When I was a kid, we had Murphy Brown. She was this tireless (if ridiculous) reporter who would go to any length to expose the missteps of government. I had a conversation about that with my parents, and I remember them saying that this was an integral part of society, that media represented the desire of the people to have faith in their leaders. Media was, at least in that context, another check and balance to ensure a responsible government.
Oh Facebook, you bastion of ignorant twats.
I just answered “No” to this poll which asks the question “Do you support drug testing to get approval to be on Welfare?”, and I am sad to say that the Nos have 103,225 and the Yes’s have 2,095,951. That means that No represents 4.7% of the responses. That means that 95.3% of the people polled actually suck.
I don’t do drugs. I’ve been known to very sporadically have a puff on a joint, but I really don’t enjoy drugs. Marijuana makes me far too stupid. I love conversation, and I can’t do that when I’m even a little buzzed, and I get entirely frustrated with my inability to follow my own thoughts to their conclusion, so I Just Say No like Nancy told me to. But I don’t give a red shit in Hell if other people do drugs. I’d rather they did the safer drugs than wind up freaked on crack or meth, but it’s their business. If someone on welfare is nursing a $500 a day coke habit, that’s weird and probably worth looking into, but if someone loses their job and goes to welfare, then it doesn’t matter to me if 8 days before they had shared a joint with a friend.
[A note from Big Ugly Jim: This is a response to Cyndi Laurenti's guest post here on Meddling Kids about education and the conflict between reason/science and faith/religion. Please feel free to provide your opinion via the comments on either piece.]
I absolutely agree that there is a serious threat to scientific thinking at every level of the educational experience, but I do not agree with Cyndi’s opinion on how best to confront it. I believe that attempting to find that line between faith and fact is a moot point, and one that cuts deeply into the effectiveness of both sides of the argument. I believe in compromise wherever possible, but compromise in this case is ineffective.
I used to teach in college. I didn’t teach evolution or origins of life or anything that would cross the line into OMG UR HURTIN MY RELIJUNZ FEELINZ, but I can imagine what it must be like. I taught (among other things) systems analysis, which is the process of determining where problems exist, understanding all of the issues around them, figuring out how things work in the current model, and synthesizing a new model that resolves the problems. There are very simple truths to this process, not the least of which is that the only way to succeed in a project is to have buy-in from your customers. They need to know that you are there to make their lives easier, and not to score points with the boss or what have you.
[A note from Big Ugly Jim: I was approached a while back by someone who wanted to know if we would be interested in some guest posts by the people she worked with. I'm always up for a guest post, and I agreed. This is the first, from Cindy Laurenti. When I read the piece, I felt it would be an interesting post to have a discussion about, because I am very much in opposition to what Cindy wrote. She and I discussed, and I have written a response to this. As ever, I love to have people provide their own thoughts on the topic in the comments.]
Although scientific rationality is certainly a feature of most curricula in higher education, for many scientists and academics who frequently find the most basic scientific principles under attack from elementary school to master’s degree programs, it often doesn’t seem like enough. Furthermore, attacks on the basic tenet of empiricism come from a wide variety of people and interest groups, not (as many think) only from religious fundamentalists.
This is one of the biggest frustrations that I have as an IT professional and a Business Analyst. I’ve commented on this before, but I had a conversation just now that reminded me, and now I’m all foamy-at-the-mouth about it, so I’m going to vent.
The fine art of gathering requirements is just not getting the love it needs. In some cases it does, but most of the time we just leap right in and start spending money, either on software or on developers, and then we wonder why we don’t get what we expected. I hear terms bandied about from time to time like “analysis paralysis” that are meant to imply that we can spend too much time defining what we want, and that’s equally as dangerous, but when people use that term, it’s generally because they don’t understand the process or the reasons behind gathering requirements.
Google, she’s a funny creature. I like to read the list of how people found Meddling Kids through Google for a variety of reasons, but I must say I prefer the swing-and-a-miss searches. I first encountered this years ago (and long before this blog) when I had written a short nonfiction narrative about the day I got robbed. It contained phrases like how having a gun to my head made me fear I was going to piss my pants and how my face was wet with homemade pepper spray. Someone found it by typing “wet pee in my pants”. Why they would be searching for that is anyone’s guess.
Today, someone found our site by searching “why religious knowledge is required for kids”. I can only assume that they were sadly let down they took a look around and realized this was an atheist’s site, and I would have nothing to say on the topic, but it made me want to post on the topic, so here we go.
So my eldest daughter spent the weekend with a friend of her mother’s. This friend is a conspiracy theorist, and he took the opportunity to explain to her that 911 was a government plot, and also some stuff about the Occupy movement. I don’t know what he said about Occupy, though I’m sure he has no clue at all about what he’s talking about, but she was (and presumably still is) absolutely certain of the government’s involvement in 911. I shot her a link to Skeptic Magazine’s refutation of the 911 conspiracy theory, but I don’t think she read it.
What I really want to do is go to this prick’s house and break his kneecaps for lying to my daughter, but if I was going to do that to everyone who lies to her, I’d have to kill a lot of Mormons and Christians in the greater Kelowna area. I am powerless to help her, because I live a province away. I would hope she would talk to me about this sort of stuff and think of me as a bit of a role model, but the conversation didn’t go that way. She said a few “facts” straight out of the mouth of this Truther idiot, and when I refuted them she suddenly disappeared.
A friend of mine posted a propaganda video for unschooling the other day, and I realized that this was a topic I had never covered here. What better time than right now, as I air on a train heading to what should be the most boring meeting in living history.
Unschooling is that special method of raising your child where you keep them home and let them focus on whatever they want to focus on. You know, we build up our children based on who they want to be, and not on who The Man thinks they ought to be. Why teach our kids things they won’t need in life when we can nurture the things they will need?
Once again, another video by Stevelikes2curse and another rant by me. This video is about the No Cussing Club, an actual thing made by actual people who clearly don’t have a clue. Like Steve, I like to cuss. I like cussing a lot. Sometimes, you simply cannot express the frustration that you feel without naughty words. And sometimes it’s just fun to do.
In fact, I was given a book called C U Next Tuesday as a gift from my darling friend miss Ethyl Alcohol, the bass player from my old bands Johnny Incognito and The Regurgitones. I had called her a particular word one day, totally as an off-handed jab that wasn’t intended as a horrible attack, but it totally stunned her. This was bad because she was driving. And frankly, it’s a word I have since tried to give up because of the idea that using terms for female genitalia as insults is bad. But I called her it. She saw the book in a bookstore in the airport she was in overseas and immediately thought of me, so she got it for me.
I saw a kid outside the mall the other day with the most handsome pit bull puppy I have seen in a long while. I went over and petted the monster and we got to chatting. It turned out this lovely, well trained pooch was the impetus behind the kid moving to Calgary.
In Grande Prairie, where he lived previously, pit bull owners must pay a $100 restricted license fee, walk their pits wearing a muzzle. Oh, and they need a minimum of $1,000,000 in liability insurance. That was the law (although it has changed since). And failure to comply was up to a $4,500 fine.
Calgary, at least for now, has no pit bull laws. They are treated like all other dogs, and that makes sense to me. It isn’t the dog, it is the owner who makes a dog bad.