India becomes the first country to place a lander on the moon's south pole. That achievement is scientifically important because there may be deposits of water there. That water could be used for human biological needs, both drinking as water and breathing as oxygen (after processing it).

I'm not a fan of Prime Minister Modi (who encourages nationalism), but I do very much like this quote:

"India's successful moon mission is not India's alone... the success belongs to all of humanity."
- Times Of India

That's the wonder of science rather than capitalism. The whole world can participate in the excitement of new discoveries, potentially improving life for us all someday. This nice achievement comes from the oldest multicultural civilization still on the planet, one that has survived and thrived without monotheism. I rather like India, as such things go, in spite of their old caste system.

I can't currently find my old post about it, but I visited the Hindu temple in Maple Grove many years ago, back around 2006. They had an open house immediately after the main building construction finished. They invited the whole Twin Cities community after it was vandalized earlier during construction.

I admire that kind of response to violence. It's part of why it makes me a little bit happy that India landed their spacecraft at the moon's southern pole.

*sigh* Sometimes, I just don't understand government or the people who vote to make it the way it is.

This morning, I looked out my kitchen window and saw a City Of Minneapolis Regulatory Service car sitting motionless in my alley. Was it here to complain about my back yard? I'm not sure what would be the problem. This looks okay from this weekend, right? Or was it here about my neighbor, which had 9 vehicles parked in the back yard recently? It's been bad for weeks/months, but 9 vehicles was a new record, so I took this photo yesterday.

If this is "broken windows policing", then I'm not a fan. These vehicles are not directly harming anything, so why waste taxpayer money on monitoring? I'd much rather have somebody driving around listening for obnoxious noises to track down, so they don't rattle my home windows.  The local noise pollution wears down the mind.  Why doesn't government spend this money instead on monitoring the powerful for stolen wages, missed taxes, or abused authority?

After my experience as a 54-year-old man being arrested at a homeless encampment facing eviction, I can sympathize with this 78-year-old woman arrested for feeding the homeless. There is also video of her arrest and her speaking about it.  Why is this happening? Is it really just religion? What breeds this contempt for humanity?  Seriously, why is this happening?

Why are people voting into office the representatives who make these laws and regulations? Why is anyone using their power in this world to enable such awful things like criminalizing poverty?  Our lives could be better.

Today's "Moody Monday" post puts me at risk of a US$10,000 fine in Texas, maybe even prison.  I think incarceration applies only to abortion providers, not information providers, but I'm not certain.  Either way, it's a good reason to never set foot there.  (Reminder: Get out.)  Indeed, Facebook and Instagram are already censoring abortion information online.  Google says it will delete location history for abortion centers, but that may still not help people who search the topic.  You could search on computers at your local library, but safety depends on if your library follows recommended practice.  Eventually a VPN may be necessary to protect yourself and to access region-restricted websites.


People are sharing their experiences in abortion care, both receiving and providing it.  They offer a lot to consider.  From the woman with a detached placenta to the doctors delaying life-saving care like this woman who miscarried but couldn't get medical help, also the 10-year-old rape victim whose young body is required by her current Ohio state law to carry to term the fetus of that criminal, and even the coroner stories of botched abortions before legalization in Canada.

• Abortion.cafe is a website with useful links for anyone seeking an abortion.
• Tech Workers Coalition also has a good list of resources.
• TheNib.com provides an educational comic that explains (with citations at the end) the abortion pills misoprostol and mifepristone.
• If/When/How includes a legal helpline.
• SkepChick has some thoughts for how supportive third parties can help.
• U.S. Department Of Defense will still continue abortion care at their bases, even in states that prohibit it.
• As for the mood here in Minnesota, we seem to be setting up as a safe harbor, both allowing abortions and preventing cooperation in prosecution from regressive territories.  We're expecting an influx of visitors from other states, and one North Dakota clinic is already seeking funds to move across the state border to join us.  But avoid the anti-abortion "pregnancy crisis" centers.
• If pills aren't for you, then there is the possibility of IUDs or getting snipped to prevent pregnancy.

I advocate letting people control their own bodies as they wish, however complex those decisions are for them.  One justification sometimes presented is the idea (more complicated than just a single variable) that allowing abortions nationwide with the Roe v. Wade court decision led to fewer "unwanted children" in high poverty populations, leading to a reduction in crime many years later.  Personally, I don't really need that justification for legalization.  I'm firmly in the camp that believes, as the meme says about baby Molly, that an embryo is simply not a person.  Similarly, I can't believe a fetus is a person until it's at least developed enough biologically to no longer remain a parasite, then we can start discussing the difficult definitions.  Plenty of mainstream religious traditions share this idea and allow abortion.  Even without abortion, some 40% of all pregnancies end in miscarriage naturally, which certainly doesn't make these women slaughterers for failing to deliver, as the new laws insist.  The idea is insanity and can actually prevent babies from being born to families who need IVF to conceive.  It's also already endangering non-abortion medical care by its sheer stupidity.

