Sharon and I saw Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine last night. The highest-grossing documentary in history, it was named the best documentary of all time by the International Documentary Association. It won an Academy Award for best documentary. And it was the first documentary in 46 years to compete in the Cannes Film Festival's main competition, where it received a 13-minute standing ovation and the jury created a special 55th Anniversary Award because the film didn't fit into any established category.
The reason I didn't like it is that it subverts its own moral. Moore asserts that competition forces local TV news outlets to hype sensational violence, leading to an unfounded culture of fear. But Moore himself stoops to some pretty sensational stunts—confronting Kmart and Charlton Heston. He seems to like David/Goliath matchups because they make compelling narratives. Hmm.
The real reason I shouldn't have liked the movie is that parts of the film are hugely misleading, enough that some people were calling for Moore's Oscar to be revoked. I learned this only after looking into it for myself. Examples:
- Moore opens a bank account in Traverse City, Mich., and gets a free rifle "within an hour." In fact, Moore's film company had worked for a month to stage the scene; normally there would have been a 7-10-day waiting period and he'd have to pick up the gun from a dealer in another city. And Moore doesn't show himself producing the required photo ID or undergoing the FBI background check.
- When a 6-year-old Flint boy shoots a classmate, Moore sympathizes with the mother, who had recently been evicted after being forced from a welfare-to-work program. He omits to mention that she had sent the boy to live in a crack house.
- The film shows NRA president Charlton Heston giving a speech outside Columbine; in fact he gave it a year later and 900 miles away. Another Heston speech, seemingly given after the Flint shooting, was also given a year later, which explains Heston's confusion when Moore asks him about it.
- He demonizes the Lockheed-Martin weapons plant near Columbine. The plant launches TV satellites.
David T. Hardy takes apart the Heston parts in particular, showing that they were edited together from various sources. "Moore has actually taken audio of seven sentences, from five different parts of the speech, and a section given in a different speech entirely, and spliced them together. Each edit is cleverly covered by inserting a still or video footage for a few seconds."
The theater audience applauded last night. I wonder how many of them know any of this. I didn't.
|W|P|105688821857381929|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comJoe Lieberman went from the Connecticut state legislature to the state attorney general's office, then served in the Senate for 14 years before joining Al Gore's 2000 campaign. Generally he looks okay to me, and there are some appealing parts of his platform that I wasn't aware of.
For one thing, he'd create a $150 billion American Center for Cures to complement NIH, increase funding for clinical trials in chronic-disease research, award grants to encourage faster drug development, and commission large-scale research across disciplines. That's new; I didn't know about that. Hmm. A "Declaration of Energy Independence" would reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil by nearly two-thirds within 10 years, hoping to kick our oil habit entirely within 20 years. And he's concerned about global warming.
He'd provide tax cuts to spur growth in the high-tech sector, and he'd accelerate the deployment of broadband Internet service.
Lieberman's a terrorism hawk—he wants to increase spending on homeland security by $16 billion, including a new $7.5 billion "Frontline Initiative" to provide more resources and information for first responders. He wants to stabilize Iraq with an international security force, an international conference on Iraqi debt relief, an "Interim International Oil Oversight Board," and a clear process for transitioning to democratic governance.
Distinguishing votes:
- Lieberman voted for the 1991 Persian Gulf War Resolution; Kerry and Gephardt did not.
- Supported "just about every tort reform proposal that's come along the track." Kerry voted against caps on punitive damages, and Edwards is deep in the pockets of trial lawyers.
- Voted against a provision to prohibit the use of federal funds for abortions except in cases of rape, incest or threat to the mother's life; Gephardt supported it.
- Advocated and voted for school choice; Kerry opposed it.
- Supported fast-track trade authority; Gephardt opposed it and Dean would not give President Bush fast-track trade authority without strong provisions for labor and environmental interests.
- Supported welfare reform; Gephardt opposed it.
- Voted for the Defense of Marriage Act. Kerry voted against it and Dean would honor civil unions.
- Supports national missile defense; Kerry opposes it.
