Island Passage

Readers of my blog may know that I am unimpressed with the evidence for threats to mankind caused by Global Warming. So when a group of Evangelical leaders published " Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action ." I was annoyed by several issues on several levels. As I review the list of signatories I see many names that I know by reputation, some leaders that I have heard teach or preach, many that I admire. But I see none with the technical qualifications to sift through the mountains of ambiguous data on global climate trends and arrive at a coherent, defensible conclusion. The signatories have relied for their conclusions on government agencies that have a vested interest in promoting Global Warming as a crisis. If you create a body named the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is inevitable as day follows night that they will produce document validating their existence as a body. Is global warming caused by human industrialization? What ...

I'm listening to AccuRadio.com at work--the Sixties subchannel is a time machine to my teens--and Love is Blue by Paul Mauriat pops on. *Shudder* If you watched the episode of Millennium , " Room With No View ," you will remember that Love is Blue is the song that Lucy Butler had looped endlessly to her captives. No big insights, just that after 6 years that song gives me the willies.

The delightfully named James Taranto writes about a recent speech by a long-ago Presidential candidate: The delightfully named ex-politician George McGovern, who lost the 1972 presidential election in a landslide, showed up yesterday in Corte Madera, Calif., and the Marin Independent Journal covered the speech in an article headlined "McGovern Gets the Last Laugh." According to the paper, McGovern sounded "like the kind of wise old sage he wishes the current occupant of the White House would listen to": Despite a decisive defeat, his Vietnam War-era campaign--the subject of the recent documentary "One Bright Shining Moment"--will be remembered for bringing disenfranchised hippies, blacks, peace protesters and feminists into the Democratic fold on a platform of peace and social justice. On Thursday, McGovern didn't have to remind anyone that Nixon, his old nemesis, ended up resigning in disgrace over the Watergate scandal. "I went to Richard Nixon...

Taleena, responding to this post , has written : I want to chime in the comparisons between fundamentalist Christian reaction and fundamentalist Muslim reaction to depictions or parodies of their sacred symbols and personages. I know that Taleena is here using a verbal shorthand, but since I have a blog I can obsess over anything I choose. Being an obsessive language nerd and having grown up in a Fundamentalist household, I cringe whenever I hear the term "fundamentalist" applied to radical Islamic viewpoints. I realize that it has now become accepted by overwhelming usage, but it was first used as a lazy way to hang a label on a viewpoint that was poorly understood by the journalists covering it, and it is now being used by those who would draw specious parallels between Christians in the Western democracies and Muslims. Christian Fundamentalism was a response to modernism, specifically to a de-mythologizing of scripture by European theologians. Wikipedia's article on ...

Reporters report that Scientists say so! Scientist predicts 'mini Ice Age' ST. PETERSBURG, Russia, Feb. 7 (UPI) -- A Russian astronomer has predicted that Earth will experience a "mini Ice Age" in the middle of this century, caused by low solar activity. Khabibullo Abdusamatov of the Pulkovo Astronomic Observatory in St. Petersburg said Monday that temperatures will begin falling six or seven years from now, when global warming caused by increased solar activity in the 20th century reaches its peak, RIA Novosti reported. The coldest period will occur 15 to 20 years after a major solar output decline between 2035 and 2045, Abdusamatov said. Dramatic changes in the earth's surface temperatures are an ordinary phenomenon, not an anomaly, he said, and result from variations in the sun's energy output and ultraviolet radiation. The Northern Hemisphere's most recent cool-down period occurred between 1645 and 1705. The resulting period, known as the Little Ice Ag...

I am an American Exceptionalist. I believe that in the last half of the 18th century a group of men gathered in a colony of England and, synthesizing Classical Greek and Roman with Nordic and even indigenous Iroquois models of goverment, founded what is today the world's oldest democratic republic. Every time I think that modern technology has taken us so far from the Founders that their writings may be becoming irrelevant, I encounter a tract, speech, or paragraph that give me a shiver of the uncanny at its current applicability. This is the case currently with the question of whether or not newspapers will print the cartoons that have been used to incite riots throughout the Middle east. That Stalwart of Liberty, the New York Times, presents an article about the cartoons illustrated by a drawing of the Virgin Mary covered in dung . In 1814, former president Jefferson's Philadelphia book dealer had some trouble securing a French astronomical work on the creation of the world...

Yes, I'm a Prog-Rock fan. I started with just a little Yes . I knew that it was wrong, but I told myself I could quit whenever I wanted. Then it was Kansas , E.L.O. , and then Emerson, Lake and Palmer . I listened to songs that filled the entire side of an LP album, 20 minute songs based on a footnote to a commentary to the Veddas. I wept. I got goosebumps when I heard Rick Wakeman's synthisizer work. I was a Trooper. Well, in the early 1980s, Punk killed Prog. Or did it? S.T. Karnik holds his own one-man Grammy awards ceremony and gives the nod to several new examples of Prog-Rock: Among the most promising recent debuts are the appealing retro-progressive rock album Peace Among the Ruins , by Presto Ballet , and Motions of Desire , by the talented Norwegian band Magic Pie (the lyrics of which are sung in English). The latter release is delightfully inventive and enjoyable, with a definite classic song in the 20-minute opening track, “Change,” a tune that spices up classic, ...

