She's Like Dying Or Something
The Black Saint on Nader.#
Democrats are big into the blame game regarding the outcome of the 2000 presidential election. They blame Jeb Bush, Katherine Harris, and the Supreme Court. They insist that Pres. Bush stole the election, but that's like saying that Rick Salomon stole Paris Hilton's virture, when in reality, she -- like Gore -- gave it away.
Gore bungled an election that was his to win. He shifted to the right and alienated his base (while Pres. Bush shifted to the right and catered to his base). During the campaign, he changed his image more often than Michael Jackson. And the icing on the tombstone was his selecting a Republican as a running mate.
Julie Leung explains why she is probably the best mom ever.#
To raise children, a mother - and father - need to know what it is that they are doing. What is the work before them. What makes a person? What makes our world what it is? What does it mean to be a member of society? Who do we want our girls to be when they are women? How do we want them to participate and change the world around them? What kind of country and culture is influencing us as a family? What kind of world will be awaiting my children in twenty years? How can we prepare them? What is education? How should we school our children? Philosophy, psychology, physiology, physics. Economics and mechanics. History and politics. Perpetual studies for parents.
There are intense intellectual questions parents need to be able to answer. If all one wants is simple survival, getting through the day, then changing diapers, wiping spills and spooning food into faces will suffice. But I feel there is an incredible vista, a huge horizon, all kinds of challenges for the intellect and mind as a mom.
I believe that who my child will be when she is 18 years old, adult and able to vote, begins when she is 18 months old, or even younger.
Daze Reader quotes Camille Paglia on Naomi Wolf's accusation of Harold Bloom.#
I just feel it's indecent that if Naomi Wolf did not have the courage to pursue the matter at the time, or in the 1990's, and put her own reputation on the line, then to bring all of this down on a man who is in his 70's and has health problems—who has become a culture hero to readers in the humanities around the world—to drag him into a 'he said/she said' scenario so late in the game, to me demonstrates a lack of proportion and a basic sense of fair play.
Chip Gibbons has some great thoughts about why environmentalists and liberals are being inconsistent. This was a result of something I wrote.#
Nature controls population through disease, war and famine. Liberals who claim to be such big fans of nature, tend to reject nature in this regard, working to subvert this natural process. When I studies biology in college we were told that overpopulation was at the root of most environmental problems; yet environmentalists tend to be in league with liberals, both doing their best to put an end to disease, war and famine while claiming to protect the environment.
They are trying to protect endangered species by keeping their natural predators alive. But if you want mice around, you don't go out of your way to keep every cat alive.
Ryan Overbey writes about the barbarism of The Passion.#
When the Jewish man assists his countryman Christ in carrying the cross up the hill, whilst the Roman thugs whip him mercilessly, and the man finally screams at the Romans, begging them to stop, when the Jewish woman offering Christ water is rebuffed by the soldiers— why weren't these discussed in the alarmist previews of the film? I am utterly confused by this. Everyone comes out badly in this film, be they Jew or Roman. When Christ is taken from the cross, and Mary holds him in her arms, she looks up, directly at the camera, directly into the eyes of the viewer. The camera pans back, revealing the bloody corpse in her arms. She's still looking at you, and her gaze accuses. It's your fault, she says.
The critics who attack the film for historical inaccuracy confuse me to no end. You can't choose both the Gospels and rational, objective history. This is a movie meant to inspire or reinforce faith, and faith is irrational. Get over yourselves. This is a movie about living, sensual, bloody, strong religion. It's irrational, it's devotional, it's about surrendering entirely and trying (and failing) to live up to the obligations of servitude and faith. It's no wonder journos find it repulsive, but can't speak their minds about it. The roots of the objections- that they find real religion to be dangerous and possibly unethical, would not sell many newspapers.
The Black Saint writes about the "new Negroes."#
A writer recently referred to gays as the "new Negroes." This annoys me as an "old Negro" and a current homosexual (sure, I'm not attracted to men, but I'm not really attracted to women, either; I also own more than one Barbra Streisand record).
Slavery, segregation, high-blood pressure as a result of a steady diet of pork, "accidental" cop shootings, and maintaing custody of Cuba Gooding, Jr. all seem more serious to me than, say, not being able to marry my lover, especially when it's not illegal for me to live with whoever I choose in whatever relationship I'd like. I can also alter my will to leave everything to my cat, if I wanted (at present, the Marilyn Monroe estate is heir to the vast Robinson fortune).
can only speak for myself, but the prospect of Jay-Z's The Black Album wasn't very compelling other than the Timbaland and Neptunes productions, but, before listening to The Grey Album, I hadn't heard any of the original beats. (Still haven't.) Most rap fans will probably have heard the original first, but not me: I'm going to hear the originals and, despite knowing intellectually that what I'm hearing is the beat Jay-Z wanted, that the "original", almost metal version of "99 Problems" that uses "Helter Skelter" as its basis, rocks so much more than its real original?? For a lot of Internet geeks, and especially Internet geeks into hiphop, The Grey Album will feel like the way Jay-Z intended the album to be, and The Black Album will seem like some lame remix project.