Let's end this post, however, by noting the central hypocrisy (both Betty Bowers and George Carlin elaborate well on this topic) that got us here.

Welcome to Amurrika.  The line forms here for your pelvic exam.

I was outside doing some afternoon gardening in the front yard today.  I noticed more than the usual number of people at the bus stop at the end of my block.  They seemed to be dressed up like they were going somewhere.  I forgot about them and continued on with my digging.

A while later, I heard drumming and native American singing.  I didn't put the two events together.  I locked up the house and walked towards the drumming.  There's both a small mini-park and a church about two blocks away where sometimes there are outdoor gatherings, so I wanted to learn what group was performing, if I could find them.

I didn't walk far, though.  I soon realized the drumming was coming from the back yard of the house at the bus stop.  That's when I figured it was some kind of private ceremony happening, so I turned around to walk back home.

Passing that intersection again on foot, I noticed a hearse stopped at the bus stop, the driver walking toward the front door of that house.  The drumming stopped soon afterwards.

I have no reason to think it was related to local violence or covid.  Maybe it was just the death of another local elder on the block.  But that's one of the cool things about this very diverse neighborhood.  A few years ago, I investigated sounds closer on my block.  I walked down the alley and found an old asian woman (probably Hmong, given the demographics here) chasing away evil spirits from the house.  I recognized the effort immediately, smiled at her, and walked back to my house without further interrupting her music.

Plenty of skin colors and religious faiths can be found here.  End the violence, and this place would be a wonderful home for an old tree hugger.

The dreaded day has arrived. If ever there was a birthday worth drinking heavily, my birthday today would be the one.

Instead, though, I have a thought that will persist regardless of this vote's outcome. There are great issues that remain, regardless of the team banner gracing the Oval Office. One of these issues is presented nicely in today's theme song from a talented queer folk musician, Joy Oladokun.


This review explains the song much better than I can.

On Friday, Oladokun released a new single called “I See America” that deftly examines the long-lasting harm that systemic racism does to Black communities, as well as the subtle and sinister cultural norms that hold it up. In the opening verse, she describes a young Black man she sees on the street, acknowledging his fundamental worth as a human being in ways that others don’t seem to have done. In the closing verse, she examines ways that racist attitudes are able to spread quietly when they go unchecked in the name of keeping peace in the family.

The song acknowledges two huge social and cultural issues that cause extraordinary and long-lasting suffering in our country. It's also a quietly powerful call for change, as Oladokun sings: "Violence and rumors in a Southern town / Will start with a whisper / But so does the difference."
- https://www.nashvillescene.com/music/nashville-cream/article/21144121/joy-oladokun-issues-a-firm-gentle-call-to-action-in-i-see-america

Such a remarkably peaceful sound for such a difficult time.

Today's theme song selection is about the audio mood and the visuals much more than the lyrics. As I've said before, creation never stopped. Evolution is a beautiful concept that ties everything in the universe together. The interconnected web is a beautiful thing, wondrous to behold.



I finished reading this week a book of historical fiction about Galileo, "Galileo's Dream" by Kim Stanley Robinson. It involves time travel, and Galileo's fate is changed from burning at the stake for heresy to (our actual, current history) simply having to lie and state that the Church's view of the universe is correct while his telescopic observations of Jupiter and the planets is wrong. He denied the beautiful truth in order to satisfy the demands of the religious reich of his time.

The end of the book provides an interesting message from a near-immortal human of our future (and past), one of the people attempting to change human history for the better.


One of my favorite quotes in this matter of obscuring simple truth comes from another fictional realm. It comes in a scene from the movie "Hogfather", a movie about Santa Claus and Christmas in a very different kind of world.


Why anyone would want to "settle the matter" and fix an unchanging story of the universe is beyond my understanding. There's so very much to explore and learn and do.  I wouldn't want to lose the opportunity of such a thrilling adventure.

I have a teeny, tiny, nearly-insignificant bit of new confidence that humanity might be worth saving.

I heard about the violence in Egypt as Muslims killed the Christians there in bombings.  What I did not hear on the news is how other Muslims came to the aid of those same Christians, even acting as human shields to protect them against more violence.  The Muslims surrounded the Christian churches during their holiday mass ceremony, hoping to discourage additional bombing attempts.


Life is easy to destroy, but hard to preserve.  It's about time we started seeing an occasional story about religion being used to inspire protective urges rather than to inspire murder and subjugation.  On the whole, I still tend to think that humanity would be better off without any religion at all.  Since it seems we have to have it in our psychology, however, then it might as well have some features that do us some good.

The internet connects society, and it permits the collection of huge amounts of data about people. You can be sure that companies are mining that data. I know only three cases where the results are shared back directly with the population base that contributes the raw data.

