Wow…  Seven years…  That seems almost impossible.

On the one hand, it feels like I’ve known Terri forever.  Seems like there’s never been a time when she wasn’t part of my life.

On the other hand, it feels like just yesterday we were getting married.

Weird.

The days just keep getting longer…

Not literally.  Literally, the days are getting shorter as we head into Winter.

But ever since those trips out to Syracuse last week, each day is feeling much longer than the last.

I think I’m coming down with something.  Or maybe I’m just depressed or sleep deprived or something.  I don’t know.  But I’m having one hell of a time waking up in the morning.  My eyes feel like lead weights.  It feels like I’m climbing my way out of some deep well just to get out of bed.

I can’t seem to warm up.  I’m sleeping with a couple blankets over me…  I’m turning the shower up as high as it will go…  I’m wearing long sleeved shirts…  I’m turning the heater in the car up as high as it will go…  And I still feel thoroughly chilled.

I’ve been feeling heavy and sluggish lately.  Like somebody turned the gravity up a couple notches when I wasn’t looking.  Everything seems to be moving too quickly.  I’m having a hard time keeping up with everything.  My brain feels like it’s operating underwater or something.

Of course, in that wonderful frame of mind, nothing is going right.  Simple tasks are requiring far more effort to complete, and I’m usually not doing them right.  Which means I then have to un-do the mistakes I made, and re-do the task correctly.

The end result of all this is that the days seem very, very long.

This morning, on Morning Joe, they were talking about some new taxes.  It wasn’t really the main point of the conversation…  Just kind of came up tangentially…  But it caught my ear anyway.

You’ve probably heard various people talking about taxing soda and fruit juices and other sugary crap.  And there’s been some push-back from the sugary crap industry.  There’s a commercial I see fairly often where some motherly looking lady talks about how just a few pennies adds up to a lot of money.  How it will hurt families to have to pay extra for their drinks.  You get the idea.

Now, personally, I really don’t have a problem with taxing soda – they tax cigarettes and alcohol after all, and soda has no more redeeming qualities than either of those do.

That ad tries to portray soda as some kind of staple.  It suggests that families would be hard-pressed to buy all the things they need.  But this just isn’t true.  It’s sugar water.  It is not required for the functioning of life.  We’re not talking about nutritious food here.

It does seem like a staple though…  If you go to the grocery store, take a look at the carts around you.  I can almost guarantee you’ll see a few of them loaded to the brim with soda.  I’ll routinely see a cart full of soda.  A good 10 cases or more.  Folks have become accustomed to drinking soda instead of water, or milk, or tea, or coffee, or whatever else.  That’s just what people drink.

And that’s kind of the point of this proposed tax.  Much like the cigarette taxes have made it cost-prohibitive to smoke absurd amounts…  The soda tax would, theoretically, make it cost-prohibitive to drink absurd amounts of soda.  And with obesity becoming the national norm, cutting down on soda intake can only be a good thing.

But then Mika mentioned that she also thought red meat should be taxed, because it isn’t healthy for you.

We’ve been taught that red meat is bad for you…  It’s got saturated fat, or whatever.  You’d be much better off eating chicken or pork or something…  And that may, technically, be true.  I’m no dietitian.  I can’t tell you which meat is better or worse for any given dietary needs.

But red meat really is pretty good for you.  Maybe pork would be better…  But if you compare a nice slab of beef to a pile of Keebler cookies, or some frozen pizza, or a bag of chips, or a bottle of soda, or one of those Kid Cuizine things…  Beef is, at least, real food.  There’s nutrients in there.

And meat in general (red, white, whatever) is already pretty expensive.  Go to the grocery store and compare the cost of feeding a family of four a meal of Kraft macaroni and cheese, to the cost of feeding those same four people some kind of meat and potatoes.

My point is that the problem in the US is not that people are eating too much red meat, it’s that people are eating too much processed crap.  Fresh fruits, vegetables, grains, breads, and meats are basically unavailable for large portions of the population.  Depending on where you live, they may literally be unavailable.  In many inner-city areas, fresh fruits and vegetables are simply not for sale.  Or, if you’re lucky enough to have such things for sale, they may cost more than you can afford.

So, people wind up eating canned and/or frozen meals…  Or they get McDonald’s or Burger King or whatever…  And we, as a nation, wind up malnourished and obese.

And, of course, if you were to actually tax red meat it wouldn’t help a thing.

You’d wind up with some sort of tax like $0.01 on every pound of red meat…  So you’d see industrial food processors start cutting their meat with more substitutes.  Folks would buy even more processed food, because it would be 50% soy, and therefor cheaper.  It’d be even more difficult to feed a family on real food like meat and potatoes.  You’d see even more families living off of macaroni and cheese.

And, of course, the big industrial food processing companies have money to spend on lobbying…  While the small, independent farmers do not…  So I’m sure we’d wind up with some kind of bizarre situation where properly packaged and labeled food is actually taxed less than raw foods.

