. As I grew even older I realized that God was not a thing but a way to live a set of standards that people use to have something that is greater than them and then the fear of being alone would be less scary. God exists because there are people who believe in this theory and if there is belief then it becomes a thing. The existence of God is not in its physical form but in its metaphysical form (can’t believe I just used that word) and it is because of this that God exists.

messiestobjects

Posted Date:

Thursday, August 30, 2012 11:50:17 AM EDT

Edited Date:

Thursday, August 30, 2012 11:50:17 AM EDT

 

Hi Paulette,
      So, are you saying that you think that just because people believe in something that doesn't exist and choose to live their lives by the myths surrounding the non-existent deity, that this deity somehow becomes an actuality? Or are you using the term metaphysical as a metaphor for "not real"?

     Obviously, as an atheist, I disagree that the term "metaphysical God" means anything at all: If there is no God then there is no God. But I'm curious to know what you think metaphysical means, because it sounds to me like it means "wishing something into existence".

     Sorry, don't mean to sound combative, it's a difficult subject to talk about without sounding confrontational! I really am just trying to talk about the definition of metaphysics, here.

Paulette

Posted Date:

Thursday, August 30, 2012 9:04:14 PM EDT

Edited Date:

Thursday, August 30, 2012 9:04:14 PM EDT

    Wait, wait, wait messiestobjects. LOL! 

    This is the first class I have taken on Philosophy. So then my first response is yours. Oh great, the pressure to answer. So I'll try.

    I think that if you want to believe this gives it, its reality. The more you believe the more you think it is real so it will be real to you.

    So I guess the answer is not if you wish but "believe" which to me are two different things.

    I am 39 and still dont know where I stand on God, I sometimes find myself saying "God forbid" or "Oh My God", but then I think why did I say that do I really believe??

Sometimes I pray, but not really sure why.

Author:

messiestobjects

Posted Date:

Thursday, August 30, 2012 10:48:59 PM EDT

Edited Date:

Thursday, August 30, 2012 10:48:59 PM EDT

     This is my first philosophy class too! It's perfectly ok not to know where you stand on God... but if you make statements about him, I think it's important to be clear what you mean,  which is why I asked all the questions. Again, I am a dyed-in-the-wool atheist so if anyone is going to make claims about God, I am usually going to challenge them on it. It's not personal, and I'm not trying to convert anyone, but it's important to me.

     I think an important part of philosophy is the art of Sophistry, which I know that Socrates spent a lot of time philosophizing against. In his day, Sophistry was the art of argument using rhetoric (word games, essentially), in order to prove a point, whereas Socrates tended not to respect such approaches; he seemed to be more concerned with the actuality of ideas and delighted in winning arguments not by making statements, but by asking his opponent questions.

     In this case, I want to get to the bottom of the difference between a wish and a belief. By "wish," I don't mean something you wish for from a magic lamp. I mean it as something which you need to be true in order to validate your beliefs. Often, people claim that prayer works, which is wishful thinking. There have actually been experiments performed which test the power of prayer, and the results are conflicting and certainly not in favor of prayer. There have been studies performed by religious groups in the hopes that they could prove that prayer works scientifically, and they found that prayer in fact could have a negative effect on the recipient of a prayer! I think that what you can safely take away from this is that prayer, at best, is not scientific and as such there is no evidence that it actually works for anything.

     Belief, in my mind, is no different from a wish in this respect. Just because you believe in something, doesn't make it true. Harold Camping predicted last year that the Rapture would occur on May 21, 2011. Some of his followers believed the "proof" which he claimed to have found in the Bible, and sold everything they owned in order to donate money and time to Camping's ministry to try and get the word out to as many people as possible. They BELIEVED that the Lord was coming back. When he didn't, lives were ruined. Belief does not make something true, in any sense that matters.

     So my Socratic question to you is; if you believe something for which there is no evidence, and it becomes real to you, in what sense is it real? If you pray for world peace, or for a relative not to die of cancer, and world peace doesn't happen or he or she does die (Or even if he or she doesn't die, the question remains; was it the prayer that saved him or her, or modern medical treatment? You can prove that medical science may have had something to do with it, but you'll never be able to show what good, if any, that prayer did), and yet you continue to pray for things, in what sense are your beliefs real?

Author:

Robin

Posted Date:

Thursday, August 30, 2012 11:07:17 PM EDT

Edited Date:

Thursday, August 30, 2012 11:07:17 PM EDT

    Messiestobjects, why do you usually challenge people when they make claims on God? If there was solid scientific proof of God and prayer, would you believe in God? This is a deep question for us all, and I think this is very interesting to be able to discuss  such this with people with many views on it in depth that we might not normally have a chance to otherwise. I'm not used to talking fairly to someone that is an atheist that doesn't quickly get upset with me for disagreeing in what I believe in, while they tend to get upset if I disagree with what they believe in. I appreciate your objectiveness!

Author:

messiestobjects

Posted Date:

Thursday, August 30, 2012 11:22:24 PM EDT

Edited Date:

Thursday, August 30, 2012 11:22:24 PM EDT

     I usually challenge them because I find that most beliefs are based on faulty reasoning, and I myself was once a victim of religious belief. I am a first generation atheist: my family are NOT happy with me (in the religious sense, at least). The process of realizing that I had been lied to my whole life, and of shedding my irrational beliefs, was both liberating and traumatic. So the debate is a lifelong, ongoing process for me. I challenge others because I am challenging myself.

     I have yet to hear of any evidence for God's existence, but I will tell you this: If there were solid, verifiable evidence that God existed, not only would I NOT believe in God, but there would not be one single believer left on Earth for the same reason that no one on Earth believes that the Sun exists: We know it does.

     This is the crux of atheism. It is NOT a belief or a claim that God does not exist. It is simply a lack of belief in things for which there are no evidence. You yourself are an atheist you know... you don't believe in Odin, Thor, Baal, Osiris, Ahuru Mazda, or Zeus! I just go one God further... :)

Author:

Christine

Posted Date:

Friday, August 31, 2012 1:36:37 AM EDT

Edited Date:

Friday, August 31, 2012 1:36:37 AM EDT

    Hi messiestobjects,

    Religion is a real sort of tabou subject, in the sense that if you don't believe in God or if you question his existence then you are sort of looked at with a discerning eye. It is really hard to question someones beliefs without at times sounding combative.  I myself question if there is a god, especially the more you read about history and science.

Author:

messiestobjects

Posted Date:

Friday, August 31, 2012 10:49:15 AM EDT

Edited Date:

Friday, August 31, 2012 10:49:15 AM EDT

    Right; when you claim to be an atheist who finds religion ridiculous, religious people don't like it. Which is actually a double standard... I don't like it that Republicans are attempting to legislate women's reproductive rights based on their religion, but for some reason we are supposed to respect their beliefs anyway. This is an untenable state of affairs. Any religion that needs to coerce others into adhering to its belief system through the law deserves NO respect, and needs to be called out on all of its hypocrisies at every opportunity.

     It may have been a taboo subject once, but no longer. There are more and more people realizing that religion is a big scam every day, and the internet has made it possible for us to make ourselves heard without fear of being ostracized from our local communities... I was an atheist for a while before I felt comfortable declaring that fact, but the more I've learned and the more I've debated, the more confident I am and I no longer have any trouble wearing a T-shirt that says ATHEIST! out in public.

Author:

Brittany

Posted Date:

Saturday, September 1, 2012 8:47:07 PM EDT

Edited Date:

Saturday, September 1, 2012 8:47:07 PM EDT

    Personally, I was raised Methodist in a small town in southern Missouri. Church activities constituted most of my social life as an adolescent, as well as the social lives of my peers. This being said, I bought into Christianity wholeheartedly during that part of my life. I believed in God, I was baptized, and I became a member of the United Methodist Church. As I got older though, I started to question the things that I had been taught, and slowly became an atheist. My main question was: If science can prove that something is true, why would seemingly intelligent people deny its validity because of the Bible? For example, some religious people have a problem acknowledging that evolution is real, or that the Earth is actually over 4.5 billion years old. I just can't bring myself to believe in an ideology that tries to hold back the advancement of knowledge in our society. I also dislike when religion is used as a weapon in the political arena. For some reason, all politicians have to say that they're Christians to get elected, and sometimes they use the idea of Christianity to deny people their rights. I also think that people often use religion as a crutch to get through the trying times in their lives, instead of actively trying to fix things themselves. Telling someone to “Pray about it”, is much less effective than giving them advice on how they can proactively make the change they want to see in their lives.

With this in mind, I would never take it upon myself to impose my own personal philosophy (that science is truth, and that we make the decisions that shape our lives) on someone who said that they did believe in God. I think people are entitled to their own beliefs, and no one is necessarily right all the time. However, if someone had a question about whether a scientific fact or a religious idea was true, I would offer them my opinion.

Author:

messiestobjects

Posted Date:

Sunday, September 2, 2012 10:59:55 AM EDT

Edited Date:

Sunday, September 2, 2012 10:59:55 AM EDT

    "With this in mind, I would never take it upon myself to impose my own personal philosophy (that science is truth, and that we make the decisions that shape our lives) on someone who said that they did believe in God."

    What do you mean by "impose"? I would never try and force someone to believe/acknowledge scientific truths through say, legislation or brainwashing, but I have no problem "imposing" my atheism on people through conversation or debate. Religion has been imposing it's moral values on everyone for centuries, and has been a huge force for harm in the world. I am compelled to point out errors in reasoning whenever I can because I feel very strongly that if humanity doesn't wise up very soon, we're going to destroy ourselves.

    I also don't believe that people are necessarily entitled to their beliefs. What I mean is, Islamic fundamentalists believe that it is their imperative to kill all infidels and subjugate all women. Do you think they are entitled to this belief? Christians in the US seem to believe that it is their right to impose the teaching of "Intelligent Design" in public schools at the expense of evolution. They also believe that Homosexuals do not have the same legal rights as other human beings, or that women don't have the right to choose how to use their own reproductive systems, and want to enforce this moral code on them by law. They are entitled to hold these insane beliefs amongst themselves, but they are not entitled to believe that they have the right to force other people to live by their beliefs, because we have a constitutional guarantee for the separation of Church and State.

     Since "Science adjusts its views based on what's observed, and Faith is the denial of observation, so that belief can be preserved," (Tim Minchin) I believe that the teaching of science trumps the beliefs of the religious in every public sphere. In the US, Christianity and other religions have every right to teach their beliefs to their own children at home and in church (or at temple or at the mosque etc etc) or even in conversation and debate with others, but they don't have the right to claim that we are trampling over their religious freedoms by keeping their beliefs out of schools and out of the lawbooks.

     I realize that, as an atheist, you probably agree with me at least to some degree, but I feel like it's important that when someone says "everyone is entitled to their beliefs" to point out that beliefs are not guaranteed equal status with the truth. The truth is not somewhere in between a fact and a lie, and opinions are not worthy of equal footing next to facts.

Author:

Claire

Posted Date:

Sunday, September 2, 2012 11:52:36 AM EDT

Edited Date:

Sunday, September 2, 2012 11:52:36 AM EDT

    Samantha and Stefani- I'm right in the same boat with you! I know I believe in God, and while I could probably start an argument with other people who don't believe in God, I don't feel the need to. Faith is an intimate thing. It is shaped by the way you grew up and by the situations you've lived through. Sure, someone could argue God is fake and use science to back up their claims, but that still wouldn't change my views. After living in a Christian home for my whole life my beliefs are so ingrained into the person I am that no one can take them away. Even though I may not attend church on a regular basis the Christian values I have will stick with me.

Author:

messiestobjects

Posted Date:

Sunday, September 2, 2012 12:03:34 PM EDT

Edited Date:

Sunday, September 2, 2012 12:03:34 PM EDT

     "I could probably start an argument with other people who don't believe in God, I don't feel the need to." REMINDER: The topic of this discussion board is "What is your philosophy? Do you believe in God, and if so, for what reasons? How would you prove to someone who does not believe in God that God does indeed exist and your belief is true?"

     Not an argument, a discussion. You get more points for the assignment the more good comments you make.

Author:

Jeanette

Posted Date:

Sunday, September 2, 2012 10:57:57 PM EDT

Edited Date:

Sunday, September 2, 2012 10:57:57 PM EDT

    I am a believer.  My views have changed as I have gotten older but I have always believed in God.  I was raised Baptist.  When I was 5 my parents would send me and my borthers and sisters to Sunday School every week.  They decided to stop goin after a few years but I went every week. I believed what was told to me and just accepted what they said.   After graduating High School things in my life went astray and I stopped going to church for a long time.  After my Divorce in 2006 I spiraled downhill and called out to God in Prayer asking for help.  I am not going to go into all the details but I did not think I was going to make it through the night, I awoke in the morning and heard a voice telling me to get up, get dressed and go to church. So I did.  I decided to go to a local church here and immediately felt at home.  It is not your conventional church.  Few months after I started going I decided to be baptized and accept Jesus as my savior, not because someone was telling me it was the thing to do but because it was what I felt in my heart.  I felt the change inside after the baptism.  Few months later I met a man who did not believe in God.  He knew I was a christian and I accepted that he was not.  I did not force my views/beliefs on him but I did pray to God for help in deciding what to do.  A few months later he asked to go to church with me, the first time he felt uncomfortable and left shortly after arriving and did not come again for a few weeks.  Eventually on his own he came back and accepted Jesus as his Savior and was baptized.    When I asked him why the change he told me that he had been hearing voices for a few weeks telling him it was time to go to church.    I can't prove to someone that God exists, but you also can't prove that he does not exist.  Each branch of religion be it Catholic, Lutheran, Methodist, Baptist, etc still believes in God, they just worship him differently.  I found that the less conventional way was best for me to show my love of God.  Each person has to find their own path.  Sure I still stumble and make mistakes, but my belief in God helps me to get through the good times and the bad. 

Author:

messiestobjects

Posted Date:

Sunday, September 2, 2012 11:28:27 PM EDT

Edited Date:

Sunday, September 2, 2012 11:28:27 PM EDT

    Hi Jeanette,
     I have no desire to argue with your personal experiences that led you or your friend to become born again, but I do want to address one statement that you made: "I can't prove to someone that God exists, but you also can't prove that he does not exist." The burden of proof is an important philosophical argument that has been prominent recently amid creationist / atheist debates, and the assertion you make here is an often used point on the religious side. The crux of the matter is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the existence of a God who is responsible for everything is quite an extraordinary claim for which no evidence exists. This is the reason why religious belief requires faith. If you have faith, that is certainly your business (and your unequivocal right), but you cannot  expect someone who has never heard the voices that you have to accept your claims, which is why the first half of your statement is admirable and true.

     However, the second half is a non-starter, a non-point, and yet widely used. As I've said elsewhere, it is not up to unbelievers to prove that something doesn't exist. It would be like if I asked you thus: Jeanette, do you believe in Zeus? You would probably say no. Then I would say, you can't prove to me that Zeus does not exist! I've heard Zeus telling me to go kill Medusa, so I know he is real, and you can't prove to me that he isn't!" There are many, many ideas in the world of things that probably don't exist: Purple rain, talking dogs, flying shoes, a teapot orbiting Jupiter... the only way to definitively prove that a talking dog does not exist, for example, would be to interview every dog on Earth, which is absurd. How much harder would it be to prove there is NOT a teapot orbiting Jupiter, or an all-powerful, invisible creator who only speaks to a chosen few? Therefore, you can see why most non-Christians are hesitant to accept Christian claims of special knowledge regarding the creator, and their right to impose their beliefs through legislation.

    And that's it... I tended to have the last word against my classmates. I like to think it's because they had nothing against my devastating logic bombs, but in all likelihood it's more probable that they just didn't understand some of the big words I used. Or that they simply wrote me off as an asshole.-- Powell's books was HUGE!

Wowies And Owies On The Hawaiian Island Of Maui

    Maui! We had essentially two days there, after saying a tearful aloha to Scott and Sarah, and we decided to head straight for the Road to Hana. It's a 52 mile stretch of road that took us both days to navigate because it's narrow, hella switchbacky, traverses 46 single-lane bridges that were built in 1910, and is all covered in amazing rain forest bordered by precipitous drops into the ocean. The first thing we stopped for, besides a coconut, were the painted trees.

    They are called Rainbow Eucalyptus trees, and apparently came from Australia. There is a small grove of them just off of the early part of the road.

    Trippy right? I don't have a whole lot to add... we just hung around a while and took pictures. Green, red, yellow, sometimes purple stripes of bark. And a stream of rainbow light!

    You can see the ocean from pretty much any hilltop in Maui. Rainbow tree and ocean. Now I know why people like it there.

    One last trippy tree. I wanted to lick the bark. I abstained, but I need you to know that it was difficult.

    Another attraction along the Road to Hana is the black sand cove. Pictures of sand, and beaches, and water are dull, I know. But black sand! I had to try. We swam and snorkeled.

    A rest stop we bathroom-breaked at had rikki-tikki-tavis! What do you calls 'em... Mongooses. Mongeese. Apparently they're a real problem. They eat all the endangered species on the islands, because there's no King Cobras around to battle heroically with.

    Cute little monsters, aren't they?

    There are a number of waterfalls and natural swimming pools everywhere in the jungle, and we stopped at a couple for swimmies. Just like in LOST, that horrible show that still yet made me envious of island life. See the bald backfloater in its natural element.

    We spent the night in a tree house! No electricity. We picked up some grilled chicken off the side of the road to go with the bottle of wine we bought.

    I mean, we didn't just pick it up off the ground. There was a guy. With a dirty pick-up and a grill. But we did eat some weird crazy fruits off of trees throughout the day.

    Above was our view from the bed, through the very necessary bug-netting. The mosquitoes were... voracious. But let's not dwell on that.

    There's something very nice about sleeping in a tree house in a jungle on Hawaii. Happy Anniversary! Grilled road chicken and wine in bed while the bugs dashed hungrily at us from outside the netting was fun.

    And the morning view was pretty sweet too. Then we made our mad bug-avoiding dash to the car and got back on the road. We went to see Charles Lindbergh. The toy plane is pleasing.

    He's buried in a quiet little church yard...

...with a fantastic view.

    There were horsies!

    And weird trees!

    Actually, there were weird trees everywhere. I have a lot of weird tree pictures. But I figured that after the Trippy Trees, enough is enough. Okay last one, because it's like a portal to Hobbiton or something.

