Signs of the Times

Perry's Advice for the Single Guy

by Julie Grisolano

If you're like me you've been watching and reading about the Presidential election to the point that you may have worked yourself up into a lather of worry.  To take our faithful reader's minds off of the serious matter of politics--temporarily--I have posted a funny, and only slightly vulgar, video from a young minister's stand up comedy routine.  I don't know who the comedian is, but he speaks a sad truth about our society: the feminization of the Christian church and the American male.  A sad reality to be sure, but alas, I still almost fell over in my chair with laughter from the way he phrased things. 

Beautiful_02- Single Guys Outtake from NewSpring Media on Vimeo.

Salvo has covered stories on the neutering of the American male in S.T. Karnick's article, "Girly Men."  Men have certainly been beaten down in the society, and the Sexual Revolution, the Media, schools, and yes, women, have helped facilitate the problem.  But still, all hope is not lost.

"The Girl Ain't Preggers"

I recently saw a show here in Chicago and one of the songs performed (click on "stream" underneath the download box to just listen) made me laugh and I figured it was worth passing along. It is not our usual policy here at Salvo to really care about or review new music, and I think we should keep it that way (there are a million magazines where you can read music reviews), but I'll break our rule this once just for fun. Listen to the words till the end and you'll probably think it's funny/good too.

*If the title of the song strikes you as annoying, then you probably won't like the song, but it is part of what makes it funny.

Sorry, but your soul just DIDN'T die ...

In a recent interview (August 11, 2008) with editor Carol Iannone of Academic Questions, Tom Wolfe, the famous New Journalist, who coined terms like "radical chic," backed away from the materialism chronicled in his Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died:

Iannone: About neuroscience, though, I thought I was getting from I Am Charlotte Simmons the idea that we’re resisting that, resisting that we are just impulses and synapses and so on?

Wolfe: There’s neuroscience the science and there’s genetic theory. They are two entirely different things. José Delgado, the Spanish neuroscientist, son of the Copernicus, the Galileo of neuroscience, José M.R. Delgado, puts it very clearly: “The human brain is enormously complicated. We have made only a few small steps in finding out how it works. All the rest is literature.” Delgado mentions no names, but if he has noticed them at all, “all the rest” probably includes some of the best known genetic theorists, such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, a zoologist and a philosopher. They are not neurologists. They know precious little about the human brain. They seem to have captivated a big following, especially Dawkins, but not with anything that could be called neuroscience. They’re writing speculative literature. Their theory is that the human brain is nothing but a machine, after all, a form of computer, and therefore it has no free will. In any situation we find ourselves we can only do what our evolutionary software—they love computer talk like “software,” meaning genetic makeup—has programmed us to do. So at a recent conference on the implications of genetic theory for the legal system—five distinguished genetic theorists are up on stage—I stood up in the audience and asked, “If there is no free will, why should we believe anything you’ve said so far? You only say it because you’re programmed to say it.” You’ve never heard such stuttering and blathering in response to anything in your life. But I have to confess that I made the mistake of conflating science and genetic theory in the first piece I wrote about neuroscience, “Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died”…

Trust me, Tom old boy, I have heard the stuttering and blathering too

Also just up at The Mindful Hack, the blog on neuroscience and spirituality that supports The Spiritual Brain:

US cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker defends freedom of expression in Canada (Is materialist Pinker also among the prophets?)

Political science - The messy room proves that liberals are smart and the neat room proves that conservatives are dumb (junk science alert)

Adopting a dog can be as good for your health as pills?

Arch-atheist Dawkins now thinks serious case can be made for deistic God?

P. Z. Meyers Is That Professor You Hated in College

by Bobby Maddex

I subscribe to P. Z. Myers's blog Pharyngula not because I agree with his opinions (obviously), and not because I care one whit about his precious cephalopods. Rather, I am morbidly fascinated by his absolute hatred for religious believers---Christians, in particular. The guy is so angry and bitter that I find myself unable to avert my gaze. He's like the guy with the enormous goiter who is ahead of you in line at the department of motor vehicles. You want to look away, but you just can't.

