The point of a taboo isn't to stop a behavior from happening. Rather, it's to raise the social anxiety high enough so that it must be really really compelling for you to do it.

How about we make a law that says that the only people who can vote on abortion-related laws are women?

The people with Chris Rock's attitude tend to divide their race up into downers vs. boosters; to them, there are those in their race who are lifting it up, and there are those who are bringing it down. This isn't just about "Niggas vs. Black People." It's about "The Wrong Kind vs. Your Kind."

I know this because I have the same mentality. I divide my race(s) up that way too. I'm always hard on Indians (even though I'm only half), and I'm very hard on Filipinos as well. "They should know better," is my expression when I see Indian men dressed like thugs. And I feel the same way toward Filipinos who behave unnecessarily subservient and live with low ambitions.

My attitude toward other, more distant races, is decidedly ambivalent. My attitude toward whites and blacks is that they're too far away for me to care. If I see them screw up, I just write it off. If I see a crotchety old white man unnecessarily snarling at me for breaking some nonexistent rule, I shrug it off, "it's a white thing." If I see a rambunctious, black youth with baggy pants down to his ankles, I let it go, "it's a black thing."

So what does this make me? Of course I'm technically racist in that my snap judgments are biased by race, but I'm not really a racist in the pejorative sense. Or am I? Am I really into the self-improvement of my ethnic tribe(s), but not the improvement of other ones? Or does that spare me the racist label because I'm critical of my own?

I just finished watching The Deer Hunter (1978 Academy Award Winner for Best Picture) which has, as its centerpiece, compelling scenes of Russian roulette. I also recall a reddit thread from someone who claims to have played the game.

These are my thoughts:

Man, fucking Russian roulette. What the fuck. I cannot believe people actually play that game. That really pisses me off. That pisses me off more than people who commit suicide. People who play Russian roulette disrespect their lives more than those who commit suicide. The person who commits suicide commits. They're taking a definitive stance, "my life is not worth living. Non-living is a much much better alternative." People who play Russian roulette are saying, "my life IS equal to non-living." The person who commits suicide is essentially saying, "non-living is WAY better than my life." In effect, that puts life on a pedestal, because non-living has to triumph over it. The person who commits suicide doesn't have disregard for his or her life. Rather, he has really really strong emotions toward it. He hates life, it's destroying him, it's painful, he's suffering, and/or he's causing the suffering of others. Life is powerful. The person who plays Russian roulette, on the other hand, is a true nihilist.

One of the weirdest things I do is ponder really far into the hypothetical future. For example, I speak a lot to a hypothetical future wife. The following conversation with said wife happens to explain one of the highest of high-order algorithms running in my head.

But before I dive into it, I want to digress and address what I see as a perceived problem with the premise. What's wrong with having a conversation with a hypothetical future wife? I guess there's a disgruntled voice saying, "What right do you have to say that you deserve or want a wife? You shouldn't have a preconditioned desire for a wife, rather you should want a particular person, or rather she should want you equally as much as you do, and together, you two decide to become more committed later." Or maybe the objection is akin to the same objection to planning your retirement while still in your twenties. Anyway, call me old-fashioned, then, but I plan to be a family man when I grow up.

So here is the conversation I had with a future-wife-to-be:

Look [future-wife-to-be], different partners have different methods for making relationships work. Some focus on abstract values, like honesty, humility, or kindness. In moments of relationship stress, they mentally invoke one of these keywords as a guide for a way forward.

Other partners use plucky will, a desire to please, and a belief that a deep abiding sense of love will save the day.

I'm neither of these.

For me, my method is an abhorrence of negative patterns. If I find that we're arguing in the same manner week-after-week, with the same recovery-and-relapse, then that pattern will not last very long. I hate negative patterns. I hate setups. If I see that we have the preconditions akin to a lackadaisical yuppie couple that's just drifting further and further apart in intimacy until they become bored and cheat, and ruin their children's future, I will put the kibosh on that. I will break the cycle. I promise to break as many bad cycles as I can. There will be no "whee, life is a cycle, black and white, living together, and it's best to accept it, samsara and nirvana, as one."

