Vegas

So we went to Las Vegas and had tons of fun, but as always there were lessons to be learned.  I just want to make a few observations so you can share in our fun on this trip.  I really was surprised at the number of people in Vegas for the Christmas holiday and frankly how little I felt the Christmas was on us.  It was funny though that a couple weeks after Hanukah there was still a giant menorah on Freemont Street.  But really the only real Christmas feel came from the fact that every so often I would run into a drunk couple with Santa hats on or a woman dressed as an elf letting people take pictures with her for tips.  But elves really would have more clothes on, it is cold at the North Pole.  

It was a great trip and we did have to add to the trip because the snow in Indiana so we got to enjoy an extra night.  It meant spending more money than we wanted to on adult beverages, but that is just what you do on vacation right?  But there are certain things that you might not want to do on vacation, so here is some advice. 

1. When the pilot feels the need to announce for the third time to honor the seatbelt light on the plane pay attention.  Turbulence will toss you around if you are walking around the plane.  I know it is hard to believe but you aren’t Superman.  It takes a lot to make the Southwest flight attendants angry, you should be proud. 
2. Understand that even though you have stepped off the escalator, that doesn’t mean it stops.  People are coming up behind you, don’t just stand there trying to figure out what out which direction you want to turn.  There is a Law of Physics that states we can’t both occupy the same space at the same time.  You will be run into, sorry that means you spilled your way overpriced alcoholic Kool-Aid.
3. To that end, while it makes for a cool picture the walkway crossing the Strip is not a photo studio.   I promise I will wait to let you take a picture but when you set up a tripod and start composing a scene by moving the family around you will get photo-bombed. 
4. Also unintended photobombs are so common in Vegas we should think of a special name for them.  I just can’t believe how surprised people are when you walk into their photo however that they are talking, in an elevator that is open, in a walkway, in front of restroom doors, etc.  What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but is well documented for further use? 
5. Family vacations are fun, but if you find yourself being told by a casino boss that just because the slot machine has cartoon characters on it does not mean you are allowed to have a toddler on your lap while you play you might consider your next family vacation at real Disneyland. 
6. Oh and the long hallways of the MGM are designed for running, I get that.  Just not 3am with your toddler laughing so loud car alarms are going off. 
7. If you stood in line to get tickets to a show who’s title plays off the 50 Shades of Gray books, and you know it is marketed that way, don’t complain that there is a number in it with handcuffs and bondage.  That is the hook that got many of the others there.  It is like going to the Christmas show and complaining you don’t like the colour red.  

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So there it is. I am not really complaining I just noticed these things and wanted to share. People watching was a good part of the trip but mostly it was getting away with Dianne and having fun things to do we don’t normally do here in Indy.  Big props to southwest airlines for helping us avoid the storm and not charging us for the change to what turned out to be a better flight.  Bit ups to MGM for basically giving us a free night.  If you find yourself in Vegas and want great food and the buffet experience the Wicked Spoon is amazing, and the single portion presentation is amazing.

I hope whatever you did at the end of the year was great for you.  Enjoy and New Year and no worries, I will get back to writing about politics, religion and the world around.  I mean I hear there is a fiscal cliff we are about to go over, as Thelma said to Louise, “Let’s keep going”.

Still Waiting for the End of the World

I know people who were preparing for the end of the world today, just in case.  They aren’t spending thousands or hundreds of thousands on bunkers or creating a series of safe houses in the wilds of Montana, but bought bottled water, canned goods, ammo etc.  They said that it was hedging a bet, you know who knows what will happen?  That is an odd way to go through life.  While I am sure they would find it crazy to buy an amulet to ward off werewolves, it is the same mindset.  In fact, I am sure not only does an anti-werewolf amulet exist someone has a really nice house because of it.  You see we are as Charles Pierce calls it, living in Idiot America. 

In Pierce’s Idiot America facts are unimportant.  Flash, feelings and what Steve Colbert called truthiness are what drive a discussion.  Internet memes and often repeated falsehoods take on a life of their own and become statements that do not need proof but must be proved wrong by anyone questioning it.  Take the often-repeated story 15 years ago that Al Gore said he invented the Internet.  It wasn’t true, wasn’t close to true.  But we still hear it today.  Moving forward many people get their information from sources that are interested in making their listeners or readers feel good so they stick with them so facts are less important than making the fan base happy.  In the last Presidential election that quickly translated to the tactic of a candidate who’s spokesperson said, when confronted with a fact-checked ad, that fact checkers would not direct the campaign.  Think about that.  A candidate for the Presidency was not going to allow people to prove him lying to have a voice in his thinking.  It reminds me of the opening statement at the Creation Museum in Kentucky.  It states openly that anything that is found that doesn’t prove their reading of the Bible would be rejected as untrue, regardless of evidence. 