Also, there has always been something about Meyers that is strangely familiar. I could never put my finger on it until this post in which he complains about the enormous salaries that college football coaches receive. And then it hit me: He is Jerome Quat!---the pompous, athlete-hating, atheist professor featured in Tom Wolfe's novel I Am Charlotte Simmons:

Mr. Quat was probably in his mid- to late fifties. He was a passionate, even hotheaded, pursuer of knowledge, and not even the most buff-brained athlete was likely to nod off during Quat time. But his physique was enough to make an athlete's flesh crawl. He had a perfectly round head, thanks to his fat cheeks, his fat jowls, and the fact that his curly iron-gray hair had receded to the point where his forehead had the contours of a globe from the equator up to the North Pole. He had a mustache and a close-trimmed goatee. His torso was swollen with fat to the point where little breasts had formed on his chest, a detail all too apparent thanks to his penchant for too-tight V-neck sweaters with only a T-shirt underneath and no jacket on top. The T-shirt, ordinary white cotton, always showed in the V. . . . Mr. Quat always stood up at the table as he taught, while . . . the undergraduates remained seated. [He] treated all students as antagonists, but he acted as if student-athletes---the sarcasm fairly dripped from his eyeteeth as he used the term---were cretins he would like to kill. . . . On top of everything else, Mr. Jerome Quat lectured and hectored [the students] in a highly scholarly, lofty manner pockmarked by unpleasant pronunciations.

Wolfe later delves into some of the possible motivations for Quat's nastiness:

The Jerome Quats of the academic world were born to parents in the middling strata of American society who told them from as far back as they could remember that life was a Manichaean battle . . . with Christians, especially the Catholics and . . . Protestants, being the most powerful and the most treacherous. . . . [T]he parents of the Jerome Quat types had never reached the business and social elevation where [people] at that altitude very much wanted you in their orbit, and your self-interest and theirs became interdependent. In the eyes of Jerome Quat . . . there could never be a true accommodation. The [Protestants] and Catholics could make all the protestations they wanted, but they would forever remain insensitive, powerful, [and] treacherous. . . . Or to put it another way, the Quats were the usual little people with limited vision.

Could it be that Meyers's militant atheism likewise stems not from something that science has ostensibly obsolesced, but from a sense of rebellion, revenge, or some other mitigating factor? As Dinesh D'Souza has said many times (and will say again in Salvo 7), "if you truly don't believe that there is proof for God, then you're not going to bother with the matter. You're just going to live your life as if God isn't there. There has to be more going on with militant atheists than mere unbelief." Similarly, the former atheist and biophysicist Alister McGrath notes that most of the unbelieving scientists he is acquainted with are atheists on grounds other than their science. "They bring those assumptions to their science rather than basing them on their science," he writes.

Whatever the reason for Myers's hostility toward Christians, he will heretofore be known on this blog as "the Quat"---a very little person with extremely limited vision.

Analyst: Blogs now considered mainstream media

According to a recent Technorati study, blogs have become mainstream:

So says Paul Verna, senior analyst at eMarketer, citing a study by Decipher, done for Technorati:

“Blogs are now mainstream media,” said Richard Jalichandra, CEO of Technorati, in an interview with eMarketer. “We’ve certainly seen that with the number of professional, semiprofessional and passion/enthusiast bloggers who are creating real media experiences. At the same time, you’re also seeing mainstream media come the other direction to add blog content.”

comScore Media Metrix found that blogs had 77 million unique visitors in the US in August 2008, compared with 75.1 million unique visitors to MySpace and 41 million to Facebook. In July 2008, comScore’s ranking of the top 10 entertainment Websites included four blogs. Two of those, OMG and TMZ, were rated Nos. 1 and 2, respectively.

Two thoughts in response: Writers and publishers increasingly must add blogging to their mix.

Second, we must watch closely Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission's recent efforts to start "regulating" content on the Internet. recent efforts to start "regulating" content on the Internet. It's a job they'd like, but not one that anyone needs them to do. Remember. the original reason for regulation was the limited bandwidth. That just does not apply to the Internet.

Also just up at The Post-Darwinist, Denyse O'Leary's news and culture blog about the intelligent design controversy:

Expelled DVD released today, to brisk sales, more hit reviews

Method used determines which evolution story is told

Great offer! Get Ben Stein's Expelled - plus new book and earlier ID films

Columnist: Regulate the Internet? Shut down the broadcast regulator instead!

Liberal fascism: What it is and why you should care

Frankfurt Book Fair: Kvetching over the Kindle - time for a wakeup call?