I'll have to look at him more closely. I can't find any strong criticisms again him, just accusations of occasional flip-flopping. He's experienced, moderate, and moral, and he promotes a sensible, cooperative foreign policy. And that chronic-illness thing is intriguing ...
|W|P|105680038833741555|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
|W|P|Interesting read!!
greets Anschi
A random radio announcer this morning: "Traffic is always very light on Friday mornings, but very heavy on Friday evenings. Why is that?"
|W|P|105674357101513472|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comPitch a movie idea, including genre, stars, release date, and budget, and The Box Office Oracle will predict its box-office receipts (opening weekend and domestic gross), Oscar chances, and critical reception.
For instance, "Bourne in East L.A.," a $90 million spy/amnesia flick starring Matt Damon and Franka Potente, would gross $78.79 million domestically if released in June, and The Washington Post's Michael O'Sullivan would love it.
Other entries in the Hall of Fame:
- The Mystical Martial Arts Master From the Far East Who Was Forced to Team Up With the Street-Smart Mouthy American Cop (PG-13)
- The Mystical Martial Arts Master Who Through Bureaucratic Error Was Mistakenly Teamed Up With the Other Martial Arts Master (PG-13)
- The Mystical Martial Arts Master Who Somehow Got Teamed Up With Oliver Platt (PG-13)
- AT: The Angry-Terrestrial (PG-13)
- Attila the Pun (PG-13)
- The Professional Ice Storm (R)
- The Antwone Fisher Story II: Antoine vs. Rodan (PG-13)
- Pappy: The Magical Monkey Who Pitched a Perfect Game (G)
- Pappy II: Electric Pappyloo (PG)
- Die Hard IX: Die Hard With a Vengeance and Some Gummi Worms and a Robot and a Fedora and Possibly Some Grammatically Incorrect Verb Tenses (R)
That last one has a 7 percent chance of getting an Academy Award nomination.
|W|P|105671865459890447|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe Washington Post's Dan Balz says Dick Gephardt's biggest problem in 2004 is that "he's got 'expired' on his forehead." I don't understand this. Gephardt's 61; the average age of a new U.S. president is 54. And Gephardt's served in the House for 26 years and ran for president in 1988. Surely those aren't liabilities, especially when he's running against John Edwards and Al Sharpton.
Born famously to a milk truck driver in St. Louis—almost indistinguishably from Edwards, he flogs his working-class roots—Gephardt attended Northwestern and then the University of Michigan law school. Then alderman, then Congress. He did practice law for 12 years, but essentially he's a career politician.
The centerpiece of his campaign is a plan to provide universal health care coverage to the 41 million Americans currently without health insurance. He wants universal pensions and renewable energy, and opposes privatizing Social Security. Gephardt has strong union ties, perhaps too strong. He opposes free trade, and he got a 100% rating from the AFL-CIO in 2000-2001.
(Interestingly, under the heading GEPHARDT IS A LIBERAL DEMOCRAT, gop.com screams "Gephardt Supported Slashing Defense And Intelligence To Spend More Money On Domestic Programs." Is that a damning indictment now?)
Some distinguishing votes from the other candidates:
- Gephardt voted in favor of a provision to prohibit the use of federal funds for abortions except in cases of rape, incest, or threat to the mother's life. Kerry opposed it.
- In 1998, Gephardt voted to override President Clinton's veto of a ban on partial-birth abortions. Kerry and Lieberman voted against overriding the veto.
- Lieberman voted for the 1991 resolution for use of force against Iraq, which Gephardt opposed.
- Gephardt voted against NAFTA, but Kerry and Lieberman supported it.
- Gephardt voted against permanent normal trade relations with China; Kerry and Edwards supported it.
- Gephardt voted against trade promotion authority for the president; Lieberman and Kerry voted for it.
- Surprisingly, Gephardt voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, though his daughter Chrissy is openly gay. Kerry voted against defining marriage as a union of heterosexual couples and Dean actively supports civil unions as a matter of national policy.