This conversation was inspired by marathoning Californication. In the show, the main character, Hank Moody, and his wife, are caught in a negative cycle that's lasted for twelve years. Hank can't stop living the life of an unstable man-child and his wife can't quit being indecisive.

And unbeknownst to me, the whole time I was watching I had been screaming at my screen the whole time, "Change, you fool! Just, change!"

Chalk me up as an enemy of the, "Accept you for who you are" movement. If something about you is making the relationship break, you fix it! And if your repeated attempts to fix it keep failing, then fix that pattern. Break all negative patterns. Californication features frequent imagery about cigarettes and alcohol, which I believe is a great metaphor for what sinks relationships. It's an addiction to negative habits of communication, of socialization, of whatever.

Break all negative habits. That is the driving imperative of life!

Ensconced in the San Francisco Bay Area (5 years in Palo Alto, 1 year in San Carlos), reading the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and living in a crappy apartment embedded among the richest of the richest homes in the world (I lived a few blocks from Steve Jobs), I got a sense of how the ethos of the Radical 60s became distilled into a code that is followed by the wealthy people who go to Burning Man.

Here's the rules:
- Don't smoke cigarettes
- Do smoke weed
- Don't do cocaine
- Do psychedelics
- Don't drive a SUV
- Drive a hybrid
- Always recycle
- Spend a lot of time in nature
- Be a vegetarian
- Bike
- Have an open-minded, New Age attitude toward religion
- Meditate
- Wear earth tones
- Shop at Whole Foods or food co-ops
- Buy organic, free-range, fair trade, conflict-free.
- Vote liberal
- Openly support the common man

I'm still trying to figure out or summarize what exactly this is, and why the items on this list go together. It's something for sure, but what does it mean?

There's this amazing thread on reddit that stirred up a tense gender relations flame war. Here's the trigger:

I just had an argument with a girl I know. She was saying how it's unfair that if a guy fucks a different girl every week, he's a legend, but if a girl fucks just two guys in a year, she's a slut. So in response I told her that if a key opens lots of locks, then it's a master key. But if a lock is opened by lots of keys, then it's a shitty lock. That shut her up.

There's both a lot of thoughtful and sexist comments in that thread. Most of the comments are simply funny, though:

where can i meet some shitty locks

But I want to highlight my rejoinder:

Flip it around.

I think it's unfair that a celibate man is called a nerd, dork, lameass, anti-social, "virgin" (negative tone) etc., while a celibate woman is called innocent, chaste, pure, "virgin" (positive tone).

EDIT: I want to also throw in there that women are called "good" girls for remaining chaste. While as men are referred to "bad boys" (with positive connotations) for being pimps, studs, playas... whores.

For some reason, I procrastinated in watching the Showtime series Californication. When it first came out, there was a lot of buzz over its treatment of sexual addiction, and so I immediately assumed the show would be filled with gratuitous scenes involving infidelity. Naturally, a sex addict's victims must include innocent, committed women, otherwise he'd have trouble getting his fix. And I realized I was sick of seeing scenes and imagery of infidelity on television. Maybe it's because both my parents are conservative immigrants (dad from India, mom from Philippines—countries where divorce rates are in the single digits), that somehow I have a natural revulsion to the casual way in which American television handles cheating.

For a while now, movies and TV shows that involve cheating would repulse me in the same way a bloody car wreck would. It's like I'd have to cover my eyes. For the longest time, I stayed away from watching Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which was marketed as a story about committed women who "get in touch with their inner soul" through flings with European dudes, simply because that gets under my skin.

