Café Philos: an internet café

Indian Ocean, my new musical obsession.

I have a confession to make. I have long felt I could vastly improve my prose style. I have wanted from the beginning of this blog to discuss complex ideas in a very easy to read and understand manner. And I thought I was making some progress towards that goal until... until I took the test. You see the results of the test: This blog has a college level reading level. Yikes!

Naturally, I blame the condom commercial. Obviously, the condom commercial skewed the results. After all, it can't be me. I've worked way too hard cleaning up my prose for it to be me. Damn that condom commercial!

The irony here is it took me six tries to figure out what I was doing wrong to get the very simple, user friendly "reading level program" to work -- yet supposedly, I've somehow managed to write at a college level despite that I cannot for the life of me get a very simple, user friendly program to work on the first try.

I'll sue the makers of the condom commercial. That's what I'll do. Yes, I'll sue them.

At first glance, this public service video from India is insufferably cute. But that's only at first glance. It's actually quite informative -- packing a huge amount of information into a cheesy but fun format. I only wish there were equally informative condom ads in the States.

By the way, that light-hearted tune is now stuck in my head and will probably be there all day -- evidence of how effective it is.

"When the soul wishes to experience something she throws an image of the experience out before her and enters into her own image."

- Meister Eckhart

Marissa is a 13 year old soccer star who wants to be a doctor. She started a blog a while back to showcase her poetry, but hardly anyone noticed her poetry, which is sad. She's got some pretty good stuff for her age -- albeit mostly angst ridden love poems. Check out one of her best here. And don't forget to post a compliment if you feel she deserves one!

Last week, I linked to someone who predicted the Religious Right in America was on the wane. This week, I'm linking to Ed, who says predictions of that sort are premature. Find it here.

Amuirin has a short post up about Chris Jordan, and artist who makes environmental statistics concrete and visual. Here you go.

Just in time for Thanksgiving -- a new theory of the universe. Specifically, a theory that states time is cyclical rather than linear, and hence the universe is cyclical rather than linear. Interesting reading here.

Trinifar has put up a post that I think is useful and important for understanding the overall role of science and technology in solving environmental problems.

Digby asks a disturbing question about the ability of scientists to communicate their side of the creationism/evolution debate here. At least, it's a disturbing question if you're on the side of science in that debate -- if you favor creationism, you might be dancing a jig after reading Digby.

Ms Ti looks aghast at some of the ingredients in the world's highly processed fast food meals here. Some of the things she finds make Chinese lead paint sound appetizing.

Pr3rna raises a lot of questions about both the role of the state in child rearing and the over involvement of modern parents here.

Oemar fearlessly tackles one of the most difficult questions in aesthetics: When is something porn, and when is something art? The article is here.

Ready for an outrage? Read how some high school students in Illinois were severely punished for exercising their rights as citizens. The story's over at Webs place.

I cannot recall reading a more clear and concise description of the psychological states that can occur through meditation than Mystic Wing's description of them here.

David writes beautifully about the nature of human strengths and weaknesses here.

Traveller analyzes the relationship between loss and our ability to experience empathy here. Although this is an old post, it's withstood the test of time.

I love this photo from Steve. I want it. I covet it. I need it. But when I went to download it for my personal photo files, a mean little sign popped up calling me "Cheeky" and I couldn't download it. Visit Steve's site and make him give it to me! Please! I'll be good and brush my teeth for a whole year if you do.

I have never in real life seen the gorgeous species of ducks Loren captures in these photos.

In a brazen attempt to get more Google hits, Rambodoc offers up many quaint and interesting facts about the human penis here. Little does he suspect, however, that as far back as March, I blogged on a fossilized 425 million year old penis belonging to an extinct species of water flea and I've been getting Google hits off of that one ever since.

AOS thoughtfully discusses the serial killer in fiction and film here, and identifies some interesting trends.

This is an old post, but if you haven't seen it, you haven't lived a full life yet. It's "The Mean Kitty Song" put up by Bibliomom, and it's funny, entertaining, and so witty it's probably illegal in seven countries.

Gary writes about his classes' field trip to an art museum here. The true life story has some nice twists to it, well worth a read.

Harlequinn has put up a personal memoir of how she first got an office job in the Ohio porn industry and then became a political activist because of it -- all without having much love or use for porn.