Since Gephardt began his career in the House in 1977, Democrats have used the Social Security surplus 13 times to mask government deficits. Gephardt voted for budgets that used the Social Security funds 11 times. In the fiscal years of 1983 through 1998, Gephardt voted for nine federal budgets that used the Social Security surplus for other governmental purposes.
Bottom line: Too much beholden to labor, too protectionist, and I don't like the wobbliness of his stands on abortion and gay rights. Dean still looks best.
|W|P|105662552676338996|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Here's a somewhat clumsy FICS win. He played Bird's, which I wasn't sure how to parry. It's funny, I have the right habits in preferring to study middlegames and endings, but improvised openings are starting to be my weak spot. It's just so boring preparing them, and feels somewhat like cheating. And you can't learn principles if you're just following memorized lines. Still, I should come up with a repertoire and play a little more conservatively.
Anyway, this puts my rating up to 1720, a new high for me.
|W|P|95941492|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"The thing we do best is the thing we least like to do: change. Music is a liberal art, and the music business is a conservative enterprise. Something has to break at some point. I think we're watching it now. Music is not a product, it's a service."—Todd Rundgren
|W|P|95927235|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comOkay, next up: John Kerry.
Pros: Pro-choice, supports gun control and gay marriage, wants to end U.S. dependence on foreign oil within 10 years, voted against the resolution approving the start of ground operations against Saddam Hussein in 1991. Yale grad, Navy vet, Massachusetts prosecutor, lieutenant governor, senator. Uber-plutocrat if you count his heiress wife's $500 million ketchup fortune. He's the only veteran among the Democratic hopefuls, and he co-founded the Vietnam Veterans of America and became a spokesperson for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. His 1984 Senate campaign for Paul Tsongas' seat was PAC-free, and he supported Gramm-Rudman and campaign finance reform.
Cons: The RNC says he voted at least five times to raid the Social Security Trust Fund; I'd want to hear his side of that. Opposes the death penalty. In 1995, Kerry voted "to make it harder for shareholders to file suits against chief executives."
Subtract 10 points for meaningless stump blather: "America needs a Democratic party that stands up for America, that stands up for jobs, stands up for our rights, stands up for the environment, stands up for a secure America, stands up for Social Security, stands up for health care for all. You can lead the way, now let's go out of here and win, let's make America safer, stronger, and more secure." But I suppose they're all guilty of that.
Bottom line: Not my favorite, but I don't see anything too worrisome. I'd vote for him.
|W|P|95917854|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comGood lyrics aren't enough.
|W|P|95903519|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
This is a scanning electron microscope photo of the world's smallest guitar, made by Cornell researchers from crystalline silicon. It's 10 micrometers long—about the size of a human blood cell—and each string is about 50 nanometers, or 100 atoms, wide. So it would take 4,000 strings to equal the thickness of a human hair. (A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.)
If you plucked the strings with an atomic force microscope, they'd resonate, "but at inaudible frequencies."
|W|P|95863139|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comBritain's Independent recently invited readers to submit the best opening to an imaginary novel. My favorite:
The little river glittered through the lush fields like a streak of snot on the sleeve of a green suede jacket. Now that'd be a bugger to clean, thought Archer as he kicked the French soldier carefully, just to make sure, although he certainly did seem pretty stinking rotten dead.|W|P|95837793|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
"I am absolutely convinced with time we'll find out that they did have a weapons program."—George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., June 9, 2003.
Dubyaspeak's comment: "Wait a second. ... I thought we went to war because we already knew for certain that Iraq had thousands of tons of stockpiled chemical weapons and an active, ongoing weapons program operated in violation of U.N. sanctions. Now it sounds like Dubya was acting on a hunch."
|W|P|95823387|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comI've noticed that any conversation tends to focus on the youngest person present. That's because it has to—that person doesn't have enough life experience to talk about anything else. A 12-year-old probably can't talk intelligently about hedge funds or French existentialism, so everyone talks about school and bugs.
That's as it should be, but it's always sort of bothered me. I'm only realizing recently, though, that it never stops being true. I'm 38 now, and when our parents come to visit, we tend to talk about us. I don't know what it's like to be 73. I can sort of imagine it, but I can't really talk about it because I haven't done it.
