Madeleine L’Engle

#22 on the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000

A Wrinkle in Time

What I believe is so magnificent, so glorious, that it is beyond finite comprehension. To believe that the universe was created by a purposeful, benign Creator is one thing. To believe that this Creator took on human vesture, accepted death and mortality, was tempted, betrayed, broken, and all for love of us, defies reason. It is so wild that it terrifies some Christians who try to dogmatize their fear by lashing out at other Christians, because tidy Christianity with all answers given is easier than one which reaches out to the wild wonder of God’s love, a love we don’t even have to earn.
– Madeleine L’Engle

Madeleine L’Engle passed away earlier this month.

Banned Books Week is the brainchild of the American Library Association

Mark Twain

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

#84 on the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000

“The Committee of the Public Library of Concord, Mass, have given us a rattling tip-top puff which will go into every paper in the country. They have expelled Huck from their library as ‘trash and suitable only for the slums.’ That will sell 25,000 copies for us sure.”
– Mark Twain

Angela Gunn at USA Today’s Tech_Space blog has a great entry for Banned Books Week And Tango Makes Three, a children’s book about the two homosexual penguins, Silo and Roy, who currently reside at the Central Park Zoo.

Where’s Waldo? by Martin Hanford

Where’s Waldo

#88 on the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000

An amazon.com book reviewer, Mr. Sir, wrote: I have looked into it, and it appears that the reason “Where’s Waldo” got banned was because it features adult material such as “topless sunbathers,” and other adult “hidden pictures.”

This does make me consider what else might be hidden in the complex world of Waldo. I’m wondering if I’ll find pictures of Waldo eating guinea pigs or engaging in cannibalism. What if there are pictures of Waldo flashing the “hail satan” hand sign? Could Waldo be gay? Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it could explain the fury of the book banners. Rumors abound that Waldo was seen in one picture hanging out with Tinky Winky the Teletubby. The horror, the horror!

– Raleigh Muns.

Although thought an urban legend, this was true.

Because, in the Western world, breasts are for sex, not for nourishing babies.

Margaret Atwood

The Handmaid’s Tale

#37 on the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000

A voice is a human gift; it
should be cherished and used,
to utter fully human speech as
possible. Powerlessness and
silence go together.

– Margaret Atwood

George Orwell

Although not in the top 100. Ninteen Eight-Four was a banned book, as was Animal Farm in Soviet Russia.

Animal Farm

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, “I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.” Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

“While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.”

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics.” All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.

– George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946.

J.K. Rowling

#7 on the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

Once again, the Harry Potter books feature on this year’s list of most-banned books. As this puts me in the company of Harper Lee, Mark Twain, J. D. Salinger, William Golding, John Steinbeck and other writers I revere, I have always taken my annual inclusion on the list as a great honour. “Every burned book enlightens the world.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
– J.K.Rowling

Judy Blume, author of the challenged book Forever (#8 on the list), has some thoughts on the challenges to Harry Potter.

Slaughterhouse-Five

#69 (w00t!) on the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000

Kurt Vonnegut

While on the subject of burning books, I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and destroyed records rather than have to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles. So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House of Representatives, or the media. The America I loved still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

– Kurt Vonnegut, Man Without a Country

Angela Gunn at USA Today’s Tech_Space blog also covered Vonnegut this week.

Tyrannosaurus Rex would have eaten Noah

When I was in high school I went to a monster truck rally on a lark, and was so blown away with excitement that I actually bought a Grave Digger hat, and have been a secret fan of monster trucks ever since. This despite the fact that they usually get 15 gallons per mile in mileage.

But as cool as Grave Digger was, the real highlight of the night was TRUCKASAURUS!!! A giant, fire breathing, mechanical monstrosity of doom that came out in the arena and ATE A JAPANESE COMPACT CAR!!! Take that rice-burners! God bless America! These colors don’t run! WWJD!!!

So when my mom called me with tickets to see Walking With Dinosaurs, The Live Experience all I could think about was TRUCKASAURUS!!!

Only this was a bazillion-gillion times way cooler! With a Paleontologist for a host, talking about evolution and geology and biological adaptations, instead of a redneck announcer shouting the same words over and over and over (“Hey everyone wasn’t that awesome? Awesome! Awesome! Awesome!”). And instead of the ear-piercing roar of engines sucking down gas (made out of dinosaurs), there was inspiring classical music that swelled and subsided with the action. And everyone left the show with a better appreciation of our place in the world, and what life was like 65 million years ago, instead of everyone going home to have sex with their cousins.

At one point Mom asked, “I wonder if there are any Intelligent Design people here.” Which was an interesting prospect, how would and IDer resolve the cognitive dissonance created by believing all life on Earth was saved on Noah’s boat, but somehow didn’t all get eaten by Tyrannosaurus Rex?

