Five Before Chaos

Gotta love this. Apparently, there is a bill in the Ohio senate that bars Republicans from adopting children. I’m not making this up. State Sen. Robert Hagan drafted the bill in response to another senator’s bill banning children from being adopted by gay people. Hagan’s bill says:

“credible research” shows that adopted children raised in Republican households are more at risk for developing “emotional problems, social stigmas, inflated egos, and alarming lack of tolerance for others they deem different than themselves and an air of overconfidence to mask their insecurities.”

You can read the whole scoop here…

This serves as an entryway to discuss the ‘fear of the unknown’ that drives so many people. I sometimes think that people fear abstract things more than concrete ideas. Maybe because concrete ideas involve thinking about them for more than a few minutes on a superficial level and some people just aren’t equipped for that. During the whole civil unions brouhaha here in Vermont a few years back, as well as today we hear how the concept would ‘destroy traditional marriage’. Yet, no one could really define what ‘destroying traditional marriage’ meant. Did they mean that somehow, if gay unions/marriage were allowed, that all over the world, hetero couples would just somehow instantly fall out of love with each other? And ones who weren’t married at the time would just decide to never get married? Or was it yet another feeling of superiority and exclusivity was being taken away from them? Was my divorce a few years ago not really about incompatibility/personality issues and really about the fact that Vermont allowed civil unions, even though me and my ex never even gave them any thought? Who knows? Nobody was ever able to define what that meant in any kind of coherent manner. Yet people were easily able to use that fear to whip people up into a frenzy, get real ugly, and unfortunately get to the polls.

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As some of you know who have been following the ‘intelligent design’ debate (the notion being pushed by certain Christianists that evolution has too many holes and must have been guided by an intelligent designer, i.e. ‘God’), one of the methods they’ve been using to get the idea taught in schools is that in the name of academic freedom and inquiry, we should be ‘teaching the controversy’, which is a not-so-subtle method of sowing the seeds of doubt of evolution’s validity.

There’s a bit of a problem though; amongst the scientific community, there really isn’t a controversy. Scientists will readily admit that sure, there are still many things in evolutionary theory yet to be discovered. But a solid majority of them put evolution as the bedrock of biology. CSICOP’s Robert Camp has a good article about this phenomenon here, as well as some surveying that helps prove his point.

One of the main problems I see in the way debates are framed today is this so called ‘balanced view’ approach. It goes under the assumption that A) all opinions are equal and B) that there are always two sides to every issue. It’s like saying that in order to teach a class on Holocaust studies, we must also teach the viewpoints of Holocaust deniers. Sure, everyone is entitled to an opinion. But they don’t all carry equal weight. Some can be backed up by mountains of evidence (evolution, the Holocaust) and some can’t (ID theory, Holocaust denial).

This is even more obvious in today’s political reporting. Take something like Bush’s numerous tax cuts for the wealthy. The evidence is all there on paper as to whom these tax cuts are benefitting(the top 1%). Yet when discussed in the media, both sides are shown, as if they are somehow doing us a favor by letting us decide for ourselves, even though the facts are there for all to see.

Often, I read in letters to the editors and such, how ID should be taught alongside evolution to let the students (or parents of the students) decide. Since when do high school students (or their parents, for that matter) know more than the biologists? Most people can’t even name their congressman, for Crissake.

Yes, there are often two sides to an issue; a correct one and an incorrect one. But teaching something that is factually incorrect is wrong, pure and simple.

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They sure did a job on that one, huh? The irony of Muslims blowing up a shrine of those other Muslims is lost on me. Admittedly not knowing much about the differences between the Sunnis and Shiites, I still found it odd. I figured they would just stick with blowing up each other and would leave the holy sites alone. I guess not. The real sad thing here is I suspect that the people running our little war here and liberating Iraqis from their earthly bodies don’t really know much more than I do about this kind of stuff. Some chilling stats from the BBC about the impending civil war…(full article here)

2004
Total attacks: 26,496
Improvised bombs: 5,607
Car bombings: 420
Suicide car bombings: 133
Suicide bombers wearing explosive vests: 7

2005
Total attacks: 34,131
Improvised bombs: 10,593
Car bombings: 873
Suicide car bombings: 411
Suicide bombers wearing explosive vests: 67

That whole ‘destablizing the Middle East’ thing…could it be right around the corner? We (or Israel) lob a few missles into Iran, then what?