Why should that be? I'm mature enough now that I should be capable of understanding my parents' experiences. Why does it still seem somehow beyond me? Do you actually have to have stood in a person's shoes in order to empathize with him?
|W|P|95804010|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThis morning brought news that Bush will forgo any public financing of his re-election campaign, which means there are no limits on what he can spend. There's a long way to go before the election, but this doesn't sound good. Still, I'm going to learn what I can about the Democratic candidates. I'm certainly not voting for Bush.
So, tonight: Dennis Kucinich. I don't think so. Born in Cleveland, "he and his family lived in 21 places, including a couple of cars, by the time Kucinich was 17 years old." He ran for city council at 23 and was elected mayor of Cleveland at 31, but then refused to sell the local municipal electric system to a private competitor. The city defaulted on its loans. He was voted out of office and disappeared for 15 years. Then he ran for the state senate, and then Congress.
One of the few vegans on the Hill, Kucinich is staunchly pro-environment and co-chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus. He's admirably anti-war, but if elected he'd cancel NAFTA and the WTO, and he wants to move the Social Security eligibility age back to 65. That's not for me—I think we should raise it.
His site includes a section of "responses to the media," meant to help supporters correct faulty media reports, but it just concentrates the freakiness:
- Lyn Nofziger called his anti-war campaign "nearly hysterical"
- Thomas Sowell compared his "Medicare-for-all" health plan to socialism
- The Wall Street Journal called him a fringe candidate
- The New York Times last September said Kucinich's anti-war coalition were "outside the mainstream of even their own party"
And there's this:
Citizens across the United States are now uniting in a great cause to establish a Department of Peace, seeking nothing less than the transformation of our society, to make non-violence an organizing principle, to make war archaic through creating a paradigm shift in our culture for human development for economic and political justice and for violence control.
That's enough for me. Too extreme.
|W|P|95771952|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comTonight we drove out to the library to pick up Erewhon. My family has formed a little book club, at my sister's brillliant suggestion. I haven't read any Butler, but she says it's good social satire, which sounds perfect.
Libraries have always been a little miraculous to me. It's like a store that lets you steal the merchandise if you promise to bring it back. It shouldn't work, but it does. I was reminded of a couple of recent quotes from alt.quotations:
"My mother and my father were illiterate immigrants from Russia. When I was a child they were constantly amazed that I could go to a building and take a book on any subject. They couldn't believe this access to knowledge we have here in America. They couldn't believe that it was free."—Kirk Douglas
"Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age."—Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Books," Society and Solitude
What strikes me now is that the net fulfills the same function. It's not yet as accessible as a public library, but it's getting there. And it's the biggest goddamn library that's ever been, and growing apace. Already I can't imagine life without it. How did people ever get anything done? How could anyone live a satisfying life when they had to get all their information from the media? How could the country survive when everyone depended on journalists to do the reporting?
|W|P|95733151|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comToday I'm removing a lot of left-leaning political blogs from my reading list: Common Dreams, Counterpunch, Cursor, In These Times, and The Nation. They're well done—the web is far more incisive, timely, and well-written than other media anymore—but I just can't help feeling it's wrong, and irresponsible, to get my news from someone I agree with.
Occasionally at lunch I'll listen to Rush Limbaugh. He absolutely owns AM afternoon radio, which makes it hard to credit claims of a liberal media. Anyway, I disagree with most of what he says, but he's intelligent, articulate, and reasonably well informed. I think I value his show because it teaches me the errors that people make when they're discussing political opponents:
- They impute cynical motives. I saw a great tagline recently: "Just because I disagree with you doesn't mean I'm being disingenuous."
- They focus on personal flaws. I rarely hear the right-wing media refer to Clinton's policies. They tend to mock his womanizing and stop there. It's certainly a valid criticism, but it doesn't engage him on the issues.
