Kung Fu Hustle is a fucking masterpiece!

I saw it today and I can't wait to see it again!

The Most Dangerous News

This is the most dangerous statement I've seen so far in stories about the new pope:

William Donohue, president of the Catholic League, applauded the selection.

"The new pope, like his predecessor, understands the grave danger that awaits a society wherein each individual makes up his own morality," he said in New York, The A.P. reported. "It may not sell in the U.S., but it is nonetheless true that a society that refuses to acknowledge that morality is a social attribute, not an individual one, is bound to culturally implode."

http://tinyurl.com/eyuor

The only way to keep individuals from "making up" their own morality is government coercion. This is why theocracies are dictatorships.

Of course, individuals don't "make up" moralities, they perceive them in the facts of reality. The thing which enables them to do this is the human mind's capacity for Reason. Of course it is possible for a given individual to ignore reality and actually make something up, but this is not morality, but only the evasion of it. Mr. Donohue, though, is implying that this is the only alternative to "morality as a social attribute". His statement is meant to distract from the fact that morality is actually an attribute of the individual, not society, and blanks out the facts of human rationality and volition - and the facts that those are attributes of the individual - in order to do so.

What Mr. Donohue is trying to distract you from and avoid naming is only everything that makes human beings human.

Scalia must go!

Antonin Scalia's cheerleading for the tyranny of the majority was on full display Wednesday during oral arguments in two cases regarding displays of the Ten Commandments on government property:

When Chemerinsky objected that "it is a profoundly religious message," Scalia responded: "It is a profoundly religious message, but it's shared by the vast majority of the people. . . . It seems to me the minority has to be tolerant of the majority's view." Washington Post, "Division of Church, State At High Court"

What if the majority's view is that the minority should have their rights denied, or taken away from them? This certainly seems to be the goal of supporters of constitutional amendments to ban same-sex marriage regarding homosexuals.

Or even exterminated outright? This, of course, was the Nazi Party's view of the Jews in Germany.

To me, Scalia's response clearly shows not only his contempt for individual rights, but a desire to openly establish a state religion. As far as I'm concerned, when Scalia condemns those he accuses of "interpreting" the Constitution, he is committing a fraud, for that is exactly what he is doing here.

Antonin Scalia has no place on the Supreme Court, or anywhere else in American jurisprudence.

The thrill is back!

Leonard David's Space Colonization: The Quiet Revolution on Space.com is the most exciting thing I've read in a long time. It reminds me of the way I used to feel about technology back in the 60's when I was a kid who was addicted to NASA launches and whose favorite TV show was Jonny Quest. Back then, the words "New and Improved!" were anything but a tired advertising gimmick to me.

David begins his article by suggesting that the "giggle factor" is gone from the general public's perception of private space efforts, thanks mainly to Burt Rutan's achievement with his SpaceShipOne. But, to me, there may be something much more profound going on, something that is usually derided as "gee-whiz", but which is, I think, actually - hopefully - a growing excitement about the possibilities of the future:

"During the last half of the 20th century, a host of technologies and disciplines which had witnessed millennia of slow or no growth…suddenly went exponential," McCullough reported at the STAIF meeting.

McCullough pointed to photography, chemistry and quantum mechanics that have combined to produce a new industrial revolution. Electrical and mechanical engineering are on courses that appear to indicate unbounded exponential improvement. Delving into the structure of DNA has spurred a better understanding of the cellular processes. The human genome has been sequenced and micro biomechanics has taken off, he said.

Furthermore, the centuries old technology of printing has been extended to three dimensions with inks of polymers, ceramics, wood and metals.

"These technologies have affected other technologies so that now at the dawn of the 21st century, one technology after another is assuming an exponential trajectory," McCullough noted. . . .

"There are so many technologies coming on," McCullough told SPACE.com. "The commercial drivers of these technologies are so massive, and the money is so large, that they they’re going to come right out of the blue," he said.

There are many more advancements that are already in the pipeline, McCullough said. "Some of the technologies that are out there are going to allow us to do some things that people are going to find incredible."

I can only hope that we see fit to provide the freedom required to keep this revolution going.

Good one!

Ran across this whilst surfing the AtomFilms blog:

Survivor starts its tenth season tonight.

Ten seasons of preening, back-stabbing, no-talent narcissists who think a month of drinking rain water and arguing with a lazy hick from Alabama over who cut down more palm fronds will make them a star.

http://blog.atomfilms.com/archives/2005/02/index.html#a000051

One more reason why I don't have a television.