But, alas, in watching Californication, I discovered something more disturbing than the infidelity. Surprisingly, it wasn't the sexual sin that bothered me the most. That was actually reasonable, as the main character Hank (played by David Duchovny), is a washed-out sex junkie, and his sexual adventures seem like sordid affairs, rather than wondrous escapades. *Phew*. Instead, what bothered me the most is the depiction of his twelve-year-old daughter Becca. Becca was born out-of-wedlock to Hank's ex-domestic partner, who Hank is still courting (even after twelve years!). In the pilot episode, Hank and his ex-domestic partner are called into school and told that their little angel is getting fondled by boys. That's not disturbing to either parent, but then the teacher says that Becca, when scolded, replies, "How else am I supposed to get boys to like me?"

Fast-forward ten minutes into the episode, and we find Hank rescuing Becca from a house party in Hollywood where threesomes and cocaine are behind random doors. When Hank reaches Becca poolside, she's just about ready to take a hit from the marijuana pipe.

And that's what got under my skin. That's the new car wreck for me. Because when I see that situation, I think of the most frustrating problem imaginable: How do you deal with a child who is over-eager to lose his or her innocence? Most solutions do not work. Let's consider the options. Okay, you can discipline the kid, right? Nope, that doesn't work. That just backfires and makes them resent you. Okay, you could move to Whitopia somewhere, maybe some Mormon community in Utah? Nope, that doesn't work, as study after study shows that they sin as much in Utah as anywhere else. Plus, kids have an amazing sense of skepticism toward the meticulous sheltering that their parents construct. It just inspires a backlash. Think of all the depressed cutters in stultifying suburbs ("But honey, I thought we were moving our family to paradise. What happened to my little angels?").

You don't understand how much this frustrates me. In those brief moments, seeing Becca willfully defy adult expectations, I had this harrowing sense of impending doom. Little voices entered my head, "Your daughter's gonna grow up and become the town bike," or "Your son's going to be a baggy pants-wearing gang-banger." My friend—who is aptly named "Guru"—consoled me, "You should seek out professional help tomorrow and tell them 'I'm concerned my unborn, un-conceived, no-mother-assigned yet, daughter will smoke pot and have sex at ten years of age.' Bet your average town psychotherapist hasn't seen that one yet."

But I think I have the answer, and I think it's full-proof. This comes not only from my personal experience, but mainly based on how my aunt and her husband have been raising their three daughters in Palos Verdes, a wealthy neighborhood in Los Angeles. The eldest is seventeen, and the youngest is ten, and somehow these kids have grown up well-adjusted and remained oblivious to the temptations that assault LA's youth. By observing them, I've developed a unifying theory for parenting.

The first thing you'll notice is that all of them have excellent relationships with their father. This is backed by studies showing that the date when women lose their virginity is correlated to how good of a relationship they have with their dads. If the relationship is good, the daughter is more likely to postpone wooing boys in High School, and instead focus on getting into a good college. Only then, will she grow up sexually toward the end of college or shortly thereafter. Okay, fine, but how are my cousin's father-daughter relationships so good? Well, for one, the dad works at home as a computer programmer. So he's always there. He's also interested in doing activities with his daughters. He's the dad with the fanny pack and the camcorder, taking his kids to Disneyland and music lessons. He's a soccer dad. He's dedicated. You'll never see him drinking with buddies, blowing off his family. In addition, both parents are still together. That's key, as that maximizes the total time spent in parent-child interaction. The parents don't have to trade visitation dates with each other, and instead they have family dinners with their kids, night-after-night. No parent comes home so late from work that they have to slip their kids some bills to fend for themselves at the local McDonald's.

So what you see as the recurring theme in this picture is "time." The number one thing you can do to raise your children well is to spend time with them. Lots of time. Talk to them. Don't put Baby Einstein on the TV. Don't delegate parenting to someone else. As Chris Rock said, "You know your daughter's going to become a stripper if she calls her grandma 'Mom'".