Ultimately, what I think we’d see, is a nation become less healthy because of these taxes.

Tycho, over at Penny Arcade, has a post today that rambles through a few different subject before finally alighting on the topic of video game piracy on the PC.  I’ll quote the bit that I’m talking about:

It is not a mischaracterization to say that conversations with the hardcore PC community about software theft follow these tenets:

- There is no piracy.
- To the extent that piracy exists, which it doesn’t, it’s your fault.
- If you try to protect your game, we’ll steal it as a matter of principle.

It’s like, who wouldn’t want to bend over backward in their service? You need to know it, because nobody else is going to tell you: you guys sound like Goddamned subway vagrants.

I don’t know that I’m part of the “hardcore PC community” of which he speaks…  But I do have some opinions on the subject.

To be very blunt, pirates do not matter to the game development process.

Video game pirates basically come in two flavors.  First you’ve got the folks who will not buy your game – period.  Ever.  Doesn’t matter what kind of DRM you put into it, doesn’t matter how great the game is, doesn’t matter how cheap the game is, they will not buy it.

Maybe they’re cracking the DRM for bragging rights on their warez board.  Maybe they feel they’re somehow sticking it to the man.  Maybe they have absolutely no disposable income.  Whatever.

They aren’t going to buy your game.  The best you can hope for with some kind of uber-uncrackable DRM is just keeping them from playing it.  You aren’t going to get a sale out of them no matter how much DRM you cram into your product.

Then you’ve got the folks who might buy your video game, but for now they’re pirating it.  Maybe they want to test it out first, and there’s no demo available.  Maybe they can’t afford it at the moment.  Maybe they’re waiting for the price to come down.  Maybe they want to see if their friends pick it up as well.

These people can be convinced to buy your product.  If the game is good enough and the price is right, they will pay for it.  But DRM is not going to convince them.  They’re testing the game out with a pirated copy, with no DRM.  If they go buy the game and it’s got annoying DRM on it, they’ll remove that too.  If removing the DRM cripples the game, they probably won’t buy it.

So you can’t convince the first group to buy your game no matter what.  And the second group is going to be convinced by the same stuff that would convince anyone else – a good product.  So, for the purposes of developing a game, the pirates just don’t matter.

I’m going to steal a quote from a post over on Pharyngula:

“It’s not a question of whether we have faith, it’s what we have faith in,” says Wilson. “Christopher has faith in the role of scientific inquiry, rational inquiry. He has faith in that process. Christopher is as much a man of faith as I am.”

Science is not a book or a person or a thing – science is a process.  A method.  A procedure.  Saying that someone has faith in science is like saying they have faith in trying your shoes, or assembling a piece of Ikea furniture.

So, you break out the instructions…  You follow them step by step…  Hopefully you wind up with a tied shoe.  If you don’t, either you did something wrong along the way, or there’s something wrong with the instructions.  You can follow those instructions again more carefully, you can find some different instructions and try those, or you can develop your own instructions.  But there really isn’t any faith involved in that process at all.

There is no point where you just sit there and have faith that your shoes will be correctly tied because the instructions have been handed down across generations.  There is no point where you decide that your shoes must be correctly tied, despite the fact that your shoes are falling off and you’ve got laces flapping all over the place, because you have faith in the instructions.  There is no point where you decide to blindly follow the instructions of some guy who doesn’t even have feet, much less shoes, because you have faith.

Folks who claim that people have faith in science simply do not know what they’re talking about.

Sure, I’m too lazy to actually go out and determine for myself whether Newton was right about gravity…  But that doesn’t make it an article of faith.  I don’t have faith in Newton’s science – I just happen to fall down when I jump off a chair.

If I’ve got a model rocket I want to fire off, I can look up equations and figure out how much propellant I need.  I don’t need to have faith to use somebody else’s equations.  The fact that I don’t go create my own equations doesn’t mean that I have faith in science – it means that I’ve got better things to do with myself.

If those equations were hopelessly wrong I might very well go look for some different equations…  Maybe the website I grabbed mine off of wasn’t a good choice, maybe I misunderstood them, maybe I plugged in a number in the wrong place…  But, honestly, I’m unlikely to devote a whole ton of effort to it.

But if all I did for a living was throw rockets into space, I’d probably care a bit more about my equations.  I probably would actually do some tests and hunt down truly reputable authorities and make sure I had the very best equations out there.  Maybe I’d even make my own equations.

But none of that equates to faith.  It’s all just processes and instructions.  And that’s all science is.

Science is a process, a method, that we use to learn about the universe around us.  And the really important thing is that science is useful.  You get instructions and formulas that can be used to actually do things.

You can predict where a planet will be on a given day, and how much fuel it will take to get there, and where to point your cameras – and you can actually send a satellite into space and get pictures of a planet.

