Welcome to the 19th Century

What the hell is wrong with State government?

All I want to do is get our car registered in Colorado. You'd think something like that would be fairly straightforward, right? Wrong! Because of a local bureaucracy that's still working with twentieth-century technology and nineteenth-century attitudes, it's taken me two days and it still isn't done.

To register I need (1) proof of insurance, (2) confirmation of the VIN, and (3) the old state registration or title from Texas (and of course (4), a f*cking great pile of cash).

Proof of insurance - well that one at least was easy.

VIN confirmation - now, the car was parked ten feet from the building entrance and the VIN is stamped on it in at least three places, of which two are extremely easy to get to. Can someone walk outside and write the number down? No. Can they take a photo? No, instead I have to take the car to a dealership and have them fill out and sign a paper. (How do they know I didn't fill out the damn thing myself? I have no bloody clue.) It's a good thing I'm not driving a Tatra - I'd probably have to go to Czechoslovakia to find a dealership.

Title document? Well, the bank has that. So I called the bank to have them send a copy - and they can't do it because they're in the middle of a merger and the title document hasn't been scanned into the system yet. Yes, scanned. The title document is paper - not a paper record of a database entry. Computerization of records means scanning the paper in as an image. Christ know what happens if the building housing the paper records catches fire.

Okay, what about the registration? I called our old local tax office down in Texas and asked what I need to do to get a copy of the registration real quick. VTR-275 form, they said, and $2.30 fee. Fine. I wanted it real quick so I sent the form and the fee express overnight ($16 and some cents), and asked them to fax the copy. The form went out yesterday; I got the fax this afternoon. So far so good. But when I got to the county clerks office, they wouldn't accept it because it was a fax. They have to have the original.

Message to local government: This is the twenty-first century.

We have digital cameras. We have databases. We have high-speed Internet communications with unbreakable security and digital signatures for verification.

So What the F*CK are you playing at?! Why are you still using paper copies? Why isn't a fax good enough? Why the hell couldn't I just have asked the tax office to send the registration document in a digitally-signed email to the clerk's office here? Better still, why couldn't the clerks office just look up my registration online?

This, folks, is why our local taxes are so goddamn high. I've been running around for two days chasing this stuff and the job is still not done because of local government procedures that were set in stone in the Pleistocene Era. Isn't it about time we fixed that?

The Governator speaks sense; Internet problems fixed

At least, ONE republican has a clue...

...none other than the Governator himself. Arnie was at a UN summit and had this to say:

"I say the [global warming] debate is over. We know the science," California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared forcefully at a recent United Nations summit. "We see the threat, and we know the time for action is now."

ABC News went on to point out that "president" Bush is still hiding his head where only his proctologist will find it:

President Bush, however, continues to cast doubt on the consensus in the scientific community that man-made emissions cause global warming.

"I have said consistently that global warming is a serious problem. There's debate over whether it's man-made or naturally caused...," the president told reporters in June, hours after an extreme thunderstorm felled an elm tree to the ground just outside his White House door.

High Speed Internet at last

The cable dude showed up as promised yesterday evening and fixed us up with a direct cable feed to bypass the noise problems that were causing trouble with our Internet connection. I gave it a thorough testing - not only have the problems apparently gone but (according to a speed test on BroadbandReports.com) our download speed is up 30% compared to last week. Brilliant.

What the hell is wrong with the FDA?

This is disgusting:

September 21, 2005

The American Food and Drug Administration has recalled operational rations (MREs) donated by Britain to help survivors of Hurricane Katrina. The majority of the 400,000 rations donated by Britian, at a cost of millions of pounds, are set to be destroyed at a plant in Little Rock, Arkansas.

The move has infuriated aid workers who hasten to point out that "Under Nato, American soldiers are also entitled to eat such rations, yet the starving of the American South will see them go up in smoke because of FDA red tape madness." One aid worker was quoted as saying:

There will be a cloud of smoke above Little Rock soon - of burned food, of anger and of shame that the world's richest nation couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery and lets Americans starve while they arrogantly observe petty regulations.

Everyone is revolted by the chaotic shambles the US is making of this crisis. Guys from Unicef are walking around spitting blood.

An FDA spokesman said the rations had not been inspected but were automatically deemed "unfit for human consumption" due to Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE or colloquially "mad cow disease") fears. He observed that 70 pallets of vegetarian MREs were inspected and approved on September 13th. Aid workers claim that, today, BSE is much more of a problem in the U.S. than in Britian.

