Have I mentioned that Boondocks is one of the rare comics that still has flashes of true brilliance?

UPDATE: Visiting commenter OpinionEngine reminded me that John Kerry is probably feeling left out, so here's one for him:

According to a popular myth, God grew the First Woman from a rib bone of the First man. Leave it to the Germans to take a fairytale as an engineering challenge...

German surgeons recently grew a new jaw bone in a man's back muscle in order to transplant it into his mouth to replace the jaw bone he lost to cancer. A titanium mesh cage was imbedded under the patient's shoulder blade, and injections of a growth chemical and the patient's own bone marrow, containing stem cells, were used to stimulate development of a jaw bone that fit precisely into the gap from his cancer surgery.

While artificial jaw implants pose significant risk of infection, and generally involve significant pain for a long time after implantation, this patient's biggest complaint has been that the lack of teeth on his new lower jaw forces him to cut his steak into such small pieces that it is cold by the time he finishes. Fortunately, he should be able to have teeth fastened into the new jaw within a year or so, assuming no further complications arrise.

Dr. Heinz Von Evil, lead surgeon on the jaw-growing team, has been quoted in the DeathKoala Daily Bugle, "Today a jaw, tomorrow a race of rock-bone hybrid zombie super babies with which to conquer the world!"

Today I encountered another entry for the "Wha...?" files, in the form of a 35-year-old Nigerian woman who gave birth to a rock. Mrs. Bosede Ismaila, of Allu in Yagba East Local Government Area, gave birth to a stone weighing 0.3 kg at the Kabba General Hospital after 12 months of pregnancy. Her husband, tractor driver Islmaila Idris, has attributed the delivery of the "miracle child" to the devil.

The truly "Wha...?"-inspiring part of this story is that women giving birth to rocks is not unprecidented. If a fetus dies during a pregnancy it can become lodged in the uterus and calcify, forming a "stone baby." A Zairian woman had a four pound calcified fetus removed from her abdomen, apparently a 32-week intra-abdominal pregnancy which had died. That link has actual pictures of the stone fetus. Very cool.

A race of stone-human hybrids is being produced and nobody is concerned?! Take it from somebody who has read about ten thousand comic books, the arrival of the Stone People is never good news for humanity.

Remember my July 17th news item about the man in Port Orange, Florida who beat his girlfriend with an alligator? Well, it seems the gators read it, because they are fighting back.

In Gainsville, Florida, a man was forced to jump on a 6-foot alligator with his pocket knife in order to save his dog, a bloodhound/Shar-Pei mix the gator had got its jaws around. Only by stabbing the gator in the eye could the man convince it to release the tasty pup. The dog, appetizingly named "Sugar," escaped with teeth marks around and on her head, and the owner got away with just a few scratches.

In other Florida-related news, the companies certifying America's voting technology have flat out refused to discuss flaws in like machines that will be used by nearly one in three voters this November. As the founder VerifiedVoting.org put it, this is like having ballots handled by a private company that counts them behind a closed door and then burns the results. With poll results showing an incredibly close presidential race in such states as, say, Florida, the mechanisms of voting and vote counting are once again a matter for serious concern.

Administrative note:
Comments visitor Aleks has requested I post this link to a news item as part of an ongoing debate in the comments section, since my comments feature is free and therefore crappy enough to make link-posting a hastle. Feel free to check it out, and to join in that debate...it's all open season around here.

When reason, logic, and empirical evidence cannot give the answers we seek, there is only one path left to us: the internet. It seems only fitting, then, that we use the internet in making that most irrational of decisions, namely which God or gods to worship, and doing so just got a whole lot easier...

Witness Godchecker! Search the Holy Database to gather information on familiar gods, or browse the extensive catalouge of lesser-known dieties. Play interactive games like "How Many Gods Can You Spot On The Surface Of This Burnt Crumpet?" or "Build Your Own Lego God." Vote on the relative arm-wrestling prowess of various mythic creators, or simply tout the popularity of your chosen God in either forums or the weekly polls. Even learn to count, God-style!

God bless you, Internet.

Imagine living in a world where there are no words for colors. Imagine not having any numbers or numeral concepts beyond "a few" and "many." Imagine having no written language, no creation myths, no art, and no fictional stories.

