Tal Bachman in a World Gone Mad

A New Beginning

2011-06-19T00:59:00.000-07:00

Once, I embarked on a fantastic project. First, I'd meet my true soulmate, fall in love, and get married. Then, we'd have lots of children and create a heaven on earth by designing a life which had just the right balance of challenge and risk and fun and adventure. We would continuously grow in unity and love as husband and wife and children (and eventually, with their spouses), and their children, until, in the end, my beloved and I would pass away, leaving an inspiring legacy for our descendants. The end.

The truth is that no words can describe, three years on from the violent rupture of my marriage, the combination of shellshock and nausea-inducing horror I continue to feel over the fact that this project has been destroyed, and that my efforts to save it have failed. Worst of all is knowing that my children will pay the heaviest price.

After all the conventional sloganeering about "two sides to every story" and "people just growing apart" and "you need to do what's best for you" stops, a brute fact remains: there is no way to justify the destruction of this beautiful family. A million dippy friends and "finding yourself"/"self-realization" articles and cliches could be trotted out; they don't change anything. There is no way to justify the destruction of this family, and the heartache it has caused to the children, and the heartache and trouble it will cause for many years to come.

Certainly, innumerable excuses have been imaginatively created and announced, each one seemingly more detached from the actual events of the past than the one before, and thus, more obviously ridiculous than the one before; but there's no point in pretending anymore that they are anything besides attempts at guilt-reduction and defending the indefensible. We had created a heaven on earth; we had countless adventures and laughs, done a hundred little projects, road trips to California and camping and dinosaur fossil-digging and barbecues and building bird cages and visiting hot springs and making beach bonfires; we had welcomed each new child with greatest gratitude; each day, each moment, as a bound family unit, was a miracle. All that is gone now, replaced by nothing but two souls, still completely bound at the cellular soulmate level regardless of the past and regardless of what either person tells anyone else, just living in different houses now, taking turns visiting the children we ought to be raising together, one of us in the throes of a kind of insane, stubborn hubris which impels her to keep on trying to accomplish what deep down she must know she shouldn't, and the other, a man still unable to conceive of himself with any other woman than the one he still feels cosmically bound to, despite all that has occurred, and who is therefore completely uninterested in any kind of intimate relationship with any other woman - and who is therefore, stuck. The children, I can't go into detail about, of course...but I will say they deserved a lot better than this. And they once had it, which I think makes this all the worse for them.

In a way, I want God in on this. I want a final reckoning. Of course I submit myself to such judgment; after all, this destruction is so rotten, that whatever I've inadvertently done to contribute to it or misguidedly enable it, I ought to pay for, as much as the force which actually lusted for, and caused, the destruction. I am so frazzled, so heartsick, so totally dumbstruck by the violence and insanity of it all, that I want some eventual clarity to replace the confusion, some final, righteous judgment to replace all the misjudgments, some final investigation, with appropriately excruciating punishments meted out. I want some divine order after all the hellish disorder. And I want to know how a parent could look into the young, innocent, trusting eyes of their own flesh and blood, and then walk out the door and destroy everything those children cherish most in life, which they are trusting that parent to protect.

I'm sure I sound bitter. It's more complicated than that, and far more overwhelming. Mixed up with the shell-shock and horror are all sorts of other feelings that never go away, and I don't know if they will ever go away. The incredulity, the outrage, the regret, the sense of loss and failure, the deep conviction of the wrongness of it all, the total frustration and pining for her and powerlessness and sorrow...when does it all go away? My whole adult life I thought of myself as the protector of my family. When it came down to it, it was destroyed from within, and - that I could find anyway - I had no power to stop it. And that - - really - - sucks. I have this terrible feeling I will never, ever get over it.

Resurrecting this seems impossible. But as another old saying goes, "you can't begin again; but you can make a new beginning". Maybe, one day, I will find someone I can make a new beginning with. Maybe I'll be like one of my musician buddies - a devoted father and husband by day, a famous rock star by night - who told me once that dealing with his first wife, and the ensuing divorce, was the worst thing he'd ever been through, but that it was all worth it just to meet his new wife, who was the most incredible woman he'd ever met: willing to accept love and appreciate the gifts he can give her, and who was attentive, supportive, loyal, etc.

Maybe the woman I meet one day will be moved by a love song I write, or excited by an adventure I plan for us. Maybe she will come up with her own ways of infusing our lives with peace and respect and love. Maybe she and I will really complement each other. Maybe she will love my children as her own. I can't say there is anyone like that on the horizon, but maybe that will happen one day. I don't know.

What I do know is that right now....I....ummm....well...I need to buy some horses, and start riding with my kids, as many of them as will come...and we need to ride up to Michell's farm, and ride over to the beach and have a picnic, and ride round Elk Lake, and Thetis Lake, and maybe even ride out through the wilds, near Goldstream, and camp out overnight, and maybe even try to make it all the way up to the Cowichan Valley, and try to keep as much of the magic we once had all together going, for as long as I can...and maybe, one day, a beautiful girl will join me; and the kids will love her, and she will love me, and I'll love her back, and we'll all build a beautiful heaven on earth together. And maybe that heaven is one which will last forever.

Thor-rible

2011-05-11T02:38:00.000-07:00

I went to see the movie Thor last night with my sixteen year old son, T-Bone. I hadn't heard anything about it other than that it was directed (or, as I would now put it, "directed") by Kenneth Brannagh. And remembering Brannagh's good version of Henry V, I had pretty high expectations.

Well...I don't know if Kenneth Brannagh has been hit by a train in the last year or so, but if not, I'm not sure what else could account for this movie. There is, literally, almost no aspect of it which works.

Let's take something relatively trivial: language. Thor, a Scandinavian god who lives in Asgaard a thousand years ago, falls into the New Mexican desert through a tornado-like funnel connecting Asgaard and earth, having been banished for disobeying his father, Odin. Well - we can give a pass to the time travel and interstellar funnels and stuff. After all, it is a fantasy. But even fantasy movies, while requiring some suspension of belief, cannot go so far as to require the complete cessation of mental function. And so, my question to Kenneth Brannagh is: Would it have really been that difficult to provide even a flimsy explanation for why a Scandinavian who lived one thousand years ago, speaks fluent modern English?

Let's take something else trivial: the costumes and hair. Wasn't there anyone available better than the lady who did the costumes for Brannagh's local elementary school's rendition of "The Hobbit"? Couldn't we get something at least semi-realistic? The "armour" looks ridiculous, the bad hair dye jobs look ridiculous - it all looks ridiculous.

Now, something a bit more important: How can Kenneth Brannagh expect us to believe that the bloodthirsty warrior Thor, after returning from earth, no longer wants to see the annihilation of Asgaard's murderous enemies (the frost-monsters trying to destroy Asgaard) purely on the basis of a Bono-like humanitarianism he somehow acquired because of his infatuation with Natalie Portman? That's the big peak of the character arc? A desire to let enemy creatures live who are infiltrating your kingdom and trying to kill your father and all your fellow citizens? It makes no sense.

How does Brannagh expect us to believe that Thor could break into a military compound built around his hammer (lodged in a piece of meteorite), wipe out a dozen guys, but that the commanding officer watching the whole break-in would not authorize even the firing of a tranquilizer dart into the man? And how does he expect us to believe that after all that, the military officials would just let him go (without arresting him, detaining him, etc.)?

And when the giant, fire-breathing monster shows up in town for the final showdown for Thor, and starts blowing the town up, lighting things on fire, etc., where are all the military people? Even though the military folks seem able to show up in seconds to any other unexpected event, for some reason, they are nowhere to be seen as soon as Monster Man starts destroying everything.

How does he expect us to believe in a cutesy goo-goo Thor, who hams it up for cellphone cameras?

I don't understand how a guy who has been acting and directing, literally his entire life, and who has won so many awards for doing so, could have overseen the making of a movie this bad. I mean, aside from "Train Theory". I just don't get it.

The Best Game Yet

2011-03-30T23:57:00.000-07:00

I hate losing, but I think the most fun I've had so far this year in rugby was our loss against our crosstown rival, the Velox Valhallians.

No one in town likes to lose; but in particular, no one likes to lose to Velox. They don't have the glorious, century-old tradition of winning which James Bay has, nor the tidy, almost professional air which the University of Victoria Vikes have, nor the big membership and rollicking, city-wide, let-the-good-times-roll vibe of my own club, the Castaway Wanderers. Losing to Velox is thus something of a bitter pill for teams. It just always seem to everyone else (no doubt unfairly) that they should be able to beat Velox.

But the truth is, I've played against them several times now (Third Division), and their teams have always been very good. Todd, their fly-half, runs a very tight, effective ship, and once they get on a roll, they are very hard to stop.

I experienced this again last time we played them (maybe two months ago?). They got on a roll, Todd and the inside-centre kept putting guys away on the wing, and they started racking up points. As a result, we began to panic, and began taking stupid chances in order to try to catch up. More often than not, we would turn the ball over, and then the Velox backline would begin to pound us again. If we were lucky enough to get it back, we could barely get anything going because of their ferocious counter-rucking.

I experienced that ferocity personally. My buddy and teammate John Graf had the ball and ran into contact. Tackle made. The tackler jumped up, and in that split-second, I ran in over Graf and crouched to secure the ruck (to prevent the tackler and other defenders from pushing over Graf and stealing the ball). I had it covered - both hands and feet on the ground, over Graf, crouched low. Graf put the ball backwards and I heard our scrum-half run up to snatch it away; when out of nowhere, a semi-trailer smashed into me. I'm 200 pounds, but I was smashed up and backwards like I was an 8 ounce inflatable dummy. I never saw the Velox guy coming. All I knew is that even though I had been low in a four point stance, a split second later, I'd been flipped and was hitting the ground hard on my side six feet behind where I'd been crouching. The Velox forward who'd hit me landed right next to me almost simultaneously, both of us facing each other; and in that moment, I looked at him, and he looked at me, and then...we both started laughing. I had been completely owned. I knew it, he knew it. I just blurted, "that was textbook!", and still laughing, we gave each other a tap as we got up and resumed play.

The onslaught continued without ceasing for the next hour, the Velox guys scoring try after try. With a few minutes left in the game, our coach subbed me off. I thought I was done for the day, and stood watching the game from the sidelines. Suddenly, someone got hurt, and our coach started saying, "We need a flanker. Who's available? We need a flanker!". Then, noticing me standing next to him, he said, "go in at flanker!".

"'Flanker'?". I was a back. I'd never played flanker. I wasn't even sure where I was supposed to be.

"Go!", he said. "They're about to set the scrum".

"I'm in the scrum?!", I said.

"GO!".

I went running out on the wet, muddy field toward the scrum, only a minute or two to go, us getting our butts totally kicked, completely clueless about what I was supposed to do.

"Troy wants me to play flanker", I said to Alex, another forward. "What do I do?!"

"Just play", Alex said.

As it happened, I didn't have time to get near the scrum. I quickly assumed a place in the diagonal backwards-stretching line, and almost before I knew what was happening, Kevin, the scrum-half, had snatched up the ball and was firing a pass at me.

By this time, after nearly 80 minutes of drizzle and muck, the ball looked like it had been dipped in one of those Dairy Queen vats of liquid chocolate; but sprinting forward, I managed to catch it. In that split-second, I could tell I had no gaps in the line in front of me, and so I flicked the ball to my right, to Trent, an awesome young kid who plays every game not just like it's his last, but like he's living his last minute on earth.

Just as I flicked it over, I was hammered by one of their big goons back down into the mud. But as I went down, I managed to see Trent catch it, and then - just as he was in turn being hammered by one of their goons - flick the ball back toward me, to one of our backs who had cut a line right through the middle of us. In a flash, he was through....

And there, lying in the mud next to Trent, both of us covered in grass and muck and sweat and blood, in the last minute of an eighty minute torturous ordeal in which our team hadn't been able to score one single try, getting our faces kicked in (metaphorically and literally), we watched our teammate run right through the gap created by their defenders tackling Trent and me, run another twenty metres to put a move on their fullback, and then run the remaining fifty metres all the way to the try zone to dive in for the score...and no lie, I think it might have been the most exhilarating moment of my rugby career so far (barring the try I scored last year).

We did it!, I thought. I started laughing.

"WE DID IT!", Trent shouted, in almost the same instant.

"Yeah! We did it!!!", I shouted back. "WE DID IT!", we both shouted together. And both of us started laughing uncontrollably, still lying there, covered in muck, exhausted. "We did it, man! We friggin' did it!!! Ha ha ha!". After nearly an hour and a half of trying, and failing, we had finally scored.

We stood back up. High fives. "WE DID IT!". For some reason, we just couldn't stop laughing. And even in the dressing room, we couldn't stop laughing.

And funnily enough, two or three other guys came in, also laughing, saying, "that was the funnest game we've played all year".

I thought of that game last Saturday night. I popped in to the local pub The Irish Times to check out my buddies playing, and I bumped into a couple of guys from the club, K and G. We got to talking, and the subject of Mormonism, my former religion, came up.

I didn't really want to get into the church - I've long since tired of talking about it, for the most part - but I just said, "Well, it was really devastating...to make a long story short, I discovered that it wasn't true".

There was a pause, and then K, very seriously, said, "Rugby's true. It's always true".

And G said, "it's the one constant in my life".

I knew what they meant.

And then K said, "Rugby is war, and in war, you can only live by the truth. You have to live your life by the truth...You have to live your life by the truth".

And it's hard to explain...it's something about the truth, and rugby...but I can feel it deep in my bones...

And no doubt it sounds totally ridiculous to most people - not least to people who have never been Mormon, or who haven't yet realized it is all a fraud, or who have never belonged to a warrior cult in which, in every moment, you must live by the truest truths your mind and heart can fathom, or else suffer or die (in some way or other) - but I admit, to me, in that moment, it didn't sound ridiculous at all. It sounded...well, like the truest truth there can be.

This Sunday, we play Velox again. Maybe that game will bring a lot of laughs. Then again, it could bring a lot of injuries...but whatever it brings, I'm pretty sure it will be true :).

A New Genre: The Prospective Movie Review

2010-12-10T03:50:00.000-08:00

Maybe it's wildly unfair of me, but as soon as I saw the commercial tonight for director Julie Taymor's forthcoming version of Shakespeare's "The Tempest", I thought, "it'll be a dud". The commercial showed Prospero having been changed from a male to a female; and while, strictly speaking, that in itself isn't enough to torpedo a movie, I have a sinking feeling about it all the same. The father-daughter dynamic - obviously heavily dependent on the sex of each character - is crucial to the story; change dad to a mum, and it's almost a given that Shakespeare's enchanting and powerful tapestry begins to unravel. Certainly, Hollywood's history of destroying classic tales by trying to "update" essentially unimprovable and timeless story lines and characters only inflamed my sense of foreboding; and when I later caught Taymor's interview with Stephen Colbert, it only aligned with what I'd thought two seconds after I saw the commercial.

Though few people in Hollywood seem to grasp it, structurally changing classics in order to make them "relevant" is generally a VBI (very bad idea); after all, the reason why any story is a "classic" is because it is inherently immune to becoming irrelevant. A classic can, I suppose, be neglected by people who find things like Youtube clips of gerbils eating their own young or people falling off of ladders more entertaining, but a classic, by definition, doesn't become irrelevant. In fact, the only time classics smack of irrelevance is when the artistically mediocre, desperate to think of themselves as contemporary colleagues and peers of the original genius creators, torment us with their dull-witted versions of them. So bottom line is, I'm giving this new version of "The Tempest" a thumbs down. I hope, when I see it, I find myself to be very wrong, because it's been my favourite Shakespearean play since I first read it in Dr. McNamara's political theory class seventeen years ago (that went fast!).

On the other hand, a forthcoming remake of the John Wayne classic True Grit, directed by the Coen Brothers and starring Matt Damon, will no doubt be terrific. The Coen Brothers of course are a sure bet, so I'm not saying anything that most people don't already know. I mean...good script, good actors, and good director, means good movie.

So there are my two prospective movie reviews: The Tempest is dudsville, True Grit is great.

On Hold

2010-08-07T00:51:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone - I'm on hold. I've been traveling and doing things with the kids and just haven't had much of a chance to type anything worthwhile. I hope to post something again soon.

Hope everyone's having a good summer.

Talk to you soon,

Tal

Overlords RFC, Part 6

2010-06-11T06:01:00.000-07:00

"We keep writing songs. Why don't we just do a record?", I said to Spoiler one day.

"Yeah, totally", he said. "We'd have to think of a name, though".

A couple of days later, Spoiler and I sat eating in the kitchen. Outside in the sun, the kids were having a waterfight.

"I had an idea", I said. "Why don't we just call ourselves 'Overlords RFC'?"

"Because that's the name of our rugby team", said Spoiler.

"I know, but we can have a rock and roll band that's....also a rugby team", I said.

There was a pause. "That sounds really weird", Spoiler said finally.

"I know - but it's so weird it might work", I said, warming to the idea. "We write a bunch of songs, most of which have lyrics and themes drawn from rugby; and the band has colours like an actual rugby team, and we even have team, I mean band, jerseys. The rugby thing's not so explicit that it wouldn't get on radio, but it's there enough so that rugby people would pick up on it".

Spoiler shoved a hot dog into his mouth. "Like ah shed, shoundsh pretty weer'".

"What about Sum 41, or Run-DMC, or Blink 182? Those were pretty weird names. And what about 'Smashmouth'? That was a reference to Mike Ditka's Chicago Bears".

Well, the more we talked, the more Spoiler warmed up to the idea. And the next day, in a flash of inspiration, he sat down at the piano and came up with a very catchy verse and chorus, and a bunch of lyrics. I suggested the solo-bridge sequence and helped with the structure and a few lyrics, and all of a sudden, we had a song. It didn't have anything to do with rugby, really, but I reckoned we could figure that out later. The important thing was, it sounded like it could be on the radio. So we started to get excited. And Spoiler and I really started to get into character. Scottish rugby player character. Who also was in a rock band.

