My impression of John Oliver.

Language Rape

I like to imagine the world as it would be seen by a Martian, an outsider, who doesn't have our culture and experiences. What would the world look like to that person. For example, laying down and spending a third of our time in some kind of hallucinogenic state seems odd.

From that perspective, I started to wonder...what are lawyers? What do they do? Laws are rules, basically we figure out what shitty things people shouldn't do, then we write down, don't be an asshole and do these things. And the job of a lawyer is to then work with these written rules and figure out what precisely they mean.

But it seems like what they really do is twist language and manipulate it and figure out how to take something and make it mean something else.

Basically, lawyers are language rapists.

A lawyer would say, it's not rape, we're just massaging the language – well it's a very deep massage that the language didn't want and afterward it feels violated. To me that's rape. .

For example: The First Amendment says “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.” Congress has gone on to make all kinds of laws that abridge the freedom of speech, and when challenged in the supreme court, several supreme courts have done a little tap dance and ruled that congress can make laws abridging the freedom of speech if they have a good reason. For example, you can't threaten to kill people, that's illegal, and we all go, yeah I guess that's kind of a good thing. Then they decided to make it illegal to print and sell pornography, oh and communist literature. And the supreme court said, yeah, I mean obviously when the founding father said you “shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech,” they meant you can make laws abridging freedom of speech when it comes to things you don't like such as titties and Marx.

According to these “lawyers” on the supreme court, the phrase “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech” somehow means you can make pornography and political speech you don't like illegal, but you can't limit how much money corporations spend on politics.

This is clearly language rape.

This brings me to my favorite case in the history of law.

A Panera opened in a mall. They had a contract with the mall that stipulated that they could not let in any other sandwich places. Then the mall allows another restaurant to open, and the guy who owns the Panera gets pissed and yells, “hey assholes, you weren't allowed to open another sandwich place.”

Now, does anyone want to guess what this second restaurant was? Subway? Planet Sub? Maybe McDonald’s?

No. It was a Qdoba.

Judging by your reactions, I can tell all of you people are too morally good to be lawyers.

Here's how you know that the job of a lawyer is to basically be a rapist of language. The judge didn't just throw the case out as being fucking stupid. Judges can do that. But this went to trial.

An actual trial, wherein the prosecution made the case that burritos are in fact sandwiches, and the defense had to prove that burritos are not sandwiches.

In a sane world, the mall owner could have showed up to court with burrito, eaten it, and said “wow, that was a delicious burrito, I rest my case,” and that would have been that. But we all know this isn't a sane world, and if he didn't get his own lawyer he wouldn't have known the right things to say and the judge would have made burritos and sandwiches into the same legal entity.

And what about this Panera owner? Here's a guy who runs a sandwich shop who can't tell the difference between a burrito and a sandwich. I think I know why his sandwich shop isn't doing so well. Does this guy think Taco Bell is a bakery? Does he think Waffle Tacos are just open-face breakfast sandwiches? This is a man who owns a sandwich shop, and yet he can't tell the difference between a grilled cheese and a quesadilla.

And here's another absurdity, this trial creates precedent. In essence, the decision in this case determines once-and-for-all-time whether a burrito is a sandwich. This judge by random chance is now the one member of the human race who has the power to decide if a burrito is a sandwich. I think anyone with that much power should be elected to the job. What if that judge hated mexican food, and now he is the one person on the planet tasked with deciding if a burrito is a sandwich.

In the arguments, both sides were quoting dictionaries as to how burritos and sandwiches are defined, and at some point this needs to be made into a dramatic courtroom film. They not only cited dictionaries at each other, but they both called expert witnesses. But expert witnesses are complete bullshit, because both sides will produce experts. We have a sandwich-expert who can't tell the difference between a reuben and an enchilada but he runs a sandwich shop, so trust him, he's an expert.

The US government actually has a definition of a sandwich. They need to have a definition because we have two agencies that inspect food and so they need to decide who inspects what. The Food and Drug Administration is the ones that make you label foods with nutrition facts and they inspect processed foods, soda, and things like that, while the US Department of Agriculture, or USDA, inspects farms and meat plants and the more agricultural side of things.

The USDA says a burrito is a “Mexican style sandwich-like product consisting of a flour tortilla, various fillings, and at least 15 percent meat or 10 percent cooked poultry meat.”

So that settles it right? It's a sandwich-like product. So it's...not a sandwich?

And apparently, according to the USDA there's no such thing as a vegetarian burrito?

Here's where it goes from weird to disgusting. If you package a sandwich and sell it, which agency inspects you, the USDA or the FDA?

If it's closed-face, i.e. it has two pieces of bread, then you are inspected by the FDA. The FDA does inspections daily. If however, you package an open-faced sandwich with just a single piece of bread, then you are inspected by the USDA. And the USDA inspects open-face sandwiches sold in interstate commerce an average of once every 5 years.

So don't ever eat a packaged open-faced sandwich. That's what I've learned out of all of this. Because it's legally distinct from a closed-face sandwich and it turns out that legal distinction might actually kill you.

It's not negligent homicide, it's just an advanced case of inside-out syndrome where the intestines decide to leave the body.

So it's all settled then. A burrito is not a sandwich. Fuck you Panera guy's lawyer, because you just got paid thousands of dollars because you convinced an idiotic sandwich shop owner that burritos are sandwiches and then put us all through this ordeal of language rape.

