Doctor of Philosophy

So, it's over.

I guess when you get to this point in your life, it's normal to take a step back and say: hey, I did it. I guess when your entire life has been building up to one moment, and that moment finally shows up, you're supposed to have a huge sense of accomplishment.

Well, that hasn't hit me quite yet. Maybe it will on convocation day. Right now, I just kinda feel numb. It's over, I made it. All the papers have been turned in, all the forms have been filled out, all the signatures collected. All the exams have been written or spoken, all the experiments performed. It's over.

It's weird, I guess. Like I said, I just feel numb. Like I've just had some giant grab me by the legs and beat me against a wall for four years straight, then went to the hospital and got put on so many painkillers I barely even know my own name, much less that I was just grabbed by the legs and beaten against a wall. Honestly, I think I'm just tired.

So, convocation is in June. June 9th, to be exact. I haven't decided whether I'm going or not. Okay, that's a lie: I think my mom will disown me if I don't, but having seen what my older brother had to wear when he got handed his PhD back in November, I gotta say I'm not terribly thrilled at the prospect. For those of you who aren't firmly associated with an academic setting, PhDs in many institutions are required to wear something that, for some bizarre reason, is very different from the traditional cap 'n' gown. Every university has its unique academic dress or regalia that they hand out to doctoral students so that people will think they're special or something. That wouldn't bug me that much if the academic dress of the University of Calgary weren't the most godawful combination of colors and textures I can imagine. I swear, the person who designed it must've been colorblind; and I don't mean red-green, or blue-yellow colorblind. I mean, black, white and shades of gray colorblind. And on top of that, they had bad taste. Our academic reglia looks like it was put together by a two-year-old with fingerpaint. The only bright spot in the whole thing is the hat. Yes, it looks like a mortar board in desperate need of Viagra, but at least it's not as Mad-Hatter-esque as a lot of the hats I've seen. It's more of a subtle black beret-like hat that they call a John Knox Cap. I can't find a picture of it online, but it really does look like a flaccid mortar board.

I've gotta admit that I've never fully understood the need for a graduation ceremony. It always struck me as a somewhat cultish activity. Like the academic elders were saying "yes, you are worthy of joining us." Basically, you end up with a super-high-up guy who stands atop a stage proclaiming to the world that you are henceforth to be called "Doctor," then hands you a piece of paper, announcing your name to the crowd and pretending that he actually knows who the hell you are. I'm not saying I have an issue with academia; obviously, I don't, since I've dedicated the better part of my young life to it, but I have to admit that I don't fully understand all the pomp and circumstance surrounding it. So if I go to this graduation ceremony; and let's be honest, I probably will; it won't be for me that I'm going. I'm going for my parents. I'm going for April. I'm going for my two brothers who want to watch me walk across the stage in a suit that makes every rational human being on earth ask "I wonder how many of them can fit into a tiny car?"

All that said, I'm going to look into getting my hands on a Kilt. Dad has some thing about wanting to see me wear a kilt to my graduation. Hell, you only do this once.

The "I" Word.

Well, it finally happened this week. CNN used the "I" word.

I have to admit that I (reluctantly) accepted the arguments against impeachment of the moronic monkey-boy currently inhabiting the Oval Office. Namely, that impeaching Bush would make the Democrats seem petty and partisan; or that it would make impeachment seem like a mere political tool, rather than the rarely-used check on the President's authority it's supposed to be, if two presidents in a row got impeached; and, of course, the single strongest argument against impeachment: Dick Cheney.

That said, it should be mentioned that the people who first voiced those arguments at me were the same people who felt that impeaching Clinton for an extramarital blowjob was clearly what a sober reading of the constitution demanded. Call me crazy, but somehow I don't see that someone who thinks sex is a constitutional crisis, but thinks we should look the other way when the president defrauds the entire country into an illegal war, and subverting the actual constitution can really be described as a dispassionate observer of presidential offenses.

The litmus test for impeachment is supposed to hang on one single question: has the person holding the office violated his or her oath of office? The presidential oath of office states:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Think about that for a second. Preserve, protect and defend the constitution of the United States. How, exactly does an extramarital blowjob constitute a failure to preserve, protect, or defend the constitution of the United States? On the other hand, it is clear to me that subverting the writ of habeas corpus, on its own, constitutes a failure to protect the constitution, and everything it stands for. If that were his only offense, which it isn't, that would be enough for me to say "impeach the bastard."

