Today is the second day I have had a "normal" sleeping rhythm. As I am writing this, I am *not* going to bed as I did last week at this time but have been awake for over an hour. And as yesterday morning, I didn't need the alarm clock today, either. Let us hope this stays. Thumbs up!
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Obamagate in a nutshell: rumour has it Barack Obama was not born on American soil and therefore cannot become the next president of the United States. The birth certificate is a hoax and all (read: all respectable authorities) saying anything else is part of an evermore-widening conspiracy. Prove: even Obama himself has said he wasn't born in the US: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vws9fTtQgz4
This was the last time I read Tieteen Kuvalehti or anything else before going through the contents. Or even the listing of subjects TK has on the side of the magazine.
I've mentioned before that I have a phobia of a certain species of the fauna. Well, TK had an 8-page article on those creatures. Unfortunately, I had *not* read the contets but was reading the magazine backwards, starting from the back. Obviously I don't know the titles or even the subject of the articles if I start from the final page. This resulted in the nasty incident of the terror-filled article which I started from the last page. Well, there wasn't much to read... at least I think so, I recall only the ickiest parts. Those parts were pictures of those disgusting creatures. First a general picture: "okay, I can bear that..." with a slight twitch in the face. Then, a close-up picture showing how well they adapt to the environment: "whoo... good that they're really good at that so I can't even make out their outlines against that surfice... I can just pretend their not there and ignore the arrow showing where they are". And then a close-up of the so-called face of a single creature, with its huge black eyes staring right at me from an inch's distance: "YÄÄÄÄÄÄK!!!!!!!!!!!" and the magazine drops to the floor when I retrieve away from the disgusting thing with trembling hands and a wave of disgust passing through my mind filled with the stare.
Seriously. I'm considering making a complaint. The very reason I LOVE winter is because there are no fucking butterflies fluttering around as if they're having seizures every half a second. And then you people fill eight pages with fancy close-up pictures in DECEMBER!!! To me the flying style of butterflies appears very anti-Darwinist: their style is not economic but waste of time and energy. If you have a huge room with two small flowers next to each other, the butterfly leaving one and setting out for the second will fly through the whole bloody chamber before finally landing on the second flower.
I don't know what originally triggered this phobia but those kind of close-up probably create more lepidopterophobics on this planet.
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A joke I heard this morning: What do you call a politically conservative, married straight man who actively promotes traditional values? ... A closet gay.
Have to comment on the Wikipedia-Scorpions thing going on. I agree that if a record was published today with that exact cover, yeah, I'd frown upon it. But Virgin Killers was publish four decades ago! By that time probably even the possibility to sue people for a genocide expires! So far my operator allows me to enter the album article. Besides, the actual purpose, I doubt, was not to give some old men material to watch while jerking off. If that was the intention, it's child pornography. But it's an old album cover! And theoretically speaking, anyone can use basically anything for jerking off: , mayonese for all I know. So how about using the time and energy for something a whole lot more useful... I don't know, like actually developing the wellfare of children so that they don't have to turn to priests and other politically conservative, married straight man who actively promotes traditional values molesting children possibly due to their twisted and warpped idea of sexuality? Would that be too much to ask?
Splenetic
Sofi Oksanen won the Finlandia award. Good for her. Ang good for the nation for acknowlidging the violence women face in times of both war and peace.
... or I'm in a really bad shap. I think I'll go with the latter albeit it doesn't sound that promising.
Haven't been feeling good lately and I've managed to screw up my entire daily rhythm, so I haven't been to the gym much lately. At 6.09 I decided to go to SpinnPump. The instructor (I'm sure I've mentioned her before... the one that hugged me on Valentine's Day nearly a year ago) said she had been scared when I had walked in; she explained she had thought about me last night at BodyCombat and again in the car on her way to work and had thus been taken aback seeing me walk through the door. Good that I didn't greet her the way I considered; I was thinking about expressing my having a relatively good day and happiness to see her again for such a long time by calling out to her "Good morning, gorgeous! [Huomenta, kaunotar]". Good that I didn't. Might have freaked her out even more.
And I'm not kidding, she is gorgeous. Stunning. Head-over-heels beutiful. And despite of that, so nice and positive (sometimes to the point of being annoying... but you can't feel annoyed with her for long) and funny and caring and everything. Her husband had better realise how lucky he is.
Thank you, P, for making me feel so much better!
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And now yours truly goes to bed. When I said I've screwed up my sleeping rhythm, I wasn't kidding. Last Sunday I woke up at 6.30 *PM* and decided that was too far, so I stayed awake for the next 26 hours with only half an hour of sleep in the afternoon. On Wednesday (nice... I even have to think what day it is) I for some reason managed to ignore the alarm clock and woke up at 3.30 PM wondering it's quite dark for 11 AM. Right... eleven my arse... But it doesn't matter. I'm awake during the important hours and I can work on the essays and exams at home. No lectures left for this year anymore. But I do have an exam on 20th of December. I console myself with the thought that the professor I don't like (the one saying none can get a grade higher than an M out of their MA theses!) is going to have to live through the holiday break thinking he has at least one exam to grade right away when he gets back to the university in the beginning of January. Not much but I'll treasure the thought.
