PolySciFi Blog

1) What? This is supposed to be a rational response?

2) Have you ever shot a tree? Doesn't phase the tree one bit. If a tree's coming at you, that Glock you have has ZERO stopping power. If experience has taught me nothing else (and I see where many of you are in agreement on that point), shooting trees solves nothing. I have somewhat higher expectations for the solutions created by shooting the Lorax.

3) It's traditional to kill the messenger. How do you think Rosencrantz and Guildenstern died?

4) A lever applied from the right place can move worlds. I believe the Lorax is the lever to change the trees behavior and I believe that a fear of death will be the lever to the Lorax.

5) Why not?

SPIEGEL: Do you see it as your job to recruit new followers for Scientology?

Cruise: I'm a helper. For instance, I myself have helped hundreds of people get off drugs. In Scientology, we have the only successful drug rehabilitation program in the world. It's called Narconon.

SPIEGEL: That's not correct. Yours is never mentioned among the recognized detox programs. Independent experts warn against it because it is rooted in pseudo science.

Their work is a daily sojourn to the underworld. Gillespie has a team of 10 men and six women who spend hours in front of their computers, extracting leads, writing warrants and sifting photos for clues. The payoff is the day they get to kick down a door and take the "bad guy" away. The mood is light and the humor often off-color to ease the horror.

On one wall is a "Star Trek" poster with investigators' faces substituted for the Starship Enterprise crew. But even that alludes to a dark fact of their work: All but one of the offenders they have arrested in the last four years was a hard-core Trekkie.

Det. Constable Warren Bulmer slips on a Klingon sash and shield they confiscated in a recent raid. "It has something to do with a fantasy world where mutants and monsters have power and where the usual rules don't apply," Bulmer reflects. "But beyond that, I can't really explain it."

"[Det. Ian Lamond] claims they were misquoted, or if that figure was given it was done so jokingly. Of course, even if the figure was given jokingly, shouldn't the Times' reporter have clarified something that seems rather odd? Shouldn't her editors have questioned her sources?

Nevertheless, Detective Lamond does claim that a majority of those arrested show "at least a passing interest in Star Trek, if not a strong interest."

They've arrested well over one hundred people over the past four years and Det. Lamond claims they can gauge this interest in Star Trek by the arrestees' "paraphenalia, books, videotapes and DVDs." I asked if this wasn't simply a general interest in science fiction and fantasy, such as Star Wars or Harry Potter or similar. Paraphrasing his answer, he said, while there was sometimes other science fiction and fantasy paraphenalia, Star Trek was the most consistent and when he referred to a majority of the arrestees being Star Trek fans, it was Star Trek specific."

No public funds or public facilities shall be used by any state agency, public school, public library, or public college or university for the purchase, production, or promotion of printed or electronic materials or activities that, directly or indirectly, sanction, recognize, foster, or promote a lifestyle or actions prohibited by the sodomy and sexual misconduct laws of the state of Alabama.

Sexual misconduct.

(a) A person commits the crime of sexual misconduct if:

(1) Being a male, he engages in sexual intercourse with a female without her consent, under circumstances other than those covered by Sections 13A-6-61 and 13A-6-62; or with her consent where consent was obtained by the use of any fraud or artifice; or

(2) Being a female, she engages in sexual intercourse with a male without his consent; or

(3) He or she engages in deviate sexual intercourse with another person under circumstances other than those covered by Sections 13A-6-63 and 13A-6-64. Consent is no defense to a prosecution under this subdivision.

(b) Sexual misconduct is a Class A misdemeanor.

(2) DEVIATE SEXUAL INTERCOURSE. Any act of sexual gratification between persons not married to each other involving the sex organs of one person and the mouth or anus of another.

So Mr. Allen's bill would ban any purchase or performances of works that directly or indirectly sanction, recognize, foster, or promote oral or anal sex between unmarried heterosexuals. Furthermore, any work in which a man convinces a woman to sleep with him through any fraud or artifice is off-limits; that means pretty much no romantic comedy could be shown on a college campus. Because God knows the homosexual agenda includes screenings of You've Got Mail.

It's not surprising that Allen is stupid, or that he's written a bad law, or that he doesn't seem to have even read the criminal code his law references. It is surprising that the MSM has focused on this as "a law to ban gay authors and characters" (which is appalling), and missed the fact that the law as written is really "a law to ban gay authors and characters, unmarried characters who suggest that oral sex may be enjoyable, and male characters who have ever decieved women in order to sleep with them."

