Goodbye.

Holy Cow.

The best movies are the ones that are both fun to watch and interesting to think about afterwards. Who Framed Roger Rabbit definitely qualifies in my book.

Mr Hell said he initially decided to enrol Max at the school under his wife’s maiden name, to avoid the ridicule he himself had suffered as a schoolboy.

The decision won the support of the school’s head teacher and parish priest, he said.

But at the last minute, he and his wife decided against the name change.

Mr Hell claimed the priest refused to accept his son as Hell, and was told by the school’s head he had “made a rod for your son’s back”.

“It’s Hell. That’s our name, it’s our heritage,” Mr Hell told The Age newspaper. “It’s who he is, and if he wants to change his name at 18 then that’s up to him.”

For my uncultured readers, the title is a reference to Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue.”

I can’t figure it out. What is it that made the Yankees better in the regular season and worse in the playoffs? And I’m not interested in any theories of the “Yankees suck” variety. I want serious answers. Anyone?

According to an espn.com article, “On the subject of Bonds, most Hall of Famers take the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ line in public. ” Robin Yount said, “Until somebody tells me for sure that this guy had some ‘artificial help,’ I won’t hold it against him.” Tom Seaver declared himself to be “one of those people who believes you’re innocent until you’re proven guilty” when asked about Bonds. Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig recently announced that he would be there when Bonds hits number 756 “[o]ut of respect for the tradition of this game, the magnitude of the record, and the fact that all citizens in this country are innocent until proven guilty.”

In American law, we presume innocence until guilt is proven and for good reason. Before the government deprives an individual of a his basic freedoms, it ought to afford the accused every reasonable chance to exonerate himself. The law rightly considers a mistaken conviction to be far worse than a mistaken acquittal and this important value is codified in the 5th and 6th Amendments to the United States Constitution.

But we’re talking about baseball. If Bonds were on trial for drug use, the law would offer him the presumption of innocence that all defendants deserve. At issue here, though, is whether the baseball record books or the Hall of Fame should treat Bonds as a cheater. Since nobody is in danger of losing his life or his basic freedoms, I don’t see why the situation calls for the beyond-all-reasonable-doubt standard of criminal court. Simply put, it’s far more likely than not that Bonds used illegal steroids. There is considerable circumstantial evidence that he did, i.e. he first began hitting 45+ home runs at age 35. Bonds also had ample opportunity to vindicate himself by volunteering for drug testing when rumors started circulating. Again, he had a legal right to refrain from testing and if we were in a court of law, his exercising of that right could not be held against him. But we’re on the baseball diamond, not a court of law. And from out here, there’s more than enough evidence to convict Bonds.

Lobdell briefly describes the wide-ranging topics the he covered on the beat.

First as a columnist and then as a reporter, I never had a shortage of topics. I wrote about an elderly church organist who became a spiritual mentor to the man who tried to rape, rob and kill her. About the Orthodox Jewish mother who developed a line of modest clothing for Barbie dolls. About the hardy group of Mormons who rode covered wagons 800 miles from Salt Lake City to San Bernardino, replicating their ancestors’ journey to Southern California.

He discusses the difficulty he had in reporting the Catholic Church sex scandal and the reactions he encountered from other Catholics. Lobdell was, at the time, in the process of converting to Catholicism. He writes that he was comforted by friend who wisely counseled him to “[k]eep your eyes on the person nailed to the cross, not the priests behind the altar.” The reader is introduced to a fascinating man, Peter “Packy” Kobuk, a native of St. Michael Island in western Alaska. Packy was serving a prison sentence when Lobdell met him. He

had come from Southern California to report on a generation of Eskimo boys who had been molested by a Catholic missionary. All of the now-grown Eskimos I had interviewed over the past week had lost their faith. In fact, several of them confessed that they fantasized daily about burning down the village church, where the unspeakable acts took place.

It’s implied that Packy was also molested as a child. Yet, Packy hadn’t lost his faith. When Lobdell asked why, the answer left him envious.

“It’s not God’s work what happened to me,” he said softly, running his fingers along the beads. “They were breaking God’s commandments — even the people who didn’t help. They weren’t loving their neighbors as themselves.”

He said he regularly got down on his knees in his jail cell to pray.