    We stopped at a random beach on the way back for a nice swim. There weren't many people there so it seemed perfect. And it was... big waves, clear water, lots of fun. Until we almost died when we got caught by an effing strong current and were dashed over some lava rocks. Got a good scrape on my zombie knee, dammit. We made it out after some minor struggling and were all like, "whew, haha!" But as we were leaving, we saw this sign which of course we hadn't seen upon our arrival.

    And that's Maui. It was nicer than I expected. I'd never have made the effort to go to Hawaii if it hadn't been for Scott being there, so I'm glad it worked out that way. Julie and I had a really nice 2nd Anniversary. Wow, I really set the bar a bit too high for only a 2nd. How in hell's bells am I supposed to top that?

On The Island State, Every Night is Great--Oh Every Night Is Date Night In Hawaii

    We finally got our power back after 9 days, and I have just got caught up on all my school work. Oy what a month. So the above photo is an overview of Honolulu from the top of Diamond Crater. Julie and I hiked up it on our first morning in town. It was really hot. The island of Oahu is amazing, except for all the people. It really illustrates how the tourist industry is adept at turning a beautiful place into an ugly mess. Don't get me wrong; there are plenty of unsullied beaches and beautiful drives and amazing vistas, yadda yadda yadda. But the urban development and masses of crowds in inappropriate places is especially jarring because of it.

    That's the problem with being a critical tourist though. By definition there is a healthy dose of hypocrisy in such statements. If it weren't for the tourism industry, I'd be out of a hobby. I just wish that Americans could be less... crass and destructive about the whole thing. The below photo is of one of those secluded areas.

    It's the place where Scott and Sarah almost got eaten by that wave from my last post, and also apparently the crash site from LOST is around there somewhere. But we didn't go looking for it because jesus, what a crap show that turned out to be.

    Nice vista, baby! So mostly our trip to Oahu consisted of driving around and chatting with Scott and Sarah. But of course we also hit Pearl Harbor. Sarah's dad took us out there for the day. We went to see an airplane museum somewhere. I'm not really a fan of military museums, but airplanes are neat.

    I just find the fetishizing of weaponry to be... odd. Don't misunderstand, I find certain aspects of military history and technology to be fascinating, but people who think America is great because we're awesome at killing people is a strange consequence of our national identity.

    Pearl Harbor is odd that way all around. There was a lot of self-righteousness about our getting attacked there, and it was definitely a horrendously sneaky and duplicitous attack on the part of the Japanese. But we act as though it were totally unprovoked, as though we would never do the same, and as though we were totally innocent bystanders of WWII up until that point.

    The fact is, we were economically meddling in world affairs and the Japanese knew they had to take us out of the game if they were to solidify their hold on certain resources that they needed. There are other reasons that are wrapped up in various forms of Nationalism and Japanese Identity, but that was the economic reality. That doesn't make us right or wrong to be outraged, it simply means that it was a world war, and tactics demand certain actions.

    We ourselves bombed the shit out of civilian areas of Dresden, Germany later in the war with similarly vague justifications. I find it morally dubious to "never forget" Pearl Harbor and 9/11, apparently unjustified attacks against us, while there are no such sloagans in the US for Dresden or Nagasaki, apparently unjustified attacks in which we were the immoral aggressor. The above and below pictures are of the sunken USS Arizona.

    Bubbles of oil still percolate to the surface from the ship. I tried to photograph one but really, a zoom of a little black ball-bearing in green water is a bit dull. Here's the floating memorial for the Arizona that they boat you out to. As far as memorials go, it's a pretty nice one actually.

    So that was our day at Pearl Harbor. Tora! Tora! Tora!

    The other major event from our Oahu portion of the trip was scuba diving. Scott and Sarah are Dive Masters, I have my Open Water Diver and have scuba dived (dove?) in Germany, Croatia, Thailand, Florida, and Guantenemo Bay, Cuba. Julie, however, had never done it before and so scuba was a must on the bucket list. Sarah hooked us up with a dive shop in Waikiki.

    And oh what the hell: Not a very flattering shot of me, but look, we dove with Daniel Craig!

    The dive itself wasn't the most amazing dive I've ever been on, but it was still pretty sweet and it was fun to see Julie flop around under water during the very normal adjustment period. She attacked it with courage and aplomb however, and by the end of the day was pretty damn good at it.

    You Scuba! Nice wristbands, Olivia Newton John.

    Tandem Scuba. We saw sea turtles, but Sarah didn't have the camera down on that dive. It was cool though, it was a turtle cleaning station, where they go to hang out and let fish eat accumulated gunk off of their shells. It was pretty.

    Aww. I totally took a picture of them making out down there with her camera, but they didn't send me that one. I guess they were afraid I'd publish it on my world-renowned blog or something. As-if!

    The thing about posing for pictures whilst scuba-diving: don't exhale! Ah well. Live and learn. Scott's like a zen scuba master down there on the left. So that's all I really got on Oahau. It was a lot of fun and of course it was great to hang out with my friend after not seeing him for like, 5 years now. Hopefully it won't be another 5 years.

    It was Julie and my 2nd anniversary while we were there, and I had some spare miles still so we used them to take a quick 2 day trip over to another Hawaiian island before heading home. Next post: Maui!

Had To Get A Post Out Before Sandy or, A Good Month For Friends

    So I may be about to lose power for a week, which I just realized would mean I wouldn't get a post in before the end of the month. Which would be a shame because not only have I never missed a month, but it's been a really good one, and busy too.The above photo I took in Hawaii, where Julie and I went to meet Scott and his girlfriend Sarah on a layover they had, from mysterious lands to parts unknown. That wave almost killed them, and they were happy to know that I was there. That's right, don't count on me to come running with help; but I'll whip out my camera and photograph your death if possible.

    He's probably going to be pissed that I posted these pictures on my little blog. Well, I'll take them down if he begs, but I wanted everyone to see how Daniel Craig he looks. Everyone I tell thinks I'm lying. Plus, I've missed pissing him off. It's been years, and it was really good to finally hang out a bit.

    Awww. This was our trip to Pearl Harbor. I have a longer post about Hawaii, but you know; Sandy. It's going to kill us all at any moment. Or my wife is, for forgetting to fill the ice trays. Either way, this is a rush job. I also had a trip to Portland, Oregon for work! Lots of old Chiemsee friends live there! They were having a Halloween party! It was a wig party!

    I'll tell you one thing: no matter how much you think you've changed over the years, there's nothing like getting together with friends you haven't seen in a long time to prove that you haven't really, not one bit!

An Atheist In Ken Ham's Court

    There is a sign on the entrance to the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky that tells you that they reserve the right to remove from the property anyone who wears offensive clothing, among other things. Well I braved it anyway, and ran into no problems for the duration of my visit. I suspect that when deeply religious people (of the type who might visit the Creation Museum) see written words their first impulse is not to read them. Avoid knowledge at all costs! Such seemed to be the case on the day I was there, at any rate. To be fair, there was a preponderance of Mennonites, who are likely more used to ignoring what people's T-Shirts might say.

mu·se·um

[myoo-zee-uhm]

noun. a building or place where works of art, scientific specimens, or other objects of permanent value are kept and displayed.

    So right off the bat, the Creation Museum fails to meet the requirements of actually being, you know, a museum. All that is there are dioramas of Bible scenes, and placards which lay out the anti-science of Creationism. Also, they have a huge dinosaur fetish. In the old days, Creationists denied that dinosaurs ever existed. They used to say that dinosaur bones were deliberately placed by God to test our Faith. Well, they must have finally conceded that this would make God a huge asshole, and so to quite a large extent the Creation Museum is a Christian Apology, where they are now saying that dinosaurs are in the Bible, and that Fossils actually prove that the Bible is true. This is a popular reverse-position tactic used by Christian Apologists all throughout history, and it was entertaining to see the results of the latest Christian Backpedalist thinking.

    There is this whole thing that they keep saying there that the conclusions that people come to change depending on what point you start your assumptions from. They divide the only two possible starting points, apparently, between "Man's Word" and "God's Word."

    This is an example of the kind of "scientific specimen" they have there. They list certain scientific ideas, devoid of context or explanation as though it's insane to "believe" in the "priesthood" of Science, and right next to it they list certain vaguely congruous Biblical ideas, devoid of any context, evidence, or logic other than Biblical authority itself.

    So God is apparently Popeye now. Sorry, cheap shot, but goodness gracious. I yam what I yam. At any rate, what they've done here, right from the get-go, is to set up a false equivalency, a straw man argument that carries them through their twisted line of logic. Before I explain the false equivalency, allow me to digress on that point. When you go to a real museum, which is full of actual specimens and scientific conclusions arrived at through careful examination of evidence, the museum is usually an open floor plan. You can go from room to room, willy-nilly, and decide what section you want to peruse as your own whim takes you. This is because real evidence supports itself, it can stand on its own and is supported by other evidence from other disciplines, or at the very least remains uncontradictory. The creation museum, interestingly, is physically laid out as a single, twisty road which you follow from beginning to end in order to be exposed to certain ideas at proper moments. They start you off with faulty assumptions and build on them from there, until by the end of the walk you are asked to accept as the Creation-version of truth some pretty outrageous claims, and you hopefully ignore the contradictory and hypocritical statements they've fed you along the way. We'll get to that stuff.

    So back to the false equivalency. This whole "Man's Word" vs. "God's Word" business. It reveals a severe lack of understanding of what science actually is. Science is NOT man's word. It IS man's understanding of nature, as revealed through observation, experiment, the cataloging of verifiable fact, and the careful consideration of facts in conjunction with each other based, yet again, on further experiment. We arrive at scientific conclusions based on THINGS THAT ACTUALLY CAN BE MEASURED by other people, even people from different cultural, religious, or linguistic backgrounds, and they will all arrive at the same answers because physics always works the same way under similar conditions, in all places. Science is not just some dudes getting together and making shit up based on fancy. So calling science "Man's Word" sets up a false idea in the minds of the gullible. In reality it is "Nature's Word" vs. "Bible's (written by many different people, from goat farmers to pubescent scribes, who had less idea of what was really going on in the world than most 2nd graders do today) Word."

    "But because we never have all the evidence, different scientists can reach very different conclusions, depending on their starting assumptions." ARGH. This is just stupidity. The scientific method actually rules out starting assumptions. Experimenters have all manner of ways to eliminate Confirmation bias from their results. Is it always successful? No. Scientists actually can come to incorrect answers, yes. BUT, that is why science demands rigor, repeat experimentation, and PEER REVIEW before it will ever accept any particular idea from any particular scientist. If Richard Dawkins, a very respected biologist and champion of the modern atheist movement, came out and said that he had discovered evidence that Christian's brains were smaller than atheist's, the scientific community would not accept it as a fact just because he said so. They would say "That's preposterous. Prove it." And no one would accept his claim as fact until he could verifiably demonstrate it. Which of course he couldn't, because it's a lie I just made up. And it shows that if even someone like Dawkins made an erroneous claim, it would still not become scientific fact, because science does not allow false ideas to remain once evidence proves them wrong.

    This, however, is an example of the type of evidence that Creationists require and the type of reasoning they use. Atrocious, just atrocious. They think they've proved that the world is 6000 years old by adding up the ages of the sons of Adam in the Bible. This right here is the poster-child poster for what this museum is all about. A literal interpretation of the Bible and unquestioning trust in its authority, and a severe misunderstanding of science.

    And hopefully, you never will hear this in school. This is the garbage that they want taught in public education.

    This, for instance, is an outright lie! "Scientists are puzzled how so many finch species could arise?" NO THEY'RE NOT! They know exactly how. Natural Selection. Oh but wait, later on in the museum you want to talk about Darwin's Finches?

    So HERE NOW they are saying that Natural Selection (or as they are trying to rename it "created kinds", which are studied by a type of creation pseudo-scientist called a "Baraminologist") is now acceptable! Just like dinosaur bones, Creationists are finally coming around to the idea of Natural Selection, but it is still not proof of Evolution, they say. So in the previous picture, they say that Scientists are puzzled by finches, when in reality they are not because Darwin, Natural Selection; the many-finch problem SOLVED over a hundred years ago. Boom, lie. And in this one they are saying oh well, natural selection as told in the Bible is perfectly reasonable! Gah! Do you see the mental disconnect? Do you see how they take what they want, use it when they want it, and discard it when it is not convenient for a different argument they want to make?!

    "There is not enough time--even in billions of years" for man to evolve from microbe. This again is, if not exactly a lie (though it is), at the very least a simple bold statement with no context, and no evidence presented either way. ABSOLUTELY there is enough time for a microbe to evolve into a man... in the 3.5 to 3.9 Billion years that scientists think it may actually have taken. Again, this reveals the stupidity of creation scientists. They cannot conceive of a billion years, so therefore evolution could not have happened.

    Going back to Natural Selection, which apparently creationists now concede as true (though note the subtle switch from "Man's Word" to "man's opinion"); The fact that in our own minuscule lifetimes we can observe natural selection occurring in various species is a compelling argument for much larger changes occurring over much larger stretches of time. Simply saying "There is not enough time" is meaningless. How do they know there is not enough time? They are happy to add up all the sons of Adam, after all, why don't they want to add up the time it takes for natural selection to occur, and apply that function from 100 years to 3.5 billion years? There is definitely enough time. Also they are saying, again apropos of nothing with no facts or evidence, that mutation does not have the ability to create new genetic information. IDIOT, that's what mutation IS. A mutation IS a change in genetic information. Since that is what it IS, it most certainly HAS the ability to be what it IS. Fucking infantile word games with these people.

    So... because poison dart frogs aren't naturally poisonous, this is evidence that the Garden of Eden actually existed? What about Rattlesnakes? Black Widows? Scorpions? Jellyfish? Pfeffer's Flamboyant Cuttlefishes? This is cherry picking one instance to back up your argument while ignoring all other instances which contradict it, and is known as Confirmation Bias. And in any case, the "evidence" of the Poison Dart Frog is evidence of nothing except that Poison Dart Frogs can synthesize their poisons from the alkaloids in the food they eat in the wild. In no way does this "evidence" in any way prove or even imply that someplace named Eden existed, though it doesn't stop them from trying to imply it anyway.

    Biblical diorama of Adam fucking a sheep from behind in the garden of fuckin'. "Holy Me, Adam, knock that shit off! I said name them, not rape them! Man, I need to give you something to fuck. Go to sleep, will you? Even though I created the entire Universe out of nothing, I need your rib to create just one more thing. You dirty sheep-fucker."

    Adam: "Awwwww yeah. Thanks God, but you know, the sheep didn't make so many mouth noises. Maybe this woman-thing ought to be subservient and silent, hey? Hmm, apples."

    Anyway, another big thing in the Creation Museum, obviously, is a literal interpretation of the Wholly Babble. They had this urban section dedicated to the dangers of what happens when culture abandons scripture. This was a 7-fucking minute video of a kid fidgeting in church. They claim that when a literal interpretation of the Babble is given up in exchange for liberal Christianity, the damn kids lose respect for religious authority and, you know, do drugs and whores and fidget in church and stuff. The real point Ken Ham wants to make here is that when you stop terrifying children with the real, literal possibility of hellfire and damnation, because actual science has shown that it's totally, ridiculously impossible for the Bible to be literally true, that they will no longer respect his religious authority! Wah! This actually is evidence of the authoritarian nature of religious control, and nothing else.

    "The Big Bang is just a theory! Scientists don't have all the evidence, they're just guessing! Man's Word! I mean, Man's opinion! Oh wait, we can't find any timber from Noah's Ark, which should definitely still be there if the Flood only happened a few thousand years ago? WELLLLL, we can't be sure that the Ararat in the Babble is the same Ararat as the Ararat in Turkey! The Earth's crust was probably unstable! Guess, obfuscate, theory! BUT DAMN YOU TO HELL, THE BIBLE IS LITERALLY THE TRUTH YOU FUCKIN' HEATHEN!" Now see, here is where an actual museum might have, say, some actual timbers from Noah's ark, or a leg to stand on.

    Nope. Some nice models though, with a subtle reminder that all you damn unbelievers are gettin' they asses left behind. And oh, wait, perhaps some more apology and supposition?

    "With a jug maybe like this, Noah's family could simply... With a cage system similar to this one, Noah's family could simply..." In other words, we don't know shit, because there is no evidence that anything in the Bible ever happened, but we're going to twist science to mean what we want it to mean, abuse English to say what we want it to say, and attack facts as mere suppositions and imply that suppositions are facts until your head is so fucked you won't think straight 'till Sunday, when we can fuck your brainhole in Church, too.

    Oh yeah. And Dragons. They had this whole movie about how even though every scholar on earth regards dragons as mythical, that the fact that they are such a prevalent myth means that Dragons actually existed... as dinosaurs. PROOF OF DINOSAURS AND HUMANS, LIVING TOGETHER, THEREFORE BIBLE. BITCHES. That was pretty much when my head exploded, and the Lord forced me to reveal my inner four-eyed demon, and I had to run before the Christians pitchforked me.
So that was my Creation "Museum" adventure. At its conclusion, I had to admit that it is in fact a museum, if not in the way its creators intend: A museum dedicated to human stupidity and willful ignorance. 2 Peter 3:3-6 - ³ Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts,⁴ And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.⁵ For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water:⁶ Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished: I love that they highlight 'willingly Ignorant.' Oh how they twist and twist!

The Bible mentioned me!

Area 48... Area 49... Area 50... Area 51! Ready Or Not, Here I Come!

    So leapfrogging back over the last inexplicable post, remember when I said that we go to Europe for castles, history, sexy accents and beer, and that they come here for the amazing landscapes, New York City, sexy accents, and... um. Definitely not the beer? Well, Death Valley has a castle for those of us who can't go to Europe whenever we want, and in case Europeans get homecastlesick. On our way out the next morning (after a fabulous night in the 50s-fancy Furnace Creek Inn thanks to a room upgrade) we hit Scotty's Castle.

    Scotty was a con man who convinced some rich dude to invest in his non-producing gold mine, and the rich guy built the place so he could be near his investment. By the time that the gold mine fell through and Scotty had disappeared, Rich Dude had discovered that the desert was good for his health, so he stayed.

    Interesting place, but not so interesting that we wanted to pay $30 to take a tour. We left Death Valley and took the sceneic drive back to Las Vegas, revisiting a cool place I went to once before...