- They dwell on perceived hypocrisies. People are hypersensitive to this in authority figures, I suppose because it's an index of trust. That's valid, but it's always going to be possible to find contradicitions in a president's actions. Unless they illustrate a much larger pattern, which is very rare, they're just anecdotes.
I have to assume I'm guilty of the same errors. I tend to think Bush invaded Iraq because of oil or empire, I criticize his stupidity, and I wonder how we can claim to champion freedom when we're detaining more than 500 people without charge.
In truth, Bush has surrounded himself with very capable advisers, and he listens to them. They undoubtedly believe they did the necessary thing in invading Iraq, to oust Saddam and to establish a Muslim democracy between Iran and Syria. And it was necessary to send suspected terrorists to Guantanamo Bay because of the imminent possibility of further attacks. Bush probably understands the left's outrage at this, and at wartime deficit tax cuts, but he and his team feel that the benefits will outweigh the risks. He's not evil, and even in the best of times every presidential decision will meet some opposition.
I still disagree with Bush, and with Rush, but it's possible to disagree respectfully. Leftist media just tell me things I already know and fan the flames, which doesn't help anything.
I'm beginning to feel the same way about my only magazine subscription, Harper's, but I think I want to keep that until I can solve the Puzzle ...
|W|P|95680396|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
I'm not playing enough chess to keep my chops up. I should quit or pick it up a little more. Here's a 20-minute trifle that I threw away with passive play in the endgame.
Moral: It's okay to play conservatively when you're ahead, but not so passively that the other guy gets the initiative. Keep trying.
|W|P|95624883|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comDamn! Damn damn damn! It happened again! About three weeks ago I picked up Michael Shermer's Why People Believe Weird Things at the library. I wasn't looking for it. I was slumming in the low end of the Dewey Decimal System and the title caught my eye.
Fine. Last night I was surfing through Penn & Teller's site, and came across an essay called "Why People Believe Weird Things". This is not a small coincidence. Penn Jillette and Michael Shermer turn out to be friends, and this essay is specifically about the book.
Uh, fine, odd coincidence, these things happen. Tonight, intending to blog a manifesto against overdesigned toothbrushes, I googled "overdesigned toothbrush" and came up with The Disenchanted Dictionary. And after about 30 seconds of browsing that I ran into this:
"Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for nonsmart reasons."�Michael Shermer, September 2002 Scientific American
This is really creeping me out! It's true that I am trying to surf more broadly, so I can avoid recycling the same stuff that everyone else is writing about. But it's not as if I'm surfing the same sites, or even the same topics. Searching on "overdesigned toothbrush" is the cosmic equivalent of shuffling the magician's deck really, really thoroughly. Toothbrushes have nothing to do with unthinking credulity; the search turned up only six hits.
If this happens again tomorrow night, I'm moving.
|W|P|95608253|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Block," by the Austrian ray-trace artist Vaclav Cizkovsky, is just one of 840 works in the 3-D gallery at raph.com. Anyone can submit a work, but you have to get past a jury of 20 international artists before you can display here. To date 350 artists from 30 countries have made it.
The images are striking, spooky, and often nearly photorealistic, but in the world of computer art landscapes and still lifes are still much more convincing than human figures, particularly faces. I guess that's a measure of how subtle and nuanced people's movements and facial expressions are. Even at the very highest levels, most computer graphics and animations seem to represent humans as stone-faced mannequins. They're getting better, but slowly.
One other note: There are now more than 3 billion pages on the web, but I keep running into eerie coincidences. As I was wandering through this gallery I stumbled on Meats Meier's "Etcher," which I had just seen two days ago while copyediting the cover of this week's Science Fiction Weekly. The odds against that are stupendously high. I can't explain it.
|W|P|95570446|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"The only thing that I am reasonably sure of is that anybody who's got an ideology has stopped thinking."—Arthur Miller
|W|P|95544214|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Is there a Guinness world record for Least Enviable Guinness World Record? Ray Macaraeg blew 119 soap bubbles in 30 seconds with a live tarantula in his mouth. You can see it peeping out between his incisors. I wonder what kind of childhood this guy had.