I mentioned earlier that I was on board with some of the arguments against impeachment. It's time I revised that position. Frankly, if the things Bush has done fail to qualify as impeachable, what does? Well, if we go by historical precedent: blowjobs, B & E, and botching reconstruction (although technically, Nixon wasn't impeached for that B & E, it's clear that he would have been, had he not resigned).

Basically, we have a destructive buffoon of a president who's talking about going into Iran and Syria, not to mention the 20,000 troops he wants to send into Iraq. He's basically thumbing his nose at Congress and saying: "yeah? Well, how are you gonna stop me?"

Congress decides where the funding goes. They approve the budget. They can, and should, cut off funding for pretty much anything Bush decides he wants to do. This will have political consequences, but as an American citizen, I'm beyond the point of caring. It's the right thing to do, and they should do it. But frankly, I'm not sure that the consequences will be as bad as everyone fears they will be. This troop surge is roughly as popular as a guy with a rash at a nudist colony; and let's be honest, the war itself isn't doing much better. But even if it weren't, cutting funding to this war is still the right thing to do.

The other way is impeachment. If Bush has decided that he's the King, or the Decider, or whatever; and that he can expand this war the country wants out of even if Congress says "no," we have exactly one way to stop him: to knock him the hell out of office. Yes, it's extreme; yes, we'll be stuck with Cheney as our next president, but it's still the right thing to do.

GET ME THE HELL OUT OF DENVER!!!!!!!

You'd think that I would've learned from my experiences last year not to travel through Denver, Colorado ever again. You'd think I'd have picked up a little wisdom during my seven-hour drive from Denver to Durango last year that I would've given a second thought to taking a connection through there again.

You'd think. And you'd be wrong.

I woke up bright and early on Wednesday, December 20th to catch a flight from Calgary to Denver. Three and a half hours crammed in a tin can punctuated by approximately one hour in an even smaller tin can at the end of which, it was promised, I'd be safely in Durango, Colorado.

That was the plan, anyway.

I arrived at the ticket counter a good two hours ahead of time, got my boarding pass and made it through customs in record time. The guy behind the customs desk barely even glanced at my passport. Kinda surprising since the last time I tried to cross the border I was informed that I was on the terrorist watch list. This time they barely even looked at me. I'm at a complete loss to explain that one.

The flight left at 6:55 am on Wednesday morning. The skies were clear and dark (the sun hadn't risen yet), but the weather in Calgary was pretty much ideal. The temperature hovered around freezing, the terrorism alert was yellow, and all in all, life could've been a lot worse.

The plane took off less than five minutes late (so, pretty much right on time) and turned south, cruising towards the distant, invisible runway at Denver International Airport.

I didn't even have any idea that anything was wrong in Denver until we were about an hour out from Denver, and even then the only notice was "some flights out of Denver have been cancelled." I wasn't really worried, since there are a dozen flights to Durango from Denver, and even if mine was cancelled, I figured my chances of getting onto one of them were pretty good.

And, to be fair, they probably would have been pretty good, if any flights were leaving Denver at all.

Now, I should mention that the descent into Denver was one of the most uneventful landings I've ever experienced (and I've experienced a few); except for the fact that we couldn't see the ground until we were about a hundred feet above it. Due to some minor delays enroute, we arrived at the gate approximately fifteen minutes before my flight to Durango was scheduled to leave. I thought I'd dodged a bullet. I figured if we could land in this weather, we could take off, as long as we took off before the weather got any worse.

I know, it's a vain, delusional hope, but it was something for me to cling to... for about thirty seconds, right until I saw the monitors and found that pretty much every posted flight out of Denver (including two to Durango) had been cancelled.

And that was pretty much the high point of my day.

I actually made it to a window that gave me a real picture of the weather outside. The weather was horrendous. The snow was falling so thick that from the large window, I couldn't see the airplane parked right outside it. And it was falling sideways. Brutal winds blasted the dry snow into thick snowdrifts which piled around buildings in piles several feet thick. I later found out that they were describing this as the fourth most severe blizzard to hit Denver ever. How, exactly, they quantify these things is a bit of a mystery to me, but I'm not about to argue the point. I've lived in Calgary for twenty-seven years (not counting five that I spent in Quebec), and I've seen a bizzard this bad exactly once in my life. And I was seven at the time.

I landed at 9:45. By ten, every outgoing flight had been cancelled; by noon, every incoming one. Some flights still arrived into the afternoon because United Airlines is being run by a bunch of monkeys, but as of noon, Denver International Airport was closed for business.

Which meant that I had to find a place to stay for the night.

