My Alma Mater Is A Banana Republic

This is a recent op-ed I wrote for the Eagle. They declined to publish it, because they're worried about more political interference from the Student Senate, but I figured I'd post it here because it's important to push back against the hypocritical fascist bastards trying to shut down free speech on campus.

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution reads, in part, that "the freedom of the press shall not be abridged." The unifying principle of patriotism in America is not race, nor allegiance to a monarch, but allegiance to the Constitution; this is judged so important to the body politic that the military (including ROTC officers) are made to swear to "uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States." Thomas Jefferson, who knew a thing or two about the Constitution, famously said "I would rather newspapers without government than a government without newspapers."

Chadron State College's experience with both has proven the sage of Monticello correct once again, as the People In Charge try anew to forget that the Constitution was forged to bind them.

There was a letter to the editor last week regarding the propriety of a comic that joked about using Eaglecards to take drugs. The people whose job it is to promote Chadron State to prospective students got upset at this article, because apparently a tongue-in-cheek joke that upsets the authorities is going to destroy our enrollment figures. As we all know, the students thinking about coming here are going to see a joke about drugs, clutch their pearls and drop into a fainting couch.

An Academic Journey to a New World - Part II.

While writing that last post, I was casting about for some kind of image. I take it as a point of pride that I can usually find some manner of appropriate image for most of the posts I do. While I ended up settling on that drawing of Carthage I made (it's hanging in my bedroom to this day), my first thought was to post an image of one of those Carthaginian coins with the map of the world under it that was cited in the paper.

I found the website of the guy that postulates this particular theory well enough, but what I couldn't find was a clear image of the full coin. (That guy, Dr. Mark McMenamin, isn't even a historian as it turns out, but a geologist... so he's not speaking in his area of expertise.) Anyway, I saw the coin to your left, and I saw a detailed image with a section of a that coin that looked really detailed as well as an artist's rendering of that coin, but I haven't been able to find any other instances of the coin on the internet.

However, doing a search for Carthaginian coins wasn't fruitless. These are some examples of what I found, after the jump:

An Academic Journey to a New World - Part I.

When I was an undergraduate student, I took a class called "History of the American Indian." It was taught by Dr. Hyer, who at the time was Chadron State's newest history professor, and nowadays is Dean of the School of BEAMSS here.

Back in those days, the history faculty's approach to homework was mostly no-nonsense. You did a paper, and two tests. Depending on the professor, you might have a couple other minor projects or homework besides that. I like that philosophy - it doesn't waste anyone's time, and at the end of it all, if you paid attention and did your work you had something pretty impressive you could show people. (Which is what I'll be doing shortly.)

I have my own approach to homework - I don't want to bore my professors. In my World War II class, I wrote my term paper on Pink Floyd's "The Final Cut" because I was pretty sure Dr. Rankin had read a million papers about Hitler and the Holocaust and the Battle of Stalingrad already. There was nothing I could say on that score that hadn't already been said by someone a whole lot smarter than me.

But I could do unique, so I did. In this case, I chose to examine pre-Columbian contacts between the Old and New Worlds. Dr. Hyer suggested I limit my inquiries to only one possible pre-Columbian Old World society, so I chose what seemed the likeliest unproven candidate: the Phoenicians/Carthaginians.

This is something I'd read up on a bit. I'd always been an avid fan of Phoenician/Carthaginian history. When I was a little kid, I learned the Phoenician alphabet - it was probably my first act as a linguist. When I was in high school, I did a presentation on the Battle of Cannae, still studied in military colleges and considered one of the most brilliant military victories of all time. Also in high school, I drew that picture up top; it was supposed to be a representation of Carthage. I drew it from written descriptions and not pictures or maps; it has the Bursa and the two harbors connected by canal, and a statue of Dido.

Point is, I knew a lot about the subject. And I was fairly familiar with the arguments advanced in favor of Phoenician contact with the New World.

I am reposting my paper for that class, so you can all see what I wrote back then. It's after the jump.

Everyone should see just what Wall Street really thinks of us.

You should read this.

I don't have much to add; the article speaks for itself. The same dudes that wrecked the world economy are making fun of their victims. It's unbridled, psychopathic cruelty, and it's just met its bane - sunlight.

I really hope this story takes off. It needs to.

Project 86 is looking for funding support for a new album.

It looks sweet as hell too.

They've been one of my favorite bands since high school. The 503 is replete with Project 86 references, up to and including putting their frontman Andrew Schwab in the comic for Strip 300. The Project 86 froams (sic) were the second messageboards I ever posted at. They are, all around, a fantastic band whose brilliance hasn't diminished with time. Not only that, but they did it all with very little label support (back when that was a necessity) and in a scene with very little acts that could hold a candle to them. (One of the few that could, Anberlin, recently announced that they're breaking up after a farewell tour.)