Alexander Payne comments on the many guys who think he's hot.#
Commenting on this in a chat, a friend said I should be more open-minded. I may have to be, since my apparent hotness seems to only carry cred with bloggers and the sort of college girls who have a decided, perhaps preconceived and strategically unified, absence from my campus. They know they can't resist my "pouty, but too serious" (same friend) charms, so they stay on fancy liberal arts campuses, cloistering themselves in with endless dull deconstructionist readings of whatever that their aging '67 radlib professors assign them in bales, looking up from their highlighters pulled from Kate Spade bags just long enough to let out a small sigh of longing, thinking verboten thoughts of al3x before moving on to the next turgid, self-indulgent paragraph.
Chai Tea Latte comments on my taking linear algebra.#
The way my crazy floaty 3D brain works (ok visualizes because everything is visual for me, I am a pathologist after all) makes the proofs sensible and the application of the proof a sheer pain. Anyway, I never listened to my professors. I always assumed I could do anything I set my mind to, which always got me into a boatload of trouble.
Ugh, I hate visualization. I always go out of my way to never graph and do any of that stuff because I can get the picture without actually seeing it.
I too think that I can do anything I set my mind to, and do not plan on giving up yet.
Tyler Cowen links to The New Scientist on teen motivation.#
Teen risk-taking is much higher that in adults - teenagers are more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol and take sexual risks - but the reasons for it are hotly debated. Now researchers at US National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism have found evidence for a difference in brain chemistry in a part of the brain involved in calculating risk and reward.
In adolescents, this part of the brain, known as the right ventrial striatum, appears to be under-active, says James Bjork, who led the small study. Perhaps teens seek more extreme behaviours to achieve normal levels of stimulation in this brain region, he suggests.
Randall Parker has more information.
Chip Gibbons quotes and comments on a San Francisco Chronicle article about the history of marriage.#
The article also reminds us that Biblical definitions of marriage have changed over time:
"It is really much more complex in religious perspective than you might think,'' says [Mary Ann] Tolbert, the George Atkinson Professor for Biblical Studies at the Pacific School of Religion. "What the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament) suggests as a general model for marriage is polygamy. You look at someone like Solomon who had 200 wives and 600-and-some concubines. Or Abraham, who had his first child by his wife's slave. It sounds as if it was quite normal.''
The problem with having the state involved in marriage is that it confers special status and privledges on those whom the state defines as married or eligible for marriage. Once those special benefits belong to certain individuals they don't want to let anybody else have them.
Cynthia Rockwell writes about becoming a film student and a film lover.#
So you love film and you decide you want to learn more about film and you go to grad school to study film and raise your taste level and you learn to see film differently, to think about film differently, to analyze everything, to move your experience of film from your emotions to your intellect, and you do, you learn to see every detail, to analyze as you watch, to constantly deconstruct, and you become a fearsome analytical beast, your brain a pulsating lethal weapon...
...and then you get burned out on all the thinking and analyzing and critiquing and your brain is fried and you see the lack of joy in what you do and you get tired of tearing everything apart in the name of understanding and you tell your brain to get lost, you abandon it, you find yourself gravitating to musicals and animation and Adam Sandler and sugary-pop movies and anything that does not tempt you to analyze...
Laurel Snyder explains the "Jewish opinion" of The Passion.#
"My position?" I repeat. "I don't really have one." They get flustered, and I tell them that I have some feelings, some fears, some gut-reactions, but that I'm not sure what I think.
They respond: "But your community overall -- what is your community feeling?"
And I'm at a total loss. It's like they imagine I've just gotten off a conference call with Ariel Sharon, my bubbe's ghost, the Elders of Zion, Moses, Chabad, The Beastie Boys, and the ADL.
Because there has been a major event, and they imagine my community is unifying, reacting, converging. And what is the event? Certainly not the explosion in Jerusalem yesterday, and not the building of the fence in the territories. Not the execution of Texas inmates and not the Iowa caucuses. A big event, bigger than that, a really enormous event.
Chip Gibbons thanks a few people.#
And to Mel Gibson for teaching us the God-like power that comes from knowing the needs and cravings of your audience. I still have so much to learn from him. Maybe if I change the name of my blog to "The Passion" I would get a lot more hits. They'd probably give me all their money, too, if I told them that God loved them so much that he tortured and killed His own son for them.
And I'd also like to thank Alan Greenspan, a member of Ayn Rand's "collective," for reminding us that Social Security is not secure when there's more money going out than coming in and to George Bush for his consistent denials that fiscal responsibility matters.