It is in this world that it is easy to get people to invest in 2012 bunkers at prices reaching $1.7 million and sending money to a man who says he will save the world by jumping off of Bell Rock in Sedona.  The latter of the two was fascinating, not sure what he needed the money for but his website had a large PayPal section.  Perhaps the temporal vortex he was going to slide through to reboot the computer program that he says is our reality has an entry fee.  As of this writing he was suppose to make the jump at 6:12 this am.  No word that he did it but we are all here.  So…..

So in the wake of the deadly shooting in Newtown Connecticut we were ripe for fiction in the response.  First came the idea that this never happened when we had prayer in school, which of course is not true at all.  There were school shootings in the country before it was a country but even more so, the last school shooting was at a Christian college.  Then we had a repeated notion that we shouldn’t do anything to modify gun ownership in this country as the 9-11 hijackers used box cutters.  Funny I can no longer take box cutters or any other sharp objects on planes.  In fact because someone tried to ignite a bomb in his shoe I have to have my shoes x-rayed on each trip and because someone had a liquid explosive in his underwear we can’t take liquids in quantity on planes and women have to prove their breast milk is breast milk.   My favorite meme was that this doesn’t happen in Israel because Israeli teachers are armed.  While that is untrue it didn’t stop people from reposting a picture of a security guard with a group of children on a field trip.  Seeing as some of the areas of Israel can be considered war zones, that kinda makes sense.   Which led to Wayne LaPierre, the head of the NRA speaking at what he trolled people into thinking was press conference but was a statement inform of reporters as he didn’t take questions.  What he called for was a registry of the mentally ill (something that exists in 36 states) and an armed police officer in every of the nations 100,000 public schools.  What the NRA fails to mention or even acknowledge is that at Columbine, an armed guard exchanged fire with Eric Harris.   These can certainly be part of the solution in general but they are a starting point not an ending point.  LaPierre and the NRA does not want to begin to discuss limiting access to guns, in fact they lobbied recently to allow people on the terror watch list to get guns. 

But what LaPierre said made the right feel good.  They cheered him on and made fun of protesters who tried to disrupt the statement.  By tomorrow there will be people continued the lies about gun free zones and the use of armed guards in grocery stores, banks and churches.  And people will believe every word. 

Today is a holiday to Idiot America, both those who threw money at hucksters who were going to save them from Planet X, solar flares or returning Mayan gods and those who would rather believe a lobbyist or talk show host over real evidence. 

So, it really doesn’t matter what you believe is the best course of action, either about crazy fake prophecy or about the current social and fiscal problems facing our country what you should do is find a way to get real information.  I know I used some right wing examples and that is my frustration for today but I could have easily said the right is not going to push grandma over a cliff, Romney did not kill a woman with cancer and rich people don’t want to have slavery return.  We are better than that.  We are smarter than that and we can find a way to come together and leave the shrill voices alone.

Happy Solstice and welcome to the end of world.  

It's the End of the World as We Know it....

...and I feel fine.

I have been overwhelmed by the pain of the recent school shooting and the tsunami of ignorance that followed.  Of course I waded into it and didn't even put on my water wings.  So today I want to write about something more fun.  The end of the world.

Seriously, this Friday I am going to an end of the world party.  I don't know what I am going to bring but part of me wants to give everyone green bananas.  I have lived through many dates that should have been the end of world in my life time.  Modern day prophets have used everything they could to calculate the end of the time.  Some with horrific effect as followers killed themselves and others, while more often the leader of such movements wakes the next day and says whoops, the batteries in my calculator were running low.  New date to come.

This week is a particular confluence of end time hilarity.  You see, the Annunaki are returning with an entire planet, the Mayans long-count calendar is turning over, the Nostradamus crowd looked back to find something to hang their hat on not wanting to be left out, and of course the continued drumbeat of those looking for the signs and portents that match their reading of the Bible, and bad weather, dead animals, and the recent re-election of the President all gave them fodder for gigabytes of blog posts for at least the rest of the week.

I could go into detail telling you why these are all wrong, but why insult your intelligence.  You know that if a planet was on its way by Friday some 12 year old some where would be posting pictures of it on facebook because it would be apparent in the night sky and frankly the day time sky.  (though look at pictures of Nibiru online, they are nice examples of a contemporary Ink blot test.  Some see a planet and two plumbers from New England would see ghosts).