And does it even count as a world record if no one else has tried it? Saying it's a record implies a comparison, or a competition. I probably hold a number of world records right now for obscure specific actions that no one else quite happens to do. No wonder that book's so thick.
|W|P|95501411|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comTwo timely quotes from Mark Twain:
"If patriotism had been taught in the schools years ago the country would not be in the position it is in today. Mr. Skinner is better satisfied with the present conditions than I am. I would teach patriotism in the schools, and teach it this way: I would throw out the old maxim, 'My country, right or wrong,' etc., and instead I would say, 'My country when she is right.'"
"There are two kinds of patriotism—monarchical patriotism and republican patriotism. In the one case the government and the king may rightfully furnish you their notions of patriotism; in the other, neither the government nor the entire nation is privileged to dictate to any individual what the form of his patriotism shall be. The gospel of the monarchical patriotism is: "The King can do no wrong." We have adopted it with all its servility, with an unimportant change in the wording: "O country, right or wrong!" We have thrown away the most valuable asset we had:-- the individual's right to oppose both flag and country when he (just he, by himself) believed them to be in the wrong. We have thrown it away; and with it all that was really respectable about that grotesque and laughable word, Patriotism."
|W|P|95487228|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
B3ta features a list of really bad country song titles this week. My favorites:
- "Billy Broke My Heart at Walgreens and I Cried All the Way to Sears"
- "Come Out of the Wheatfield, Nellie, You're Going Against the Grain"
- "Hand Me the Pool Cue and Call Yourself an Ambulance"
- "I Changed Her Oil, She Changed My Life"
- "I Sat Down on a Beartrap"
- "I Still Miss You Baby ... But My Aim Is Getting Better"
- "If I'd Killed You When I Wanted To, I'd Be Out of Jail by Now"
- "When You Wrapped My Lunch in a Roadmap, I Knew You Meant Goodbye"
- "You've Already Put Big Old Tears in My Eyes, Must You Throw Dirt in My Face?"
The best of the lot: "I Don't Know Whether To Kill Myself or Go Bowling."
|W|P|95405978|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comUnlike most people with profiles on personals sites who are apparently independently wealthy because of their designing, art, writing, photography, modeling, and acting careers, I have a boring job I go to every day that I don't particularly enjoy.|W|P|95366466|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
I don't live life to the fullest. I don't treat every day as a new adventure. I am not close with my family. I do not enjoy watching the sunset from my hip Brooklyn loft. I am not spiritual. I do not get mistaken for attractive celebrities (or even unattractive celebrities.) I do not have a glamour-shot. I am not a fan of Yo La Tengo, and Portishead doesn't get me "in the mood." I do not consider David Sedaris's "Naked" a "great" book, though I enjoyed reading it.
I am 25 and do not "know how to treat a woman right." I am not particularly creative, nor am I successful/ambitious/career-oriented, though I do recognize that these are code words for "wealthy."
I am not confident, which is apparently a universally desired trait, though by definition I guess this mean I am also not "cocky," which is apparently universally disdained.
I am probably just out to get laid, but I can easily pretend that I am interested in whatever bullshit you are.
Feel free to string me along when you have no interest in me romantically--my time means nothing, nor do my feelings. I promise to do the same, but probably only if you put out.
I also like wasting my time sending countless e-mails to girls who are apparently just looking for some sort of bizarre ego-affirmation, but who have no intention to actually meet up with me in person, or, god forbid, have a relationship.
After the Catholic sex-abuse scandal broke, I sort of drifted over from tolerant agnosticism to outright atheism. 866 priests have been accused of sexual misconduct with minors since the 1960s. Those are the ones we know about. I think one would have been enough to turn me away forever.
Does a pedophile priest think God made him that way? He must understand that he's responding to an in-built (for him) desire; he's not just choosing to be wicked. He must see that other people don't have those feelings. If that's so, how can he condemn homosexuals? Do conservatives think gay people just volunteer for hatred and abuse because they like kinky sex? Why would they do that?
Results of a recent Gallup telephone poll on sin:
- Of 1,007 American adults surveyed, 84 percent said they believe in sin, while 14 percent did not. This number is down from 1995, when 90 percent said they believed in sin.