Someone was walking around handing out these little pink slips which provided a good rate for a hotel that night... provided that we could get out of the airport. Something, it turns out, that was easier said than done. Getting a hotel room was actually the easy part. Getting to the hotel, on the other hand, was going to take a little work.

So I called my folks. On my cellphone. Long distance. Roaming. I couldn't get through to United Airlines to get a flight to Durango; or anywhere, for that matter, so I had people in two different cities try to get me a flight to anywhere. As long as it was out of Denver. From there, I figured I could make my way to somewhere that was in striking distance of Durango.

It was coming up on two o'clock in the afternoon at this point. I'd been standing in line for a little over three hours, only to be told that they weren't reserving any more flights, and that they weren't letting me get my checked bag out of the system. So it looked like I wasn't going to be able to change my clothes until this was all over. United Airlines' stock was in freefall as far as I was concerned.

I ran into a airport employee and showed him my ticket. He looked at my ticket with a confused expression on his face.

"Why did your flight leave Calgary?" He asked me.

I looked at him with a somewhat flabbergasted look on my face which is universally recognized to mean "why the hell are you asking me!?" But aloud I only said "what do you mean?"

"Well, we sent out word at 4:00 am that no more flights were to leave for Denver. That's three hours before your flight left," he told me, as if I wasn't able to do the math myself.

Assuming, for the sake of argument, I wasn't already pissed off at United Airlines, that pretty much drove the last nail into the coffin. If they'd mentioned just once before I got on the plane that getting out of Denver might be a little difficult, I could've waited and got onto another flight to somewhere else.

Anywhere else.

But I digress.

So... getting out of the Airport. Believe it or not, that would be the largest challenge I would face over the next 48 hours. I knew I had a room reserved, and would at least have a warm bed, assuming that I could get out of the airport.

Shuttle busses were coming, infrequently, to the airport and let me just say that I saw something of a wide spectrum of human behaviour during my time waiting for the bus. I saw people elbow others out of the way just to get onto the bus, and I saw a crowd stand aside to let by a woman with a baby. As you'll see in a moment, I'm not exactly in a position where I can huck stones around, but I felt it important to point out that human beings are fickle creatures.

Around 4:00 pm, I looked at the (huge) crowd around me and came to the realization that the vast majority of them weren't going to get out of the airport before the highways closed. I turned to two guys I'd spent the afternoon with and told them that if we wanted out of this, we were going to have to short-out the lineup. Taxis were already starting to bypass the airport and try to get back into town before the highway closed. So we decided that we had to do something stupid. We hiked up the shoulder of the highway, in zero visibility, in snow that was driving into us and freezing our eyes shut. We flagged down a taxi, and between the three of us, we offered a $120 "tip" on top of the fare to get to the hotel.

Yep, we bribed a taxi driver to get out of the airport. I'm not proud of it, but it did the job. I should point out at this point that normally, the ride from the airport to the hotel is approximately 20 minutes. The three of us piled into the taxi at approximately 4:13 pm. It was just after six when we arrived at the hotel. I'm no stranger to blizzards, but this one scared the bajesus out of me. Visibility was functionally zero. Cars had been abandoned on both sides of the highway, and you could see people trying to hike along the median to safety. We stopped to help jump-start two cars, helped push another one out of a snowdrift, and we carried another person to the hotel we were going to, mostly at my insistance; my attempts to atone for leaving a bunch of people stranded at the airport, I guess. At any rate, the (now four) of us made it to the hotel and we gave the taxi driver his payoff (with an additional $40 contributed by the person we'd picked up). I think we probably set the record as the single highest fare he got year. It's also worth mentioning that as we were driving away from the airport, we heard over the radio that the highways into and out of the airport were closed; so I'm pretty sure that we were some of the last people actually get away from DIA.

Like I said, I'm not proud of it, but it worked. It sure as hell beat being stranded at the airport.

I checked in at 6:12 pm (I feel I should direct your attention to the time at which my flight landed at DIA, a few paragraphs north of this one).

I slid into my room and crashed pretty much immediately. I needed some sleep.

I'll jump forward a couple of days here, since not much that was particularly noteworthy occurred for two days other than being told "no, Denver International Airport is not opened yet," repeatedly. I did manage to get a reserved flight on the 23rd from Denver to Salt Lake City, standby; then from Salt Lake City to Durango, also standby. To use a sports metaphor, it was like fumbling at the four yard line, being pushed back to the thirty, than attempting a touchdown when all of my receivers have broken ankles. For two days, we couldn't really leave the hotel until the snow plows cleared the roads, and even if we could, there wasn't really anywhere to go. I hung out with a fellow pinko liberal at the hotel bar discussing at length how much we both hated Bush and his administration. He was a nice guy. He bought me a couple of drinks. Turns out that he was also a fan of the Crown Royal and Coke; my drink of choice, when I'm not buying.

