Month: February 2010

The Innocent Smith comments on the deconversion video the Dish posted last Sunday:

Chris [the creator of the video] — I fully agree — made a number of bad arguments for God while a Christian, including the argument from First Cause; yet whereas I would get rid of the arguments, Chris gets rid of the God. This is a decision that, as I mentioned earlier, I can comment on, but would be ill advised to “refute,” since it involves something other than reason — something that Chris’s “reasons” in fact suppress: history.

Appleyard counts the world’s gray hairs:

In a new book, Peoplequake, the science writer Fred Pearce provides startling evidence [of the demographic change taking place]. The average citizen of the world is currently less than 30; yet, when he dies, that average age will have risen to 50.

The average age in Britain is 39 and rising, although it may stabilise or fall if mass immigration continues. Thanks to a crash in its birth rate, in the space of 30 years Italy has gone from being Europe’s youngest country to its oldest; after Japan, it is now the second oldest country in the world. There are only 1.3 Italian taxpayers to each pensioner.

For reasons that are not always clear, birth rates are plummeting across the world. Meanwhile, people are living longer. Life expectancy has soared. The global figure a century ago was 30. Today, it is 66, with the Japanese, the longest-lived, surviving on average to 79 for men and 86 for women. Surprisingly to most demographers, life expectancies are continuing to increase. Whether we like it or not, the world is rapidly growing more wrinkled.

A reader writes:

That's a really discouraging story. When I keep reading your posts about the Catholic hierarchy, I usually have the same reaction.  I always think that the Church is a lot bigger than its administrators and intellectuals, and that there's a lot of good being done by a lot of nuns on the ground.  So no matter how discouraging the present Pope might be, you can take solace in other parts.

I have a friend in Chicago who sets up boxes to collect clothes in high rise buildings. People clean out their closets, and he takes the clothes to a Catholic Charities run organization that helps battered women get on their feet.  They find them places to live, help them get jobs, etc.  The clothes are useful because they tend to be nice professional stuff — good for job interviews.

When you meet people doing work like that, it really makes you feel good about the Church specifically and religion generally.  If you spend all your time reading about fundamentalists, or about intolerant angry people, it's really discouraging.  But when you look at what religion can be on the ground — what it very often is — it gives you a lot of hope.

But these whacked out people at the DC diocese are actually preventing nuns from helping people.

Another writes:

Reading the Washington Times article on this, I am reminded of my own family life. My father, very much a traditional Finnish Lutheran (and the son of a Lutheran pastor from Queens Village), has long made it clear that he cannot "condone" my sexuality. This became somewhat of a problem when trying to bring home my boyfriend of five years for Christmas. We went back and forth on the matter, and eventually he laid down the law; either I could come home alone, or not at all.

A few weeks into January, after I had stayed away, he called me to say how sorry he was for that decision, and explained himself by saying that he didn't want to give the impression to the gathered family that he was O.K. with homosexual relationships.

As I read about the DC Archidioces' actions, the biggest thing that's clear to me is that this is as much about the perceptions that the church feels will arise than about any conflict with doctrine. I hope that they will come to realize, as my father did, that the unconditional love mandated by the Gospels and two thousand years of Christian teaching is far more important than keeping up appearances.

Ron Paul won the CPAC straw poll. Ambers:

Ron Paul crushed–absolutely crushed–all the other GOP big shots on the list except for Mitt Romney, who took a close second. Romney has a history of doing GOTV on big straw polls, but apparently he didn’t get an operation in gear to best Paul.

Paul’s victory said something about the event, and the type of people who attended it. CPAC was an exposition of ideology and conservative glee, not necessarily political prowess. Ron Paul will probably not be president in 2012; he seems to have no relationship with the tea partiers; he has ceded his conservative stardom to the likes of Sarah Palin.

At least Paul has some core integrity; at least he believes in small government and has long been honest about what he wants to cut; at least he fully understands that continuing an empire with this level of debt is unsustainable and unconservative:

He will continue to be smeared by the more extreme neoconservatives precisely because they see his attempt to unwind an unsustainable neo-empire as an end to open-ended, unconditional support for an increasingly far right and fundamentalist Israel and an end to the PNAC global control ideology that is slowly corrupting this country and bankrupting its treasury. Why do we have thousands of troops in Germany and Japan for Pete’s sake? If we can afford that but we cannot afford some basic health insurance for working poor Americans, something has gone seriously wrong.

He is not a cynical mannequin like Romney, nor a clinically disturbed fraud like Palin; nor an alleged moderate like Pawlenty now declaring that in government, “God is in charge!” He is real. He is sincere.

Which is why the pundits keep dismissing him. I don’t.

Surprise! The photographs on dating websites are not very accurate:

While online daters rated their photos as relatively accurate, independent judges rated approximately 1/3 of the photographs as not accurate. Female photographs were judged as less accurate than male photographs, and were more likely to be older, to be retouched or taken by a professional photographer, and to contain inconsistencies, including changes in hair style and skin quality.

Scott Adams teases the gold bugs:

If things go so badly that the S&P 500 becomes permanently worthless, I have a hard time believing that the people who own gold will rule the world. I think it's more likely that the people who own steel that is conveniently shaped like guns will control everything, including all of the shiny rocks. At that point, the new currency will be something along the lines of "Wash my car and I won't shoot you in the leg."

William Cane is a “kissing expert“:

Women’s favorite spot to be kissed, other than the mouth, is the neck. Ninety-six percent of women reported that they like neck kisses, while only about 10% of men do, so a guy will not even believe that a girl likes being kissed on the neck because it doesn’t really do anything for him. So I tell guys to move or slide off the lips occasionally down to the neck, and that will produce big results; we demonstrate that onstage. Similarly, women like being kissed on the ears much more than men do.

Men often respond most to the French kiss, whereas women often respond to a romantic kiss.

One great thing about being gay is that while everyone is different, we don’t have to figure out what turns the other dude on.

We have access to the same equipment 24 hours a day as Seinfeld once pointed out. We know how to give a blow-job because we know how we like to get a blow-job. Ditto hand-jobs. And yeah, French kissing is very hot. Ditto lesbians don’t really need a crash course in how to stimulate clitori, unlike many poor young men bewildered by the whole thing until they get the hang of it. I could go on … but I’m sure you’d rather I didn’t. But it’s enough to make one think that homosexuality is actually an advantage sexually in so many ways.

So about that “natural” law …

(Hat tip: Design Boom)

Tim Parks laments the stultifying effect of the global marketplace on fiction writers:

In particular one notes a tendency to remove obstacles to international comprehension. Writing in the 1960’s, intensely engaged with his own culture and its complex politics, Hugo Claus apparently did not care that his novels would require a special effort on the reader’s and above all the translator’s part if they were to be understood outside his native Belgium. In sharp contrast, contemporary authors like the Norwegian Per Petterson, the Dutch Gerhard Baaker, or the Italian Alessandro Baricco, offer us works that require no such knowledge or effort, nor offer the rewards that such effort will bring.

More importantly the language is kept simple. Kazuo Ishiguro has spoken of the importance of avoiding word play and allusion to make things easy for the translator. Scandinavian writers I know tell me they avoid character names that would be difficult for an English reader.