Scores of priests involved in sex abuse cases
Under an extraordinary cloak of secrecy, the Archdiocese of Boston in the last 10 years has quietly settled child molestation claims against at least 70 priests, according to an investigation by the Globe Spotlight Team.This is all over the news up here. 70 priests!? Just in Boston alone!? It's just sickening.
It really brings into question the effectiveness of religion as a source of morality. Does it really work? Does it do any good to force rules upon people by threat of eternal punishment? Does it really make for better human beings? I don't know. But, it doesn't seem to have worked in this case.
UPDATE: There's also a thread over at Metafilter about this, wherein aacheson points out the following: "Remember when Sinead O'Conner tore up a picture of the pope on SNL? She did it to protest the cover-up by the Vatican on down, of sexual attacks by priests. She didn't do a very good job as her message got lost in the translation, but I agree with her level of anger. "
Wow... I never knew what that was really all about.
I've got an idea. The googlewhacking phenomenon and this post from Mitsu have cross-pollenated in my brain. The background is that people have very different tastes, and most of the time, you can't just blindly trust people's reviews or recommendations. People have very different ideas about things.... about what makes something "good" or "bad". The other driving point is that there often seems to be SO MUCH stuff out there. So many movies, so many albums... and you just know that there is a ton of GREAT stuff out there that you are missing.
So, the idea is this: people create "recommended" pages, where they just keep lists of all the things that they like. Movies, music, restaurants, artists... anything. These pages will also contain a common identifier, or code, that will designate this page as being a "recommended" page. Preferably, this would be a word or phrase that is not common, so it wouldn't appear in google search results otherwise. Lets call them... submonitions. As you can see, you don't get any results in google for it (as of 1/28/2002).
So, people create "submonitions" pages, with lists of all of their favorite things. Then, if you want to find someone who has similar tastes as yourself, simply type into google the word "submonitions" followed by a list of YOUR submonitions (you could just cut and paste from your page). The first result will probably be your own page, but the next results will be the submonitions pages that have the most matches to your list. Hopefully, then, this person's page will have some other stuff listed that you will also like.
As Mitsu pointed out, in your search you will probably want to use things that are not too common.. or, things that you like a lot, but most people do not.
Just to get things rolling, here's a start to my submonitions page. Spread the word, create your own. It's easy! :)
UPDATE (1/30): Mitsu points out a small problem with the submonitions idea. By default Google requires that all the keywords you are searching for appear on a page in order to return it as a result. However, I believe it will still work if you format your search like this: "submonitions [item1] OR [item2] OR [item3] OR [item4] OR ..."
I just put up a new piece entitled Whatitwas. It's a simple little music box type melody. I hope you enjoy it. Oh, and by the way, I encourage you to leave your comments on the music page.
I am happy to have been invited to be a contributor to Dr. Menlo's new group weblog project: American Samizdat. Other contributors include Mark Woods of Wood's Lot, Eliot Gelwan of Follow Me Here, and Adam Rice of randomWalks. Don't expect to hear from me too often, but I will chime in occasionally. Thanks Doc!
A Short Guide to Life by Jesus
Actually, all of his sermons are really quite good.
I also particularly enjoyed his tirade on juices. Right on!
Write here, write now (New Scientist)
Pinning messages in mid-air, using the location's Global Positioning System (GPS) reference, could become the next craze in communications. The messages are not actually kept in the air: they're stored on an Internet page. But that page's Web address is linked to coordinates on the Earth's surface, rather than a person or organisation. As you move about, a GPS receiver in your mobile phone or PDA will check to see if a message has been posted on the website for that particular spot. If you're in luck a snippet of info-left as text or a voice recording by someone who passed there previously-will pop up on your screen or be whispered into your earpiece.Interesting. I like it. Of course, there are some major issues to overcome, like filtering out the signal from the noise. If anyone can post anything, anywhere... things could get messy. Also, it could have some interesting implications as far as re-localizing the internet and building community. I'm all for it, as long as we can turn it off whenever we want and leave our GPS beacons behind.
A Culture of Simplicity by Leonard Koren
- Wabi-Sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent and incomplete.
- It is a beauty of things modest and humble.
- It is a beauty of things unconventional.
- Wabi-sabi is a nature-based aesthetic paradigm that restores a measure of sanity and proportion to the art of living.
- Wabi-sabi — deep, multi-dimensional, elusive — is the perfect antidote to the pervasively slick, saccharine, corporate style of beauty.