So, we had nothing better to do for two days than sit at the hotel bar and have a few (dozen) drinks.

I tried in the interim to show up uber-early to the airport and get on an earlier flight to Durango on standby, but it didn't work out. They were telling me at the time that the earliest they could get me out of the city was the 29th. Fortunately, I had my Denver-Salt Lake City-Durango ace in the hole.

So, the 23rd rolled around. I want to take a moment to point out that that day, exactly one year prior, I was also stranded in Denver International Airport, and I ended up driving from Denver to Durango (for seven hours) with three strangers I ran into at the airport; arriving at 3:00 am on Christmas Eve.

But I digress again.

DIA was a madhouse. It was a state of organized chaos. At 8:00 am (ten hours before my flight was scheduled to leave), the lineup to get to the ticket counter was 2.7 miles long, winding its way all over the airport. I know this because the woman standing two spaces behind me was wearing a pedometer.You can see a picture of the lineup to the ticket counter here.



In an act which could be considered cruel, in one of its meanderings, the lineup for the ticket counter overlooked the security lineup, which was just as bad; and that's where we were going next.



The guy who helped me at the ticket counter (two and a half hours after I got in line) was pissed off, not that I can really blame him. He'd spent the last couple of days talking with really pissed off people, I guess it rubbed off on him.

So after just shy of three hours standing in line to get a boarding pass, I stood for just shy of two more waiting to go through security. That line was longer, but it moved faster. I attached a picture of the lineup for security as well.

I made it to the gate my plane would be leaving from, and waited. I had another four hours before my flight left. I had an hour and a half connection in Salt Lake city, so as long as my flight left roughly on time, I would make it to Durango after a long day of traveling, but I'd make it.

Notice the qualifier.

I watched as the flight from Denver to Salt Lake City announced that the flight, instead of leaving at 6:00 pm, would be leaving at 8:30 pm. Unless the flight from Denver to Salt Lake was less than a half hour long (which it isn't), there was no possible way I was going to make my connection; and frankly, I was going to trade one stranding for another, since I wouldn't have any way out of Salt Lake City when I got there.

My day had just got a lot worse.

So I called my folks to let them know that they probably shouldn't bother making a bed for me, it was starting to look unlikely that I was going to leave Denver. United Airline's stock was again in freefall as far as I was concerned.

To put things in perspective, I'd now been in Denver, Colorado, less than 300 miles from my final destination, for 78 hours, I was tired, I'd been wearing the same clothes for four days, and I smelled like something that had died in an outhouse. I was not having a good day.

Then I had a thought.

The previous year, April had spent New Year's with me in Durango, and to get there, she had flown from Denver to Cortez; a tiny town about an hour away from Durango.

The flight was a tiny little propeller-powered Beechcraft; which departed from a small, corner of Denver International Airport; and it was a flight that absolutely nobody knew about.

So I'm pretty sure I set land-speed records sprinting from Concourse B to the extreme far end of concourse A (which, for those who are unfamiliar with DIA, is the single most distant point possible from the gate I was sitting at), and skidded to a stop right in front of the gate for a flight to Cortez. The nice grandmotherly woman behind the counter said that I was the first on the standby list, and that there was room on the flight, so it looked good. Then she said the single most dreaded word in the english language (for me, anyway, at that time): "but."

"But," she told me, "you're going to have to get a paper ticket which shows what we call an 'involuntary transfer' from Salt Lake City to Cortez."

"Perfect," I told her, "how do I do that?"

"Go to the Customer Services Desk, it'll take them ten minutes," she informed me.

She'd barely finished the sentence, before I dashed (again at a full sprint) back to concourse B (the customer services desk happened to be right next to the gate I was waiting at, which, you'll recall, is about as far away from the gate for the flight to Cortez as you can get without standing on the tarmac). So I skid to a stop just in front of the customer services desk, only to find out that United Airlines had just seen it fit to cancel four flights. The lineup was weaving back several hundred meters. There were exactly forty-one minutes until the flight to Cortez left, and there was no possible way that I was going to make it to the counter in time.

So I ran, again at a full sprint, to the far end of Concourse A (that's three sprints back and forth, for those of you keeping count) and arrived at the gate, out of breath, sweaty, and smelly, all of which combined to make me look just pathetic enough for her maternal instinct to kick in.