See, it was that week that the old Scottish guy next door had started shouting across the fence at our new puppy, which had provoked a million jokes, in Scottish accents, amongst Spoiler and my older kids and me. In fact, we hadn't been able to stop talking in Scottish accents since it happened.

So we began trying to come up with song ideas every day. Often the ideas were less about any song, and more calculated to just get more laughs out of the resentful, brusque, coarse, 85 year old Scottish guy alter-egos we had now fully adopted. We'd sit down with guitars, and then one of us would say something like, "Let's wrrrite a song about....about a guy who gets his face ****in' right bashed in on a rugby pitch and there's blood everywhere!", and "let's write a song about a rrrancid slag who won't come to her fella's rugby games!", and "what about one where a guy throws a deep-fried Mars Bar at the referee at Murrayfield for missing a call, and blasts his eye socket to smithereens?"

Quick digression here:

One night, in the midst of all that, we arranged for my oldest son to babysit, and Spoiler and I went down to Darcy's, a local pub, to hear some live music. I bumped into some of the Castaway Wanderers players I knew, began to chat, and got separated from Spoiler. When I finally wandered back to try to find him, I spotted him, holding a Budweiser, talking to a cute blonde girl.

I approached and said, "hey". Spoiler quickly pulled me aside and said into my ear, "Brudder - you gotta help me out on this. I told this chick we were Scottish rugby players from Aberdeen, and we're just over here for six months playing with CW. She's totally buying it. Just keep the accent going".

Not seeing much harm in that, I held out my hand to her. "Pleased to make yair acqueentance, missy", I said.

"Same here!", the blonde said, seemingly quite taken with the whole thing. "So amazing you guys are over here. Your brother was telling me all about where you guys live in Scotland, and all about your games" (Needless to say, Spoiler's never even been to Scotland, and had never picked up a rugby ball until eight or nine days earlier, and the only game either of us had ever been in at that point was touch rugby against the little McCue kids [who had taken to calling themselves 'The Hellcats'] at the park). "So awesome you guys play".

"Aye, it's great fun but o' course just a wee bit dangerous", I said.

"I love how you guys say 'wee'! It's more than a 'wee' bit dangerous anyway". She looked admiringly back at Spoiler.

"Rright then, lassie", he said, shooting me a quick "eye-smirk". "How about another pint then?"

Sadly for Spoiler, Blondie got around to sheepishly admitting a short while later that she was married and that she'd come to Darcy's with her husband, so that ended that...but the magical power of the schtick was not lost on either of us. And so it was that a few days later, Spoiler went back to White Rock for a day to meet up with V., an ex-girlfriend who had been trying to re-initiate their relationship. Spoiler called me the morning after, triumphant.

"Okay Brudder, last night I was hanging out with V. I told her upfront that there was no way I was getting back together with her, 'kay, but I dropped a couple of hints about how I might be into spending a bit of 'quality time' with her. SO BRUDDER CHECK THIS OUT! She was all curious about what I was doing over in Victoria, so I say, 'I've been playing a lot of rugby'. Brudder, she went into total shock, because she knows I've never played any sport! She was like totally dumbstruck. She was like, 'you - you - you play rugby now?'. I'm like, 'oh yeah, I'm on a team called the Overlords. That's why I can't stay over here very long. They need me back there for practice and our next game'. Then she's still dumbstruck, like she can hardly speak, and she's like, 'What - what - like - what, what teams do you play against?'. So Brudder, I go, 'Well, we play a lot of games against this team called...The Hellcats'. Brudder! Her head completely exploded! She was like, 'oh - my - God. I always knew you were amazing. But this just proves you can do anything! That is amazing!'. And brudder, lemme just tell you, after that it was ROGER WILCO ALL SYSTEMS GO shagfest! HA HA HA HA!".

Well, I'm not saying I condone his little maneuver, but I must admit I ended up choking with laughter at the thought of Spoiler, keeping a straight face, reporting that he was now on a rugby team which often played against their crosstown rivals, the Hellcats - and happening to omit the fact that it was touch rugby against a bunch of eight and nine year olds - and so completely blowing his ex's awestruck mind.

Where was I? Oh yes - the band that was a rugby team that was a band.

More later.

Will Bud Selig Do the Right Thing?

2010-06-02T23:13:00.002-07:00

Will Bud Selig do the right thing? I think the answer to that question is another question: Why would he start now?

Bud Selig's refusal to allow any sort of video replay into the game he claims to love has once again been revealed to the entire planet as the supremely idiotic position it has always been. Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga tonight pitched a perfect game against the Cleveland Indians, except that first base umpire Jim Joyce erroneously called Jason Donald safe at first. Making it all the more nauseating is that it wasn't even close. Donald was clearly out, but once Joyce ruled, that was it, and Galarraga's perfect game - only the 21st in major league history - will, at least as of this writing, not be officially recorded as such.

What is the right thing to do? I think the answer is obvious. Just as baseball commissioner Ford Frick ruled in 1961 that Roger Maris's homerun record of 61 in a season be recorded as having been accomplished in 162 games (to distinguish it from Babe Ruth's previous record of 60 in just 154), Selig should decree that the history books record that Galarraga pitched a perfect game tonight. Furthermore, he should shut the hell up about Ernie Banks and Dizzy Dean, stop hazily dreaming about the past, and take baseball into the 21st century - which means utilizing video replay. It's simple - each team could have one challenge opportunity a game, or even a certain number per season. The NHL uses video replay. Rugby league uses video replay. Football uses video replay. Rugby union uses video replay. Why? To preserve the integrity of their game. That's what's so stupid about Selig's position on this: despite all his prattling about wanting to maintain "the integrity of the game" by keeping video replay out, it is precisely that integrity which is damaged when the outcomes of games are determined not by the players, but by refereeing errors. Duh.

But...why would Selig start caring about (as opposed to just talking about) "the integrity of the game" now? After all, he's the guy who turned a blind eye to steroid use for years, and in doing so, facilitated the most integrity-damaging saga in baseball since the Black Sox scandal of 1919. No - if Selig does the right thing in this case, it will be, first of all, a miracle; but second of all, prompted only by a vain concern about looking like an idiot, rather than an innate sense of decency or justice.

So hopefully, there will be enough of an outcry over this episode that Galarraga's marvelous performance tonight will be enshrined in the record books as the perfect game it was, rather than the one-hitter it was not. But...I'm not counting on it.

Time for a new commissioner - and video replay.

Overlords RFC, Part Five

2010-05-27T22:39:00.000-07:00

The next day around noon, I said, "Okay Brudder, if you want to get going here, you could get that big wisteria planted, and then get on the beds for the cedars. The kids and I can start on the flower beds".

"No problem, Brudder. I just gotta run to the store to get a few things". That made some sense, because he'd shown up with only a backpack, and was supposed to stay for three weeks. "I should be back in a few. Can I get twenty bucks in advance?". I said sure. Being carless, he jumped in my van and left.

Three hours later, with still no sign of him, I called his cell.

"Hello?", he said. In the background, I could hear what sounded strangely like calling seagulls, ocean waves, bottles clinking, dogs barking and people laughing.

"Brudder - where are you?", I said.

"I'm at the beach. It's totally awesome down here! Joey, wait, try it upside down...yeah, like that...HA HA HA HA HA!".

What the...? Who's Joey? "Hello?"

"Here boy, come on over - Tina, grab him for a sec..."

"Brudder, you there?"

"Yeah I'm here, hang on - Wait, let me try, I bet he jumps right off the edge. WOOOO HA HA HA HA HE DID IT! GOOD BOY! (ruff ruff rrrrr ruff) Where'd Bucks go? Hey-"

"Brudder - what the hell's going on? Who are you with?"

"I'm at the beach with some friends..."

"'Friends'? You just got here last night. How can you have friends?"

I heard the sound of guitar in the background, then Spoiler saying, "That's not how you play it, gimme that..."

"Brudder! Listen - you there? I need the van. I have to go get food for dinner".

Well, Spoiler finally made it home, but as usual, was frustratingly vague about how he could have made a dozen friends almost instantaneously on a trip to a store. Although, I'd seen this kind of thing before with him. We're somewhere, someone - or a group of people - appears and approaches him - not me - and says, "Hey man! What are you up to? Nice to see you. We're hitting the lake tonight, you should come on down. K, catch you later!". And then when I say, "Who was that?", Spoiler says, "I don't know; I've never seen them before". It made no sense. It was totally inexplicable, and it happened over and over. Maybe there was some cosmic "party" energy field that these people were all attuned to, that I had no access to, which enabled them to find and identify each other. No clue.

Anyway, we went to the grocery store, then threw some steaks on the barbie, and after dinner, we got out the rugby ball and went into the back yard. I don't think Spoiler had ever touched one in his entire life up to that point.

"How do you throw it?", he said.

"Just like this". I put my right hand towards the back, my left hand towards the front, and gave it a little spin as I tossed it. Within a few minutes, Spoiler had gotten the hang of it, and along with the kids, we all tossed it around.

"So Brudder, you gonna play with us against the McCues?".

"Yeah of course, Brudder", Spoiler said. "I'm an Overlord now". That was quick. Cool.

"Too bad we don't have a uniform that will fit you", I mused.

"WHAT?", said Spoiler. "Brudder, WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? I'M NOT GOING TO SHOW UP IN A T-SHIRT FOR A GAME. WE'RE ON A TEAM. THIS IS RUGBY. I'M AN OVERLORD-"

I admit I was totally caught off guard. I had no idea Spoiler would instantly take this so seriously. I mean...he hadn't even heard of the Overlords until a day or two earlier, and I don't even think he'd ever been on any actual team in his entire life, except for maybe a stint on a Little League team when he was seven or eight. "Okay Brudder, calm down - we'll try to figure something out", I said.

"YEAH BRUDDER. GUY INVITES ME OVER, AND THEN WANTS ME RUNNING AROUND IN A T-SHIRT DURING AN OVERLORDS GAME. UNBELIEVABLE!"

Well, a few days later we headed out to Sierra Park for our scheduled match against the McCues, the 6'3" Spoiler jammed into one of our Overlords jerseys, Polish-sausage style.

An hour later, the game was over, and we headed back to the house. The kids wanted to jump on the tramp while the sprinkler was on underneath it. Spoiler and I sat down with a couple of guitars. Within a few minutes, we'd come up with a pretty good idea for a song. The next day at the beach, we came up with another couple of ideas. Same thing the next evening, sitting around the fire.

And after a week of that, I had a strange idea.

Robin Hood Review

2010-05-20T08:55:00.000-07:00

We interrupt our regularly scheduled broadcast...

I saw "Robin Hood" last night, the new Ridley Scott-directed movie starring Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett. I'd heard from a few sources that it was average, but I didn't believe them. Putting together, in my head, the "Gladiator" director and the actors and the timelessly appealing story, I just thought, "it's gotta be good". In fact, it was average, a five out of ten.

Probably the most important reason for its mediocrity is a less than compelling story. The story depicted is actually backstory, an explanation of how Robin became Robin (the movie actually ends at the moment that Robin becomes an outlaw). Now that I think of it, this is the first movie I have ever seen which seemed entirely devoted to being "the first movie of a series of movies", rather than primarily a stand-alone movie, which, secondarily, could also setup a sequel. Anyway, bottom line is, the story just isn't that compelling, and is depicted in too lengthy and cumbersome a fashion.

The second factor is casting and acting performance. I can see Russell Crowe as Robin Hood, though just. He would definitely be a rougher, cruder, more piggish Robin Hood than, say, the dashingly nimble Robin Hood played by Errol Flynn decades ago. But...you know. Maybe that would have been better, more realistic. But Cate Blanchett - a fine actress - as Marian? I can't buy it. I'm not trying to be mean when I say that Cate Blanchett is one of those actresses (others include Jodie Foster, Whoopi Goldberg, and Sarah Jessica Parker) who have made it to the top-tier of their profession while being entirely devoid of sex appeal, so I think she was an odd choice. Great as Elizabeth I, miscast as a dashing hero's love interest. It's completely unbelievable.

The supporting actors are likewise pretty mediocre here. Mark Strong as Godfrey is too...what's the word...obvious; too "caricature of a bad guy". William Hurt is too American for this picture; he looks American, he moves "American", he just shouldn't be in this movie. Danny Huston was phemonenal in "The Proposition"; here, his brief acting performance, like so many of the others, is just that tad overwrought (must be Ridley Scott's fault). Robin's Merry Men, same thing.

"Robin Hood" would have been far better with a different leading lady, subtler, more "organic" acting performances, and a tighter, more dramatic story, whether comprised of pure backstory or the traditional tales of Robin Hood, or some combination.

Overlords RFC, Part Four

2010-05-13T09:36:00.001-07:00

Right around this time, I had a chat with Mommy.

"I'd like to go back to England", she said. "I need to re-connect with my family and friends. That will help me on my journey of healing" (healing after leaving Mormonism, that is).

Not to go into too much detail, but no one had been longing as desperately for Mommy to complete her "journey of healing" more than I had over the past few years, so in the moment she said it, I was on board. She asked me to buy the tickets and schedule the trip for her, which I did: three weeks in July (2008), back to England. I would stay at home with the kids. As usual, I felt very hopeful - in retrospect, naively so - that this trip would really help her achieve peace, etc.

We were all sad to see Mommy go, although I also was relishing having a fun, laidback three weeks with all eight kids. Barbecues, the beach, swimming, biking...I thought we'd be able to have a blast. And then I had another idea. I called up my brother, Spoiler, who was still in White Rock (on the mainland, a suburb of Vancouver).

"Tracy's gone for three weeks. Why don't you come over?", I said.

"I have no money", he said.

"I have landscaping I have to complete. You can help me, and I can just pay you".

"Done", he said.

The next day, my cell phone rang. It was Spoiler.

"Brudder, it's me. I'm just pulling in to the ferry terminal. My friend gave me a ride on his motorbike".

I wondered why he was calling me if he was still riding on the back of a motorcycle. Didn't you need to hold on with both hands? In any case, it sounded like they were just stopping the motorcycle, and he was trying to get off.

"I'll be on the 3, can you pick me-OWWWWW!!!!", he suddenly shouted. "YOUR BIKE JUST BURNED MY LEG! LOOK AT MY LEG!".

In the background, I could hear his friend was saying, "Oh, you gotta be careful around the-"

"YOUR BIKE JUST BURNED MY LEG! NOW I'M GOING TO HAVE A SCAR! ALL SUMMER! A GIANT SCAR FOR SUMMER! LOOK AT MY LEG! WHY DON'T YOU WATCH IT WITH YOUR STUPID BIKE, MAN?! Brudder, this guy's pipe here just totally burned my leg. YEAH THANKS A LOT MAN. NOW MY LEG IS BURNT!....YEAH WHATEVER....YEAH....YEAH, SEE YA LATER!"

Listening in, I couldn't quite grasp how it would have been his friend's fault (who after all, I assumed had given him a ride all the way from White Rock to the Tswawwassen ferry terminal) that Spoiler, who was wearing shorts, had burned his leg on the pipe while dismounting.

In any case, the kids and I picked Spoiler up a couple of hours later on the Vancouver Island side...and thus began a legendary three weeks of hilarity.

Gotta run, more later.

Overlords RFC, Part Three

2010-05-09T10:49:00.000-07:00

I put a call into Rich McCue. We had been friendly with Rich, his wife Heather, and their kids for a couple of years. We had played hockey with them a few times, so I thought they might be game for a rugby adventure. Fortunately, they were, and we scheduled a touch rugby game for the following week.

So far, the kids had been pretty excited about the idea. This was as surprising as it was gratifying to me, since none but two had ever shown any interest at all in rugby. Maybe they felt the low morale, too; and maybe the idea of a new adventure that we would all be embarking on, and the alter-ego element, the opportunity for totems and colours and all those things, and maybe even a kind of small-scale glory, appealed to them the same way they did to me at that moment. T-Bone and A-Roq were already interested in Norse and continental mythology, and were quite into fantasy video games, often with a martial element. They began coming up with a mock mythology for our alter-egos almost immediately. Sno-cone, six at the time, came up with a stirring riff on the piano one day, which we immediately adopted as our battle theme. The little girls, for their part, seemed very keen on dressing up in the navy and blue family jerseys, with the matching shorts and socks. We even began brainstorming for an official logo and motto. We came up with a logo - an upright oval with a simple half-cross in the upper half - and tossed around the motto "Break or Be Broken" for a few days, before concluding one day, amongst a few chuckles, that it was too intense for playing touch rugby with a bunch of little kids (we finally settled on "Together We Rise").

Anyway, we hit the local elementary school field a couple of times for practices, and when our debut game came that Sunday, we were ready. We laid out the boundary cones, went over some rules with the McCues, and the fun began. I must say it was disconcertingly tiring. I couldn't believe it. I couldn't even breathe after two minutes. Rich is something of an athlete already, and does triathlon training. I thought I was in pretty good shape, but the continuous process of stopping, accelerating as fast as possible, slowing, accelerating again, stopping, leaping, etc., really destroyed me. Rich zipped past me more times than I'd care to admit.

Despite my exhaustion, we managed to eke out a victory, and our amiable rivalry had begun. Almost immediately, our weekly games became the family highlight of the week, and I was thrilled that the kids talked about it so often, and even wanted to go out and practice during the week. I wondered sometimes how many sixteen year old boys were keen on going out a couple of times each week to run rugby drills with their little brothers and sisters. Everyone was excited and it all seemed to be working better than I had dared hope. Kids started tossing rugby balls around in the house and in the yard ("we need to practice again, our game's only in two days!"), and two even asked if they could wear their Overlords RFC jerseys to school. It seemed like magic.