Congratulations, you just imagined being a Piraha. The Piraha tribe of the Amazon also have no pronouns in their own language, and communicate by singing, whistling, and humming as much as they do by normal speech. They never sleep more than two hours at a time, and they frequently change their names because they believe spirits take over their bodies and change who they are.

While theories like Chomsky's univeral human grammar have dominated much of linquistic theory, the Piraha seem to be an example supporting alternate models like those of Wittgenstein and Benjamin Lee Whorf. Whorf theorized that learning a given language will strongly influence cognition, and that our native language will play a large part in determining the construction of our though processes. For example, though the Piraha express strong interest in learning mathematical concepts, even the most patient efforts at teaching them counting and arithmatic have failed.

Perusing the Piraha promts me to ponder the purport of palaver. If language factors into our awareness and comprehension (or lack thereof) of reality, then do individuals with more expansive vocabularies have a wider range of experience? When one grasps the lexical distinction between subtle connotations of complex terms then does that correspond to a dawning awareness of the distinctions between the two states or objects being described?

Please tell me that it does, 'cause then my SAT Verbal score is still worth bragging about.

(Special thanks to Jay for letting me know about the Piraha story.)

This just in: God punishes Florida.

We don't know exactly why, but according to Christianity.com, God is the mastermind in control of the hurricane that left death and destruction in its wake across Florida. Hurricane Charley already smacked around the godless communists in Cuba, though the 102 mph winds were not able to actually kill any of said heretics. It was, apparently, able to kill some Americans, since "significant loss of life" is reported from Punta Gorda, Florida.

Christianity.com's TheARtLady assures us that God is responsible for keeping the hurricane from her relatives in South Carolina, and that He is to be thanked for keeping the devastation to a minimum in Florida. Those survivors who wish to rebuild the homes God smashed will be helped and sustained by God, thanks, in part, to TheARtLady's prayers, which also convinced God to change His plan and spare a few people He had been planning to kill. Additionally, God plans to comfort those people whose lives He attacked just yesterday, driving me to wonder how any Christian can give John Kerry crap for being a flip-flopper.

Words fail, at this point.

Made it to DC, slept on the floor last night because it proved impossible to obtain a bed or mattress. Subsisting on 7-eleven donuts and beer for now, though perhaps grocery shopping is in the cards for tomorrow. Happy birthday to Aaron Devine, the best blond Jew a bitter old agnostic like me could hope to befriend. Hopefully posting will still procede, though it may be a little slow for a while.

Administrative note:

Haloscan, which provides my Comments feature, seems to be having some trouble. I lost my comments from a March post, a June post, and a July post so far, and I may be missing more that I haven't noticed yet. Their tech support assures me they will get those Comments back, but if you were trying to discuss something on one of them you might have to wait a couple days.

I would apologize for the inconveniece, but this is a free site...you get what you pay for.

Tomorrow is moving day. I'm shlepping my ass half way across the country to an apartment I have never seen, attending a grad school I am probably not prepared for, entering a life I'm not sure I want.

So why am I in such a good mood?

I think going to college was a means of lulling me into a false sense of confidence. It wasn't ever supposed to actually prepare me for what comes next, or to make me more likely to succeed, it was just supposed to convince me that I have been well prepared. It had nothing to do with building skills or experience, but was a matter of making me so sure of myself that I would be willing to take the necessary leap into the real world with a smile on my face.

We'll see if I'm still smiling a month from now, I suppose.

Public school must be as ineffective as they all say, because my math skills aren't able to explain how $445 billion is less than $375 billion.

The Bush White House is claiming that our deficit situation "improved" this year, and I just can't seem to work that out. True, $445 billion is lower than the originally projected $512 billion, but the last time I checked we didn't measure budget improvement by how wrong we were in our original estimates. The deficit this year is larger than last year, it's merely less inflated than they originally told us it might get.