- Get rid of all that is unnecessary. Wabi-sabi means treading lightly on the planet and knowing how to appreciate whatever is encountered, no matter how trifling, whenever it is encountered. "Material poverty, spiritual richness" are wabi-sabi bywords. In other words, wabi-sabi tells us to stop our preoccupation with success — wealth, status, power and luxury — and enjoy the unencumbered life.
- Obviously, leading the simple wabi-sabi life requires some effort and will and also some tough decisions. Wabi-sabi acknowledges that just as it is important to know when to make choices, it is also important to know when not to make choices: to let things be. Even at the most austere level of material existence, we still live in a world of things. Wabi-sabi is exactly about the delicate balance between the pleasure we get from things and the pleasure we get from freedom from things.
Feeling blue? Try the blogjam random kitten generator. Cute!
'More people in America watch 'Friends' than have friends.'(via FmH)Leading American sociologist Robert Putnam made this semi-serious claim in a talk he gave recently to a large audience at the Brisbane Convention Centre.
Professor Putnam cites public health research which shows that people who are socially isolated are as much at risk of death as people who smoke.
Robert Putnam is the author of the term 'social capital', which refers to community bonds and interpersonal connections. These, he argues, are just as important for the public good as economic wellbeing.
His bestselling book 'Bowling Alone: The Decline and Revival of American Community' described how on many measures social capital has declined dramatically since the 1970s. Putnam analysed factors such as membership of voluntary organisations, how often people went on picnics, and levels of philanthropy, and found sharp declines on all fronts.
He blames television, but not computers - the internet, he says, has rich possibilities for new connections. Commuting long distances by car is seen as one of the most disconnecting developments of the late 20th century. It robs people of time they'd otherwise spend with family and friends.
The solution is not to try and return to the past, Putnam says. The challenge is to re-invent ways for people to connect with each other, just as newly industrialised and urbanised societies had to do at the end of last century.
Rich in Things, Poor in Time by Wolfgang Sachs
Beyond a certain threshold, things can become the thieves of time. Goods have to be chosen, bought, set up, used, experienced, maintained, tidied away, dusted, repaired, stored and disposed of. Likewise, appointments have to be sought, co-ordinated, agreed upon, put into the diary, maintained, assessed and followed up. Even the most beautiful of objects and the most valuable of interactions gnaw away at our time — the most restricted of all resources. The number of possibilities — goods, services, events — has exploded in affluent societies, but the day in its conservative way continues to be just twenty-four hours long. Scarcity of time is the nemesis of affluence. The rich may have plenty of things, but are poor in time.In fact, in a multi-option society people do not suffer from a lack but from an excess of opportunities. While well-being is threatened by a shortage of means in the first case, it is threatened by a confusion about goals in the second. The proliferation of options makes it increasingly difficult to know what one wants, to decide what one does not want, and to cherish what one has.
Human well-being has two dimensions: the material and the non-material. Anyone who buys food and prepares dinner has the material satisfaction of filling his or her stomach, and the non-material satisfaction of having enjoyed cooking a particular cuisine or partaking in good company. This non-material satisfaction requires attention, which means time. The full value of goods and services can only be experienced when they are given attention: they have to be properly used, adequately enjoyed and carefully cultivated. Having too many things makes time for non-material pleasure shrink; an overabundance of options can easily diminish full satisfaction. So poverty of time degrades the richness of goods. In other words, there is a limit to material satisfaction beyond which overall satisfaction is bound to decrease. Frugality, therefore, is a key to well-being.
Television Addiction by Robert Kubey and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
(via Rebecca's Pocket)
"There are two excesses: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason. The supreme achievement of reason is to realise that there is a limit to reason. Reason's last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it. It is merely feeble if it does not go as far as to realise that."
