Mike Dukakis wants your turkey carcass

Massachusetts's quirky former governor wants your turkey carcass. Happy Thanksgiving!

Five years of Knocking on the Ceiling

I started this blog in November 2010. I think it was originally shaping up to be a venue for my thinking about the tension between skepticism and spirituality. And it was that to some degree. But I actually wrote quite a lot outside this blog in a private journal about that topic. I don't know if it got me anywhere. I didn't find anything compelling in my thoughts for an atheist and skeptic to hang his hat on, spiritually speaking.

The best progress I made on my quest toward a skeptic's spirituality was through John Shelby Spong's Jesus for the Non-Religious, which I blogged about in 2013. Without having to believe anything supernatural, Spong brought Jesus into my life. No, it isn't a simple as the secular liberal's basic recognition that Jesus taught a couple good moral lessons. It is deeper. Spong's Jesus is powerful: Historically, we can verify barely a handful of facts about Jesus's life; but we know that he moved people in ways they could only describe with the religious language of the time.

Another big step for me was Chris Stedman's Faitheist. That book didn't advance me spiritually, but it taught me a lot about how to exist as an atheist in a fairly religious society. Stedman said what needed to be said: Atheists and theists can get along and even work together.

This has also evolved to be a general blog where I post what I want to post. I've reviewed movies and books and commented on the news. I suppose I like have an outlet when I feel the need to say something to the world. Apart from Chris Stedman tweeting my review of Faitheism, I don't have evidence that anyone is reading this. That's ok. One of the main reasons I blog to is keep my writing muscles from atrophying when I am not writing much at work. 

I've had other blogs that I let go dormant for one reason or another. But this one has endured and I raise my teacup to five years of Knocking on the Ceiling.

Ancillary Justice

I happened to see that  Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice had won multiple major awards. I had been looking for some good science fiction to read, so I gave it a shot. This post includes spoilers.

There is a lot to like about Ancillary justice. Leckie describes the pieces of her world masterfully. From the dreary ice planet, to the city-like space station, to a newly annexed planet--her descriptions feel real. The system of social stratification of Leckie's world is not unlike our own, with its "houses" or varying power and prestige. It is like our world's House of Bush, House of Kennedy, House of Windsor, House of Vanderbilt, House of Castro. And it is fun how tea is central to social interaction among members of the higher houses. It helps renew my fondness for tea.

The mechanics of how Breq, the main character, came to be are fascinating. She was the artificial intelligence of a ship and its ancillaries (human bodies whose mind and will the AI has taken over to serve as, well, slaves). Breq is what remains of the AI when the ship and all but one of the ancillaries are destroyed. She is essentially a simple human.

With that said, I didn't enjoy the book as much as I had hoped. I think I just didn't like the story. With such masterful writing, the novel comes together as a tale of a weird conflict between two segments of civilization's supreme leader. It doesn't make much sense to me and it isn't very interesting.

This the first book of a trilogy, and I assumed it would hook me and I would have to read parts two and three. But one is enough.

The shit decade

The first decade of this century was awful for this country:

• It began with the 2000 presidential election's drawn out vote counting, recounting, and court resolution. This cut a blunt partisan divide and cast a shadow over the ultimate winner. The razor-thin margin revealed weaknesses in our election mechanics overlooked in normally more decisive election victories.
• Then the 9/11 terror attacks hit America hard and traumatized the country. But our response made it worse. The government now conducts more intensive surveillance on its people then I'd ever have thought possible. And...
• ...we got ourselves into a truly stupid war in Iraq that made the region more of a threat then when we started there; killed, wounded, and mentally damaged many soldiers; and cost a incredible amount of money.
• The financial crisis and the Great Recession sucked the wealth out of our communities, leaving millions of homeowners underwater and the highest unemployment in a generation.

The decade closed with some better events. We elected our first black president. The economy stabilized, thought we haven't returned to pre-recession prosperity. And then we saw Iraq descend into such chaos that we speculate that it isn't any better than it was under Saddam.

It was a shit decade, and we are still rolling around in some of that shit.