“A lot of people make fun of me, asking if the Virgin Mary is going to rescue me,” Packy said. “Well, I’ve gotten helped more times from the Virgin Mary through intercession than from anyone else. I won’t stop. My children need my prayers.”

Tears spilled from his eyes. Packy’s faith, though severely tested, had survived.

Lobdell’s own faith wouldn’t survive and the article concludes with the writer calling his wife to tell her that he wants a new beat at the paper. His explanation, though, is not only not compelling but somewhat childish.

My soul, for lack of a better term, had lost faith long ago — probably around the time I stopped going to church. My brain, which had been in denial, had finally caught up.

Clearly, I saw now that belief in God, no matter how grounded, requires at some point a leap of faith. Either you have the gift of faith or you don’t. It’s not a choice. It can’t be willed into existence. And there’s no faking it if you’re honest about the state of your soul.

I was disappointed to see a paragraph like this in an otherwise well-written and interesting article. Skepticism is an equal-opportunity predator. Any sophomore philosophy major can tell you that our most fundamental and noncontroversial beliefs depend on assumptions that are very difficult, if not impossible, to prove. To say the belief in God requires “a leap of faith” implies that other beliefs don’t. Even the phrase “belief in God” is ambiguous, but that’s a subject for another time. If it’s true that “[e]ither you have the gift of faith or you don’t,” then all argumentation about religion is moot. Is that what Lobdell means? If “[i]t’s not a choice,” then the great debates over religion throughout history were a waste of time.

I remember a conversation I had with my father years ago. I think it was after I did poorly on a exam. I asked out loud whether I really had the ability to do well. Maybe I just wasn’t as smart as I thought I was. My dad quickly admonished me. He said that by questioning my ability I was trying to relieve myself of responsibility. If I’m not capable of doing well, then, obviously, I shouldn’t feel bad about it. Of course, he was right. Lobdell is doing the same thing and he should be called on it. It’s not that he’s missing some innate “gift of faith,” as comforting as that would be. He mistook religion’s practitioners for religion itself. He allowed the noble ideals that originally drew him to the Church to become drowned out by the scandals he covered, instead of using those noble ideas to lead and instill chance. He failed where Packy succeeded.

Shema means not only to “hear” but also “to listen, understand, internalise, respond and obey.” It is translated here as “Listen” because listening is active, while hearing is passive. This, the most famous line of Jewish prayer, is a call to action on the part of the mind, emotion and will. It asks us to reflect on, strive to understand, and to affirm the unity of God. God speaks in a “still, small voice”, and to serve Him is to listen with the totality of our being.

Secular terms for understanding are permeated with visual images. We speak of insight, foresight, vision, observation, perspective; when we understand, we say “I see”. Judaism, with its belief in an invisible, transcendent God, is a culture of the ear, not the eye. The patriarchs and prophets did not see God; they heard Him. To emphasie the non-visual nature of Jewish belief, it is our custom to cover our eyes as we say these words.

The emotion of fear, the sense of lowliness, the melancholy so typical of homo religious, self-negation, constant self-appraisal, the consciousness of sin, self-lacerating torments, etc, etc constituted the primary features of the movement’s spiritual profile in its early years. . . . The halakhic men of Brisk and Volozhin sensed that this whole mood posed a profound contradiction to the Halakha and would undermine its very foundations. Halakhic man fears nothing. For he swims in the sea of the Talmud, that life-giving sea to all the living. If a person has sinned, then the Halakhah of repentance will come to his aid. One must not waste time on spiritual self-appraisal, on probing introspections, and on the picking away at the “sense” of sin. Such a psychic analysis brings man neither to fear nor to love of God nor, most fundamental of all, to the knowledge and cognition of the Torah.

Clara Oleson, an Iowa Democrat and former labor lawyer, explained all these distinctions on a riverbank in Iowa City last week, while waiting to hear Clinton speak to a crowd of about 1,000. “Obama is the female candidate. Obama is the woman,” she said, after admitting that she was one of his supporters. “He is the warm candidate, self-deprecating, soft, tender, sad eyes, great smile.”

So what does that make Hillary Clinton? “She is the male candidate — in your face, authoritative, know-it-all.”