"Tell you what," she said, "you're first on the standby list, so I will sell you a ticket at the last minute to fly to Cortez."

So that's how it played out. Literally seconds before the flight was to leave, I forked over $270 (US), to hop a flight at the last minute to fly from Denver to Cortez.

I heaved a huge sigh of relief as I sat in my seat on the tiny plane.

The engines spun up, and the plane turned to taxi towards the runway.

Then it stopped.

It stopped dead in the middle of the flight apron, its engines spinning, waiting to lift off.

The pilot turned around and announced: "Folks, I'm sorry to announce that we've had a minor technical problem and we cannot lift off at this time. We're going to go back to the gate and deplane, and we'll see if we can get this corrected."

There's a point at which the situation becomes just absurd enough to be funny. I was quietly giggling to myself as I sat in the airport for the next half hour, watching them try to fix the plane outside. Maybe it was because I was exhausted, both physically and emotionally, but the whole situation suddenly seemed hilarious. I remember I had to force myself not to giggle uncontrolably when April called me on my cellphone while I was waiting at the gate.

The flight finally lifted off, almost an hour late, but it lifted off, and landed in the tiny airport in Cortez, Colorado, just over an hour later.

Me, I was just happy to be out of Denver.

Dad was already waiting for me at the gate when I got off of the plane. I vowed never to fly through Denver; ever again.

Now, as an addendum, remember how they wouldn't let me get my bags and as a result, I had to wear the same clothes for four days? Well, guess what, my bag arrived in Durango the day before I did. So apparently, it was more important for them to get my bags to Durango than it was to get me there.

Nice to know where I rate.

So, for those of you keeping track, I'm never flying through Denver again, and I'm never flying United.

Happy New Year, everybody.

That'll teach me to make my Email address available on my blog...

So I got a very angry email from some anonymous asshat, who had excised a few key passages from a few entries in this blog (often severely out of context), had decided that I was a radical left-winger, based upon what I can only assume was a severely twisted view of what constitutes "radical left," and proclaimed proudly that I simply "[didn't] get that there are people out there who want to kill Americans."

I get a lot of email from asshats, usually in the form of spam, but this one deserved a response, I felt. Unfortunately, attempts to respond to said email were bounced back to me; so I can only hope that said asshat is reading this now.

In truth, the asshat in question isn't the first to claim that I "don't get that there are people out there who want to kill Americans," not by a long shot. I've had members of my own family tell me that I "don't get that there are people who want to kill Americans." As if I'm running around with my fingers in my ears singing "lalala, nobody wants to kill us." As if, were the amazing revelation that people out there want to kill Americans were to penetrate my thick skull, I'd suddenly love Bush, support the war in Iraq, and hate Muslims.

Why? Because apparently not supporting the war in Iraq means that I somehow don't get it. Somehow, because I think that attacking a country that presented no threat whatsoever to us is stupid, I'm missing out on this mysterious truth that "there are people who want to kill Americans."

Let's pretend that's true, for the sake of argument. Let's assume that if I don't support the war in Iraq, then I simply "don't get that there are people out there who want to kill Americans." One would have to therefore accept that because a certain group of a certain race and religion want to kill Americans, that the logical response is to go after a country that had absolutely nothing to do with any attack on American soil, ever; but happens to have people living in it who have a similar race, and sorta-similar religious beliefs.

I'm hoping that the aforementioned asshat realizes just how absurd that position is.

Now, I can hear said asshat's whiny voice now saying "well, what do you think we should do?" For the record, I can't say for sure whether the asshat has a whiny voice or not, but the voice my brain made up for him was sure whiny when I was reading the email. I have a bunch of answers for that question. We could've actually finished the job in Afghanistan, for starters. I fully supported the invasion of Afghanistan, for the record. I was all for going in there and making sure that it was no longer a breeding ground for terrorism. And we could've done it, too. If, after the Taliban had been overthrown, we'd dedicated resources to rebuilding that country, getting it back onto its feet, making it a reasonable contributor to the world stage, we may well have actually gained an ally in the middle east. At the very least, we'd have one less country populated by "people who want to kill Americans." We could've actually caught Bin Laden, rather than abandoning the search for him for no logical reason whatsoever. We could've spent money that we would instead waste in Iraq, trying to rebuild a country which still desperately needs rebuilding.

I could think of a dozen things, and it's mostly things that would cost a miniscule fraction in both dollars and lives than this unending, pointless, and very likely illegal war in Iraq cost us. It's not sexy. It's not a grand gesture like blowing the crap out of a country which does not present; and could not, in the foseeable future, have presented; any reasonable threat to the United States of America, but at least it would make some degree of sense.