And here's the worst part. If tomorrow a Qdoba opens up in a mall, and the Qdoba makes a deal that says the mall can't bring in any other burrito places, and then the mall lets a Panera move in, the Qdoba owner could sue, because we have only legally settled that a burrito is not a sandwich. Whether or not a sandwich is a burrito is legally unsettled ground. And I bet you that somewhere there's a lawyer who is trying to date-rape the word burrito so he can make tens of thousands of dollars on a stupid lawsuit. And if the Panera guy shows up with just a sandwich and common sense and no language-rapist on his side, then the judge will rule that sandwiches are burritos.

Then we'll live in a world where a sandwich is legally a burrito, but a burrito is not legally a sandwich.

Here's some more language rape for you. Subway Footlongs. People started measuring them and many weren't a foot long. Some were right at 11 inches. What Subway should have said was, bread rises and expands when you cook it, so it's not always going to come out exactly at precisely 12 inches, but we do our best and you'll find that many come out longer than 12 inches and we're not systematically trying to screw you over.

Instead, what they said was: 'SUBWAY FOOTLONG' is a registered trademark as a descriptive name for the sub sold in Subway® Restaurants and not intended to be a measurement of length.

Not intended to be a measurement? That'd be like if the McDonald's quarter pounder weighed way less than a quarter pound and McDonald's said, “the name just describes how heavy it looks.”

Here's another example of language rape. The 2nd amendment. Hopefully I won't be shot by the time I finish this. 

The 2^nd amendment is a single sentence. “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

Now, a lot of people like to forget the first half of the sentence. In fact, in the Lobby of the NRA headquarters, they have the text of the 2^nd amendment on the wall. Or, they have the second half of it. They conveniently leave off the first half that talks about militias, because they couldn't be bothered to put the whole sentence.

I'm no language rape expert, but when you spend the first half of a sentence saying that a militia is good, I think that is relevant to the meaning of the second half of the sentence. That's what punctuation is for. If these are unconnected thoughts, you would use a period.

The modern interpretation of this, by the Republican Supreme Court is, and I quote, “The second amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia.”

What they're saying, these brilliant language-rapists of the highest caliber, is that the 2^nd amendment means “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,” and that the first half of the sentence is meaningless and is just there because the founders felt like saying that militias are nice, especially well-regulated ones.

That would be like if I wrote a law that went like this:

“Farting being one of life's simple pleasures and also a necessity for comfort, the right of the people to pass gas shall not be infringed.”

And then the supreme court decided that this meant that companies could release all the toxic pollutant gases they felt like because they have an unlimited right to pass gas.

And when somebody says, isn't that sentence about farting? Antonin Scalia says, “oh no, the founders were just saying that they liked farting, but unconnected to that, and in the same sentence for some reason, they also think unlimited pollution is a fundamental right. They're unconnected thoughts, that's why they're separated by a whole comma.”

If the founders wanted to give us all the right to bear arms unconnected to anything to do with militias, then the second amendment would have said: “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” But they didn't just say that!

There's an earlier draft that said:

“A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, being the best security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; but no one religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person.”

Let's break that down:

A militia, what is a militia, why militias are good, therefore militias should be able to exist, and you can't make Quakers join the militia.

Every bit about this is about militias, not rednecks with AR-15s. And if it's all about the militia, it also says “well regulated militia.”

So it seems to me that the amendment is saying “you have a right to form a militia, as long as it's well regulated.”

A few years ago, the city of D.C. Passed a law that banned handguns and it was challenged and went to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court struck it down because the Republicans on the court ruled that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, therefore you can't ban handguns.

If you interpret the second amendment this way, then doesn't that mean you can't make laws banning any kind of arms? Tanks, Napalm? Can I own a tomahawk cruise missile? Can I own an ICBM and a missile silo? You know, for self-defense.

Well. . . Actually, you can own a flamethrower if you want. We have no regulations on flamethrowers. You don't even need to pass a background check. You can buy a flamethrower online.

According to genius language rapist Antonin Scalia:

“Obviously the amendment does not apply to arms that cannot be hand-carried, it's 'to keep and bear,' so it doesn’t apply to cannons,”

Okay, so I have to be able to hold it. I've seen Arnold Schwarzanegger hold an 8-barrel Gatling gun. So according to Scalia, what guns you can own depends on how strong you are.

He goes on to say:

Scalia: “but I suppose there are hand-held rocket launchers that can take down airplanes, so that'll have to be decided.”

Fox News Person: “How do you decide that if you're a textualist?”

Scalia: “Very carefully. My starting point and ending point will be what limitations are within the understood limitations that the society had at the time.”

So Scalia is saying that it might be unconstitutional to ban heat-seeking shoulder-fired missiles if his gut feeling is that people in the 1780s would have been cool with it.

Which do you think is more likely: that the founding fathers wanted to give everyone the right to own any weapon, no matter how powerful, just as long as they could physically carry it, OR that they wanted to make it so that we had a right to form a well regulated militia?

Which of those two options seems like something that was thought up by complete fucktards?

GirrlaCanes

Friday June 6th, 2014

Nation, have you ever met a lady and had a hot, steamy connection, a real wet and wild affair, only to discover that when she left, she took your car and your house? It's a phenomenon that affects millions of men every year. I'm talking of course of Hurricanes.