Be in front of them, all the time. Be their TV. Pour constant stimulation and inherent wisdom. Don't worry too much about teaching lessons or active parenting. My parents rarely scolded me. Instead they smothered me with conversation. I couldn't escape! They talked to me like an adult, and they talked all the time. There were barely any "timeouts," as that would separate me from them. Even as I got busy with the Internet in the late 90s, locked in my room surfing for hours, I still had every meal with my parents, and often with my grandma, and we'd talk about everything, from politics to business. To this day, even though I live a thousand plus miles away from home, there is no distance between me and my parents.

The worst case scenario, if you follow this plan, is that your kids become so occupied with their homework and the time spent with you, that they'll have no time to wander into mischief.

So thank you Californication. In spite of all of the show's raunchy titillation, there's a treasure trove of moral lessons.

Writing an essay about the love of food is the kind of index exercise that writers go through, similar to how every comedian eventually has their own way of re-telling the Aristocrats joke. So this is how I'd phrase a love-of-food essay:

My diet for today. Yikes:

Breakfast Tacos
Horchata
Chicken Fries
Cheesy Tots
Twix Bars
Ramen
Vitamin Water

How did I end up here? It all started two weeks ago, when my dad visited, and paid for every meal.

Well, scrolling back further, let's look at my base diet. My diet/life has usually been: wake up, dick around on the Internet, then have either a bowl of cereal or oatmeal. After some work, 1 or 2 PM rolls around and I get a mild hunger pain, and so I get up and out and acquire lunch. Work some more, then by around 7-9pm, I seek dinner in order to catch restaurants before they close and also to offset any hunger pains that may strike me as I try to go to sleep.

Along comes my dad, and I start my day off with my breakfast routine, but then the lunches and dinners with my dad are always at nice places. And since I want to take advantage of the situation, I go for the big stuff. Without limits, I'm eating big food all the time. While as before, I'd always go to the places that had the cheapest meals that I knew: like fish tacos at Wahoos or chicken burritos at Chipotle. Eating with my dad, on the other hand, meant having chicken fried steak for lunch and then maybe lamb marsala at an Indian restaurant at night.

And then, amidst all this big food, I had two bad days. On both of these days I had exercised, and afterwards, I initially felt fine, like I normally do, but as an hour or so passed, I got really tired. Like dreadfully tired with headaches and stuff. I had trouble sourcing it, and I came to the idea that it was the food. The mantra, "eating is unhealthy," recurred over and over in my mind. My body was rebuilding muscle tissue while also digesting a steak from dinner, a deep dish pizza from lunch, and some oatmeal in the morning.

Toward the end of my dad's trip, I broke my routine, and stopped eating breakfast. This helped ease the load on my body. And then when my dad was gone, I kicked it up a notch and decided to stop eating altogether. So, if I was dicking around on the Internet, and wanted to keep dicking around, and the idea of eating oatmeal or cereal was unappealing, I should skip it! Or if I was hungry, but not hungry enough to be motivated to get up and find food, I should let it go!

As a result, I re-learned some things about my body and its relationship to hunger. I noticed that hunger pains were more temporary than I had remembered. When you are truly hungry, your hunger pains last for an hour. But back in boring, 3-meal-a-day land, I'd have virtually no hunger pains, or if I did, they'd only last 5 minutes and be very mild. And back then, I'd seize those 5 minutes and just get up and go find food, because hey, "strike while the iron's hot!" In the new way of non-eating, the trick is to wait till the iron gets hot and stays hot for a while; that's when you know you're simmering with hunger.

I also started to love food. A lot. In the new way, I have a 50% chance of savoring a meal, while as back in boring-diet land, I savored maybe 2% of my meals. Now, I eat with zest.

But before I get excited, I have to return back to the fearful nefarious message at the top of this post.

As I mentioned earlier:

Breakfast Tacos
Horchata
Chicken Fries
Cheesy Tots
Twix Bars
Ramen
Vitamin Water

That was my diet today. Instead of having square meals, I was bottom-feeding junk meals to stave off starvation. At El Chilito, I was eating some breakfast tacos, savoring the hell out of them. And then I ordered some horchata (a drink of almonds, sesame seeds, rice, barley) and drank the whole thing, which usually never happens. Since I'm on Recession-budget diet, I'd've never ordered soda or special drinks. But the exceptions I'd permit myself are when I really want something, and that horchata made my heart race. Especially when I googled it so I could read the ingredients in order to confirm that the $3 drink was going to deliver. And it did!