More often than not, people who speak of secret knowledge and government hiding information from you usually have either a financial or mental health need for it.  The first is just cynical though would make P.T. Barnum happy but the second is sad.  We have turned a great deal of this into entertainment so we can read Dan Brown's books, watch Ancient Aliens (on the History Channel) and see the Mayan Calendar on the evening news.  We love it but we should fear that which is too easily believed that is certainly beyond belief.  Seriously, how can anyone think lens flairs are a planet hiding behind the sun and what does that mean for the rest of their life?  I don't know, what I do know is that whenever there has been an end of the world panic people have died.  I hope this weekend is uneventful.

Judaism teaches that creation never ended and we are always adding to this on-going creation.  Everyday the world is new so every day a world ends.  We help to create the new world that we live in.  As we move forward in the wake of recent tragedy remember the ingredients that we bring to the recipe of the new world will be important to what the final product will turn out to be. Don't let the hurt we all still feel and the anger over the financial uncertainty be the main focus of the world you build.  Look for the joy we all have somewhere in our lives.  Focus on that and as Friday comes and goes, and the sun rises on Saturday, take the moment to create the new world you want.  I know I will as I pack for a vacation.

God Had Nothing To Do With It

Today, many of my friends have taken time to remember the death of a good friend of theirs who lost his life two years ago today.  In the interconnected world we live in I could feel the mix of sadness and sweet memories as they spoke about the joy he brought to them and how much he is still missed.  I didn’t know him well, but what I did know of him was that he made sure he always had his friends’ backs and that he would reach into any sadness they might encounter and try to take away the sting.  The memory of the pain I saw in people’s faces reminded me of a few weeks ago when a woman in her 50s was taken from this world have succumb to cancer.  A woman who brought great joy to all she encountered, who raised two beautiful and caring daughters and was married to a man who I am proud to call a friend. 

In both cases there were people who asked me about fairness and what God’s place in the loss is.  How can a truly loving God simply take these and so many other young lives?  People who were lights to the world and had so much to live for are gone.  Where is the justice in that?  Ironically, when someone dies in Jewish tradition one thing that is said is, Baruch Dayen Emet Blessed by the true judge.  It is designed as a way to push aside the question of fairness and understand we may not fully understand God’s ways, but somehow they are right.  When I hear the word Judge however I do long for justice and in some deaths I can’t find it and do not want to worship a God who is so cryptic.  I had enough of that 25 years ago. 

When Linda was murdered there are a few moments that stick out for me in relation to trying to understand why God would allow someone to take her life.  One was the medical examiner, who trying to comfort Linda’s father, a minister, said “This is God’s will”.  To wish the good reverend replied, “God had nothing to do with this”.  Later a man, trying to explain away the murder suggested that God was trying to get my attention to live right.  In both cases there was a well intentioned approach to the unexplained but the default position was to “give it up to God”.  As Joni Mitchell writes in her take on the Book of Job as Job suffers he calls out to God:

Tell me why do you starve the faithful?

Why do you crucify the saints?

And you let the wicked prosper

You let their children frisk like deer

And my loves are dead or dying, or they don't come near

([Antagonists:] We don't despise your chastening

God is correcting you)

But is that the God we want is that truly the God of Torah?  It is not what I want.  I don't see God as the Greeks saw Zeus.  God does not play with our lives this way and if God did, is that God truly worthy of worship?

We are once again tested in these thoughts on a less personal but more profound way.   Today a disturbed man walked into an elementary school and shot and killed 20 children and 6 adults.  Five year olds had their life ended by bullets from a person who we now learn had mental health issues.  While we may never know why he felt the need to kill those children and then himself, what I do know is God had nothing to do with.  Don’t look for some master convoluted plan to make it part of some Rube Goldberg machine to a good end.  It isn’t.  Children are dead, dead because a man decided they were going to be and had the means and opportunity.  In the coming weeks we will debate why it was easy to do and trust me I will be on that, but tonight I want to address the fact that we have to stop blaming God for these things. 

An aside of sorts:  Mike Huckabee, a man who was once rational enough to be consider a viable candidate for the Presidency of the United States, came out with a statement while some of the bodies of small children still lay in the school suggesting that the violence was the result of taking God out of the school.  Gov. Huckabee, I would give you due respect if you hadn’t lost all of it for me, Shut the Hell UP.  God is not a vindictive jerk who is going to kill small children for us to turn the diverse public schools into your kind of church.  I am sorry attacks in schools date back to the 1700s and I pretty damn sure that kids were reading Bibles in those schools.  Take your religio-political show somewhere else.  You make me sick.

