The White Menace

“…national studies have found that next to having a large Division I sports program, the single most highly correlated factor with alcohol and substance abuse on college campuses is the percentage of students who are white: the whiter the school, the bigger the problem. Not because there’s something wrong with white people, per se, but because privilege encourages and makes more likely all kinds of self-destructive behaviors, and allows those who enjoy the privileges to remain cavalier about their activities all the time.”

-Tim Wise, White Like Me, page 40.

Evolution is a treadmill, not a ladder.

“Progress … is about to hit the buffers of overpopulation, the greenhouse effect, and the exhaustion of resources. However fast we run, we never seem to get anywhere. Has the industrial revolution made the average inhabitant of the world healthier, wealthier, and wiser? Yes, if he is German. No, if he is Bangladeshi. Uncannily, … evolutionary science is ready to suit the mood. The fashion in evolutionary science now is to scoff at progress; evolution is a treadmill, not a ladder.”

A Noble Solution

I propose curbing gun violence not by further restricting the availability of guns but by expanding and reorienting it. Men would still be forbidden to walk the streets armed, in accordance with current laws, but women would be required to carry pistols in plain sight whenever they are out and about.

Were I to board the subway late at night, around Lincoln Center perhaps, and find it filled with women openly carrying Metropolitan Opera programs and Glock automatics, I’d feel snug and secure. A train packed with armed men would not produce the same comforting sensation. Maybe that’s because men have a disconcerting tendency to shoot people, while women display admirable restraint. Department of Justice figures show that between 1976 and 2005, 91.3 percent of gun homicides were committed by men, 8.7 percent by women.

Excerpted from Give Women Guns by Randy Cohen, in the NYT Sunday Magazine.

Link courtesy Justin Ricaurte.

Chilean Sea-bass

“I’m hoping that by the time my favorite foods become extinct, I’ll be dead already.”

-Jeanna Lee

Beer’s Effect On The Brain

A herd of buffalo can only move as fast as the slowest buffalo in the herd. When the herd is hunted, the slowest and weakest (at the back) are killed first. This natural selection is good for the herd as a whole, because the general speed and health of the whole group keeps improving by the regular killing of the weakest members. In much the same way, the human brain can only operate as fast as the slowest brain cells.

Excessive intake of alcohol kills braincells. Naturally, it attacks the slowest and weakest braincells first. In this way, regular consumption of beer eliminates the weaker brain cells, making the brain a faster and more efficient machine. That is why you always feel smarter after a few beers.

Thanks, Mom

Art Bell On The Supernatural

Wired: Why are people so drawn to the paranormal?

Art Bell: The same reason we’re drawn to God. The greatest question of all is whether our experience on this planet is “it” or whether there is something else. Things in the supernatural realm give support, strangely perhaps, to the things we take on faith. Like ghosts, for example—they underscore the possibility of an afterlife.

Art Bell: Radio’s Master of the Unexplained Explains Himself – Wired

Hammerpants Now At TopShop

“If hammerpants weren’t a wardrobe staple they wouldn’t sell them at TopShop. Now excuse me while I take tiny jumps sideways away from this foolishness.”

Via the anti-shazzzam.

Puritanism, Hysteria, And Control

“Unlike Winston, [Julia] had grasped the inner meaning of the Party’s sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party’s control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship.”

-1984, George Orwell

T-Pain’s Top Inspirational Quotes

T-Pain is one of the wisest, most quotable scribes of the 21st Century. His records “I’m Sprung” and “I’m N Luv (Wit’ A Stripper)” took the worlds of philosophy and academia by storm. The following is a selection of his most insightful quotes, organized by topic.

On Blazing Your Own Path:

“…rapping was just something that I started doing ’cause I thought it was cool. I just went ahead and did that cause everybody was doing it.”

On The Importance Of Good Grammar:

“…it’s some ‘having-fun-with-my-niggas’ dancing, you know what I’m sayin. If you saw me and my niggas in the club, you gonna be like ‘them niggas there is trippin!’””

On Ray-J’s Swangin’ Man-Meat:

“It’s not many guys who can go after Ray J. The man got a huge meat, okay? He got length on him. I got the width, the shit is wide. He got a foot on him. Man got a foot on him. Much respect Ray. Man to man, no homo. I know when respect is due. The man swangin’. Ya’ll seen that shit, ya’ll know the man swangin’.”

On Proper Composure At The Golf Club, Good Dental Health:

“There’s a lot of talk that I flipped over in a golf cart, that’s fucking true. It did happen like three days ago. My ass is on fire right now. My side hurt, my mouth hurt… I bust my ass. I’d show you the marks, but I don’t wanna pull my pants down right now. I got my teeth fixed the same day. Rich nigga teeth.”

T-Pain is a Grammy Award winning-artist, an active member of MENSA, and holds a PhD in Particle Physics from MIT.

‘A Series of Tubes’ Has Competition

“We have to do it in the Facebook, with the Twittering, the different technology that young people are using today.”

—outgoing Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan on the party’s Internet strategy, The Washington Post, January 5.

Pants Off

“Mr. Speaker, I suggest that we will need to take our pants off. We’ll need to take our pants off and buy a pair that is about three sizes smaller. This is not a sufficient belt tightening bill, Mr. Speaker.”