Food donations from Spain and Italy are also being held by the FDA due to similar concern, as well as thousands of gallons of pear juice from Israel.

Source: Wikinews

How can this happen?

Armed looters in the streets, shooting at the police and helicopters.

A sniper taking potshots at a hospital with 200 patients waiting to be evacuated.

Men robbed and women and girls raped in the bathrooms at the convention center; now people defecate on the floor rather than risk using the bathrooms.

Bodies riddled with bulletholes; a man with his head shot off.

I can't believe this is happening in the USA. It's difficult to believe that people can sink so low as to prey on the victims of Katrina. As one source said, when the Tsunami hit, the people helped each other, but that's not happening here. As Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco said:

What angers me the most is disasters tend to bring out the best in everybody, and that's what we expected to see. Instead, it brought out the worst.

John Who? (repost)

Bush has now endorsed the idea of teaching Intelligent Design, a.k.a Creationism, in schools as if it was science. The ID proponents (or "IDiots", as I like to call them) must be jumping up and down shouting Hallelujah and Perraise the LOOORD! like there's no tomorrow.

Enough has been said by others about the stupidity of this, and the stupidity of a "president" that would believe it.

This week's big question is this: Bush has a scientific advisor - John Marburger. Does this IDiot "president" just not ask his advisors anything, or does he get all his answers from prayer and reading the bible?

Note - I deleted the original post because some spamming w@nkër posted an ad comment to the original. Unfortunately it means I lost the original comments (but there were only two and one was mine anyway). I have now switched on word-verification to avoid that problem in future. Sorry for the inconvenience, friends.

Tulsa Zoo gets it right after all

Following up on the last post, great news: after massive reaction from the public, the board reversed the decision and there won't be a creationism display in Tulsa Zoo after all. Read about it here.

The original vote in favour of the display was 3-1; the new decision came after a 3-1 vote the other way. The lone holdout was Mayor Bill LaFortune - which just goes to show that there should be something to protect us from getting uneducated people voted into positions of responsibility.
 

Tulsa Zoo heading drainwards...

I don't know who's worse - the creationist phuckwhits, or the Tulsa Park and Recreative Board. At least the first bunch have an excuse; many of them are too dumb or too lazy to pick up a book and actually read something about the subject they claim to be such experts on. But you'd think that the Tulsa Park and Recreative Board, who run Tulsa zoo, should know better.

Instead, it seems that the park board are either thick, or there's a creationist mole or two among them, or they're too chickenshit to fight for what's right, or they just don't care. I just got this from the Center for Inquiry:

For ten years, evangelical Christian Dan Hicks has been vexed by the Tulsa Zoo's statue of Ganesh (the elephant-headed god of Hindu lore). And for ten years, he's tried to get the zoo to represent his religious perspective too.

Now he's got his chance: in June 2005, the Tulsa Park and Recreative Board, which governs the zoo, voted to install a creationist exhibit in the zoo - not far from its exhibit on evolutionary science.

Clicking here will take you to a page with a form letter to be sent to the decision makers. I urge you to do so if you care about the future of your children and their education.

Don't they have any actual scientists working at Tulsa Zoo? (Zoo: short for Zoological Park, where you'd expect them to have at least one Zoologist on staff, right?) If so, what are they doing about this?

Just by the way...

I did this little test to check on how loyal I am to "president" George Dubya. The result?

Your score is 0 on a scale of 1 to 10. You hate Bush with a writhing passion. You think he is an idiot, a liar, and a warmonger who has been a miserable failure as president. Nothing would give you greater pleasure than seeing him run out of the White House, except maybe seeing him dragged away in handcuffs.

...which says it all ;)

Last one to leave the country, please turn the lights off

This article about how they might repeal the 22nd Amendment and make it possible for Dubya to stay in the White House for yet another destructive term is just plain scary.

Kate pointed it out to me yesterday and to be honest I thought it was some kind of joke at first, but Kate was adamant that it was for real so I thought I'd better do a bit of checking.

It's for real. A bill was introduced in February that if passed will repeal the 22nd amendment. This makes it possible for a President to serve more than two terms.