    Yup. That small outpost of humans just outside of Area 51, Rachel Nevada. In fact the long route from Death Valley goes north, east, and then south for about 300 miles and circumnavigates the gigantic military installation which houses Area 51 as well as the Tonopah Test Range where if you look at it from google maps, you can see the hundreds of gigantic craters left from the nuclear bomb tests they were doing all throughout the 50s.

    The road that travels along the north end of Nellis Air Force Base, State Route 375, is known as the Extraterrestrial Highway.

    Of course we stopped in at my favorite American diner, the Little A'Le'Inn, for lunch. Damn fine cuppa coke, alienburger, and shoestring fries.

    On the last occasion I visited Rachel, I was stopping in at the Inn when this crazy ass Donnie Darko-lookin' storm rolled in out of nowhere, and I got a cool shot similar to this of this tow truck and Inn sign out front.

    After lunch, I chatted up the employees and asked them if they'd mind if I published the shot, if I ever had the oportunity. There's this whole thing about property releases that the sign in the photo necessitates. So the owner, Pat Travis, was in and she came out and asked to see the picture. I pulled out my laptop and showed it off:

    And she said she'd sign a release on the condition that I send her a copy to hang in the diner! She may have simply been being polite, but she does have a lot of stuff hanging on her walls in there so there's a good chance that any future visitors will see my picture in there. And in any case she signed the back of a card for me so, it's a win-win.

    From there, Julie and I headed over to Area 51.

    The famous black mailbox. It's funny because lore had it that it was some sort of secret drop-off box for Area 51, when in fact it's just a mailbox for a local rancher named Steve Medlin. He has had to take extreme measures to make it secure because people keep vandalizing it; he's repainted it since the last time I was here.

    And then the 5 or 7 mile dirt road journey to the anti-climactic border of Area 51.

    I have this juvenile glee for taking pictures of signs that say photography prohibited, and then pulling out my zoom lens for close-ups of seeeeeecret things. Like this strange alien-shaped spy device looking down on us from a hilltop.

    Or these creepy guys in this creepy truck looking down at us through creepy binoculars from a creepy hilltop.

    Rumor has it that if you step one toe over the border into Area 51, these guys will rush down and arrest the fuck out of you and take you to a local county jail, where you have to pay a $500 fine. Kind of not so scary... If I had a bunch of money and I wanted to risk losing my job I'd seriously consider making a break for it, just for laughs. I've been cuffed by military types before; it's more funny than intimidating.

The Vacation That No Recent Eye Surgery Patient Should Go On, Really

    Julie got Lasik surgery! Actually, it was PRK, a custom job, which gives you better vision (better than 20/20, apparently!) but takes longer to heal post-op. The Doctor said that it was very important to keep her eyes really moist for at least a month in order to heal faster. So two weeks after surgery, we celebrated by going to the hottest, driest spot in North America! When I took the below shot, 116 °F was the highest temp we'd come across yet, but we later saw it get up to 122 °F. Sort of reminded me of the good 'ol days in Iraq.

    I had my 20th-ish trip to Ridgecrest, CA for work last week, and I can honestly say that I have not gotten tired of the 5 hour drive from Las Vegas through Death Valley. We'd made the decision to have Julie come with me before the surgery, thinking that it would be a great visual feast for new eyes.

    And it was! That's Badwater Basin, lowest point of land in North America and Julie's first glimpse of the beauty of Death Valley. Oh sure, her eyes were red, swollen, blurry, and she had to keep a constant flow of eyedrops dropping to battle the heat and dryness that made the clothes you were wearing contantly feel like they'd just come out of the dryer 2 seconds ago, but to the best of my abilitity to discern the quality of her sincerity, she wholly believes it was worth the discomfort!

    Zabriske Point. It was nice to have Julie along for several reasons, but one of them was that it's been a long time since I stopped to inhale the moistureless dust, other than the occasional surprise visit with desert puppy... I've gotten more into HDR photography since then, and so it was nice to sort of re-tour Death Valley with her new eyes and some new camera techniques. We spent the night at the swanky Furnace Creek Inn near here thanks to a room upgrade.

    More Zabriske Point. According to Wikipedia, the philosopher Michel Foucault called his 1975 acid trip at Zabriskie Point the greatest experience of his life. I can see why, it's really a great spot. Another favorite is the Artist's Pallet drive.

    It's about a three mile one-way loop drive which starts up there, and drives through those technicolored hills. The best time to hit it is during sunset, and we were a little early so we did the loop twice, which turned out to be perfect.

    A Charlie Brown Death Valley! I like the zig-zag that the ground makes with the mountains. Nearly every point along the drive offers a great photographic opportunity...

    ...and in the above photo, the road literally comes to such a point! I love it when a vanishing point plan comes together.

    This is one place where you should definitely pay attention to the squiggly road signs.

    Road boobs! And I remember futilely attempting to capture the way the scrub lights up like little fires in the sunset the first time I was here a few years back, and I feel like this picture captures that a little bit. So yay!

    Death Valley is just huge, and monothematic, and at the same time every bit of it has its own unique perspective to offer. I felt like this picture sort of got that idea. Maybe. Anyway I like it. You can click on it to make it bigger, maybe that will help.

    The eponymous Artist's Pallete. I posted this one with the tiny little French family in it to help with perspective. There were a lot of Europeans bumping around the valley. In fact, I heard only one or two Americans speaking the whole time we were there. Makes sense though: Europeans are horny for the US National Park system. It's the main reason that many of them visit our country. We go there for castles, history, sexy accents and beer. They come here for the amazing landscapes, New York City, sexy accents, and... um. Definitely not the beer, anyway.

    The sunset show is almost over, but I like the yellow that popped mid-range here.

    And that's sunset in Death Valley folks! Anyway, I have more stuff to post about the trip but this post is long enough and that's a good place to stop for now. Here's my parting shot of Julie and I in sepia at Zabriskie Point overlook, eyedrops in tow.

The Past Is In... The Basement... Of The Alamo!

That day off in Texas I had... I drove down to San Antonio to see an old Chiemsee drinking buddy, that guy there. Good times. We ate we drank we loading dock philosophized... it's always fun to realize that you can pick up right where you left off with certain friends. One of my favorite people from the bad old days, Josh is a complex and lovable individual. It was awesome to hang out again, and the afternoon went by too fast before I had to head back up North to work.

The Alamo! Josh had to work that day and didn't get off until 3ish, and I got into San Antonio at around 10ish. So of course I went in search of the Alamo basement. The Alamo is really... dull. And did you know it doesn't actually have a basement? So that killed about a half hour. There's a big ass crazy old oak tree in the Alamo gardens.

I spent the remainder of the morning wandering around San Antonio's River walk, which was a city plan to liven up the downtown area and preserve the waterway. Good idea, really, and the effect is a mini-Venice in Texas... but of course it's all-American. By which I mean, it feels more fabricated than organic, and is chock-a-block with restaurants with big shiny menus and fat people. (I suppose I should add here that I'm not a fattist, it's just that the preponderance of the over-ponderous in this country really gets me down in certain settings.) I did my best to leave all that out of the picture though.

And that's all I got out of San Antone before meeting up with Josh. I hope the next time we meet, it's somewhere less Texas.

"Every Single Commodity You Produce is a Piece of Your Own Death!" - Hitchhiker

Yes so as once previously threatened, I made it back to Austin Texas and I spent the night at the infamous Austin Motel penis-or-middle-finger-hotel depending upon your viewpoint. It was nice, but it didn't feel infamous. To be honest, I had more fun the last time I was in Austin with my wife, but this time at least I got some pictures.

The South Congress area of Austin is hip-hip-hip. For about 5 blocks. I mean, it's cool, and so are other parts of Austin, but I guess that you really have to be a city mouse to think that it's a cool place to live. I like the woods, and privacy, but I do admit that it is nice to browse some hip shop windows from time to time.

Ha! Take that, all ye fearers of irony, and scardey-cats of culture! It's so laughable to be homophobic, they're ironing books now. I do love me a good bookstore front window.

There is a bridge on South Congress street under which all the local bats hang out, and at dusk they pour out en masse to check out Austin's hotspots. I didn't make it to the bridge on time, but solitary literary bats are far more interesting than the groupthink bats that all mob the same places together anyway.

Or maybe that's just a bird. WHATEVER. Hey look over here, it's Captain Satan!

I know, I know, too many quirky book shop window shots. Nobody wants a book about DIY Porn.... or FUCKIN' DO they?! Anyway, I was excited to run across a famous Austin landmark, The Continental Club. 'Slacker', a favorite Richard Linklater film, shot a scene in here. The one with the anti-artist.

And yeah so one night in Austin, before heading up into the wasteland surrounding Fort Hood for work, isn't enough to do it all. All the cool cred that Austin has didn't seem worth it enough for me to ever even for a second consider that it might be yee-haw to live in Texas. Though, to be fair, I would have to attend SXSW fest to be completely certain.

I had a day off on this trip, during which I drove down to San Antonio to meet up with an old Chiemsee chum, one of my favorites. More on that in the next post.

Blogkeeping At Its Worst

Yes, it's that time of the month; the last day that I can post before I break my perfect archives column which has at least one post every month since 2005. So here are some random old pictures that haven't seen the light of day in a while. Above is the Bern Ogre, in Switzerland. Eatin' Babies. Below is a Spider on the Hancock Observatory in Chicago

Between school, dull work trips, and recovering from my stupid injury it's been a really slow year so far. But we got a canoe so, things are looking up.

The Bottomless Desert Puppy Well of Death Valley Cuteness

Talk about going back to the well, right? I made my first trip of the year back out to Death Valley last week, and my old pal, desert puppy, was waiting.

He really strutted the cat walk for me this time, too. Desert puppy walk? Coyote walk?

Yawning looks more threatening in the wild.

So does... whatever that is. Creepy. So ok, as usual I took a lot of pictures, and desert puppy was super cute and obliging and at one point his old pal raven even showed up. But I don't really want to insert inane commentary between every single picture so without further ado, enjoy the coyote and raven show.

Albert Einstein's Dead Letter Mailman

It's been awhile, but my doctor finally gave me the green light to go back to work. I've already had a couple of short local trips, nothing too exciting but it's nice to be on the road again. A couple of weeks ago, Julie and I went down to Maryland for a job where we had some nice dinners and a nice relaxed time. Nothing of note but I did get this shot at a statue park on Solomon's Island which showcased what happens when idle wealthy housewives have nothing better to do with their time, and think they know what art is.

I also just had a job at Fort Dix. Huh huh. But I got to swing by Princeton University and check out 112 Mercer Street, the home of Albert Einstein when he lived in Princeton. Very exciting.

While I was there, the mailman was doing his rounds and he stopped me while I was taking a picture and jokingly said that he didn't think I was allowed to take pictures of that house, that the CIA would jump out from behind some bushes and arrest me or something. I laughed at this statement for some reason and said that I thought it was a National Historic Landmark. He conceded this point but said that the lady who lives there gets crazy with people who invade their privacy, as kids often knock on their door thinking they can get a tour or something. I'd known it was a private residence and assured the mailman that I had no intention of doing anything other than snapping a quick photo. He then told me that he just the day before got a letter for Albert Einstein addressed to the house, and that it drove him crazy when that happened because, you know, damn kids. Plus he had to fill out a deceased mail recipient form or something like that every time. Look, here he is delivering mail there!

Old Photo News, Because I'm Still A Denizen Of The Couch

National Geographic accepted another photo of mine for their stock website! It's not a huge deal, as there are like millions of photos there and a surprising amount of them are kind of crappy, but hey. Prestige is prestige. This one:

One of my favorites, too. If you want to see it on their page, go to nationalgeographicstock.com and search the photo number: 1432908. It's one of those deals where I can't link directly to it for some reason. 

In case you didn't catch it before, the other photo they'd accepted from me a ways back was this one:

You can search it on the site by the photo number: 1401257. The photos are listed under two different photographer names, messiest objects & Michael H Williams, though I've no idea how that happened. I only have one account with them. Oh well.

I Juxtapose The Salton Sea With A Depressed Mood I'm Having

It was hectic holidays this go-around, but I thought it might finally be time to get back to the Salton Sea. Behind Salvation Mountain lies Slab City, an RV community for nomadic hippies. That's my only picture; I liked the community bulletin board but I don't really feel comfortable just going around shooting people trying to go about their lives, no matter how weird it seems. I suppose I'll never make a good cultural photographer.

I headed over to the Salton Sea itself; a vast inland body of salt water which is drying up at an alarming rate, apparently, leaving behind salt caked beaches.

To be honest, after spending all morning at the massively fascinating Salvation Mountain, this was more of a rest stop for me. It was creepy enough to keep me shooting, but my mind was elsewhere.

And my mind is elsewhere now. A lot's happened in the month since I was here, and I'm posting these mostly just to get them off of my pending shelf.

I guess I'm feeling a bit out of it at the start of 2012 because I'll be taking a few months off of work, and I'm sad that I won't have any travels to post about in the meantime. I broke myself on Christmas Eve.

I was playing Manhunt Dodgeball with the niece and nephews, and I have no idea how it happened but I found myself writhing on the concrete basement floor in pain. I'd torn my acl and broken my hand.

So I may or may not be getting hand surgery today, depending on how the doctor thinks my hand is healing, and I'm getting surgery on my knee in a couple of weeks. They're going to put a cadaver tendon where my acl used to be. Zombie knee. I'm going to name it Ted. I'd introduce you, but Ted's dead baby, Ted's dead.

We were supposed to go to Thailand in February to hang out with my friend Scott, who teaches Scuba. We were going to sit on the beach, drink and tell our significant others funny and embarrassing stories about each other, and scuba dive.

So that's off now. Hopefully we can still go later this year, but we'll see. It'll be hard to take these two unplanned months off from work and then turn around and ask for more time off. Anyway, that taken with Obama signing an abhorrent document into law while everyone was partying on New Year's Eve which allows the military to detain any American citizen indefinitely on the suspicion of terrorism, evidence and trial be damned, and it's shaping up to be a depressing start to 2012.

I don't believe in all that Mayan prophecy jazz, because it would require a complete lack of critical thinking on my part to do so, (If the Mayans could predict the future, why did their entire culture disappear? Why do scientists who actually study Mayan writings keep saying "Duh, it's merely a cyclical calendar which is due to reset this year, but they weren't actually predicting the end of anything other than the calendar itself!"?) but some sort of world changing, eye-opening event this year sure would be nice. It's really astonishing how fast the American end-game is approaching.

One Man's Obsession Is Another Man's Salvation Is Another Man's Lunacy... Probably The Same Man

I was back in San Diego for another class, for another week. I was online trying to figure out what to do with myself during my free time (a common work problem for everyone, I suppose) and I stumbled across a thing called Salvation Mountain while researching the Salton Sea area.

Out in the middle of nowhere is a hill. And one day in the distant past, a crazy religious nut named Leonard Knight wandered by and decided to paint it. Actually, much of it he built with adobe clay and straw, and then painted over top of it. He's been bricking, baling, and painting this place every day since 1984. He estimates that he's used well over 100,000 gallons of paint.

You might think, given my history of anti-religious rants, that I came out here with the intention of being condescending and smug about such a massive, insane ode to religious fervor. Surprisingly, especially to myself, the fact that it was a huge glob of toxic, colorful paper-mache out in the middle of the desert was the irresistible draw, and the thought that it was dedicated to a God and a religion with which I disagree vociferously barely registered.

Also, the opportunity to take pictures, as always, completely overshadowed any thought of religion the whole time I was there. I often feel a sort of physical disgust when I go into lavish European or Salt Lake City cathedrals, for example, but that was not present here at all. Salvation Mountain is bizarre, it's insane, it's folk art, it's baffling, but it is not asinine in the same way that official religious locales are.

There are several broken down old vehicles scattered about, and it's obvious that in his off days Leonard was still under a compulsion to throw paint on whatever he happened to be sitting near. The image in his head of his love letter to God was obviously an obsession; up there he's painted a 2D representation of his vision. And down here, he apparently thought the desert needed a boat.

On the side of a painted tractor, I'm guessing that some visitor left these here as stiletto fuck-me shoes don't seem to fit in with his ideas. But it makes a nice contrast.

Ok, one last scope photo... before we go into the rabbit hole. In case you haven't picked it up from the photos, the mountain seems to be painted in a sort of waterfall motif, where the blue and white lines are the water representing God's flowing Love, I suppose.

There is a path going up the front of the mountain, which you are encouraged to tread along.

It's yellow. I'm supposing that's to represent the streets of Gold in Heaven. Or perhaps he's just showing some playfulness...

Yup, playfulness. A technicolor child's dream of Heaven, perhaps.

Sea anemones? But even if Leonard thinks that there are sea anemones on the path to God, the amount of attention to the details of his vision combined with the dedication of giving his entire life to the project are astounding.

Looking out upon his works.... And I was perhaps unduly fascinated by this next shot, having always wondered what the edge of the Universe might look like, or the other side of a painting or a mirror. In Leonard's Universe, it stops right over the lip.

So right next to the mountain is another project. He has created a hollow hill of hay-bales, propped up by trees and interspersed with old car windows. Front view:

Approach view from the top side:

Rear view:

And inside is a warren of painted bales, trees, and pictures. It's bonkers.

Did I think we were entering the rabbit hole before?

Pictures can't really convey what it was like to walk through here.

But I sure did my best.

When I couldn't take any more shots down tunnels, I pointed my camera upwards. It. Just. Never. Stops.

And then I would find more tunnels.

I spent about 2 or 3 hours at Salvation Mountain, taking shots almost non-stop the whole time. I can't begin to express how many pictures I'm actually sparing you from. It's odd how one loony-bin's obsession can become yours that way.

Here is an adobe cave he built for himself to live in; a nice place to escape the heat. Only he never moved in, opting instead to stay in his trailer because he couldn't not paint the hell out of everything he did.

Here's a random clatch of his sea anemones I found off to the side somewhere, for example.

So remember how I said I came without smugness or condescension? Well, that blissful state of photgraphic being was briefly shattered near the end of my stay. The whole time I was there, I was so in awe of the visuals, and obsessed with capturing them, that I hadn't really paid any attention to the words he was writing in paint. Until I went out and around for one last round of shots and I started way back out, by the mailbox.

Erm... poor choice of wording there Leonard. Maybe that's how it's written in the Bible, but some paraphrasing might have been beneficial. All this does is make me think that you wanted Jesus to violently prison rape you. Granted, I'm sure I'm more dirty minded than you, and I have been watching HBO's OZ on dvd lately, but you've got to think about your audience, after all.