Basically, their music kills, killed and will kill to come. Just about anyone who listens to harder stuff has dug them after I played a few songs of theirs. And their latest crowd-funding project is a fan's dream. For $25, I'm getting a signed limited-edition copy of the album, and a bunch of additional stuff. If you look on the list of perks on the Indiegogo site, it's nuts just how much they're willing to do for their fans.

I really really hope this thing works, which is why I'm spreading the word. It's got 38 days left to work, and they're over halfway there, but I wanna make sure they reach their goal. I'm currently reading a book for class called Who Owns The Future? by Jaron Lanier, and one of the points he makes is that the digital network economy has hollowed out the middle class, and one of the places it started was the music industry. It's harder than ever before to eke out a living playing music, but I think and hope that Project 86 will be one of the rare acts that manages to not only pull it off, but to do so on their own, without having to rely on a label. The future of the music industry is going to increasingly look like this, and as a multi-medium artist myself, I want to support other artists trying to make it work.

Brought him home.

Pete Seeger's dead.

He lived a great life, dying at the ripe age of 94. He committed the greatest "sin" an American ever could - being a Communist during the Cold War - and nevertheless founded folk rock and dedicated it to the antiwar movement. He was a strongly ethical person, dedicated to democracy in its most practical sense - every concert he played was one big singalong, and he fought inequality everywhere he saw it - and he finally got the recognition he deserved.

Chadron's got a relatively huge folk scene, given the population, and pretty much nothing that gets played in that would have been possible without Pete Seeger's life and work. With Pete Seeger, there's no Bob Dylan; no Kingston Trio; no Peter, Paul and Mary.

So today, I'll be listening to this song:



And this song:



And this song:



And especially this song that I was singing with some grandmothers as we marched to Student Center last week:



Rest in peace, Pete Seeger.

Real progress on homelessness, from the last damn people you'd expect.

I've tried not to be too political on this blog. Couldn't really avoid it with the government shutdown, but all my previous blogs were mainly political, and I wanted to break away from that. But this issue is near and dear to my heart; I've seen homelessness up close and personal. Some of the closest people to me were homeless once, and the general hatred and indifference of society to their plight fills me with sadness and rage all at once, so I decided to post about it.

Anyway.

Utah is the reddest state in the nation. Redder than Texas. Redder even than Nebraska or Oklahoma. It is more Republican than a white guy in a Duck Dynasty shirt taking off his gun holster to have sex with his wife on a bed made of money. Utah is so Republican that Mexicans not only don't want to immigrate there, but insisted we take it with us along with Texas and California. Utah is more Republican than saying hi to a cop on your way to a stockholders' meeting. Utah is more Republican than Sarah Palin saying anything.

Point is, you would not expect Utah to be the first state to solve homelessness. And yet.

White supremacist chucklefucks in North Dakota, and all that entails.

It's a big dustup up North Dakota way: this tiny town called Leith has been chosen by a racist organization as a place to settle, in hopes of taking over the local government. And ever since this shit started, it's been a nonstop chuckle factory. What to talk about first? How the racists got shown up when a bunch of Lakota grandmothers stole their Nazi flag and burned it?

Or maybe how their leader is 1/8th black? I shit you not. Apparently Craig Cobb, the guy leading this schiesse-on-wheels, is in denial at the results, and wants a "more reputable" DNA company to test him. When that inevitably happens and he sees the results, it sounds like he won't change his mind, he'll just become a "border guard for people more pure than I," at least according to the article.

What a pathetic joke. Reminds me of this Dave Chappelle skit I saw once.

Let my people roll?

Apparently the very first d20 was made in Ptolemaic Egypt.

What's really cool is how similar it is to modern d20s, shapewise. It just goes to show the universality of mathematics: it's pretty much the only branch of knowledge that's completely free of social construct. The symbols and the way we write the numbers are social constructs, sure, but the underlying principles are the same. And apparently, the icosahedron is the simplest way to render an object with 20 sides of equal shape and size. (Because there's so little in the way of social construct, xenobiologists are suggesting that in any first contact scenario with an alien race, we'll likely be "speaking" math until we can figure out each others' manner of communication and then the languages therein.)

The only real differences, of course, are that it's not made of plastic like our dice, and it's not quite as balanced as our dice, and obviously the characters on the dice. They didn't have Arabic numerals or a place value system in Ptolemaic Egypt; they didn't even have Roman numerals. The characters are instead from the Greek numeral system which, like the Roman, used letters to represent numbers. However, looking on the faces, it's a scattershot of different numbers, with values ranging from 1 to possibly even 1000, if I'm reading the cursive right and that is indeed a sampi. (It could also be a localized, demotic-influenced alpha, as this was Ptolemaic Egypt.) So whatever game they were playing with this, they either didn't need a 1-20 numbering system, or the Greek letters didn't stand for numbers.

