Medical experts tell me I have only 468 months to live.

Next month, it will be 467.

How do I know?  I consulted one of the many life expectancy calculators available on the Internet.  The MSN calculator I used takes into account personal behavior, family and personal health, lifestyles (including alcohol and cigarette use), diet and exercise and driving habits. Based on my lifestyle habits, I have just determined that I’m scheduled to die at age 89, 39 years from now.

I have no grounds to complain about the small-seeming number of months I have yet to live. I’m certainly not looking for pity.  Compared to many other people, I’m doing well. People in the Stone Age (ca. 8000 BC) lived only about 20 years.    At the beginning of the 20th century, the average person lived only until my current age, 50.  In African countries hit hard by AIDS, the average person lives a total of only 30 years, significantly less than my remaining life expectancy at age 50. This is a phenomenal and disturbing statistic: at age 50, I am expected to live longer than a child born today in Zambia.

The reason I wrote this post, though, is that calculating my remaining life expectancy is much more than mathematics.  I’ll try to explain.  Perhaps this experiment won’t have the same effect on you, but it might.

First of all, why calculate my remaining time in months rather than the years?  Because as an adult, the month turns out to be the most basic unit of time.  Years …

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How analogue progressives frustrate binary neocons

Analog: any variable signal continuous in both time and amplitude. It differs from a digital signal in that small fluctuations in the signal are meaningful.

Binary: compounded or consisting of or marked by two things or parts.

You know that feeling of resentment that wells up inside when someone enters your space and dumps chores on you?  It breeds a lot of resentment.  That’s how neo-conservatives feel about progressives. Neo-cons hiss and spit when they speak of progressives because progressives try to dump lots of extra work on neo-cons. 

What kind of work, you ask?  The work of actually having to get to know people before judging them.  It’s a lot of work.  No wonder conservatives express such animosity toward progressives!

For the next minute, step inside the collective mind of the neocon . . .

We had to retaliate against Iraqis when people from Saudi Arabia attacked us.  Sometimes you need to show those people who’s in charge.

I check in with conservative talk radio quite often.  In the privacy of my SUV, my radio reminds me that all unmarried mothers are failures.  All welfare recipients are trash, of course.  All drug addicts should be thrown in prison for a lonngg time.  Well, except for Rush.  All immigrants should be kept out of the U.S.A.  Who the hell do they think they are, trying to get what we have. 

Homosexuals?  They are clearly immoral.  Criminals, actually. . . guilty of something.  Do I actually know any gay

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Christian Spirit, Sharon & Robertson, and Knowing Nothing About History

This happened some time ago, but it’s taken me a while to “process” it and come up with a cogent observation.  Sometimes, certain things are just too unbelievable to take.  But this is by no means the first, nor shall it be the last, time someone from the frothing-at-the-mouth christian right has said something which leaves most reasonable (and reasoning) people flatfooted.

Partly, this is about not knowing history, which is something all of us could do with a little more intimate acquaintance. 

The right Reverand Pat Robertson, who spews forth on the 700 Club–a televised ministry previously notable for bad hair, excessive eye makeup, and monetary and sexual hypocrisy that ran off the scales–let the public know what he thought was behind Ariel Sharon’s massive cerebral hemhorrage. Seems God did it.

If there is a more ideologically corrupt pundit currently mouthing off, I am unaware of him or her. Mona Charen might qualify, except her observations are so fecklessly ill-formed that she poses no serious challenge to reason, and Ann Coulter seems to have turned purely to a Limbaugh-esque “don’t confuse me with the facts, my numbers are more important than truth” kind of screeding moronity.

According to Robertson, God struck Sharon down because he was about to give God’s land to the Palestinians. He said:

“God considers this land to be his…You read the Bible and he says, ‘This is my land,’ and for any prime minister of Israel who decides he is going to carve it up …

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U.S. bishops turbo-charge rote prayers

The U.S. Catholic bishops have a lot to be concerned about these days.  The Church has been closing numerous parishes.  Fewer people are going to Mass.  Catholics are struggling with the meaning of ancient Catholic doctrines.

It was with this backdrop that the bishops held their “vigorous debate” over another pressing matter.  After all the dust settled, though, the resolution could finally be announced.  Thanks to the bishops’ effort, freshly tweaked rote prayers can now be uttered at Catholic Mass.  Bishop Donald Trautman declared that these new prayers were “the most significant liturgical action to come before this body for many years.”

  • Instead of saying:  “The Lord be with you” / “And also with you,” Catholics will now say: “The Lord be with you” / “And with your spirit.”
  • At confession, instead of admitting aloud that they have sinned “through my own fault” parishioners will now add “through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.”
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My life as a sponge

Why do so many people fight the idea that humans evolved from simpler life forms? Perhaps, this resistance is the natural consequence of the "chain of being," the long-time teaching that God and the Angels are the most superior forms of existence, humans inferior to them, and "beasts" and plants more inferior still, with rocks at the very bottom. Great_Chain_of_Being - new.jpg [The 1579 drawing of the great chain of being from Didacus Valades, Rhetorica Christiana] Even though biology does not recognize a status hierarchy among living things, the “chain of being” schematic nonetheless lingers in the minds of some people, especially among people who fail to appreciate the immense biological record uncovered by dedicated scientists, the importance of the scientific method and the elegance of evolutionary theory. Those who oppose evolution tend to be the same people who go around dissing organisms traditionally plotted lower on the chain of being diagram. A good example would be the (lack of) respect given to sponges. You can almost hear the fundamentalists spitting and hissing as they utter something like the following: "How dare those evolutionists claim that we come from sponges!" To me, however, this reasoning does not reveal a scientific dispute, but only ignorance regarding the intimate biological relationship between humans and sponges. I find the harsh anti-evolutionary rhetoric of fundamentalists to be, essentially, anti-spongist. Since one can further trace human ancestry all the way to bacteria, I find such reasoning also anti-bacterialist. It makes me want to shout: You anti-spongists! You anti-bacterialists! The remedy for this attitude problem of fundamentalists is that they need to take the time to honor and appreciate the complexity of "simpler" organisms.

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