The seven of us: A-Roq, T-Bone, Skinny Dip, Lady Lu, Red Bear, Sno-cone, and myself so far comprised the team (Trixta had only just turned three, and J-Dawg, the oldest, was more focused on doing musical demos at the time). We would have had an awesome time for the rest of the summer just us, but Overlords RFC got an injection of new excitement when an unexpected addition to our playing side showed up one day...

To be continued.

Overlords RFC, Part Two

2010-05-09T10:48:00.001-07:00

We need something to rally around...we need some common goal or pursuit...we need some story...and something that can unite our three year old with our seventeen year old, something we can all do...we need...

And then suddenly I had it:

We need a family rugby team.

I had never played before, only tossed balls around with the kids. But I'd always known that rugby was the coolest sport on earth. Making it easier was that a couple of my kids had played for a local club.

We'll start a team. We'll get jerseys. We'll start drilling. We'll find another family to play against. Each week we will have a game; that is, we will go to war. We will have fun. We will have colours, a team name, maybe chants or songs, code words...it'll be like something out of James Frazer's Golden Bough....

I began wracking my brain for our "one true team name". I didn't want any name that had ever been taken for a sports team. I didn't want "The Cougars" or "The Tigers" or anything like that. No...this had to be different...unique...it had to be us.

Then one day, I think after we just got home, reading a magazine article about the Anglo-Saxons, I came across a sentence, and the word just popped out at me: overlords. That's it!, I thought. I ran a google search; there was no team on the planet called The Overlords. Plus, it was a key word in my very first favourite song, and probably the coolest rock song of all time, Led Zeppelin's "The Immigrant Song" - and all the kids had always liked the song, too. So we also had a theme song. Even better, Mummy was from England; my family was from Germany; there was an actual blood connection between us and the ancient Anglo-Saxon overlords of the British Isles. It was perfect.

The next task was determining the colours and getting jerseys. I looked online to see how much it would cost to get custom-made rugby jerseys for all of us. Way too much. I then looked around local shops - Wal-Mart, Zellers, Roots, The Gap, etc. - trying to find shirts that A.) looked like rugby jerseys, and B.) came in sizes to fit everyone from Trixta (three years old) to me. Frustratingly, I just could not find anything.

Then luck struck again one day. I popped into Old Navy, and there, marked way down (clear-out), were a bunch of matching cotton shirts, white front and back, but with navy shoulders and neck band, in all boys sizes, from extra small to large. The shirts even had a couple of navy stripes on each short sleeve. And the cotton was stretchy enough so that I could actually jam into a size large. And they were like three bucks each or something. I had already come up with the idea of having our colours silver and navy, so when I saw these, I just thought, Done.

I bought them all, plus matching white and navy blue athletic socks, and then took them to the local T-shirt shop, where I had them emblazon, in navy and silver, the name Overlords RFC (rugby football club) with a navy border around it. I brought the jerseys home, and there was an element to the whole thing that seemed akin to the thrill an as-yet-unsassigned superhero-in-waiting might feel once he is given his superhero name, a list of his superhero powers, and his official superhero outfit. All the kids put on their jerseys, looked at themselves in the mirror, and somehow or other, instantly became The Overlords, a family of elite superheroes which no force on earth could now keep down, let alone separate.

Now, we just needed a battle to fight.

Overlords RFC, Part One

2010-04-27T00:52:00.000-07:00

We needed something. Family morale seemed to be sinking, maybe because some strange distance had once again emerged between Mommy and me, a distance I hated and wanted to erase. Why? Because I loved the woman body and soul. I'd tried a bunch of things - giving her lots of space, getting us matching beach bikes for joint evening rides, getting us kayak lessons, trying out various seduction strategies, going to a couple's seminar, giving her even more space, lots of date nights, writing notes and songs, surprise concerts, more space again, fantasy getaway weekends, counselors, everything I could think of - but nothing had really worked, and I couldn't figure out what else to do.

It was spring of 2008. Tracy and I had had a rough time two years earlier, but we had gotten over that. But now...it seemed like the bond was slipping again. What to do?

I thought and thought - kind of like Winnie the Pooh trying to get an idea - and finally I came up with something. Maybe - long shot - but maybe just getting out of town for a couple of weeks would help us re-set. But where? Well...we need happiness, I thought. For that, where else do you go but "the happiest place on earth"? It was worth a try anyway.

That's how in May of 2008, Tracy and I and our six youngest kids wound up driving to Disneyland from Victoria in our RV (our two oldest wanted to stay at home with friends). Ideally, the two of us would have gotten away alone, but it's hard to find someone to watch eight kids for a week or two. In the end, it became obvious that if we wanted to get away, we'd all have to go. Despite that, I hoped there would be some special moments between the two of us...

I don't know what Tracy would say now, but I thought our trip was a blast, and I think the kids thought so, too. We stopped first at one of our favourite little getaway places, Seaside, Oregon, and then next in Florence to ride on buggies on the giant sand dunes, and...finally we got to Disneyland, and did it all: the Matterhorn, Space Mountain, Big Thunder Railroad, Sleeping Beauty's Castle. I don't know what it is - the tidiness, the faint smell of jasmine everywhere, maybe even the comforting predictability - but for some reason, the magic of the place never fades for me. I've been going there since I was a little kid, and each time, I feel the same thrill.

We augmented our trip with a foray to Knott's Berry Farm, during which my son Sno-Cone I think became the youngest child to ever ride on Montezuma's Revenge, and another to a dinner theatre thing with pirates, and a night out at Medieval Times. We also hit the Long Beach aquarium, a few other beaches, etc. On the way home, we stopped at a nice little resort somewhere off the highway near San Luis Obispo. It was awesome.

But the whole time we were gone, I found myself mulling over the follow-up questions: How do we keep the family morale up when we get back? How do we keep having fun together? Even though we all live our own individual lives, how do we remain centered as a family?

And then one day, lightning struck, and I had it: Overlords RFC.

More to come.

Heroes vs. Hypocrites: Mormon Rugby Girls vs. Mormon Leaders

2010-04-26T23:46:00.000-07:00

So, let's see.

The BYU women's rugby team drills for hundreds of hours: wind sprints, push-ups, burpees, tackles, line-outs, scrums, rucks, passes, the whole deal. As they are not an official university team, they scramble for financing, holding fund raisers, relying on any source of money they can find. They pull together and make it to the national finals in Florida, where, due to a scheduling error, their second-round game against Penn State is scheduled for Sunday, rather than for Saturday. The BYU girls are then confronted with the heartbreaking choice of either pursuing the dream they have worked so hard to realize, or living up to their religious commitment to keep the Sabbath day holy. Devastated, they finally decide to live their religion. They forfeit the game. And with that, their shot at the title disappears.

But at the same time, the men who run the church they believe in so deeply feel quite happy to require that church-owned businesses - of which there are many dozens - operate every single Sunday. Why? For the same reason those leaders require them to operate the other six days of the week: profit.

This isn't right. Mormon church leaders never tire of telling church members to keep the Sabbath day holy. As an example, consider the words of the late Mormon president Gordon Hinckley in an LDS General Conference talk called "Look to the Future":

"...There are what some may regard as the lesser commandments but which are also of such tremendous importance.

"I mention the Sabbath day. The Sabbath of the Lord is becoming the play day of the people. It is a day of golf and football on television, of buying and selling in our stores and markets. Are we moving to mainstream America as some observers believe? In this I fear we are. What a telling thing it is to see the parking lots of the markets filled on Sunday in communities that are predominately LDS.

"Our strength for the future, our resolution to grow the Church across the world, will be weakened if we violate the will of the Lord in this important matter. He has so very clearly spoken anciently and again in modern revelation. We cannot disregard with impunity that which He has said".

But "disregard with impunity" is exactly what Hinckley did throughout his tenure when it came to the fourth commandment. As the man at the top of the Mormon pyramid, he could have stopped the operation of the church's for-profit businesses on Sunday at any moment. Instead, he authorized it, just as his successor, current church president Thomas Monson, does. To take just one example of this shockingly open hypocrisy, the church's Salt Lake City NBC affiliate, KSL-TV, as a rule broadcasts six hours of sports each Sunday, the watching of which is the very thing that Hinckley, in the talk quoted above, told Mormons was bad. So while the BYU girls refuse to play a game on Sunday for which they will not be paid, on grounds that doing so is incompatible with the Sabbath, the very church leaders who in effect told them not to, are making money off of broadcasting sports every single Sunday of the year!

The BYU girls walk the walk. Why don't Mormon leaders? How can they preach against the very thing they are doing? Easy - the same way Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, Jesse Jackson, and dozens of Catholic priests have all preached chastity while having sex with prostitutes, mistresses, or children; the same way conservative writer Bill Bennett preached a return to old-time virtues while blowing millions in gambling casinos; the same way radio host Rush Limbaugh preached against soft-on-crime liberals while he was illegally buying Oxycontin off of drug dealers in Denny's parking lots; the same way Idaho senator Larry Craig preached family values while cruising for anonymous gay sex in airport restrooms; the same way California senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer preach the evils of guns while both possessing concealed weapons permits...they just say one thing, and then do another. They just exempt themselves from the rules they tell everyone else to live by. It's easy.

Some people might think the BYU girls are stupid. I don't. I think they have demonstrated what character is all about, and I admire them: they sacrificed their own pleasure for the sake of their principles. It's too bad their religious leaders are too busy counting up the profits from the Sunday sports shows they tell everyone are sinful, but happily broadcast anyway, to do the same.

Final score:

BYU women's rugby team: heroes.

Mormon leaders: hypocrites.

Sno-Cone

2010-04-08T01:51:00.000-07:00

I'll always remember the night my son Sno-Cone (nickname) was conceived.

It was late July, 2001. We were living in White Rock, BC, and I landed around 5:30 PM in Vancouver that day after a week away. I'd missed Tracy a lot and eagerly jumped in the car to begin the forty minute drive home.

I flicked on the radio as I pulled on to Highway 99, and heard an advertisement for what was then called "The Symphony of Fire" (now "Celebration of Fire"), Vancouver's annual fireworks contest held in English Bay. They haul a giant floating platform out into the water, and then teams from all different countries come and take turns shooting off their fireworks displays every night over the course of a week or so. Judges then award prizes for the best displays. In that instant, listening to the ad, I had an idea.

I grabbed the cellphone and called Tracy, telling her I'd just landed and that I wanted to take her out for a special overnight adventure, and to pack and put on something she'd feel comfortable going out in. When she asked what we were doing, I said it was a surprise, but not to eat. I made a few other calls to get everything arranged, including overnight babysitting, got home, hugged and said hi to the kids, jumped in the shower, threw on some clean clothes, and then we left, heading back to Vancouver. So far, so good, I thought.

It was another amazing sunny summer Vancouver evening, slight ocean breeze, the odd eagle overhead, pines and firs everywhere...it felt great to be back home, and to be out with Tracy. She seemed excited and curious, which was pretty charming, and looked beautiful as ever - like a cross between Brigitte Bardot and Marilyn Monroe. No one could believe she'd already had six children.

As we parked a couple of blocks from English Bay, I revealed that I'd made reservations for us to eat dinner at Rain City Grill, a restaurant we'd never visited, but which I had noticed always got rave reviews in local papers for the top flight dishes it served, using only fresh, seasonal, local food.

We walked in, and to my surprise, the greeters recognized me, and seemed thrilled to meet us. Even with my songs pumping on radio, I wasn't recognized very often; and while I honestly couldn't care less about that sort of thing normally, I have to admit that on that particular night, out on a special date with my wife, hoping that everything would go well, it felt kind of nice to meet people who seemed excited to meet us...it added to the "specialness" of our evening thus far.

I can't for the life of me remember what Tracy ordered that night, but I do remember that I got the short ribs, and they were phenomenal. We ate and chatted and laughed as the sky outside more and more turned indigo, and took bites of each other's dessert, until finally we were done.

We walked down to the beach, just a few metres away from the restaurant, and found a nice place to sit. The fireworks displays were breathtaking, and...I can't really find words to describe how I felt, sitting out there in the warm summer air next to the mother of my children, watching the shooting flames and sparks, thrilling along with the crowd to each surprise, smelling the ocean air and catching glimpses of reflections coming off the water. Everything seemed right in the world that night.

After the climax of the last fireworks display had ended, we made our way a block up the street to the quaint little hotel I'd booked for the night, and, well, you know. Our surreally, powerfully beautiful evening ended in similar fashion.

Well, you know where this is going. A few months later on Salt Spring Island, where we had moved in the meantime, Tracy got the predicted due date of our seventh child after having an ultrasound, and out of curiosity, looked at the calendar, and then exclaimed: "it was the night we went to the fireworks - it had to be!".

Sno-Cone was born April 5, 2002, in Bellingham, Washington, a hale and hearty boy, with white-blonde hair (which he still has), his blue eyes shaped like almonds (like his mother's), and an unusually calm, solid demeanour.

More to come on Sno-Cone.

Unreasonable Reason

2010-03-19T03:48:00.000-07:00

One version of the story of the last three hundred years is that the intellectual movement known as The Enlightenment spearheaded a glorious change in human affairs, in which the shackles of dark religious superstition were cast off and replaced by the light of human reason. Popery and priests were out; science and logic were in, and amazing increases in human well-being would ensue.

We now have cell phones and aeroplanes, microwaves and computers, MRI machines and laproscopic surgery. Those are very nice things. But in the immediate wake of the Enlightenment, we had the almost insanely savage French Revolution, followed by Napoleon's tear through Europe, and then a century after that, we had the two most savage wars in human history (which included historically unprecedented genocide). And they were fought mostly by the most scientifically advanced nations ever. Moreover, in the wake of World War II, we had tens of millions of people tortured and butchered by communist regimes in service to the aims of their "one true social science". Our technology has improved. The problem is, we haven't.

Actually, the problem is worse than that, because it's not just that we haven't changed - it's that we can't. Despite all our longings otherwise, we remain human. That means we still love, and we still hate; we still unite, and we still divide; still share, and still steal. And this will never change, no matter how much more technology we have, or knowledge we possess. Contrary to Thom Yorke's ongoing paranoia, technology doesn't turn us into machines. It just gives us a power we wouldn't otherwise have. And that power can be used for good or for ill. All the while, the human animal remains the same.

Why can't people see this? The silly (if not dangerous) old notion, first purveyed by Plato and regurgitated ad nauseam even nowadays by self-styled "secular humanists", that "knowledge is virtue" - that the more "reasonable" we all are, and the more we all learn, the better people we will all be - has been refuted a million times, in a million different ways, and will be a million more times in the future. Yet it doesn't make any difference at all to the secular humanists, no doubt for the same reason that knowing that the communion wafer doesn't actually "transubstantiate" into the flesh of Jesus doesn't make any difference to the believing Catholic: because these claims are now dogma. They are now identity to these people. They have become unchallengeable articles of faith, beyond the power of any argument or empirical proof to refute. Yet, the truth is, the wafer doesn't become Jesus, and knowledge doesn't become virtue. And that means that "secular humanism" - or to call it by its real name, The Enlightenment - is as much of a fraud as Catholicism. Those who most loudly champion reason over faith, are often as unreasonable as the religious believers they think themselves superior to, if not more so.

The First Try

2010-02-14T19:42:00.000-08:00

I was frustrated. And embarrassed.

I'd had the guy lined up. I figured he would get the ball any second, but I slowed down slightly, since in rugby, you're not allowed to tackle a guy without the ball. A split-second later, he had actually received the ball, and by then, it seemed too late. With my weight on the wrong foot, he quickly sidestepped and got past me.

And then, a few minutes later, it happened again. And then, it happened one more time. (It didn't help that the Comox jerseys seemed to be made out of some space-age super-slippery material). A few expletives popped into my head.

It seemed like a timing thing. I couldn't seem to get that down. I felt kind of like Steve Martin on "The Jerk", trying in vain to dance in time.

At half-time, I approached K., one of the guys who helps run the team.

"I can't seem to get my timing down with tackling", I said.

"Okay, no problem. I can tell you exactly how to tackle. You just have to remember one thing".

Wow, I thought. This is awesome! I'm about to hear the one key that will unlock the mystery forever. Never again will I miss a tackle. I just need this one vital piece of detailed information...

"All you have to do", drawled K., now staring at me very intensely, "is focus on the guy, and kill him". He waited a second, and then said again: "Kill him".

I looked - in vain - for any sign that K.'s lesson was a bit of cheeky hyperbole. In fact, his face was now drawn into a cold, brooding, squint, kind of like Clint Eastwood as the Spaghetti Western bounty killer right before he draws and, well, kills someone.

I managed to suppress the urge to swallow hard.

"Uh...isn't there...like...some technique I need to remember...?"

"Yeah - KILL HIM".

In the first half, I'd actually accidentally clotheslined a guy trying to tackle him. I swung my arm out just as the guy ducked low, and the inside of my elbow hit the guy right in the throat as we were running full blast at each other. And because caving in a guy's throat (classic karate move) actually will kill him, I was very worried for a second that I'd really hurt him. As it was, he was okay. But it was impossible for me to think about trying to kill the guy I was about to tackle, after coming so close to severely injuring someone. I mean, all I wanted to do was tackle these guys, for God's sake, not live inside a serial killer alter ego...

Well, fortunately for me, we retained possession of the ball more often in the second half (meaning of course that we weren't on defence), so I didn't have to worry too much about whether to focus on remembering proper tackling technique versus imagining I was Sammy "The Bull" Gravano dealing with a ratfink. But I still longed, as I always do, to be able to contribute in some way. I play out on the wing, where one doesn't get many carries even at the best of times. But playing in a Third Division game on a muddy field makes it even less likely that the ball will be spun out wide. So far, all I'd done in the game was miss a few tackles.

