Internal Monologue

"Virgin" Teen sluts save my D&D minis collection! Remember when I said I'd give up a sizeable fraction of my minis collection to know how many people kept their virginity pledges ? Well, it turns out maybe I will not have to give up any of my D&D minis , because the good folks at Harvard University have just published a study . While the study doesn't give hard data about who kept their word, it does have findings which shed some light on whether these things are effective. First of all, the pledges are often repudiated by the youth themselves: The analysis also found that 52 percent of adolescent virginity pledgers in the 1995 survey disavowed the virginity pledge at the next survey a year later. Additionally, 73 percent of virginity pledgers from the first survey who subsequently reported sexual intercourse denied in the second survey that they had ever pledged. Second, people who take these pledges tend to "recant" ( i.e. presumably lie about)

Blitzkrieg of the Conservative Think Tank to the Rescue! The libertarian Cato Institute has just published a scathing report on Bush and his abuse of the constitution . This isn't too surprising, as the Cato folks are small-goverment/unfettered capitalism conservatives, rather than hate-filled religious fanatics or devoted cronies of Bush. And Cato has been critical of Bush in the past. But this should help counter the Republican spin that any criticism of Bush must be the product of the "moonbat Left". It's not just us liberals who think Bush is a disaster! How could it be? His approval rating is at 33% according to FOX news , and I don't think 67% of the country would idenitfy as liberal. Of course, "liberal" has come to mean anyone who doesn't support bush. So at this point, I guess someone like George Will is a liberal! What a wacky world the reality distortion field around these Republicans makes. If the Cato Institute can't save us,

Nice Quote: "It's impossible to make a man understand something when his livelihood depends on him not understanding it. " -Upton Sinclair Rather Marxist: Our way of making a living, ( i.e . our economic reality) colors, even controls, how we think. While I'm not so completely deterministic, I do think that self-serving bias is an almost impossibly powerful force to overcome. We had to invent something as enormously difficult and ponderous as the scientific method to help overcome it (Alleluiah!). Do ya think this quote has something to do with the Bush family business and our country's ridiculously short-sighted and petroleum-dependent energy policy? Nah...

How come right-wingers think we can assimilate Iraq, but not Latin American immigrants? LarryInNYC on DailyKos (where I've been spending a lot of Blog-time recently) pointed out this interesting little discrepancy in his post . Here's my contribution to the discussion: I agree with your insight concerning the disconnect between right-wing thinking on immigration ("We can't make them like us!") and Iraq ("We can make them like us!"). I think this is a part of the larger disconnect in what used to be the conservative movement but now seems to be the followers-of-Bush movement: ambitious plans to expend blood and treasure for sweeping social change in the Middle East, combined with an unwillingness to lift a finger to redress any social problem within our own society. I think it is was foolish enough for the neo-cons to think we could change Iraqi society into something great by military force, but to think we could do so easily, quickly, and cheaply

Someone on DailyKos asked, " Who the hell is Andrew Sullivan and why does anyone read him? " While I don't really know much about who he is, here is my reply as to why I read him: I read Andrew Sullivan because he's as far to the right as I seem to be able to read regularly and not completely shut down with exasperation. I also think he has been one of the most vocal critics of the administration's torture policies and its unconsctitutional notions of executive power. I didn't start reading him until around the 2004 election, when he very reluctantly endored Kerry, so I'm not familiar with his "wingnut" phase. He often posts interesting bits on morality and sexuality (like the one I link to in my blog, see below). I completely disagree with his animosity towards much of government spending, and it's painful to watch him cling to his Catholic church in the face of that institution's deeply ingrained homophobia. And I disagree with

" I put on my robe and wizard hat" OK, enough of this metaphysics. Time for some vulgarity. This has been around the 'net quite a bit, but if you haven't read the Bloodninja "cybersex gone wrong" transcripts , you haven't experienced the hilarious vulgarity that the 'net has to offer. I think they're too funny to be real, and I can't imagine anyone would put up with him as long as they seem to (particularly the final one, which I hope isn't real.) Warning: these are very explicit and offensive. And funny. The first episode should be of special interest to all my gamer readers.

More god discussion on Kos by me : I certainly agree with the Pascal quote. The reasoning of the heart (or what I would call the emotional part of the mind) certainly operates by a different set of rules than the reasoning of our "reasonable" and "logical" minds. And sometimes our reasonable self comes into conflict with our heart and finds it incomprehensible. This brings up the question: when our heart and our reason conflict, what should we heed? My answer to this is that it depends on the subject matter. There are some things are heart is good at and some things our head is good at. When the question is something like, "Should I propose to my girlfriend?" the heart should have the dominant say (though it would behoove one to consult one's reason as well). When the question is, "what is the average annual rainfall in Austin, TX over the past ten years?" the heart should shut up and let the head figure it out (probably with Google).