The smugness and condescension went away fairly quickly though. I may be infantile about certain things but I have learned that remaining infantile beyond the shock moment is probably unhealthy.

The problem though is that once I started paying attention to the words, that's all I could see, and it admittedly became more difficult to ignore my anti-religious feelings.

At any rate, to distract my self from getting too snarky, I wondered what paint on the ground looked like up close after baking out in the California desert sun for years.

I took a seat at the makeshift viewing area before leaving, and found yet another photo op.

And one last distance shot, because I. Just. Can't. Stop.

Hundreds of photos, and I kind of wanted to go back at night and get some more in different light. But I didn't. If I'm back out that way again, then maybe. But with this post I'm glad to get this mountain of obsession out of my system.

It's All About The Little Differences

I was in San Diego for a week and on one of my days off, naturally I headed down to Tijuana Mexico. There's not much to see there, but I wanted to get a real Mexican taco and some cheap prescription medication. Specifically I was looking for a topical creme (none of your business!) that even with a prescription here in the land of the medically fleeced is wicked expensive. Also I was thinking of picking up some prescription strength ibuprofen because the constant long flights criss-crossing the land of ridiculously high medical care costs can get tedious in my lower back and ass-bone area.

These are pretty much the only pictures I got in Tijuana, but I have more border town follies to tell. Luckily, I also visited the Mount Palomar Observatory while in Southern California and there's not much to tell about that trip so I'll punctuate my Mexican tale with those pictures instead.

So randomly, I chose one Mexican pharmacy out of hundreds; a tiny corner shop that I liked the look of. I went in and the proprietor introduced himself as Federico. I asked him if he had my topical creme (shut. up.) and he did, and then I asked him about my ibuprofen. He had it of course but it was a bit expensive for me so I opted not to get it there and maybe shop around a bit first.

So as I was purchasing the topical creme Federico pulls up a bottle from behind the counter and asks me if I like Tequila. I stutter for a moment but what is one supposed to do in such a situation? I say well sure, who doesn't? So we do a shot of tequila together. I then sputter a bit with the tequila shivers, but it's actually pretty smooth stuff and I enjoy my shot. I say well that's mighty nice of you Federico, thank you very much. He says hang on hang on, want another?

So we're hanging out for a while, chatting about this or that, doing shots of tequila in this pharmacy over the counter in broad busy daylight and I think, "Mexico is different." Then he asks me why I wanted the prescription strength ibuprofen for and I explain to him about my lower back pain and all of that. So my new friend ducks down under the counter again and pulls out a large blue pill and hands it to me with another shot of tequila and says to try this one out. I of course take it because I trust this mad chemist completely, for some reason (I'm guessing it had something to do with the tequila but I suppose we'll never know for certain). "What is it?" I ask, putting down my empty shot glass. "Vicodin my friend," he says. "Wonderful," I reply.

I had sprained my foot jogging on a hotel treadmill earlier and I quite forgot about it during my afternoon in Tijuana. I had the nicest time, walking about, buying a cup full of salty pomegranate seeds from a street vendor. I got my taco and a cerveza too, and they were delicious and I felt very good and nice.

My job in San Diego was on a Navy Base, and the next day I was talking to one of the Navy guys in the class telling him about my trip to Tijuana and he got all weird on me. He said "You went to Tijuana?!" And I was kind of like uh, yeah why not? It's like 15 minutes down the road, what's the big deal? And apparently the big deal is that the military has forbidden servicemen to go into Mexico while off duty because of all the drug cartel related violence down there. He was telling me how people are getting killed there all the time, or kidnapped, even American bystanders and I was thinking huh, I'm glad I went and had such a nice relaxed time there without knowing about all of that.

Oh Give Me A Home, Where Buffalo Roam, Where Ranchers And Photographers Play

And for the final leg of my Salt Lake City trip, I headed up to Antelope Island State Park which is in the middle of the Great Salt Lake itself. I didn't see any antelope, but there was a whole mess of Bison. I love how the above photo turned out; It's an HDR and everything came out blurry except the American Buffalo because it was so windy that I had a hard time keeping the camera steady through three exposures. I have a weird affinity for blurry pictures anyway, so this was really a bonus. I did get a clear one, and here it is but I like the blurry one way better.

I really wanted to go for a swim, and I didn't even care that it was windy and cold. But the beaches were closed and anyway it seemed like the lake was at low tide or something..? I'd have had to walk through about 100 yards of mud before getting to the water, and I was simply not prepared for that. Sigh. But here's the causeway you drive on to get to the island.

Yeah, fascinating. I like the vanishing point though.

Caught a bison checkin' me out.

They're so strange looking, like they're wearing a fur stole or the hide of an enemy they totally head-butted to death. I drove up to a nice viewpoint over the island. Got some landscape shots.

Neat. I like the next one also though because I caught some mist coming off the lake and the Sun looks cool through the clouds.

There's a bison ranch on the island too, where you can go and check out more bison. And the ranchers who are also an odd-looking species.

When I got there they were busy herding the buffalo down these chutes until they could pin 'em one by one in this metal boxy thing in order to tag 'em or give 'em a vaccine or whatever crazy ass thing it was they were doing.

I got a couple of fairly typical shots of them running away from the scary man-people.

Sigh. I need a better telephoto lens, dammit.

Check out this scary monster.

Whew, the nice bison got away from that nasty beast.

And that's it really. I had a great time bopping around the island, obsessively changing out my lenses a million times because whichever one I was using was never the right one but you know, that's the nature of being an amateur photgrapher. I was stalking this one buffalo as he was grazing, and it was only after I got home and looked more closely at my pictures that I realized I may have been in any danger. This one really must be sick of the tourists; that is a mean mean eye.

"I Don’t Know Why People Are So Keen To Put The Details Of Their Private Life In Public. They Forget That Invisibility Is A Superpower." - Banksy.

"People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.

Any advertisement in public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It belongs to you. It's yours to take, rearrange and re-use. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head" - Banksy

"The Art we look at is made by only a select few. A small group create, promote, purchase, exhibit and decide the success of Art. Only a few hundred people in the world have any real say. When you go to an Art gallery you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires..." - Banksy

After checking out the aspens, I drove down into Park City, Utah. I almost decided not to even stop in town because from the road it sort of looked like a typical cutesy American main street chock-a-block full of quaint shops, which depresses me. So many American towns sell themselves as Historic or as a good tourist destination when in reality all that they have to offer is a short stroll past shop windows and Galleries full of crap. However, the Sundance Film Festival is held in Park City every year, so I figured there might be something worth seeing. I parked on a hill, walked down some steps that led to an alley which exited out onto Main Street Park City. And just as I was getting to the end of the alley, before I even really caught a glimpse of the town, I did a double, triple, quadruple take at the above work of graffiti on the wall. I recognized it immediately as a Banksy! Well, and not just because the locals framed it with a big BANKSY nameplate, neither.

"The human race is an unfair and stupid competition. A lot of the runners don't even get decent sneakers or clean drinking water. Some people are born with a massive head start, every possible help along the way and still the referees seem to be on their side. It's not surprising some people have given up competing altogether and gone to sit in the grandstand, eat junk food and shout abuse. What we need in this race is a lot more streakers." - Banksy

Needless to say, I stood around that corner for about a half hour taking shots, not even really noticing that my assessment of Park City as yet another whimsical trade street was otherwise entirely correct in my desire to use it as background.

"You're mind is working at its best when you're being paranoid. You explore every avenue and possibility of your situation at high speed with total clarity." - Banksy

Although I love Banksy's work, embarrassingly it was a bit of time before I came down off of the high of discovery to actually think about the meaning of the piece very deeply. I mean, my initial assessment was that it was a sort of anti-film industry statement and I left it at that. Then when I'd gotten off a few shots and calmed down a bit, I started to feel a bit stupid as I began to suspect that the joke was on me and my need to photograph everything, and that's the type of mania that Banksy was lampooning. I got a little shy and surreptitiously looked around to make sure that the locals, who were probably in on the joke by now, weren't laughing at me. Nothing too overt, but a girl walked past and I swear that she snorked at me.

"We can’t do anything to change the world until capitalism crumbles. In the meantime we should all go shopping to console ourselves." - Banksy

Then I decided that I had better study it more closely. I slowly began to realize that maybe it was more of a comment on places like Park City; People find a beautiful bit of nature and WHAM! Ruin it by plunking down a town full of boutique shopping, ski slopes, spas, gigantic resort hotels that resemble Hogwarts and a million vacation houses which, due to the non-stop real estate frenzy, wind up all facing and contemplating each other, thus destroying the open natural beauty that had made the area a popular destination in the first place.

"People say graffiti is ugly, irresponsible and childish. But that’s only if it’s done properly." - Banksy

Feeling satisfied that Banksy wasn't necessarily having a laugh at my expense and being happy with my pictures, I wandered through town for a bit casting internal aspersions on the stupid snorking girl and continuing to contemplate the piece. One thing that Banksy is right about for sure; seeing a work of art in context is much more thought provoking than seeing it on a wall in a highly secured building, or in a book. I imagined that there was a reason he chose to paint that particular piece in a town where the rich and famous gather in obnoxious droves every year to celebrate themselves. I eventually decided that perhaps it was a comment on art and celebrity in the media, how in the race to put something under the microscope and on film for exploitative purposes, you destroy what may or may not make it valuable. Then I saw some photographs of aspens in the shop window of a gallery. I "ooohhhed" and "ahhhed" in the privacy of my hypocritical head, and went in to see. Inside is where I learned about aspens, and also that the reason that Banksy had been in town was for the opening of his film "Exit Through The Gift Shop". He street arted the place up, and then later on the locals framed it with pride for him. I'm not exactly sure what Banksy's current stance on permanently framing his work and hanging his name on it is, but I suspect he has complicated emotions about it. The gallery attendant told me of another small piece that Banksy had left behind (and also locally framed), and where to find it.

"I'd been painting rats for three years before someone said "that's a clever anagram of art" and I had to pretend I'd known that all along." - Banksy

He's famous for his rats. They're a bit of a trademark; better than a tag, really. At any rate, by the time that I left town, I'd decided that the main piece could probably mean any or none or all of the things that I went through thinking it might, which is the great thing about seeing it live. Though the Banksy book that Julie has will always be one of my most treasured rat books, isolated on the page I got much less highly dignified contemplation out of his hundreds of great pieces than I did from seeing that one where it was meant to be seen.

"Sometimes I feel so sick at the state of the world I can’t even finish my second apple pie" - Banksy

The only other thing in town that tickled my fancy was an advert for a certain beer in a bar window. Normally I wouldn't have cared much, but being in Utah, with the Mormons and all, I was compelled.

"I used to tell everyone I met to be an artist..... I don't do that any more." - Banksy

I'm A Damn Tree-Photohugger. Don't Like It? Kiss My Aspen!

About a 30 minute drive to the East of Salt Lake City is Park City, home of world class skiing and the Sundance film festival. So of course I had to go check it out. I got sidetracked once I got there though, and found myself driving around some mountain tops, narrowly avoiding car crashes and running off of cliffs as I stared out at these amazing trees. I of course stopped and took several pictures without knowing what they were, but thinking that they were some kind of birch tree.

I found out later that day that they were Aspens. I have this thing that I do when I travel where I try not to find out too much ahead of time about the places I go, other than the basic landmarks and attractions to watch out for. I like to see things with fresh eyes and as few preconceptions as possible. Often after I've seen something on a trip, I'll look it up later and find out all the history and details about it Ex Post Facto. Usually this works out fine for me as really, for example, I don't need to know every little particular about why the Mormons built the Temple Square, or it's history, in order to take pictures of it and appreciate it for what it is; My brain retains information about places much better when I have recent first hand experience and a subsequent interest in the subject.

In this case however, I rather wish I'd known about Aspens before going. I'm fairly happy with my tree pictures here, but I probably would have spent more time tramping about the woods and tried to go more in depth with photos had I known the deal. Aspens are like, the raddest trees ever. The incredible thing about them is that what you're looking at is not a grouping of individual trees, but a single root organism with multiple extensions coming up out of the Earth, a vast system which looks like individuals above ground.

In fact, the oldest, largest, and heaviest known organism on Earth is an Aspen grove known as Pando (Latin for 'I Spread') located in the Fishlake National Forest in south-central Utah.

I didn't have time to head down there, but if I ever get another job out that way I just might make the time for it. At any rate, the Aspens were gorgeous and inspiring enough to make me get out of my car on top of a cold windy mountain road and spend not a little time snapping shots without even knowing what they were. That should tell you something even if the pictures themselves don't. I took a load of them as usual, but I'll stop with just these next four. They're all the same photo obviously, but with different RAW and HDR techniques applied.

As usual I had trouble deciding which I like best, and it's a short post about trees anyway so, why not throw 'em all out there. I'll get to Park City itself in the next post.

I Get A Little Salty In The City With The Mormons

Lately I've been splitting up posts about single trips into multiple posts, each showcasing a different leg. It allows me to have more blog content, stretching a very thin blog out to respectable proportions. However in reality my real reason for doing so is that now that I'm all into HDR photography, I take about a bazillion photos and have a serious issue with being able to cull them properly. Anyway, Salt Lake City! This is the Salt Lake Temple, home lair of the Mormons or Latter Day Saints or whatever they want to call themselves. Silly buggers.

But I will say that in some small way, walking around Temple Square pleasantly reminded me of walking through some small European town, what with the grandiose religious architecture and people walking around speaking gobbledygook. In Europe of course, the gobbledygook is merely another language which I don't understand. Here it was English, but spoken in a freakish religious dialect completely alien for all of that. I had fun telling a couple of pretty young Mormon girls who tried to bother me while I was taking pictures that I'm an atheist, and that their beliefs are based on nil evidence and a thorough brainwashing. This is the Mormon Assembly Hall.

I mean most religion-speak is nonsense, but next to the Church of Scientology, The Latter-Day Saints take the prize for wackiness without even counting the insanity of that whole golden plate thing. Check this out:

I mean, to a sane person, this reads as batshit crazy. But even looking at it within religion's own internal "logic", why did God have to restore the authority of Baptism? Given the baptismal habits of all of the other practicing sects of Christianity, it doesn't seem as though such authority was ever lost from the Earth. This is the statue in full.

Two guys go off in the woods, see John the Baptist, and found a religion. Man, I see stuff in the woods around my house all the time! Just this morning Jesus and I were all like, kicking back on a stump and smoking a bong. He told me to tell everyone that marijuana was the new sacrament of his coming reign, and ye shall recognize your brethren by the sign of "peace-out, man". Of course, you probably don't believe me, but why on Earth did anyone fall for these con-artist's similar bullshit?

Again, nonsense. If the power of God is manifest, shouldn't people be able to uh, notice it? That's kind of what manifest means. I belong to the priesthood of Messybastards. The power of reason is manifest in all my actions and therefore God has chosen me to lead the world in it's fight against the descent into madness. Can't you see the halo of God's atomic logic hovering over my head? Well, you just don't believe strongly enough, so you're going to the fiery nuthouse in the ground.

The main thing about these statues that gets me is the authoritarian motif. You're supposed to trust con artists like Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery because they are getting authority all conferred up on them by the wonky ghosts of ancient spiritual leaders. Says who? Says the con artists. And you know what? Even if any of those Ghosts appeared to me, and tried to confer authority on me, I'd tell them to take their little 2-inch authorities and shove them up their asses. I don't want their permission to tell people how to live their lives; I'd much rather people used their own brains to figure things out than just accepting the say-so of anyone, including mine.

So yeah, I suppose an anti-religious rant was inevitable. But I was pretty jazzed to go to the Mormon Tabernacle. Not that I'm a huge fan, but their music is pretty. Though I'm not sure what Exxon has to do with anything...?

There was a guy playing the organ, so I hung out for a while. Not a very ornate Tabernacle, but giant organs are cool.

The Mormons have the largest Genealogy library in the world. I went in to see if they could find my family roots in Europe, but when I told the confident library docent the story of how my great great great grandfather was a stowaway on a Portuguese ship who changed his name to Williams without ever revealing his real name to his family in the New World, his confidence slipped a bit. When I told them that my other ancestor was a horse-thief who named his oldest son after the judge who didn't hang him during the decade where all the census records burned in a fire, they gave up. Guess I really have to embrace this whole disreputable vagabond thing; seems to be a family heirloom. Here's the Salt Temple at night.

The rest of Salt Lake City was fairly uninspiring. It actually looks like a cool city to live in though. The surrounding mountains are pretty and there's stuff to do. And there are bars so it's not really a dry city, despite my misconceptions. Plus, the Mormons make up only a small portion of the population these days. Anyway like I said, I had a couple of other legs to my SLC trip so there's more to come.

On The Importance Of A High Fiber Diet

So this is one of those place holder posts which as someone with a bit of OCD I feel compelled to do since I've never let so much time go by without posting. Feel free to skip it; it only exists in service to my completion mania. It hasn't been a slow month, but I've been travelling to some places which I've already been to a bunch of times, and were also never very interesting to photograph in the first place. So rather than allow my 6th blogiversary to go by without a post, I'm going to post some pictures of the pumpkin carving party.

That Christian pumpkin is really horrified by the Satanic pumpkin, but them's the breaks on Halloween.

Anyway, it's been a super Autumnal Autumn. Our Anniversary kicked it off, and we've gone apple picking like 3 times. We may have overdone it a bit, but eating like 5 apples a day really, uh, cleans one out.

Mount Wilson Observations And Coronal Messy Ejections

Stuck in LA for three days because of mass flight cancellations due to Hurricane Irene while Julie is at home alone filling the bathtub with water and battening down the hatches, and what do you do? You find the coolest thing in LA and go there. The Mount Wilson Observatory is up the road past Pasadena, high up on top of Mount Wilson overlooking the city and as George Ellery Hale surmised in 1904, a really good spot to put an astronomical telescope or two.

This of course was before LA was a smog and light-polluted blight on the planet and, due to the natural inversion layer there which causes the temperature of the air to increase with height, was a doubly good spot as a side effect of the inversion is that Mount Wilson hosts some of the steadiest air in the country. I suppose the reason this is good for astronomical observations being that stars twinkle less and you can get a better look at them. The inversion also happens to be a major cause of smog, as it traps the noxious gases and helps keep them there, but whaddyagonnado.