Chanson has been publishing a novel on her blog in installments. It's a fascinating read, and one place to start is here. But be warned! It's addictive! You can really get into her characters.

Theraaa surprised me with his views on the reunification of Germany. Apparently, Germany is still in many ways divided more than a decade after its political reunification. Read about it on Theraaa's blog before Time Magazine picks up the story.

Brendan posts a well written and comprehensive analysis of the abortion debate here.

Priyank's blog seems to be working this week, something that's not always the case, so jump on this chance to check out his travelogs! But hurry! His blog has a way of going down at times.

In life, it is far more important to develop your strengths than to compensate for your weaknesses.

This morning I was surfing blogs. One link led to another and I found myself on a site devoted to "mysticism". But as I read the site's introduction, I was struck by the author's insistence that God exists ontologically:

"Basically all religions teach the same basic truth: man's existence has a metaphysical basis, to which man wants to relink his life. This metaphysical basis is usually referred to as God, Brahman, Allah etc. But it is the same in every man. This magnificent and unspeakable source of life and happiness will here be called the God/Brahman, but you can give it any name you want, according to your own convictions."

Man's existence has a metaphysical basis? I doubt anyone wisely begins a study of mysticism by assuming god exists ontologically, as some kind of metaphysical entity. That's like preparing to shop for groceries by assuming you already have enough food in your house: It's a foolish assumption that will retard your progress until you discard it.

The spirit and substance of mysticism is to discover whatever there is to discover through one's own experience. Mysticism is not theology, and, unlike theology, it is not fundamentally speculative, nor is it hearsay. Instead, mysticism is grounded in direct experience, in personal discovery.

Personal experience is open ended and uncertain. Hence, mysticism is open ended and uncertain. I cannot today tell you with absolute certainty how I will feel tomorrow. Perhaps I will bounce out of bed feeling like a new man. Perhaps I will wake up with a cold. If I cannot even tell you with absolute certainty how I will feel tomorrow, how much of a fool must I be to pretend it is absolutely certain God is an ontologically existing metaphysical entity?

A young couple I know were arguing the other night about love. Specifically, one of them held the position that love ends at divorce, while the other was equally insistent that love didn't need to end at divorce.

The point hardly seems worth arguing for the truth is obvious: It's certain some couples who divorce are not in love, while other couples who divorce are in love yet somehow incompatible (the whole notion that you can be in love yet still not be compatible doesn't seem to occur to most young people -- I think you need a few more years and to have seen it a few times to realize it's quite common). So, why were they arguing it?

I might speculate it's because our society -- actually, our popular culture -- has such a narrow view of love and relationships. From Hollywood we learn that a couple who love each other never divorce unless they are going to remarry by the film's end. We also learn true love overcomes all difficulties, life is meant to be lived for love, and no one is better off single than in a relationship. Popular music and romance novels pretty much tell us the same things. If that's all you've been taught to expect of love and relationships, it is small wonder you might argue over whether love ends at divorce.

Real life is much richer than the cartoons of love and relationships presented to us by popular culture. So, I thought I would list a few scenarios that are not typically portrayed in popular culture:

• You can love someone you're incompatible with, and many people do.
• Most often, there's no reason or explanation for why you love someone: You just do.
• So very often lovers part because they cannot overcome some difficulty having little or nothing to do with love or even with psychological compatibility, such as a difference between them of race, age, lifestyle, or religion.
• People can and do love more than one person.
• There is no guarantee the greatest love of your life will marry you.
• People in love with each other can prefer to live apart.
• Divorced people can still love each other, and yet not wish to remarry.
• Not all love is constant -- many times love comes, goes, and returns like a breeze.
• The most significant thing about love is surely not how long it lasts, and merely how long a relationship lasts proves nothing in itself about the quality of love in that relationship: After all, mere co-dependencies tend to last forever.
• Most people, at one time or another, will confuse love with emotional dependency.
• Some people can be much happier single than married.
• Not everyone who loves, loves well, nor ever learns how to love well.
• The intensity of one's feelings does not necessarily indicate the quality of one's love. Just because you love intensely does not mean you love well.

So, what other scenarios that aren't typically found in popular culture have I forgotten here?

According to some historians, during the thousand year long Middle Ages in Europe there was on average one peasant revolt per year. All of them failed.