A new study claims that female-named hurricanes are more deadly than male-named hurricanes, saying that when people are dealing with female named hurricanes they are “not as willing to seek shelter” because they are “viewing women as warmer and less aggressive than men,” and implies “implicit sexism.”

Did you catch that folks? Female hurricanes kill three times as many people as male hurricanes, but the gender-police at Arizona State think this is proof that we're all a bunch of sexists who can't take women seriously.

Well I've got another idea. Maybe female hurricanes are more deadly. (Lightning Bolt)

Of course it's gotta be men's fault. Mother Earth wouldn't be more deadly than Daddy Globe. Of course not, Mother Earth would never drown her kids in the tub.

Poppy-cock! Daddy Globe might yell and spank and throw a baseball at you, but Mother Earth is burying all of that emotional trauma deep inside until she snaps and tries to murder us all with a barrage of Hurricanes and Femnados and Vag-canoes.

The government agency that is concerned with giant floods and hurricanes, which is aptly named “Noah” (NOAA), suck on that Atheists, which is short for National Oceanographic and Atmospheric's Anonymous, has been called on to give all hurricanes male names to fix the alleged problem of people not thinking that women named Katrina could possibly ruin their lives.

But those Mother-Earth worshiping Feminists are protesting this move, saying that naming all hurricanes after men would merely treat the symptom, not the problem, and that clearly the easier thing to do is to change all of society so we all respect and fear women as much as we fear men.

We could start by naming scary things after women. Tornadoes are now called Sheilas. We're tracking a category 5 Sheila, you better take cover. History channel can have a show called “Sheila Chasers.” Ebola is now Shebola. Pooping your pants is now pulling a Vicky. Surely this will make people take cover when Hurricane Mercedes is coming.

Of course, you know I'm not buying this feminist argument that female storms are more deadly because they're misunderstood. That's why I'm calling on NOAA to do a better job of probing our Hurricanes so we can find out their genders ahead of time. Don't bother telling us when we've got a harmless male-a-cane, but you sound the alarm when it's a herricane.

So come on NOAA, get out there and sex our hurricanes.

NOAA has two flagship hurricane hunter aircraft, which are named, and this is true, Kermit and Miss Piggy.

I never thought I'd say this again: Save us Kermit, you are our only hope.

Some groups are calling on NOAA to give hurricanes all male names, but now we're talking about reverse-sexism. Oh sure, let's reinforce the stereotype that males are more likely to stab you with a marlin. That's totally fair.

Other groups are saying that we must give hurricanes androgynous names. Names that could belong to a man or a woman... or a pet piranha. Names like Paco, Fram, or Steeee. But this suggestion was immediately shot down as “trans-phobic” and cis-het-normative, which coincidentally is the name of my cat. You know it's its name because when you say “cis-het-normative,” it won't come to you because it's a cat.

So nation, what are we supposed to do? Using female names kills more people because we've become desensitized to periodic female problems. Using male names reinforces the stereotype that men are dangerous. Using androgynous names demonizes the transgendered. So what's left? What kind of name would instill fear without creating a negative stereotype?

Wait. I think I have it.

Call all Hurricanes Hurricane Obama. He's already caused millions of scared white people to horde supplies, and that's without even showing up on radar. Let us all just pray that Hurricane Obama never develops a stealth capability that he could use to evade being detected by Miss Piggy and Kermit.

And it wouldn't create any stereotype, we all already know that Obama is destroying America. And when Obama is out of office, we can just move on and name all hurricanes Hurricane Hillary. 

(This is part three of the "I pretend I'm a writer for the Colbert Report" series. Part Two Part One.) 

Macaque's Selfie

Friday, August 8th, 2014

Nation, have you ever wondered how Wikipedia is able to obtain pictures for its articles without infringing on copyrights? Neither have I.

Wikipedia can only use images that are either in the public domain or are specifically licensed for free use by third parties, otherwise they are guilty of copyright infringement.

If you go to the wiki article of a famous person, let's pick one at random, how about Stephen Colbert, D.F.A.? You'll find that there are no pictures from my show, since screenshots of the Colbert Report are copyrighted by some guy named Via Com. I think he's Italian.

So Wikipedia has to get creative to obtain images.

One method is to wait for some moocher to ambush me with a camera. That's how those non-profit fat-cats obtained this photo of me and First Lady Michelle “I don't wear mom-jeans” Obama. This image was taken by the White House's official photographer, and therefore the picture is owned by the US Government. Since the Government is not a corporation, it cannot be a person like Mr. Via Com, and therefore it cannot hold a copyright and therefore the image is in the public domain.

Another method is to wait for users to upload and license their own images to Wikimedia. In such a communist utopia, fine people everywhere take time out of their busy lives to photograph and upload images so that all Wikipedia articles may have wonderful and free illustrations.

Just kidding, Wikimedia has been completely overwhelmed by user-submitted dick pics, and they would like you all to please stop.

It's hard to pin down an exact figure of the number of dick pics because Wikimedia uses sub-categories that can themselves contain further sub-categories. For example, under the category of “Human Penis,” there are 24 sub-categories such as “Human penis size by degree of rigidity,” which itself has four sub-categories. I'm guessing, those four are hard, soft, really soft, and Cheney.

