A ‘verse, a ‘verse, my brain for a multiverse!

The ability of Creationists to fool themselves into thinking they understand science always astounds me — they so obviously and plainly fail at it on every level. And yet they always seem to think that they are able to see something that actual scientists don’t or won’t, because there’s some huge anti-Creationist conspiracy of scientists who hate God or something equally ridiculous – and they, by golly, with their third grade level of science understanding, are just the ones to overturn all those thousands of hours of study and experimentation.

Or something.

Woohoo! I’m still here…

It’s been a while. That seems to be the way I open all my posts lately. I know, I haven’t been saying much. So sue me; I have a life you know, unlike the rest of you basement-dwelling freaks.

Ahem. Yeah, so. Been a while…

A lot’s been going on with me which I didn’t write about because I’ve kind of been dealing with it. The first thing is that I was notified in about mid-March that my job was going to be made redundant. Arrgh, arrgh and double-arrgh. Not the best time for it to happen, to be honest, what with that global economic meltdown and everything.

So, I started applying for jobs. I was applying for jobs more or less the same field as I’m already in, administration. After a few rejections, I started getting some traction and some interviews, partly with the help of the county’s internal job finder service.

I almost ended up with a job working in the central library in Oxford, which looked like it would’ve been very interesting, if a little bit of a dead-end, career-wise; similarly, I was down to one of two for a position with a carer’s advocacy group.

Then, however, I happened to mention to a friend at work that I was being made redundant. My friend happens to be a moderate-sized cheese in the facilities and support department, and she immediately helped me by pointing out a vacant position in one of the social services teams and by throwing her weight behind getting me into the post. In short, I will be starting on 11th May in my new job, just one building over from where I am now, on a significantly higher pay-grade than before. All in all, getting made redundant is probably one of the best things that’s happened to me in a while.

I’m excited, maybe a little nervous, too. The post uses a completely database than the one I’m used to; two different databases, in fact. So, the first thing will be to get trained up in those, but it doesn’t seem like I’ll be thrown in at the deep end immediately, which is good.

According to someone else who works in the building, the team is quite quiet; there’s not a huge amount of stuff to do, although I won’t count on that. In a way, though, a nice quiet job would be just the thing — I could stand to not be on edge all the time wondering what work is going to drop on me today. I suppose what I mean really is a job with routine, as opposed to random bits of work appearing out of nowhere… We’ll see what happens, I guess.

I plan to be making a few more posts here from now on, although I’m staying true to the idea of blogging without obligation: the moment this becomes a chore, something I feel like I have to do, I’ll stop doing it at all, most likely.

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Le sigh, as they say in France. Or not.

I’m a person who’s interested in politics generally. I try to keep up with the news via a number of source as much as possible, and I frequently read assorted blogs of various political stripes and persuasions, just to keep my ear on the ground. One of the ways I find them is via links on other people’s pages, which is how I first saw Rumproast; another is by looking through RSS feeds and the tag listings on WordPress.

I am still alive…

… contrary to any rumours.

I’ve moved house. It’s a much better place. Still shared accommodation, but in this one, the landlord lives in, and so has a vested interest in keeping the place nice. I don’t remember if I blogged about it, but in the the last house, a small drip in the bathroom resulted in the ceiling in the living room falling down. This was November, 2007; as of two weeks ago, new plasterboard was put in. Yeah, exactly.

Anyway, the room I have now is nicer and the house generally is in better shape – less cold, less run down, and the people seem much nicer and more together. Less likely to go bugshit nuts, in other words, which was a problem in the last place.

I don’t have any responsibility for the bills, beyond handing money to the landlord for them.

Altogether, it’s a much better place to be living.

I have also come late to the game and started using Skype for calling the missus; I have the Unlimited World package, meaning that I can make up to 10,000 minutes of calls monthly for £7.99, which is significantly less than what I was previously paying…

It’s a much better situation all round for me right now, and I’m happy to be here

I’m working Monday to Wednesday in the coming week; not because I couldn’t get time off, but because I didn’t want it. I’ll have Christmas Day and Boxing, because they’re Bank Holidays, but there’s not really much I can do about that. I dislike Christmas generally, and not only for the whole religious side of it; there’s the atmosphere of forced jollity and the requirement that you be seen to be enjoying yourself. I got called “Scrooge” by a couple of people in (partial) jest, and I responded by challenging them to call me when they start celebrating Ramadan or Rosh Hashanah or Diwali, which seems to have done the trick…

In other news, I’ve also moved back to Opera-based browsing, and boy, is it an improvement! I was using Firefox for a while, because anything beats Internet Exploder, but that was really only because I wanted to use StumbleUpon. It was just cranky and kept crashing on me, so I decided to come back to Opera, and what a blissful browsing experience it is. I can recommend 9.6 to everyone.