The scary part is of course just as I said: there's a danger that Dubya could stay in power to continue his policies of destroying the economy and the rights of individuals, and taking the country back to the middle ages in terms of scientific progress and religious tolerance. What a lovely thought.

However it seems that the guys that wrote the bill are Democrats. The interpretation is that they're hoping that this will open the door for Bill Clinton to put Dubya's crap in black sacks on the White House steps.

Me, I hope they're right. In the last election I thought Dubya's record (like lying the country into a fake war and hyping terror threats to give the government an excuse to attack personal freedoms) would be enough to clear him out, but thanks to his other record on rigging election results he got in despite all that. So, I'm not going to get so overconfident in 2008.

If they repeal the 22nd amendment but the Dems get in regardless in 2008, fine. If the Repuglicans stay in - and especially Dubya - I don't think we'll be staying here to watch what's left of the place crumble around us. Rats leaving a sinking ship we may be, but when the rats are leaving because the captain's blowing holes in the hull with a shotgun and hoping a crucifix will save the crew, that's a different story.

Facts and Theories and Lies

Let's get something straight: despite what you may be hearing from Kansas, evolution is a fact, not a theory.

Gravity is a fact. If gravity wasn't a fact, we'd know about it pretty damn quick - people, cars, patio furniture and so on detaching themselves from the ground and floating up into space would be a bit of a giveaway, I think. But there are several theories of gravity. Theories don't dispute the facts - a theory is an idea about the underlying causes that explains the facts. In this case, one theory is that all the atoms that make up matter emit particles called Gravitons that carry the gravitational force. The more matter, the more particles, and therefore more gravity. The Earth contains so much matter, six thousand million million tonnes of it, that the gravity it generates is pretty strong.

The graviton theory is just one of several theories about what makes gravity work. At most one theory can be the right one but they're all good theories - that is, they explain the facts and we can design experiments to test theories against observations. If an experiment shows a result that is not what the theory predicts, then that theory is wrong. We may need to make modifications to the theory, or discard it altogether in favour of another theory. What's important, in scientific terms, is that any good theory is falsifiable - that is, that it's possible to design an experiment that could prove the theory wrong.

Now this is important: while it's easy to break a theory by performing an experiment that proves it wrong, it is not usually possible to prove that any theory is correct. When an experiment shows the result that the theory would predict, that result supports the theory but does not prove it. In fact, the result of the experiment may be as predicted by several competing and incompatible theories (including theories that haven't been thought up yet); in that case the result of the experiment supports all those theories but doesn't prove any of them correct.

For the everyday we don't need to know exactly how something works to be able to make use of it. We know enough about gravity to be able to weigh things and predict the motion of comets and asteroids, for example, even though we don't know for sure which of the available theories is closest to the truth. We don't fully understand quantum physics but we know that it's real and we know enough about it to be able to create television and computers and lasers. We don't fully understand light but we know it's real (or you wouldn't be reading this) and we know enough about how it interacts with matter so that we can make solar cells and telescopes.

Evolution is real; we see it all the time. It happens slowly, so that we don't usually notice it, but over decades and centuries it becomes more and more apparent. The usual example that schoolkids are given (at least, this is one that my biology teacher taught many many many years ago) is a species of moth found in northern England. At the beginning of the eighteenth century most of these moths were light grey, a natural camouflage that made them difficult to see against the light-coloured bark of the trees they landed on. In the middle of the century the Industrial Revolution came to town and with it, the soot of ten thousand coal-burning factories covered the bark of the trees of the region. By the end of the century the moths were predominantly dark, so that moths were still camouflaged against the soot-blackened bark of the trees. The species had evolved - adapted to the changing conditions of its environment. That's just one simple example but there are countless others.

Evolution is a fact, as undeniable as light and gravitation and the quantum.

There have been a number of theories to explain how evolution works but by far the most successful is the one that began with the ideas of Charles Darwin - the theory commonly called Natural Selection, or Survival of the Fittest.

I'm not going into detail about it here because that's not the point. I will say, though, that I thought I understood the theory but I didn't really, as well as I should have. The whole thing became far more clear - and elegant, and beautiful - after reading Richard Dawkins' book The Blind Watchmaker, which I can't recommend highly enough. If you haven't read this book, you should.

Natural Selection may be "just a theory" but it's a damn good one; it explains the existence and diversity of life on this planet better than any other theory currently available. It's testable and falsifiable, and over three hundred years of challenges and tests have not shown it to be wrong. Other theories, such as Lamarckism, were proved wrong a long time ago.