Articles like this make me doubt the merits of democracy. I can’t believe actually choosing a candidate based on who has “sad eyes.” What a pathetic reflection on our culture.

But how can we trust the words of a self-proclaimed liar? The judge then asked Ellis, “So, are you lying to me now?” Ellis answered “Well, I don’t know. I might be.” He then confessed to intentionally trying to avoid jury duty and was taken into custody. He may face perjury charges.

Stark’s bias aside, A-Rod has been far more valuable to his team than any other player in baseball and precisely because the Yankees have been playing so poorly. In April, with Wang injured, Mussina pitching poorly, and Rivera blowing rare save opportunities, A-Rod’s bat kept the Yankees in games they deserved to lose. And, now with Giambi injured, A-Rod’s homers are that much more valuable.

As far as statistics go, A-Rod and Ordonez are fairly comparable. Ordonez’s OBP is better, A-Rod’s SLG is better. Combined, A-Rod comes out on top by a hair. But there’s one statistic that removes all ambiguity. In the 9th inning, A-Rod is hitting .542 with 7 HR and 18 RBI. His OPS in the 9th is a whopping 2.145, which includes two grand slams. So much for A-Rod’s reputation for not hitting well in the clutch.

[t]he only fully-reasoned choice that drunk drivers make is to drink. The subsequent choice whether to drive or not is made in the drinker’s more or less inebriated state - a state which might preclude mens rea. The reasoned choice (to drink) is only sometimes correlated with the un-reasoned one (to drive drunk), and so we may not take the choice to drink as identical with the choice to drink and drive. As such, drunk drivers might lack mens rea for driving, the choice regarding the criminal act.

There is at least one faulty assumption in Pam’s framing of the issue: the inebriated cannot make reasoned decisions. Certainly, the inebriated’s judgment is clouded and his ability to assess risk is compromised. But that’s a far cry from the inability to reason. He was not merely an automaton compelled by alchohol to get behind the wheel and turn the key. Presumably, he knew where the car was parked, how to open the door, and how to start the ignition. He knew that stepping on the gas pedal caused the car to accelarate and remembered how to switch gears from “park” to “drive”. All of this is evidence of reason.

Indeed, if mens rea required the ability to engage in cost-benefit analysis and risk assessment, most criminals wouldn’t qualify. So I don’t think we need to transfer the drunk driver’s mens rea from the sober decision to have the first drink to the inebriated decision to drive. A monkey can’t drive a car, no matter how reckless he is. That’s because he lacks the complex reasoning skills required to negotiate the steering wheel and gas pedal. The drunk driver has those reasoning skills and uses them. The fact that he chose to limit those skills doesn’t preclude mens rea.

The reviewer seems to hold to the 19th-century von Ranke idea that there is one truth to be told. Most historians, and most intelligent people, including bright 12-year-olds, understand that there is no such thing as a single “objective” truth, but that there are different truths according to the viewpoint of the historian.

The absurdity of Zinn’s relativism quickly reveals itself in the next paragraph.

Kirn is irritated because his “truth” is not mine. His truths — built around veneration of the “great men” of the past: the political leaders, the enterprising industrialists — add up to exactly the simplistic history fed to young people over the generations, which my book tries to replace. His kind of history produces a submissive population, always looking for saviors on high.

I’ve addressed this issue before, in more depth. If indeed there is no “one truth to be told,” but rather, “different truths according to the viewpoint of the historian,” it wouldn’t make sense to criticize Kirn’s view of history or to argue that one view is superior. But Zinn suggests that his approach demonstrates how American history “is a striving, against corporate robber barons and war makers, to make [our highest ideals] a reality.” He mocks “the orthodox romanticization of Lincoln,” noting that “[historian Richard] Hofstadter brilliantly punctures what he calls the ‘Lincoln legend.’”

Zinn can’t have it both ways. If there’s no objective truth, then Zinn’s history is no better and no worse than any other. But then one has to wonder what the heck he’s writing about.

(via Jill)

The American Medical Association on Wednesday backed off calling excessive video-game playing a formal psychiatric addiction, saying instead that more research is needed.
. . .
AMA delegates instead adopted a watered-down measure declaring that while overuse of video games and online games can be a problem for children and adults, calling it a formal addiction would be premature.