There are several reasons for the failure of the peasantry to successfully revolt against the elites of the Middle Ages, but I'll mention only one reason to illustrate the difficulty the peasants faced. Before the advent of the hand-held firearm, it required years of training to produce someone highly competent in the best weapons of the Middle Ages. Most peasants didn't train in those weapons, and as a consequence, were usually over-matched when they revolted. Sickles against lances, hammers against swords.

But why did the peasants so frequently revolt in the first place? The most usual reason seems to have been famine. During most of the middle ages, transportation was so poor that it was almost unheard of to ship food in bulk for any distance. So, if the crops failed in one locality, that locality could experience famine even though there might be a surplus of food a mere 30 miles away. When famine struck a locality, the elites had custom, law and force all on their side -- they got what food there was, despite that the peasants produced the food. That left the peasants starving and prone to revolt.

Broadly speaking, at least three things came together to end the thousand year landscape of the Middle Ages. The first was the rise of capitalism, which can be traced back to very early beginnings around 900 A.D. The second was the British Agricultural Revolution -- a remarkable increase in agricultural productivity -- that can be traced back to around 1500 A.D. And the third was the Industrial Revolution, which began around 1700 A.D.

Those three factors, working together, created Europe's most successful peasant revolt. For, while all the revolts of the Middle Ages failed, capitalism, the British Agricultural Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution eventually brought not only wealth and long lifespans to the peasantry, but arguably contributed to their political liberation.

It seems odd to me that nowadays so many of us have come to resent those three developments. We see the many serious problems they have created and we sometimes imagine it would be a good thing if we were rid of capitalism, industrialization, and even large scale agriculture. Yet, to get rid of those things would surely plunge us back into an age when most people lived a short life of scarcity and want. So, I think the real problem is not to get rid of the very things that have lifted societies out of poverty, but to "update" them. We do not need, for instance, to abolish capitalism so much as we need a newer, more useful version of it with the most pressing bugs worked out.

A final consideration here is my gripe against ideologies. Not just any ideology, but all ideologies suffer from the fact they are either impossible or cumbersome to change. The world moves on, but the world's ideologies merely turn into retarded and retarding dogmas. I have never met an ideology that didn't turn to stone all it touched. If a software company were ever to adopt an ideology of software, you can bet they would go out of business -- because they would never update their product in any meaningful or useful way. Version 2.0 would have the same bugs as version 1.0 -- and only the marketing department would say it was better than 1.0. If we are ever so unwise as to leave the future of capitalism, the agricultural and industrial revolutions entirely to ideologists, we will surely get the disasters we deserve for our folly.

After all, it wasn't Christianity, the ideology of the day, that brought about Europe's most successful peasant revolt. Nor should we expect the ideologies of our day to bring about a successful social and economic future for humanity.

Is it just my imagination or has anyone else noticed that when teenage girls talk about having "spiritual yearnings" it means they're horny?

I don't mean to put down teenage girls here. They face a lot of challenges and don't need to be dumped on. Yet, at the same time, I believe I've noticed on many occasions how the word "spiritual" can seem almost synonymous with the word "horny" as it's used by teenage girls. Not always, but often enough to be noticeable.

I even have a theory about it (why, of course I do!). My theory is that most of us, when we enter puberty, don't make an instant connection between the new feelings we experience and horniness. In both boys and girls, feelings of horniness are created by the hormone testosterone. But those feelings don't come labeled "horniness". Instead, we must learn to interpret them as horniness. And while we are learning to properly interpret them as horniness, we often interpret them as something else, such as a "spiritual yearning".

What are the feelings produced by testosterone? Well, one of the most common feelings is sometimes described as "a desire or longing to hit the road". You can see how easily that feeling could be interpreted as spiritual if you listen to Led Zeppelin's famous "Stairway to Heaven" while Plant sings, "There's a feeling I get when I look to the west and my spirit is crying for leaving."

Testosterone also produces a feeling very akin to "emptiness" -- and I've long noticed that when adolescent girls talk about their spirituality, they often talk about it in terms of feelings of longing and emptiness.

I speculate it might be a little harder for girls to make the connection between the feelings produced by testosterone and sexual yearning because girls don't come equipped with an appendage that frequently rises up and points out the connection to them. Boys do. But perhaps a bigger reason it might be more difficult for girls to make the connection is that society expects and accepts that boys will get horny, while at the same time, society more or less still frowns on girls getting horny. Therefore, there might be some pressure on girls to find a more socially acceptable label for their testosterone induced feelings than "horniness". What could be more socially acceptable than a "spiritual yearning"?