The unease has been mounting with me… not so much the Iraq thing, just all of it, mostly the idea that we really have a madman or two in charge of our country right now, and a spineless opposition party. I know it sounds like typical liberal chicken-little stuff, but the freshness of William Shirer’s ‘The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich’ that I read over the summer is still on my mind. Some of what we’re seeing now (spineless opposition, xenophobia, control of the media) was going on in Germany in the early ’30’s. I am for once fearful of what this country may be like in five years, and the sad part is I don’t have enough faith in my fellow countrymen to turn it around. 9/11 did more than take down the towers.. it knocked the critical thinking skills right out of the heads of many Americans, something in short supply to begin with.

But that begs the question for me… how unpopular are Bush and the Repugnicans right now? 39% is the number of the day. You figure maybe 20-25% is the Rapture crowd, but what about the rest? How do we find out, other than the typical horseshit polls we are saturated with every day? Do we even trust any of them, when often they are done by the same media outlets that have enabled Bush and Corp. to get away with as much as they have already? It’s even tougher when you live in a true-blue place like Vermont, where most of the people you know hate Bush to begin with. You forget how it is in, say, South Dakota, where the legislature just passed an abortion ban with no exeptions for rape, incest. You forget that there are still a lot of crazy people out there.

Is the tide turning? How much more will even the Repugs in Congress put up with being marginalized by the White House? One theory as to why congressional Repubs are getting nervous centers around all those electronic voting machines. Earnest Partridge of The Crisis Papers expands on it a bit here, in a fine article called “Perception is Reality”. Basically, he says that as the voting public gets ever more weary of our government’s actions, they are going to be more open to listening to stories of voter fraud, an issue which the MSM has done a great job of marginalizing as a liberal conspiracy kind of thing. And when people vote in droves against the GOP, and somehow the tallies still come back as GOP victories, it won’t smell right and people won’t swallow it so easy as they have in the past. And that means less Republican victories. 40-50% is easy to fudge, as we’ve seen in the last few elections. 30% ain’t so easy.

My apologies for the lack of focus in this post. I intended to originally just comment on the shrine bombing, but thoughts start drifting, and there you have it. Time for more sausage.

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So this is Krusty, half chow, half golden retriever. She’s the exact opposite of Fredo. Gets in trouble all the time, obnoxious, and loves to roll in the turkey shit at the farm next door. And eat cat poop. This dog eats anything, habenero salsa, avacado, raw broccoli, rotten leftovers, moles, coyote skulls, you name it. Fredo, on the other hand, would smell a piece of steak for 5 minutes before eating it. And no, Krusty isn’t a Republican, either.

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Was feeling the urge to blog today. I was all set to tackle the whole ’selling control of our ports of entry to the Arabs’ thing but something else took precedent…. sausage.
Was out doing a billion errands today, and on the way to the storage unit, on a road I’ve driven thousands of times, I saw next to the Cottage Street Pasta shop in Barre, ‘Ping’s Sausage Shop’. Too good to be true. Let me just say that as much as I love living in central VT, and as one who hasn’t been to major cities more than 25 times in his entire life, when I am in a huge metropolitan area I always seek out the local ethnic markets, whether they be Asian, Hispanic, whatever. Sometimes I end up picking up some strange bottle of soda, a new hot sauce or some weird cookie. There are a few ethnic markets in the North End of Burlington, such as an Asian one and an African one, but they are few and far between. There’s nothing like that in the Montpelier area. But there is Ping’s Sausage Shop. I’ve been trying to find good chorizo, the Spanish and/or Mexican sausage. My mom brought some up from Florida, but it’s mainstream Swift/Armour/whatever stuff, kinda scary and full of preservatives and possibly dead Mexicans. So I go into the store.

Pretty spartan, with some freezers off to the side, a lady making ravioli greeted me. I saw they had 6 kinds of sausages, including chorizo. Other than that and mortadella, I hadn’t heard of the other kinds so she went and got the sausage maker, a middle-aged guy who looked just like he could have been the butcher in a shop in Little Italy in the 50’s. Turns out he was of Spanish descent, Castillian Spanish, as he proudly informed me. He still looked like he could’ve been one of my Italian uncles. Anyways, he explained to me what all the different sausages were, and the chorizo was Spanish style, not as spicy as the Mexican kind. The mortadella wasn’t that ‘big bologna with the chunks of fat’ you see in the deli case(that was actually ‘mortadella di Bologna’, the Italian kind). His was some kind of liver sausage. I’ll pass on that one.

The other kinds, all of which I’d never heard of, were salamini, zampet, vaniglia (which actually is flavored with vanilla), and the one I bought, luganiga. The warmth that this guy showed, and the way he talked about his (preservative-free) sausages, he was the real deal. We talked about organ meats, how people who grew up during the Depression never wasted anything when it came to food, and a few other things. I knew I’d be back even before I tried the sausage. I also picked up some raviolis.

