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teacher!!! sorry!!!
next time I better better good presentations!!!
don’t Put enough effort into their presentations
—> my parents calling??  OH!! My god!!
Sorry teacher!!  teacher very very handsome!!
I love teacher~very very!!!
I should better next time!!!
The next positively Supplement by presentations

Teacher~<3 Sorry~!!
—>My teacher talk NO!!! Never no!!!!
teacher..help we!!!!!
very very tired..Ok?
next time better good!!
Sorry sorry sorry!!!!!

—Kim, 15 years old.

This is a conversation that took place after Jason saw my previous post:

Jason:  OH MY GOD MAKING FUN OF MY BLOG POSTS

1.  Find an amusing photograph that was either taken or made by someone else.

2.  State something simplistic about the subject of said photograph.

3.  Conclude post with said picture and smugly think you are funny.

4.  Rinse, Lather, Repeat.

Being an Atheist, I obviously hold Charles Darwin as my G-d.  This isn’t too complicated since I only have to pray to him 5 times a day while facing the Galapagos Islands.  Eventually I will have to travel there and throw rocks at a copy of the Bible, but that is neither here nor there. 

Anyways, I’ve been trying to think of what to do for Darwin Day this year or what I like to call “Atheist Christmas.”  Since it is on Februrary 12th, I have a while to decide; however I have already found a cheap statue of our patron saint that we only need to cut out and fold.  I’m hoping that despite my lack of artistic skills, I’ll be able to cut in straight lines.

I would love to blog more, but lately I have been as busy as a jew next to a shallow water fountain.  But today I was really pissed off at work and thought I would vent.

I love Korea, I like teaching and I even like Koreans sometimes.  But they are some of the least rational people on the planet.  Among the countless irrational things they do, two have stuck out today.

1.  They leave the god damn caps off of the dry erase markers. 

Sometimes at the end of class, we will play hangman to kill some time.  And, like clockwork, the last person with the marker puts it back on the tray with the cap still on the wrong end of the marker.  I can’t decide whether they can’t put 2 and 2 together that the marker will dry out or if, since the marker isn’t theirs or their amazing fantastic parent’s, they just don’t care.  Either way it pisses me off.

2.  When they cheat, THEY DON’T ERASE THE EVIDENCE.

Each day, every class has to do a word test.  Basically, they are given anywhere from 30-70 words in Korean and expected to translate them to English.  Well, they know every word and the order of the exam.  Needless to say, cheating is hardly a difficult task.  And a popular method is to write some of the words on their desk in pencil to reference during the test.  Now, I walk around, but their arms and test papers can often conceal their handy work.  So, inevitably, kids are getting away with it.  I catch a fair deal, but I can’t catch them all.  Until they leave my class 50 minutes later.  Then, I can walk around and look at the desks.  And, amazingly, they don’t erase the evidence.  It’s unbelievable.  They make a great effort to cheat, get away with it, and then leave it there to be found.  It is like robbing a bank, getting away with it, and turning yourself in.  It boggles the mind.  And I talked to a Korean teacher about it and she couldn’t really see my point.  But what can you expect from a society that teaches that you can get taller from playing basketball and an electric fan will kill you, but more on those later.

Ah, Obama’s supporters amongst the Libertarians ought to be ecstatic right now.  Im sure when they thought of the ideal cabinet the Libertarians weren’t imagining that the economic positions would be filled with liberals and the US defense secretary would be a Republican.  Best possible combination eh?

From the BBC:

Analysts had suggested that former CIA director Mr Gates, 65, might be
asked to stay in his role because he was respected by both parties and
would reflect a more bipartisan administration.

Sadly, this is not the bipartisan approach that I had hoped for.

While I don’t agree with everything that is coming out of the Obama presidency, I have to say that I very much enjoyed the headline on yahoo today that “foes of stem cell research now face a tough battle.”  As Yahoo says:

President-elect Barack Obama is expected to lift restrictions on federal money for such research. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., also has expressed interest in going ahead with legislation in the first 100 days of the new Congress if it still is necessary to set up a regulatory framework.

As a Libertarian who believes that the government should invest in science, this is great news.  The foes of stem cells really don’t have much ground to stand on that isn’t religiously based.  Plus, over the last decade, stem cells have grown in importance and further research is absolutely necessary.  While it is true that scientists have begun to adapt to the restrictions by studying adult stem cells of some varieties, right now it is simply easier and more beneficial to use embryonic stem cells. 