None of this is meant to discount the genuine spiritual needs of adolescent girls. I merely wish to point out my impression that girls (more often than boys) sometimes confuse horniness with "spiritual yearning". Adolescence is usually the first time in our lives that we become intensely concerned with spiritual matters. It is also usually the first time in our lives that we become intensely concerned with sexual matters. Since both concerns are in many ways new and unfamiliar to us, it seems possible that we might at times confuse the two.

If so, I wonder how often an exceptionally fervent teenage interest in religion is due to good, old fashioned horniness?

I wonder if Americans will ever get tired of trailer park politics? Will they someday decide that demonizing your opposition, seeing the world in black and white, slandering your opponents, and allowing your ideology to do your thinking for you are no way to run a household, let alone a nation? Or will the disease of trailer park politics continue indefinitely?

Politics has always been a dirty business, yet there are times when it's a dirtier business than usual. We seem to be living through one of those times.

What do you think? Do you see any signs that the trend towards trailer park politics is abating? Or are things just likely to get worse?

"What we cannot do, can never do, is change who we are as a people. We are an open, welcoming nation. So let's not be afraid, America. Let's stand tall, welcome the rest of the world, and show terrorism what democracy and freedom is all about."

- Colin Powell

"It is always our own self that we find at the end of the journey. The sooner we face that self, the better."

- Ella Maillart

"Addiction should never be treated as a crime. It has to be treated as a health problem. We do not send alcoholics to jail in this country. Over 500,000 people are in our jails who are nonviolent drug users."

- Ralf Nader

There's some great reading over at Chanson's site, "Letters From A Broad" -- the 10th Humanist Symposium is up! Chanson has done an excellent job bringing together a diverse and fascinating collection of articles for the 10th Symposium, despite the fact she included one of my articles in the selection. Please check out the Humanist Symposium here.

The above photo was taken in the late afternoon at a park close to where I live in Colorado.

Via Evolutionary Middleman

Objective reality -- that's any reality one objects to, right?

"An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics."

- Plutarch

Some of the articles I found on the net this time around are a week or two old, but I think they're good articles and still interesting.

Rambodoc posted an award winning design for an environmentally friendly city car of the future here. The car has details you won't believe possible -- but the technology is entirely feasible.

Susan blogs on an American school that has banned hugs here. The school apparently can't distinguish between a hug and sexual harassment.

Nita writes here about the tendency in India to wedge children into the sciences even when the kids have no aptitude for them. Doubtless, this practice creates numerous adults who feel they are in the wrong careers.

Orcinus has an alarming investigative post here on how Latvian fundamentalists are coming to the United States specifically to attack gays -- often violently.

Amuirin has an intriguing post on the Days of the Dead celebration here. This was the first time the holiday made sense to me.

Enreal posts a poem on the aftermath of a relationship here. I thought it captured well how we all feel at some moments in the fallout from a failed relationship.

The Atheist Ethicist writes about the Maine decision to provide birth control upon demand to middle schoolers here. This decision has been sensationalized elsewhere, but the Ethicist looks at it with remarkable rationality.

Over at An Unquiet Mind, Mahendra has prompted one of the most interesting economic discussions I've seen in a while here with his post comparing the economies of Dubai and the States. The comments are extensive, but very much worth reading as several people with extensive information weigh in.

A photographer who goes by the name Markablue just began a photography blog here. Her main theme is nature and she starts off with an excellent selection of fall material that strikes me as very reflective.

Maha looks at corporate funding in American politics and finds good news: The Christian Right is being marginalized this election cycle. Story here.

Bill Hulet posts an exceptionally insightful essay on fundamentalism, reason and religion here. In this case, the religion in question is Daoism.

AOS asks whether reading a book matters if we forget that we've read it, he and comes up with an interesting take on that question here.

David defines genius in an amusing yet thoughtful way here.

After a hiatus of about two months, Brendan has started blogging again here.

Ybonesy posts an hilarious open letter to the makers of digital cameras here.

Eric writes about the neurochemistry of motherly love here.

I began with Rambodoc and will end this week's round up with him too. Here is an absolute must read post -- a gripping, true life account of his care for an aged patient written in beautiful prose.