Other sub-categories include “human penis facing left” and “human penis facing right,” which of course is needed to make sure that penis pictures remain Fair & Balanced, “Human Penis in Art,” which has a further 7 sub-categories, “Ultrasound Images of fetal penis,” which is not Child Pornography because it's difficult to be aroused by SONAR if you aren't a Dolphin, and “Sex Practices involving the penis,” which contains a further 8 sub-categories, one of which is “Male masturbation,” which itself contains a further 8 sub-categories, including “videos of male masturbation,” which itself contains another four sub-categories, one of which is “videos of male masturbation by posture,” which itself contains three sub-categories which are “Videos of recumbent males masturbating,” “Videos of sitting males masturbating,” and “Videos of standing males masturbating.”

Thanks to the generous giving from thousands of volunteers, now wikipedia editors have plenty of videos to choose from to illustrate how congress works. 

Wikimedia doesn't list the total number of images and videos in all the sub-categories of sub-categories, so you would have to pour through each sub-sub-sub-sub category to take an accurate dick census, and nobody has time for that. Except for Jay the Intern, who reported back that there are over 9000 dick pics and videos.

This bouquet of phalluses has led to protracted battles as users try to prop up their dick pics as the best. Some users go around nominating other dick pics for deletion while simultaneously inserting their dick pics into articles, fighting to make their penis the actual protypical penis pictured in the world's most used encyclopedia, making them a true modern Vitruvian Man.

While the penis war wages on, many other Wikipedia articles are lacking in the picture department.

Please don't sue me.

One such page is that of the “Crested Black Macaque,” which is unfortunately not a sub-sub-category of penis, it's a kind of monkey. Wikipedia uses this selfie that a Black Crested Macaque took after it stole, I mean, borrowed a photographer's camera in Indonesia.

The photograher, David Slater, claims that he owns the copyright to this image and requested that it be taken down. Wikimedia responded by sending him a picture of their black-crested macaque and balls, saying that he is not authorized to request the removal of the photo because he is not the photographer and therefore doesn't hold the copyright. According to Wikimedia, the image was taken by the Macaque, so only the Macaque can hold the copyright, and since a macaque is not a person, the image is therefore in the public domain.

And That brings us to tonight's Word.

Macaque Selfie

How can monkeys take selfies if they don't have a self? Or do they? 

What does it tell us about humans that the Macaque took selfies of its face instead of thousands of neatly categorized close-ups of its genitals?

That it's a female.

Slater claims the picture belongs to him because he engineered the shot saying “It was my artistry and idea to leave them to play with the camera and it was all in my eyesight. I knew the monkeys were likely to do this and I predicted it.”

“Artistry”

Which is how I wrote my book I Am America and So Can You, by leaving my laptop open and predicting that my interns would write something in it.

Interns are non-persons and cannot hold copyrights. :(

Wikimedia countered that the person pressing the button is the photographer, regardless of who owns the camera. But Wikimedia might be opening up a huge barrel of angry monkeys with this argument.

The Precursor to the Legal Precedent of the Origin of the Inciting Incident of the Planet of the Apes.

If a monkey is capable of being a photographer, why then can't the monkey own the copyright on the image? And if monkeys can own copyrights, why can't they, I don't know, own people as slaves?

Many of us are already slaves to Macaques.

Slater claims that his career has been ruined and figures that he has lost around 10,000 pounds in royalties.

Which is equivalent to 160,000 ounces of Freedom.

There's a famous saying that a monkey at a typewriter, if given an infinite amount of time, would write the complete works of Shakespeare. Now we know that a monkey with a camera can ruin a photographer's career in about five minutes.

Monkey see, monkey do. Monkey take selfie, monkey become world famous photographer.

If your income is jeopardized by monkeys hitting buttons, then maybe you should have majored in something a little more useful than photography.

Monkey Business?

And if Macaques are capable of taking selfies, why didn't Anthony Weiner defend his dongle tweet by saying “I didn't take the picture, Macaque did?”

That picture is filed under “Human Penis – Concealed by Boxers – Penis Selfies – Career Ending”

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then if a Macaque named “Romeo” takes 885 selfies, he will have contributed more to society than Shakespeare.

Luckily, I happen to have a Macaque named Romeo in my pants, and I have been training him to take selfies.

Eww...Wherefore art thou Romeo?

I'm coming for you Shakespeare!

Not literally.

Nation, it's happening. Monkeys are contributing to Wikipedia. What's next, monkeys commenting on YouTube videos? That's absurd, it would quickly degenerate into a massive shit-flinging nightmare – (REALIZATION)

Now we know what those monkeys at typewriters have been doing while they were supposed to be writing plays.

Nation. If Monkeys are photographers who spend their days writing Youtube comments, then that can mean only one thing.

Macaques are college students?

Monkeys are unemployed free-loaders. Get a real job macaque! Your picture taking and internet arguing is being subsidized by my tax dollars.

Or it would if I paid taxes...

Well I won't be a monkey's uncle or his sugar daddy.

Mr. Obama: De-port Ma-caque.

Macaque just hangs out all day, checking out girls, getting in fights,

Sword Fights?

And taking selfies. Just ask Wikipedia if we need more macaque selfies.

Wikipedia: "Please God Make it Stop."

President “Mom Jeans” – Deport Macaque. And that's tonight's word. 

(This is part-two of the "I pretend I'm a writer for the Colbert Report" series. Part One.) 