Today's example comes from a social dating website called OKcupid.com. People there post detailed descriptions of themselves. People also answer multiple-choice questions generated by other users of the site. Those questions make for a very interesting mix of ideas and potential interactions.

They occasionally mine their half-a-million profiles for nuggets of interesting knowledge. The news last week was specifically about findings of racial differences. Click on the gender image at the top of each racial profile to switch between male and female results. Being an infovore, I enjoyed reading through the revelations about various trends in the data.

Buried towards the end of the long entry, however, are some nuggets about literacy that are separated by religious identity. They used a formula called the Coleman-Liau Index to rate the "readability" (grade level) of the text that people write into their profiles. This formula ignores word meaning and instead focuses specifically on structure complexity (characters per word, words per sentence).

Here are the literacy charts by race, religion, and religious fervor. The results practically write their own punch lines.

( Cut for 3 large images... )
As they summarize at the end of the blog:


Kudos to the Buddhists and the Jews for keeping pace (almost) with the freethinkers.  That almost all of these groups operate at an average Junior High (7th and 8th grade) reading level is a testament to the efficacy of the American education system.

As it turns out, foeclan had a copy of "The End of Faith" in his room.  He's loaned it to me, and I've been reading it today.

How utterly depressing.  I thought I was already upset about Jesusites and other religious terrorists, but it gets worse when someone views it more objectively than I did and writes rebukes more succinctly than I did.  *sigh*  I hope this book offers some optimism later on.  It does have me wondering, though...

How is it that the Greeks let their gods fade into myth without giving them up altogether?  By what social process did the demands of religion transform into the insights of theater?

I want to know.  Maybe we can still duplicate their good fortune.

I hope, when the time comes, that I have the presence of mind to escape. Failing that... I hope, when the time comes, that I have the bravery to die rather than kill. I'm not certain of my own pacifist leanings, but I can at least hope to be a better example of a thoughtful person than my attackers.

Some 15 years ago, my boss (on the political right) and I (on the political left) were discussing politics and we both agreed that America would see civil war within our lifetimes unless civil discourse found a revival. People need to keep rational minds and civil tongues in order to safely explore opinions and to find points of compromise or at least find ways to live together in tolerance.

My subconscious seems ready to accept that civil discourse has ceased. I blame mostly the "right" for this effect (see: Nazi, death panels, gun stealing, constitution shredding, and other claims without any rational justification that I can find (and I have tried to look for it)), but the "left" is finally waking up to the fact that they are trying to debate with irrational people. I expect civility to collapse before Obama's first term is out. I voted for him because I hoped he had the brains and the voice to hold this country together through such tearing.

It is a deadly serious matter to me.

"God never "felt" anything about it, he commanded it and said they should be taken out and killed. ... You want to know why sodomites are recruiting? Because they have no natural predators."

and

"Go find one of these queer churches, they'll put the faggot behind the pulpit. ... Our country is run by faggots. ... He's a pedophile. He has been arrested for interacting with boys that are in their teenage years when he's in his 50s. ... That's Barney Frank. That's who just sold our country into fascism. ... I'm not going to stand by and let a faggot run the church. It's bad enough that we've got a lot of faggots running the government."

- both available at http://www.rightwingwatch.org/god-commands-you-kill-gays.html

I don't usually hang out at such websites, but I am trying to examine both far-right and far-left news this week. I could find no news article justifying the claims by this man about Barney Frank.  The closest that I could locate was an old Washington Post article, and it refutes his claims.  The "recruiting" argument is so ludicrous that it doesn't even deserve refutation here.

I'm beginning to wonder if the immediate dissolution of the United States might actually be the most peaceful outcome available. The "right" is getting shrill in a way that involves weaponry. Peaceful or deadly resolution? A matter of choice.

I hope that I choose to die rather than kill. Peaceful protest may lose as many lives as outright warfare, but it leaves its soldiers unscathed by moral compromise. I find it curiously coincident that God hates the same outsiders as the people themselves already hate.  God can kill humans by divine will. God has angels that can kill humans.  Why does God need angry mobs to kill for him, and on schedules that fit their own political tide?

"What does God need with a starship?"
- Captain Kirk, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYW_lPlekiQ

I find that certainty about who should live and who should die is a poison that seems to consume some people through and through.  Following the Abrahamic metaphor, the apple and the Knowledge Of Good And Evil seems to have poisoned some souls more than others.  A great many people seem certain of who is Good and who is Evil and what order should be established for every human on the planet.

They have a lot more certainty about such arrangements than I do.  I cannot be allowed to exist in their world, so they believe.  My own father has hunted queers as a group sport.  Is this brand of fun poised for a comeback?  When rationality and civility are totally lost, how will I respond?

I hope that I choose to die rather than kill, when they come for me.  But here too I lack their certainty.  Perhaps soon we will be able to distinguish the correct one (if any) among the four theories of human violence.