But - perhaps in a miraculous example of divine intervention - that all changed in an instant. One of my teammates got the ball and began speeding down the right wing. Another guy and I chased behind in support (that is, so we could ruck over, or grab an offload, or maul across the try line). My teammate was hit a few metres from the try line, and the ball squirted backwards and towards the out of bounds line. And towards me, running full-tilt behind him.

Still at speed, I snatched the ball on the bounce before it went out; and glancing forward, saw that the only thing now stopping me from scoring a try was a Comox player standing directly on the try line, four metres in front of me. In that instant, I knew I was in. I hit him full speed, and as he tackled me, he started to flip me out of bounds. As I twisted over him still hurtling towards the out of bounds line, I slammed the ball down. Try awarded: the first try I'd ever scored in a rugby game.

A cheer went up from the Premier players watching from the balcony, and I felt a sense of relief that I'd finally actually contributed something substantial. And as it happened, I think that try tied the game. So that was pretty cool.

As we walked back to receive the kick-offs, I got a few laughs by announcing tongue-in-cheek to the other guys that from now on, I expected a lot more passes. "After all", I said. "I'm averaging one try per carry in this game".

The game ended a few minutes later in a draw, 22 to 22. Annnnd...we'll see what happens next week.

Lying: A Personal Experience

2010-01-15T00:57:00.001-08:00

An anonymous reader asked in the comments section to the last post if I am capable of lying.

In terms of not volunteering certain facts, I have done this a number of times when I thought someone would be damaged by it, or would be driven to destructive behaviour by it. This can be a dangerous habit to get into, but then, in real life, there are sometimes circumstances in which certain truths would be devastating to people; and in fact, I can think of one example where I still wonder if telling someone all I knew was really the right thing to do. The truth, in that case, was devastating and debilitating. Maybe keeping my mouth shut would have been better...

Regarding the more obvious lies of commission, especially for the purpose of personal gain: I have a visceral aversion to these. I choke even on telling white lies for some reason, even when I want to tell them so as to make someone feel better. I dislike being lied to and I make it a rule to not lie to others (though I can imagine where lying might be morally justifiable). I honestly can say that I don't remember lying like this, except for the example below. It was a spectacular failure of an attempt, and it remains a good reminder to me to keep things straight up.

In 1999, when my record came out, I did a lot of traveling. This wore me down; I'd be home for a day or two, then off again for five days, then home for a day, then off again for three, then home for a week, then off for ten days, etc. And a typical day on one of these trips was, get up at 5, shower, get car to the TV station for the early morning show at 7....go all day doing interviews at radio, etc., play evening show, and then finally get into bed at 2 AM after a big dinner with the local Sony people, then up again at 5 to get an airplane to the next city. So I got worn down a few times.

Well, on one occasion, I landed in Vancouver (we lived in White Rock at the time) and drove home (45 minutes), arriving at night. I spent time with the kids and my wife, then tried to sleep, but couldn't, even though I was exhausted.

I had to get up very early the next morning and fly out again, this time to Denver, and I was literally almost falling asleep at the check-in counter. I said, "Look - I'm falling asleep and as soon as I land, I gotta go perform on TV. Can you please put me in a row of three, where the other two seats aren't assigned, so I can lay down?"

So the lady said, "We have the very back row clear. The chairs don't recline, but that won't matter if you're laying down sleeping across all three". I said great, and I was on my way.

So I get on the plane, and I was so tired I actually felt *pain*, which I don't think I'd ever felt before from exhaustion. I sit down next to the window eagerly awaiting take off so I can lay down and pass out. Everyone was seated and ready to go. And then, disaster struck.

Some big goofy cowboy looking dude and his trashy wife stumbled on to the plane, and headed down the aisle right toward me.

"Oh no.....no.....it can't be", I thought. I glanced around, but there were no other open seats...no!

And sure enough, they got to the back, glanced at their tickets, and plopped right in the two seats next to me. Inside, I felt a kind of desperate panic. I must sleep. I must sleep!

Anyway, I don't know what the hell happened in my head, but in that moment of panic, I mumbled, "no - no, wait, don't sit down" and blocked the seats lol. The flight attendant, who was right there, said, "Is there a problem?"

And I said, pleadingly, "yeah, I need these seats, I gotta sleep". And then, in my half asleep state, I remember saying, "All three of these are mine"!

So the flight attendant snapped, "You're trying to tell me you bought *three tickets* for this flight, and these are all yours?".

Great idea, I thought. And I sort of feebly choked out the words, "uh - um...yeah!".

Understandably, she shot me a digusted look and snapped, "don't be ridiculous. Move out of the way"! lol

Of course, she was right: I had said something totally ridiculous - and obviously untrue. In my waking, painful stupor, I'd tried to salvage my yearned-for "coma time" by saying something so stupid, that I am embarrassed by it to this day.

And what was worse about it all is that, of course, my seat wouldn't recline; so I had to fly all the way to Denver bolt upright, nodding off in weird five or ten second bursts with my head snapping forward, like a WWI soldier stuck in a trench for a week.

The only consolation was that the cowboy and his wife turned out to be stone drunk, and while I was passing in and out of hallucination next to them, they became belligerent towards the flight attendant and were met by the Denver police getting off the ramp, who handcuffed them and took them away!

Anyway, minus this exception, I just don't remember lying ever being a part of my life. And in real life, I am never in situations where I would even feel tempted to lie, because there is just no need. It just doesn't come up.

Red Bear

2009-12-24T21:51:00.000-08:00

I'm going to have to do something with this girl, I thought. She goes from calm and happy to psycho loon in under half a second, and then...you never know what she'll do. I looked down at my crotch, my fingers lightly touching the spot on my leg where contact had been made. That was close. And it would have, um, really hurt...

Silly me. A few months earlier, I had assumed that rugby would have been enough of an aggression channel for Red Bear (a.k.a Shortcake), my freckled, red-headed, pepperpot of a nine year old daughter. In reality, three hours of rugby each Sunday tended to calm her down for the rest of the day. But by the next day, she was back to normal. Usually sweet, friendly, and confident, but with a serious temper. So...I got her and Lady Lu horseriding lessons. But that wasn't enough, either. Obviously.

What had happened a few minutes earlier was just the latest indication of that. I had kicked the can for the third time in a row, freeing all of Red Bear's prisoners and thus forcing her to to have to count again while we all hid. But in the moment that I ran up and kicked it, the petite warrior queen had let out a primal shriek and let fly with a lightning quick Muay Thai-style roundhouse kick which had landed perilously close to my broncos.

"GEEZ! Red Bear! Control yourself!", I said. "Relax!". I started laughing because it was so unexpected and outrageous (I don't allow any hitting or kicking amongst the kids at all), but really...this sort of thing was getting serious. The explosions (mostly verbal) were fairly regular. She was so full of passion, spark, energy, fearlessness, so possessed by a kind of vivacious drive which would sometimes instantly explode into a kind of fury; it was so much a part of her, that she was going to have to learn how to channel it, control it, direct it. And now was the time. Soccer, rugby, horses, biking, rough play on the trampoline, taking her to the park all the time, nice calm discussions about how to handle frustrations, time-outs, occasionally barking at her when she started to go nuts...all did a little bit, but she needed more. What else could I try?

Hmmmmmmm. Oh. Yes. Of course.

I called the gym the next day.

"Hello, 'Q' Gym, Sarah speaking", said the chipper-sounding girl.

"Hi Sarah. I have a question for you. I have a girl here who I think might like to try Mixed Martial Arts down there".

"Tell me about her", said Sarah.

This is not one word of a lie.

"Well, ummmm...she....". I stammered, and didn't really know where to begin, and then, it just sort of came out: "she...she has red hair".

Sarah started laughing. "Ohhhhhhh. Ha ha ha. A redhead!".

"Yeah. Big-time".

Sarah was still laughing. "I get it, yeah. And I love it. She'll be amazing. I want to work with her!". Thank God. Sarah understands about the red hair, I thought. This sounds promising.

The next Monday (this was the 14th of this month), I showed up at the Q MMA Gym with Red Bear, my seven year old son Sno-Cone, and my four year old son Trixta. Red Bear's hair looked absolutely wild, a huge mass of long, natural curls and waves, containing what seemed like every hue of red it was possible to have: blood red, candy apple red, carrot orange, Creamsicle orange, streaks of sunshine blonde. She looked like she could just have emerged from a cave somewhere in Denmark brandishing a giant sword, ready to join a Viking raid.

We wandered into the gym area after taking our shoes off, and were greeted by Sarah - who herself had reddish hair, and who I found out, had recently been ranked the number one bantamweight female MMA fighter in the world. Wow.

"Okay you guys", she said to the six or seven kids who were already there (we were about fifteen minutes early). "Grab some of those balls over there and start throwing them around. Start trying-" (again, this is not one word of a lie; this is the God's honest truth). She said, "start trying to hit the other kids in the face!".

In that moment, I fell in love with Sarah. Not really, but you know. I'm so sick of control freak school yard monitors telling my kids they're not allowed to throw pine cones, or snowballs, or rugby balls, or dirt clods, or wrestle, or do anything rambunctious, that I felt a surge of intoxicating, almost infatuating, adrenaline. The kids, for their part, seemed absolutely dumbstruck with amazement, like they couldn't believe what they'd just heard. For a split-second, they stared at each other. Then they started laughing and ran on to the mats, grabbing the mini beach balls and hurling them at each other, with a frenzied, wild abandon, laughing still.

This is completely awesome, I thought. Even Trixta was running around laughing, dodging and throwing the balls. And hell...I couldn't help it; I finally jumped in, grabbed a ball, and started playing myself, much to the delight of the kids.

After fifteen minutes of that, class officially started. For the next hour, Sarah led Red Bear, Sno-Cone (Trixta opted out of the official class), and the rest of the class through a series of punching, kicking, ducking and wrestling drills. One wrestling drill was similar to a Sumo match: two kids faced each other and tried to push each other outside the perimeter ring. Trixta and I watched Red Bear push one kid, then another, then another, then another, then another outside the ring. She didn't seem self-conscious or nervous at all. She seemed to really be enjoying herself, even though she was smaller than everyone there, even Sno-Cone, her younger brother. Maybe this will be her thing, I thought.

Time will tell whether Red Bear wants to stick with MMA. But I'll always enjoy the memory of watching her dive in, kick butt, and come out smiling. She is one special girl; and once she learns how to channel her passions, she will be unstoppable at whatever she puts her mind to. I can't wait to see that.

In Search of Consciousness, Part 3

2009-12-23T02:34:00.000-08:00

I want to back up a bit, because I confess the concept of emergence, at least as it is often bandied about, is not entirely clear to me.

As I noted, probably the most uncontroversial definition of emergence is that it describes an exclusively macro scale property of micro scale processes, like the illusory overarching "invisible hand" which seems to efficiently steer a free market economy.

But in this supposedly paradigmatic case, is the invisible hand really an exclusively macro scale property of micro scale processes? It doesn't seem to be, because all that Adam Smith's metaphor is meant to represent is a kind of intelligent volition - but the property of intelligent volition does not exist only at the macro economic level, but inheres in almost all of the miniature economic decisions made by individuals. So, intelligent volition is not an exclusively macro scale property; it is there at every level of economic decision.

Maybe my lack of clarity about this arises from the definition, so what follows is a different definition proposed by Jeffrey Goldstein, a professor at Adelphi University: "the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems".

Well - this is better, I suppose, since it brings in the concept of self-organization. However, I am still not sure how the free market economy possesses "novel" properties, as opposed to simply being the sum total of millions of individual economic decisions by consumers and producers.

Anyway, I could go on for pages on this, so let me put this aside for the moment, and at least explain how I think the term "emergence" should never be used, ever.

Imagine we are in a factory in front of a big machine fed by a conveyor belt. A worker places a lump of coal on the belt, and it enters into the machine. A minute later, out the other end, comes a live rabbit. We have absolutely no clue how any machine could turn a lump of coal into a rabbit, yet we feel pressure to explain it, somehow. Let's say we have reputations to defend...so how tempting would it be for us to simply say, "A-HA - emergence!"? Or rather, come up with some fancy explanation which takes 800 words to just, again, say "emergence"?

Judging from the example of quite a number of consciousness researchers, I would say very. But in the case of the rabbit-making machine, as in the case of consciousness, the term "emergence" is a kind of thought-terminating cliche. It does not explain; on the contrary: it distracts from the fact that we can fathom no explanation at all.

Consider some of the following quotes from consciousness researchers:

"Consciousness is not a property of individual neurons. It is a natural emergent property of the interactions of the neurons in nervous system of the body in an environment. It makes a structure that is related to lower level interactions as well as higher level thoughts, and it represents a new observational mechanism of the entire system" (Baas and Emmeriche, "On Emergence and Explanation", Intellectica, 2, 25, pp. 67 - 83).

John Searle writes:

"Consciousness is a higher-level or emergent property of the brain in the utterly harmless sense of ‘higher-level’ or ‘emergent’ in which solidity is a higher-level emergent property of H2O molecules when they are in a lattice structure (ice), and liquidity is similarly a higher-level emergent property of H2O molecules when they are, roughly speaking, rolling around on each (water)" (From "The Rediscovery of the Mind", p. 14).

Notice that as is typical of characterizations of consciousness as an emergent property, there is simply no attempt by the authors here to explain how such a process could ever occur. We hear from Baas and Emmeriche that consciousness is an "emergent property" of neuronal interaction. Okay. Great. What does that tell us? Actually, nothing. I mean, if we walked out of the factory and soberly announced to all our colleagues that "after careful observation and extensive discussion, we have determined that the explanation for the live rabbits is that they are an 'emergent property' of 'rock-machine interaction'", we'd be laughed at, and rightly so. And I just don't see how John Searle's analogy to water in its liquid and solid form, um, holds any water. What water is to ice, is not what non-consciousness is to consciousness. When water turns to ice, the previously mobile molecules become inert, and thus become bound to neighbouring molecules; i.e., they form (hard) crystalline structures. The water's chemical composition does not change, only the physical expression of that chemical composition: heat the ice, and you'll get liquid again. Heat it more, and the liquid will turn into vapour. Cool it down, it will turn into liquid again, etc.

Needless to say, there is no conceivable way in which consciousness could be like this. All we know - or all we think we know - is that we start with non-conscious stuff, and then, for some reason or other, we wind up with conscious stuff. That isn't the kind of thing that can just be casually whisked away with a water-ice analogy and an "emergence" label. It's a big, fat problem. And I'm not the only one who thinks so:

"‘A motion became a feeling!’ – no phrase that our lips can frame is so devoid of apprehensible meaning...The passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable... Suppose it to have become quite clear that a shock in consciousness and a molecular motion are the subjective and objective faces of the same thing; we continue utterly incapable of uniting the two, so as to conceive that reality of which they are the opposite faces (William James, as quoted in "Consciousness" by Susan Blackmore, pp. 19-20).

"How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of Djin when Aladdin rubbed his lamp" (Thomas Huxley in "Lessons in Elementary Physiology", 1986, p.193).

"How is it possible for conscious states to depend on brain states?...How can technicolour phenomenology arise from soggy grey matter?...How could the aggregation of millions of individually insentient neurons generate subjective awareness?" (Colin McGinn in "Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?", 1989, p. 349).

"The immense richness of the phenomenological world that we experience – conscious experience as such – appears to be dependent on what seems a mere trifle in the skull...Why would a mere location in the brain or the possession of a particular anatomical or biochemical feature make the activity of certain neurons so privileged that it suddenly imbues the possessor of that brain with the flavour of subjective experience, with those elusive properties that philosophers call qualia? This is the central problem of conscious experience" (Edelman & Tononi in "A Universe of Consciousness", 2000, pp. 35, 17).

"The individual cells that compose you are alive, but we now understand life well enough to appreciate that each cell is a mindless mechanism, a largely autonomous microrobot, no more conscious than a yeast cell. The bread dough rising in a bowl in the kitchen is teeming with life, but nothing in the bowl is sentient or aware...(but) you are made of parts that are fundamentally the same sort of thing as those yeast cells...(Daniel Dennett in "Sweet Dreams" , 2006, p.2).

And lastly, this if from John Searle, he of the water-ice analogy:

"The central question in philosophy at the beginning of the twenty-first century is how to give an account of ourselves as apparently conscious, mindful, free, rational, speaking, social, and political agents in a world that science tells us consists entirely of mindless, meaningless, physical particles...How can conscious experiences like your pain exist in a world that is entirely composed of physical particles and how can some physical particles, presumably in your brain cause the mental experiences? (Searle in "Mind", 2004, pp. 11, 4).

We already know Searle's "answer" to this question: emergence, the end. But, at least for me, this answer is embarrassingly inadequate. Its function is identical to that of the words "and then a miracle occurs" in the famous cartoon below:

I gotta go to sleep. More later.

An Opportunity Lost: A Review of "Invictus"

2009-12-20T23:12:00.000-08:00

Can I please run a Hollywood studio?

How could anyone screw up the story of Nelson Mandela achieving the seemingly impossible: uniting South Africa, a nation on the brink of savage civil war, via the 1995 Rugby World Cup? It is one of the most amazing, inspiring, exciting stories of all time, sitting squarely on the nexus between race, class, culture, ethnocentrism, language, politics, individual and collective identity, war and peace, the primal and the transcendent, and a dozen other stirring, difficult themes. How do you make a story like that...boring? And even worse, how do you make a story like that boring when you have all-star Morgan Freeman playing Mandela, and super-stud Matt Damon playing Francois Pienaar, captain of the South African rugby team (the Springboks)? And how do you make it boring when it revolves around the world's most exciting team sport?