But in 1904, the smog and the light pollution were not an issue and as a result some very important Astronomy was performed here, and I love to pay homage to historic scientific sites. As per my hit or miss luck with such things, I happened to arrive on the day when they conducted the very first ever paid tour of the Observatory, and as a result was among the first of the public ever to be conducted inside the building housing the 100-inch Hooker telescope, pictured in the first photo on top, but we'll get to that in a bit. Now this is a picture of a picture on display in the small museum there that tickled my funny bone:

If you are familiar with the Astronomical bestiary, you will know that pictured above is not in fact a nebula, spiral or otherwise, but a Galaxy as noted in the smaller print underneath. This picture was taken, printed, and on display here at Mount Wilson at a time before Astronomers knew about Galaxies! That killed me. They thought it was only 10,000 light years away, when in fact it is now known to be about 23,000,000 light years away, and 100,000 light years in diameter. We've come so far in just one century in our understanding of the size and scope of the Universe.

The above picture was taken inside of the 150 foot tower, (the one in the middle in the 2nd picture of this post) which is in fact a solar telescope that is still in use. As part of the first paying tour group we were allowed inside to meet an astronomer working on it, and to see some real time sun activity.

I couldn't set up my tripod in such tight quarters so this is not the clearest picture I could've got, but that is the sun, as reflected onto the viewing plate directly through the lens and 150 feet of tower. Now, I could be sensationalistic and say that those are actual sunspots that we got to see, but the fact is that what you can't see in the picture is that those spots are on a small piece of paper which he put down next to the actual, much smaller sunspots which we were able to see but which the brightness of the sun has washed out in the photo. He did this as an exercise in comparison; the big ones you can see are a copy of the largest spots ever observed at this telescope, and the ones not visible in the photo were the actually occurring at that moment, and were the size of the Earth. So those spots you can actually see there are in reality tens of times larger than our whole planet.

They had a couple of walls of this kind of Data in there, and I love that stuff. One other thing about sunspots; relative to the rest of the surface of the sun, they are much cooler and therefore appear to be black, shining far less brightly. In reality they still range in temperature from about 2727–4227 °C and would still burn the fuck out of your eyes if the sunspot light was isolated. One photo on the wall caught my attention as an example of what you can do with a little planning and a really really good telephoto lens, or an astronomical camera advantage.

Love it! What a cool photograph. They also had some other very interesting pictures hanging on one wall. Apparently Einstein and Hawking both visited on various scientific errands.

So that's how star hunting is done in LA, for real. Messiestobjects style. And so last and best was the 100-inch Hooker telescope. Obviously it's quite large; the 100-inch refers to the size of the lens. This is the building it's housed in.

In we went and up some stairs and voila, scientific glory.

Using this telescope, this fabulous beautiful piece of machinery, Edwin Hubble discovered that those Nebulae were in actuality Galaxies. Rather than oddly shaped clouds of dust and gas, they were in fact gigantic, amazing whirling structures of stars, millions and billions of stars. Structures of a size to rival what we thought previously to be the size of the entire Universe, all there was, our own Milky Way. And once again, our own personal size and place in the cosmos was reduced, yet our understanding of it made more unimaginably awe-inspiring.

This is also where Hubble and an assistant discovered the redshift, the indication that our Universe is expanding rather than static as Einstein had hoped. More than many other such places I've visited, standing underneath this historical object really gave me a glimpse of the scientific endeavor and it's awesome sense of the joy of discovery.

At any rate, it was awesome, but I still had three more nights and two full days, stuck in that helLA hole. So I decided to get out. I went down to Palm Springs, got a nice little hotel, sat in a salt water pool and jacuzzi, and ate a bunch of good food. I took no pictures because it was a dreadfully dull place and is a good example of the occasional downside of my job.

'Going In Circles' Would Be The Name Of My Travel Show

Well I finally had a job last week. Don't get me wrong, it was awesome being home for a month, being with my family, working out, gathering and cutting wood for the winter. But I definitely appreciate the balance in my life of being domestic then being on the road then being domestic then being on the road, etc. etc.

My work was actually in Ridgecrest, California. Normally I'd fly into Las Vegas and drive through Death Valley, and I was actually looking forward to it as it's one of my favorite drives and I haven't been out that way yet this year. But then I noticed on the map that if I flew into LA instead, I'd drive right through Mojave on the way to work.

Mojave Air & Space Port is of course the home of Scaled Composites, who are famous for being the design team behind SpaceShipOne, the craft which won them the Ansari X Prize for being the first company to successfully launch a privately funded, manned space flight.

And there it is. Actually it's a replica, which irritates me. The original is hanging in the Smithsonian's National Air And Space Museum right next to the Spirit of St. Louis. I was there a few years back and saw it, but it seems like it should be at Mojave, the site of it's triumph.

The other thing that irritated me is that if it's a replica, why do they shut it in a glass tomb that you're not allowed to go in? Hard to get a decent picture on a sunny day. I guess I can console myself with the HDR shots that make reflections look somewhat arty, where no art credits are deserved.

I took the 5 dollar tour of the airfield. There was no other space related stuff that I saw out there, but I saw Scaled Composite's work hangar, though it was closed. They are currently working on SpaceShipTwo in there. Which will be test flown at Mojave until it's ready for its first commercial spaceflight. Which will take place at Spaceport America in New Mexico. Which is currently under construction where I went and blogged about a few months back. It's the circle of messiestobjects, man.

Exciting, right? But what was cool about the tour is that the airport actually serves as a dumping ground for planes. Whenever airlines want to retire a plane or just store one somewhere for a while, Mojave is one of the places they do it at. Their HUGE plane yard was full of old wrecks, planes used for spare parts, and planes on sabbatical. It was totally wild and a photo shoot there would yield some fascinating gains, no question. But I wasn't allowed to take pictures, it was screamingly frustrating. Apparently the airlines don't like pictures of wrecked planes and whatnot circulating around out there because they feel its bad for their image, which is silly of course. However you know how they won't show movies on planes about bad things happening to planes, so they are famously touchy about that stuff after all.

I snuck that one photo after the tour from the road with my telephoto, which tells you nothing about how awesome the place really was. Those are resting planes, you can't even see the junkers unless you're deep in Mojave airport territory. One really fun thing about the tour: there was this couple who were on it with me and the guy was a huge plane nerd. He recognized all the different types and was ohhing and ahhing and saying stuff like "Check out that old 7blah blah something 7 fuselage just lying there! Awesome!" or "Man, I haven't seen one of those engines in years!" And his wife, who was less technically savvy was nonetheless as weird about it as he was. She was into them for different reasons: "I love those old USAir planes! I prefer the old color scheme to their new one." Or, "Oooh! There's an old Continental! Those are my favorites" (She declared those old Continentals to be her favorites at least 4 times) Or, upon seing an old Aloha Air (which no longer exists) plane; "Wow, look at the artwork on that tailfin! It looks so 70's, very groovy!" It was hysterical, but I couldn't laugh because they were very serious about it. It was like they were birdwatching and going nuts over the plummage.

Anyway, after Mojave, and on my way back to LA after completeing my work in Ridgecrest, my flight home on Saturday morning was cancelled due to Hurricane Irene. It took me hours to get someone at the airline on the phone to reschedule, and by the time I did the earliest they could get me home was Tuesday. Stuck in LA for 3 days! LA kind of sucks. I'll get to that in another post.

Sommerflaute Is What It's All About

We've hit an odd Summer lull at work and I've been off for a few weeks, and a few more to come. Luckily, there was an episode of The Hollow Geographic in my yard this morning as a young Buck came wandering through to break up the monotony.

I thought I'd also post a few 3rd stringers from the couple of months I spent in and out of New Mexico. This is a shop window in Roswell, though I don't know to what kind of shop it belonged; this is all they had on display.

And Sunspot, NM is high on a mountain overlooking the White Sands range. On the way out there I took some of those breathtaking-to behold yet pointless-in-a-photo shots of the valley.

See those white sands way off... eh. Here's a telephoto at least.

Speaking of Sunspot, I went there a second time because the first time I'd gone I got there after 5pm and the visitor's center was closed, so I wasn't able to get a magnet for my fridge. I collect magnets at US travel destinations. Shut up, it's better than collectible spoons. Also, I was able to go inside of the Dunn Solar Telescope building, so it was worth it.

They keep it very dimly lit in there, so I had to tripod and open-shutter it. But telescopes is neat. Plus, I got to watch some of the Solar Astronomers hard at work to understand solar behavior in order to, among other reasons, better predict major solar events which could massively disrupt many electromagnetic-based technologies here on Earth.

While Shopping In El Paso For Weapons To Murder Your Enemies With, Why Not Stop In At P.F. Chang's?

Adverts at Airports in military towns for weapons contractors always give me the heebie jeebies. Huntsville, Alabama is actually worse, but I got bored waiting for my baggage in El Paso.

Happy Independence Day!

Ahh, the fat of the land.

Roswell Does NOT In Fact End Very Well, Futurama.

"The only thing that scares me more than space aliens is the idea that there aren't any space aliens. We can't be the best that creation has to offer. I pray we're not all there is. If so, we're in big trouble." - Ellen DeGeneres

Third trip to New Mexico is the charm! Roswell, baby. Actually it wasn't all that. I mean, it's cool to be able to say that I went, but other than the UFO Museum and Research center, there's not a lot going on there.

Not that, as a town, they don't embrace the hell out of their notoriety. Visitors are, after all, welcome.

The whole town has crap like that all over the place. Alien head lampposts and see the mailbox?

They need to take a little more pride in their place in history.

But what kills me is that the UFO crash didn't even happen at Roswell, rather 30 miles North closer to a town named Corona. But the military base where the investigation went out from was in Roswell, so there you go.

The museum was... well full of things like this. There is a LOT of reading material in the research room, but who has time for all of that when you're just using up some free time on a work assignment? Hell, who has time for that unless you're totally obsessed anyway?

Not that I'm not intensely curious. But I'm in the camp of people who don't really think that any information that is available to the public can point with any certainty to anything, well, for certain.

I've just finished reading that new book on Area 51 by Annie Jacobsen, and nothing in it made me feel any differently. It's an excellent book, well written and full of information about Area 51 that I didn't know before, including the U2 and OXCART spy plane dramas, but her conclusion about what the Roswell incident was about is a bit... well all she's doing is telling us what some guy who used to work there told her what he was told it was.

Which, if you've read anything about the book online, you'll know is that it was a technologically advanced hover saucer piloted by surgically altered retarded children (altered by none other than Joseph Mengele himself) sent by Joseph Stalin as both a psy-op to induce panic in America and to send a message to Eisenhower that he had wack Nazi technology at his disposal too, so what up?

She calls this a simpler, more Occam's Razor-like explanation than an extra-terrestrial crash landing, but I'm not so sure about that. This explanation leaves a lot of other questions; if Stalin had such advanced hover technology back in '47, and was able to penetrate American airspace with such ease, why wasn't this technology used again or since? I'm not sure that we could have won the cold war if they were that far ahead of us in stealth technology.

Anyway, I'm not saying I believe it was an alien crash. More likely it was something we were working on, and every bit of cover and disinformation ever released about it is just that, including very probably Annie's findings. One disturbing thing she says in the book is that the real reason Area 51 has been kept so secret all these years is because atrocities in the name of National Security have been going on there since the 50's, including human experimentation. I suppose the people involved would rather the public speculated endlessly about Aliens and/or Joseph Mengele than consider for a moment that a US Government-sanctioned continuation of Nazi experiments might be going on. In fact, I much prefer to believe that it is Extraterrestrial in nature.

Knowing what we know about how the corporate-controlled military-industrial complex of a government that we have operates in public, however, I shudder to think what the reality is about how they operate in private.

They're not the Aliens man, we're the Aliens.

Oh, Write Of Me, Not "Died In Bitter Pains," But "Emigrated To Another Star!"

Who knows what myriad colonies there are
Of fairest fields, and rich, undreamed-of gains
Thick planted in the distant shining plains
Which we call sky because they lie so far?
Oh, write of me, not "Died in bitter pains,"
But "Emigrated to another star!"

- From Helen Hunt Jackson, "Emigravit" (1886)

So as promised, the high point of my second work week in New Mexico. Spaceport America. Funny story. Funny sad, not funny ha-ha. I was actually signed up to do the tour with Follow the Sun Tours during my first week in New Mexico, on Friday May 13th. Which was the very first tour they were ever going to do of the place. They called me the night before to say they had to cancel, because I was the only one signed up for the tour. My heart broke a little on that day. I begged them to let me pay extra for the privilege of being the first paying tourist of what will become the World's first private Spaceport, because how cool would that be?! But, no go. They asked me if I wanted to reschedule for Saturday, and still be in the first tour group as they had people signed up for that one, but I was flying home and couldn't do it. So that, grandkids, is how your irascible 'ol granpa was cheated out of his itty bitty spot in history. But I knew I'd be back in a week or two, so I rescheduled for that and settled for just being one of the early tourists, who probably get no historical recognition but still get to say "We were there, before everyone in the world wanted to be there."

Indeed, we were there before they were even finished constructing it! This is a view of the approach to the Spaceport, what will one day very soon be the main entrance. Where those who are wealthy enough to pay Sir Richard Branson and his company, Virgin Galactic, for the $200,000 ticket will arrive for their trip to sub-orbit on SpaceShipTwo. Sigh. Once upon a time, I was flush enough to afford a trip to the very edge of space on a Russian Mig-25 jet just outside of Moscow, but this particular ride will be out of my price range until prices come way down. Doublesigh.

This is a testing pad for vertical launch and hover landing models, I think. The tour guide wasn't allowed to stop or let us out of the vehicle while in this area apparently, so I was trying to snap shots through the window while being bounced about on gravel roads as he was giving the tour spiel so I didn't really catch everything. But yeah, the pockmarks in the concrete pad are from rocket testing. I don't know why there are rocks on top. Paperweights?

In the foreground is what will one day be the Spaceport Operations Center, and in the background, the side of the Spaceport. Here's a better side view:

They did let us get a bit closer, naturally. Here we all are, wearing our fashionable construction site tour-wear in front of the gaping entrance to the hangar which will one day house spaceships.

Spaceships! Hahahahahaha! I will come back one day, so that I can see them.

Ok, here come a few more shots of the hangar area.

See how the side facing the runway has mirrors?

Yes well, if you know me at all, you should be able to see what's coming next.

That's me in the mirror there! Standing on the entrance to the runway! Waving!

It's going to be a very pretty building. One of the cool things about touring the Spaceport during its construction phase is that we got to poke around in areas that will not be open to the public once it's open for business, such as the runway, obviously. Very soon, they will cease allowing tourists to walk out onto the runway.

Spaceport runway points! The Spaceport, by the way, is located right next to a portion of El Camino Real (The Royal Road), which was a major trade route between northern New Mexico and Mexico City from 1598 through 1882, until a railroad was built parallel to the Real in order to make the 6 month journey, well, take a bit less time. And now, the runway of the Spaceport has been built parallel to both of them. A very literal symbol of technological progression, and a striking one at that.

Unfortunately when I asked if there were any plans, even very remote plans, to build an airport near Spaceport America, I got a definitive no. There are lots of good reasons for not building an airport, including ecological issues and a nearby no-fly zone over White Sands testing range which rivals the White House's no-fly zone, but what I interpret this fact to mean is that Spaceflight at this location will always be a rich fucker's club. They did not plan this public Spaceport to ever be public enough that you can hop on a commuter from Chicago, Newark or LA to get here, and then flea-hop a quick 45 minute space ride over to Dubai or Sweden, where there are plans to build connecting spaceports. So as exciting as visiting a real live Spaceport was for me, it is only the itty bittiest of baby steps towards a future where spaceflight is as common as air travel. Still, it's more exciting than your typical Sunday drive.

Interlude: Observing The Observatory And Wandering The White Sands

On my free afternoon I headed out past Alamogordo to Sunspot, New Mexico. There is a secluded community of solar scientists there, and one of two missions for the National Solar Observatory. It was neat-o.

The other mission of the National Solar Observatory is at Kitt Peak in Arizona, where I got to go a couple of times last year. Unfortunately I got to Sunspot after the visitor's center was closed, but I was able to walk around outside and snap a few shots anyway.

This is the Dunn Solar Telescope, and it looks spooky in black and white. I framed it with the sun right behind it because I'm all apropos like that.

And the obligatory myself-in-the-mirror shot, of course.

After my science pilgrimage, I drove back to Las Cruces, stopping off at sunset in the White Sands for a few shots.

I wasn't quite in time for actual sunset, but a sandstorm was rolling in and it looked so cool these people started dancing. I think that's what they're doing. Those are dried up Yucca plants in front. I have two other nearly identical pictures of this scene, but I like them all.

I'm not good at choosing between similar pictures sometimes. I like the people dancing in the first one, but in the second I like the way the Yucca is in the middle of the sunset colors. In the next one, well it looks like some sort of romantic stock photo. Yuchsh. But still, I like it.

I stuck around a bit so I could find a Yucca plant that had live flowers because they're really neat looking, and I wasn't disappointed. Got three shots of this one, too.

They're a bit grainy; it was dark, windy, and sand-stormy so I had to have enough exposure to light the subject, but not so much that it blurred the plant because of the wind. Difficult. The graininess comes from using a high ISO, but whaddyagonnado? I like the way they turned out anyway.

See? Pretty Yucca flowers, and wavy sand.

I'll get to the high point of my trip in the next post, promise.

Get Back On That Rocket And Make Me Some Trinitite, Boy!

"Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner."

-Omar Bradley

So on my second work trip to New Mexico, I wanted to hit the outdoor missile museum at the White Sands Missile Range again because I hadn't taken the shot I really wanted to get the first time. So on my way in to work I gave it another shot. It's really striking how appropriate it is that the base of a giant rocket testing facility is situated right in front of the Organ mountain range. The missile display rather mirrors the mountains, don't you think?

I'm guessing that was intentional, but who knows. At any rate, it struck me ominous every time I drove by the mountains. It's as though they've been waiting all of their geologic lives for someone to come test big pointy phallic payloads of destruction at their feet.

So I keep getting really stuck thinking about the duality of the space rocket/ death missile theme going on all over New Mexico. The technology is mostly the same, but the application is as different as annihilation and salvation. And the birth of both aspects of the technology happened right here. (Actually, most of the original work happened over at Fort Bliss, but it's practically the same base as White Sands; they're adjoining) I guess there's not much to say about it, I just keep coming back to that fact in my circular thoughts.