In "Fretting in Frankfurt," (Der Spiegel, 10/15/2008) Michael Scott Moore conveys the sense of angst felt at the colossal Frankfurt Book Fair about "the future of the book":

This year's Frankfurt Book Fair, by accident or design, has set publishing types chattering about the fate of the book as we know it. "When the fair opens for business today, many publishers may stop for a moment to marvel, or to shudder, at the stands displaying the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader," according to the Associated Press. The abrupt focus on books in digital form -- which some 60 percent of Frankfurt attendees admit they've never used, at least according to an informal poll by the fair's organizers -- may strike some people as artificial. The bulky and expensive Kindle (an "e-book reader") hasn't, after all, turned the publishing world upside-down. But in September an American company called Plastic Logic announced plans to start selling a lightweight electronic paper -- a sort of flexible plastic display screen that will store books, magazines, newspapers and business documents -- in early 2009. The devices will be manufactured in Dresden, Germany.

Moore's article admirably conveys the misunderstanding and head-in-the-sand attitude that, in my view, prevail in too much of our industry. For example, if 60% of publishing honchos have never tried using a Kindle - on the eve of the introduction of a better technology from Sony - well, that's a problem right there.

Do they really have a right to just ignore it and insist it won't come to anything and then wring their hands helplessly if it does? And if they are so sure it won't come to anything, why did Sony bring out a competitive product? Similarly,

"(German publisher) Gottfried Honnefelder gave a long speech in Frankfurt about copyright problems posed by the new machines. He railed against governments which had so far failed to grapple with the legal vacuum surrounding digital media. He may be right. And how much worse it would be to watch the disappearance of a literature that can explain a world like ours -- a world on the verge of using electronic media readers, or the world beyond."

Who said literature would disappear? Literature has existed for countless thousands of years, in a variety of forms - oral recitation, manuscript, print, audio, pageants, faithful dramatizations ... E-books are just a digital delivery of the written word.

I am looking forward to getting an electronic reader myself when the first-kid-on-the-block prices give way to ye-old-working-stiff prices. I would very much value an electronic reader because, for example, while working on The Spiritual Brain, I had to read or at least check out over 100 books. That meant delays, expense, storage problems, and trips to the library whether they were convenient or not. And I had an urgent deadline to meet. I had to give away most of my beloved gardening books just to find the space.

How much easier to just download a number of books to an electronic reader and work on them from there! So I predict that a key use for the e-reader will be projects where the non-fiction researcher/writer must address many books.

I agree with publisher Honnefelder that copyright issues urgently require addressing, but before we get to that, we need to accept that change is inevitable, and it has occurred thorughout the history of literature without destroying it.

Note: My volunteer stint with The Word Guild, a Canadian Christian writers' organization, chronicles the massive, worldwide changes in the publishing industry. Some readers here may be interested in the following articles:

Writer's corner: How you can make money from blogging

Bookstsores: Why mom and pop are leaving us

Christian Book Shop Talk: A window into the bookseller's world

Writer's corner: Confessions of a serial blogger

All at Future Tense. Future Tense is The Word Guild's blog on the transitions under way in the publishing industry.

Darwinism and popular culture: More on Church of England's recent bout of "false apology syndrome"

by Denyse O'Leary

Following up on the Brit media story about the Church of England's faux apology to Charles Darwin, I note where Jonathan Petre (Daily Mail, September 13, 2008) quotes

Former Conservative Minister Ann Widdecombe, who left the Church of England to become a Roman Catholic, said: ‘It's absolutely ludicrous. Why don’t we have the Italians apologising for Pontius Pilate?

‘We've already apologised for slavery and for the Crusades. When is it all going to stop? It's insane and makes the Church of England look ridiculous.’

Yes it does, because as I observed earlier, there is no evidence that the Church of England ever wronged Darwin particularly.

On this phenomenon of "false apology syndrome", psychiatrist and essayist Theodore Dalrymple notes,

Guilt, by its very nature, ought to be connected to responsibility; it ought, moreover, to be in proportion to the wrongdoing that is its occasion. To assume a guilt greater than the responsibility warrants is actually a form of grandiosity or self-aggrandisement. The psychological mechanism seems to be something like this: “I feel very guilty, therefore I must be very important.”

In some case, it is a substitute for importance, or for a loss of importance.

That would certainly apply to the Church of England, which has suffered significant declines in attendance in recent decades.