After that meal, I got distracted with other things. Sure hunger pains hit me, but I was busy. I was playing video games. Eventually I delayed eating so long that restaurants closed (this was a Sunday). Sure I could go to the traditional go-to late-night places, like Kerbey Lane or Magnolia, but for some reason, those sit-down places weren't conjuring interesting meals for me. Besides, I was busy running errands, no time for a sit-down place.

But as I got to my errands place (Wal-Mart), I saw a Burger King. And I remembered that Burger King had tater tots! Zip, I changed my direction and went to the drive-thru. I saw the sign, "drive-thru open until midnight!" Success. It was only 11:40 PM.

And this is when I really started to reinforce my new-wave diet. See, the way I was thinking, it's like my hunger saved me. It guided me better than my bland stupid planning ways would have. My hunger made me jump right at the Burger King, to follow my craving. If I had been planning, let's say, to get some late-night tots, because I wasn't that hungry—so lacking in hunger that I had the wherewithal to plan eating—I probably would have gone straight to Wal-Mart so I could craftily reward myself with tots. But noo, my hunger said I needed tots now, and had I gone to Wal-Mart first, I would've arrived at the drive-thru after midnight. See!

And I saw the tots on the menu, and my eyes ravished the menu. I saw chicken strips, no wait, even better: chicken fries! Wow, so I ordered both and chomped through them in the parking lot, feeling like a champ.

And then I went to Wal-Mart for my errands, but I got some thirsty-pains, and so I bought my other favorite drink, Vitamin Water.

As I drove back, I got a craving for ramen. And so I bolted to the 7-11, acquired a Maruchen ramen pack, slapped that in the pot, boiled, bam, done, and in 5 minutes, I was sucking on MSG-powder-stained noodles.

I know this is all unhealthy, but since I'm experimenting with this diet, I'm letting myself go crazy just to see what happens. But this day of junk food is making me think my diet is simply a matter of jumping from craving to craving. I wonder what tomorrow will bring when this exciting diet goes into practice during daylight hours. Will I have square, but epic meals since normal restaurants will be open? Or will I go for the junk food all the same. Who knows, fireworks in my taste buds seem eminent.

"There is no love sincerer than the love of food."
George Bernard Shaw

I think a lot about gender roles and power structures between women and men. I cannot be easily pigeonholed into feminism or masculism. I can't even be pigeonedholed into the negative spaces of those fields. I'm not an anti-feminist (nor an anti-masculist). I want to somehow turn all these thoughts I have about gender roles into some kind of work, but I don't know how, so instead, I'll shoot from the hip as the ideas come.

This one idea will be about the innate superiority of females over males.

There are these nodes floating in the global consciousness, at least maybe in the academic soup, that women are more human than men. On a basic level, women do have more equipment than men. How do you define "more"? "More" can be defined by a sense of order. There is more complexity to women. There are more labels for things that women have than labels for things men have.

Hell, women have factories for manufacturing other people. Men ain't got nothing on that. I've often heard men expressing their jealousy of women because they can make people. The whole miracle of pregnancy and birth goes on in a woman, and when the kid comes out, the father looks at it and already knows it's more her possession than his, and he feels jealous because he didn't labor as hard to bring it into this world, even though it shares half his genes. Even when a man complains about the under appreciation of his contribution to child rearing—"I put food on the table!"—they always seem like crocodile tears.

If I piece together things I've read in biology, it's like men are reduced, pruned-down females. Women are XX while as men are a stunted growth XY shrivel. After the pruning, they are then amped up with testosterone which explains why they ultimately become more powerful.