That’s about it for now, really.

SCOTUS denies election stay

Following the dismissal of Donofrio’s spurious lawsuit, the Wrotnowski suit has also been denied cert.

Via Ed Darrell, from the AP:

Court won’t review Obama’s eligibility to serve

6 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court has turned down another appeal arguing Barack Obama is ineligible to be president because of his citizenship.

The challenge by Cort Wrotnowski of Greenwich, Conn., was denied Monday without comment.

Wrotnowski argued that Obama was a British subject at birth and therefore cannot meet the requirement for becoming president.

He wanted the high court to halt presidential electors from meeting to formally elect Obama as president.

Echoing an appeal that was rejected by justices last week, Wrotnowski said that since Obama had dual nationality at birth — his mother was American, his Kenyan father was a British subject — he cannot possibly be a “natural born citizen.”

The sad thing is that this only seems to be spurring the wingnuts on further, as in here, here, and here (for more, visit the Obama and Birth Certificate tags).

Apparently all of their ranting, raving and nonsense about natural-born citizens and the increasingly finer and finer shades of the “true” meaning of the term have failed to impress anyone; the claim is not only dead in the water, but floating belly up.

Not that this’ll mean anything to them, as I said; these are the same people who think Clinton killed Vince Foster, after all. Facts and reason have never exactly been their strong suits before, so this is unlikely to change any minds. Many of them seem to have sensed defeat and are refocusing their efforts on the Blagojevich non-scandal, especially WingNut-in-Chief, Pam Geller, of the Google-hating paranoia-fest known as Atlas Scrubs Shrugs.

We’ll see what happens; personally, I don’t think these people can be reasoned with, and that they’ll remain at a low simmer of lunatic resentment until 2012, when they will resurface in support of Palin and promptly be told to fuck off with their old, discredited stories already.

Sinking Ships

I haven’t posted anything substantial in a while, which is fine with me. BWO, remember? I do have something brewing in my mind about juries, grand and otherwise, but nothing written down, as yet.

McDonald’s Sued Over Woman’s Naked Buns – TMZ.com

McDonald’s is known for its cheap meat — but after a bad trip to the burger joint, one guy’s wife allegedly became cheap meat.

McD’s just got served by a guy who allegedly left his cell phone — which contained nude photos of his wife — at the Arkansas restaurant, only to find the nude pics posted online.

Phillip Sherman was assured by employees they’d keep the phone safe, yet the photos — along with Sherman’s phone number and address — somehow found their way onto the Internet.

The couple claims they had to move to a new house to get away from his wife’s new stalkers. Sherman wants 3 mil for their troubles.

via McDonald’s Sued Over Woman’s Naked Buns – TMZ.com

Hehehehe… I know I should be sympathetic towards the woman, and I am, but I can’t help laughing just a little bit at her husband’s stupidity.

You can bet your arse that if I were to have nudie pics of my wife, they wouldn’t be accompanying me on a visit to a fast food joint, and they certainly wouldn’t be on something that I could accidentally leave lying around.

I have nothing to say lately…

… although her indoors has been prompting me to post stuff. I just don’t feel like there’s much around now for me to blog about. Ironic, given recent historic events, but it seems like a lot of people have this one covered.

I will start blogging properly again soon, though. I just need a topic… Any suggestions? Anyone got any inspiration going cheap?

Big Love, Small Love

I’ve just recently been thinking about polygamy and gay marriage.

This has come from a number of different directions — I’ve been watching HBO’s Big Love via the On Demand service that comes with our cable TV.

The series is about a polygamist family of fundamentalist Mormons living secretly in a suburb of Salt Lake City, and the various troubles and difficulties it brings to them, both personally, professionally and in terms of their religion.

The series takes an even-handed look at the issues raised, not judging in favour of or against the practice. Of course, it also makes for good television; conflict is the root of all storytelling, and the conflicts between the public personas and private lives of the family create a lot of conflict.

Another source of inspiration has been the interwebs, as usual: in a recent comment to a post on my wife’s blog, for example, Truthwalker posited the following in regards to governmental influence and involvement in the subject of marriage:

I personally think that civil union should be the law. For everybody. Any two people, male, female, straight, gay, or sexually inactive, should be able to enter a legal relationship with the consenting person of their choosing where one person is the primary bread winner and the other does more non-monetary work.

Leaving aside the problematic assertion regarding one partner being the breadwinner and the other the housekeeper¹, this also brings up another question: why should it only be two people involved?

The final source of inspiration, of course, has been the recent decision by the Supreme Court of Connecticut regarding the civil rights of gay couples. In a divided opinion given on the 10th October, the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled that the State’s Constitution required that the government extend marriage rights to gay couples, by virtue of the State Constitution’s equal protection clause in Article 1, Section 20.