I remember back in the 1980s when the line, "I want my MTV," was current and MTV actually played only, you know, music. At this time the big news was that Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, wasn't in the MTV video rotation. The question on America's lips was, "Would Jackson be the first artist to break MTV's color barrier? Would he be the Jackie Robinson of pop music?" (This was the cute, black, talented Michael Jackson. The one who was stunning the world with his chart-smashing albums; not the sad, creepy, pedophile Michael Jackson currently hiding out in Bahrain.) There was a news program at the time that profiled the programming directors of MTV as they decided what videos would make it into their playlist. The image of the programming team, the very heart of MTV, was stunning: it was a corporate boardroom filled with white guys (an two white women) in business suits, planning how they were going to sell their latest picks to their compliant teen viewe...

In an earlier post I made the following statement: There seems not to be a clear consensus about the propriety of publishing the Mohammed cartoons. Hugh Hewitt feels that it was indifferent to the sensitivities of the Islamic world, and points to a political cartoon in the US that offend conservative sensibilities. His point: "...don't cheer the vulgar and the stupid." I differed with Mr. Hewitt and compared the publishing of the cartoons to the US Navy's "Freedom of the Seas" exercises. Over at National Review Online, Jonah Goldberg writes about the issue of giving offense : Personally, I didn't think the cartoons were particularly good. They also seemed to be published out of a desire to offend Muslims. The editors, and many defenders of the Jyllands-Posten newspaper, claim otherwise, saying that they needed to prove there was a climate of fear in Denmark generated by Muslims. So they offended Muslims, and effectively proved, at the least, that th...

Apparently the sitcom Will & Grace was planning a Very Special Easter episode : NEW YORK (AP) — Britney Spears will guest star on an episode of Will & Grace, NBC announced Tuesday. The pop star will appear as a Christian conservative sidekick to Sean Hayes' character, Jack, who hosts his own talk show, on the April 13 episode, the network said. Jack's fictional network, Out TV, is bought by a Christian TV network, leading to Spears contributing a cooking segment called Cruci-fixin's But doggone it, them Fundamentalists are gittin' uppity again! Via IMDB , this nugget. The Rev. Don Wildmon's American Family Assn. (AFA) is taking credit for killing a planned Will & Grace episode on NBC that reportedly was to feature Britney Spears as a Christian conservative co-host with Jack, the gay character portrayed by Sean Hayes, on Jack's Out TV cable channel. According to an early NBC news release, she was to appear in a cooking segment of the s...

Via Slice of SciFi : February 02, 2006 Invasion Gets KO'd In Six Submitted by: Kyle Nin The slow-paced Shaun Cassidy scifi creation Invasion is being put in the back of the top shelf of ABC's closet in about six weeks from now in order to make room for a new mid-season crime drama called "The Evidence." As early as 3 weeks ago ABC execs were touting their faith in the show and vowing to stick with it. Whether this remains to be the case or not only some time will tell. Until then the last episode of Invasion before it's unscheduled hiatus will be shown near the end of March. Bad news for the Islander family. We have been enjoying the genre-bending* series since it premiered last year. Part paranoia trip (much in tone like Invasion of the Body Snatchers ), part weird soap opera, the story started claustrophobically in a small Florida town, and it has just started to open up both geographically and in its cast. I won’t mourn it just yet...

Todd, over at Speak Like a Geek, sent me this link to a website that generates titles for fantasy novels: http://nine.frenchboys.net/novel.php In just a couple of tries I got: Castleِ Winterِ and Mistress Citadelِ Runeِ and King Summerِ Ladyِ and War Sunِ Heraldِ and Master As you can tell, I have a weakness for triplets! But if you see a novel as requiring a beginning, middle, and ending these titles practially plot out the book for you!

Sebastián Schiavone over at myWhidbey.com has a post linking to the cartoon depictions of Mohammed that have sparked riots across the Islamic world. He concludes his post with this question: Would cartoons of Christ in a similar light be as offensive to Christians? Well, ruling out Jack Chick tracts and those odd little cartoons in Good News for Modern Man , there are quite a few less-than-reverent cartoon depictions of Jesus. Exhibit A: South Park's Pilot, The Spirit of Christmas (Jesus vs. Santa) pretty much takes the cake: Jesus arrives in South Park and at the local mall he accuses Santa of blasphemy. Santa challenges him to a fight and the violence between the two quickly escalates. Even Brian Boitano can’t help the boys who’ve found themselves in the middle of this fight. Swear words were used 26 times total in this episode, out of them, the F-word was use 16 times. 7 kids were killed-including Kenny. Well....

...Known agent Norah Vincent has penetrated protocols 5-Alpha through 9-Gamma. Critical intel, vital to the Patriarchy, has been compromised... After reading the raves of Ms Vincent's latest book, and hearing her interviewed by Glenn and Helen , I bought and am reading her book, Self-Made Man: One Woman's Journey into Manhood and Back Again . I am only halfway through, but I'd like to record three impressions while they are fresh in my mind. First, Ms Vincent has really made a hugh leap into male culture. Her ability to see what she has looked at serves her well. When she first joins a bowling league, she encounters the three other guys that compose her team. When she's introduced to them she wonders if their terseness and abruptness means that they are treating her with hostility. Then the team captain shakes hands with her and she gets it . Their quite reserve is a sign of the respect they show her as an equal. I can't count the number of times women have tri...