Now, it's natural for an administration to high-ball their estimates, so they can have something approaching good news when the deficit is still around at the end of the year. We know this time was no different, because the Congressional Budget Office predicted $44 billion lower than the White House's estimate, but really that's not unprecedented or evil. Such friendly reasoning is a very smart political move, especially since a January 2004 poll by the Pew Research Center found that 51 percent of respondents called the deficit a top government priority, but only 1 in 6 Americans can correctly identify the difference between the federal debt and the federal deficit. I am more than willing to let them have a little fudge room to cushion the blow. I draw the line at out-right lying, though.

When releasing the report last week, Budget Director Josh Bolten said President Bush is on track to keeping his oft-mocked promise to cut the deficit in half by 2009, and even other Republicans aren't buying that. For instance, the Republican-based Concord Coalition has specifically outlined that if Bush tax-cuts are made permanent the deficit will increase for at least the next 10 years, unless serious curbs to spending are implemented immediately. The Coalition is a nonpartisan group, founded and chaired by Republicans, that is dedicated to fiscal responsibility. Current CC president (and former commerce secretary) Peter G. Peterson remarked in his recent book, "This administration and the Republican Congress have presided over the most reckless deterioration of America's finances in history."

Peterson also makes what should be a very obvious point, that cutting taxes doesn't fix a damn thing unless spending is also cut; the White House's own calculations show tax cuts accounting for 29 percent of the deficits built up from 2001 to 2004, but Bush has specifically stated he has no intention to off-set those tax cuts with any reciprocal tax adjustments.

White House projections show that the deficit will fall to $331 billion in the 2005 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1, and drop steadily until it is $229 billion in the 2009 fiscal year, when the next presidential term ends. However, these calculations do not include any additional spending in Iraq and Afghanistan after early next year, when current appropriations will run out. Thus the numbers are already useless, since President Bush just yesterday approved $25 billion of additional spending for U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq as part of Pentagon funding for the fiscal year 2005.

Quite a pickle, and not a sweet one. To straighten out this mess of economics and unimaginable sums of money, I propose a simple experimental test that all Americans can try:

Weigh yourself. Now write down the absolute most you could possibly weigh next year, assuming that you consumed as many calories as physically possible each day and did not move at all. For the intervening year, eat as much as you want, avoid any nonessential physical activity, and then weigh yourself at the end of the year. Explain to all your friends that you lost weight eating whatever you want because your original estimate was higher than the actual end product, and convince them to get on board with your new miracle diet. Measure the amount of elapsed time before you are nominated as the next GOP presidential candidate.

I'm telling you, people, DEMOCRACY DOESN'T WORK.

In a survey by the Washington Post and Harvard, more than half of all Americans agreed with the following statement: “Politics and government are so complicated that a person like me can’t really understand what’s going on.” No, this was not a survey from the 1960s...this was less than ten years ago, and a new study completed last year showed no significant change in response to that question compared to the results from the original survey.

During the height of what many consider the conservative revival in America, almost half of Americans couldn't tell the difference between capitalism and communism; a 1987 survey found that 45% of adult respondents believed that Karl Marx's principle "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" was part of the U.S. Constitution.

A 1991 poll by the American Bar Association found that only 33% of Americans surveyed knew what the Bill of Rights was. That means that, even using the most generous possible improvement in civics comprehension as estimated by the U.S. Department of Education, more than three out of five Americans DON'T KNOW WHAT THE BILL OF RIGHTS IS.

If somebody admits that driving laws are too complicated to understand, and if that person cannot identify a stop sign, then we don't allow them to drive. Yet, propose any system of basic requirements for voting and everybody screams "Elitism! Evil Aristocracy!" Why is that? Information on civics and voting is available for free to the public, just like information about traffic laws and driving...so why should licensing the one be considered elitist, but not the other? Rich people can buy cars that handle better and can get professional driving lessons, so does that mean the system of licensing drivers is elitist because it favors the rich?

Here's the real reason why I am so up in arms about this today: in the grocery store check-out line I over heard a cashier discussing the splendid work being done by "our Vice President Rumsfeld" with a middle-aged customer. Yup. Rummy has be promoted by the morons of the Midwest. Both of these people can vote in the upcoming elections, even though they cannot correctly identify the Vice President of the United States. These two people can, with their votes, completely cancel out and reverse my vote.

Fucking democracy.