-Washington State Representative Gary Alexander

Letter To ‘Washington Bus’

Email to political organization Washington Bus regarding their (in my opinion) misguided goals:

From: Cameron Newland
to: info@washingtonbus.org
Mon, Apr 27, 2009, 5:08 PM
subject: Issues: What We Stand For

I went to a WashingtonBus event last week at Moe Bar, and my friend and I enjoyed ourselves quite a bit. People there who knew what The Bus was (I didn’t) said it was a sort of non-partisan organization that advocated young people getting involved in politics. I just checked out your website, and upon looking at the Issues: What We Stand For page, I saw some things that I believe need correcting (lest someone else like me comes to your site looking to join and reads some things that they don’t agree with and promptly leaves your site without dropping you an email detailing their concerns).

First, the Issues page looks very partisan. In fact, it sounds really socialist/liberal. You don’t want it to look like that, because that limits your audience as an organization. It will turn people off who don’t agree, and they won’t ever join.

The Health Care blurb was brief, nondescript, and perfect. Everyone can agree with what you said there. Kudos.

The Environment statement is something I would definitely advocate changing. Why? It seems to suggest that pollutants/emissions are the only enemy when it comes to environmental stewardship. That’s not true at all, in fact, the real driver of environmental change is population, not pollution. More pollution is a byproduct of more population. Pollution can certainly be reduced, but if you were serious about decreasing our footprint on the planet, you’d advocate reducing population before you advocated stricter emissions laws. I suggest you either broaden the list of enemies to the environment by adding ‘untenable/irresponsible population’, or otherwise rewording the Environment statement so that it doesn’t single-out emissions/pollution.

The Economic Justice portion should be stricken from the manifesto completely. Why? Equality is never going to happen, ever. It’s a romantic idea, but it can only come with communism (also a romantic idea), and communism fails in practice. What you should replace Economic Justice with is something like ‘Equal Opportunities for All’ with regard to education/jobs/advancement. That would indicate that you’re pro-fairness and not pro-pipedream, which is currently the case (when you seek vaguely-defined ‘justice’, a noble aim that is impossible to attain).

On the Equal Rights portion, kudos! I couldn’t have said it better myself! Ditto Election Reform. Pat yourselves on the back.

The A+ Education statement needs work. The biggest problem with it is that it advocates ‘better funding’. I don’t know what ‘better funding’ is. Your readers probably don’t, either. If ‘better funding’ is federal/state/local money to support innovative charter schools, then I would say I support ‘better funding’. If, by ‘better funding’, you mean more funding, then I would say you’re absolutely wrong. Throwing money at a poorly-designed, antiquated system is money wasted. The biggest issue today with primary education is that we don’t really have free choice. There is a Soviet-style government monopoly on education (tax money for schools only goes to government-administered schools). Our public schools, unable to thrive in a competitive environment, fail to innovate and fail to educate our children up to the level at which they could be. The future of education, the way we can improve our children’s education, is to make our primary education system function like our thriving higher-education system (which, I might add, is the envy of the world). If government money supported the best-performing schools instead of only government-run schools, our children (and our economy) would be much better-off. I attended Bellevue High School and the UW, and had an AMAZING, SUPERIOR education (100% in public schools). Most pupils in public institutions are not so lucky–I’m the exception to the rule, and I know it.

My last critique is that there is nothing on there about liberties. Rights, yes, but not liberties. Our freedom from undue regulation is what makes our country so great and so productive. Government shouldn’t stand in the way of any of us. In fact, government’s only reason for existence is to 1) arbitrate between people when one is being wronged (ensuring fairness with a justice system), 2) to maintain order, and 3) to build things that we might not build on our own, like roads, or a national defense. Because the group’s manifesto seems so liberal (definitions of liberal include favors political philosophy of progress, reform, protection of civil liberties; and a broad array of related ideas of government that consider individual liberty to be the most important political goal) you should surely include something in there about freedom from undue regulation, essentially favoring no government action unless it’s absolutely necessary to protect fairness/maintain order/provide something that we wouldn’t on our own.

I’d love it if any or all of this could somehow make it into the Issues page. Reflect on it, at least. Remember, for every thoughtful letter you receive, 100 have come and gone thinking the same, yet wrote you nothing.

-Cameron Newland

Non-Prophets

The [Charlston, SC] chapter of Habitat for Humanity would not let the Secular Humanists volunteer to build houses wearing T-shirts that said “Non Prophet Organization.”

The t-shirt stunt was too polemical, I admit (just like Affirmative-Action Bakesales), but quite funny nonetheless.

More Atheists Shout It From the Rooftops – NYTimes

A Growing Minority Soon To Become a Majority

“…the ranks of atheists are growing. The American Religious Identification Survey, a major study released last month, found that those who claimed ‘no religion’ were the only demographic group that grew in all 50 states in the last 18 years. Nationally, they nearly doubled, to 15 percent in 2008 from 8 percent in 1990. In South Carolina, they more than tripled, to 10 percent from 3 percent.”

More Atheists Shout It From the Rooftops – NYTimes

Single Digits

I don’t think I’ve ever drunk champagne before breakfast before. With breakfast on several occasions, but never ‘before before’.

-Fred Varjak