Posio vaikenee, mutta vain hetkeksi,
Splenetic ;)
Oh, and I am a member of the Faculty Board!!! I can only say the following in Finnish without watering down the connotations: vähänkö näyttää hyvältä seeveessä!!! YAY!!! WHOHOAAA!!! YAY to the power of fantazillion!!!
"Subject: Humanistisen tiedekunnan tiedekuntaneuvoston esityslista"
Okay... why did I get that since I'm not a member?
"To: a lot of people who are members of the thing... more of those people... a student member splenetic@university.fi... more known members..."
What?! Since when have I been a member...??? I know they were having a deadline for applications for to become a student member, I know I sent a reply asking what the job involved (I mean, you know, it looks really fancy in a CV...), I know I got a reply saying the current student members would be sending me an e-mail telling me what it's about, I know I never got any e-mail so I never sent an application by the deadline... SO HOW DID THIS HAPPEN????!!!! Oh, fuck... I mean, it would be great to be a legimitate member, I just don't know whether I am or not...! Gotta find out.
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Wow... in the same relatively short list with the chancellor of the entire university... who may be going to the President's Palace in a few days... nice... ;)
This is a movie narrated by a relatively famous American TV-personality Ben Stein. The whole film is created to promote ID, Intelligent Design. You have to admire the way they use the material and linguistics: showing the Berlin Wall being built between the Germans and using the word freedom over and over again. The point of using 'freedom' is the same as that of George W. Bush: no one can say they think freedom should be put down. Of course not! What they don't differentiate is the division between 'freedom to' and 'freedom from'. Next good word to use in an American production for Americans: the A-word, atheism. There was a survey a while ago which listed the most prestiged and the most despised religions in the US: atheism was second last, only overcome by scientology. Someone once said that it doesn't really matter what you believe in, as long as you have a religion in the US.
The promoters at one point try to excuse some firings by saying these people weren't teaching creationism or ID, but that they were exercising their academic freedom. These people go on about how the evil atheists in the academia are nearly paranoid about the mere mentioning the theory, or ID, in a lecture or an academic paper. Hmmm... perhaps because of this: "If we can get Intelligent Design in the class rooms, we will soon be able to have daily school prayers." Ahhh... didn't you just say the goal wasn't to do that???
There are nicely cut short clips of interviews with known evolution biologists and -of course- people from the Unholy Trinity, that is, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, telling what's wrong with the theory of Intelligent Design and the promotion of bringing it to the science class. To me it would appear the makers of this are attempting only to somehow ridicule them, instead of actually thoroughly answering the criticism presented to them.
One of the funniest parts is a very obviously acted scene where a smart-looking 50's guy looks down on a skull on the table with a typical girl next door wearing a dress looks up to the guy, asks the professor next to them in a veeery broad Deep South accent, how people could have become humans from monkeys when the BIBLE SAYS otherwise. No shit, Sherman. Or: a scientist mixes water, CAFFEINE, etc. and runs electricity through it. No life emerged. Conclusion: life could not have been originated from "primordial soup" without a divine spark. And this: "Richard Dawkins has devoted his entire life to promote the Evolutionary Gospel." This nicely shows their entire language used to deal with evolution is religious-based. No wonder it doesn't work!
All the way to the end they gather men and women in front of the camera to tell the audience how they were wrongly accused. "I mentioned ID in some of my slides." "I mentioned ID in my academic paper." "I was fired because in my academic paper I questioned the usefulness of the evolution theory since mathematical sequences don't work when applied to the mutations of animal species." Quantitative methodology doesn't work for drawing conclusions from qualitative material. Again: no shit, Sherman! They march in numerous people with fancy academic titles to back up that ID really is science. “Evolutionary debates are no longer abut science but it has become a religious War.” You brought in God -> yo brought in religion -> you’re going to have to suck up the consequences of your action, boy! The same thing goes on : some people say that evolution promotes atheism, which “has no moral foundation, no afterlife, no nothing”. Read the chapter seven of ‘The God Delusion’: if people’s moral foundation is the Bible, we’re fucked. Just look at the Old Testament, or even the New Testament. And don’t try to say that some stories are allegories and some true: on what grounds do you decide which ones are true and which are not? That’s not in the Bible. You don’t have some innate idea of what morally good, do you? Oh dear, then atheist could have that too!!! Our Father, thou art in heaven…!!! Or as Einstein put it: “If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.” One professor tells about his childhood trauma when studying biology at the university, his evolution teacher in his opinion showed no signs (nor the text book) about there being design as part of Darwinism, which then led him to ID. Well, no, obviously there‘s no invisible design factor in Darwinism, that’s the whole point. Hence the debate between ID and Darwinism. I assume his enthusiasm to speak in this film has nothing to do with the large tumor in his head (he‘s diagnosed with brain cancer).