You can observe the affect of various chemicals on certain bacteria, and how those bacteria affect other living cells, and how those living cells affect the rest of the organism – and you can actually develop medicines to cure diseases.

It works.  It produces results.

That, I think, is one of the key differences between science and faith.

You can look at a shoe and see whether it is tied.  You can analyze the instructions and determine whether there are wasteful steps, whether it could be made more efficient.  You can test to see whether the process changes with different colored laces or not.  When somebody comes along with velcro shoes, and tells you that your shoe tying instructions are wrong, you can actually test and see where the problem is; maybe create new and better instructions.

There is no faith to any of this.  It’s simple observation and documentation.

I guess I might have faith in my doctor…  Might have faith that he really is a doctor, actually went to medical school, knows what he’s talking about, that he’s prescribing the right medication, things like that…  But that’s not faith in science.  That’s faith in another human being.

Pastor Marc Grizzard claims the King James version of the Bible is the only true word of God, and that all other versions are “satanic” and “perversions” of God’s word.

On Halloween night, Grizzard and the 14 members of the Amazing Grace Baptist Church will set fire to other versions of the scripture, as well as music and books by Christian authors.

“We are burning books that we believe to be Satanic,” Pastor Grizzard said.

“I believe the King James version is God’s preserved, inspired, inerrant, infallible word of God… for English-speaking people.”

All other religious or Christian texts are sacreligious, the pastor insists. The list of books being burned will include works written by “a lot of different authors who we consider heretics, such as Billy Graham, Rick Warren… the list goes on and on,” Pastor Grizzard said.

Also on the pastor’s list of heretical authors — Mother Teresa, according to a full list that was previously available at the Amazing Grace Baptist Church’s Web site. The Church’s Web site — which is no longer available — calls the event ‘Burning Perversions of God’s Word,’ and urges parishioners to “come celebrate Halloween by burning Satan’s bibles.” Calls to the Amazing Grace Church were not returned Thursday.

Some in the pastor’s community support the event.

“In my opinion, the King James Version is the only version,” Sissy Messer said.

But not all residents of Canton, N.C. agree with the bonfire of the profanities.

“I think some of the newer versions make it easier for people to understand,” said resident Judy Kirby.

The book-burning is being promoted as a social event with a barbecue dinner.

The story is a little fuzzy…  I’m not sure if he’s suggesting that the KJV is the only true word of god ever, and that god originally intended to speak in English; or if he simply means that the KJV is the only true English translation of the word of god.

I’m also not sure that it matters.

What I love is how well this illustrates one of my primary complaints against religion.

This guy claims that the KJV is the only true word of god.  All the folks out there going with some other version of the bible (and there are plenty) are doing it wrong.  Of course, we’re not talking about baking a cake here…  If you get it wrong you aren’t going to wind up with a mess in your kitchen…  Numerous wars have been fought over which is the right holy book, and lives have been lost over the correct interpretation of of a verse or two.  This is some serious stuff.  If you get it wrong, you’re probably going to hell.

So we’ve got all these folks operating under the blanket label of “Christianity” – off of them worship basically the same god.  But they’ve all got their own slightly different take on things…

Some of them like to worship god by speaking in Latin and having very somber ceremonies with lots of impressive headgear…  Others like to sing and dance and clap and make lots of noise…  Others think you ought to be handling poisonous snakes…  Some just want you to bring food…

And even though all these different folks are following “the bible” and worshiping “god” – they’re all doing it very differently.

The more tolerant folks will tell you it’s OK to have different opinions about god.  They’ll tell you the important part is to accept Jesus into your life and to bring a dish to the pot-luck.  They really don’t mind if you read a different version of the bible or if you don’t put french-fried onions on top of your green bean casserole.

The less tolerant folks will tell you that you’re going straight to hell.  They’ll tell you to repent, burn your sacrilegious texts, and beg for forgiveness.  They’ll tell you that theirs is the only truer religion, the only right way to worship.  They’ll tell you that everyone else is worshiping false gods, or idols, or whatever.

These people can’t all be right.

If the moderates are correct, then the fundamentalists are wrong and they’re preaching a lot of fear and hatred un-necessarily.

If the fundamentalists are correct, then all the moderates are going straight to hell even though they think they’re worshiping the right way.

So either way you’ve got very devout, faithful people who are worshiping the wrong way.

These people are absolutely convinced that they’re doing it right.  They pray to their god, and believe he listens.  They take communion, or take up serpents, or tithe their money, or whatever…  They make important decisions based on this religious instruction…  They will defend their belief with words like “faith” and “truth”…  They’ll try to force their beliefs on other people…  All with the best of intentions, and the sincere belief that they’re doing it right.

But they aren’t.  They’re worshiping wrong.

And we’re just talking about Christians here.

If all the folks reading the bible and praising god can’t agree on what’s right, how do we know that actually reading the bible and praising god is right.  How do we know that they shouldn’t be sacrificing people to Odin?