Well, there is really only one way to make it boring: go into production with a mediocre script, get a mediocre directing job, and then get a mediocre editing job. Freeman and Damon are great as usual, but their performances can't redeem the other problems. (Damon is curiously underutilized here; he is almost a supporting actor). The result is a six out of ten movie, which - given the real life story behind it - should have been a nine or ten out ten.

I was going to write out a long review here, but I'm almost too upset to do so. The short version is:

1.) The acting performances (minus Freeman's and Damon's) are mediocre.

2.) This picture fails to adequately ram home, concisely and dramatically, what should have been its primary focus points, for example, how and why exactly rugby came to symbolize the apartheid regime in the minds of black South Africans, how it functioned in white (and particularly Afrikaaner) culture, what white fear really felt like and what the stakes for the country really were, etc. Instead, the movie meanders, and hints, and meanders again, and suggests, and meanders yet again, and just doesn't hit those emotional peaks like it should have. It often even relies on character dialogue to try to describe some of these themes, instead of showing them with dramatic scenes.

3.) The All-Blacks Jonah Lomu, in real life, is a 6'5 monster who towered over the opposition. The guy they chose to play him here looks like he's about 5'11 or something. As a result, the visual support of the sub-story line of the Springboks having to stop a one-man wrecking crew suffers.

4.) The script does not make adequately clear beforehand that the grand finale of the movie - the match against the All-Blacks - is actually the World Cup final.

5.) The film takes too much time depicting Mandela as a saint. In fact, the movie seems torn between being a movie which tells the story of how Mandela united the country through the 1995 Rugby World Cup, and being a character study of Nelson Mandela. It does neither particularly successfully, but conceivably would have done a good job of one or the other.

6.) This movie could have used a strong character as an antagonist to Mandela. Instead, Mandela's "foil" was a couple of grumpy black advisers and his sourpuss daughter, who seemed to put up only token protest.

7.) The music chosen is ridiculous, especially the sappy ballad prior to the big game.

8.) The shots of the rugby games were unbelievably fake; the movie didn't even come close to showing the true physicality, brutality, and demands of the game. It looked like everyone was taking it easy on everyone else. Also, how many shots were there looking up from the ground in the scrum? One or two would have been fine - not seven or eight. And why didn't we get to see Damon running with or passing the ball in the games? He's playing the captain of the team - how about we see him leading the charge on the pitch, instead of just shouting at guys after a try is scored? Instead, we see him pushing once in a scrum, with all the other shots involving other guys. Bizarre.

That's probably enough. Yeah, I'm upset. The story behind "Invictus" is epic; the movie based on it should have been epic, too. Instead, it is more or less a snoozer: a mediocre script directed and edited in mediocre fashion, featuring too many mediocre acting performances, resulting in a movie lacking the emotional peaks and valleys that all great movies have. Clint Eastwood was simply not the guy to direct this movie, and they should have used a different screenplay. This was an opportunity lost, for sure.

In Search of Consciousness, Part Two

2009-11-11T15:53:00.000-08:00

If Dennett's ideas (or perhaps better, non-ideas) were ludicrous, what else was there? One I found early on was proposed by Australian National University philosopher David Chalmers. Unusually for an idea published in academic journals, it appeared to have been inspired primarily by LSD and Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" album. But at least if it was spectacularly wrong, it had an element of the spectacular about it.

I find many of Chalmers's ideas unclear, but in a nutshell, he argues for panprotopsychism, the idea that consciousness may exist in the universe without depending at all on anything physical (i.e., it is a "fundamental property" of the universe, like gravity); and further, that it may just find more particular expression when matter comes together in a certain way. Amongst other things, Chalmers says that we are justified in believing that even crude information-processing systems, like thermostats, may be conscious.

The problem, I think, with Chalmers's creative ideas is that they seem unconstrained to the point of being inherently untestable (no doubt why British psychologist Susan Greenfield describes them as "unhelpful"). Somehow or other, we need ideas that empirically can justify belief in them, and I am not sure that conscious thermostats qualify for that. Still, I admire Chalmers for taking consciousness seriously, and for being bold enough to propose such ideas.

Another idea I came across early on was proposed by British philosopher Colin McGinn. Our brains, he says, are the products of evolution. This implies that the brain capacities we have are those which helped our ancestors survive. And because the capacity to answer the question of where consciousness comes from cannot conceivably be of any survival value, McGinn says, we may conclude that our brains simply have not evolved in such a way as to enable us to make any headway on this question, ever. It is simply beyond our capacity, as much so as nuclear physics is forever beyond the mental capacity of an earthworm to understand. In short, human beings will never understand consciousness. (Perhaps as a result of this evidently liberating conclusion, McGinn now spends a lot of time surfing).

This position has been dubbed "mysterianism", and has a few high profile sympathizers (Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker among them). But like Chalmers's position, it seems unhelpful and also doubtful. After all, the human brain obviously possesses high-powered reasoning capacities. Humans have been calculating astronomical distances and orbits for millenia; we devise complex codes and decipher dead languages; we split atoms and create particle colliders and invent computers and create vaccines. We build rockets and fly to the moon. We have already discovered quite a lot about the brain, and there seems to be no reason why we could not in principle understand how consciousness arises. So while I understand that in its common formulation, the question at the core of consciousness research is stupefying, I still can't buy McGinn's conclusion that consciousness is in principle unfathomable to the human mind. It just seems like way too much of a leap.

Anyway, the more I read, the more intrigued I became. I even flew to North Carolina at one point in spring of 2004 partly to chat with Duke philosopher Owen Flanagan, a leading commentator on consciousness. He was surprisingly friendly and even invited me over to his house. We hung out on his back porch chatting for about an hour. (While we chatted, Flanagan's dog came bouncing up with his favourite tennis ball, and I threw it into the woods over and over for him to retrieve...).

But Flanagan, in the end, was as much at a loss to explain how consciousness could arise from non-consciousness, as everyone else was. In fact, I noticed that many commentators, particularly psychologists and neuroscientists (Christof Koch comes to mind), who by temperament and training are far more inclined to producing empirical results, ended up arguing that we ought to continue mapping particular brain functions, like how the auditory or memory system works, instead of sitting around trying to understand where consciousness comes from in the first place. Maybe, the argument went, if we focus on understanding brain functions we already have something of a handle on, eventually the answer to the Big Question will become obvious; in the meantime, let's get some stuff done. A practical enough approach; but the minutiae of how the visuo-motor system works held little appeal to me. It was the dark gap at the heart of everything that intrigued me...

Now, one recurrent claim in the pieces I read was that consciousness was an "emergent" property (John Searle and Michael Gazzaniga come to mind) of the brain. What does this mean? Well...unfortunately - and this is really the problem - it can mean lots of different things.

However, one common understanding of the phrase "emergent property" is that it refers to an exclusively macro scale property of micro scale processes. The free market economy is an oft-used example. Of all the economic systems yet devised, it makes the most efficient use of resources, so much so that the famed Scottish economist Adam Smith once wrote that at the macro level, resources in a free market ecomony seemed to be guided by "an invisible hand", i.e., by a top-down intelligence and power. But in fact, there is no such top-down intelligence or power guiding the free market economy; this is, so the argument goes, a macro-level property emerging from many millions of micro-level economic transactions made by single agents (buyers and sellers), each possessing a very minute amount of information, and who often do not even act particularly rationally (for those interested in this, check out Austrian ecomonist Friedrich von Hayek's work).

This is an immediately appealing example of emergence, because while we all know that buyers and sellers have relatively minute amounts of economic information (as in, this green coat is ten dollars cheaper than that one; therefore, I'll buy this one, the end), we can easily imagine how many millions of data-impoverished economic decisions, in aggregate could produce spectacular macro scale efficiency of resource usage and distribution, and produce the illusion of a super-intelligence guiding the whole system.

Unfortunately, the word "emergence", I found, is also used in very different ways.

More later.

In Search of Consciousness, Part One

2009-11-10T23:40:00.000-08:00

There is a mystery at the heart of all research into the human brain, and it is the mystery of consciousness. How, so the question goes, can a lump of non-conscious grey matter give rise to consciousness?

My own interest in this question began about six years ago, when I went through a period of deep introspection, and ultimately, epiphany, over the religion I was raised in. At one point, I ended up feeling like I could "observe", so to speak, parts of my mind in action which I had never before observed. In particular, I felt like I became aware that my subconscious mind had been filtering out certain evidences, questions, conclusions, and even feelings in a way, which would have caused me severe emotional distress. In a way, I felt like I became able, from some sort of detached state, to observe myself deceiving myself.

Becoming aware of this was very disturbing to me. I had no idea, never having read anything about the psyche, that it had been well established that the subconscious parts of the brain routinely filtered out all sorts of things, keeping them from the conscious parts, both for reasons of functional efficiency and to protect us from emotional distress. Thus, it was something of a revelation to read through a big, expensive book I ordered off of Amazon around that time, entitled "Essential Sources in the Study of Consciousness". This book is a compilation of articles written by top consciousness researchers, and a number of them describe studies showing the subconscious in action - including how it filters information (I was particularly struck by articles by Bruce Mangan and John Kihlstrom, psychologists at UC Berkeley).

Even after I gained clarity on the religious questions which had tormented me, I continued to read about consciousness. I was wading into the topic for the first time, but consciousness, to my mind anyway, is surprisingly alluring to novice investigators. The main reason is that no one, not even the most famous consciousness researchers out there, can give any sort of coherent account of how consciousness might arise from non-conscious brain matter. So...it almost seems like even the novice investigator might be able to solve the mystery.

Here is an example. Tufts philosopher Daniel Dennett wrote a book almost two decades ago now called "Consciousness Explained", in which he takes 500 pages to essentially argue that what we experience as consciousness is but an illusion, and that therefore, there is nothing to explain (perhaps the most brazen example of a non sequitir in the history of science writing). So clearly, if a famous philosopher can claim to have explained consciousness simply by claiming that consciousness is merely an illusion, which of course does not follow at all (the whole point is that regardless of whether we are merely imagining ourselves to be conscious or not, our capacity to imagine itself is the very thing which needs to be explained), then anyone could take a shot; no proposal could possibly be sillier than Dennett's, even though it was taken seriously by many (UC Berkeley philosopher John Searle is one exception, and has written one of the most astute criticisms of Dennett's silly ideas).

I read through dozens of books and articles over the next few years. Chalmers, Baars, McGinn, the Churchlands, Levine, Koch, Searle...I blew hundreds on Amazon. They were all interesting, but in the end, with one or two semi-exceptions, none of them really made sense. Here is why.

Remember that the question is: How can non-conscious matter give rise to consciousness?

Another way of putting this question is as follows:

How can a pile of rocks become conscious? After all, to hear all the consciousness researchers tell it, the brain was made up of matter no more conscious than rocks.

To me, early on, the answer was obvious...

But I am getting ahead of myself.

To be continued.

The One, True Bicycle

2009-10-16T16:28:00.000-07:00

I hate bicycles. Not per se - I just hate all the designs now. Somehow, they just ain't...right.

Bikes all cost a fortune now, and have a million gears, and they have wires all over the place, and strangely-angled bars and freaky grips, and weird little tiny seats, and because there are so many parts, they're always breaking. Mountain bikes are fine for mountain biking, I admit; but what do you do if you just want a normal, straight-ahead bike?

Most people would say, "get a cruiser". Yes, they are somewhat close to a normal bike; the problem is that they are actually more like caricatures of a normal bike. They're usually painted some weird bright colour, often sport weird designs, they have overly large mud guards and handlebars, and a giant seat...So the whole cruiser package just screams, "Ooo, look at me, I'm doing the whole retro-cutesy thing! Woo-hoo! Here I am! Isn't this funny?!". For more modest cyclists, this just won't do. Moreover, if you buy one of those cruisers at Wal-Mart or K-Mart, they fall apart within weeks.

So what does the guy do - a guy like, say, me - who just wants a normal bike, nothing overstated, just a rock-solid, easy to use, durable bike? Well...what you do is, you look for a vintage Raleigh, and then, you get lucky.

That's what I did. I walked into the bike shop a couple of months ago to drop off, yet again, one of my kids's broken pieces of garbage, and...there it was...up on a display shelf about eight feet off the ground: a 1950's, single-speed, black Raleigh, made in England, with the original leather Brooks Brothers seat, in great condition.

Oh my God...! I was mesmerized. I felt like Jodie Foster at the end of Contact: "It's....so.....beau-ti-ful...."

I'd inquired in this shop before about buying display bikes, just in case one ever came in that I wanted. The answer had always been, "they're not for sale". So I wondered to myself what I could do to make this happen...

I actually couldn't think of anything other than to shift my question from, "Are those for sale?" to "How much for that Raleigh?". So that's what I did.

And, perhaps miraculously, it worked. The guy said, "Hm, I don't know. Let me go ask".

He came back a few minutes later and said, "They'd let it go for $200".

I couldn't believe it. Two hundred bucks is only a bit more than the locks cost these days.

"Can I see it?", I said.

The guy got it down. And then, if you can believe it, he said, "It's heavy" (duh). "I can get you into one of these Fishers here for around eighteen hundred bucks. These are awesome! They're made using a new composite blah blah blah...".

I looked at the bike he was describing. Absolutely ridiculous, I thought. No challenge. No character. No vibe. No mojo. Just a weird little piece of nothing, for some weird little dude wearing a weird little spandex butt-wrap and a weird little helmet to use for his weird little fitness cycling. And way too much money.

"This thing here", he said, pointing back at the Raleigh, "you know...it's, uh, it's old...you can get into something way better here...that Trek over there is on sale. It's only $3599 now...".

I didn't want to blow the deal by popping off, so I just asked if I could take the Raleigh out for a spin.

If you have never ridden a vintage Raleigh, it is hard to describe the feeling. For one thing, the front forks are positioned at a different, more out-front angle, than on bikes nowadays, so the steering, and the whole feel of the bike, are quite different. The weight of the bike (it's pure steel) seems to quickly give it a kind of momentum; and the relatively low height of the handlebars, combined with the seat, make it feel almost like you are reclining, though of course you are not.

And the brakes...they have no wires; they're all connected with rods of steel. Rad.

It took me four seconds out on the street, and I was sold.

"I'll take it", I said, coming back into the shop. The guy looked shocked. These punks have no clue, I thought.

I had them put a little leather pouch on the back of the seat, plus a trap, and a little back light; and now, riding this bad boy around Cadboro Bay has become one of the great little thrills of my life. We live close to a school, and the kids and I will sometimes just go ride around it just for the sheer joy of it, or ride down to Pepper's, the grocery store, or to the beach. It's just so much fun to ride, that it almost doesn't matter where we go...so often, we don't go anywhere in particular at all.

We just ride.

A Response to Smile

2009-10-02T16:59:00.000-07:00

In response to my last post, a reader named Smile writes:

"A blanket condemnation of young female sexuality followed by a recommendation of repression kind of bugs me".

I find this comment unfair and irritating. It exaggerates and distorts my comments, and includes what seems to be unthinking assent to the idea that any form of "repression" - whatever exactly is meant by that - is somehow wrong.

So, first things first. I did not offer a "blanket condemnation of young female sexuality". I expressed concern about something specific: the pornogrification, to coin a word, of young female sexuality. That's a big difference, and I do think it will be obvious to 99% of the people who read my post. To repeat, it is not human, or "young female" sexuality I object to, but to a social situation in which, at a formative time of life, a girl's primary sense of identity, purpose, and status derives from how outrageously she puts out. It's like living in a world created by Larry Flynt or a pimp, and it's bad - psychologically, emotionally, and physically - for boys and girls both.

Now, about your comments on "repression"...I am not sure how much I can say, because I am not exactly sure what you mean. This is a big, broad word which you have tossed out, which could refer to all sorts of things, some perfectly acceptable, others foolish, others dangerous.

For example, if one has the inclination to sexually molest children, then I see repression (either through willpower alone or with the aid of castration) as the only acceptable solution. Don't you? If so, then you agree with me that in some circumstances, sexual repression is a good thing, and could hardly condemn me for selectively supporting it. And certainly, there are all sorts of other cases where you would support repression of some kind. If a man is provoked by his girlfriend and wants to hit her, I assume you would encourage him to repress those violent urges. Likewise with dozens of different, destructive urges.

In fact, it is not too much to say that what we mean by the word civilization is no more than the taming, diversion or flat-out repression of certain instincts and desires which, if acted upon, would make society impossible, cruel, or dangerous. So I don't really know why this word should be thought to refer inherently to something bad.

You say my comments bug you. I say that what should bug you is a significant percentage of boys today growing up thinking of girls primarily as sperm receptacles. I think what should bug you is girls running around school dressed like prostitutes and competing with each other in what amounts to a "putting out" contest for the boys. I think what should bug you is citizens paying millions of dollars to support a public school system whose administrators lack the will and the legal or practical ability to enforce order, challenge students and hold them accountable, hire inspiring and purposeful teachers, fire lousy teachers, replace their boring curriculum, and build, deepen, and broaden students's character by inculcating ideals and habits like self-respect, self-discipline, and self-direction.

I mean, on this last point, I gave a guest speech to a high school in Oregon ten years ago, and the whole administration was absolutely petrified that I was going to talk about ethics and morals. Mentioning anything connected to a deity was obviously out of the question. The principal nervously made me promise ahead of time to steer clear of these topics. It was bizarre and chilling - literally like being in the Soviet Union in 1972 or something. I think that should bug you, too.

What should bug you is the equivalent of a million Jodie Fosters in "Taxi Driver", and all the confusion, sorrow, pregnancies, abortions, and everything else, that go with that...

To be continued, I'm sure.