The question isn't what books, plays, and movies would be banned from Alabama schools, universities, and libraries. The question is what would be left.

Update: Hello, Andrew Sullivan readers, and welcome to Polyscifi!

In response to this post where I cite Jacqueline to argue that women would be safer arming themselves instead of engaging in show marches, Matt (and others) argues that the reason that feminists are leftists is due to the their dislike of some on the right who have made statements that are disagreeable to the feminist position (while somehow ignoring the feminist transgressions of Condit, Kennedy, and Clinton).

Poppycock.

If nothing else, this rationale supposes that feminists have a juvenile capacity for reasoning most commonly seen in the teenager rebellion phase.

“Dad/Mom pissed me off when they did X, therefore I’m going to to do Y because my parents would want me to do Z.”

I, however, am willing to believe that feminists are rational. Further, I believe feminists are leftists (and are associated with the left) because ………… they’re leftists.

But let’s not base this belief on mere suppositions. Let’s do some empirical work on the subject. Let’s consider the luminaries of modern feminism - Simone de Beauvoir, Andrea Dworkin, Shulaminth Firestone, Betty Friedan, Catharine MacKinnon, and Gloria Steinem - and see where they fall on the political spectrum. If I’ve left off a modern feminist of approximately equal caliber, let me know, but I don’t believe I have (and good luck convincing me that the less-well-known third wave of feminists didn't start on the Left).

Simone de Beauvoir was a socialist. In fact, her whole feminist theory was predicated on socialism. Writing in 1949’s The Second Sex, de Beauvoir wrote that equality would come, “when the socialist society is realized worldwide, when there would no longer be men and women but only workers equal with one another”

Andrea Dworkin was an active protestor of the Vietnam war and was also a socialist thanks to her father’s teachings: "Andrea Dworkin was born into a Jewish family on September 26 1946 at Camden, New Jersey, where she attended a progressive school. Her father, a teacher and a committed socialist, inspired her political leanings. "It would be hard to overstate," she wrote, "how much he taught me about human rights and human dignity, how to talk and how to think."

Shulaminth Firestone’s best known work, Dialectic of Sex (published in 1970) argues that Marx and Engels did not go far enough and pushed for something called “cybernetic socialism”

Gloria Steinem is an active socialist, specifically a member of the Democratic Socialist Party.

So the luminaries of feminism aren’t just left leaning, they’re socialist/marxists. I think that has a lot to do with feminism’s connection with the Left and not Limbaugh or Schlafly, both of whom came on the national scene long after feminism was already wedded to the Left.

But we were talking explicitly about the “Take Back the Night” marches. These were started in 1978 in San Francisco which says to me a high percentage of leftists involved in the creation. (Note Dworkin gave the kickoff speech and I believe MacKinnon was a big player in the feminist conference against pornography that preceded the 78 San Fran march).

So if we wish to discuss, "Why, oh why, is the feminist movement more associated with the Left?", the position that feminists are Leftists because of bogeymen on the Right is a flawed position from which to begin.

Just a thought, but perhaps feminists are more associated with the Left because the leading feminists are indeed Leftists.

"If feminists are serious about empowering women against violence and sexual assault, their time and money would be far better spent organizing (and advertising widely!) subsidized defensive handgun classes for women than putting on hostile, exclusionary marches. Unfortunately it appears that the feminist movement is too wedded to the political left -- the main group pushing gun control -- to consider that seriously as a primary strategy."

"The woman [Ayala] who claimed she found a well-manicured finger in her bowl of Wendy's chili last month was arrested Thursday night in Las Vegas, police said."

"All the employees at the San Jose store were found to have all their fingers, and no suppliers reported any hand or finger injuries, the company said."

"Ayala has a litigious history. She has filed claims against several corporations, including a former employer and General Motors, though it is unclear from court records whether she received any money. She said she got $30,000 from El Pollo Loco after her 13-year-old daughter got sick at one of the chain's Las Vegas-area restaurants. El Pollo Loco officials say she did not get a dime."

As a little addendum as to the effect of frivilous lawsuits and false claims:

"Sales have dropped at franchises in Northern California, forcing layoffs and reduced hours, the company said. Wendy's also has hired private investigators, set up a hot line for tips and offered a $100,000 reward for anyone who provides information leading to the finger's original owner."

