unreasonable.org

Bjorn Lomborg was one of the first high-profile "climate change skeptics". In 2001, he argued in his book The Skeptical Environmentalist that fighting global warming would be a waste of money.

Now, in a new book Smart Solutions to Climate Change, Lomborg is calling climate change "undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today", and calling for a carbon tax to collect $50 billion a year.

The Week has a brief on him and five other climate "skeptics" who have come around.

Good news for barflies! Time reports on new research into alcohol and life expectancy, which not only shows that moderate drinkers live longer, but that even heavy drinkers live longer than total abstainers.

...[A]fter controlling for nearly all imaginable variables — socioeconomic status, level of physical activity, number of close friends, quality of social support and so on — the researchers (a six-member team led by psychologist Charles Holahan of the University of Texas at Austin) found that over a 20-year period, mortality rates were highest for those who had never been drinkers, second-highest for heavy drinkers and lowest for moderate drinkers.

The sample of those who were studied included individuals between ages 55 and 65 who had had any kind of outpatient care in the previous three years. The 1,824 participants were followed for 20 years. One drawback of the sample: a disproportionate number, 63%, were men. Just over 69% of the never-drinkers died during the 20 years, 60% of the heavy drinkers died and only 41% of moderate drinkers died.

A key factor here is that the study accounted for the difference between people who never drank, and those who had problems with the bottle and then quit. It still found that moderate alcohol consumption is beneficial.

This morning, while I was doing my usual Wednesday 10k-ish run my mind wandered all about, as it usually does. If I were a "real" runner I suppose I'd be worrying about improving my stride or something, but as a dilettante, all kinds of stuff goes through my head.

I was thinking about the need for (gentle! voluntary!) population control, about how mainstream economists insist we need to keep the population growing so we have enough younger workers to support the elderly, and how what we really need to do instead is to recognize and encourage the contributions that the elderly make to our society.

I had the beginnings of an interesting piece for the blog, about how ZPG -- and even a slight NPG -- ties in with better status for women and the elderly, about how it means more wealth for everyone, since wealth is limited by natural resources divided by population. Indeed, some say that the population reduction cause by the Black Death helped set the stage for the Renaissance, with a reduction in population meaning more stuff per per person, including lots of surplus clothing -- which could be turned into rag paper to feed the new printing presses.

But now, forget about it, we can't have a meaningful discussion about the topic for months if not years thanks to the poor doofus who stormed the Discovery Channel headquarters today with a gun and some bombs, insisting that they air "programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility."

He's dead now, and it will be impossible to have a serious conversation about a serious issue for a while. That's what violent extremism gets us.

Zelda's Inferno exercise: writing off of a prompt from another participant. I drew the phrase "She said Hitler wasn't such a bad guy, and that I only looked 25." (If you know our group, you might have guessed that this came from Jeff! And I would like to emphasize that this is entirely a work of fiction.) So...

She said Hitler wasn't such a bad guy, and that I only looked 25. It was that sort of evening, that sort of crowd. If I was a fox I would have chewed my leg off to escape, but I had to settle for chewing off my brain by means of strong drink. I raised my hand and caught the bartender's eye. "Bombay Sapphire martini, please."

But it would take a few minutes before the medicine could take effect. So while I waited for the drink, I had to employ a bit of the ol' social engineering to prevent this vapid old-money bimbo from getting a tighter grip. How to repel someone who thinks that Hitler wasn't that bad? Being Jewish would top the list, but no such luck, and I didn't think I could pass. Who else was on the Nazi hit list? Gypsies, pacifists, vegetarians, gays...ah!

"Oh, thank you, darling!" I waved my hand, letting my wrist flop a bit. "You know, it's so important to moisturize. Product, product, product!" As the martini arrived, I thought, shoot, I should have ordered a Cosmo; still, I picked up the cocktail glass with a flourish, my pinky hanging out, took a sip, and declared, "Yummy!"

Her knee, which had been flirtatiously almost-brushing mine, backed away at least eight inches, and her face tightened like a lug nut being driven home by an air wrench. "Oh. Well," she stammered, "um, excuse me just a minute, be right back." She jumped off her barstool like it was on fire. I relaxed and took another sip of my martini, actually tasting it this time.

Dear Ms. Palin:

I am not quite sure how to react to your remarkable claim that the way to honor Martin Luther King, Jr., is to support the military.

It's difficult to believe that you could be so totally ignorant of Dr. King's anti-war activism. King wanted us to honor our soldiers the same way that today's peace movement does: by bringing them home and apologizing to them for sending them on a fool's errand. In one of his most famous speeches, he spoke against the American invasion of Vietnam and said that it made the U.S. government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today".

On the other hand, I am reluctant to believe that you are so evil, so deliberately and shamefully immoral, that you would knowingly and maliciously twist the legacy of one of the greatest Americans in history. I don't want to think that you're deliberately employing the Big Lie technique.

I try to assume the best in people. In a case as outrageous as this, that's really difficult; but I will operate under the assumption that somehow, you never actually learned about Martin Luther King and what he stood for.

