Science is in Intensive Care

Attempts to popularize Science and rationality as it was purveyed 30 or 40 years ago was invariably done by someone with credentials, and who approached it in a systematic manner (Martin Gardner comes to mind), and where what you learned invariably made sense in one's further readings*.
Now.....the best way to put it is that we are screwed. The popularization of Science has been taken over by movies, TV and the mass media, and there is so much that is twisted, rampantly Procrustean, or just plain wrong that there is literally nowhere to begin.
It may be that Mass Man never had any real chance of integrating Science with spirituality and a balanced view of the world, but we'll likely never find out.

*My citations here should in no way be construed as to apply any label of atheist or rationalist to me. Nothing could be further from the truth.

How Can I Interpret This?

The following was recounted to me, and did not happen to me personally; I should feel myself having suffered temporary insanity if it had.

The interlocutor of the person relating the story was talking about a boy who grew up with parents who were both deaf.

He remarked, "Isn't that a wonderful way to grow up?"

Does this carry the probable meaning, that in the case of this particular boy, growing up with deaf parents enabled him to better relate to the disabled (however arguable the point), or

...does it imply that all persons would be better off being raised by parents with disabilities?

I think the first is questionable, the second preposterous, and yet I cannot escape the feeling (knowing this person only slightly) that he really believes the more global proposition to be true.

We live in a marvelous age, wandering around in our tiny hermetic worlds.

Remember Journalism?

A soldier dies in Afghanistan. As someone remarked, "There are two rules in war, 1, that young men die, and, 2, you can't change Rule #1." Presumably, any adult understands that war, and its attendant casualties, cannot be prevented so long as the human race does business in any of its known avatars.

The role of journalism should be to report, basically, and do it clearly, unflinchingly, and with the bare minimum of adjectives and adverbs. So- what happend to journalism? In today's example, a U.S. soldier, Joshua Bernard, is fatally wounded in Afghanistan, serving his nation gallantly and in the best traditions of the United States Marine Corps.

The Daily Mail online reported, and I can only wish they were not typical of today's news reporting. Unfortunately, this kind of reportage can be seen on a daily basis, without even searching. The first sentence of the article:

"It is a deeply disturbing image which depicts the grim reality of war - a fatally wounded U.S. soldier lies slumped in the mud as fellow marines desperately try to save him as his young life ebbs away."

This, of course, is all too typical of much reportage, not only that coming out of Albion, but all too many -perhaps even a majority of news outlets. It's bad reporting, pure and simple.....and those "Limeys" didn't bother to capitalize "Marines."

The sentence, as it should have been written: "It is an image which depicts the reality of war- a wounded soldier lies in the mud as fellow Marines try to save him." All else is hype, gloss, dross, unwarranted hyperbole.

It is as if The Mail were attempting to construct an inflammatory and divisive article, instead of reporting on an event; to attempt to construct division through verbiage instead of providing evidence of such division.

Oh, America is divided, all right, but not about Marines lying in the mud. They're mainly divided over why the government can't afford all the things they want, why the recession won't go away.

It seems fitting to let the last word here go to some U.S. Marine graffiti in Iraq: "America is not at war. The Marines are at war. America is at the mall."

Do You Like What I Like?

Here's the article of the day, in the Daily Illini, student newspaper at our nearby Illinois (...it used to be The University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, but is now being marketed as simply "Illinois," and....don't ask.)

Here's a Brave New World quote, now:

"I like the First Amendment," said Will Green, graduate student and member of the Graduate Employee's Organization. "And our University doesn't respect that."

And why should it be incumbent on anyone to "like" what you "like," Will? Answer: it shouldn't. Our rights proceed from basic principles antecedent to government, so that government is subsidiary to them, not that government is obliged to "like" or "respect" them. It's perfectly obvious that Will has never moved beyond an elementary school playground level of analysis. No government respects your rights, Will, it can only fear what will happen if it transgresses, and in the meantime, will attempt to get away with whatever it can.

I don't respect you OR your ideas, Will. How do you like that?

Horrifying x 10^23

This morning's Fox News featured a pic of a car hitting cyclists in a bike race in Mexico. According to the news reader, it was "-horrifying, horrifying, horrifying, horrifying." Four. I counted them. Now that we've bankrupted all the extreme adjectives and adverbs in English on a daily or even hourly basis, the only thing to do is repeat them for emphasis.

As to why this is so much more horrifying than other people smashed to jelly by motor vehicles, I imagine it's the usual- "-we got good video."

Yodish

Non-language of the day: "People may not be accepting of that."

Shame is that a......