While we're on that subject, let's talk about the fact that we're getting our asses kicked in Iraq. Who's kicking our asses? Yes, admittedly, they're "people who want to kill Americans." But really, can we hold that against them? They were, quite literally, minding their own business when we decided that we, for some reason, didn't like them and ploughed onto their soil to depose a dictator we put in power in the first place. Frankly, I'd be a little pissed at Americans myself if it were me. It's like having someone kick in the door of your house, rip up your furniture, light a fire in the middle of your living room, take a shit on your couch; then watch them complain indignantly when you try to kick them out. So, yes, there are people in Iraq who want to kill Americans, because we made them hate us. To presume that the people who are mopping the floor with us in Iraq had any thing to do with the guys who blew up the World Trade Center is absurd in the highest degree. We're not preventing another 9/11 in any way, form or fashion by fighting the insurgency there. In fact, I would go so far as to say that by annoying an entire new generation of terrorist recruits, we're guaranteeing another one. In his six years in office, Bush has done more to ensure that at some time, we will have another 9/11 than any other president before him. But I guess he figures that's okay. He'll probably be out of office by the time that rolls around anyway.

So yes, I disagree with the majority of this administration's policies. I disagree with the Patriot Act, I disagree with the Military commissions act. I disagreed with Congress when they suddenly decided that the thing that most needed doing was the creation of a constitutional amendment to ban flag-burning. I disagreed with congress when it decided that the greatest threat to American society was Gay Marriage. I disagreed with Bush when he decided that stem cell research was a dire enough threat to require him to exercise his first ever veto. Bush keeps claiming that those people who "want to kill Americans" hate us for our freedom; and he's doing his damnedest to ensure that pretty soon, that won't be a problem.

So, a couple of final notes to the anonymous asshat.

1. If you're so pretentious to put an "MA" after what I can only assume is a pseudonym, you should realize that "it's" is only spelled with an apostrophe when it's a contraction of "it is." "It's" is not the possessive of anything. On an unrelated note, "catastrophic" has no "f"s in it; if you're going to compare Bush to the mythical character Gilgamesh, you really should know a little more about it: it's not as much of a compliment as you seem to think it is.

2. You really shouldn't put an "MA" after what I can only assume is a pseudonym if all your ideas are stupid.

3. Yes, I do get that there are people out there who want to kill Americans. Do you?

The Evil Athiest Conspiracy (tm)

Science is more than just sitting in a laboratory randomly throwing things together to try to make pretty colors or a puff of smoke. Scientists by and large don't sit in an ivory tower trying to decide how we can further the Evil Athiest Conspiracy. Granted the argument could be made that science is atheistic, but only by virtue of the fact that the actions of any god or gods is an unscientific proposal. It's not that scientists don't believe in God (although some don't). It's that regardless of whether God, god, or gods were involved in the creation of the universe, there is no experiment we can perform which would give us any information as to the nature of said gods. I have met a number of athiest scientists; but I have met a far greater number of scientists of all faiths who have absolutely no difficulty reconciling their religious beliefs with their scientific pursuits. Christians (several flavors thereof), Muslims, Jews, Pegans... Some of whom hold their religious beliefs very strongly, yet are able to find a middle ground where their beliefs and their science can exist harmoniously. As one of my associates put it: "those whose faith is so weak that their God can only exist within the confines of science; and who force science to fit their definition of God; have done nothing to deserve faith."

The problem with bringing God into science is simple: science stops. What makes science such a wonderful pursuit is that it is never-ending. Every time you answer a question, it brings you in new directions, makes you ask new questions. It forces your mind to think in a way that you hadn't thought before. Once you bring God into the scientific process, you have nowhere else to go. How did the universe get here? God snapped Her fingers. How did we get such a complex array of life on this planet? God declared it so. God pretty much obliterates any questions you might ask. You can perform no experiment which would tell you how She'd do it. You simply stop asking questions, and if you stop asking questions, you stop learning. Why the hell would God want us to stop learning about the world?

Thomas Jefferson once said "Question with courage even the existence of God, for if there is one; he surely must prefer the homage of reason to that of blindfolded fear." Postulating the existence of God, it strikes me as completely non-sensical that She would be nice enough to provide us all with free will, then be enough of a prick that She doesn't want us to use it. It's completely non-sensical to me that She wants us to learn about the universe from a book that has been re-written, re-translated and revised dozens of times since the dawn of time; and to alienate those who dare consider the possibility that the Bible might not be the best scientific resource.