"Hey son, check out this big ass gun. We killed a buncha commie nazi jerk-offs with this bad boy!" "Wow, Dad! Nazi jerk-offs!"

To be fair, I have no idea if that was the actual conversation. I just think it's weird to bring your kid to a museum dedicated to high tech killing machines. Maybe, like me, he's troubled by this aspect of technology and wants his son to see the park in a philosophical sense. Forgive me if my expectations for the typical American family are rather low in this regard. At any rate, they also have an inside museum which I didn't get to the first time. This next batch of photos are probably tedious, but I'm just a bit riveted here and I think they're interesting.

I like the fact that the sound effects guy from the original Star Wars flick donated a Darth Vader helmet for letting him record some sound effects there. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but why not a light saber or a spaceship model? Was he subtly commenting on the evil of fetishising death machines? Actually a Death Star model may have been more appropriate in that case, but perhaps that would be too on-the-nosey. Or, most likely, it means nothing other than, "Hey, I got this extra helmet lying around. Here you go, thanks for helping me out." But I like the symbolism there whether it was intentional or not. I mean, look at this thing; it could be the model for a death star right?

That's a model of the original A-bomb tested at Trinity. Here's a closer up of the information on the wall above it.

Such a weird period in history. Did you know that the explosion of the Nuclear bomb created a new type of mineral? Trinitite. Hard to come by for your rock collection.

They also had this duck and cover display. I'm not sure if the museum was mocking its own historical propaganda here or if they're still trying to put a serious face on it, but I feel like mocking it. Mock mock mock.

And imagine being stuck in a bomb shelter for 20 years while waiting for the radiation levels go down to a safe level with these military provided sanitation kits. Bomb shelter crapping is a complicated business.

Well that's that for now. I did more stuff but once again I've taken so many photos that I'll save it for another post.

Oh The Merry Merry Month Of May, When Random Photos Ruled The Day

May was a busy month, obviously. It really made up for a slow start to the year. I went back to New Mexico for a second work trip but before I get to that there were a few miscellaneous items that I want to catch up on. I had a job just outside of LA in between the two NM trips and before I flew home I visited an old High School friend who works for CBS. Anjali gave me the backstage tour and when we ran across the Wheel, I snorted a little bit. I didn't know I was such a Price is Right nerd, but I did spend a lot of time watching that show when I was a kid so, I guess it's kind of legendary. Anjali kindly accommodated my not-so-inner geek. Afterwards we went to some industry party that was going on; some friends of hers who own a sound studio were throwing a casino night.

When I sat down at the poker table and was apparently asking stupid questions, they asked me if I even knew how to play and I told them yeah, I've played Yahtzee. I didn't get to stay long; had a plane home to catch. But I learned that some of those LA stereotypes are waaaay ON base. On our way to the party we walked through the Farmer's Market by CBS and some pasta seller tried to pitch Anjali a terrible idea for a TV show. And then at the party when people realized I wasn't in the business, they gave me some pretty hard "who is this bumpkin?" looks... that may have been fish out of water anxiety though, to be fair, because everyone was actually pretty nice. It was really fun.

Also in May, the above photo got picked up by National Geographic for their stock photo page! It's not a BIG deal as they have like jillions of photos on that site, plus I don't have a High Res version of it, having snapped it with a disposable camera and I seem to no longer have the original photo, just the scan I made of it so all they got was a low res digital version which they have made available for free because no one will pay for such quality. But still, cool. If you want to see it on the stock photo page, go to nationalgeographicstock.com and then type 'Chiemsee' in the search bar, mine should show up in there somewhere.

And now I just have a couple of leftover shots from the first week in New Mexico of various signs I ran across. Above is the New Mexico State Road 2001; it is a very short road that leads up the hill to the International Space Hall of Fame. I kind of have to think it's a gimmick. Somebody pushed someone to get that road appellation put there.

New Mexico has some pretty existential road signs. Gusty winds may exist. They might not, who knows?! Wind is invisible so it may be the aether. No no, I get what they really mean; that it might be supergustywindy so drive with caution. It's just an odd way to word it. Maybe in Pennsylvania here we should change our signs to say "Icy Roads May Exist. They might not, if it's Summer, but they might."

A sign on the way in to the White Sands Missile Range, with the Organ Mountains in the background. Doesn't really need further comment. And that's pretty much it for my leftover photo salad. As I said I just got back from my second New Mexico trip and I'll have more on that soon. In the meantime, here's a leftover flash forward sign shot.

Yet Another Very Large Array Of Photos Of The Very Large Array, This Time At Sunset

And so after leaving the Las Cruces area, I drove the four hours back up to the San Agustin plains, and got there just in time to catch some sunset photos of the VLA. The cold opener above is an HDR I tried out and they aren't supposed to come out looking like that, but I really really like it.

I got some Plains life in just before the sun set. That deer above was headed straight away from me, so I shot him. And these cows, too.

There is nothing like standing out in a gigantic plain in the middle of nowhere with a tripod and some radio antennae at sunset.

That movie 'Contact' was filmed in part out here, and there is a scene where Jodi Foster is looking out over a canyon, with the radio dishes behind her. Yeah, that's Hollywood stupidity. There is no canyon; I looked. I hate that. Why do they always feel the need to amp up things that in reality need no amping up? If you want the VLA in your movie, film it as it is. It doesn't need a canyon to be awesome.

But HDR doesn't hurt! Actually, taking HDR shots at sunset is a tricky business. Weird colors kept popping in that aren't in any of the original bracketed photos. This next one is not HDR, but it almost looks like it is. I'm learning that not everything needs such embellishment, myself. And also how hard it is not to embellish, sometimes. Maybe I should go easier on Hollywood.

I really like this next one; there's two small line gaps in the dish where the setting sun shines through them, and echoes the reflective train tracks quite nicely. I like the continuity of theme in that; the radio signals from space track down into the dish, and get carried along the train tracks back to the receivers that interpret them.

Ok that's probably not how the signals actually get sent to the receivers, damn you Hollywood! You've corrupted the way I interpret things with your need to visualize everything dramatically! But still. Pretty.

And yes, I really like tonemapping. Sometimes the accidental byproducts are neat, such as green radio dishes. At any rate, remember when I said that there is nothing like standing out in a gigantic plain in the middle of nowhere with a tripod and some radio antennae at sunset? Well, that's nothing compared to doing it at night.

Unfortunately, the moon was really bright that night, and I had to work hard to get any stars in the photos at all.

Damn moon. At one point I tried taking a ten minute exposure, but that didn't really bring out any more stars either. Still.

You'll notice the dish is pointing at a different angles in different photos. They moved them to point at different parts of the sky every so often. I tried to get a shot that captured the motion in an interesting way, but it kept catching me by surprise. This is the best I could do.

At one point, a couple of guys with a mexican accent drove out to where I was in a dirty pick-up and told me I had to leave because the astronomers don't like it when people hang out by the dishes at night. Hope I didn't mess up any of their work! But still, I couldn't leave without at least attempting a laser light self-portrait.

Rockets And Missiles; Salvation And Destruction In The New Mexican Desert

So picking up where I left off, after leaving the VLA I headed down to Las Cruces for work. Actually, I stayed in Las Cruces but my job was in the White Sands Missile Range, just over the mountain pass 20 miles or so. Inside the base, about 100 miles north of where I entered it, is the Trinity site where the first nuclear bomb was tested. It's open twice a year for the public to tour, unfortunately one of those times did not coincide with my visit. There is a museum on base though.

An open air display of many of the missiles they've tested there over the years. What about the Bomb you ask? Here's one. You might recognize it from it's stint on that long con of a TV show, LOST. It's called the Fat Man.

Sobering. I mean, it could have actually had a plot, and then it would have been a great show, but they made their cowardly writing choices, and all we were left with was that fat bloated sorry excuse of a bombed TV show. Bomb... right, sorry, got sidetracked. At any rate, as fascinating as a "museum"consisting of a yard full of devices designed solely to exterminate as much of the human race in one shot as possible is, I did run across something a little more interesting.

I don't know if you'll be able to read that so here it is, cropped.

I would guess that they were trying to insert this into the Roswell narrative somehow, but the "first firing date" of 1966-1967 is well after the alleged UFO Crash near there so it's a clumsy attempt in that case, especially since it also seems to have abandoned the "weather balloon" story but then why bother mentioning Roswell at all? I sort of suspect that it's a bit of a psi-op, or perhaps the military folk at White Sands actually simply have a sense of humor. We'll never know, because I'm sure a sense of humor in the military is classified information.

So out in the middle of the base, just off of the public highway that runs through it, is the White Sands National Monument. It's a vast sea of sand dunes composed of white gypsum crystals, where the military base took it's name from.

Got a picture. The sand really is very white, and because it's gypsum it stays cool to the touch even at midday in a very hot sun. I walked around barefoot for a while, it was nice.

But you know, sand is sand. I drove on to Alamogordo where they have the International Space Hall of Fame, which is not sand, and which is dedicated to the less destructive aspect of rocket technology. It's always fascinated me how the two aspects of rocket science so perfectly represent the potential destruction or salvation of the human species. The ones designed for killing are meant to fly only high enough to get over their target before crashing back down in fiery armageddon, while the ones designed for exploration are meant to keep going up and up until they escape the insanity of local politics. The other more interesting thing about this inherent symbolism of rocket science is that we humans are ourselves the architects of the instruments of our own destiny, whichever way it goes. If there is ever a day of Heavenly Judgment, raining fire on us from above, it will be of our own design.

Having said that, they all crash in the experimental phase. This is a crashed V-2 rocket, designed by Werner Von Braun for the Nazis before he came over to our side. They also had a moon rock at the museum, showing that sometimes rockets do get to where they're supposed to be going.

I got to hold it thanks to an amateurish bit of trick photography. I also hit on one of the pretty scientists that worked there. She was all wrapped up in her work though. "Hey baby, can I have a job?"

One of the other museum guides who worked there was a guy named Viggy who had worked on the Hawk missiles from their inception over at Fort Bliss in Texas. He was obviously proud of that so I asked him to pose with his rocket for me.

The only other interesting thing going on at the Space Hall of fame was that Ham, the first chimp in space, is buried there. I paid my respects.

After leaving the Alamogordo area, I headed back to White Sands for work, and from there I made my way back up to the VLA for some more shots before flying home. But I'll leave it here for now.

The Very Large Array Is An Array Of Very Large Radio Antennae, Arrayed Over A Very Large Baseline On Top Of A Very Large Plain

This is the Very Large Array, in New Mexico. I had a job in the south of the state last week for five days, so I flew into Albuquerque and proceeded to head straight for the, uh, very large array of 27 independent radio telescope antennae for a visit on my way down. Get ready for many, many shots.

I didn't get there until the evening, after the visitor center was closed, but I headed over anyway to try and get some night shots. It was windy, cloudy, and cold.

So I did my best, but even with a tripod it is difficult to get clear shots in such weather at night. Black & white helps; makes things look intentionally arty, or summ'at.

HDR could even only do so much for me. But it works. However, my prize for the night came about completely accidentally. I was trying to take some long exposures, hoping to get a few stars in through the clouds (didn't wind up getting any), and I was testing different settings for them to see if I could get it to work (I couldn't). But after I'd got back to my dingy hotel room in the tiny New Mexican town of Magdalena and went through my photos, I saw that with one 30 second exposure I'd caught a meteor shower!

I certainly did not actually see the shower while taking the picture, but the exposure revealed it. I'm not sure how that works but, there you go. My regret of course is that it's such a dark, noisy picture. Had I left it exposed just a bit longer, or used a better ISO... anyway. I tried messing with it to make it look better, and this is the best I could do.

Still noisy, and I honestly can't decide which of the two is any good. But still, meteor shower points! What's weird though is that the expected meteor shower from the tail of Halley's Comet hit Earth and peaked on May 6th, whereas I took this photo on the evening of May 10th, so I'm not sure what it is we're looking at, unless it's just a random shower that nobody predicted, and nobody knew about, because I can't find any mention of news for a May 10th shower. Maybe it's just some Halley leftovers.

At any rate I got up early the next morning and headed the 20 miles back to the VLA. There are 27 (according to Wikipedia) or 29 (according to my admittedly faulty memory) independent radio dishes arrayed about the vast Plains of San Agustin, over a distance of three 13 mile tracks set in a single large Y-shape. The dishes are frequently moved from close together to spread completely out, depending on the configuration they need. Last week, they seemed to be spread completely out, making it difficult to get shots with multiple dishes in them.

But with a telephoto lens and a little determination, I did my best. How do they move them you ask? Why, by specially designed train cars of course. There's this whole process which they explain in a video at the visitor's center, and it's pretty fascinating but if I revealed everything, why would you ever want to visit the VLA yourself?

There are two of those dish transport vehicles, and they always seemed to be moving about on some mission or another. But I like this shot because it gives you some perspective on how large the dishes actually are. Just imagine a little guy standing in the man-lift there and you'll see what I mean. Plus, it's nice to have some color in one of these shots. The Plains of San Agustin (as in the winds are a'gustin'?) are beautiful, but fairly large and colorless. At least during the day, anyway.

So okay having said that, here are the obligatory HDR shots.

And I tried to get all clever with the next one. There's a balcony on one of the buildings that they don't let you go in. The stairs are on the outside, so they do let you walk up to get a slightly higher view, and there is a large window which acts as a one way mirror so that you can't see in. But it allowed me to experiment further with HDR.

As Julie noticed, in our mirror Universe, people smoke. In our mirror near-twin Universe, they do not. Also, the dummies who smoke are so primitive that they need handles to open doors. And I just like this next one. The fluorescent lights behind the mirror make it look like the dish is shooting death rays.

Well that's all I got on that morning's trip; I had to head down to Las Cruces for work. There's only so much free time on my work trips, after all. Sigh. But don't worry, I had to fly home from Albuquerque (which brought me past the VLA again!), and the area around Las Cruces held a few surprises as well, so there are more pictures to come. But this post is long enough and I got other stuff to do. I'll post some more junk later. Meanwhile, check out 'ol Radiohead, here.

An Atheist Rant Which Those Whose Hands Are Over Their Ears May Wish To Avoid.

"Rational arguments don't usually work on religious people. Otherwise, there wouldn't be religious people."

-Doris Egan, House M.D., The Right Stuff, 2007

I haven't done a nice long insane rambly sea ranty in a while, and tonight I inexplicably find myself in the mood. Perhaps being stuck in Fort Bragg for three weeks in a row where there is nothing much to photograph has something to do with it, but perhaps also I can lay the cause on the doorstep of religion, my favorite whipping post.

For those of you who are facebook friends of mine, this is no surprise; other than my photo of the day, about all I've been doing over there is posting links to anti-religious videos, blogs, and news items. I've been feeling up for a fight lately. The problem is that my adversaries, those who put authoritarian belief in front of rational discourse ain't got much fight in 'em. You can't have a dialogue with those people because they haven't got a brain to stand on. Perhaps that is not fair; they do actually have brains but they've been quite thoroughly trained not to use them. I should know, I used to be a member.

In order to believe in the existence of God, any God, one must have faith. Faith is the belief in something for which there is no evidence. Fine. When I wipe my bottom after disposing of bodily waste, I use the first knuckle method. Since you will never witness this yourself, you'll have to trust me that it's true. You might not even know what the first knuckle method is, but what's important here is that it exists. I know, because I made it up. BELIEVE me when I tell you, I've felt it's presence. So you see, I have belief in certain things which can only be witnessed by an individual on a personal basis. However, if you choose to ignore my account of my VERY personal ass-cleaning method, I'll completely understand. In fact, if you want to pretend I never said it, so much the better. That's exactly how I feel about your god damned religion.

So, by expressing a belief in God, for whom there is no evidence, you've put yourself in an awkward position. More awkward than the first knuckle method in fact, difficult as that may be to imagine (don't imagine it!). You've aligned yourself with those who wish not to believe in reason. Reason, of course, is the primary tool of the mind. But this is the nature of faith, the very definition of it. "Set aside your reason, saith the lord, and believeth in this shit in this book right here. And do this not by your own impulse, but because these dudes who got that book from some other dudes, who are now dead, tell you it's the truth." Can you feel the presence of the lord in that logic? Amen!

I must say that my own progress towards rationality has been long and hard. I believed, and the illogic of the Lord did not sustain me. I searched for the Lord, and did not find him. Instead I found some used book store philosophy which slaked my thirst better than vitamin water for a time, until that too became as coca cola. Then, after discovering Carl Sagan and Joseph Campbell, I settled into a comfortable agnosticism where science was the only possible language of God, if he existed. I spent a while there, but all it took was a logical argument by a friend I've never met to convince me of the liberating joys of atheism.

If there is one thing I've learned from all of this, it's that one side will almost never convince the other. An atheist speaks the language of reasonable discourse and the religious speak the language of authoritarian "knowledge". An atheist can be convinced to change his mind on a subject through strongly reasoned logic and hard evidence, and a theist can be convinced by an impassioned emotional plea and hypnotic crowd techniques. Never the twain shall meet, as reason and faith go 'round and around and around.

One of the most overused and incorrect arguments against atheism is that one is simply switching a belief in God to a belief in no God. This is a false understanding of the situation. Atheism, in it's strongest sense, is a lack of belief. Were actual, hard evidence to come to light that God truly existed, atheists would still not become believers-in-God, they'd become knowers-of-God. In other words, we don't believe in an all-knowing deity for the same reasons we don't believe that thunder is really Thor going bowling. Because it's nonsense and there is far more evidence against religious dogma and a creator than there is evidence for it. In fact, there is NO evidence for it.

When I was a member of the Christian cult, there was a lot of talk about "knowing God" and "feeling his presence" and "answered prayers". I always wondered why, as fervently as I prayed to Jesus and as badly as I wanted to be on the side of Heaven, why did I never feel or sense those things? Why did Jesus talk to the crazy old cat lady, or the Pastor who had an affair with his daughter's best friend's Mom, or the self important and exceedingly boring old usher guy, but never to me? I was earnest, I was in need, ready to be called to battle in the old "Onward Christian Soldiers" sense.

Finally I figured it out, when I reached a certain age and began to fumblingly learn how to utilize the logical part of my brain. None of those people feel or sense those things. They want to, they try to, they convince themselves with certain self-hymnotic techniques that they do feel them, and then they go to church and Praise Jesus or Allah or David Koresh or Fred Phelps loudly in order to continue to convince themselves and those around them that they are one of God's chosen. It was the biggest scam in history, perpetuated mostly in ignorance by it's own victims; the true meaning behind my favorite fable, The Emperor's New Clothes.