Space For Sale

As I type, I'm perhaps a month away from finishing Moon For Sale, my second novel in a planned trilogy about Kingsley Pretorius, a South African billionaire who starts his own space program.

The idea for this trilogy is not to predict the future but to offer up a possible future that realistically could happen. I don't believe the plot of these novels will come true. I believe that I have done my research, that these books will never violate the laws of physics, and never sacrifice realism for fake drama. 

Really the germ of this idea came from a perceived lack of near-future science fiction. There's plenty of sci-fi in far-flung futures, with terraforming, human civilizations spread across the solar system or the galaxy. There's also plenty of sci-fi about alien contact, space monsters, space wars, etc.

But both of these types of far-flung futures have almost no resemblance at all to actual space travel. They wave a magic wand and launch massive colony ships. 

Sure, I'm interested in seeing far-future humans spreading across the solar system and galaxy, but I also want to see how we get there from here. What's the first step? When do we get to Mars? When do we go back to the Moon? Who will do it? Will it be a cold-war-like space race between US and China? Or will it be an international cooperation like the European Space Agency teaming up with NASA and RSA? 

Apollo and the early space programs live large in our collective imaginations, and I'm very interested in seeing the next Apollo. Maybe that's a moon base, maybe a base on Mars. But I don't want wand-waving that skips to the supposedly more interesting story of discovering aliens, monsters, alien-monsters, etc., but rather a story like that of Apollo, of real people with limited technology, bravely leaving the Earth, heading out into space, and hoping they aren't lost in space, to orbit the sun for millions of years if the mission fails. 

What comes closest to this kind of premise, from the popular culture that I can remember, are films like Red Planet and Mission to Mars. They both came out in a short period of time, and both portrayed the first attempts at sending humans to Mars. 

But in Mission to Mars they discover that the face on Mars is an alien artifact and they try to solve all the mysteries of life in the last 10 minutes of the film. In Red Planet, they encounter flesh-eating nematodes and their robot companion turns against them. Evil robots, flesh-eating alien monsters....doesn't exactly sound like Apollo does it?

The film Europa Report which just recently came out was supposed to be a more realistic space film (than say Sunshine and it's monsters...), but Europa Report did some very silly things. They send humans to land on Europa before humans ever land on Mars or Ceres. Their ship and mission design make very little sense, and then they run into monsters. There's also Apollo 18, about a lost Apollo mission...where they run into Moon monsters. 

Look, I'm sure there is alien life out there somewhere, but we've had so many alien monsters in fiction...can't we just get one example of space that doesn't include monsters, doesn't include wand-waving that makes orbital mechanics go away (Like the film Gravity which ignores basically all of orbital mechanics...), doesn't resort to the low hanging fruit of space monsters, space-splosions, and pseudo-scientific plot points. 

So with that in mind, I was very interested in writing about the next 20-30 years. Realistically, how do we take the next step? How would we go to Mars? What would that program look like? Apollo on steroids?

I had been thinking about this kind of story for several years, but I didn't have much of an idea about how we would get there. The easy answer seems to be a new space-race against China. Reach a little higher in the creative tree and you might get to massive corporations replacing space programs. There's plenty of sci-fi in which nation-states have been overcome by massive corporations, and that's not all that far-flung an idea. 

But the problem I see with the idea of massive trans-national corporations launching the next space-race is that there's not a lot of profit to be made in just sending people to Mars or Ceres. This is why much of that far-flung sci-fi skips a long period of time and jumps to the time when these massive corporations can be turning profits with space mining and such. But that's a big leap in time. Sure companies probably will be turning profits by harvesting resources from space...but that's not going to be the next step, we have to start actually exploring space before we start sending miners to the Moon or Mars. 

If nations aren't willing to drop hundreds of billions on going to Mars, and corporations aren't going to turn a profit until we've already expanded a good way into space...how do we ever get this period of exploration kick-started?

When I started learning about Elon Musk, at first, like many people, I was skeptical of him. But about two years ago, I realized that he was the real thing. And he provides the answer. Maybe not him personally, but the idea of him...

Sure, it's possible that the US or China or Russia decides to stake their claim on being the world's foremost power by sending humans to Mars...but politicians won't be the ones making the trip, and politicians aren't typically big fans of science fiction or all that interested in space (The US Military budget is something like 40 times bigger than NASA's). Sure it's possible that some corporation will decide they can turn a profit by going to Mars, but I just don't see them making those numbers work...

But what about eccentric billionaires?

We live in a time when there are a few hundred or a few thousand people who literally have the power to go to Mars if they want to. If Bill Gates decided he wanted to move to Mars and had 60 billion dollars to throw at the project, it's certainly possible that he could do it. Eccentric billionaires can put billions into a project that has absolutely no chance of turning a profit, because they personally will profit from the experience. And that, I believe, is how the next step in human space travel will be taken. 

So now that I finally had a vision of space travel that felt both compelling and realistic, I set out to learn everything there is to know about Elon Musk, SpaceX, NASA's plans, and everything there is to know about the near-future in space. 

The direct result is a trilogy of books: Space For Sale, Moon For Sale, Mars For Sale. 

Without going into too many details, you can see the progression of the story in the titles. But if the story I had to tell was nothing but details about space missions, Tom Clancy-like expounding on the specific impulse of the engine, the mass fraction of the rocket, some kind of study or report on the feasibility of a series of space missions, then that would not be a very compelling story. 