Forget brain power. Sure men have more spatial cognitive capabilities, and probably better aptitude at numbers, but women have better judgment and can multitask. If you were creating an artificial intelligence, it would be harder to make a woman than a man. Because to program the extra features that men have, such as the ability to move through 3D spaces and crunch numbers, it would not be as hard as programming the extra features that women have.

And yet, I believe in the importance of men and think masculism is a very under appreciated field of study.

The Filipinos are interesting. We were watching Wowowee on Filipino TV at a Filipino restaurant, and there were no subtitles, and up on the screen was this man with no teeth. Well, he had one tooth, like a can-opener tooth, and the MC was asking him some questions. And then the camera moved to the audience, onto what looked like his daughter, and you could make out she was talking about wanting to grow up and become a nurse. And then the camera went back to the old man, and he was crying.

I couldn't pick up exactly what was going on, but based on what I know of Filipino variety shows, the basic gist is usually an impoverished person getting a major break. And eventually this man did. He won half a year's salary right then and there without performing any major feat of trivia-recall or other game-show achievement.

This show couldn't happen in the US. Too many people would be disgusted by the display of rednecks and would deride the show, commenting like, "Ah, that hick is just going to spend it on booze and hookers."

In the Philippines, this is about the Cinderella story. In the US, just witnessing these people is self-debasing.

On a related note, I feel disgusted by "People of Wal-Mart," in both meanings of the term. I find the styles and fashion sense of the unwitting subjects to be repulsive. Simultaneously, I find the harping on Wal-Mart repulsive. I think hating on Wal-Mart is what makes liberals unattractive. Actually, among liberals, making fun of Wal-Mart makes you cool. But my gut sense of Wal-Mart is that it employs a ton of low-income people and it provides goods and services at really affordable prices to the poor (and wealthy alike).

If you hate Wal-Mart, what would you want in its place? Do you want fancy boutique stores that only the middle- and upper-class can afford? Sure, expelling Wal-Mart will improve property values, but at whose expense? You're making someone else's commute a little bit longer.

So does this make me a bleeding heart conservative?

When I watch those Filipino programs, my first thought is, "aw, poor guy," but then my second thought isn't, "let's throw tons of money at him." Instead, I ideate about what would it take for them to better themselves, or hoping they find some solace in something healthy, like the joy of family or good fun.

Or I'm an elite who's just trying to prove he's more enlightened than both conservatives and liberals. And more self-aware.

As I write this, I potentially have someone watching over my shoulder. My friend is sleeping on a couch behind me, he probably can't read my screen from that distance, and he's probably asleep, but there's always a chance that he can read this. Despite his quietude, he's present.

I have this image in my head of Radiohead's House of Cards music video where Thom Yorke's face is mapped by a 3D camera so that it looks like he's swimming in a sea of polygons.

It's like the frozen Han Solo's face extruding from the carbonite. What I see in these two images is how my awareness is drawn and teased away when others are in the room. I become partially less aware of myself and a little constantly aware of the other. Even if the other person is completely silent, sleeping in my room, extra resources are devoted to making sure I don't make any noises. Or let's say they're even sleeping in the next room, at any moment they could burst in, so I have to modify my behavior to prepare for that event. For example, I won't be doing naked yoga. That would make things awkward.

They also say that people who live alone, but have pets, lead healthier lives, both physically and psychically. One idea is that you develop more empathy. I read a study showing that children who grow up with pets develop more empathy. But perhaps, it has more to do with how pets impact your attention. You always, at minimum, have a background process running in your mind tracking their movements and needs. This creates enough of a distraction that you avoid over-thinking and over-introspection, two common causes of depression and dysphoria.

I often wonder why I spend so much time on reddit. Reddit is an online link sharing community filled with edgy and obnoxious computer nerds. It reminds me of some of the people I associated with in High School, who had nothing better to do than pull pranks and moderate chat rooms all day. And reddit has all these cultural connections to 4chan which represents the most raw and sociopathic tendencies of online communities.