I’ve posted a flickr set with more photos of the event (all with poor lighting (sorry!)), but your really have to see it in action to believe it, so check out the video on YouTube.

If they had Walking With Dinosaurs when I was a kid, I would’ve had a much happier childhood.

civilization’s
lowest denominator
and greatest are one

---

The Japanese Garden in Portland, Oregon is hosting a haiku contest. They’re offering a $100 gift certificate and two $50 certificates to the top three winners for their Gift Store, which, if you don’t live in Portland Oregon, like me, you’ll never redeem your prize.

However, a selection of submitted haikus will be posted to their website and in their newsletter, The Garden Path, which is very cool.

Plus their criteria for what constitutes an haiku is pretty slack on syllables, but makes for good reading about artful delivery.

Stem Cells Life?

Sperm and Egg Not Life?

So I’m mulling the news that scientists hope to harvest stem cells from testicles. Beyond the way this new development makes me squeak with fear and cross my legs protectively, it’s also muddling my mind with cognitive dissonance trying to understand why harvesting stem cells from someone’s yarbles is considered significantly less controversial than embryonic stem cells.

President Bush Jr. has explained his stance on restricting stem cell research, because the blastocyst has the “potential for life.”

Bush isn’t a vegetarian, so we may assume he means human life, but the potential for human life is problematic. Sperm and unfertilized eggs both have the potential for human life, but the pro-life lobbists aren’t calling for an end to male masturbation or menstration, both of which terminate zygotes, reproductive cells. So it’s not the potential for life at all that serves as the criteria for restricting stem cell research for its opponents.

That leaves us with human life, established human life, a living human being. Everyone on all sides of this debate agrees that killing human beings is wrong. No argument there. So now we have to figure out the criteria for what makes a living human being.

Pro-Life proponents believe a living human being begins at fertilization:

When humans procreate, they don’t make non-humans like slugs, monkeys, cactuses, bacteria, or any such thing. Emperically-verifiable [sic] proof is as close as your nearest abortion clinic: send a sample of an aborted fetus to a laboratory and have them test the DNA to see if its human or not. Genetically, a new human being comes into existence from the earliest moment of conception.

So the 23 chromosomes in the sperm recombinate with the 23 chromosomes of the egg, and at the moment there are 46 chromosomes in a single cell, according to this definition, we have an established living human being. “Period. No debate.”

Every cell in our bodies, with the exception of our zygotes, has 46 chromosomes of our human DNA; therefore, according to both the “complete set of chromosomes” and “potential for life” criteria, a skin graft is an established living human being. Period. No debate.

But we don’t see Pro-Life proponents picketing hospital Burn Units, and shooting plastic surgeons, so, to give them the benefit of the doubt, their definition of established human life goes beyond both these criteria. They must mean only those cells that make up a blastocyst, stem cells.

Again, this is lacking. Not all of the cells in the fertilized zygote are what we would normally consider human. The blastocyst’s outer cells will become the placenta, the remarkable organ that supports and nourishes the fetus by robbing the mother of these necessities. Although technically not a parasite, evolution has struck a long-fought balance between the needs of the mother and fetus, in some respects, pregnancy is a battle between the two.

Once again, we don’t see Pro-Life proponents conducting rescue missions to save unwanted placentas. So, although they are referring to the whole blastocyst when preventing stem cell research, because removing any part of it would remove the potential for human life, they don’t really consider the whole thing a human life.

Medical science defines pregnancy, not necessarily human life, as beginning at conception, the point at which the fertilized zygote attaches to the uterus. This does not always happen, and in fact accounts for three-fourths of lost pregnancies.

Again, the inconsistencies of Pro-Life definitions intrude on rational thought. They have set up organizations for couples to adopt the surplus embryos produced through in vitro fertilization (IVF), which they call “Snowflake Children;” however, Pro-Life proponents are unconcerned with embryos produced naturally that fail to attach to the uterine wall and are rejected by the woman’s body through spontaneous abortion. 20% of known pregnancies end in miscarriage, but it is believed this number would be much higher were it possible to include unknown pregnancies. By one estimate five out of six fertilized zygotes never implant (from the BBC’s Intimate Universe, 1998).

Confused about when life begins? I am, and we should be. The biology of human reproduction is an incredibly complex process, and the evangelical movement’s delusive actions, which feign their attentions as being solely on abortion, but their actions belie pathological struggle to control human sexuality.