The Porn Generation

2009-09-30T09:18:00.000-07:00

I have long felt disdainful of the enduring habit of nearly all Westerners, on the left and right, of viewing everything through the lens of impending apocalypse. For lefties these days, the world - at least humanity - is about to end in a flash of environmental meltdown and resource scarcity. For righties, especially of a religious bent, culture is always "slouching towards Gomorrah", getting more and more depraved and violent.

While both views contain elements of truth, both rely on simplifications and distortions of very select slices of reality. The world's food and water supply, for example, has never been as clean, safe, and bountiful. At least in America, mega churches continue to thrive, AM radio is saturated with Christian, social conservatism, and family-style entertainment options continue to be widely available.

But I think it is fair to say that in one respect at least, the righties might be on to something. From what I can tell, there seems to be a substantial segment of girls these days, from, say 16 to 26, whose biggest dream in life is to dress, talk, and behave like porn stars. Binge-drinking, wild forays into even the darkest regions of human sexuality, completely loutish behaviour...it has become "normal".

Not so long ago, most high school girls were quite conscious of maintaining their reputations for self-respect, and would feel a sense of mortification if it ever got out that they had "gone too far" with a boy. By contrast, many girls nowadays are keen to build up reputations for just how far they'll go. Sex acts which, literally, would have ruined a girl's high school social life not so long ago, now confer a kind of bizarre status on to her, and are often bragged about by the girls themselves. Forget second base - now it's...well, I won't say it.

I don't have any particular religious beliefs, but this all makes me feel nauseous. Human beings - including teenage girls - are, or certainly can be, multi-faceted. We are more than just sexual impulse, aren't we? And that so many girls seem to have wound up identifying themselves primarily via their ability to whip themselves up into a frenzy of orgiastic insanity so that lunkhead boys can get off on them, seems gross. Why sign up to be no more than a trashy, hyperactive inflatable doll, when you can be a beautiful, intelligent, self-respecting young woman? Somehow or other, Jenna Jameson - not Rosa Parks, or Florence Nightingale, or Uberfrau Ma Walton, or Amelia Earhart - seems to have become the great idol. Jenna Jameson, the porn star whose "achievements" boil down to only be able to do what any ape or dog can do - have sex - has obliterated them all. And yet we all look over at the Muslim lady in the supermarket wearing a veil and think, "The poor soul...brainwashed...what a pity". Yet I cannot see how obsessively trying to put more mileage on to yourself than the space shuttle, and walking around with your butt and thong and bellybutton and bra and boobs hanging out for all to see, and dishing out blow jobs in pub lavatories or school parking lots, is more praiseworthy than the choice of some devoted wife and mother to wear an outward symbol of her religious commitments. Something's gone really wacko here...

I have children in high school, and based on my own observation, I would bet a thousand bucks that most of the students are far more versed in every last aspect of sexual depravity than in Milton, Newton, or Mozart. Kids can go through an entire 12 years of public school these days without ever being forced to learn how to punctuate a sentence, spell correctly, or do rudimentary math. Yet they all emerge fully prepared to direct porno movies. What happened?

When I ask, what happened?, let me be more clear. What happened to self-respect? What happened to self-discipline? What happened to the ideal of education both deepening and broadening our souls? What happened to the moral centre of the education establishment? I don't get it.

In my perfect world, parents and schools would join together to inculcate habits of self-discipline and self-respect in the young. I would absolutely favour schools adopting dress and grooming standards for students (yes, uniforms), and holding children accountable at every stage for their academic performance. In designing curriculum, I would accept the fact that humans will always idolize someone or other, and see to it that those men and women truly worthy of emulation are held up as such.

I would also favour tying educators's salaries to their achievement, instituting vouchers so parents can choose between schools, and apportioning tax dollars for religious schools (as they do in Canada) providing they meet certain standards. And if some school wants to include corporal punishment for designated offences, and the parents are okay with that, then great. Better a smack on the butt than, say, a cuff on the wrist, or more to the point here, a bun in your girlfriend's oven.

Here I've mentioned only a feeling of nausea and disappointment about all this. I haven't mentioned the STDs, the heartbreak, the unwanted children, the abortions, all the practical reasons for trying to institute some sort of order in this area. But I guess that's a topic for another post.

Now this was a great day...

2009-09-27T22:52:00.001-07:00

It is quite rare for me to have "great days" without the kids being involved - in fact I can't remember the last one - but today was one.

Early this morning, I flew from Grand Prairie, Alberta, where I played last night, home to Victoria. I was nervous the whole time because I had lost my keys. I'd ripped my bag apart, the guitar cases, and couldn't find them...and that meant I wouldn't be able to go to the rugby game this afternoon, where I might have a chance of playing (my kit would be locked in the van).

But I finally recalled, sitting in my plane seat, that the last time I had seen my keys, I had almost unthinkingly tossed them into a plastic bin to go through the X-ray machine on the way to Grand Prairie, so I spent all day hoping that when I returned to the Victoria Airport, someone would have found them and turned them in.

And...they had. Wow. Talk about elation. I said goodbye to T. and J. (bass player and drummer), jumped in the van, and headed to one of the most storied rugby pitches in Canada, the James Bay Athletic Association's pitch. I found K. and asked him how numbers were for the Third Division game.

"Low", he said.

Then D. walked past and said, "Where's your kit?". Then I saw C., and he said the same thing. So I thought I would throw my stuff on and play, even though I was pretty fried from the plane travel.

It was an absolutely perfect day, sunny and very warm. I don't know what the official temperature was, but it felt about 78 Farenheit there on the pitch. I played the first 55 minutes at left wing, was then subbed off for ten minutes, and then came on again for K.L. at right wing for the last few minutes.

With each game, I get a bit more comfortable, and a few new things happen. For example, I picked up a kick today and booted it back - first time I've ever attempted a kick. (The arc was low and it hit a big James Bay forward closing in on me square in the chest and bounced right up into the air). I was also in quite a few rucks, as there was lots of play on the perimeter, and got quite a few passes.

I didn't do anything spectacular, but also didn't do anything stupid (that I know of). At some point, I got knocked in the right knee and could barely walk back to the car (it has settled down now). Other than that, everything went okay, though we ended up losing by a hair.

M., the Fijian, had a very good game at fly-half today, with a few spectacular runs, a couple of which ended in tries. I notice he is always quick, and tricky with the ball, and very adventurous, but always seems composed. Actually, a lot of the fellas had very good games.

I came home and showered, and hung out with the kids. I told Sno-Cone and Trixta a Timmy story and a Pizza story, which they both seemed to love (I had them laughing pretty hard during the Pizza story - a little tale about Pizza burning down a restaurant by "accident"), gave Shortcake some medicine and tucked her in, chatted with A-Rock, E, and T-Bone (Tracy is staying here at the moment in a spare bedroom and watched the kids while I was gone).

After the kids were all in bed, Ashton said he would be in charge and I popped down to the rugby clubhouse. To my surprise, it was quite full. A few guys had guitars and everyone was singing. After a few minutes, knowing that I'm a musician, they all started chanting "Tal - Tal - Tal", so I finally obliged and played a few numbers. Actually, I ended up playing piano for about an hour, taking requests. We did "Hey Jude", "Let It Be", a bunch of Bob Marley songs ("Redemption Song", "Is This Love", etc.), "California Dreamin'", "My Girl", and, well, anything anyone suggested really. I actually felt quite shy at first, not being that talented at rugby, but it ended up being pretty hilarious. R. even ended up doing a solo dance while I played "Superstition", which had everyone laughing. He also attempted to sing "TNT" (with me on acoustic guitar), and he was so bad, it sounded instantly legendary.

Afterwards, I hung out and chatted with the two giant young twins from Ontario, L. and C., about football and hockey. I ended up telling them the story of me trying to sing the national anthem at an Islanders home game...I also chatted with T.C., the talented New Zealander outside-half for the Premier squad. The whole while, the lager flowed, and the Fijians did up a batch of kava, their homegrown root beverage which tasted a lot like muddy pond water...

All in all, this rugby thing has turned out to be quite the adventure, and I honestly think I might have gone insane due to all of the emotional turmoil caused by - well, you know, caused by "marital difficulties" - over the past year without it. Never having played a contact sport before (my last stint on any sort of team was when I was fourteen and played baseball), it has really been a challenge in all sorts of ways. But it has really, in a way, been life-changing.

So today was a great day.

Überwindung

2009-09-16T00:41:00.000-07:00

"I don't care who's on the other team", barked S, in his Australian accent. Twenty guys, including me, surrounded him in the locker room. "We gotta (expletive deleted) smash them, hammer them. I want to play on the Premier squad. We have to win this! LET'S (expletive deleted) SMASH THEM! Put your hands in - CW on three - one, two, three, CW!!!"

That was loud, I thought. And...uh...kind of violent. I don't think I belong here...

What was I doing there? It was a question I'd asked myself many times - like when I was at practice a couple of weeks before, and R., the coach, had told us to pick up the man next to us and run fifteen metres, then jump on his back while he carried us back, and then made us do it non-stop for four excruciating five minute segments. Or when, at the same practice, we had to do sequences of push-ups with our same partners lying on our backs. Holy Mother of Gawd what am I doing...?, I began thinking.

But there never really was a clear answer. My best guess was some unconscious, primal need for risk, challenge, danger...some need for overcoming (the Überwindung of Nietzsche). But again, it was a guess. The truth was that I was in the throes of another ultimately inexplicable obsession over which I seemed to have no control, and even though I often felt out of place, never having played rugby before, I couldn't stop.

Anyway, back to the locker room.

I walked out into the blazing sunlight - it was about 85 degrees Farenheit - all suited and taped up for a game which I now realized I had no business playing in. This was last Saturday.

See...A few days earlier, I had gotten an email from the team manager inviting me to come down to the club training and intra-squad game day. It sounded like a good way to get some more fitness in, and more importantly, to get some game time in a fairly friendly atmosphere. After all, it was just an intra-squad scrimmage, playing against all the guys I'd see around the clubhouse, or at touch.

So I showed up at 10:00 AM, and casually passed a ball around with a couple of guys. Then L., the coach, called everyone in, and explained that we were about to do two hours of intensive fitness testing so as to help the coaches evaluate who would play on the top team (the Premier team), and who would be relegated to the team below (the First Division). I didn't even start on the Third Division team last spring, and was nowhere near competing for a slot on even the First Division team, let alone the Premier team.

But I was standing there in my shorts and T-shirt, and I couldn't just leave without looking like a dweeb ten minutes after showing up. So...I decided to try to do all the fitness drills. They included things like sprinting five metres, dropping and doing two push-ups, sprinting ten metres, dropping and doing four push-ups, sprinting ten metres, dropping and doing eight push-ups, sprinting ten metres, dropping and doing sixteen push-ups, sprinting ten metres, dropping and doing two sit-ups, then four, then eight, etc., then a series of squats, etc., for twelve minutes. L. made sure to tell us, after twelve minutes of gasping and gagging, that the rugby league team he helped coach in Australia had been able to do that without any problems at all (thanks). We then moved on to a quick agility, passing, and defensive drill (three on two, then the two without the ball turn around and defend against the next three, etc.).

One of the drills I did step aside for, only because the other guys were familiar with it, and I wasn't, and it looked sort of confusing. By the time I'd figured out the choreography of it, L. had stopped it and we'd moved on.

In any case, we drilled for two hours and then ate lunch, with the recent Springboks versus All-Blacks game playing on the big screen while we ate. And then, around 2 PM, everyone started to get ready for the game.

Well...what I had thought was going to be a friendly intra-squad season-opening warm-up game, in fact turned out to be yet another assessment by the coaches: the Premier squad to play against arch-rivals James Bay next week would be selected based on game performance. So instead of a friendly game, it was an all-out war, the club split in half, each man fighting for a shot at glory, potentially a spot on the national team, and if that, potentially a pro career.

"Hey, uh, R.", I said. "I'm not sure I really belong in this game...I'm not competing for a spot on either team, and I don't really want to get killed". R. said he understood and that he wouldn't put me in.

I'll be honest - there is really no other way to describe what I felt other than fear. Never having played until recently, it still seems foreign...and I felt afraid I'd do something stupid. I felt afraid I might do something to lose the game. I felt afraid of being crushed by some jacked-up lunatic (some of the boys are over three hundred pounds, and some of them have played for the national team and are amazing players). Even deeper than that, I think, is still simply the idea of me, a lifelong musician, even playing the sport. It is just hard to get used to, in a strange sort of way.

But, I watched throughout the first half...and the more I watched, the more the obsession rose within me, until by half-time, I couldn't stop myself. For some reason, I had to.

"R. - I want to go in". What the hell, I rationalized to myself. You only live once.

R. looked surprised. "Okay man. Go in at right wing".

And that is how I wound up playing the whole second half in a game I had no business being in, in any way. And as it happened, it was a total blast.

Just a few seconds after the half started, a guy carrying the ball broke three tackles and hit the gap between myself and the outside-centre, slipping behind me. There was now only eight metres between him and the try line. I whirled around and gave chase, managing to catch his jersey with my finger; and if you can believe it, I managed to stop the guy with just my middle finger and thumb long enough to pull him down, and thus save the try. I then jumped up, got back onside, by which time one of my teammates had completed the tackle and was on top of him, and formed a ruck with a second teammate, driving over. In a flash, the opposing team flooded the ruck trying to drive over us toward our try line, which was only now two metres behind us. I pushed hard and hyperextended my left leg, and ended up buried beneath probably eight guys, all pushing forward and thrashing like spawning salmon.

A penalty was then called ("not releasing"), with a quick break in play, and I must say, it boosted my confidence to hear S., the Australian who had issued the violent speech in the locker room, call out, "Great tackle, Tal!".

As it happened, I was in some pain by that time, but I couldn't stomach coming off the pitch only a minute after I'd gone on. It would have looked completely pathetic. So I took a deep breath and vowed to stay on as long as I could. After a few minutes, my ligament settled down and I felt okay (the next day, Sunday, I could hardly move!).

I got a few carries, one of which brought me face to face with E., a gigantic Pacific Islander (yes, he tackled me). I offloaded and play continued.

I didn't do anything really great - no big hits or anything, no tries, with the try-saving tackle as the only thing approaching an actual contribution - but it was a great thrill to have overcome my initial reluctance, and just get on...There is really no feeling like being in the thick of things on the pitch, bodies flying everywhere, people shouting, giants charging at you, everything depending on split-second decision-making.

That night, we all met at the clubhouse to celebrate. I had a few nice chats with the guys, and also was met with the cry of "Buffalo!" on one occasion, which I was mystified by, until SA said that anyone caught holding his beer in his right hand would arouse such a cry, and the penalty was to drink the beer all at once. Since I'd had no idea, I requested a reprieve. But when I got caught a few minutes later again, I did the sporting thing and finished my beer off.

War, Part II

2009-09-06T19:47:00.000-07:00

"Okay, everyone loaded?", I said.

"Check", said T-Bone.

"Everyone put the anti-fog stuff on their mask?"

"Check".

"Everyone ready for action?"

"Check".

"Good", I said. "We'll make a plan once we get up there".

Ten minutes later, we were up on the first course. It was rough terrain: ravines, hills, lots of trees and fallen timber, shaped like an elongated-diamond, with a tower at each point. The objective was to capture the flag hanging from the enemy team's tower, before your enemy got yours.

The five of us, along with the other twenty or so guys on our team, crowded around our tower, waiting for the horn to sound. The five of us decided to head up the right side. The pressure - all of it self-imposed, of course - was huge. The world is depending on us. We have to get the flag.

The horn sounded and we ran as fast as we could up the heavily treed trail, down the ravine, to the halfway point, along the far right perimeter.

"Hold up", I shouted. We all hid behind trees for a minute to look for snipers. Nothing. Through the trees, we could see the rest of the paintballers 35 or 40 metres away converging on each other in the middle of the course. "Let's move up".

We began to leapfrog each other up the right perimeter, James and A-Rock sticking together in a pair, T-Bone, E, and I moving up about five metres from each other, hiding behind stumps, trees, and rocks. Within about eight minutes of the game starting, we had moved to within fifteen metres of the tower. Three or four of their soldiers were inside. T-Bone and I crouched behind a corrugated tin panel, E behind a tree, A-Rock and James behind a boulder. The tower guards spotted us and began firing out the windows. We tried to pick them off, but it was impossible.

There is a strange phenomenon which has happened to me now many times playing paintball, and which I might as well pause here to describe. The first couple of times it happened, I thought I was imagining things. But it has happened so often now, and has been so unfailingly reliable, that now I am not sure what to make of it at all. It is eery.

When a game begins, there is an initial rush of adrenaline as you run to get into position. You don't know where your enemies are, or what their plans are, and often you don't even know what your teammates are going to do. So you run and try to get as far as you can, and then take cover, and try to get some idea of what is happening as you try to plan your next move. Often seeing what is happening is impossible. You get pinned down so you can't look around, or even if you can, you can't make out where anyone is. But something has happened to me now a bunch of times, as I really focus, and then focus harder, and then focus even harder: at some point in the battle, a sudden silence will descend upon my mind, so that I can no longer hear the shooting or shouts, or even my own thoughts anymore. It is just a sudden, pure, total silence, which comes unexpectedly, and then...

Some voice tells me exactly what to do. Like, "run behind the far left trees and then straight for the base. GO NOW", or "the last defender just left the tower while you were hiding; GO NOW".

I know it sounds crazy, but everytime I've heard it, I've immediately obeyed it, even when it seemed like the command was suicidal; and every time, I've gotten the flag (or otherwise achieved my objective, e.g., secure the tower).

