hell’s handmaiden

Once again the nation is convulsing over a celebrity sex scandal. Racy photos of yet another teen star are making the news, and boy is it shameful!

Except that the whole thing is nonsense. Hannah Montana star Miley Cyrus was photographed showing her back. Yes, that’s right. She was photographed exposing that thing with the spine in it and the shoulderblades and such.

This must be one of the more amusing ‘debunkings’ of evolution I’ve seen thus far. Have a look. think of it as a kind of ‘how many layers of stupid can you find’ game. I love the little speech given by the frumpy lady starting about ten seconds in.

Several videos follow the break.

Popularity: 14%

I’ve written here and there about climate change and I also think that I’ve mentioned my fetish for technology. The problem, rather obviously, is that technology requires power. I like power. I do not wish to return to those halcyon days when long distance travel meant going to the next town and ingrown toenails were a serious medical condition. Not my bag, baby.

The trick then is to generate power without killing ourselves in the process. And that is quite a trick, but I don’t think it is impossible. I’ve made a few offhand comments on the topic.

Short but hopefully inflammatory.

The United States was founded on a strong set of principles, most if not all of which I favor by the way. But lets think about something else. Since its founding, people in the United States have had a kind of religious zeal about those founding principles. Politics seems to be eternally about returning to an earlier age. The suggestion is that the such an earlier stage somehow approached perfect and hence all we can do is preserve it. We can try not to stray too far from our foundations but we have little hope of doing better. Whether the founders thought of it this way is a different question.