It's A Beachball, It's A Ufo... No, It's SUPERMoon!

I need a better telephoto lens. Sigh. Even at it's closest point to us in 18 years, the moon is still too far away. So I'm thankful for modern cropping technology.

Better, but not perfect. Zooming in only increases the size, not the quality of course. There are a jillion better moon pictures out there, but I'm trying to take opportunities to practice night photography whenever I can.

Plus, I need something to post every once in a while. Here's a filtered moon shot I took that kinda looks like the BP logo. Bad moon!

Backyard Attractions & Photographic Actions

So not having any real exciting trips to remote locations coming up, I of course had to hit my back yard and house to practice my new HDR technique. My neighbor's barn is the closest structure to my house. The best time for multi-exposure shots 'round these parts is during the evening.

Not very spectacular shots in and of themselves, but grading out the light produces some beautiful effects huh?

My cat wandered into one of the shots, wondering what the hell I was doing and stared at me long enough to get in two out of three AEB shots in low light. Cats have scary concentration.

Tone mapping in Black & White has its advantages too. I couldn't decide which one I liked better.

Reflections are easy and fun, and proper tone mapping makes them even more-so. That little statuette is a replica of those giant statues in Afghanistan that the Taliban blew up. Jerkwads. I got it at a yard sale for a buck; figured that was a good way to make up for not getting the chance to see the originals, ever.

Puppy! She protects our house from squirrels and runs from bears. (Monster! She yelps as she pounds on the door to be let back in) That path of ice is my route to the woodpile.

In Like A Rocker, Out Like A Lamb

February was a slow month. This time of year usually is. The only trip of note I went on was to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. Just off the highway between Fort Leonard and St. Louis in Fanning, MO on route 66, is the world's Largest rocker. Wheee-hoooo.

I didn't go into the taxidermy studio. If I'd had that kind of time, I would have gone back to the St. Louis Gateway Arch again. Oh well, next time.

However I have some exciting photo geek news. I've discovered how to merge shots of different exposures. I've known it was possible for a while, so very occasionally in the past I'd take Auto Exposure Bracketed shots (AEB) in the hopes I could figure out how to merge them one day. I never really did until recently, and sad to say I never did have the forethought to take very many AEB shots. No idea what I'm talking about? Let me explain. These next three shots of a scene in Death Valley National Park were taken as AEB; three shots of the same frame at different exposures:

And with the correct software, they are merged together to look like this!

It takes the best light from each object in the photo and puts 'em together for what is called a High Dynamic Range (HDR) image. This is an especially useful tool for instances where the light on the subject that you're photographing is just too disparate. As you see in the first three photos, when I exposed for the detail of the basalt rock, the sky and background get washed out, but when I tried to expose for the background, the basalt gets blacked out. One such common occurrence in photography are indoor shots with windows during the daytime. If you want to see what's outside as well as what's inside, HDR rules. My Den:

You'll notice that the HDR images don't look quite as sharp as a regular photo; they almost look painterly. That's just a detailing option you can use in the software. It can render the image more normal looking as well, it's just a preference. Here's my HDR Den, more normal:

I like the painterly look. It makes my less interesting photos look more interesting. Someday I hope to take an AEB photo that is interesting in and of itself. I'm excited about the software, so hopefully it will happen. In the meantime, here's another AEB shot I took way back on a Sacramento California trip.

"Astronomy Compels The [Mind] To Look Upwards And Leads Us From This World To Another"

Guess where I went again? And this time I brought my tripod. One aspect of my job that I very much appreciate (one aspect among many) is how I am able to return to the same place more than once. With some assignments it's not the greatest, but getting to return to Napa Valley, Death Valley or Kitt Peak on multiple occasions way more than makes up for multiple Nowhere, Indiana or the occasional Harrisburg, PA types of assignments. I like going some places many times because each time I go, I notice something different or have a new experience, and I get to know that place a bit better. Also, when I am somewhat familiar with where I'm going, I can make more adequate preparations.

Several things about my second visit to Kitt Peak totally ruled. As I said, a) this time I was prepared and brought my tripod, b) it was a much clearer night than on my previous visit, with no clouds or moon out, which makes the stars extremely bright and multitudinous and c) it was less windy and a bit warmer (though still quite desert-at-night chilly) and so they opened up a different telescope for us to use this time. So all around it was a totally different experience than before. The telescope we used this time was more or less the same as the other one (pictured above), except this one was housed a bit further up the hill in a flattop observatory rather than a domed one. The flattop style would have been quite dreadful on a windier night, open to the elements as it is, you see.

That flat part to the left, hanging over the red light, is the roof; it's been rolled back from the cylindrical observatory on the right. We got to see some really awesome stuff this time around. The middle star in Orion's sword stands out in my memory mainly because while it looks like a single star to the naked eye, it's actually four newborn stars surrounded by clouds of gas and dust cast off from their birth. It was quite lovely. You can see Orion in the next picture. That really bright star just above the roof-line of the Observatory is Sirius, the brightest star in the sky and only 8 light years away, and Orion is just above it, the next brightest stars in the picture being his sword. It looks like I also caught a faint shooting star, between Sirius and the telescope. Or maybe that's an airplane, who knows. I bet Astronomers really hate airplanes.

Oop, there's another one. It's a meteorite, it's an airplane, no! It's a...! Well, no it's got to be one of those two things. You decide.

I also got to see something that is apparently very difficult to see in most places due to light pollution. Kitt Peak is far away and high enough from any major city that the night sky just pops, more so than I've ever seen but less so than people could see from anywhere only 100 years ago. I know that last picture rather looks light polluted from the ground, but that's mostly just a quirk of shutter exposure. At any rate, what we were able to see was the Zodiacal Plane. It's the plane in which all of the planets orbit the sun, and the reason it's see-able is that the millions of leftover particles and gases that are trapped in the same orbit from which all of the planets emerged reflect a faint light. The really bright star just above the robot-looking weather sensor thingy is actually Jupiter, and you can see how the sky is brighter just around it.

I also got to see the double star Almach, The Eskimo Nebula, the star cluster M44 with hundreds of tiny blue stars, the cigar galaxy M82, and our docent even showed us how to find the Andromeda Galaxy with the naked eye. And of course, the only other thing which my camera is actually capable of taking a picture of, the Milky Way.

Although I did get this picture of Jupiter early on just around sunset. I was just playing with settings on my camera when I took it, and it's totally dull and would never make the cut in a million years except I just happened to shake my camera in just the right way to give the planet its self-referential initial.

Hee hee. Anyway, one thing I didn't mention in my first Kitt Peak post was that at the end of the evening, around 10pm, they have to lead us in a caravan down the mountain because you're not allowed to turn your headlights on as they would interfere with the Astronomers doing real work at the observatory. Parking and taillights are fine because they are not luminous enough to have an effect on the telescopes. So as they were gathering us up to go this time, I realized that I'd forgotten my tripod bag back in the flattop observatory. So while everybody else drove down the mountain, I got to wait behind for the docent to come back so he could let me in to get my bag. While I was waiting, I got a nice shot of the parking lot and everyone's taillights as they queued up and drove off. Now I'm not saying that I forgot my bag on purpose, I'm just saying that it worked out rather well for me.

So another awesome night at Kitt Peak all around. I really hope I get to go at least one more time because aside from all of the astronomical learning, I figured out a thing or two about taking night sky pictures which I didn't know before and I'd like the chance to try them out further. At any rate I'll leave you with my final picture of the night; when I got all the way down to the bottom of Kitt Peak I stopped to take a final shot which I thought was poetic, and sad.

"O Krampus! My Krampus! Our Fearful Trip Is Done...

...The whip has weathered every whack, the prize we sought is won;
The beer is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady march, the Krampus grim and daring"

-A Krampusization of the first verse of 'O Captain! My Captain!' by Walt Whitman

And so we come to it at last, Krampus fest 2010! For anyone who has been wondering just what the hell Krampus is, and why I've been making such a fuss over it for the last several posts, hopefully this one will explain our love for it. The last time I was at Krampus was in aught 6, so it was really great to hit it again at long last. Here's a distant glimpse of a pack of demons led through the lower part of town by St. Nick as they make their early house calls.

Krampus fest is awesome. In a nutshell, on every 5th of December many small mountain villages from the area around Berchtesgaden send a Krampus delegation consisting of a band of demons led by the village's St. Nick stand-in. St. Nick will usually have a couple of little girls dressed as angels following close to his side, ringing small chimes to warn of their approach. The demons come in a few different types. Some wear simple furs with a furry dog-face looking mask, and carry whips. Some wear furs with a more elaborate wooden hand-carved demon face mask, sometimes with cowbells strapped to their backs, and carry whips. And others are covered in straw, usually with the wooden masks, always with the cowbells strapped on their backs, and carry whips.

The delegations converge upon Berchtesgaden for the official Krampus opening ceremony. It was really crowded during the daytime this year, so we were unable to get close to the square where they had it, but I've seen it before so I can describe the gist of it. Basically what happens is that St. Nicholas, in an effort to make the human race behave more admirably than is it's wont, meets up with an old friend of his, a shady character named Knecht Ruprecht. St. Nicholas asks to borrow the demons that are under Knecht's control for two days and nights, that he might lead them into battle for the souls of children. The German Bundeswehr, a military outfit, supervises the handing-over ceremony. If negotiations go smoothly they promptly escort Knecht and themselves out of town, essentially handing control of Berchtesgaden over to the demons of St. Nick for the duration.

This is where it gets scary. So in order to wage war against the sins of mankind, St. Nicholas orders the demons to begin their rampage. Krampus demons, being demonic, are able to sense the sinful. Sniffing out their own kind, as such. They know if you've been naughty, and when they find you, they use the combined psychological warfare tactics of being damned scary looking, their towering Bavarian farmer-like sizes, and the maddening sound of the cowbells of hell in order to make you flee in terror. And when you flee, that's when they chase you, and use the whips.

You see they're no Disney whips, this is a serious business. They whap! you pretty hard with those things on the back of the knees or thighs, and it stings. The purpose of the whipping is to beat the sins out of you. St. Nicholas, being the kind saint that he is, wants to be able to give the little German children presents on Christmas morning and the only way to insure that he doesn't have to leave anyone out is by punishing them for the past year's sins first. It's quite an elegant system, if you think about it. No coal in the stockings, or wooden shoes or however they do it there. No child left behind. Whap!

It starts off fairly tamely in the late afternoon. The crowds of onlookers are thick, and the demon packs roam about town in fairly orderly fashion, whacking the occasional bystander who sticks out from the crowd a bit too much. The Krampus fest coincides with Berchtesgaden's Christkindlemarkt, so there are plenty of places to stop and grab a gluwein or a beer and some wurst or spätzle while shadowing a particularly fun bunch of demons. There's even a bit of time to... do... some... window... shopping?

Erm... I love it. I'm not sure if little armless goat/tree boy here has anything to do with Krampus, but for him to just sort of appear in a wood carver's window amongst other more standard shop fare is fairly indicative of how awesome Berchtesgaden is. Is he supposed to be vomiting twigs? Anyway. As the night carries on, things get a bit rowdier. The demons get drunker and start hitting harder, the crowds get thinner, and those who stay get numb from both the cold and the whippings. And drunker.

Gluhwein comes in those nice little mugs. The above scene is a demon showing a rare bit of selective craftiness. He'd reached over John there to grab the mug of gluhwein from the young lady in order to lure her away from the table, where he proceeded to whip the tar out of her. I sort of can't believe she fell for it, but she was pretty young, after all. Very young, John. [Ahem.] Shows you they do in fact know who needs a good whipping.

You may have noticed that the hands and arms of the demons are covered in a greasy soot. They tend to rub their hands over the faces of their victims, leaving a sooty hand-print. I'm not sure exactly why; logically I would guess they do this so as to leave a message for the other demons that this one has been taken care of, move along, but I haven't noticed that the demons leave previously-marked victims alone any more than anyone else. Indeed, sometimes it seems as though the mark is given to single out those who need more attention than usual, and may end the night having been beaten several times.

Young women in particular do seem to get singled out more often. But if I explore this thought it leads into uncomfortable examinations of German sexuality and the whole town seems to view this behavior as a healthy and normal outlet for the youth once a year so I suppose we'll leave it at that as no harm, no foul. Or rather; not too much harm other than a slight stinging and a few morning after bruises, no foul.

Creeeeepy. But then, this isn't supposed to be charming. It is an ancient tradition and despite the rather gleefully dark connotations of the whole thing, is actually religious in nature. As such, there are certain aspects of Krampus that should be taken seriously which, I am ashamed to admit, in my younger and more vulnerable years I did not realize. Pretty much anything goes at Krampus but the main thing is that during the festivities, the demons are in charge. It is not appreciated when some wise-ass American stands up to them. I know that sounds crazy; I mean look at these guys, who would have the nerve to stand up to them anyway?!

Well it happens. Some stupid drunk American thinks he's braver than most people and flits about, trying to steal a whip, or simply standing in the middle of the road forcing a confrontation just to display how unafraid of getting a whap! behind the knees he is. Sometimes the demon ignores him, but often, especially the later it gets, said dumb-ass American finds himself on his back on the cobblestones after having been the victim of a running tackle and shoved 15 feet through the air across the road. And then group-whipped repeatedly. Usually the victim is too stupid to realize this is a severe reprimand of his behaviour and instead mistakes it for "all in good fun". Sheesh.

One of the greatest of the worst-kept secrets of Krampus fest in Berchtesgaden is the Goldener Bär, (The Golden Bear) a solidly good German restaurant with an Italian restaurant upstairs. If you sneak through the Goldener Bär, then sneak upstairs, there is a balcony which overlooks a hidden courtyard behind the building. And in this courtyard is a sort of staging/pow wow/rest area for the Krampus demons. It is a very long, exhausting two days for these guys, dressing in heavy costumes and running around all day whipping people and ringing bells. They need the occasional break to rest up, drink some beer, howl like demons, and party it up on their own. And of course a place for me to get some good shots. Here St. Nicholas is basking in the worship of his demons.

And then, just to prove he's no prude, St. Nick instructs them to let the howl-down begin!

Austria has this brand of chocolates named after Mozart. They are dainty little bon-bons, and cardboard cutouts of Mozart displaying a box of them are ubiquitous in the Alps. Apparently, Krampus demons thought Mozart needed a good whipping this year. Off with his head!

And this seems a little dangerous to me but hay, if a demon needs his nicotine, I for one am not standing in his way. (misspelling intended, haw haw!) A flaming straw demon would have been pretty scary anyway, and I was ready, if disappointed, with my camera.

The balcony overlooking the courtyard is really a great spot. Next time we go I will try and borrow someone's video camera so I can catch all the action. The cowbells from hell, the chanting, the howling, the demonic singing. I love it! One of the demons needed to use the demon loo and came up and was trying to get by us. I think he scared Nimmer a little.

But at the end of the night, even demons need to tone it down and kick back a bit. Even from the demon pow wow, a rest in a normal pub with some human friends is occasionally needed.

As for myself, one of my favorite places to rest my whipped buns and weary feet with a beer is upstairs, at that Italian restaurant I was telling you about. They serve good European style pizza and of course wonderful German beer, but most importantly it's very warm and not usually too crowded. So Gerald, Julie and I took a break up there for some quiet replenishment when some of our friends came in for a quiet rest of their own!

The above photo was taken with Julie's camera by a demon, and believe it or not it was their idea! I don't think any of us had the courage to ask for a photo but it turns out this was a really friendly pair. They just came over and plopped down next to us and began a half-hour or so of friendly chat. Of course, they didn't speak much English and my German is minimal, but it was educational nonetheless. Julie took this one.

The demons were obviously friends. The one you've seen here is a giant Bavarian man, and would be extremely intimidating even without the getup. His friend was a much smaller man, and they made an amusing pair. Julie got this fantastic photo as well.

The smaller demon allowed Julie to try on his mask. I can't believe she asked him if she could; I was still terrified of them. Perhaps I have too many preconceptions about Krampus Nacht to be able to separate the guys wearing the masks from the traditions they represent.

When I tell people about Krampus, I get very mixed reactions. Some people think it sounds like the coolest thing ever but more often, people just think it sounds stupid. "Why would you want to let a bunch of scary men in costumes whip you?! You're weird and a little gay, dude." That always surprises me. It's an experience like none you'd ever be allowed to have in the States. I mean, people like the idea of running with the bulls, or going to that crazy tomato festival. This is along the same lines as those but much more fun in a way more primal.

Notice I got greased on the top of my head. I think they like to take advantage of such a landing deck when they can. Anyway, I hope I've managed to get across why Krampus is awesome and not stupid and a little gay to anyone reading this who might be new to the whole thing.

So that was Krampus 2010. It was awesome, and really great to see my friend Nimmer again and meet his girlfriend and his friend John, and it was great to have Gerald along as well; he was one of the few who thought it sounded awesome the first time he heard about it so it's nice to see it get appreciated. It wound up being a really fun group of people. I was bummed that other Krampus companions of years past were unable to make it, but maybe next time. However the best thing about Krampus this year was being able to share it with Julie, who has had to listen to me yammer on about it and Germany for the last 4 years and finally got to see for herself. She had a really great time and now when I yammer on about it, she can join in. She and I stayed in Berchtesgaden for two more days after Krampus in order to recuperate from three weeks on the road and a nasty bug. I'd never done that before but A) Berchtesgaden is a near ghost town after the fest and B) the perfect place to decompress at the end of a Honeymoon. The hotel Bavaria had a Turkish bath and sauna in their private spa room, and we took full advantage. And two more delicious German dinners at the Goldener Bär are nothing to pass up. Well, until next time, may visions of gluhwein and whip-bearing demons dance in our heads.

So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Good Night, I Hate To Go And Leave This Pretty Sight

And now... we have arrived. I want to sing poetry for Munich, that's how gay for it I am. My favorite city in the whole wide world. We got off the train from Nürnberg and I was able to begin extolling about the pure awesomeness of the city to Julie right there in the best train station in the world (The München Hauptbahnhof). They serve a slow-roasted half-chicken there, fondly referred to by the old AFRC-E gang (Armed Forces Recreation Centers-Europe. Sorry, I'll try not to parenthesize too often) as cheap chicken. Because it's the most delicious thing you've ever eaten and it only cost like 5 bucks. As we'd planned all year, we met a friend from Chiemsee for some cheap chicken there. Well and for Krampus, but cheap chicken first. Jeff Nimmer brought along his girlfriend Beth and his friend John, and we began our traditional meeting day. Cheap chicken at the bahnhof, then a walk down to the Marienplatz.