Many people say that Obama would bring change to the way things are done.  So far, he really hasn’t shown it.  He has essentially hooked into every under-secretary from the Clinton years and has given them prominent posts.  While in my opinion its a good sign, Im pretty sure that the “change” crowd wasn’t expecting such a raid.  Below is a short list of such picks:

Hillary Clinton - Secretary of State: Bill Clinton’s wife

Peter Orszag - Budget Director: Economic Adviser to Bill Clinton, “protege” of Robert Rubin

John Podesta - Transition team: Bill Clinton’s last chief of staff

Eric Holder - Attorney General: Deputy attorney general under Bill Clinton

Gregory Craig - White House Counsel: Led Bill Clinton’s defense in the impeachment hearings

Rahm Emanuel - Chief of Staff: Senior adviser to Bill Clinton and resident IDF volunteer

Janet Napolitano - Homeland Security Chief:  Appointed US attorney for Arizona by Bill Clinton

Personally, I don’t see this as a bad thing; however those who wanted to return the presidency to the Jimmy Carter years (or FDR years) ought to be a little worried.

Hat tip: Slate

Ryan hates Martin Luther King Jr with a passion.  This is not because his is a racist prick, which he is, but because he believes that Martin Luther King was a lying and plagiarizing cheater.  For those of you who don’t know, MLK probably plagiarized a good chunk of his doctoral dissertation at Boston University.  He also cheated on his wife.  While you can’t doubt that King created a lot of good in the world, it is evident that he was not of the highest moral character.  But should that matter?

When judging people, we can judge them on what they have created or what they do in their free personal time.  I am a strict believer that we should only judge people on what they have created for the world.  I would rather have 1 Martin Luther King who created equality than 10,000,000 Mormons who sit in their houses being virginal and pure.  Without MLK, there is a good chance that we wouldn’t be closer to equality than we were in the 60s.  The Jim Crow laws could still be in effect and African-Americans wouldn’t have the same opportunities as everyone else.  Hell, if we want to extrapolate this further we could assign some credit for the fall of the Apartheid government in South Africa to MLK too.  King not only changed how Americans viewed themselves, but also how Americans viewed other nations in terms of race.

I believe that how I view MLK in contrast to Ryan also leads us to how we view President-elect Obama.  I like Obama.  Hell, I’ll go as far as saying as I have a man-crush on Obama.  He is incredibly smart, a great speaker, and even loves basketball.  Plus, any president willing to use their power to get us a BCS bowl game is a good man in my book.  But I did not vote for Obama.  Why?  Because there is a difference in character and achievement.  While I think Obama has the utmost character, he has not achieved what I view as a positive change for America.  He succumbed to supporting the Patriot Act and is an economic leftist.  Yet, Ryan supports Obama and even donated to his campaign.  Why?  Because he likes him, thinks he will bring about change with his nice nuclear family and scandal-free life.  Sadly, that won’t lead us to the promised land.

In conclusion, I’d rather have 1 MLK than 100 Obamas.  But using that math, I’d rather have 1 Obama than 100,000 Mormon fundamentalists.  Yeah, that seems about right.

No more idiotic lolcatz after this

Every so often on BBC, you’ll run across an article about the “Human species may split in two.” This is mainly there because people keep emailing it to each other thinking that it is new news.  The theorist, who by no means is saying that this will happen or that he has any proof for it, simply states that it is possible that the rich and the poor will diverge more over the next 1000 years.  This is supposed to make people think about their high school reading list that contained Brave New World and 1984. 

Of course, this completely ignores the fact that we had greater stratification in years previous which saw very little divergence.  The royalty in Europe had the benefit of a long time period and the ability to select whoever they wanted to marry; however other than the odd case of Hemophilia the really isnt any difference between Prince Charles and Wayne Rooney.  This is partially because macro evolution of a diluted species takes longer than 1000 years and because humans tend to pick their mates on prescribed notions instead of class status.

Oliver Curry, the evolutionary theorist above, also mentioned that the nature of society in the future will impact the speed at which we’ll devolve.  Technology will apparently create a barrier between the haves and the have-nots.  This would seem to go against modern history as well.  Technology has brought the lower classes and upper-classes closer together instead of further apart.  200 years ago, only the richest could demand entertainment whenever they wanted; however most of the world currently has a television set despite it being invented less than 100 years ago.  Air conditioning, while not everyone, is found in locations where it was never dreamt to be possible before.  Even the internet has stretched all across the globe over the last 20 years.  Technology dimishes, not increases, the difference between classes.

Last, even if for some reason the human species still maintained strict class divides over the next 1000 years it would be unlikely that we’d diverge into two species due to beauty.  The fact is that attractive parents don’t necessarily create attactive offspring.  It is a well known fact that attractive fathers tend to create attractive daughters and ugly sons.  This would explain why Ryan’s sister is boneable however Ryan has to get girls drunk and slip them GHB.  Genetics does not work as we would like to believe, there are no perfect genes.  The key to facial attractiveness is being the most average and average is not a sustainable genetic trait.