Rhinocrisy

Apparently, some fundamentalists have managed to sneak it into school curriculums in Texas that NASA research supports the Biblical account of the sun standing still in the sky (Joshua 10:11-14) at the behest of Hebrew ass-whupper Joshua. NASA actually has a page about this.^*

Anyway, Majikthise was on this shit fully a month ago. I just caught up via Hedwig, who had a panel of the comic “Slowpoke” posted mentioning this travesty. Jen, creator of Slowpoke spells it out in detail.

Since I’m clearly in the dust on this one, I’ll employ this opportunity to point out that not just Christian fundamentalists spout such hooey. My mom does, too!

My parents publish a newsletter that goes out to the New England Hindu community, and I’ve drawn a small one-panel comic for this for many years, usually religiously-themed, often inspired by Hindu mythology. One particular comic was based on a story about Hanuman, the son of the wind (”monkey god” to you uneducated rubes). In his youth, the young Hanuman looked up one day and saw the orb of the sun in the sky. Imagining it to be a ball that he might use as a plaything, he leapt up and took it in his mouth, plunging the world into darkness. The various demi-gods, alarmed, intervened and encouraged the boy to cough up the sun. Then they cursed him to forget his powers for good measure, perhaps telling him he was a very naughty monkey.

Anywho, being the humorless empiricist that I am, I lampooned this story by depicting Hanuman looking up at the sun and telling a bystander, “Well, I was going to swallow it, but then I realized that my mouth wasn’t wide enough by 870,000 miles.” Ha ha!

Later I discovered that the official censors (my parents) had edited my comic and replaced my punch-line with the limpid “What a nice ball! Why don’t I find you a different one?” (voiced by the bystander). I was about as outraged as I could be about something so ridiculous and unimportant, but since my name didn’t ever actually appear on the comic I couldn’t demand to be divorced from it. So instead I argued it out with my parents, who told me that my comic had been “wrong”, because Hanuman had, in fact, swallowed the sun. All my best efforts to point out how absurd this was, including the likely catastrophic effects on the Earth ecosystem of even a momentary blip in solar input, the concomitant change in mass required by Hanuman and its disruption of gravitation in the solar system, etc., were met with patient insistence that I was wrong. My parents are smart folks, but their adherence to dogma (in this case, the notion that the Ramayana is absolutely historically accurate) sometimes leads them to espouse ideas that are not so smart at all.

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^* Rotational energy of the Earth, incidentally, is 2 x 10²⁹ J. What happened to all that energy in the intervening hours while the Earth wasn’t rotating is a mystery. Also a mystery is why Joshua says, “Sun, stand still,” instead of “Earth, stop rotating.” It’s almost like he believed the Sun traveled around the Earth! Fortunately, it’s called Biblical inerrancy, not Joshuaic inerrancy.

Sorry it took so long. Old results. Although I’d like to point out that some of your fears are misplaced: the moon’s orbit is actually decaying AWAY from Earth, not towards it. So unless some meddling Kryptonians show up, we should be okay.

I talked to a friend in Baton Rouge yesterday, who had some fairly disgusting stories to share. Not of official incompetence (although there was that, too), but of active malfeasance: cops looting goods in the vacated city, lounging around at their ease with their stolen largesse, stealing (”commandeering”) from evacuating residents, keeping people from taking what they need to survive. There’s other ugly stories: opportunists running around buying up property to rent out to refugees, housing prices rising, landlords forbidding tenants to take in guests.

And then there’s some gorgeous ones. This one, via Bitch PhD is buoyant. It’s a long saga, and it’s written the way an anarcho-communist like myself would love: the Man is the villain, the working people are the noble heroes.

We decided we had to save ourselves. So we pooled our money and came up with $25,000 to have ten buses come and take us out of the City. Those who did not have the requisite $45.00 for a ticket were subsidized by those who did have extra money. We waited for 48 hours for the buses, spending the last 12 hours standing outside, sharing the limited water, food, and clothes we had. We created a priority boarding area for the sick, elderly and new born babies. We waited late into the night for the “imminent” arrival of the buses. The buses never arrived. We later learned that the minute the arrived to the City limits, they were commandeered by the military.

If you’ve found this obscure corner of blogland, you’re probably used to spending too long staring at computer screens. So go read these. They will grow hair on your chest and make your children grow fat and happy.

Tom Englehardt wrote a few days ago all too well about what has happened in New Orleans. Depressing and beautiful. Go read.

James Wolcott makes a good case that we are at the end of our financial rope in the USA, and about to see even worse times.

In better news, I just watched a golden lab and a pointer stare in fascination at the stuffed lamb in the window of a store on Valencia Street in San Francisco. They kept sniffing the window, trying to learn more. These were dogs who had never seen a lamb before, but they knew, somehow, that it was something they should know more about. I love that.