But in a study released this week by the CDC and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association ("Excess Deaths Associated with Underweight, Overweight, and Obesity"), the public health community has finally owned up to their massive fib by acknowledging that the number of deaths due to obesity in the US is closer to 26,000 not 400,000 as previously reported. This means that if these numbers are correct -- which is questionable -- then obesity goes from being the leading or second leading cause of death to perhaps the seventh leading source of premature mortality.....

Second, for individuals aged 25-59 the risks of premature death from being underweight are substantially greater than those of being overweight and they are also slightly greater than those of being obese. For those aged 60-69 the risk of dying from being underweight is much higher than from being even significantly obese, that is with a BMI > 35. Again, the total number of premature deaths due to obesity is 25, 814, while the mortality attributable to being underweight is 37, 746. If anything this points to an epidemic of not fat but thin caused death.

Since 1950, the average new house has increased by 1,247 sq. ft. Meanwhile, the average household has shrunk by 1 person.

The National Association of Home Builders’ “showcase home” for 2005 is 5,950 sq. ft. That’s 15% bigger than last year’s model.

More than 50% of exurban lots are 10 acres or larger. Exurban homes account for 80% of residential development since 1994.

In 1950, 1 in 100 homes had 2.5 baths or more. Today, 1 in 2 do. [yeah, but how many have 20?]

14 million households own 4 or more TVs.

1 in 5 new homes is larger than 3,000 sq. ft.—the size at which it becomes unmanageable to clean without hired help. [WTF? 3000 sq ft requires hired help to clean? Now if it was this house...]

Sales of Sub-Zero and other “premium” and “superpremium” refrigerators have been rising by 15% a year.

Since 2001, the number of Americans who have bought second homes has increased by 24%.

"People who are a little overweight are likely to live longer than people who are underweight or obese, a study shows....

BMI of 18.5 to 25 is considered normal. One below 18.5 is considered underweight and 30 or above is considered obese. The researchers found that the people who had BMIs higher than 25 but lower than 30, which meant they were moderately overweight but not obese, did not have a reduced life expectancy.

The people who lived the longest of all were those with BMIs of 25, which lies between the ideal and overweight margins."

Goat unemployment
Unsafe working environments for goats
Stop goat rape
Goats falling behind in internet usage
Goats lacking Congressional representation
Support a goat

The team concludes that the more men ejaculate between the ages of 20 and 50, the less likely they are to develop prostate cancer.

The protective effect is greatest while men are in their twenties: those who had ejaculated more than five times per week in their twenties, for instance, were one-third less likely to develop aggressive prostate cancer later in life (BJU International, vol 92, p 211).....

"It's a prostatic stagnation hypothesis," says Giles. "The more you flush the ducts out, the less there is to hang around and damage the cells that line them."

As a large fraction of polyscifi's readership are males in their twenties, I offer the following link for our readers' health. (not work safe, but it's good for your health).

For our female readers, there was a related beneficial process noted in the article:

"His findings suggest an intriguing parallel between prostate cancer and breast cancer, as recent studies indicate that lactating reduces a woman's risk of breast cancer, perhaps because this also flushes out carcinogens."

• Dorris Bowden.
• Darryl Hickman.
• Dan Ford, John Ford's grandson and biographer.
• Gregg Toland's daughter
• Shirley Fonda , Henry Fonda's last wife.
• John Carradine's sons, David and Keith.

I'm not sure how they found all these people, or got them all to show up, but like David Carradine said, they were all just looking forward to watching this movie with everybody. It must be pretty great, if you're Dorris Bowden, to be able to see yourself onscreen for a big audience again.

The movie was great; funny, well acted, beautifully photographed. Some "social message" movies from the 40s (all right, most social message moves from the 40s) haven't aged well. But some have, and this is one of them. The politics of the movie are more complicated than you may remember; here's the end of Tom Joad's famous speech:

...and when people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they built - I'll be there, too.

Which sounds a lot like Bush's ownership society. What's deliberately missing from Bush's worldview, and painfully apparent in this movie, is that the game is rigged; if you don't have money or property, good luck getting any. It's easy to subscribe to a bullshit view of the left that says: what they want is for everything to be communal, from each according to his abilities, &c. And that's true on the very fringe, but then by the same token, the right wants fascism and theocracy (combined!). Anyway, more on that when I think about it more; for now the note is it's a great movie.

