[ Part 1 — 2 — 3— 4 — 5 — 6 – 7 — 8 ] Cutter After seasons of proving myself at many of the other chores of branding, on this day, I’m in charge of castrations. After the calf slides to a stop and both the heel rope and the top man are firmly in place, I step forward and kneel down by the calf’s belly. I stretch out the scrotum and slice across the lower third of it with a sharp knife. The testicles usually pop out on their own, but sometimes you have to fish around, pressing … [Read more...]
[ Part 1 — 2 — 3— 4 — 5 — 6 – 7 — 8 ] Cowboyin' The early end of the beef industry involves a lot of labor at identifying and altering young bovines from their original, mint-condition wholeness to something more in line with human designs, as they make their first transition from free beasties to hamburger-on-the-hoof. The work can be done in sheer industrial efficiency, with metal chutes and shock prods and unconcerned hourly workers, or it can be done by working cowboys, in … [Read more...]
[ Part 1 — 2 — 3— 4 — 5 — 6 – 7 — 8 ] Somewhere above all this, all the roiling newness of the growing atheist and progressive community, there’s an overview. I’ve tried very hard to see it. It may be that there are plenty of people smarter than me, more educated, innately broader of understanding, who already know what it is we’re all working towards. But I have yet to read their books or hear their talks. I look out and see ... pieces. A chopped salad of efforts … [Read more...]
Before I started A Citizen of Earth, I blogged as The Blue Collar Atheist. The name was mostly intended to underline my lack of a college degree, or any great amount of advanced education, to make the point that giving up religion, become an agnostic or atheist, is not something you need a Ph.D. to do. You can be a complete doofus and still reason yourself free of it. Speaking of which, even *I* can see the gaping holes in some of the stuff from this site (hat tip to commenter Chris for … [Read more...]
How many times have you seen it? Someone convenes a panel of talking heads to discuss morals, justice, or any of the other “goodness” issues, and the speaker’s table is filled with a priest, a minister and a rabbi (and here lately, to prove our generous and inclusionary nature, an imam). As far as the organizer is concerned, and large swaths of the audience, atheists don’t exist. Because we don’t know anything about morals, you see, or deep human convictions, or even feelings. We … [Read more...]
[This is a repost of a piece I did several years ago, slightly edited for 2013. This essay is also part of the conceptual force driving my thoughts on the need for Beta Culture.] Leaf One Con games and sleight-of-hand magic work because, one, we humans only have so much attention to spare at any one moment, and two, they direct that attention deliberately in one direction. If you look at where the finger points, you miss … well, everything else. Like the movie teen backing through a … [Read more...]
Initial conditions show up in the final product. I’ve often thought about bonsai trees in relation to child-rearing. In my own case, there were many brighter possible futures I might have enjoyed. In my few years of college, I was a genetics major, aimed at medical or veterinary school. But I ended up, here and now, as a sort of junior-grade bus driver. I was wounded from an early age by ... well, call it less-than-optimal parenting. By the time I reached my senior year in high … [Read more...]
"What do you get when you cross an elephant with a rhino?" goes the old joke. The answer: Elephino (hell if I know)! To the question of whether the attached image is the real thing, that's the best I can figure out. (Click to see it full-size.) I saw it this morning on the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Science and Reason Facebook page, a link shared by J.O., commenter from Gothenburg, Sweden. The original image appears to be from Imgur. The Imgur side-caption says the picture was … [Read more...]
One of the problems I have with writing about Beta Culture is that I want it to make sense to people, but that it’s in my head as a growing gestalt – a huge, block consisting of many, many pieces (and hundreds of pages of notes) – becoming progressively more complex and exciting the longer I consider it. I want to write about it in a way that carefully explains it – it’s a new idea to most people, after all, and things like that are always difficult to wrap your head around – … [Read more...]
[ See Beta Culture Intro Part 1, Part 2, Part 3] Futures Big and Small Say there’s this future out there. And it’s ... some way. I mean, some real things are in it, and some real things are happening in it, and there are preceding real things – objects and events and people – that cause those things to be there, doing what they’ll do. There are two futures we’re talking about. Or, really, one future viewed at two very different scales. There’s the sort of private-life … [Read more...]
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