Carlin was inspirational to me, in some ways, as a teen.  He had a biting wit and was more a social commentator than comedian.  I saw him live a couple of times – once at the University of Maine where he autographed a dollar bill for me.  The fact that it took me several months to spend that money was as much about my respect for him as my flat-broke-ness.

One of my favorite Carlin rants is here – Carlin on Politicians – and I’ll miss that penetrating side of him.  He could make us laugh so hard that our guts hurt, and not always because what he said was funny, exactly – but because it was so sadly true.  In his later years, I was sad to see him move more toward aimless anger and jokes about death and poop, but I suppose that’s how things go.

He died at Saint John’s in Santa Monica – just a mile or two from my place -  at the age of 71.

Hey pork-lovers: remember the pig brain mist story?  Well, mother nature’s delivered us a fresh little firmware upgrade, just like I promised!

ABC is reporting that the “National Security Principals Committee” held dozens of meetings in the White House specifically planning who and how to torture. The principals conspiring to commit these war crimes included the vice president, then-CIA director George Tenet, Attorney General John Ashcroft, National Security Advisor Condi Rice, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and then-Secretary of State Colin Powell. According to ABC, Ashcroft at one point asked, “why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly.”

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“… We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government…”

[so old it's cool again.]

Years ago, I read Pinchbeck’s Breaking Open the Head, and found it to be a good and interesting book, even if somewhat inconclusive.

Somehow I missed Rolling Stone‘s profile of him over a year ago. It’s a really interesting story – his influences and where they took him. I saw Pinchbeck on the Colbert Report a few months ago talking about his new book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl and I was quite confused.

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Y’all know how I feel about factory farming in general. Stuff like this really upsets me, and one of these days, Mother Nature is going to bite back. When she does, it’ll be pretty hard to feel sorry for those she bites. Those of you who eat meat should, at the very least, be sure it’s not commercially farmed and never saw the inside of a slaughterhouse. (In the words of Michael Pollan, “pay more, eat less.”) Video is here.

US Attorney General Michael Mukasey: “Torture, as you know, is now unlawful under American law. I can’t contemplate any situation in which this President would assert Article II authority to do something that the law forbids.”

Senator Arlen Specter: “Well, he did just that in violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act; he did just that in disregarding the express mandate of the National Security Act to notify the intelligence committees.. didn’t he?”

Mukasey: “I think we are now in a situation where both of those issues have been brought within statutes and that’s the procedure going forward.”

Specter: “That’s not the point. The point is that he acted in violation of statutes, didn’t he?”

Mukasey: “I don’t know.”

[Testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, 1/30/08]

“All Religions were invented by the Devil to conceal God from Mankind.”

I love this story. Seems that Garrett Lisi, a broke 39 year old surfer from Hawaii, has stunned scientists by presenting a viable, testable “theory of everything” that unites particles and forces within the universe.

While some are calling it a “long shot,” a few top scientists are pleasantly surprised and not so fast to write it off. Lisi’s theory takes gravity into account – something that, to date, has only been accomplished by string theory. String theory, as some of you know, requires ten or eleven dimensions to really work. Lisi’s theory has higher dimensions, too – but unlike string theory, it proves out just fine in our “ordinary” four-dimensional (3d+time) existence. I just like the E8 structures, which were discovered in 1888 but not fully computed/proven out until this year.

Whoa, dude, totally intense.

I’m very much looking forward to PopTech 2007, which kicks off later this week.  I’ll see some of you there – and those who won’t be there can catch the live webcasts, courtesy of Yahoo!

I’m also excited to meet and learn from Steven Pinker, who I’ve been grooving to recently via his new book, The Stuff Of Thought.  He and his partner Rebecca Goldstein are profiled in this cool piece at Salon: Proud Atheists.