I have no issue with religion, actually, I don't even have an issue with including one religion in the public arena. For me the issue is the exclusion of all the others. We have had people insisting that a monument of the ten commandments had to remain outside a courthouse; but what if someone had insisted that we include the Wiccan Rede? People would respond with absolute outrage. What if we included prayer in public schools, but insisted that it had to take the form of a Hindu prayer, or a Taoist or Buddist meditaion? What if we said that students had to read the Tao or the Koran every day before class began?

Why are these suggestions any more absurd than including Christian prayer in class, or the ten commandments outside a courthouse?

My point is simple: worship or don't worship in whatever way you see fit. If it's as simple as meditating for a few minutes every day, fine. If you pray to God, or Allah, or Jesus, or his brother Bob; so be it. But if you pray to God, don't tell the guy sitting next to you who's praying to Bob that he's doing it wrong.

If that makes me an evil athiest, so be it. I'd rather be an evil athiest than a pious bigot.

Best. Week. Ever.

The democrats took back congress, which means that for the first time in his presidency, Bush might actually have to listen to the other side of the aisle rather than having them just rubber stamp the bills he sends his way. It also means that for the first time in six years, I'm actually cautiously optimistic about this country's political future.

Rummy's gone, and although his replacement is an ol' buddy of Bush's, he's also worked under several administrations that aren't Bush, and with a little luck, and a nod from the gods, I'm actually cautiously optimistic that we'll actually have an exit strategy some time in the near future.

A creationist whackjob in florida just got nailed for tax evasion, which just goes to show that although creationist whackjobs can manipulate school boards to force their particular flavor of christianity into the class room, they aren't completely above the law.

Stem cell initiatives have passed in one state, a ban on gay marriage was defeated in another, and a complete ban of abortion was defeated in a third, giving me reason to be cautiously optimistic that the US as a whole hasn't slid hopelessly far to the extreme right.

Oh, and I passed my PhD. thesis defense.

Okay, I am in as bad shape as I thought I was.

I'm in marginal pain at the moment.

So i'm back to three Kung Fu classes every week. I couldn't make friday nights for pretty much the last several months. The problem is that Friday nights are the hard classes. We do conditioning on Friday night. Basically, it's a two-hour torture-test where we find new and creative ways of abusing our bodies with the aim of building muscle, endurance, and physical strength.

I haven't been to a Friday night class in several months. I guess that comes from working on a fricking PhD. thesis. Side effect of sitting in front of a computer for 16 hours a day is that you get out of shape rather quickly.

So I went to class last night, and as most Fridays are, I brutally abused myself for three hours. But as the evening drew to a close, I figured that I wasn't in as bad shape as I thought I was. Oh, I was hurting, naturally. You don't push yourself for that hard, and that long without some body part voicing an objection or two; but it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be. I thought I'd be vomiting by the time the class was half-over.

So I thought I was in better physical condition than I feared I would be.

Then I woke up this morning.

Nope. Turns out that I'm in as bad shape as I thought I was. Pretty much everything hurts at the moment.

I'm gonna have to do something about that.

America needs Edward R. Murrow

On the 19th of October, a small minority of the American people may have seen something which has been absent from the newscasts for far too long. A man speaking with true passion to the masses.

In the '50s, a relatively minor newscaster stood up to announce that the country he loved dearly was destroying itself from within. He stood to speak with passion about the systematic persecution of people who had, at the time, committed no illegal action. He stood to speak in defense of those who were permitted none. He stood to speak on behalf of those who had no voice.

America needs that passion again. It needs people who are willing to say that something's wrong with the country. It needs people who can speak passionately about the country that they love, and what they love about it.

It needs dreamers. It needs idealists. It needs people who see the world through rose-colored glasses. It needs people who aren't willing to compromise on things like compassion, liberty and equality.

Recently, the US government passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006. In particular, the writ of Habeas Corpus is denied to non-US citizens.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the term Habeas Corpus is the right of every person to stand in court and get an answer to one very simple question: "Hey, why am I in prison?" While technically this is only denied to non-US citizens, there's a rather disturbing loophole: if the American Government decides you are not a US citizen, with Habeas Corpus no longer applying; you have no way to challenge the claim.

In short, democracy is dead in America. As Olbermann puts it in his special commentary, the president has been given a blank check. He has the power to arbitrarily place someone in jail, hold them without trial, and convict them with evidence they are not allowed to see.