This population of useless nerds is growing. They're the kind of people that play World of Warcraft all day. Who are these people?

And then it dawned on me. Do these people represent the glorious new leisure class that modernism was supposed to deliver to us? The expectation of a broad leisure class (not to be confused with other leisure class theories) comes from the assumption that all this technologically-created economic abundance should unchain people from doing things they don't need to do, allowing them to be creative.

But what has really happened is that the candidates for this leisure class simply don't sign up. Instead they sign up for more credit cards, rack up girlfriends and boyfriends, consume more than they need, and then they have to go back the grind.

Online geeks, on the other hand, have no real world social lives or material needs, and consequently have loads of free time. By simply holding a part-time job as a Network Admin, these guys can afford a small apartment and an infinite supply of ramen and pizza.

Instead of using that freedom to be creative, they just goof off and slack. This is the darkside of that glorious creative class we were promised.

(On the other hand, given large enough legions of these goons, a small percentage of them turn their obsessions into things like Microsoft, Apple or Google.)

Lately I've been unseating my attachment to modernism. The way I interpret modernism is that there is an arrow of history that ultimately points toward progress and the betterment of humanity. At the high point of my attachment to modernism, I believed in the coming of a technological singularity, when computers get so fast that you can simulate a brain in the computer, and then eventually make even faster computers, ad infinitum until we create a techno-utopia for our virtual selves.

In a more general sense, I've felt that somehow our moment in history has been exceptional, which has led to some biases in my thinking. For example, I have believed that America's high divorce rate was somehow a trapping of modernism. That household appliances and the Pill liberated women, or that the high life expectancy makes long marriages insufferable.

But I don't think I have that kind of bias anymore. For example, we have a burgeoning leisure class, but that's not unique to America in the 21st Century. History has shown that abundance has recurred enough times that humans have developed adaptations for it. There have been many societies and tribes that had century-long resource booms. For example, a tribe that had control of a desert all of a sudden has its land greened because of a lake formation. That tribe and their children, and their children's children, are rich and fat off the land for centuries. What did they do? They had unruly teenagers who were bored with ennui.

Or I like learning how the Transcendentalists of the 1800s were very much like the drug-addled hippies of the 1960s. Somehow we think history begins at the start of World War II, and that everything after that is history's unique gift to us.

But things like teenagers hating their parents, mid-life crises, prevalent ennui, high rates of depression, high divorce rates, boredom, slackers, drugs, these are all things we tend to ascribe to the trappings of a modern American syndrome. But I bet you these things have all recurred many times in history.

I'll admit, I don't believe in evolution deep in my bones. The theory of evolution is something I rationally acknowledge to be true, but I can't comprehend evolution the same way that I can't comprehend really large numbers like a million or a billion. You say that a million Earths could fit inside the Sun? I don't have grasp of what that means. Likewise, I guess a billion years of mutations and natural selection would eventually lead bacteria to become a human. Who really knows?

I think I'm sold on the mechanics of evolution. The fittest do survive, and they have changes that they pass on. But damned if I still don't have an internalized confidence in how the eye evolved. It doesn't matter how many damn times I read about it. Or take the evolution of consciousness and our ability to perceive colors. For example, how do I know that the Green that I see is the same as the Green that others see? Where is that green stored in my mind? Again, who knows how that kind of phenomena could have evolved.

My political instincts tell me that if I told a wingnut the logical inconsistency between Confederate flags and patriotism, I'd be marginalized as a smart ass, and that'd be that. Or they'd say, "Hey, my buddy Jimmy fought in Iraq, and he waves the Confederate Flag. Are you accusing him of being anti-American??"

HOW DO YOU GET THROUGH TO THESE PEOPLE??

The challenge in answering that question is the reason I listen to Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity.

I think I've arrived at a better understanding of racial pride. Check out this post on Devil's Aggregate.

The knot in my mind that I went to bed with was tighter in the morning.

chartreuse is a good color

interface of the cheseeburger