Winding down from Christmas. Spent the day cleaning up and organizing. Did some testing in preparation for ripping my vinyl. With the new receiver, and the turntable set up, I did some recording with SoundForge. Did some testing with Groove Mechanic which removes clicks and pops. Magic! I need to test some record cleaning techniques and I will be ready to rip vinyl to CDs. Or MP3s.

Why religion and government might not be the best mix

Seeing the light
A former Christian fundamentalist recalls a life of ferocious, intractable faith -- and the moments it began to crumble.

This morning I drive to work thinking about the lipstick on my front tooth that I can't fix until I exit the freeway, my college freshmen students who will not be prepared for class and firemen, my new heroes. I turn on NPR. An interview.

A scholar explains how difficult it is for a religious fundamentalist to function with the concept of multiple identities. While most of us are comfortable defining ourselves in several different roles, a fundamentalist cannot. She is called to forsake anything that challenges her mission as a single-minded follower of God. Even good things can distract her from the narrow road. Once the image of "zealot" has been forged, the radical will cling to that self- definition and disregard anything but her mission of serving God with her whole heart, soul and strength.

Can the zealot be a city councilman, a lover of literature, an expert at chess or backgammon? Unlikely. These pursuits have the potential to hinder the believer from becoming a sold-out follower of God. The Old Testament God who consumed his servants' sacrifices in a blinding flash of fire is not a God content to be a suburban pursuit, a scheduled event on a crowded calendar. The zealot capitulates in the face of this demand and is rewarded with sure answers secreted in inerrant scriptures and promises of eternal security. In a chaotic world, the clarity of seeing oneself simply and irrefutably as a child of God is immeasurably comforting. No need to quibble about what is important and what is not -- God is important and everything else is not.

I know this to be true. The interviewee on the radio is describing my former incarnation, a religious fundamentalist who would have died defending her faith. Remembering how I spent my youth clinging to a sole identity makes me cry, there on Interstate 235 on my way to teach paragraph development to sleepy and hung-over youngsters.
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Religious Right Finds Its Center in Oval Office
Bush Emerges as Movement's Leader After Robertson Leaves Christian Coalition

For the first time since religious conservatives became a modern political movement, the president of the United States has become the movement's de facto leader -- a status even Ronald Reagan, though admired by religious conservatives, never earned. Christian publications, radio and television shower Bush with praise, while preachers from the pulpit treat his leadership as an act of providence. A procession of religious leaders who have met with him testify to his faith, while Web sites encourage people to fast and pray for the president.

There are several reasons for the adulation. Religious conservatives have regarded Bush as one of their own since the presidential campaign, when he spoke during a debate of the guidance of Jesus. At the same time, key figures in the religious right -- Robertson, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, Billy Graham and Franklin Graham -- have receded in political prominence or influence, in part because they are no longer mobilized by their opposition to a president. Bush's handling of the anti-terrorism campaign since Sept. 11 has solidified his standing by painting him in stark terms as the leader in a fight of good against evil.

"I think Robertson stepped down because the position has already been filled," said Gary Bauer, a religious conservative who challenged Bush in the Republican primary. Bush "is that leader right now. There was already a great deal of identification with the president before 9-11 in the world of the Christian right, and the nature of this war is such that it's heightened the sense that a man of God is in the White House."
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thanks to also not found in nature

'Objectivity' RIP

Most infuriating about the right's capture of the media since the war is the fact that, according to the Pew study, nearly three-quarters of the respondents say they want news that includes the views of America's enemies, and just over half say reporters should dig hard for information rather than trust official sources. So just why are the media wimping out exactly when tough, critical reporting is not only crucial for the functioning of democracy but is also being demanded by their audience?

Conservatives will never stop whining, but it is hard to remember a time when they were riding any higher in this country. Liberalism is in disarray, as evidenced by the New York City mayor's race, and the mainstream media are indecently obsequious to the right's worldview. Al Hunt, the Wall Street Journal's token moderate, recently observed that Bush's selection as President, however shamefully executed, has turned out to be a lucky break for the nation. Why? Because liberals are more patriotic than conservatives and far more civilized in their opposition. The far right--including, no doubt, the folks on the other side of the page from Hunt--would have been merciless in their attempt to exploit September 11 as a stick with which to beat Gore, just as they used Kosovo to pummel Clinton. Hunt reminds us that House Republicans refused to pass a resolution supporting the troops there, even after the fighting began. Tom DeLay and Don Nickles both suggested that the atrocities in Kosovo were more Clinton's fault than Milosevic's. In other words, conservative hysteria has made America all-but ungovernable for anyone but conservatives.
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thanks to reading & writing

But what if the world is more than 10,000 years old?

ICE MEMORY
Does a glacier hold the secret of how civilization began—and how it may end?

Over the past decade or so, there has been a shift—inevitably labelled a "paradigm shift"—in the way scientists regard the Earth's climate. The new view goes under the catchphrase "abrupt climate change," although it might more evocatively be called neo-catastrophism, after the old, Biblically inspired theories of flood and disaster. Behind it lies no particular theoretical insight—scientists have, in fact, been hard-pressed to come up with a theory to make sense of it—but it is supported by overwhelming empirical evidence, much of it gathered in Greenland. The Greenland ice cores have shown that it is a mistake to regard our own, relatively benign experience of the climate as the norm. By now, the adherents of neo-catastrophism include virtually every climatologist of any standing.

Abrupt climate changes occurred long before there was human technology, and therefore have nothing directly to do with what we refer to as global warming. Yet the discovery that for most of the past hundred thousand years the Earth's climate has been in flux, changing not gradually, or even incrementally, but violently and without warning, can't help but cast the global-warming debate in new terms. It is still possible to imagine that the Earth will slowly heat up, and that the landscape and the weather will gradually evolve in response. But it is also possible that the change will come, as it has in the past, in the form of something much worse.
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