So, back to the game. I was stuck behind the corrugated tin. There was no way to approach the tower; the people inside were still scanning and shooting at everything. I dashed five metres to my left and hid behind a boulder, got a peek, and saw the flag. It was fifteen metres away, and probably six feet out from the tower on a pole. E, A-Rock, T-Bone, James and I were all within five or six metres of each other, all trying to pick off the tower guards, with no progress being made.

And then it happened again; amidst all the shooting and shouting, suddenly everything went stone silent in my head, and the voice came back, the one I hadn't heard since the last time I went paintballing, and it said, "GO IN FIVE SECONDS: five, four, three, two, one, GO NOW AND KEEP SHOOTING". I obeyed it; I leaped out from behind the boulder; to my amazement, just as I emerged, the shooting from the tower lulled unexpectedly. My right hand veered out and I began spraying the tower (which was at about my 2:30) as I ran, leaping over the rocks and logs...and before I knew it, I had the flag.

The boys were thrilled. The Overlords still had Lord Wotan's magical mojo!

"We're going to dominate", said T-Bone. If it is not obvious, it is particularly important to T-Bone, player of many heroic military video games, that we do well in these games.

T-Bone was right. In every one of the first four games, even though there were almost fifty people playing, our small pod of elite commandos captured the flag. E and T-Bone got the next two, and I got the fourth. The referee - obviously not realizing that no matter he did, the Overlords would come out on top and save the universe - shifted the teams around to try to make us more even.

Not being informed of this, we were caught unaware during Game Five and our team lost.

"No excuses. Unacceptable" was our verdict. "Let them have as many as they want...it's like Agincourt! We must redouble our efforts, men!".

The Overlords charged out in Game Six, and once again, one of us (E) captured the flag. Game Seven was the same. We were on a course featuring four linked towers; in between each pair of towers hung the flag; the object was to capture the flag and touch it to the opponent's base camp. At the sound of the horn, I ran immediately up the ramp, through the first tower, through the second, and grabbed the flag; the enemy unleashed a volley, but none hit me. I got back to base and gave the bag to T-Bone. We then ran into the woods along the left perimeter along with eight or nine teammates, me covering him. And there, we all got pinned down. Our opponents captured the middle of the course, and then came up behind. Unfortunately, we couldn't run forward toward their camp because there were three guys there shooting back at us. One by one, our teammates were getting picked off, and we were getting squeezed. It is hard to describe the feeling of being behind a barricade with three other people, and then over the course of just a minute or two, they all get nailed...and most of the time, you can't even figure out where the paintballs came from.

T-Bone finally got hit. That left E, me, two girls, and as I found out later, A-Rock. The two girls got hit. Six or seven enemies were trying to come from behind; somehow Ashton managed to hold them off all by himself, about twenty feet behind us. I shouted at E to grab the backpack and get down. We were in deep trouble. Then E said, "I'm out of paintballs".

Oh no. We had to do something...we were getting bombarded and there were only three of us left, against at least fifteen of them. I peeked out and saw I had an open shot at someone in the fort underneath the tower. Two shots, direct hits, and he was down...and then, with only a minute or two to go in the game...it happened again.

The voice said, "RIGHT NOW is your only chance. The men just left the base. GO NOW".

It was hard to believe they had left the base - they had been there the whole game - but I jumped out anyway and yelled "RUN BEHIND ME" to E. Just to make sure, I pulled him as I ran past him. And eery as it may sound, it happened again; just as we made our break, there was a sudden lull in the firing, as if all of our enemies had ducked down at the same time. That was fortunate, because we had to run half the length of the entire course to make it to base. And if you can believe it, after enduring all that bombardment for the previous thirteen minutes, we made it to base I think without a single shot being fired at us. We'd caught everyone unawares...and no one could believe we'd ended up winning that one.

The day ended around 4 PM. We had played ten games. Our teams won eight of the ten. In seven out of the eight, though there had been 45 or 50 guys playing, many of whom were competitive paintball players, it had been one of us who had won the game.

"Dad! We completely dominated!" said T-Bone, over and over again.

"We won almost every game", said E. "It's like we're magic!"

And the whole way home, we talked and recounted episodes from the battles, and gave ourselves permission to imagine that we really were elite soldiers of preternatural intuition, smarts, and courage, and that we really would have dominated in real battle a hundred, or a thousand, or seven thousand years ago. And I have to admit - it felt pretty good. The Overlords had saved the world again...

War

2009-08-31T23:56:00.000-07:00

"Dad, wake up".

I jolted upright and glanced at the clock. 7:50 AM. My alarm hadn't gone off. What the...? T-Bone, my fourteen year old son, stood in front of me, wearing the genuine US Army camouflage jacket we'd picked from a buddy who frequents military supply auctions.

Twenty minutes later, T-Bone, E (just turned thirteen), A-Rock (sixteen), and A-Rock's buddy James (all decked out in camo) were in the van. Lots of excited chit-chat...but underneath it all, there was an undercurrent of tension. We were all thinking it (except James, not prone to Bachmanian flights of dramatic fancy)...it just hadn't been brought into the open yet.

We are elite. We are the Overlords. We have a reputation to defend. We have a war to win; and winning it is up to us, and only us. If we fail, our whole team fails. If we succeed, our whole team succeeds. It is break or be broken now...and we will break them.

By 9:15 AM, after a McDonald's breakfast, we'd arrived at TNT Paintball, a half hour outside of Victoria. I'd called ahead - a group of 40 kids and parents were coming, plus a couple of dozen more drop ins. We were the first ones there.

"This is good", I said, as we picked out a corner of the barracks. "It gives us time to get in the zone. Like the Spartans at Thermopylae the night before the final battle, when they were all washing up and polishing their armour, focused and calm".

"Hey Dad", E piped up. "Did you know there's no evidence that Ephialtes the herdsman actually betrayed the Spartans and showed the Persians where the mountain pass was, or that he even existed?"

Not again, not E and his weird tangents. "What do you want, a videotape?", I shot back. "It was two and half millenia ago, and the Greeks have been talking about it ever since. That's probably as much proof as you could hope for. Anyway, let's focus".

This was serious, after all. We had been three times before. And each time, we - the four or five of us - had completely dominated, even over the 20-something-year-old ringers who go all the time and have all their own gear. I had even called ahead to alert the ref that we all needed to be on the same team.

"We're an elite squad of commandos", I explained.

"Oh yeah?", said the guy.

"Yeah. We don't split up".

"Well, how many people in your party?"

"Five. Myself plus a thirteen, fourteen, and sixteen year old. And my sixteen year old's buddy", I said.

"Gotcha". He sounded like he was about to laugh. Laugh at the Overlords? We were superheroes about to save the freaking universe! "Well, sure you can be on the same team", he said.

(More to come).

Ghosts of an Ancient Past

2009-08-28T13:05:00.000-07:00

I'll be honest - I want to meet my ancestors.

I wonder who they were, what they looked like, how they lived, and what physical or personality traits (due to genetics, that is) we share.

And it is a funny thing...in addition to German, I have Scottish and Ukrainian ancestry, but I feel no affinity with those lines. Like, nothing. I feel as "Ukrainian" as I do Aztec, as Scottish as I do Maori. There is just nothing there, even when I try to make myself feel some resonance...

For some reason, I only feel German, and only ever have. Maybe it is because my grandpa - whose parents immigrated to Canada from the Magdeburg area - was a practical, sensible man; the world seemed to make sense when he would talk. But I have no clue.

What I do know is that - I don't know how to explain this exactly - I feel like I have glimpses inside of me, and they all seem to be set in northern Europe. They include fires at night, chilly temperatures, a certain kind of piny, smoky scent in the cool air, northern skies and constellations, Germanic sounding words, beautiful long songs, and stories, and hard decisions, and furs, and forests which look just like those I've seen in that part of the world...and the glimpses seem to come from a long, long time ago.

One part of the emotional content of those glimpses is the feeling that the world makes sense. For a fleeting moment, I can see and smell and feel something...feel that I loved and was loved; protected and was protected; respected, and was respected back; and the animals and forests and stars, and my people, all fit together. I understand it all...

Another part is a feeling of vigilance, a kind of enervating fear if you like - of predators, human or animals, who might harm those I am responsible for protecting. Another part is some sense of heroism or glory...And I have a woman, a wife, who is all mine, and I'd give my life for her...and we have children.

Do I sound mad? I am not worried if I do, for I feel that I have no control over those glimpses. They are just part of who I am, and who I have always been, and I cannot make them go away. So mad or not, it doesn't matter.

The truth is...I don't know what to make of these glimpses. They seem real, but I suppose, cannot be...They come to me far more often than I would ever wish to admit to; and the truth is, if I could, I would go to that place, and stay there. But I can't.

Vanity and Morality, Part One

2009-08-11T22:46:00.000-07:00

It is easy, in the comfort of our own living rooms, to imagine ourselves to be of incorruptible integrity. We would never take a bribe to allow something illegal or evil to occur. We would never stab a friend in the back for our own gain. We would never lie or cheat or steal, maim or kill. We would never take money to injure someone, or work as prostitutes, or allow someone "to treat us that way".

The truth is that we are very fortunate to be able to indulge in such flattering delusions. Most of us live in rich, stable democracies, where we take the rule of law for granted. For us, "hunger" is when we decide to go on our trendy "cleansing fast" for a day, which we then proudly tell everyone about, rather than the involuntary, prolonged, health-destroying agony that it is for millions of others. Many of us are treated pretty fairly at work, and receive fair compensation for our labour. The desperate situations that so many of our fellow human beings have existed in are almost unimaginable to us.

Put us in those dire, desperate circumstances...massively circumscribe our choices... inflict pain on us, or on those we love...and what would we do? Use your imagination, and you will find that there are actually very few "bad things" that you would not do, given certain variables. In fact, you will even find that in extreme situations, many of those bad things begin to appear very much like good things.

Say your child is kidnapped. You live in an area of the world where the police are corrupt and will not help you. You and your friends then are able to capture the kidnapper, who will not tell you where he is keeping your child. Each hour he does not tell, is another hour in which your child may suffer or perish - from hunger, from an assault by others, etc. What do you?

You - to use the technically precise term - torture. You tie him up, beat him, put a Bic lighter to his arm, break his kneecaps, waterboard him. Whatever. You do what it takes to save your child.

In that situation, your choices were radically circumscribed. The kidnapper would not reveal the whereabouts of your child without being tortured. So, the result of refusing to torture the kidnapper would be that you allow your child to be tortured and probably murdered. The result of torturing the kidnapper is that you protect your child from torture and probable murder. Either way, you are at least facilitating torture. So your choice boils down to, which one of these two people gets tortured?

It is remarkable that there are people out there so detached from reality, that they would listen to this little hypothetical and say something like: "The ends don't justify the means" (which certainly in this case qualifies as a thought-terminating cliche); or "There would have to be a better way than torture...".

No, in fact, sometimes, there are no better ways. That's the point. You live in Vermont or Queensland, not in a village in Africa where your child actually was kidnapped by some warlord's henchman. What if you did?

Once we get going, it becomes easy to imagine situations in which we would steal food, push people off bridges, lie, bribe, take bribes, prostitute ourselves, all sorts of rotten things.

Here's another example. You're a cop in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Your annual salary is $1500 (that is actually the average annual wage for a Mexican policeman). One day, a representative from a notorious drug gang contacts you. He tells you that he will pay you $10,000 a year if you simply turn a blind eye to what happens at a certain cantina. If you refuse to cooperate, you will be murdered. You have a wife and kids at home. You want to live. You're also getting a pittance, risking your life trying to enforce the law, when you know that the same drug lords have high-ranking politicians all through the government, and other cops, on their payroll, too. In short, there is nothing, on your own, that you can do to stop the drug gang. You don't know if your own police chief is also on the take; if you report this to him, who knows if he won't tell the gangmembers, and they'll kill you?

In this case, which is the real-life choice faced by quite a number of Mexican cops right now, what choice do you have? And what do you say if your contact one day says to you, "I need you to take this bag to la farmacia and give it to 'Roberto'"? Do you say no?

Say no, and you die, only to be replaced by someone who will say yes anyway.

Say yes, and you survive, and are able to buy your wife pretty things, and give your children more opportunities. Say yes, and you can at least try to compensate for your own corruption by doing good in other ways. Say yes, and rise through the ranks...maybe one day you'll have the power to stop the very sort of corruption which you've been involved in. Say yes, and maybe you can save up and move to America, where such corruption is rarer. But if you say yes, you're a bribe-taker, a drug runner, and you are now protecting an organization which tortures and murders people.

Your conscience says, "If all of us stood up and said 'no' to these thugs, we could defeat them". The problem is that you live in a real world, and that will not happen. There's no way to make it happen. It is just not going to happen. In this real-life situation, the cost of idealism is death.

What do you do?

A Glimpse of Heaven

2009-06-20T08:01:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday, I got a glimpse of heaven.

I got up early and fixed up all the family bikes - filled up tires, tightened brakes, replaced chains, etc. - and then my youngest six kids and I rode from Cadboro Bay, where we live, over to Oak Bay (the next bay down). It was really something to see them all lined up riding down the road, especially little four-year-old Trixta (hip-hop name) riding his little bike, his legs pumping furiously since his wheels are only like twelve inches in diameter.

We first rode down to Cadboro Bay Village and then made it up the hilly Cadboro Bay Road, crossing over on to Beach Drive through the large "Uplands" pillars. Uplands is a beautiful neighbourhood, full of big houses and manicured, landscaped lawns, and is on a small bluff overlooking the ocean (and at one point, the Oak Bay Yacht Club). Even our one mishap turned out great - T-Bone got a flat tire, and I had to call Spoiler (my brother) to come help us. We threw a rugby ball around on a small piece of grass bordering the sidewalk as we waited. Spoiler finally showed up in his big old GMC pick-up - a bizarre site in that neighbourhood - and proceeded to drive right over the curb and sidewalk toward us. We attached the aerosol tire-filler thing he brought to T-Bone's wheel, but to no avail - we finally just threw his bike in the back of the pick-up, and the other kids and I continued riding, and met up with Spoiler and T-Bone at Willows Beach. After a game of touch rugby on the grass, we all slipped down to the beach and had a rock throwing contest, and then headed up to Willows Galley, the local fish and chip shop.

Of course, my two oldest sons weren't there; they're off now with friends and girlfriends most of the time. It would have been fun if they had been, but then, they are all but out of the nest now. What I did regret was that Mommy wasn't there...but I guess a discussion of that is beyond the scope of this entry.

It has been a long time since I saw the kids as happy as I saw them on our ride. I guess it was something about all being together, and all experiencing so much pleasant sensory input: the big blue sunny sky, the popping flowers all around, the smell of the ocean and trees and blooms, the feeling of freedom on the bikes, the thrill of novelty (since we had never taken this trip before), the feeling of satisfaction at being able to overcome a challenge, the delicious fish and chips at Willows Galley...the whole experience, simple as it was, made a deep impression, and the kids have been talking about it for the last week.

In life, it is the simple pleasures which count. Being with those you care about, and who care about you, communicating with them, laughing with them, experiencing the world and each other in new ways...those are the moments which remain with me always...those are the moments I cherish most.

Why Does Leonardo DiCaprio Keep Getting the Shaft?

2009-04-13T11:58:00.000-07:00

I'm preaching the Hollywood gospel here. Today's topic is Hollywood leading men.
Tom Cruise is a bizarre, control-freak twerp. Nicolas Cage is an embarrassment. Ben Affleck has poisoned his career by becoming a disgusting tabloid figure. Matt Damon has played his cards right and been in some great movies, but has been rewarded by the Oscar committee. What I don't get is, why hasn't Leonardo DiCaprio gotten an Oscar yet?

Leonardo DiCaprio, with the possible exception of his role in the saccharine monument to James Cameron's vanity that is "Titanic", has been great in everything. He was great in "Gilbert Grape", great in "The Departed", great in "Catch Me If You Can", great in "The Blood Diamond"....he's always great. Where is his Oscar?

DiCaprio's performances have been all the more remarkable for their range; yet for some reason...he's not getting the love from the establishment.

What's up with that?

Estranged

2009-04-12T02:37:00.001-07:00

I've been waiting for something to strike me here for a couple of weeks, and nothing has. I don't know what to write about anymore.

I did have a rugby game today - a playoff game in fact, against Velox at Windsor Park in Oak Bay. But as a newbie, I only played a few minutes. No carries, one tackle. I hung out at the Castaway Wanderers clubhouse this evening, chatting - that was fun.

But overall, I don't know what to say anymore, and even though I feel that familiar awe as the earth comes back to life, and am having a great time with rugby, I feel a sort of emptiness inside, and it never quite goes away.

Perhaps seeking out religion is one way of coping with that for some people; but then, I always felt that emptiness as a devout religionist, too. Maybe it is something about me, some flaw which can never really be repaired.

I feel - and have felt for a very long time - as though there is a part of me which isn't really here, or doesn't really belong here (here being, wherever I am). And I drive around sometimes, like I used to do in White Rock, where I went to high school, realizing that while everything around seems familiar, everything feels foreign, too, in some way I can't describe. But I can never figure out why, and I never hear anyone else say such things, and I don't know what to make of it. It is as though I am always outside myself.

The E Update

2009-04-01T01:46:00.000-07:00

Long-time blog readers will know that my 12 year old son, nicknamed "E" (also known as Skinny Dip) switched from soccer to rugby last summer. I was disappointed at the time - we had put a lot of time and effort into helping him pursue his soccer dreams - but things are going very well. And in fact, I've found his efforts pretty inspirational.

You see, E is the youngest, shortest, and skinniest boy on his team - and probably in the entire league - and yet seems entirely unaffected by this. Putting it another way, playing rugby is like running around in the middle of a wildebeest stampede knowing that you will be trampled; it can be intimidating, even when you're the same size as the wildebeests. But what about when they're twice as big?(Compare his size to that of others especially in the top right photo here). Despite the massive size difference, E - in other ways, an extremely high-strung and at times fearful boy - plays rugby with the cool, determined confidence of a boy twice his size.