Also just up at The Post-Darwinist:

Darwinism and popular culture: Why so many conservatives won't vote for Darwin

Darwinism and popular culture: Still not clear how mind emerges from mud

Darwinism and popular culture: Fish story evolves in pop science media

Morning coffee: Are you a redneck? A red diaper baby? And does it matter?

(Fill_in_the_blank) Design

Just passing along a clip for your enjoyment. This is pretty amazing.

Language: Students cannot form logical position about television's impact?

by Denyse O'Leary

A reader writes,

The state of Maine gave a test to about 15,000 eighth-graders to assess their writing skills, including their ability to form a logical position. When the state refused to release the results, a newspaper filed a Freedom of Information Act request and learned that 78 percent of the kids failed, which was 50 percent more than failed the test the previous year. Maine's Department of Education explained the results were "inconclusive", and they discarded them because students reacted emotionally to the test. “Kids got ticked off at the [question],” explained Education Commissioner Susan Gendron, “so it was not an accurate reflection of their writing skills.” The essay-based test asked the students to support or refute the statement, “Television may have a negative impact on learning." (Portland Press-Herald) ...And their inability to form a logical position and refute that is proof that the test is flawed.”

At Bangor Daily News.com, Kent Ward asks:

Just what there is to get so upset about in the debatable proposition that television may have a negative impact on learning, I haven’t a clue. The more so when test instructions clearly gave students the choice of making a case either for or against the premise and provided the pros and cons for making their argument. Which is to say they weren’t exactly starting from scratch, with only a blank sheet of paper and a debilitating writer’s block for inspiration.

In any event, from Kelley Bouchard of the Portland Press Herald (September 7, 2008) we also learn:

Edwards noted that eighth-graders who took the writing test in 2007 were able to draw from their own experience to sustain arguments for or against the following statement: "Rather than maintaining separate teams for boys' and girls' sports, a high school is considering combining teams and having a completely coed sports program."

Now that strikes me as a very emotional question for many students, yet the students could handle it.

Gendron could be right, that the results this year are a fluke. But here's another possibility: Thinking about television induced in many students a state of mind not suited to critical thinking because that is in fact how they react to television. So they were not "ticked off" by the question, they were disabled by it. That's hardly good news, even if it is a fluke.

Let's see what next year brings.

Also just up at The Mindful Hack:

"Loving" chimpanzee eats its victims alive, new research shows

Commentator Dinesh D'Souza challenges "Religulous" documentary producer to a debate

Do believers in other religions go to hell, Muslim asks?

Religious freedom: Student threatened with loss of diploma for faith statement

Spirituality: Addiction as a false spiritual quest?

UT Football, Futurama, and the Nature of God

by Bobby Maddex

This is an excerpt from my favorite episode of Futurama, and I have been trying for quite some time to justify including it in a blog post. And then I watched the University of Texas play Oklahoma this past Saturday, and I found the reason that I was looking for.

Stay with me; it will (hopefully) all make sense in the end.

I'm a huge fan of Texas football. No, I didn't matriculate at the university, but my wife did convince me to live near her family in Austin for a little over two years, and my father-in-law bought me season tickets to the Longhorns with hopes that I would fall in love with Texas and remain living there. Well, I never did learn to like Texas, but I got hooked on the Horns, which means that I of course thoroughly enjoyed Saturday's game and am thrilled that Texas is now #1 in the nation.

After the game, however, I was watching our plucky little QB, Colt McCoy (the names that parents give their children in Texas are enough to send any reasonable person screaming for the Mason-Dixon line), being interviewed on ESPN when he announced, and with all the confidence in the world, that "God had great plans for the Longhorns."

Now I'm no Deist; I definitely believe that God is present and active in our lives. But the suggestion that he in any way cares about the success of the 2008 Texas Longhorn football team made me laugh out loud. It also reminded me of this episode of Futurama in which the alcoholic robot Bender is launched into space, whereupon a civilization evolves on his stomach.

Still with me?

Okay, here's the connection. It suddenly struck me that only a bumbling, indiscriminately and intermittently involved God such as Bender would take sides in the BCS hunt and lead his chosen team to victory. Then again, perhaps I missed the gospel account of Jesus frequenting the chariot races.

And we wonder why atheists and other anti-religious liberal elites find us so ridiculous. Too many of us offer up a Bender-ized version of God that is indeed unworthy of serious consideration. Don't get me wrong. I hope Texas wins the National Championship. I really do. But I'm not about to pray that they win it or entertain hopes that heaven is painted in burnt orange and white.