Now we have something else. It's called Creationism and basically it says that the Biblical account of the creation of life is literally the one and only true explanation. In an attempt to make it scientifically acceptable creationism has... well, evolved, into "Scientific Creationism" and more recently "Intelligent Design", or "ID". Its proponents are trying to convince school boards and others that it is as scientific a theory as Natural Selection, but it isn't; ID is not a scientific theory. The very nature of ID is such that there is no experiment that can be devised that would prove it wrong; in essence, everything becomes evidence that supports ID.

For example, ID proposes that the Earth was created by an intelligent power (read, "God") about six thousand years ago. When presented with fossils and carbon-dated samples that can be proved older than that, a truly scientific theory would crumble, but not ID; to get around this minor wrinkle, ID'ers say that the intelligent power deliberately faked the old rocks and fossils to test faith. Why an intelligent power would deliberately set juvenile traps like this is not explained, but the point is that it doesn't matter what evidence is presented, ID always has some way to "explain" the inconvenient facts.

Having failed in the past to persuade the school boards that ID is a valid scientific theory, its proponents have resorted to dirty tricks such as getting their supporters voted onto those same school boards so that they can rewrite the rules. Now, in Kansas, they're trying to not only rewrite the rules but change the very definition of what science is so that they can have their ideas taught to children as if they were as valid and scientific as Natural Selection. The children, who don't have the skills to tell truth from junk, will end up believing the ID doctrine and most of them will carry those beliefs through to adulthood.

In an scientifically advanced country this is a scandal. The problem is that, as scientifically advanced as this country is, individual citizens have for the most part not been educated in science well enough to tell the difference between real science and pseudoscientific claptrap. As a result, the legislators and parents (and in many cases the teachers, sadly) are just not able to tell the ID crowd where to shove their doctrine.

The ID'ers have a right to their beliefs. What they do not have a right to is to demand that those beliefs are taught as scientific fact in science classes. These teachings should be kept in religious classes, where they belong.

Destruction of the ANWR a step closer...

The senate has voted by a narrow margin to leave open the possibility of drilling for oil in Alaska - just another example of the current administration selling the country by the pound.

Sierra Club press release

Carl Pope, Executive Director of the Sierra Club, said:

Even the oil companies know that America’s energy future does not lie in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

We've got bigger fish to fry

I wouldn't normally weigh in on the subject of the Ten Commandments being displayed on government buildings and in any case it seems that it's all over, with the supreme court saying it's ok "because they pay tribute to America's religious and legal history". That's fine by me, but I should point out that it would have been fine by me either way. The reason I'm saying something now is that with all the heated words from both sides I haven't seen anyone mentioning the point of view I lean toward: that the whole thing was a waste of time and taxpayers' money.

The main argument against allowing the displays is all about the separation of church and state - something that I agree with heartily. The danger, apparently, is that displaying the commandments is tantamount to an endorsement by the legal system. To me it's plainly obvious that there is no danger.

Consider: normal, well-adjusted people know that it's wrong to steal or commit murder. We don't need a book or a stone tablet to tell us that. It's also wrong to commit rape or molest children - but I don't see a commandment forbidding either. As for "no other god before me", that's just plain silly in a country that is not exclusively christian.

What about coveting? For one thing the way it's worded provides more than a hint that the writers considered wives as no more than the property of their husbands. In any case I covet all the time - for example, I often see a Chrysler Crossfire and a new Thunderbird in the office parking lot, and I can't go near them without my brain's Coveting Lobe firing up. I think the people who wrote "thou shalt not covet" down thousands of years ago must have thought it was a brilliant way to control the believers - make a sin of something that is totally intangible, unprovable and universally practised, then you can tell everyone they're all miserable sinners and must be saved.

The point is that unless the courts decide to make coveting a crime, with death by stoning as the penalty, I don't think we need to worry too much about what gets displayed on government buildings. As such, arguing about whether or not to allow the displays on the outside of government property is about as important as arguing what kind of wallpaper is right for the inside.

If we want to talk about separation of church and state, consider this statement:

I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.

This is the oath of office that US senators have to swear. Note that the part I've italicized is not optional (the oath the president takes is different and doesn't officially include the "So help me God" part, although it's customary to add that in practice).