Cooked up dinner for me and Jenni. The sausage was awesome. I didn’t know what to expect, it didn’t taste like Italian sausage or anything else I’d had before. There was a predominant spice in there that was really familiar to me but I’m not sure what it was (Jenni thinks it might be rosemary-turns out it was nutmeg). Definitely gonna go back and try the rest (except for the mortadella-I don’t do liver).

I guess I found this blogworthy only for the reason that strangely enough, this made my day. I wasn’t having a bad day or anything, but it was a good experience. SO here’s my plug, and this is the closest you’ll ever get to an endorsement from me… When in Barre, VT (or within a reasonable drive), be sure to check this guy out, he’ll appreciate the business…

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News from the war on intelligent thinking….

In their neverending war on science, critical thinking and reality, proponents of ‘intelligent design’ seem to take a few steps forward, and a few steps back. First item here, we have Ken Ham, of ‘Answers in Genesis’ fame visiting schools and propagandizing to schoolchildren about the evils of evolution. It’s not amazing how his simplistic answers go over well with elementary school children, who haven’t developed the critical thinking skills necessary to make rational deductions, weigh facts and such. What is amazing (and sad) is that this same line of un-reason seems to work really well with adults whose critical thinking skills, (when not completely numbed by hours at the mall and episodes of American Idol) should be able to disseminate facts and such. But these people, infected by the mind virus known as ‘Biblical literalism’ have never been much for the facts, anyways. Here’s a few samples of some horseshit for you…

“Boys and girls,” Ham said. If a teacher so much as mentions evolution, or the Big Bang, or an era when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, “you put your hand up and you say, ‘Excuse me, were you there?’ Can you remember that?”
The children roared their assent.
“Sometimes people will answer, ‘No, but you weren’t there either,’ ” Ham told them. “Then you say, ‘No, I wasn’t, but I know someone who was, and I have his book about the history of the world.’ ” He waved his Bible in the air.
“Who’s the only one who’s always been there?” Ham asked.
“God!” the boys and girls shouted.
“Who’s the only one who knows everything?”
“God!”
“So who should you always trust, God or the scientists?”
The children answered with a thundering: “God!”

Yay! I didn’t see it so it must not have happened! Saddam! 9/11! O.J. is gonna find the real killers! Erp…! (sound of brain synapses misfiring). So here we have propaganda at a very early age. Some more twisted illogic for you…

“Ham described the fossil record as “billions of dead things … laid down by water” — proof, he said, of Noah’s flood.”
In a bit that brought the house down, Ham flashed a picture of a chimpanzee. “Did your grandfather look like this?” he demanded.
“Noooooo!” the children called.
“And did your grandmother look like that?” Ham displayed a photo of the same chimp wearing lipstick. The children erupted in giggles. “Noooooo!”

This next nugget is so important… a major family crisis was averted….

“Emily Maynard, 12, was also delighted with Ham’s presentation. Home-schooled and voraciously curious, she had recently read an encyclopedia for fun — and caught herself almost believing the entry on evolution. “They were explaining about apes standing up, evolving to man, and I could kind of see that’s how it could happen,” she said.
Ham convinced her otherwise. As her mother beamed, Emily repeated Ham’s mantra: “The Bible is the history book of the universe.”

Man, the Flying Spaghetti Monster can’t be too thrilled about this. No mention of it anywhere. So what do you make of all this? Will these children(at least some of them) be deprogrammed as their brains and thinking skills hopefully become more developed? Some will struggle with it. Many, I suspect will continue to live in their little bubbles and not allow facts to get in the way of their worldview. And maybe one will be president someday.

But all is not bad. Some good news from the New York Times, here. Apparently, in Ohio, Intelligent Design people were trying, once again to incorporate doubt upon evolution in science class. That pig didn’t fly, fortunately. One thing that seems to continually be missing from any discussion from the ID people is that even the core ID proponents, such as Michael Behe, concede that there is no way to prove any of what they are saying is true. ‘Facts are stupid things,’ once said their annointed savior, Ronald Reagan.

The ID propaganda organization, The Discovery Institute, whose game plan is ‘teaching the controversy’ (of which, among scientists, there is none), was counting on Ohio to be a testing ground for it, if you will. God shoulda told them this wasn’t gonna fly, huh?

Fiction is a funny and sometimes dangerous thing. Not a good thing to base your whole life on, is it?

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So this has been up for about a month and a half now. I need to post more. I don’t do it so much but I do enjoy it when I do. I checked my stats, I’m getting a few repeats here, so you’re obviously coming back. Patterson, NY? I grew up there(Putnam Lake, actually)…

At any rate, don’t be afraid to drop a comment, start a debate, etc. I’m interested in knowing who’s actually reading this.