If that's the case, at this late date I honestly don't know if it's useful to try to teach you. One would have to dig down through decades of beliefs built on top of a foundation of dangerous ignorance.

But, as I understand them, one of the fundamental teachings of Jesus Christ -- a man whom both you and Dr. King claim to follow -- is that all people, however wretched, are capable of salvation. So to attempt to honor Dr. King, I will choose to believe that even you, Ms. Palin, can be taught and can reform your ways.

So let me present you with some excerpts from that famous April 4, 1967, speech at Riverside Church in New York City, where he spoke to a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned. Here's what Dr. King really thought about war and militarism; and where he speaks of communism in Vietnam, we could just as truthfully say the same of religious extremism in Iraq and Afghanistan:

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I recently competed the second draft of Why Buddha Touched the Earth, and I've now started to send queries out to literary agents.

It seems that writing a query letter is an art unto itself. Some of the advice I found applied more to novels or to narrative non-fiction than to a historical and philosophical inquiry into religion, but the basic idea of describing your work in a few tight paragraphs, starting off with a one or two sentence "hook", seems pretty sound.

So here's what I came up with. I know in trying to explain this darn thing to some of you before, I've ended up going off on tangents or tripping over my tongue -- hopefully this is clearer! I will be continuing to polish both it and the manuscript itself.

Shortly before his death, John Lennon called himself a "Zen Pagan." With this he gave an excellent name to a religious trend that goes back at least as far as Henry David Thoreau, who wrote of his love and respect for both the ancient nature god Pan and the Buddha.

The connection between Buddhism and nature spirituality is ancient. According to legends of the Buddha's enlightenment, in his hour of need he asked the Earth to bear him witness, rather than appealing to a heavenly deity. Over the centuries Buddhism influenced and was influenced by nature religions like Taoism and Shintō, and its introduction to the West came partly by the work of spiritual nature writers like Thoreau and Gary Snyder. Occultists like Aleister Crowley and H.P. Blavatsky played key roles in both Buddhist and Pagan history.

Why Buddha Touched the Earth: Zen Paganism for the 21st Century investigates these connections. It combines rigorous historical research with lively and practical discussions of mysticism, magic, meditation, ethics, and the future of religion.

September 19 will be Frank Zappa Day in Baltimore -- featuring a stretch of Eastern Avenue being marked as "Frank Zappa Way", the dedication of a bust of Zappa (a gift from a Lithuanian fan club), a talk at the Creative Alliance by Gail Zappa, and a free concert featuring Zappa Plays Zappa", Plus an after party at the Creative Alliance with Big In Japan, Telesma, and DJ El Suprimo.

Event details at http://www.clearpathentertainment.com/#/Zappa/. (Warning: most annoying website I've seen this year. Their design team -- indeed, any design team producing a Flash-based site for anything but games or video -- needs to be keel-hauled.)

Anyone who works with computers can understand this guy: after a night of drinking, Joshua Lee Campbell allegedly returned to his workplace (RANLife Home Loans) and opened fire on their computer server with his .45-caliber handgun.

According to prosecutors, Campbell called police and claimed that he had been "mugged, assaulted with his own firearm and drugged" by an assailant who then shot up the server; but Campbell's acquaintances told the cops that they had seen him drunk, armed, and threatening to shoot the computer -- and maybe himself.

I've been programming computers for (counts on fingers) 29 years. (Great ghu, is that right? Yes...my first programming class was in the summer of 1981, at the Maryland Summer Centers for Gifted Students' "Center for Advanced Studies" program.) Trust me, I know the urge to employ a high-velocity lead debugger all too well!

Every religion's got 'em. Christianity has its Fred Phelps (of "God Hates Fags" fame) and its racist Christian Identity groups; Muslim extremists are in the news so much it takes effort to remember that they're a small band of nutcases; Hindus have been implicated in Indian nationalist attacks against Muslims; Pagans have the occasional racist nutjob who thinks Asatru or Druidism is about ethnicity and "White power"; and even Zen Buddhism had, during World War Two, leaders who supported slaughter in the name of Japanese nationalism.

And yep, Judaism's got them too. Haaretz reports on "The King's Torah", a collection of Halacha (Jewish religious law) put together by nutcase rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur. It claims that "Thou shalt not murder" applies only "to a Jew who kills a Jew", that it's fine to kill children of Israel's enemies because "it is clear that they will grow to harm us", and that non-Jews are "uncompassionate by nature", and should be dealth with harshly to "curb their evil inclination". An expose in the Israeli tabloid Ma'ariv called the book "Jewish terror".

One of the book's authors, Shapira, was suspected in 2008 of involvement in a rocket attack on a Palestinian village; no arrests were made. The other author, Elitzur, penned article in a religious bulletin saying that "the Jews will win with violence against the Arabs."

Stumbled across in my web browsing: from Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library, a list of journals that accept unsolicited poetry. What's neat about this list is that the journals in question are subscribed to by Enoch Pratt Free Library; so they are journals that somebody is reading. If I get off my ass and try to get some stuff published, this will be highly useful.