Ordainment
3 Weeks Ago
I'm now, officially, an ordained minister.
As an atheist, this makes me grin. But of course, it was done for a (good) reason. In a few months I will preside over the marriage of some friends. (possibly twice, but only once officially). I will be presiding as a minister of the Church of the Subgenius, unofficially, but ordained by the Universal Life Church officially.
I really didn't think I'd ever find a church I approved of until I looked up the ULC.
"Do only that which is right."
Well, that's close enough to Wheaton's law.
"Don't be a dick."
I approve.
Anyway, for a marriage, the only thing besides the signing, and registering of the papers that is required is the "statement of intent". In normal weddings this follows the form of "Do you solemnly take" blah blah blah...
I'll be following the form from the film *Joe vs. The Volcano*.
Tom Hanks' character has agreed to jump into the volcano. Meg Ryan's character asks him to marry her "for all of five minutes". Abe Vigoda, as the high priest of the island, marries them by saying this:
"Do you wanna marry him?"
"Yes."
"Do you wanna marry her?"
"Yes."
"You're married!"
By law, that constitutes the "statement of intent". I see little reason to drag it on beyond that. Both these folks have been unsatisfactorily and temporarily married before, so this time they've thought about it a bit more seriously... (maybe).
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Asea
Apr 8, 2012
I'll be AFK for the next seven days as I'm about an hour away from hopping on a ship and going to the Caribbean. I'll probably pop on a couple of times (at exhorbitant rates on board) just to keep the backlog from becoming overwhelming upon my return. This will be the fourth time I've been to Roatan, Honduras. I absolutely adore that island because it has only local businesses. There's no Carlos & Charlies, no Hooters, no Rainforest Cafes, no Joe's Crab Shacks. I'll be on a zip line for an hour or so, then stopping by Fantasy Island resort for a few hours (and a few Salva Vita beers) and then dining at Geo's Crab House. Do I get the lobster and crab platter or the amazing seafood soup I had last time? We'll also be stopping in Belize City and Cozumel, both places I'm also quite familiar with. I'm not sure what I'll do in Belize City, but in Cozumel I'll be "discovering" scuba. This trip I splurged and got a stateroom all to myself. I won't have to worry about my snoring disturbing anyone nor their snoring disturbing me. On my last cruise I discovered and alerted my roommate to his sleep apnea. He now has a pace maker.
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What I do
Feb 1, 2012
People often ask me what I do at NASA. While this fellow's work deals mostly with Hubble Space Telescope imagery and I work more with lunar and Earth Observation imagery, our daily jobs are quite similar. http://t.co/IdXCOqFW
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The Owners
Nov 1, 2011
(Not part of NaJoPoMo)
Here's a bowdlerized and partially edited version of a wonderful quote from George Carlin from 2008.
Carlin - The Real
Owners Of America
24.06.2008
"The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They've got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They've got you by the [short hairs]. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying... lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want? They want more for themselves and less for everybody else."
"But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting [Belgium]ed by a system that threw them overboard 30 [Belgium]ing years ago.
"You know what they want? Obedient workers... people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly [more pooh laden] jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they're coming for your Social Security. They want your [Belgium]ing retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this [Belgium]ing place. It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club. By the way, it's the same club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy"...
"It's called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it."
With the #OWS protests it seems Carlin was speaking to the 99%. I think he'd like what they're doing and saying. While much of the coverage of the protests, especially in the main stream media and Faux News focuses on their apparent lack of direction and message, they are accomplishing something very important. They are changing the dialogue. They are changing the questions the public are asking. I recently saw a report that looked at the terms used in the media. Before the protests the leading terms recurring in the press was about the deficit. Now it's about corporate greed. The term "corporate greed" appeared around 300 times in the month before the protests and 1600 in this last month. Whether the media is leading the story or not, people are looking at the oppressive financial inequality we're seeing everywhere today and many of these people aren't going to let it just get swept under the rug for the next talking point.
I'll use this journal entry to post things I find and things that occur to me that relate to this New Gilded Age we live in.
Today I read this article in the Guardian about The Corporation of London.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentis...31/corporation-london-city-medieval
This is something I'd certainly never heard of. I think a lot of people will be hearing about it soon. This makes the U.S. Chamber of Commerce look like rank amateurs, mere upstarts.
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7 Billions
Oct 27, 2011
On Halloween, the world's estimated human population will surpass 7 billion. The population is doubling at an increasing rate. It has doubled in my lifetime.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=world+population+in+1967
That's 6 years earlier than I was expecting according to the 50 year rates I was taught in college. (This discrepancy is probably just due to me shifting the scale to fit my life.)
Since I was made aware of the threats of overpopulation when I was in school, I've always kept it in the back of my mind. I would think about all the implications. I would trace other social problems back to overpopulation. There are the obvious ones of starvation, over-crowding, and loss of natural habitat. And also less direct ones like crime, economic disparity and the rise of Walmart. For me, it was like playing a weird version of the Kevin Bacon game, how many connections until I could connect a problem to overpopulation.
Of course, the worst part was not seeing any obvious, plausible and ethical solutions. The rampant infanticide in China showed us that it's not something that can be legislated. War, starvation and plague come to mind, but they're not solutions rather they're mitigating factors. But recently, I did read that there is a force that has been shown to lower birth rates in an ethical and desirable manner: education. Specifically educating girls. And it's not just education in family planning and contraception (although these are very important, of course) but general education. The more educated a girl is, even in impoverished countries, the more options she envisions for her life, the more she sees that having children early and often will limit her opportunities greatly. If she delays or avoids having children or limits the number of children, she sees that she has more chances to live a more comfortable and productive life. The statistics in many African and other "third world" countries where education programs are successful are proving this theory with lowered birth rates.
The greatest challenge then is to increase education of young females in overpopulated and impoverished nations. But there's one thing that fights against such plans: religions. We've seen the Taliban and others forcibly deny girls education. We've seen Catholic priests in Africa promote the idea that condoms CAUSE AIDS. In the US, we have evangelicals not only pressuring state governments to restrict and deny access to abortion, but at the same time promote abstinence only education ensuring even more unwanted pregnancies.
If only education could mitigate religion... Oh, wait...
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- Latest reply: Oct 27, 2011
Show more of My Journal Entries
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like me). I am a puzzle god! (Not 'the' puzzle god, mind you, just one of the smaller ancillary ones. Actually, I'm the puzzle god of my local pub to be truthful about it). I love elipses.... Non sequiturs follow even though they're not supposed to. Yellow, because snake have no armits. You can glad-hand a tyrant all you like, that doesn't mean we won't have to slap him down a decade later. 37 is my favourite prime number.
Baron Grim
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