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Ah yes, the mighty trombone. Jenni’s uncle gave her an old one that must have belonged to her cousin or something. It needed a mouthpiece, so I picked one up and decided to give it a go. Having a lot of fun with it, more on that later. But it gives me an opening to talk about music. I was reluctant to go there… in the late night depths as I read the random blogs, I realize how in 99% of the cases, I really don’t like reading about peoples’ personal stuff. There’s the usual “I went shopping with Mary at the mall today” crap, the “boo hoo I’m lonely” stuff, and there’s still all those teenaged girls from Singapore with their food diaries. Like I said in the beginning… why the hell should you care what I think? So I’m gonna try to make this as entertaining as possible.

I started playing guitar in 4th grade. Never got too far with it, but I could play “Yellow Submarine” and “House of the Rising Sun”. Dabbled on and off with it for a few more years, mostly blues and surf music. Then, in 1984, I remember watching that video by the Thompson Twins, for a song called “Hold Me Now”. You probably remember it, typical 1980’s pop post-new wave crap. But I finally noticed that the bass only had 4 strings, not 6 like my guitar. Must be easier, I figured(wrong). A few months later, my parents bought me an entry-level Peavey “Patriot” bass. Started figuring out more blues, classic rock, etc. I don’t think I was all that good.
Fast forward a few years…. no longer living in Putnam Lake, NY, living in Bonita Springs, FL, pure hell. But I started playing with people, and enjoyed it a lot. Enjoyed the attention from the females, too. Must pursue this further.

FFWD some more, living in CT. Was still going back and forth between guitar and bass. At this point I was starting to listen to jazz and fusion and stuff, as well as expanding my consciousness with an array of new-to-me chemicals. Put together a band called…Five Before Chaos. It was kind of like punk jazz. Our hearts were in the right place but our chops and writing skill weren’t. It was a great period of musical growth for me because I started to really realize the creative possibilities of the instrument. I just needed to get the skills to tap into those possibilities.

1996… Living in VT. Got a lot of real-world bar-band experience with a blues band(F.B.C. didn’t really gig much, and when we did, there was a lot of audience head-scratching going in). Played in biker clubs, roadhouses, ski resorts, even a prison. To be a bassist and play the blues, ya really gotta love it, because it’s more or less variations on the same thing over and over. And over.I was bored shitless, even though the money was good (one does not truly know tedium until having played the bass on ZZ Top’s ‘LaGrange’ for 20 minutes straight). Stopped doing that, got involved in a pop/funk/worldbeat band. We did pretty good, some of the musicians were fantastic, and things really started to click for me as to what great bass playing entailed. As usual, got burnt on it after a couple of years, as did others. End of that(for me at least).

Playing in a band, with all the rewards and bullshit, can be funny. You get tired of it, you take your break. You get tired of driving home dark, dirt roads at 3 AM, smelling like an ashtray and having a headache ‘cuz the guitarist wouldn’t turn down. And then after a few months you start to miss it. Just like Michael Corleone in Godfather , Pt. 3 - everytime you try to get out, you get pulled back in. Wash, rinse, repeat. I was getting more and more into jazz and old school funk, and put together an all instrumental band called Leon Tubbs. This is the one I’m really proud of. It was a hybrid of jazz, funk and worldbeat, and it didn’t suck. Great, original writing and playing (if you’re curious, lemme know and I’ll see about putting some up here). One of the high points was opening up for jazz guitar legend John Scofield at the 2002 Discover Jazz Fest in Burlington. Now that was a pants-pooper. It’s one thing to play to a bar full of people gettin’ down, but to hear 2000+ people applause afterwards was quite the rush. We went on for another year or two, went into the studio to start an album, but a lack of personal creativity, coupled with mounting problems in my personal life kinda just made it hard to continue. So I moved on.

Without getting sappy or cocky, I wanna say music is a very important part of my life, and I’ve gotten pretty good at it. I put endless evenings and weekends into it. Sometimes the reward was great, sometimes it made me want to commit multiple murders. But I also love to be in the woods. And go for rides with Jenni. And chop wood. And finish college. And write minimalist ambient stuff and music for films that don’t exist yet. And have a mortgage. So I’m kinda semi-retired. It took a long time to come to terms with it that I wasn’t gonna be out on the road with some band, because that was my focus and goal for almost a third of my life. I still gig occasionally, and I know I could gig a lot if I wanted to. But then I wouldn’t have time to sit around and make obnoxious musical farting noises on the trombone, would I?

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