- The 14 percent who said they do not believe in sin is the highest total in 22 years.
- The question about sin showed little difference based on their age, race, sex and level of formal education.
- Those more likely than others to say they do not believe in sin were those who identified themselves as having a liberal political ideology (25 percent), those with a postgraduate education (21 percent), or those who said they "rarely" or "never" attend religious services (22 percent).
- A series of Gallup polls from the late 1980s indicated eight out of 10 Americans believe in a "judgment day," when all will be accountable to God for their moral actions. Of every 10 Americans, eight identify themselves as part of a Christian tradition; 6 percent are non-Christian, and 13 percent claim no religious tradition.
- Islam is the fastest growing major religion, with a five-fold increase from a population of 200 million in 1900. In 1970 there were 554 million Moslems in the world, and 666 million Catholics. By 2000, Islam had 1.2 billion adherents and Catholicism almost 1.1 billion. In 2025, it is estimated that 1.3 billion Catholic will find themselves in a world with 1.8 billion Muslims.
- There were 558 million Christians in the world in 1900, which grew to about 2 billion by 2000. But as a percentage of world population, Christianity has dropped from 34.5 percent in 1900 to an estimated 33.1 percent today. Hmm.
Before we got Sasha I went on a research jag to find the best cat names of all time. Here are my top 10:
- Occupant
- Sir Isaac Neutered
- Dances With Squirrels
- The Upholstered Brick
- Clawed Monet
- Inkus Stinkus Domininkus
- Damn You Get Outta There
- Chairman Meow
- Oliver Boliver Buck Buck McPhate
Runners-up:
- Uranium 235
- Frank
- Senator Oxnard P. Quat
- Capt. Beauregard Schmoodiddly (Ret.)
- Unstoppable Killing Machine
- Cheswickingtonshire Limited, Esq.
- Lap Slut
- Evil Dr. Zorba Diego Tutweiler, Ph.D.
- Mr. Dogfood
- Wellington J. Mouseripper
- Buzzlingtonian Gingerbits
- Malcolm The Boneless
- The Supervisor
- Sebastian Napolean Bonaparte Bartholomew McGillikitty II
These are all real names of actual unfortunate cats, I think. I wonder if they make up names for us.
|W|P|95310976|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comIn The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan wrote that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." He meant to expose the consequences of credulousness and a lack of skepticism, and I applaud that. But I think the way he expresses that idea betrays some pretty scary prejudices, particularly in such a respected popularizer of science.
Who gets to say what's extraordinary? That's purely a subjective judgment. Certainly the church thought Galileo's ideas were extraordinary. Today do we consider that a progressive, forward-thinking reaction? No, it was reactionary and backward and dogmatic. Science is supposed to advance by mistrusting itself, by continually testing theories with evidence. The accumulated evidence supports a claim or it doesn't, but I can't imagine a case where it would be preferable to judge a claim from the standpoint of existing theory, rather than from data. We do that necessarily for convenience, but we should recognize that it's a dangerous concession. It's arrogant.
The world may end on my sister's 50th birthday. The fifth cycle of the 25,000-year Mayan calendar has an interpreted ending date of December 23, 2013—an event involving the sun is prophesied. Will it happen? Maybe, maybe not. But the way to judge this is according to the evidence, not according to what we think we understand about the world. Sagan meant, "Claims require evidence." Any more subjective judgment can only hinder progress.
|W|P|95257266|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comYeegy-weegy. I spent eight hours yesterday staining the little deck outside our bedroom. I don't think I'll spend eight hours using it this year. I didn't even do a good job—the house is a ranch, but the lot slopes off, so the deck is on 10-foot stilts, which means I had to do some incredibly dangerous acrobatics atop a ladder for part of it.
I keep telling myself that if we stay put for a while, all this home maintenance and yardwork will get easier. The trouble so far is that we've been moving every four years, which means learning a new routine instead of refining and improving the old one. We have to stop that.
|W|P|95214648|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com