And also John Kerry and John Edwards for being too of the biggest frauds to ever run for president. What would bloggers have to [write] about if all the aforementioned didn't exist?
Chip Gibbons posts a really cute picture of his cat, when he was a kitten.#
The Black Saint plays a great game: God or Gangster?#
"Behold, the day of the Lord comes, cruel, with wrath and fierce anger, to make the earth a desolation and to destroy its sinners from it."
"What the fuck are you doing? You're hanging around my fuckin' neck like a vulture, like impending death."
"You shall not bow down to them or serve them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me."
"And if by chance an honest man like yourself should make enemies, then they would become my enemies. And then they would fear you."
"I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done."
Tyler Cowen points to a story about Senators and market performance.#
US senators' personal stock portfolios outperformed the market by an average of 12 per cent a year in the five years to 1998, according to a new study.
[...]
"The results suggest that senators knew when to buy their common stocks and when to sell."
First-time Senators did especially well, with their stocks outperforming by 20 per cent a year on average - a result that very few professional fund managers would be able to achieve.
"It could be argued that the junior senators most recently came out of private industry, so may have better connections. Seniority was definitely a factor in returns," says Prof Ziobrowski.
There was no difference in performance between Democrats and Republicans.
Not really a surprise but interesting anyways.
Richard writes about being a generalist and how to do so while maintaining professionalism.#
In this bit he's talking to his colleague who wants to blog about more than just her work, but is worried about the implications of doing so. She wants to be a generalist without compromising her professionalism, but I agree with Darren: you should be able to write about what, on condition that you agree not to be consequence-free. If you write, you can expect people to both read it and respond to it, and you may not like the responses you get, but you will have to accept not so much what they say but their right to say it. I didn't like AccordionGuy's response to my recent rants, but I accept not only his right to respond but the possibility that the responses of that type (the ones that call bullshit on me) are necessary and for my benefit.
Being a generalist is what Just a Gwai Lo is all about. The subjects that aren't covered are either for privacy reasons (health, work, friendship issues), because I'm uninterested in them (I'm making an effort to be interested in things that will benefit me down the road), or they're covered on my other weblogs. I've been trying also to find something to specialize in, but that's a battle I don't think I can win.
The Black Saint on JC and other rebels.#
Unfortunately, the Christ myth ultimately misses the point itself. It's all about Christ's dying on the cross "for our sins" (reportedly, Jesus openly wondered why he couldn't just die for our sins in a Florida retirement community as his descendents would 2,000 years later). Thus, the brutal whippings, beatings, crucifixion, and one-on-one time with Jessica Simpson was all planned in advance, like some brilliant yet horribly masochistic chess match.
This, of course, is all nonsense. Jesus, like many who followed him (Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, even Lenny Bruce), made the wrong kind of noise and society put the beat down on him. If there's anything to learn from or admire about Jesus's life, it should be his teachings -- all that garbage about turning the other cheek and assorted slave mentality, which, obviously, is not my cup of tea -- I'm less about love and more about picking up an axe and screaming, "Let's get these Roman muthafuckas out of our promise land! Bring da ruckus!"
John Quiggin explains why outside of a war, there is no reason to spy.#
On the other hand, there's no evidence that they've ever found out anything that was both useful and sufficiently reliable to act on.
This isn't a matter of bad luck, or even incompetence. Standard game-theoretic reasoning shows that, outside the zero-sum case of war, there's unlikely to be a net benefit from actions like bugging offices. The problem is simple. If I bug your office and you don't suspect me, I can gain potentially valuable information that you don't want me to have. But if you suspect me, and I don't suspect that you suspect, you can use my bugs to mislead me. As with all game theoretic reasoning, you can iterate this as many times as you like, but the end result is that the net value of information derived from bugging is zero. On the other hand, the costs of the activity are substantial. In an environment where bugging is routine, everyone learns to communicate in various forms of code, and decoding is costly and prone to error.
Gary North goes into a great amount of detail about The Passion, it's all very interesting.#
There is no mention in the text of the devil after his entrance "into" — do we really understand this? — Judas, just before Judas went to the Sanhedrin to betray Jesus. Yet the presence of the devil in the film is powerful aesthetically. Gibson has the devil begin the movie with the heart of the story: Jesus' bearing of the sins of the world. Without this bedrock theological explanation, the Christian interpretation of the crucifixion is meaningless. How could Gibson get this message across without tampering with the text? He added to the text in order to convey the text. Amazingly — and fittingly — he has the devil present it.
When you mess with this text, you risk upsetting people who believe that the text is sacred. Nevertheless, I don't think Gibson will get many complaints from Christians about this particular instance of text-tampering. There is no textual evidence that Satan was in the garden of Gethsemane, but I doubt that you could find a Christian who would attempt to make a case that Satan wasn't there. If Satan wasn't there, he was really asleep at the wheel. This is not how Christians think of the devil.