What these deaths do teach us is that maybe in the world we live sometimes things happen and that is just the way things are.  Perhaps the universe was created by the God we believe in but with the dynamic that God can’t simply change the rules Willy nilly.  That freedom will sometimes mean that we have to encounter someone choosing to do something horrible.  That a world that gives us the beauty of a rose or the wonders of the Grand Canyon, will also give us diseases that end our lives sooner.  Perhaps we are not meant to look to Job to find answers to the pain in the world but to Isaiah who challenges us to act to fix the social ills of the world, to focus on helping others.  It won’t stop everything but it I truly believe if we spend more time looking to help out neighbors than wringing our hands to God in a tragedy we will all make for a better world.  We might find that  when doctors are not looking to find ways to patch up the victims of violence they may be able to better understand disease, that when we have the courage to reach out to a neighbor they may not be quite so angry and that when we see someone in mental distress we won’t look the other way and get him or her the help that is needed. 

God had nothing to do with what happened today in Newtown Connecticut.  God was an innocent bystander.  If you believe in God or not,  you know that we have the ability to show compassion, the intelligence to figure out how to stop this in the future and the capacity to learn from this and not let it keep us in darkness.  It is up to us, we have the tools, now let’s get to work.  If God can do anything about this tragedy it is through the work we do moving forward.  Don’t be a Job or a Huckabee.  

Anti-Science is Dangerous....

Indiana State Senator Dennis Kruse is launching another attack on reality after losing his battle last year to have Indiana science teachers teach creationism as science.  His new attempt coming from the creationist institute ironically known as the Discovery Institute is the equally ironically titled Truth in Education Law.  It would require a teacher to provide “proof” to a student who questions the teacher because the knowledge violates what the student believes.  Kruse must think that students are not asking questions in the classroom.  What this new proposal will mandate is that the teacher could be forced to jump through the ridiculous hoops of a student who denies the evidence that so clearly exists for the so-called controversial topics of evolution or global warming.

In Kitzmiller vs Dover School District the court rules that Intelligent Design, a modern repackaging of Creationism is not science.  In fact the main proponent of the idea of Irreducible Complexity,  Michael Behe, said there is no theory of Intelligent Design, no peer reviewed articles on the topic and no mechanism for how it works.  Behe, a biochemist and a darling of the creationist crowd, basically destroyed the argument that there is any science in the ideas he promotes. 

But what is worse is that this is an attack on the very profession of education.  Leave aside the fact that science education is important and that the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection and the theories surrounding the fact that the planet is warming are highly studied and that all but a handful of scientists agree in the major questions involved.  In fact there are few true scientists that have done research that refute the major tenets of either of these scientific areas and the only ones who do it seem to be for religious reasons in the case of evolution and financial ones in the case of global warming or climate change in general.  When politicians want to force teachers to respond the emotional dreck that oozes from the mouths of radio talk show hosts and other cranks we have destroyed education.

This is not about questioning.  Right now in every classroom everywhere that good education is taking place students can ask questions and in many cases truly challenge the teacher on facts.  But that only goes so far.  A student who brings up mythology as a response to science or a political talking point as a way of challenging a fact should not be given the power to force the teacher to have to bring more to the class to refute it.  This law would allow the a student to force a teacher to prove the moon is not hollow, an idea promoted by UFO enthusiasts and ancient alien so-called theorist.  Imagine a discussion of tides and a student not believing the moon causes tides (remember one crank de tuti cranky Bill O'reilly once said he didn't know what causes tides) in part because it couldn't do what we see it does if it were hallow.  Can you prove to me that the moon is not hallow.  I can link to a dozen websites that says even NASA thinks it is hallow.

Putting one's religion or politics above education is a tragedy if it is allowed in the public schools.  I have friends who see the Bible as the unerring word of God, and in that must believe that we were created in the form we are today and evolution doesn't work for them.  Many of them are clear in their conviction and I can't fully fault them.  I wish they would see God as I do and not have to rely on the Bible as a science and history book when it was written as Divine Poetry.  Even an 11th century commentator, centuries before Darwin lived, indicated that the story of creation is a story of unfolding and that all potential was created on the first day and the on-going creation is God's vision of a universe that continues to develop, change and uncover wonder.  But my friends don't lie to me in such discussions of what the Bible means and what the facts of evolution are or are not.