--Pascal
(via FmH)
Social Policy Implications of the New Happiness Research by Geoffrey Miller
Popular culture is dominated by advertisements that offer the following promise: buy our good or service, and your subjective well-being will increase. The happiness research demonstrates that most such promises are empty. Perhaps all advertisements for non-essential goods should be required to carry the warning: "Caution: scientific research demonstrates that this product will increase your subjective well-being only in the short term, if at all, and will not increase your happiness set-point". (...)Yes! These are very important, very big ideas. I recommend reading the whole essay. (Although, I think he dilutes the point with the part at the end about utilitarianism and population.)Also, if we take the happiness research seriously, most of the standard rationales for economic growth, technological progress, and improved social policy simply evaporate. In economics for example, people are modelled as agents who try to maximize their "subjective expected utility'. At the scientific level, this assumption is very useful in understanding consumer behavior and markets. But at the ideological level of political economy, the happiness literature shows that "utility" cannot be equated with happiness. That is, people may act as if they are trying to increase their happiness by buying products, but they are not actually achieving that aim. Moreover, increasing GNP per capita, which is a major goal of most governments in the world, will not have any of the promised effects on subjective well-being, once a certain minimum standard of living is in place. None of the standard "social indicators" of economic, political, and social progress are very good at tracking human happiness.
Redesign in progress. Much tweaking to come. Why must I be so obsessive about this? Argh.
Amelie was a wonderful movie. Fun, heart-warming, beautiful, funny, inspiring... just wonderful.
Jared Diamond (author of Guns, Germs, and Steel) is a very smart man. In this editorial, Why We Must Feed the Hands That Could Bite Us, he makes the argument that if we want to wipe out terrorism, we need to look at the source of the problem. We need to reach out and help those in need. Our lives are interconnected.
There's a simple logic to this line of thinking, based on a sweeping change in the way the world has worked over the last half century. In the past, we have often portrayed foreign aid in the grand tradition of noblesse oblige -- as noble help to others. And while that's still true, foreign aid more than ever represents self-interested help. That's because the increasing efficiency of worldwide communications and transport (aka globalization) isn't just a matter of "us" being able to send "them" good things. It has also become easier for "them" to send "us" bad things.I am reminded of the words of Martin Luther King Jr:If a dozen years ago you had asked an ecologist uninterested in politics to name the countries with the most fragile environments, the most urgent public health problems and the most severe overpopulation (measured against available resources), the answer would have included Afghanistan, Burundi, Haiti, Iraq, Nepal, Rwanda, Somalia, Yugoslavia and Zimbabwe. The close match between that list and the list of the world's political hot spots today is no accident. In contrast, countries with well-maintained environments and modest populations, such as Belize, Bhutan and Norway, are no danger to us.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.-- Martin Luther King, Jr 1929
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction....The chain reaction of evil--hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars--must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr 1963
A good friend of mine from school, Gina Tamburri, recently got a very positive writeup in a major Pittsburg newspaper for her recent exhibition. She does beautiful organic/biology-inspired paintings.
The Right to Think: An Interview with Howard Bloom
Amazon.com: In Global Brain, you amass considerable evidence that intelligent systems exist everywhere at all scales from the microscopic to the cosmic. What do we know about the kind of large-scale intelligence that humans create through our networking?(via FmH)Howard Bloom: Quite a bit and very little. We call some of the large-scale patterns humans make our history. We examine them in anthropology, archaeology, and sociology. But we can't sit Elizabethan England or Tokugawa Era Japan down at a desk and have it take an IQ test.
Often the collective intelligence works in ways we bump into all the time but never see. There's an example in my previous book, The Lucifer Principle, of the Balinese, who had an elaborate system of holidays so heavily crowded onto the calendar that almost every single day called for its own ritual. In the 1970s modern agricultural experts came along, looked at the Balinese system, were convinced it was a lot of superstitious bosh, and replaced it with up-to-date Western techniques. After a few years, the number of mice shot up and the productivity of the rice harvests dove.
It turned out that the old system of appeasing the gods had accomplished something the Balinese farmers were utterly unaware of. All their rice plots were on terraces cut into the sides of Bali's mountains like steps on a staircase. At each mountain's top was a large dam that supplied all of the terraces below. The outer wall of each terrace was a low dam that held in water draining from the terrace above and kept it from flooding the terrace beneath it. The rituals were a timing mechanism--telling the farmers on one terrace when to clear the land, when to plant, when to allow water to come down from the terrace above, when to allow the water to drain down to the terrace below, and when to harvest. If you threw that timing out of whack, the whole system broke down. By 1979, the Western experts threw up their hands and let the Balinese go back to doing things the old-fashioned way. Humans networked in groups and wired to mobs of ancestors by tradition, literature, tools, toys, and culture accomplish things that the individual, for all his or her billions of brain cells, doesn't even know s/he's accomplishing.
On the Implausibility of the Death Star's Trash Compactor by Joshua Tyree
"WordsEye is a Natural Language Understanding system that converts English text into three-dimensional scenes that represent that text. WordsEye works by performing syntactic and semantic analysis on the input text, producing a description of the arrangement of objects in a scene. From this scene description we then generate an image."