Unfortunately, this is where the debate ends. For while scientifically-minded people are having an honest and open debate about when human life really begins, Pro-Life proponents reject such an exchange of ideas. Their position is set in stone, and the challenges I have posited here and the challenges other developments have brought up, from Hoo Suk Hwang’s successful creation of parthenogenesis in a human, where the disgraced doctor got a human egg to self-fertilize, to Twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome, where the termination of one fetus may be necessary to prevent the loss of another.

There is a perpetual debate refining our understanding of these intricacies in human reproduction, and it’s time the Pro-Life movement came to the table and engaged them with us.

---

As noted by ichthyes in the comments, I was lazy and sloppy with some of my terminology in this post:

a zygote is the result of fusion between two gametes, gametes (not zygotes) being the sex cells that carry 23 chromosomes in humans. There are other things, but nevermind.

Peer-reviews/corrections are always welcomed.

So I’ve been trying to follow the recent revelation that, if you count all the government employees and contractors, that there are now more people in America reliant on the government for their paycheck than there are in the private sector. The NYT covered the blog wars about it in their article, Debating American Serfdom.

I think exploring this issue would help to explain how America continued to grow in jobs as the private sector muddled through one of the most pathetic and uncertain economic recoveries in history; after all, the federal government is growing by leaps and bounds.

The more money the fed spends, the more jobs result. Does this officially make America a socialist nation? I can’t seem to find the cognitive clarity to figure it out because I’m so excited about MY NEW CHAIR!!!

UNICOR CXO Chair of DOOM!

The UNICOR CXO Chair, which we just got for our division at the Coast Guard base, includes:

1. Sleek Ergonomic Design!
2. Adjustable Lumbar Support!
3. 16 Points of Articulation!

For too long, I’ve been bringing my sleep home with me. Thank you so much all you wonderful taxpayers. Thanks to you, I’ll be able get some proper rest at work. And thank you George Bush junior. Without your total abandonment of fiscal responsibility, this luxuriously comfy chair wouldn’t be possible.

I luv ya Dubya!!!

At $650-plus a pop, my chair cost some poor sap their entire week’s pay at McDonalds! Bite me private-sector loser! Actually, with 80-plus of my coworkers getting these chairs… Bite me 80-plus of you private sector suckers! Total ownage!!!

…and the Columbia president, Lee Bollinger, took him to the ‘splainin’ room:

“Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator,” he said, to applause, before directly issuing Mr. Ahmadinejad a series of strongly worded questions on his country’s poor record of civil rights and support of terrorism. “I doubt that you will have the intellectual courage to answer these questions. But your avoiding them will in itself be meaningful to us. I do expect you to exhibit the fanatical mindset that characterizes so much of what you say and do.”

Ahmadinejad’s complaints that Bollinger’s statements were a disrespectful act toward an invited guest were met with a small smattering of applause, but his complaints reflect the difference in values between our countries. In America, we are free to publicly call our leaders jackasses, even our wartime Presidents.

Welcome to America Ahmadinejad, excuse us while we take you to task with the same vigor and bluntness we smack our own Presidents around with. That’s because here, we consider our leaders Public Servants.

I thought Bollinger’s statements were fantastic, awesome, courageous, and resolute demonstration of intellectual fortitude. It was also a great big F U to all the spineless NeoCons who objected to Americans facing the Iranian President in a public forum.

There is no clearer sign of ideological weakness than to suppress debate, and Monday morning, when Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter threatened to introduce legislation that would strip Columbia University of its federal funding if they hosted Iranian President Ahmadinejad, was a dramatic sign of how closely NeoConservative political-thuggery resembles Iran’s theocracy in its hatred for open debate.

Bollinger called Ahmadinejad a jackass, and then Ahmadinejad got up on the podium and proceeded to prove it.

CSPAN radio opened up its lines to callers after the talk, Republicans, Democrats, Independents, and even Monarchs (Yes, the Iranian Monarch Party, apparently hiding out in Washington DC) called in to complain that Ahmadinejad got away with evading the questions put to him.

You know what? If it was so painfully obvious Ahmadinejad was not answering the tough questions that even the Monarchs noticed it, then HE DIDN’T GET AWAY WITH IT. He just made a jackass out of himself, as Bollinger predicted he would from the outset.

The most offensive thing about Ahmadinejad’s comments to my mind was his twisting of scientific principles for his own ends. When asked about his statements that there should be more research done into the Holocaust, which he has previously referred to as a ‘myth,’ he replied that people objecting to research were anti-science.

Ahmadinejad did not address his historically ignorant opinion of the holocaust in his response, but, as with all his responses, tried to turn the focus back on the questioner. It was almost as if he were taking a page out of the Intelligent Design movement’s book of rhetoric. How do you say, “Teach the controversy,” in Farsi?