Too often the voices of places like the Discovery Institute will lie about the facts of evolution, cloaking it in the words of science, say things that are blatantly and knowingly false.  They will try to discredit evolution by trying to link it to horrors of humankind like the Shoah or other dictatorial genocides.  They will focus on the ignorance of the many when it comes to scientific practice and say things like Evolution or Climate Change are "just theories".  With Evolution they will say there are other theories out there.  No there are not.  There is the Theory of Evolution and then nothing else rises to the level of theory on the subject.  There is fantasy, mythology, conjecture and lies, but no theories.  The entity of biological science in the modern world is based on the very facts the Theory of Evolution explains.

There are many reasons to allow educators to educate.  We gain more from an educated population than one forced to follow the grinding silliness of a politician with an agenda.  In the case of Kruse and his stupid truth in education law we can see Indiana education run backwards, just remember there was a time when science was seen as evil and even witchcraft.  There is too much wrong with the world to allow that to happen to appease a religio-political agenda.  Besides, Hogwarts is not really and there are no wizards Dennis.

Calling all Warriors

When our country was started one of the driving forces that brought people across the vast ocean from Europe was religious freedom.  From the pilgrims to the signing of the Constitution, religion played an important role in the development of the country but not just one religion.  Freedom to express faith in one’s own way was so important to the founders they made it the first codified right in the Constitution.  The reason was easy to see, religious and civil authority was the same in much of Europe and civil crime was seen as a sin.  While some of that was exported to the new world in states and communities, there was a real effort when we became our own country to make sure that those who found God or even a different God or Gods than the majority were safe from government.  While many of the founders were not only Christians, they believe that Christianity was the best way to live one’s life and that they hoped non-Christians would find their way to Jesus in their personal life.  But for government and public discourse they found that it was better for the country to allow other faiths to find a home and be able to express their own vision of God. 

So when I read the other day that a person was upset because he had to tolerate stores that do not say “Merry Christmas” and chose other less specific greetings.  I was stunned.  It was part of the fake war on Christmas that seems to suggest that Christmas is being pushed out of the public view.  Seriously, here is a challenge.  Leave your house and set a timer and see how long it takes you before you see a public expression of Christmas.  For me it is less than 2 seconds as a neighbor has turned her house into the Vegas strip.  But even if I had to wait for a less personal expression, you can see Christmas products from the Kosher food section in Marsh.  Christmas is not under attack; in fact it is on the offensive.  Last year I said that Thanksgiving was a carbload for shopping on Friday, however Christmas started on Thanksgiving day, people leaving the dishes, football and family behind to be in line when the stores opened on the evening of Thanksgiving to begin the long march to December 25^th, a march made longer by an early date of Thanksgiving this year. 

But what strikes me is the sense of real entitlement by the Christmas warrior crowd who look for reasons to attack someone over this issue.  Governments who open up public space to other thoughts have been called evil by some.   What the person who is struggling with having to tolerate stores that do not celebrate Christmas to the exclusion of other celebrations this time of year doesn’t understand is that his position does not have the right to control the public voice for a month each year.  If he doesn’t like the diversity that makes this country great he is certainly entitled to avoid those stores, but to call me intolerant for supporting them is just backward.  You see I don’t avoid stores that say Merry Christmas, I don’t look down on someone who celebrates their faith, I don’t see government making room for all thoughts as an attack on me.  I am good.  I don’t need government to legitimize my holidays.  I do however do not want government standing in the way of my practicing my faith or anyone else’s.  But that is not what is happening.  When a city like Santa Monica decides that they don’t want sectarian displays on public land any longer I don’t take them to court claiming my rights are being taken away.  Because they aren't  yet that is exactly what happened in that seaside town.  A tradition of a Nativity display was ended by a city council that didn't want to have a fight over who could display what in the park, so no one can display anything on the public land.  But no one is stopping the displays on private land where they will be this year. 

There is no war on Christmas, Christians are not victims of a vast atheistic conspiracy and we are not on a slippery slope to hell because the Governor of Connecticut or Target stores uses the world Holiday over Christmas.  Those are insane positions.  But tell you what, if a government agency truly tries to stop you from celebrating your faith, if your decorations are illegally taken down by the police, or if you are led away because of greeting someone with a Merry Christmas call me.  I will stand with you to fight the man.  Until then stop complaining that people are embracing diversity, and oh don’t be the jerk who once told a teenage cashier at a grocery store “In my house we say Merry Christmas” when she wished him a “Happy Holidays”.  Hey jerk, perhaps you should avoid trying to puff up your chest to a 16 year old and go back and read about the guy whose birth you are celebrating.  You might be surprised what he would have said.