These novels are about going to space, about revolutionizing space travel by bringing costs down, about electric cars replacing combustion engines, about congress meddling in NASA, about corruption, about corporate espionage, about space firsts...but they are mostly about characters, people who have dreams and goals and flaws, and some of those people are eccentric billionaires with money to burn.

When you open the world's first space hotel, you're not going to be launching spacecraft filled with boy-scout-like-astronauts who follow orders.We're talking about Russian gangsters with billions to spend trying to avoid prison by living in space and Justin Bieber and his pet Capuchin trashing their space hotel room (which they paid for in bitcoins). We're talking about George Clooney buying spy satellites to spy on genocidal fuck-heads in Sudan and the first ever porn filmed in space. We're talking about things that are both absurd and absolutely realistic. 

That's what these books are about: The absurdity of the reality we actually live in. They're about a dream of making space travel cheaper, and all the obstacles that stand in the way of a bold thinker that tries to make his dream a reality.

I would describe the series as being like Apollo 13 and The Right Stuff. It's funny, it's realistic, and it has authentic space drama. 

The first book is out. The second book is coming in a few months.

Here are some excerpts from early reviews:

-Best 'modern' setting book I've read.

-There must have been a great deal of time spent on the research for this book; I actually feel like I received an education on the history of manned space exploration from this book. With this book, I think Jeff Pollard has done for space nerds what Ernest Cline did for 80's pop culture geeks with Ready Player One. There are tons of nerd culture references scattered throughout the book, and looking for these little Easter Eggs became a meta game for me.

-There were some pretty memorable passages in the book too, and I thought Kingsley's epiphany speech to Caroline was one of the hardest hitting pieces of self reflection I've ever read.

-All in all, I thought this was a really enjoyable read, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in science fiction, space history, Elon Musk, pop/nerd culture, etc.

22 Answers to Creationists with Dumb Questions

5 February 2014

Over at the paragon of intellectualism called Buzzfeed, they posted a series of 22 questions posed by creationists in attendance at the Creation Museum where Bill Nye debated a talking ham.

I will now answer all of their questions.

1. Bill Nye The Science Guy teaches children about reality. What are you doing at the Creation Museum? Lying about reality, telling people not to listen to scientists, undermining science teachers, attempting to replace science education with religious indoctrination. Are you telling me it's healthy to tell children that an after-life of eternal torture awaits them if they question what you teach them?

2. No. I'm not scared of something that has not been proven to exist. I'm also not afraid of Big Foot or a Flying Spaghetti Monster or Sharknados. 

How's this for a question. Are you afraid to imagine that you cease to exist when you die, and that you won't be reunited with loved ones and that death is final? Are you so afraid of not existing that you'll seize on the fairy-tale that you will live forever in a magical land despite no evidence to back it up? When smart people come along and point out that the book which you claim proves this fairy-tale ending is actually riddled with falsehoods and contradictions and doesn't match up with the nature of reality, will you plug your ears and insist that the scientists are lying? Will you be willing to brain-wash your children to ignore the facts of reality in order to keep alive your fairy-tale idea about your immortality?

3. I'd add: too many layers of ice, visible stars that are billions of light-years away, dinosaur fossils from millions of years ago...

Sure, it's possible that it was created like this. A god could make the earth and make it so that stars that are billions of light years away already have their light 99.9999% of the way to earth so that we can see them even though the light hasn't had time to get here, or he/she/it could manipulate the composition of radioactive elements to make it erroneously appear like things are billions of years old...

But why would god go out of his way to make all the evidence point to a universe and an earth that are really really old? 

Don't you find it a little weird that your god is using the nature of existence to lie to you? 

You think you have a prankster god? I'll let Bill Hicks handle this...

4. No. It doesn't. Thinking that it does shows that you don't understand thermodynamics. 

The second law of thermodynamics basically says that a closed system will grow more disordered over time. Order in thermodynamics is really refering to usable energy, so like a small pocket of high heat surrounded by areas of low-heat. This is ordered. 

Over time that heat will spread out and the whole area will be the same temperature. 

In other words, you don't pour a room temperature bath and then discover hours later that there are ice cubes floating in one end of the tub and hot water on the other end.

You can throw ice cubes into a hot bath, but over time the whole bath will end up at a uniform temperature.

The 2nd law says that you always go from more order to less order and inevitably to the lowest-ordered state.

Creationists then take this to mean that you can't go from low-order (primordial soup) to highly ordered (complex living things).

However this is a completely wrong assessment for a number of reasons. For one thing, the 2nd law isn't talking about this kind of order, and even if it was, the Earth is not a closed system, there is heat pouring in all the time. 

For another thing, there is no mechanism in a closed system by which a bath of uniform temperature would then stratify into ordered layers...but you could create such a mechanism, and evolution is a mechanism that creates order out of less order. That's the whole beauty of evolution.

Saying that evolution violates the 2nd law because it creates order out of less order is like saying that your freezer violates the 2nd law because it creates ordered ice cubes out of disordered water.

It's a nonsense question that only sounds smart if you don't know anything about thermodynamics...