Now perhaps this is just as pointless as the "commandments on buildings" argument, but it seems to me that the nature of the oath makes it impossible for someone to be a senator unless they believe in the christian god, and in principle that it is equally impossible for someone to be president unless that person is a christian.

So much for separation of church and state, then.

A Message to Bush-Bashers...

...and in fact, president-bashers of all administrations - red, blue, whatever: Keep on bashing.

Here's why you should

In 1939 Germany under Hitler annexed Poland. Shortly afterward, France was invaded. Hitler wanted to control all of Europe and things could have gone that way. Had that happened Europe would have been under the control of a militaristic dictatorship - citizens would have lost the right to choose who led them, the right to free speech and more.

If you've ever wondered why Britain and the US went to war against Germany, here's the answer: it was to preserve our rights to vote, to speak out against the actions of our leaders without recriminations, and much, much more. Many thousands of men and women died protecting those rights so that we would still have them today.

For US citizens the right of free speech is embodied in the text of the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

You have the right to voice your thoughts; you have the right to be heard. Nobody - nobody - has the right to stop you speaking out against the government when they do something that you don't like, think is a bad idea, wrong, or just plain stupid. You should speak out against your government, loud and often, when things are wrong in your view. That's how democracy works. Keep your mouth shut when things are going down the toilet and you may as well join the ones pulling the chain.

This is why I get annoyed when I hear someone saying that it's "unpatriotic" to criticize the president. My answer to these people: YOU are the ones being unpatriotic. YOU are the ones being unconstitutional. If you only want freedom of speech when you like what's being said, there are are still plenty of dictatorships to choose from. Don't forget to revoke your US citizenship when you get there.

The current climate seems to be quite anti-Bush. There is a lot of commentary criticizing the current administration, and from where I sit the main pro-Bush response to this seems to be calls for the dissenters to shut up, rather than any reasoned argument about why they're wrong. As far as I'm concerned this speaks volumes.

My own opinion is that Bush is an undereducated religious-right redneck in a suit, ready to sell the country's every natural resource and welch on every agreement that hampers big business, just so that his big-business friends can make a fast buck, in office because of a bogus ballot based on a bogus war based in turn on lies. That's what really pisses me off; Clinton was impeached, not because he had an affair with an intern, but because he lied to the American people about it. Bush lied to the American people about weapons of mass destruction in the middle east - lies to justify a fake war that cost the lives of over a thousand soldiers and thousands of civilians. When are we going to see him impeached?

Canadian, Eh?

I was thinking, about the time of the elections here, that I'd seen better-run elections in some eastern European countries not best known for their records on human rights and free speech. Now it seems those thoughts were justified. I quote:

"International monitors at a polling station in southern Florida said Tuesday that voting procedures fell short in many ways of the best global practices. The observers said they had less access to polls than in Kazakhstan, that the electronic voting had fewer fail-safes than in Venezuela, that the ballots were not so simple as in the Republic of Georgia and that no other country had such a complex national election system..."

[see the complete article this is quoted from here]

Yes, folks, the whole damn circus is still in town, with all kinds of evidence^* that the election was rigged: electronic voting machines that gave no printed paper to the voters to confirm their votes with a paper trail, ran code that was not made available to independent experts for checking, were wide-open to hacking (one report said that a hacker demonstrated getting into a machine and altering votes in less than a minute), and suggestions that they may have actually registered votes incorrectly in front of the voters' very eyes... exit polls at wide variance with the official returns, but strangely only in swing states and marginals... intimidation of voters... the list goes on.

My own opinion is that ultimately The Truth Will Out and that if it turns out that the Bush misadministration did indeed engineer their "victory" they will be forced to pay.

In the meantime my advice for any American planning a trip abroad is to pretend to be Canadian. And in case you think I'm joking, check this out. A firm in Albuquerque, NM ("T-shirtKing.com") is selling "Go Canadian" packages including T-shirt, lapel badge, patch and a guidebook with handy facts about Canada, in case you get questioned. For example, on the subject of sports the guide suggests: "This is easy to remember. There is only one real sport in Canada and it is called hockey. Regardless of any trivia question, the answer is 'Wayne Gretzky.'"

I think I need to design a "Go British" package for Americans who want to go to Canada...

^* - Note: "evidence" and "proof" are two different things. Just so we're clear.