The always geek-love-inducing Centauri Dreams has an short, interesting post up on the possibility of large lunar telescopes. How cool would that be? No atmosphere to interfere with the signal, low gravity to make large-scale construction easier and more cost effective, and plus, it’d be a permanent human installation on the moon, which definitely excites the technophilic and Humanist parts of me. (N.B: These parts compose approximately 98% of me, by volume.)
Sorry for the double-post on politics, but it looks like I have yet another reason to not vote for McCain:
Now, I have nothing against McCain being a Christian. All of the finest Presidents that this nation has had have been Christians. The fact of someone being a Christian or not says nothing about their ability to perform well or poorly in the role of President of the USA. Which is exactly my point. America is was not born or conceived as a “Christian Nation” (cf., for the most succinct statement of this, The Treaty of Tripoli).
For McCain to infer that he’s a good leader because he’s Christian or that America is, in any sense other than a demographic one, a “Christian Nation” is, to put it simply, asinine.
Well, the Ds have spoken and it now looks like this year’s dog-and-pony show will be a run off between Mr. Hopey Changey and Ol’ Coots McGeezer. Oh, and then there’s Mr. Neo-Conservative Libertarian.
Well damn. What’s worse, they’re all applying for a job for which none of them have read the job description. They’re all telling us what they’re going to do about the economy, health care, immigration, etc. None of which is actually, you know, what the president is supposed to do.
Oh well. Those are the candidates and, as the grammatically atrocious saying goes “them’s the breaks.”
But which to vote for? It feels a bit like being asked which lumberjack I want as my dentist. Well, none. I’d really actually like someone who will do the job they’re being hired to do. I mean, I’m sure all the candidates are fantastic lumberjacks, but we don’t need anyone who’s good with a cross-cut saw at the moment.
*Sigh* Oh well. I am going to vote (no matter how tempting is seems not to at times), but I really dislike the idea that no matter who I vote for, I’ll probably spend the next 4 years wishing I hadn’t.
You agonize for a good half hour over what to name your new wireless network.
Apparently a bunch of people in the Washington, D. C. area are praying at gas pumps, so that God will lower gas prices. Hundreds of thousands dead in the past month or so from natural disasters (what your insurance company probably calls “Acts of God”) but what God really cares about how much it costs these folks to fill up their tank.
. . . Really? That’s the kind of God these people want to worship? One that will kill a bunch of people in the third world, but will intervene to save you some money at the pump?
Fortunately, it looks like that particular version of God doesn’t exist, since gas prices have risen significantly since they started their little experiment in applied theological economics.
You know, I normally see these kinds of prayer actions as quaint, but this one is honestly offensive. Here they are, disrupting business (so much so that they’ve already been run off at least once, so that they can save a little bit of money. And I’m sorry, high gas prices are a sign of the end times? Are you kidding? If you’re so self-absorbed that you think getting your wallet pinched a little harder when you fill up your car is a sign of the immanent eschaton, then please stop for second. Now, find a mirror and take a long, hard look in it. I’ll wait . . .
Done? Good. Now punch yourself right in your stupid, self-centered face.
Here’s the way it works. Petroleum companies are human institutions. They sell a product. They are free to sell that product at whatever price they want. If you can’t afford it or don’t want to pay that much for it, then you have a recourse: don’t buy the product. Don’t go disrupting the business of their resalers and shouting into a void after a deity that didn’t even care to save Chinese schoolchildren from an earthquake. If he exists, he sure as hell doesn’t care about your fuel expenses.
And if he cares about the status of your gas tank and bank account but not about the lives of innocent children? Then fuck him. He’s not worth praying to or associating with.
(Of course, this argument is aside from any theological argument about free will, both the petroleum execs’ freedom to charge whatever they want and our individual freedom not to pay it if we don’t want to. Somehow I doubt once someone’s to the point of praying in front of a gas pump, they’re probably beyond the point of reasonable theological discourse.)