6. The laws of thermodynamics do not debunk either The Big Bang Theory nor the Theory of Evolution. At the big bang we had essentially a soup of highly charged particles, nothing but the simplest of things. But from this lack of order we get ordered galaxies, stars, people, etc.. This kind of order (spiral galaxies, planets around stars, DNA) is not the kind of order talked about in thermodynamics. And there are processes that create this order. You can see computer models of dis-ordered clouds of dust and gas becoming ordered solar systems. Gravity and the conservation of momentum will create this order. But all the time, the thermodynamic order of the universe is decreasing, in fact, eventually, if the universe doesn't collapse, if it is a closed system, then we will reach a point when the universe will be at the lowest possible ordered state of thermal equilibrium. At that point no work can be done, not even computation. This possible end of the universe is called The Heat Death of the Universe. 

5. A sunset occurs when the sun dips below the visible horizon on a round planet. Why do we need god for a solid object to block light? 

This question might as well be "How can you explain that anything exists without a god." So we all ask where the universe came from, and we say that the earliest thing we can explain is the big bang, and you say "what was before the big bang," and we say, well, before that, space and time did not exist in our universe. Our universe may be part of some bigger structure, a multi-verse, a series of bubbles or branes in 9 or 11 dimensional space, but here in our universe, we can't see outside of it and so we don't know. 

You say "god made the universe." Where did this god come from? Has it existed always? If you have no problem saying that god has always existed then we have no problem saying the multi-verse has always existed. 

Why are you anthropomorphizing something that has nothing at all to do with people? There are a septillion planets in the universe, but you think god is an understandable personality similar to the intelligent apes found on one of those planets? Or do you think it's more likely that whatever creatures reach intelligence are likely to invent a god that is similar to them?

7.  Wikipedia says: "In philosophy, noetics is a branch of metaphysical philosophy concerned with the study of mind and intellect."

So this isn't really a question, but I guess she's trying to imply that intelligence and consciousness come from a soul and can't be explained by physical processes. 

We have evidence of consciousness. We have no evidence of souls... We have plenty of neuroscientists that can tell you all the ways that physical processes in the brain create consciousness. You can shock a part of the brain with an electrode and make someone become instantly euphoric. Zap another spot and they become suicidal. Cut out a section and you can make a sociopath. Insert a tumor and you can remove all inhibitions. Where's the soul in all of this?

8. Inside our heads. It's nice when questions are posed in a way where you can actually answer them. Meaning, experience, love, anger, you name it, it's in your head. Go study evolutionary psychology if you want to know the origins of these things. 

9. 

Life arising from non-life is called Abiogenesis.

The Miller-Urey Experiment set out to show that a soup that was like the ancient Earth, with simple compounds, if exposed to heat and electric sparks (like lightning) and given a long period of time, could produce more complex amino acids which are the basic building blocks of life. The experiment created at least 20 more complex amino acids from simpler compounds. In other words, a soup made in a lab given a few years can make the building blocks of life. Now lets make that soup so large it fills the oceans of the planet, and rather than a few years, lets give it a billion years and see if something happens by chance in all of those countless chemical reactions and protein interactions all over the planet. 

There are over a septillion planets in the universe. Perhaps one in a billion of those planets are potentially habitable. That leaves a quadrillion habitable planets. Let's let 13 billion years go by and see if any of those quadrillion planets might at some point spontaneously create life out of non-life. Remember, we're not talking about an ape crawling out of the ooze. We're talking about something that is microscopic and barely removed from a chemical process.

Do you think that quadrillions of oceans with billions of years might once in a while create life? 

Or is it more likely that a complex, thinking, all-powerful, omniscient life existed already at the start of the universe?

Centuries ago, when it was thought that the Sun or even the Earth was the center of the universe, and there was only one star, only a half-dozen planets, then it might seem more likely that a god existed than life spontaneously coming about on one of those few planets. But now that we can see literally septillions of planets, it doesn't seem so unlikely does it?

Creationists will counter this by saying that the odds of life arising on Earth are miniscule, so the fact that we are here shows that we are special. Let me ask you this: if life hadn't occurred here, if our ocean wasn't the right composition and life didn't arise here, would we be here to think about it? 

If life can arise from non life and perhaps a thousand intelligent civilizations have arisen across the universe, all of those civilizations will be on a planet where life was possible to arise, all of them had long odds...but it happened somewhere... To say that we are special because we are here is like saying we are special because we are the sperm that made it...of course we are! You don't see the sperm that didn't make it walking around do you? Or it's like the lottery. If you are the one person in a million to win the lottery, you might think you are special and it happend to you for a reason. But to the person pulling the balls out of the machine to pick a winner, it's not magical at all that somebody is going to be a winner. 

10. Genesis also says more.

Bill Nye was booed when he pointed outan error in Genesis.

"Nye calmly riled everyone up, by bringning up Genesis 1:16, which reads, “God made two great lights — the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night.   He also made the stars.”  Nye then corrected the Bible.  “The lesser light is not a light at all, but only a reflector.”

At this point, the Waco Tribune records that one mother jumped up from her seat and screeched, “We believe in God!”, then ran away crying, dragging three of children away with her.  As she ran off, the mother was seen visibly cupping the ears of the child in her arms so her baby would not have to hear any more of Nye’s science."

So God created two great lights. The Sun and the Moon...