They interview the author of ‘The Dawkins Delusion’ and conclude that ID is about explaining ‘why’, not ‘how‘. No; Dawkins says in ‘The God Delusion’ that explaining the ‘how’ through Darwinism also answer the question ‘why’. These people just want to lift their hands up and explain everything at the present time unexplainable or difficult with the sentence ‘God designed it‘. It never ceases to amaze me how easily the ID supporters are lacking any curiosity, they just want to check everything out as ‘God made it’. And the best argument: ‘Of course the carbon measurements state that the rock is ten thousand years old, that’s how God designer it.” So let me get this straight: God designer the rock to appear to be older than what it really is? Vintage stones? For what, to test the faith of the people? ‘Let’s see if the father is willing to burn his own son, Isaac, on the stake alive.‘ ‘I bet he will!’ ‘Hell no! It’s his own son!’ Well, he did try but an angel intervened just in time to save the son’s day and life. Hahahaaa… what an excellent joke! That is so funny!!! Not.
“What is being presented to the public is [that] first comes the science, and then comes the world view. I would like to argue that that might not be the case that it may actually be the other way around. That the world view comes first and it influences the interpretation of science.” No, it wasn’t Tapio Puolimatka speaking (the name and the authority of the speaker is unknown since it is not shown in the part it is said [the film is divided into eleven parts]) “I think it is sending a really bad message to religious people who are interested in science that -- in order to do science credibly they have to leave their religious beliefs at the door.” (Dr. Steve Fuller, Professor of Sociology, University of xxxxwlok) That’s because it’s true. It’s not science if you attempt to prove something by a divine factor.
Okay. So life cannot begin if the possibility is one in a fantazillion. That one is nothing, there must be God evolved. Yeah, obviously... Just because something *appears* miraculous, doesn't mean it's designed by God. This goes right back to the Watchmaker thing (see Dawkins' 'The Blind Watchmaker'). And just because modern science cannot explain something now, doesn't mean that's how it's going to remain the same forever. Technology evolves (ooh.. the E-word... sorry, my bad). Aristotle thought human health was due to the balance of slime, bile (=sappi), black bile and blood. Doesn't work today, does it?
These people seem to label evolution theory (swearing again...) as something static when in reality Darwinism is under constant scrutiny. The definition of fundamentalism is that a person refuses to change their views even when presented the strongest evidence possible proving the opposite. From my point of view, the Christian Right which promotes the ID theory and attempts to include it to school curricula (and sometimes succeeding as in Kansas, see www.venganza.org). Of course universities won't let Intelligent Design intervene the curricula and pose as science; if given the change, I doubt there will be an end until were in pre-Darwinian age when religion rules the academia. There must be a zero tolerance.
Let me know if you had the stomach to watch the whole thing all the way to the end. I think it was the seventh part after which I ended. It kept repeating the same things all over again, and getting sidetracked even more from the ID theory towards the Evil Atheist Conspiracy Who Try To Lure Our Young Into Forsaking God. The title of the film is perfect, I just think it's perfect for different reasons that the film makers.
Someone presented a question what would be the consequences if this was revealed in Finland and brought to court. My guess: the guy would be officially condemned and given a harsh sentence (something like five years in jail, which in practise would be two to three years if the guy's a first timer), unofficially other men would be admiring him and asking if the daughters had tight pussies.
And let us not ignore the mitigating factors:
the father has a job -> sentence easesns
the victims were women -> sentence easens
the father didn't use "force" = didn't lock them up in a cellar/keep them in chains -> sentence easens
the daughters didn't report the abuse = "they must have wanted it" -> sentence easens
the father gets unwanted publicity and crap from the media and the public = "he has suffered enough already, the daughters should know their fucking place and shut up and spread their legs" -> sentence easens
the victims know the perpetrator -> sentence easens
the daughters were wearing clothes considered lustful by male courtpersons = "they wanted it" -> sentence easens
the father has no previous convictions -> sentence easens
the crime was committed over 25 years = "it wasn't even that long" -> sentence easens
the perpatrator has underage children -> sentence easens
Result: daughters get jailed for "rikokseen yllyttäminen" and "väärä ilmianto".
"The Universal Declaration of Human Rights stipulates that human rights apply to all people equally, 'without
distinction of any kind such as race, color, sex, language…or any other status'."
"Human rights have long been understood to apply universally—to all people, at all times, in all places."
"Violence against women is rooted in a global culture that discriminates against women and denies them equal rights with men. Women today earn less than men, own less property than men, and have less access to education, employment, housing and health care. This global culture of discrimination against women denies women their fundamental human rights and legitimizes the violent appropriation of women’s bodies for individual gratification or political ends."
Are we human yet?
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Today is the 25th of November, International Day Against Violence Against Women. It is the start for sixteen days during which activism against gender violence.
Watched Idols last night. Voted five times for Ansku. Didn't watch teh result programme since I thought it would be clearly Kalle who'd leave. Ansku's version of 'Joutsenet' continued to go on in my mental jukebox (as it is still going doing).
Now I read from MTV3 Idols site that Ansku had to leave. I mean what the fuck?! Is this the 'Antti Tuisku' thing all over again? It is a real shame to kick out someone so good as Ansku. Come on, kids: just because you have a crush on a singer doesn't mean their objectively "the best"!