One of the commonest tropes used against gay marriage is the assertion that it will lead to all kinds of horribleness, like polygamy, bestiality and even child marriage.

Leaving aside the fact that the slippery slope is a logical fallacy, let’s take a look at some of the countries which have created gay marriage rights in the past decade or so. The Netherlands enacted same-sex marriage rights into law in 2001, Belgium in 2003, followed by Canada and Spain in 2005, South Africa in 2006. Norway is due to follow in 2009, after 16 years of civil partnerships. The following countries have created civil partnerships: Andorra, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Uruguay. The status of civil partnerships in these countries varies somewhat, with some having only partial rights while others are identical in all but legal name to marriage, with entirely identical rights, such as the UK, where people routinely refer to civil partnerships as gay marriage, legal titles notwithstanding.

Opponents of gay marriage have, as we’ve said, predicted all kinds of social doom and gloom as a result of various court rulings and laws creating the appropriate rights in law; various groups are trying busily to reverse them, as in California Proposition 8, all of which efforts are happily meeting with fierce opposition.

No such terrible consequences have occurred in any of the countries which have enacted gay marriage or civil partnership laws. You still cannot marry your dog, three of your friends, or children; . It’s almost insulting, really, to think that opponents of gay marriage think that people will fall for this kind of stuff, and none of these mooted dire consequences are likely to occur; child marriage and bestiality both fall under the heading of cruelty and meaningful consent, to a degree that most people find the very idea respulsive.

Likelihood of its occurrence aside, how do we object to new concepts of marriage like polygamy while freely assenting to the concept of gay marriage? Isn’t that contradictory and even hypocritical?

I would argue that it is not. While the institution of marriage is by no means perfect and acts in some ways as discriminatory towards single people, it does perform a useful social function: it provides for at least minimally stable homes for children; allows for people to express a solemn commitment to one another socially with a formal commitment; allows for the pooling of financial resources and shared prosperity; allows for partners to make legally binding decisions on behalf of children and loved-ones in the event of need; allows for partners to provide for each other in the event that they die intestate, and so on.

The extension of marriage rights to gay people simply broadens the categories of people who may marry each other, in much the same way that extension of interracial and interreligious marriage did. It provides for more stable families and couples, and as such, carries benefits to both the individuals involved and the society in which they live.

Polygamy, however, does not do this. While gay marriage simplifies, polygamy complicates. All the benefits of marriage, such as stability, combined financial responsibility, power of attorney in difficult situations, simplified inheritance and so on, all of these are unneccesarily complicated by the addition of extra members. What if the wives² disagree over who should have power of attorney when their husband is in hospital? Who decides who inherits what in the event of a death? While these are not insoluble problems, they represent a big enough sphere of difficulties to argue against enshrining officially recognised polygamy into law; they would create monstrous legal headaches, and the alleged benefits of polygamy would be far, far outweighed by the problems caused. That’s even leaving aside the issue, frequent enough in the past to remain a possible future concern, of young people entering polygamous marriages before the age of consent or even too soon afterwards.

While I’m concerned for the right of people to live as they wish, I can also see a valid point of distinction between leaving others alone to conduct their private affairs as they see fit and making them into legal entities. I cannot in all honesty see that the enshrinement of polygamy into law serves individuals or the society they reside in, practically or otherwise.

---

¹This is troubling to me, I must admit; not only because it buys into the idea that there should be strictly defined roles within marriage, but also because it’s profoundly unrealistic. The “traditional” ideal of marriage which social conservatives most fervently posit as orthodox marriage fails to admit that this model was only true for a tiny minority of people across a short period of time, and it is even more irrelevant today, when two-income families are the norm.
²I say wives here because it seems that most advocates of polygamy seem really to be advocating polygyny rather than true polygamy per se.

Day 15: Bourbon Tofu

This is just going to be a quick one, as it’s late. I left it kind of late in the day to do this one, because I was, well, doing other stuff.

Lunch was fairly dull, I’m afraid: bits of cheddar-style Sheese in wraps with salad. Not about to light the vegan world on fire with that, really.

Dinner was more interesting. One of my favourite things to eat in the whole world is bourbon chicken. It’s tasty and moreish, and I can eat platefuls of it all day long, especially when there’s broccoli in it as well. I was really craving some tonight, but obviously I couldn’t have any.

But then I thought to myself, why not try it with tofu? One of the virtues of tofu is that it takes on flavours very easily when cooked. A classic form of it is to simply marinade firm tofu in soy sauce and fry it. It comes out very nicely, especially if you let it get really crispy. The saltiness of the sauce comes over really well.

Read the rest…