Vote beyond reality.

It appears that Nebraska may not be completely lost to the forces of progressivism after all.

We've got constitutional amendments for both medical marijuana and full-on legalization on the ballot in 2014. And believe it or not, I'm pretty confident that they'll both pass.

Why?

Remember, this is an agricultural state. The legalization amendment mentions not just weed, but also hemp. This state could make a killing from hemp farming, especially east of the 100th meridian. Hemp can grow on marginal land that other crops can't, and is worth a whole pile of money. So basically, we could turn over land that's currently making us a couple bucks growing grass for cattle into hemp farms, and our ranchers-cum-farmers would see a pile of money as a result.

I think this issue has been detoxified enough to happen. It's actually bipartisan - a majority of both parties support it. It's happening across the border in Colorado already, and the world has failed to end. Legalizing it here would reduce the headache, and the cops probably wouldn't mind being able to switch their focus to destructive drugs, especially meth. And it's a great way to boost state revenues without raising taxes, especially the hemp provisions.

God yes. I can't advocate for the passage of these two bills enough. We need to make this a weed-friendly state ASAP. It's a foregone conclusion that marijuana will be legalized nationally within two decades. What's being decided right now is what states are going to play host to an established and legalized marijuana industry first. The way some of my friends talk about "California medical" and "Colorado medical" as high-grade, desirable commodities, they could be talking about "Nebraska kush" in future. When marijuana's legalized everywhere, if we're one of the first states to legalize it, we could have already established an export industry with a reputation for quality, the way Colorado and California already have. That doesn't just mean jollies for stoners - that means jobs and a future for our struggling rural areas.

Income inequality in America.

CNN has a really good article about it.

Honestly, income inequality is probably the biggest single social issue facing America. Deal with this, and you deal with a lot of issues regarding race and poverty in one fell stroke. You deal with a lot of healthcare-related issues, you deal with a lot of crime-related issues. Basically, reducing income inequality is a silver bullet, and it's one we need to stop ignoring.

The biggest single reason I'm a Democrat is because they're the only major party taking this even remotely seriously. The Republicans need to as well, instead of just providing ideological cover for the rich to continue widening the gap. Because as it stands, we've got crazy Third World levels of inequality.

Homer Simpson is brilliant.

Or at least, his writers are.

I didn't understand half the shit they were talking about until they explained it, but it's an incredibly cool read. And to think that that donut-munching bozo that became the template for Peter Griffin and every other cartoon sitcom is secretly a math genius... is almost enough to make The Simpsons funny again.

Almost.

Just got an article published in the Eagle.

Go check it out.

I complained about the "tuition fee" bullshit and explained, in great detail, just how much bullshit it was.

As if you didn't need any other reason to get the hell off of Facebook...

Facebook's gonna start tracking your cursor movements.

I wanna reiterate what I've said plenty of times before: Facebook is a soul-sucking productivity killer that's making money off of you that you could be making for yourself. Stop checking Facebook and get a blog instead. All the shit you post on Facebook, post it on your blog. Get your friends to do this too, and follow their blogs if you like what they have to say.

After you make thirty posts, you can sign up with Project Wonderful. I mean, you can start with Google Adsense immediately, and if you're worried your blog's gonna have almost no traffic, that might be a better route... but it'll take forever for Adsense to pay out, because you have to make at least $100. With PW, you only have to make $10, and you get to keep a much bigger chunk of the revenue. Furthermore, you'll be helping fellow creative people promote their own projects, instead of whatever company that's probably not even terribly relevant to whatever you're doing. And if you're getting around 50-100 hits every day, you'll make something with it.

I swore I'd quit Facebook, and I've been trying to. It keeps sucking me back, mainly because it's an effective communication platform, and the easiest way to get ahold of a lot of people I know. But I also get sucked back because there's people on there that I miss and they need to make a blog already so I can swear off that haven of filth and status reposts forever.

Penguins and dolphins are jerks, and other things from last night.

S'truth.

I was telling that to Vera last night, as we were drinking. Penguins and dolphins have created their very own "rape culture," as have all manner of other animals. They're also remarkably sentient; apparently scientists have discovered that they call each other by names.

I also talked about the unfilmed script of Firefly, and it was gonna be really cool. When I tried to track it down, I found the tenth anniversary special, which talked about a bunch of script ideas. Alan Tudyk came up with an idea about a planet where they train these vicious dogs, and then Jayne accidentally gets dog pheromone on the crew, so they have to run away until River pets them and they calm down. There were a bunch more... if anyone can find that video, they should post a link.

I dunno. Last night sucked and was pretty good all at once. We watched The Room, need I say more? And now my roomie gets why, every time we're listening to 93.7 and the Windfarmer Energy ad comes on, I say "Oh hi Mahk!"