The last two pictures are of the New Town Hall, because it's only just over 100 years old. It faces the Marienplatz, which is what they call the main square of Munich, but it seems like every town and city in Bavaria has a Marienplatz also. But the one in Munich is definitely special. I love that building. From there we hit a few other of our favorite spots; Dahlmyer's, the tomb of Bavaria's unknown soldier, the Viktualienmarkt. Stop for a Gluhwein here and there. We skipped the traditional bacon cheeseburger at the Irish Pub as this time around as we were all coming from the States and no one was craving one. This year it's delicious, comforting German food all the way. Then it was back to the Hostel for a nap before the evening festivities.

Munich is the best city in which to begin any European travel in order to beat jet or train lag right off the bat. Arrive, stay awake as long as you can before napping for no more than two hours, at which time it's easy to make yourself get moving again because you do not want to miss an evening out at one of Munich's many awesome beer halls, (if you've only got time for one beer hall, it of course has to be the Hofbrauhaus) and a liter of beer (called a mass , pronounced moss) or three. I've heard Americans say that they don't like the Hofbrauhaus because it's too touristy, that they'd rather hit the Augustiner Haus or the Paulaner Haus, but I say that just goes to show you how little they understand Munich. You'll hear many different opinions of course, but from years and years of careful research I believe that I understand something about Bavarians; The social life of a Bavarian is all about Beer, good food, Beer, good cheer, Beer, and a big crowd of people to drink beer, eat good food, and sing good cheers with. They're like Hobbits that way. The Hofbrauhaus is full of tourists, but it is also full of Bavarian regulars who enjoy their tourists and are happy when guests come to visit. Not all Bavarians like tourists of course, but would you rather sit in a beer hall where the locals are ignoring you, or would you rather get drunk with a cheerful Bavarian? It's all personal preference, I suppose.

One of the great things about Bavarian beer halls is that tables are not private. If there's an empty space on the bench, expect for it to be filled by almost anyone. A drunken lederhosen-garbed Bavarian, a group of drunk Australian girls, a group of drunk Spanish guys, a North Carolinan matron and her daughter just off the plane, or a Bavarian gangster rapper. And you can also expect to be super best drunken friends with all of them before they leave the table. At any rate, by the time you leave, you will have no problem staggering back to your hostel and getting a good night's sleep, to awaken refreshed and on German time! You probably won't even be all that hung over either thanks to the Bavarian beer purity laws of 1516. Julie took this picture on our "walk" home from the Hofbrauhaus.

So that morning, we met another friend at the München Hauptbahnhof. I'm always trying to convince people about the awesomeness of Germany and how much fun Krampus is, and it's the rare individual who both believes me and takes me up on the invitation. Gerald had just flown in and he'd missed the traditional Munich meeting day, but was just in time to catch a regional bahn with us down to the town of Bernau, which is on lake Chiemsee where Nimmer and I onced lived and worked. Here's a shot which will likely only mean something to any Chiemseers who happen to be reading.

We froze our asses off on the ferry ride out to the Fraueninsel, a small island on the lake which has a convent founded in 782 and the tiniest, cutest little town you ever did see. Here's a stock postcard I'd pulled off the internet a while back; I never did get any aerial shots of my own.

We ate many sausage sandwiches and drank much gluhwein there at the tiniest, cutest little christkindlemarkt there that you ever did see. That tiny little island was packed though; I was afraid the weight of the crowd would sink it. We went back to the mainland and met an old Bavarian friend, Florian, at the bar he owns (the above pictured Bernauer Stub'n) for a few drinks, and then back to our rooms at Frau Hermann's place.

Our view from the rear balcony in our room at Frau Hermann's the next morning.

It's always bittersweet to tour the old stomping grounds. I love it there so much and I love to revisit, but it never lasts long enough and far too soon it's time to leave again. That morning we hopped on the train down to Berchtesgaden, where the Krampus festivites were to begin that afternoon. I love riding on trains through Bavaria... it's the most magical place on Earth. This is what the train ride usually looks like.

Passing by countless picturesque Bavarian towns which make you wish you'd been born and raised in such simple beauty. (If you're gay for Munich, then you're gay for Bavaria. That's just how it goes, I'm afraid.)

Berchtesgaden is the most amazing place though. A mountain village, nestled deep in the Bavarian Alps. You've already seen my shot of the Watzmann, but have you seen Berchtesgaden building art? It's magnificent. Did you know there were Bavarians at the crucifixion? I bet you didn't. We call him Helmut. Paying our respects to him is one of the first things we do upon arrival in Berchtesgaden. Say hello to Helmut. Hallo!

Here's the Hotel we stayed at. It's called The Hotel Bavaria, and is under new management since the last time we came. It is now run by a super awesome Bavarian couple, Wolfgang and Pietra, and their son Andre.

They didn't know that we'd been in town many many times before, and upon our arrival they warned us with very concerned looks on their faces to be careful if we went up the hill into town because there was this crazy local festival going on and it gets a bit rowdy. We grinned merrily amongst ourselves. Once we assured them that we knew all about Krampus, they let us in on a secret; a group of very special Krampus demons would be hitting the courtyard at the Hotel Bavaria early in the evening. A group of one of the oldest Krampus packs in the area were apparently hiking all the way down from some tiny mountaintop hamlet and making their first stop there, so we were welcome to join them in the courtyard for gluhwein mit schuss and cakes! So as my final Krampus teaser before the actual Krampus post, here are three shots of the beginning of the festivities. Here a Krampus demon asks a terrified littled boy if he's been good this year, as St. Nick and a little angel look on approvingly.

Krampus demons are especially fond of terrorizing young ladies. They were sort of passing this girl around like a football as she was screaming bloody Deutsche murder, but later when I looked at the pictures I had snapped she appears to be, um, enjoying the attention. Ah, Krampus.

And finally, the leader of the pack howls to the air, calling his demons to battle. The battle for the souls of wicked little children and young girls, and any man, woman, child or animal who stands in the way. Let the bell ringing and the whippings begin!

And to help with the anticipation, perhaps a teaser video of a Krampus demon bell-ringing pow wow behind the Goldener Bär restaurant.

Glückliches Neues Jahr! Wilkommen Auf Deutschland!

After Paris, I finally returned to the Fatherland. There is something special about crossing the border into Germany; I feel finally at home. Nürnberg is a nice easy train ride from Paris. We'd arrived at night, in the middle of a big snowstorm. There had been a couple of delays, but I was so happy to be traveling on Deutsche Bahn again that I didn't mind at all. This is a nice blurry shot of us about 5 minutes after being outside that night. I was using my small pocket camera and didn't realize the date stamp was turned on. Grr.

Nürnberg is the home of the largest, cutest damned Christmas Market (Christkindlmarkt) of all time. In Germany they are ubiquitous this time of year, and this was Nürnberg's 175th annual market. 175th. I've been to Nürnberg several times, and have yet to get a decent picture of the market. I'm not sure exactly why that is, except that I may be too busy enjoying it to bother trying too hard with my camera. They sell all kinds of delicious holiday treats like Lebkuchen, Wurst, and gluhwein along with various other staples such as Christmas ornaments, hats, gloves, candy, liquor, and good, solid, practical German cheer.

Nürnberg is also home to the Albrecht Dürer Haus. He was a very famous 16th century artist. This is the Albrecht Dürer square.

See the rabbit? That's one of his sculptures. Let's take a closer look.

Are those human toes? And demon baby rabbits? Dürer was kind of a nutjob. But then again so are all those mid-millenium religious artists. It doesn't seem like something that came out of the 16th century, does it? More like that H.R. Giger guy who designed the Alien.

Anyway, Nürnberg is a small town. To be savored more than photographed, apparently. Julie had her birthday there, where I totally scored points for best birthday party location ever. We there began our week of eating delicious German food with spätzle, nürnbergerwurst mit sauerkraut, and good thick beer with twice the alcohol content of American and including Bavarian State-mandated pure beer ingredients. And we took a break from the snow and cold to see the latest installment of the Harry Potter franchise at an original language version cinema there. Good good times.

So that's that. It was awesome. I'm getting all excited just reliving my time in Germany, so imagine how happy we were to actually be there. I will retire there one day, I swear. Here's the next Krampus teaser pic. The mountain is called the Watzmann, as viewed from our hotel balcony in Berchtesgaden. At the bottom of the shot you can see some Krampus demons jogging through the streets of town on their way toward the evening festivities.

They're a bit hard to see. If you click on the picture you can view it in a larger format (that's true of all the pictures I post, by the by) or, I'll post a bonus-bonus Krampus teaser shot of a closer-up. The bells, the bells!!

"All I Wanted Was To Connect My Moods With Those Of Paris. Beauty Paints And When It Painted Most, I Shot." -Ernst Haas

Despite popular belief, Parisians are not, in fact, all assholes. Every Parisian we interacted with was lovely. It wasn't my first time there either; it was my third visit to Paris and I've found that to be true each time. I think that the reason that so many Americans seem to think Parisians are jerks is because Parisians are actually quite friendly and accommodating, and as a result they lose patience really fast with people who do not return the same courtesies. Americans are typically known in Europe as rude and oblivious travelers, though in fairness I don't think we mean to be. But, and obviously I'm stereotyping us here, our habit of not trying to understand the customs or the languages of the places we travel to is fairly considered to be pretty asinine. There are cultural and geographical reasons for our seemingly built-in xenophobia and obtuseness, however when leaving your home and entering another's, it's not unreasonable for the host to expect a little understanding that things are done differently there and that while it may be their duty to make us feel welcome, it's our duty to try and fit in.

So that's our lecture for today kids. God I'm getting preachy in my old age. Aw who'm I kidding, I've always been preachy. ANYway, obviously after hitting Barcelona Julie and I night trained it up to Paris. As I said I'd visited a few times before, but Julie hadn't and as it is quite a lovely honeymoon destination, we hit that. We were there for three days. What can I say about Paris though? It's a beautiful city, with a crap ton of cool stuff to do. You might find it odd that after having said that, I pretty much only have pictures of the Sacre Coeur church to post.

There's a good reason for that. Paris was bloody cold. Actually from here on out, the rest of our trip was bloody bloody bloody bloody cold. It wasn't often that I had the gumption to pull my camera out of the bag. But the Sacre Coeur has a special signifigance for Julie and me. She's had a painting by Maurice Utrillo of a street scene on her wall in her bedroom for many years; It had belonged to her Nana and she'd always loved it. She would stare at it and wish she could enter the painting and go there, but she never knew what or where it was. Not until I once had occasion to see the painting myself whereupon I said to her "Hey, that looks like the Sacre Coeur in Montmartre, Paris. I've been in that exact spot. Cool picture."

It's possibly a little more commercial in that spot nowadays than it was in Utrillo's day. But still a cool looking scene. So of course this was one of our most important must-do's on our honeymoon. Julie said it was quite surreal to stand in this spot after all those years of staring at it and wishing she could go there, but perhaps she will wish to comment more on that herself. At any rate, of course we went back there at night when shops were closed and no one else was out, mostly because it was snowing and was bloody bloody bloody bloody cold. But very attractive.

We did do other stuff in Paris of course. But posting photos of paintings in the Louvre is rather dull. There were still a crap ton of people in the Mona Lisa room. Probably the same ones who were there last time I was there. However we did pass by proof that all of the paintings there are fake stand-ins. They train 'em right there, during normal business hours!

We also passed a window which had a really nice view of Montmartre, so I pulled out the 'ol telephoto lens.

And a bit more tele, please.

Another very, very important aspect of Paris was the food. You can not go wrong in Montmartre. We hadn't had the greatest food luck in Lisbon or Spain; the Tapas were kind of nasty. I think we just picked bad places somehow though. But everything we ate in Paris was awesome. That stereotype is absolutely true. Julie sated a yen for Foie Gras and I sated a yen for Creme Brulee, along with many other italicized satiations and some great wine. The only bad experience was at this one trendy fondue place. The fondue was delicious, but the restaurant itself was a bit unpleasant. It was tightly packed with squealing young foreigners, Julie was forced to stand on the table to get over to her seat where she became quite literally booby-trapped for the evening, and in a final indignity they served their passable house wine in baby bottles which is exactly where I drew the line. I immediately took the lid off as I have a snobby attitude toward wine which tastes of rubber nipple.

Julie apparently does not. She's much more fun than I am.

I'm not really sure what exactly the gimmick was supposed to be. So then Parisians may not all be assholes, their food may be all kinds of awesome, but they are also kind of weird sometimes. Anyway, we also hit Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower, of course. And the catacombs. Gotta hit the catacombs. Because miles of human bones deep underground are cool.

Two-headed ogres live down there.

And that's pretty much our Paris trip. I left stuff out, such as the five story spiral staircase we had to climb three to four times a day, and the unforced evacuation of the Louvre which we did not participate in, or the Christmas concert in Notre Dame, but really those are just details which are better kept between ourselves.

One post closer to Krampus! Sorry it's taking so long to get there. Busy time of year and all that. Here's the next teaser pic.

More Travel Chanties: Oh Sevilla, Barcelona, Alhaaaaambra, España! You Were Fun But Now It's Over, Dreadful Sorry, Clementine.

We took a night train from Lisbon to Madrid. I've been on night trains in Europe before, and once from Cairo to Aswan, Egypt, and they are awesome. You get a bunk bed room with a sink. You hang out, drink some wine or whatever, pass out. Then you wake up at your destination well rested and ready to sightsee. For some reason, the Lisbon to Madrid night train wasn't so restful. I mean, we did everything right; we had a private room and a bottle of genuine Porto bottled Port Wine. (Which we learned was invented by the British in the Portugese city of Porto. They didn't like Portugese wine, so they mixed it with Brandy and voila!) Maybe I'm just getting... well certainly not older. I'm the same age I always was. Maybe just out of practice.

At any rate, all we saw in Madrid were train stations as we attempted to find a way down to Seville. They don't make it easy, the damn Spaniards. But we made it, and spent a night. We didn't like the tapas, but the old Cathedral that looks a bit like a mosque in the last two pictures was pretty. We opted not to pay the overpriced entrance fee to check out the interior, however. How's that for hard-hitting travel journalism?

This was a museum which we also didn't go in to, but I dig the lion device over the archway. Hey, we were still a bit jet and train-lagged, and we were just glad we had the energy to wander around town at all at this point, ok? So after Seville, we got an early morning train to Granada.

Again, still exhausted, and Granada was extremely stressful and confusing at first. But after hauling our packs onto many buses and over many hills, we finally found what we were looking for, the Alhambra.

To be honest, I'd never heard of the Alhambra before Julie convinced me that we had to go see it if we were going through Spain. I feel a bit confused by that now; it's like never having heard of the Louvre, or the Roman Colliseum. How does that one go under one's radar? Washington Irving lived at the Alhambra for a time and wrote a book of tales about it. And I'll be embarassingly honest once more; at first I was a bit cranky, and did not enjoy walking around it. My excuse? Again, train-lagged and we had hiked over a lot of hills already that day, and the place is HUGE.

But you can't stay cranky for long with these kinds of sights. On the one hand, the place is awe-inspiring. An aggregate of palaces and gardens, constructed by various conquerors of contrasting empires over a period of centuries. On the other hand, my inner proletariat was outraged once again by the excesses of the wealthy at the expense of the subhuman working class.

But at some point you just have to let the rage go and enjoy the views.

Or not, you know. Bitterness is a good frame of reference for the traveler. And either way, it IS beautiful. It's not like I want to visit the shanty towns of South Africa as a sightseer, or even the poorer districts of Granada. Bloody rich people.

If I seem conflicted, it's because I am. You can't walk around this planet without a healthy dose of confliction. I despise the overly wealthy, not because they're wealthy but because they seem to spend their lives and their wealth making sure that the mass of humanity gets screwed, but of course when you travel as an American, one realizes that I am overly wealthy compared to much of the world. Which is kind of sad and makes me even madder. And then I try to put it all out of my mind and just enjoy the trip.

So you know, Travel for the self-loathing! I oughtta work for Carnival or Disney. At any rate, the Alhambra was really wonderful to see. But the best part of the day was dinner. After hiking back down into the main district of Granada, I found a Doner Kebap place! Doner Kebaps are the Turkish version of Gyros and are way awesomer. They are all over Europe, but I have yet to see one in the States which is crazy. You could make a small fortune if you opened a Doner stand. One last view of the Alhambra, and then it's off to Barcelona.

We spent a few days in Barthelona. That's how they pronounce it. It's a really neat city, with loads of the usual city life kinds of things. Nightlife, sidewalk cafes, museums, etc. Our first night there though, we hit the Gaudi stuff.

Gaudi was a religious nut, and judging by his architecture at least partially insane. But you know, that's a good combo for art. They started building the Sagrada Familia cathedral in 1882, and it is still under construction, to be completed in 2026. That's freaking crazy right? But it really is an amazing looking building.

And honestly, it also looks a bit demonic. Like a big church made out of flesh. Maybe that's why I like it.

We also checked out his Casa Mila, which is awesome but I feel like it falls a bit short of his vision. I don't understand why all of the windows aren't desgned the same way as that big one on street level. The webby soap-bubbly like pattern of the door frame is awesome, and the other windows are all just, square.

The next day we hit the Picasso museum, once again at Julie's prompting. And I have to say, it did it's job. I'm a convert, I like Picasso's stuff now. I didn't really care about him much before, though I always thought that his attempts to render the idea of actual three dimensional vision rather than two dimensional representation of the third dimension onto canvas was rather awesomely nerdy, if a bit inherently flawed as a concept. But being in a room full of his weirder stuff is definitely one of the few times in my life where I actually felt wonderfully affected by art, because I'm not normally big on paintings and sculptures and such. But, you're not allowed to take pictures of his paintings, dammit.

We spent a lot of time in Barcelona just walking around and enjoying the atmosphere. I have loads of pictures but they're mostly touristy, so I'll leave off with this one.

And that's it for Spain. One post closer to Krampus! Speaking of which, here's the next teaser pic I promised.