Also: they showed two newsreels. One was a Christmas Parade down Hollywood Boulevard. You could clearly see the Taft building and the Roosevelt, but of course all the shops are now long gone. And the L. Ron Hubbard's Winter Wonderland display that's my personal favorite thing about the season? Not there; Hubbard was still writing pulp sci-fi. The other newsreel had then-columnist Ed Sullivan presenting Bette Davis and Mickey Rooney crowns as the "King and Queen of Hollywood." So not exactly earth-shaking news in either case.

Last: shorts. Teddy the Rough Rider, which was decent, and A Wild Hare, which was kickass.

Indescribable! Ultimate luxury, quality, and craftsmanship. From the grand entry and the sophisticated formal living and dining rooms to the many additional entertainment rooms and indoor & outdoor pools, this impressive estate appeals to every sense and satisfies every desire. Four stories of sumptuous living including beautiful master, gourmet kitchen and breakfast room, his and her offices, bowling alley, screening room, huge indoor pool & spa, racquetball court, state-of-the art spa & gym, and downstairs guest suite with two bedrooms, bath, and kitchen. Beautifully landscaped grounds with lawns, rose garden, fruit trees, patios, outdoor pool, spas, and full outdoor kitchen and BBQ. Gated, private and secure.

This figure got Jody and me thinking. First of all, don't get any ideas about buying this beauty, as we've already agreed that we're going halfsies on this house. Our agreement requires me to raise my 26.5 million dollars first. Once I've got my half, he indicated that he'd then chip in his share.

Of course, we're motivated by the fact that you'd have to be a fool to try to finance something like this. Who doesn't buy a house like this and pay cash? But never fear. If you're willing to put down 20 percent (snicker), someone (heh heh) could then lend you the rest. A 30-year fixed-rate mortgage near the current average APR (about 5.4 percent) makes this exquisite property yours for the low, low payment of $237,799...a month.

Now in the middle of all of this, I realized that nowhere in the listing is there an indication of how much usable space the house has. You always see this in house listings, with the exception of houses that cover so much ground that it's not unreasonable to get lost in them one day out the month.

But quite undaunted, I decided to do some investigative journalism. I sent an e-mail to Jade Mills with the following inquiry:

Ms. Mills:

Good morning. I was browsing the listing shown above, and sheer curiousity drove me to ask what the measure of usable square footage on this beautiful estate might be. Any reasonably accurate indication that you can give would be appreciated, whether it includes indoor-only space, or whatever outdoor amenities can also be included.

Thank you for your time and attention.

Jason Thweatt
for Polyscifi Blog

You probably couldn't have guessed that I used my "fake" name there.

1. Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me."

2. I will respond by asking you five questions. I get to pick the questions.

3. You will update your livejournal/website with the answers to the questions and provide a link to your answers in the comments.

4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.

5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

The quality of the figures is uneven. Some came out exactly as we drew them, others are quite fuzzy. There's no particular discernable pattern as to what caused different certain pictures to come out so badly.

Some tables are split across a couple pages - an editing no-no.

There are three different chapter introduction styles - something I thought I had flagged in the editing process, but which apparently didn't get fixed.

Pope John Paul II is being reborn in a Colombian comic book as a superhero battling evil with an anti-Devil cape and special chastity pants...

Like any self-respecting superhero, the Incredible Popeman has a battery of special equipment. Along with his yellow cape and green chastity pants, the muscular super-pontiff wields a faith staff with a cross on top and carries holy water and communion wine.

In the comic book, the pope dies and is reborn with superpowers beyond the infallibility Catholic doctrine gave him on Earth.

(yahoo slideshow)

(R. Leon sketches)

1) Illegals inflate tax rates by being a part of the black economy while consuming government services like right there in L.A. (Of course, with a consumption tax, this wouldn't be as much of a problem, no?)

2) It encourages workplace abuses. (Can't complain about your conditions or we'll deport you)

3) It harms security by facilitating the entry of undesirable elements (like al Qaeda).

4) It hurts the assimilation process as the illegals, by necessity, get cut off from the rest of society.

5) It fosters lawlessness (as does any unenforced law).

1) Illegals provide cheap labor vital to the economy.

2) Illegals are helping keep social security afloat by paying social security taxes without drawing payments. ¹

3) Illegals could provide useful work in the intellectual economy.