When asked about the execution of homosexuals in Iran, the Iranian President rambled on a bit with some ignorant nonsense about drug dealing and the spread of diseases before giving this bit of silliness:

In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country. We don’t have that like in your country. … In Iran we do not have this phenomenon. I don’t know who’s told you that we have this.

This is the guy who President Bush won’t debate? This is the rhetoric our President won’t rebuke in front of the whole world?

I have very little faith in Bush Jr’s eloquence and rhetorical talents, but he would totally kick this guy’s butt all over the stage intellectually in a debate. As much as I regret our President’s lack of wisdom and insight, I have complete faith that he would serve as America’s gladiator fighting for Democracy in a battle of ideas against Iran’s oppressive theocracy.

Democracy, freedom, and equality are such great %$#&ing ideas that they speak for themselves. Imagine an American President standing on a stage in front of the world and sternly admonishing totalitarians right to their faces like Bollinger did. I wonder what leader would have the stoutheartedness and firmness of conviction to spread Democracy in such an effective fashion?

Barack Obama for President

9.24

In honor of Take a Child Outside Week:

Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.
– E. O. Wilson

The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.
~ e.e. cummings

God writes the gospel not in the Bible alone, but on trees and flowers and clouds and stars.
~ Martin Luther

Aechnea “Beye’s Giant” (Photo by Ryan Somma)

9.25

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.
~ Frank Llyod Wright

Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.
~ Kahlil Gibran

I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in.
~ George Washington Carver

Brassia giveoudiana (Photo by Ryan Somma)

9.26

The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us,the less taste we shall have for destruction.
~ Rachel Carson, “Silent Spring“

When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.
~ John Muir

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church,
I keep it staying at Home –
With a bobolink for a Chorister,
And an Orchard, for a Dome.
~ Emily Dickinson

Purple Cactus (Photo by Ryan Somma)

9.27

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.
~ Henry David Thoreau

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.
~ William Shakespeare

The Amen! of Nature is always a flower.
~ Oliver Wendall Holmes

George (Bucket) Taylor, Ph.D. of NC Ecotours shows children Foxtails right around the corner from the Port Discover Children’s Science Center

See also Daily Advance coverage of Take a Child Outside Week.

9.29

I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it…. People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.
~ Alice Walker, The Color Purple

Each species is a masterpiece, a creation assembled with extreme care and genius.
– E. O. Wilson

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Aechnea “Beye’s Giant” (Photo by Ryan Somma)

9.30

“There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me.”
– Thomas Jefferson

“A sense of curiosity is nature’s original school of education.”
– Smiley Blanton

“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest–a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
– Albert Einstein

Grass and Fog (Photo by TGAW)

“I am at two with nature.”
– Woody Allen

William Gibson predicted the Internet, but his visions were barren and lifeless compared to the enchanting pandemonium we get to experience daily. Isaac Asimov predicted a world village connected with light-wave signals through satellites, but could nowhere near imagine the scope of social change, the effective mobocracy that it taking place. No futurist accurately predicted this delightful Memetic Playground that is the InterWebbies.

1900’s Vision of 2000

The World Wide Web sufficiently increased my intelligence so that I could join Mensa. It completely changed my modes of thinking. Where I was previously limited to having my learning directed by the content of books and television, I now draw my own threads of inquiry, following the hyperlinks from data bit to data bit, creatively hybridizing knowledge into new ideas and perspectives.

The Internet promises the complete democratization of knowledge. Sites like Jamendo have freed me from corporate-push music and Miro from corporate-dictated television. The Internet is freeing us from the inbred lowest common denominator media that is the result of incestuous relationships between news, entertainment, and other industries.

I feel privileged to witness this transition into the Communications Revolution, and perhaps I will get to see a few more revolutions. So long as the Internet continues to mix and match memes, we may not be far from a revolution of revolutions. Empowered individuals are bringing about an Age of Amateurs, which will in turn spur an Age of Ages.

Surprise me.

Happy One Web Day.

Tales of the Super Science Ninja Squad Benjamin Franklin

This is only a small part of the story, check out Franklin’s Unholy Lightning Rod to read about the religious resistance to this invention.

Wilson Quarterly “Surveying the World of Ideas“

The WQ’s recent article “The Climate Engineers,” made it to the journal’s online version, and reading it reminded me what I’ve been missing out on in the last three years since I let my subscription lapse. The article looks at the entire history of Climate Engineering, from the 1800s to the present day, from military ventures to famous geoengineers and their futile attempts to control the weather. It even includes the work of Benrnard Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut’s older brother, and Kurt’s literary response to the weaponization of climate in his book Cat’s Cradle.

My first issue of this extraordinarily well-written, exhaustively in-depth quarterly journal arrived today. It will easily keep me happy through December, until the next issue arrives in January.