Edward R. Murrow once said: "We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home." While I doubt he knew at the time how prophetic his words would be, we need to remember his words now; for they are as true now as they were during the red scare.

America needs that passion again. It needs people who still believe in the idealism of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. It needs dreamers who dare to believe in the great society that America once was; and who believe that it can be so again. We need idealists, not pragmatists. We need people who see what principles the country was founded upon, and seek them again.

We need Edward R. Murrow; but until then, Keith Olbermann will do.

I have included an embedded video of Olbermann's speech, if you have about ten minutes to watch it; it is truly worth seeing.

Collateral Damage

It's official: the American people elected a total asshat into the whitehouse in 2004.

Good ol' Dub-ya has, after six years of presidency, exercised his first-ever veto of a bill passed through congress.

And what, you may ask, was such a horrendous threat to the world that our illustrious president decided to block a bill that had already received congressional assent? What was so terrible that Dub-ya felt that for the first time in his entire presidency, he had to stop it from happening? What could possibly make Bush exercise the Presidential veto that the past three presidents never once used in their entire times in office?

Stem cell research.

Yes, our great and illustrious president decided that Stem Cell research was such a horrid threat that he'd veto a bill which would have allowed it.

Yep, Bush thinks that life is so sacred that he's blocking research performed on invisible clumps of cells; which he apparently thinks is the equivalent of walking up to someone and shooting them in the head.

'Course, when it's dropping bombs on Iraqi civilians, it's "collateral damage."

And, lest we forget, while Governor of Texas, Bush shattered all records across the country for most death row inmates executed while under his charge. But that's "justice."

As of this writing, there are approximately 400,000 embryos on ice in the United States of America. Until this bill was vetoed, those embryos could have been used to find cures for Parkinsons, Diabetes, paraplegia, MS, ALS, severe brain damage... Stem cells could mean an end to organ shortages. Now that this bill has been vetoed, those embryos can be either used for InVitro Fertilization, or destroyed. This bill would have allowed those slated for destruction to be used for research. Apparently, according to the Pro-Life brigade in the US, this would be the equivalent of mass murder.

Now, for some reason that is somewhat beyond my capacity to grasp, Bush decided to announce his vetoing of this bill while surrounded by "Snowflake Babies," their term, for the record, not mine. These babies were formed from embryos which were frozen; exactly the type of embryos that would have been used for this research. The irony is that none of these babies would exist if it weren't, literally, for decades worth of research performed on human embryonic cells; but Bush is going to studiously ignore that one, methinks.

Oh, and let's not forget, IVF requires implantation of several blastocysts in the hope that just one of them will grow into a full fledged human being.

All the others, I guess they're just "collateral damage."

Marshall McLuhan was wrong.

I should probably make clear at the outset that I'm against censorship of any kind.

I'm against censoring what we watch on TV, I'm against censoring the use of some specific words, I'm against censoring what is available to be viewed or heard.

I'm against censorship; especially in an era where if you don't like what you see or hear, you can change the channel or walk away.

But free expression means, practically by definition, sooner or later, someone is going to say something, or do something, or express themselves in some way that offends you. You can't have it both ways. You can either have free expression, or you can expect never to be offended. You cannot, in a free society, expect to have both. To do so is naive and, frankly, silly.

George Carlin did a famous comedy routine where he spoke about the seven words which were specifically prohibited on television. Seven, he said, out of approximately 400,000 words in the English language. "What a ratio that is," he said in his famous routine, "399,993 to seven. They must really be bad. They'd have to be outrageous to be separated from a group that large." He then went on to list the seven dirty words; shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits; on national television.

But seriously, what is it about some words, one specific sequence of sounds that we find so utterly offensive? "Truck" is an utterly inoffensive word, but somehow, when we replace the "TR" with "F," that word suddenly becomes vile?

And what makes a word offensive anyway? How do we decide that one specific sequence of sounds is horrendous and vile? What makes that switch turn on in our brains that says "oh, no, that's a bad word?" It would be trivial for me to offend you or spew the most vile of sentiments using the "cleanest" of words. Conversely, I could express the most gentle and noble of sentiments using the most vulgar profanity.

The point is that if you're not offended by the message I'm sending, it seems to me that it's ridiculous that you'd be offended by the words I use to send it. Kinda like recieving the present you always wanted for Christmas, then complaining about the gift-wrap. It's as if they don't care if you speak with hate, as long as you use appropriate wording to do so. As if the words you use are what make the discourse hateful or distasteful.

Marshall McLuhan was wrong. The message is the message.