Neat!
"If I were a tree among trees, a cat among animals, this life would have a meaning, or rather this problem would not arise, for I should belong to this world. I should be this world to which I am now opposed by my whole consciousness and my whole insistence upon familiarity. This ridiculous reason is what sets me in opposition to all creation. I cannot cross it out with a stroke of a pen...."
--Albert Camus
(found at dle)
Ten Things You Didn't Know about Your Books by Adrian Johns
10. What is reading anyway? Descriptions of the experience of reading--the physiological and psychological processes--vary from time to time. In the Renaissance, physicians and philosophers appealed to magic, theology, and anatomy to explain the effects of reading. Nowadays we have recourse to psychology. Either way, the explanations reach to the deepest recesses of the psyche. We cannot simply assume, when we sit down to read, that we are replicating the responses of men, women, and children in the past. Keep that in mind as you read a literary classic.Reading is really quite magical, if you think about it. We stare at a series of symbols and we become entranced, ideas pop into our minds, and we see things that do not exist. It carries us off into other worlds, or into the mind of another.
I finally did it. Billbot has been updated. He is much smarter now. He has learned from all of the things you have said to him.
Afghan City, Free of Taliban, Returns to Rule of the Thieves
The city — Afghanistan's first stop on the Grand Trunk Road, which links the nation to India — had been a smuggler's den for centuries, providing shelter and like-minded company for the bandits, traders and thieves who traveled the soaring mountain passes nearby. But in recent years, as the Taliban enforced their severe brand of Islamic law with public executions or dismemberment for criminals, crime declined.This gives insight into how a group like the Taliban could become so powerful in the first place. They provided order and justice in a chaotic world.Now the Taliban are gone, and the city and the surrounding Nangarhar Province is run once again by warlords and guerrillas, whose enterprising rackets have almost instantly turned the place into Afghanistan's version of Shakedown Street, the land where almost everything is corrupt.
The Connection is probably my favorite radio show. Wonderful topics and guests, always intelligent and thoughtful conversation. Today I listened to the show on Rumi over my lunch break. Some others I am planning on listening to are: Upheavals of Thought, Karen Armstrong, The American Left, Propaganda, Salman Rushdie, The Monastic Life, Musicology, Sonic Sculpture, Pictures and Tears, TV Nation, Painting with Sound, Observing Nature... the list goes on and on. Check the archives for a complete listing.
Monsanto Hid Decades Of Pollution
On the west side of Anniston, the poor side of Anniston, the people ate dirt. They called it "Alabama clay" and cooked it for extra flavor. They also grew berries in their gardens, raised hogs in their back yards, caught bass in the murky streams where their children swam and played and were baptized. They didn't know their dirt and yards and bass and kids -- along with the acrid air they breathed -- were all contaminated with chemicals. They didn't know they lived in one of the most polluted patches of America.This is a perfect example of a major problem with capitalism and free market systems. It's all about the money. The well being of society is hardly considered. Corporations will do whatever it takes to maintain their bottom line.Now they know. They also know that for nearly 40 years, while producing the now-banned industrial coolants known as PCBs at a local factory, Monsanto Co. routinely discharged toxic waste into a west Anniston creek and dumped millions of pounds of PCBs into oozing open-pit landfills. And thousands of pages of Monsanto documents -- many emblazoned with warnings such as "CONFIDENTIAL: Read and Destroy" -- show that for decades, the corporate giant concealed what it did and what it knew.
Yes, ultimately these decisions are being made by real people at the top, but they are effectively forced to do so by the circumstances. They have legal obligations to their shareholders to maximize profit. If they fail to do so, if they act upon their conscience, they will be replaced by someone who will. It is built into the structure of the system. Those who move up in the heirarchy are those who are willing to make the "tough decisions".
How is continued US bombing in Afganistan doing anything but GENERATING terrorists? Imagine how the people of Afganistan see this. All they know is that they are being attacked by the United States. That the United States is killing innocent people. If the goal is the bring an end to terrorism, this is definitely not the way to do it. We are just creating more hatred.
Welcome to my new home. Things should look pretty much the same at first. I'm using Greymatter as my weblogging tool, so now I can put in permanent links, entry commenting, archive searching, etc. I will be turning these things on as soon as I can get everything all prettied up and looking consistent.