QOTD, and an interesting discovery regarding Native Americans.

"Everytime I see someone on 23andme list off their mito group and then start spouting off a list of surnames as a defense of why their results are wrong, I understand why teenagers started cutting." -Jon Arsenault

Native Americans might be one-third "European."

I put "European" in quotes because I'm not sure if the descriptor really applies. Tying genetic sequences to continents ignores a lot. I mean, when we say "Africans" to get at people with black skin and features like those common to sub-Saharan Africa, we ignore their Dravidian relatives that settled the Indian subcontinent, and their other relatives that settled east Asia, Papua New Guinea and Australia before any other humans. When we say "European," we ignore the Tocharians that became one of the many founding populations of the Han Chinese, the proto-Indo-Iranians who conquered the Dravidians and blended with them to form modern India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Iran, and now apparently Native Americans too. And even when we say "Asians," we ignore their Polynesian descendants that settled a great geographic area stretching from Madagascar to Easter Island.

The best and worst of humanity all at once.

The New York Times has a good article about the American chaplains to the Nazi war criminals being tried at Nuremberg.

It reminds me of the discussion I was having with a friend recently. She's in the process of reading my book, and wondering if fallen angels really would have the ability to repent. She asked me if it said it anywhere in the Bible. As a matter of fact, the Bible is silent on the issue, and the semicanonical-in-Orthodoxy book of 1 Enoch debatably says no. But I can't imagine that a loving God would deny honest repentance to any sentient creature, no matter how evil it became.

That's not to say that such repentance would be a license to act like nobody should find fault with you, or ignore the grief of your victims, the way that a lot of people I know have acted. "Well yeah I cheated on you, but God forgave me, so why can't you?" is never an acceptable line of argument. But the strongest love should always find a way to forgive even the worst evils. We humans are probably not capable of such perfect love, but it's inspiring when we try, like the chaplains in the article I linked.

This is some scary shit.

A professor in Wisconsin just got in trouble for telling the truth.

She required some US Census data for a class, and of course it wasn't available during the recent government shutdown. When a student asked why over email, she told the truth - that the Republican/Tea Party led House shut down the government.

And that little Tea Partying shitbag of a student took a picture of the email, sent it to Fox News, and it became the latest non-controversy controversy on their contrived news network. The professor was reprimanded.

But the fact remains the truth - the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party did shut down the government. That is so established that centrist news organizations like Time Magazine have reported it as true. Some of the classes I'm helping with are also teaching it as true, because it fucking is.

Turning academia into the latest front for partisan warfare - or more specifically, Republican partisan warfare (Democrats aren't doing anything, and generally the liberal-leaning academics go out of their way to embrace Republicans there) - risks damaging the institution further. We need colleges and universities to teach our kids the truth, and when professors risk professional danger to do that, in many cases they won't.

GET BACK TO WORK YOU LAZY FUCKS.

You'd think that a party that's all about personal responsibility and hard work would take more responsibility for the now-concluded shutdown and work harder at their jobs.

Anyway, shutdown's over. The Senate stepped in and made it all better, and Boehner passed the Senate bill with Democratic votes. Nebraskans, you can be pleasantly surprised that our normally brainless, spineless Congressional delegation voted to a man to reopen the government. Across the border in South Dakota, Senator Kristi Noem didn't.

Obama's taking this unmitigated victory and trying to build on the momentum by passing a regular annual budget. This used to be the done thing until the Tea Party got angry at the scary black man in the White House, but since the Republicans were just pretending to give a shit about compromise, they'll be hard-pressed to refuse this offer.

I don't know if the Tea Party fever's broken, but it seems that way. I'm seeing even Republicans griping about those fucks now. There may yet be hope.

Day 16 of ULTAMITE ANARCHY 4EVA

Hopefully this'll be the last installment of this series. As the Democratic Senate has taken over negotiations and Boehner's admitting defeat, it probably will be.

To wit, this is what happened: with the debt default happening sometime tomorrowish, Boehner attempted to pass a bill in the House reopening the government and raising the debt ceiling, but couldn't find enough votes in the Republican caucus to do so. Not a huge surprise: he's leading a caucus of spoiled children that would destroy the world economy rather than get their way, after all. But given that he couldn't do it, the Senate stepped in to craft a bill.

Democrat Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, met with Republican Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader. They hammered out a compromise, and this is all the Republicans got regarding Obamacare:

An anti-fraud measure will be added to Obamacare, requiring income verification for those receiving subsidies to purchase insurance under the law.

That's it. That's fucking nothing, and it probably should've been added to the law in the first place. It's a very slight tinker to make Obamacare better, not to gut the system wholesale. The Republicans shut down the government for 17 days, and all they got was a lousy income verification no-prize.