iPandora

Why do I pick on people like the Miss Havisham family? Or excoriate the misinformed lifeform on Medved? Indict the frantic yuppies fearful of every nuts shadow? Or judge the juvenile respondents of the Network World poll?

Because every action we take, each response we make, and every choice is informed by our worldview.

Contrary to what many people think, there are absolute truths. It’s not an embicilic or juvenile response to say that the statement “there are no absolute truths” is self-negating and therefore incompatible with any form of reality known or knowable to any sentient being of any kind. It does not require a deep explanation or understanding of complex semantics. “No” is an absolute, there’s no arguing that.

Following proof of absolute truth is the fact that somethings are correct or right, and other things are incorrect, or wrong. Because there is absolute truth, the belief there are no absolutes is wrong. Simple. Anybody can do philosophy, trust me. Anybody who says otherwise has an inflated view of themselves and is lying, and wrong, all at the same time.

Belief in relativism is not the only incorrect idea we encouter either. The cosmos is full of wrong ideas. In fact, wrong ideas, simply because there can be so many more of them than right ideas, taken together are generally much more popular than right ideas.

I don’t claim to have a complete grasp of what’s right, and in fact I believe most people live their lives somewhere along the fence between right and the many possible wrongs. Sometimes dabbling in right but more often swiming in wrong.

People are too often convinced by the wrong and decieved into incorrect thinking, and the best way to warn others off is to point out the wrong when we see it.

I mount my soap box to show wrong where I see it in hopes that those in the wrong and others observing the situation will hopefully see the err and avoid it themselves.

The truth will win out in the end, but it benefits when we grandstand on it’s behalf.

As y’all have no doubt noticed, there has been a bit of spam making it through iPandora’s Akismet filters this last week.

I’ve been deleting them as I see them, but they keep coming. A few more each day.

What do y’all use to block spam on your blogs?

Neil gets around. A lot.

There have been at least two cases this week where I’ve found some new blog or something outside my regular reading and there in the comments was Neil, arguing with lucidity and alacrity for truth in whichever topic was being discussed.

Truly an amazing man… being from the greatest state in America has it’s benefits.

But one comment in particular stood out to me this week, or today.

On the Forbes.com blog Digital Rules, Rich Karlgaard wrote regarding freedom of thought in academia and science, specifically in context of the issue of Evolution and alternative theories and the newly released documentary/movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

To be a skeptic of Darwinism today is indeed costly. You will be publicly ridiculed. You will be called stupid, ignorant, bigoted, irrational and unenlightened. You will be compared with Neanderthals and flat-earthers. You could easily limit your career if you work in academia or science.

He ended his post with a query:

What do you think? Do advocates of intelligent design have a case? Is Darwinism flawed and are its proponents trying to silence the debate?

Neil concluded his reasoned response:

We have lots of evidence for the existence of God – cosmological (“first cause”), teleological (design), morality, logic, the physical resurrection of Jesus, etc. If atheists don’t find that compelling, then so be it. I’m on the Great Commission, not the paid commission. But to insist that we have no evidence is uncharitable in the extreme and makes reasoned dialogue impossible.

All gems are not found in comments around the blogosphere.

Here’s one I found by Gina Dalfonzo on The Point:

“…I thought the goal of schools was to teach kids lessons that would help them in life, not lessons that mom and dad would have to undo in order to give the kids any hope of breaking into the job market. Silly me.”

So what jewels have you found on your travels among the steamy babble of the Interweb?

You don’t have to agree with them. They may be just as shiny an example of stupidity as lucidity. Just make sure to link and attribute.

Just a question.

Perusing my spam lists today I found one link from a Splog (spam blog) which kinda tickled my funny bone. This particular splog gives a “personal touch” by estimating or parsing the name of the original author, giving a few chosen adjectives of description and following with an excerpt from the scraped article (usually found by automated searching of RSS feeds) and a link to the original article.

To make it more personal, the splog tries to find a first name AND last name for the author, and while I have posted my last name down in the copyright bits in the page footer, the splog didn’t find that and had to guess.

I must say I’m honored to be considered a relation of Lynne and Dick:

Matthew Cheney wrote an interesting post today on
Here’s a quick excerpt
Copyright © 2007 matthew. Visit the original article at http://www.ipandora.net/2007/12/17/frank-ernest-me-blog/. Me Blog. Frank and Ernest, December 17th, 2007. ShareThis. Tags: blog, comic, Frank & Ernest, Humor.

Further humor (to me) comes from the new plugin I installed which inserts a copyright warning at the beginning of the feed version of the article. Because of this the feed scraper only got copyright boilerplate, tag, and plugin information.

Splogs foiled again!

Frank and Ernest, December 14th, 2007

Blogging turns 10 years old today. An article in Wired magazine describes what Jorn Barger considered to be the true or original purpose of blogging and includes ten tips he has for new bloggers. He coined the term “blog” to describe

I think #2 is especially good (except the “posted elsewhere” bit, blogging has evolved and become better and worse for it):

You can certainly include links to your original thoughts, posted elsewhere … but if you have more original posts than links, you probably need to learn some humility.

The idea with blogging now is that the web is personal. A blog brings a collection of links to content along with commentary based on a particular person’s worldview and/or perspective.

The real goal of blogging is to provide a window to your own web.

The web has gotten to a point where it’s size is so far beyond any one person’s or even any single-purposed group’s ability to digest.

By blogging, we bring our perspective as well as our own circle of sites into a predigested with added commentary list for others to peruse both to get to know you and to foment and encourage further exploration, discovery and learning.