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

Take note, when god said "let there be light" he is talking about our SUN. Not the big bang. Also, the book puts The Sun as the main light, then the lesser "light" is the Moon, and oh yeah, by the way, he also made the stars. See the order of importance? The other stars are just an "oh by the way." That's because they didn't know that the sun was just one of billions and billions of stars. They thought it was the only sun. So basically Genesis, at best, is an account of the creation of our solar system and that's it. Not the universe. 

Now if Genesis had talked about the big bang, and galaxies and supernova that created the heavy elements and then collapsing dust and gas clouds that created our solar system and then the nuclear fusion that powered the sun, that might be quite a story, one that would show that the writers had some knowledge that was not available to scientists in that time. That might show they were divinely inspired. Instead it has every hallmark of being written by people who had no more knowledge than anyone else at the time...

11. Umm...they don't?

The idea that life on earth was engineered by aliens is an interesting one, but is not at all embraced or accepted by the scientific community. 

This is called Exogenesis or Panspermia.

It's certainly possible. We are now capable of genetic engineering. We could theoretically go out and find a habitable planet where life has yet to arise and then seed life there... However, ultimately, if we wash away the problem of life arising from non-life by saying Aliens did it, we still then have to explain the origin of Aliens, and ultimately they would have to arise from non-life. 

I think this person is watching too much Ancient Aliens on the (NOT)History Channel. 

12. Evolution says that humans arose through gradual changes, with each generation being almost identical to the generation before it and after it. But those small changes add up over time, and so if you go back a thousand years, people won't be much different at all, but if you can find the fossillized remains of people from a million years ago or two million years ago, you'll find that they are different and see how humans changed. 

Lucy is one of many examples of these intermediate human forms. 

Check out a giant list of these forms.

Check it out and you'll see the idea that there is "one lucy" is absurd. 

13. Yes. 

All living things undergo some kind of metamorphosis. Look at human fetuses and infants and then look at an 80 year old. We change. Animals change too. There's nothing magical about it. 

14. A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on knowledge that has been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experimentation.

The bible is not a theory. 

Gravity is a theory. Theory does not mean "wild guess." 

15. A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on knowledge that has been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experimentation.

Creationism is not a scientific theory. It is absolutely not well-substantiated, nor is it testable or has it ever been comfirmed through any kind of experimentation. Intelligent design is absolutely not science, it is religion and does not belong in a science classroom. 

Why do you object to the teaching in schools that a flying spaghetti monster created everything? 

16. All genetic information has arisen through evolution. All of it. A common point made by creationists is that the human eye is "irreducibly complex." That is, that you can't have half of an eye, it offers no advantage, and so evolution then must be saying that things without eyes suddenly had awesome eyes out of nowhere by random chance...this is not how evolution works. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_eye

The eye began with the creation of light-sensitive cells. Simple cells that could tell light from dark and that's all. Look at the diagram on that wiki page. If you make a dip and put the cells in that dip, then you can have very rudimentary directional vision of light and dark. From there the pinhole camera type of eye can arise, and from there the evolution to modern complex eyes has no trouble. Eyes have evolved in different ways and seem to have arisen multiple times. We can even see the early form of the pinhole camera in creatures still alive today: the Nautilus. 

17. Purpose is an objective human construct. Things are, there is no why, only how. We have consciousness and we get to decide what our purpose is. You have chosen that a bronze-age book has the answer to your purpose. Congratulations...

If you want to know what science says about the origin of human motivations, emotions, and so on, try watching this.

18. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_evolution_fossils

19. Can you believe that Australia exists if you have never been there? I have never seen Australia with my own eyes. However I see all kinds of evidence for the existence of it. I have seen pictures. I've met Australians. 

We see the signature of the big bang in the Cosmic Microwave Background.

We can see that all of the universe is flying apart, as if coming from a central explosion at some point far in the past. 

I think there was a big bang, but if evidence were provided that pointed to a different origin, then I would be willing to change my mind. 

If evidence were produced that showed that the bible were full of contradictions, would you continue to believe it to be true?

20. Because I paid attention in Chemistry, Physics, Biology,  and Astronomy class. Amazing does not mean designed. Order can arise from non-order. A big bang of energy and particles and given the laws of physics will produce stars and planets and sunsets and rainbows. Why must there be a creator for these things to exist?

21. The Big Bang was not a star, but a singularity. We don't know where it came from. If the answer to a question is "we don't know," that doesn't then mean "god did it." 

If you were to ask a Christian where illnesses and plagues come from in the 1700s, they would say God is punishing us. But some people were not satisfied with such answers and we discovered germs and viruses. Just because science didn't have an answer then does not mean that god was responsible. 

22. We did not come from monkeys. 

Humans and monkeys share a common ancestor from millions of years ago. Humans and Giraffes have a common ancestor from millions of years before that. Humans and trees have a common ancestor from millions of years before that. All life came from a single origin, and we are all descendants from that origin. 

Let's suppose that we take a pack of wolves and breed them, selecting the nicest, friendliest wolves of the bunch and allowing them to breed. After dozens of generations we could have animals that are like dogs, floppy eared, bushy tailed, very friendly, very nice. 

You can do just such an experiment.

And if you do, and come up with a new kind of animal, that doesn't mean that there are no longer any wolves. 

Humans did not come from monkeys. Monkeys and humans are descendant from a common ancestor. The line to monkeys has been evolving all this time, the line to humans has been independently evolving all this time. The common ancestor which both humans and monkeys come from is not still around.