And it wasn't that long ago that I stood watching him grab the ball and start running, and then being piled on in the ruck, that I thought, "If he can do it, I can do it". And the next week, I did.

So, good on you, E. Ten points for bravery!

Live from Powell River

2009-03-26T01:33:00.000-07:00

I was falling...blissful sleep dangled before my closed eyes...and it kept happening. I had my ear plugs in, but I could hear a faint murmur from the back of the bus; and then, about every fifty or so seconds, the murmur would explode:

"PWAAA-HA-HA-HA-HARR-HARR-OOOO-YEAH!-HAHAHA-ARRR-(COUGH)-HAAA". And I'd wake up again.

It sounded like I was on a 17th century pirate ship. In fact, I was on the bus traveling up to Powell River, BC, to play in my second ever rugby game.

Powell River is a long way - a five hour trip each way. No wonder numbers were low. Only fourteen guys showed up, and of those, five or six were Premier League players. That's the top rugby league in town. They'd been called in to help out; the Castaway Wanderers Third Division team is brand new, after all. I suppose it will take a bit of time for things to establish themselves, including consistent attendance.

Anyway, I did finally doze off. Which was good, since I'd only gotten to bed around 2:30 the night before, and I had to wake up at 6 to catch the team bus. While I was awake, I ended up chatting with Alex - a studious chap for a rugby player - about artificial intelligence and the possibility of machine consciousness, and also with a few other guys.

Fortunately, Powell River agreed to play us fourteen on fourteen. I was at right wing again, and was fortunate to get a lot more carries than in my first game. I didn't score, but I'm getting the hang of things, and that's exciting. In fact, in the Powell River game, it felt like I was playing in an actual rugby game, rather than it feeling like I had just dropped acid and was on some sort of surreal slow-motion trip, which is how I felt in my first game. So, that was good, and once again, all the guys helped out.

Unfortunately, we lost the game due to a young Powell River player, a Fijian, who was able to break through the line and score, I think, four tries. Pity.

But...the frustration didn't last long. We got back to the clubhouse, showered, dressed, and then were treated to a great dinner by Powell River, replete with a drinking contest between four of the players, a few jolly speeches, and a lot of laughs. One thing that got a lot of laughs was this. Someone said to me, "Hey - didn't you win a Juno?".

"Yeah, two actually", I mumbled.

"You seem pretty casual about that", the guy said.

And I was totally serious when I replied, "I'd be a lot more excited if I scored a couple of tries".

For whatever reason, the entire table erupted in laughter, and the little exchange was repeated a few times on the bus home for the benefit of those who hadn't heard it. I can't explain why, but I really would be a lot more excited to score a couple of tries...!

Ah, the ride home. That was something.

You see, someone ran to the liquor store and bought an entire crate of beer as we were in line for the ferry...and, well, long story short is, the ride home made the ride there seem like a prayer meeting. Things got louder and louder, more and more raucous and frenzied, and for the last two hours, I played guitar while a bunch of the boys sang as loudly as they could: Beatles songs, Tom Petty songs, Stone Temple Pilots songs, Chili Peppers songs, Neil Young songs, dozens and dozens of songs.

Playing rugby seems to the closest thing readily available to actually joining the army and getting shot at together (always a bonding experience). Quite the experience so far.

Just keeping a log of my rugby games,

T.

Seals, Fish, Cows - What's the Difference?

2009-03-24T00:24:00.000-07:00

The seal hunt started today, and all the usual people have started their annual freakout. The European Union, for example, is up in arms about the seal hunt and wants to shut it down permanently. It is now reportedly considering banning the sale of seal products in protest.

Young seals are killed traditionally by the Inuit peoples of the arctic with a single whack to the head - the same way that fishermen usually kill fish. A single gunshot is now the mode of choice for seals. Either way, what is more "brutal" about a whack or a bullet, than about the mode of slaughter in your local slaughterhouse - the place where they slash the throats out of dozens of cows a day? If anything, the seal hunt is far more humane.

For the EU to be consistent, it needs to ban all meat-eating. Yet the French are still eating foie gras, the Belgians are still eating frog legs, and the Germans are still eating sausage. How does that make sense? How do EU bureaucrats think that the ducks, frogs, and pigs they eat get from the state of being alive, to the state of being dead, except via being killed? It's bizarre. The guys at the EU are probably eating chicken for dinner right now, with no sense of hypocrisy at all.

As if that wasn't enough, amigos, the EU is the same organization which has continued to allow BULLFIGHTING in Spain! Why, how could they ever ban bullfighting, when it's part of Spain's "cultural heritage"? Yet the fact that the seal hunt has been a primary pillar of Inuit culture in Canada for tens of thousands of years, and maritime culture for hundreds, means nothing to these pampered snobs. It doesn't matter even that the Inuit literally utilize every part of the seal it is possible to utilize: bones, fat, eyes, meat, organs, everything, or that the maritimers also try to sell as much of the seal as possible. It also doesn't matter to the protesters that the seal population, if left unchecked, would decimate fish stocks, and then probably start dying of starvation. No - all that matters is that young seals are cuter than fat old bulls, sheep, ducks, turkeys, geese, frogs, snails, cows, goats, salmon, cod, herring, and every other living creature that EU bureaucrats, and 90% of the rest of the protesters, eat.

Killing a seal for food is no different in principle than killing a duck, deer, or moose for food. Unless the activists are also calling for a total ban on carnivorousness, their position is incoherent.

And if they are calling for the end of carnivorousness...well, that is a subject for another blog entry.

Special Olympics Bowling

2009-03-21T03:26:00.000-07:00

So Barack Obama is getting crucified today because the other night on the Jay Leno Show, he said, in referring to his inability to bowl, that it was "like Special Olympics or something".

I don't understand the world anymore. It's like the most popular pastime out there is waiting around trying to see or hear something to get offended by, after which the challenge is to make the biggest fuss possible about the offense. And if you can somehow launch a lawsuit over your wounded feelings, even better. Meanwhile, the offender has to grovel and bootlick until the offended party announces that enough is enough. It's like some weird perverted master-slave ritual which people now participate in, unquestioningly, instantly.

One of the all-time classic idiotic examples of this came a few years ago, when a (white) comptroller for the city of Washington, D.C. used the adjective "niggardly", and was forced to resign his job because of the word's similarity to the "n word". That "niggardly" is an ancient word, probably of Old Norse origin, which has no relationship whatsoever to the corrupted Spanish word for black ("negro") which is the "n word", was too complicated a fact for many of the offended to understand.

Anyway, I don't know why the Special Olympics people had to freak out over a stupid joke. If I were the president of that organization, I think I would have said, in the best of humour, "President Obama has thrown the gauntlet down, so I want to formally invite him to stand up to his challenge, and to compete in a charity bowling tournament against some of our Special athletes. President Obama, you name the day!". And Obama couldn't refuse without looking like a total dweeb. And that way, the organization gets tons of publicity, MONEY, public support, and they don't look like just another pack of whiners waiting around to feel offended.

Just my two cents,

Tal

Live from the Pigpen

2009-03-04T02:59:00.000-08:00

The referee blew the whistle. Line-out to Castaway Wanderers.

Quickly, the Castaway Wanderers lined up against the Cowichan Piggies (yes, that is their name - you'll find out why below), waiting for the throw-in, over on the right side of the field. I stood a few metres behind Chris, the scrum-half, wearing a Castaway Wanderers jersey like the rest of my brand new teammates, having just run on to the pitch to play in my first rugby game ever.

A lot of things could happen now, I thought. One thing that could happen is that the Piggies could steal the line-out throw, charge past the players in front of me, and then en masse trample me. The hulking Cowichan forwards made that seem like an awfully painful prospect. Another, more likely, thing, would be for Chris to get the ball and pass it left, away from me.

Just then, the line-out throw came in, and play started. Holy cow...this is it. Chris got the ball and began running forwards and to the right. I ran about eight feet to his right, and two steps behind...and as there was no play to his left, and I was the only person to his right, I knew in a split-second that I was going to get a pass - three seconds after I'd stepped into a game for the very first time.

Chris glanced as he was running and tossed it over. It was behind me, as it happened, but I was able to reach back with my left hand as I was running and grab it, reeling it in. Thank God. Two steps later, I was at full-speed, determined to break as many tackles as I could before being crushed by the brutes in black and green jerseys now closing in on me (the Castaway Wanderers jerseys are black, blue, and red).

I pushed off the first would-be tackler and kept running. Another guy was running full speed at me from a diagonal angle (from my 10:30 on the clock). I stopped on a dime and he flew past me. And in that split-second, I sensed the possibility of glory...while the horde was closing in fast, there was only guy directly ahead of me. Other than him, there were fifty metres of open space (actually, open mud, hence the pitch's name: "The Pigpen", and the name of the Cowichan team, the Piggies) to the try line. The second tackler now flying past two feet in front of me unable to stop, I took an accelerating step, determined to beat the last guy - when some guy I never saw coming flattened me from behind (from about 5 o'clock). And as he did so, he punched the ball out of my right arm. ARG. Knock-on (the ball went forward). The ref blew the whistle and the ball was turned over to Cowichan.

That all happened in my first ten seconds of my first rugby game last Sunday (I was at right-wing, the number fourteen position). We ended up losing the game, but it was great to finally be able to play in a game, and I really appreciated the support from the other guys on the team.

I became very keenly aware of just how much more muscle mass I need after my eighty minutes on the pitch...I'm fit enough, but lithe, and my focus now is getting muscular bulk as quickly as possible, so that next time I step on to a pitch, I don't get killed. Surviving would be really cool (and for some reason I can't explain, not playing again is not an option).

Sunday night, my brother and I popped into a local pub where a bunch of the guys from one of the more elite Castaway Wanderers teams were hanging out. I got to talking to one guy, and he said, "it's exciting, isn't it? It's kill or be killed".

And I guess this would be the time to ramble into some deep insight about the primal thrill of risk for some sense of personal achievement, or some glory...but I'm not really sure the sheer joy of getting your head kicked in running around in a mudpit can translate into words. So...I think I'll just end it here. Looks my amateur rugby career has officially begun :)

Where Did We Come From?

2009-02-11T04:23:00.000-08:00

For most of my life (as a believing Mormon), I was under the impression that humans had spirits, and that those spirits came from some sort of sexual union between Heavenly Father and one of his innumerable polygamous wives, up where they lived, near a star called "Kolob".

How Kolobian reproduction exactly occurred was never really specified by Mormon leaders; the process was especially mysterious since Mormon doctrine states that God and his wives have "bodies of flesh and bone" - so one question always was, how do perfected human beings, with bodies of flesh and bone, sire children who don't have flesh and bone, and who are only some sort of barely material spirit? Hm...

Anyway, to make a long story short, I no longer find KSRT (Kolobian Spirit Reproduction Theory) plausible. I don't really find any religious answer to this question plausible. So the question is, where does human life - or life in general - really come from?

The answer is, no one has a clue. No one has ever come even remotely close to showing, let alone plausibly arguing, how life can emerge from non-life. The once-vaunted Stanley Miller experiments have long been recognized as pretty much useless...there are hazy suggestions about lightning striking a pond, or oceanic vents, or volcanoes, and even life showing up here on a comet from another planet (known as the "panspermia" theory). But no one can explain how the vital equivalent of a bunch of rocks could somehow become alive; and not just alive, but in that moment, posessing some kind of will to keep on living, and some desire to reproduce, and some ability to reproduce. And in fact, the very idea seems at least as absurd as the one I began this entry mentioning.

I don't like this. I'd like to know where we - where I - came from. Where, how, did it all begin?

Nanny 911

2009-02-06T11:05:00.000-08:00

If you haven't seen it yet, "Nanny 911" is a reality show featuring British nannies who spend a week with a family with unruly children, trying to bring order to things.

It is absolutely amazing to me how clueless the parents are in this show. In some cases, the dad is the clueless one; in others, the mom. Often it is both. Peering in to these homes is like watching hell on earth: kids shrieking, smashing things, biting, kicking, and parents acting, in many cases, far less intelligently than their own toddlers.

What's funny is my kids will sit and watch this show for hours. They've never seen kids like that. We even ended up making up our own "Nanny 911" game, where I roll up a newspaper (so it's sort of floppy), and then I start snarling and drawling with a Bible Belt twang like the clueless parents on the show, and the kids start running around screaming, and I run after them trying to swat them with the rolled up newspaper. The cool thing is that because it's loosely rolled, it doesn't hurt at all, but it does make a giant "thwack!" sound. And the more I run after them, the more they scream and run around laughing and pretending to be the outrageous brats on the actual TV show.

I am not, and never have been, really capable of understanding why any adult would allow a three year old to bite them, kick them, and in effect, completely dominate them. Why have kids if you're going to have a miserable time with them? Why become a slave to anyone, let alone a three year old? The whole point of having children is to have a great time with them, establish and enjoy those intimate bonds of love and connection with them, and prepare them for responsible adulthood. That preparation means having fair, sensible expectations, articulating them effectively, and then holding children accountable for their decisions. My previous two sentences are really the whole key to parenting, I think.

Anyway, maybe I shouldn't judge the parents on "Nanny 911". No doubt they are doing the best they can...still, I just don't...get it.

Go Cardinals

2009-01-31T14:42:00.000-08:00

I grew up following the NFL during the era of Terry Bradshaw, Franco Harris, and Lynn Swann. The Steelers of the late 70's, early 80's, were big, bad, mean, uncompromising...and while I was keenly aware of the spell that they cast on so many people around the country, I never fell victim to it for some reason. Maybe it was because I was way out west, in Washington state, excited by the upstart Seahawks - Pittsburgh seemed like a long ways away. I was more into Jim Zorn, Steve Largent, and Steve Raible.

Even so, I was never really blown away by anyone I saw, until many years later when Kurt Warner - fresh from his job bagging groceries - exploded on to the scene as the Rams's starting QB. I'd watched Staubach, Bradshaw, Plunkett, Montana, Young...but I'd never seen any quarterback with as much total composure, as much peaceful intensity, as Warner. That was inspiring. I'd gotten married very young, and with small children and a young immigrant wife, I often felt a lot of pressure - felt often that there were a lot of problems and crises I had to solve or everything would fall apart - and I suppose that a part of me liked to imagine that I had a fraction of the same composure and wherewithal that I saw in Warner. And, I aimed to get more of it.

Now here we are, in 2009, years after we all thought we'd seen the last of Warner, on the eve of his third Super Bowl, and yeah, I am totally rooting for the Cardinals. It's not just my admiration of Warner's unique poise; Cardinals's coach Ken Whisenhunt, in my view, got the shaft being passed over by the Steeler's organization (no disrespect to Steeler's coach Mike Tomlin), and it would be nice to see him get some revenge. But maybe more is that people have dissed the Cardinals's for so long...and the media love affair with the Steelers is so intense...and the Cardinals are out here, out west...and that Warner and I are close in age...it'd be really cool to see the underdogs bring their A game and win.

My guess is that we will see the Cardinals pretty much go with what got them where they are: a lot of passing. I also think they'll use Fitzgerald as a decoy to get a lot of shorter passing options. I expect the Steelers to come out very aggressively offensively, but I also expect the Cardinal defence to be prepared for that.

Prediction: 38-27 Cardinals.

Go Cards!

Comments on "Lost"

2009-01-27T23:26:00.001-08:00

1.) Can someone remind me of what Jack has ever done? How did that spaz ever get to be the "leader" of anyone? I don't get it. He's the most irritating character on the whole show, and maybe, on TV right now.

2.) Does anyone else keep thinking that we're going to find out eventually that Ben is actually a good guy?

3.) When do we get to see the charming Claire again?

4.) Who else thinks Sun is up to something sinister?

5.) Why couldn't Hurley have just said no to Ben, instead of giving himself up to the police, especially after AnnaLucia told him to not get arrested?

6.) I think Jin's still alive...

Add comments or questions below.

Ten Mediocre Things

2009-01-27T00:09:00.000-08:00

I think of good, bad, and mediocre as sort of being on a circle. Imagine a clock. The six is the dividing line between horrific and flawless - that is, they are adjacent. Twelve is mediocre, and it just fans down from there on either side.

For me anyway, mediocre is a lot farther away from horrific and flawless, than horrific and flawless are from each other. In reality, the dividing line between horrific and flawless is often very slim, which is why I hate mediocre a lot more than horrific. Remember "Springtime for Hitler"? It was so bad, it was great. Neil Young solos are like that, too, as are Michael Bolton vocal performances. My friend Kevin tells me that the John Travolta movie "Face Off" is the same - so horrific that it's actually brilliant. I could say the same for Bret Michael's TV show "Rock of Love", or McDonald's, or Robert Plant ad libs.

Anyway, here is a list of ten mediocre things. They're not horrific, they're not great...they're just out there, floating, refusing to take a stand one way or the other, being really mediocre. Booooo.

10.) The Phillips screw (the Robertson screw, the standard in Canada but unavailable in the US, is far superior).

9.) The Snickers Bar

8.) CNN legal correspondent Jeffrey Toobin (close to horrific because of intolerably smug attitude, yet his mediocrity overwhelms even that).

7.) CNN

6.) Swiss Army Knives

5.) Kellogg's Corn Flakes

4.) The Vancouver Canucks

3.) Gibson acoustic guitars (and hugely overpriced)

2.) Colgate toothpaste

1.) English Leather aftershave

Add your Ten Mediocre Things below.

A Boy Named Pizza

2009-01-20T00:42:00.000-08:00

They were obsessive. Every morning, every night, breakfast time, dinnertime, in the car, in the tub, everywhere...

"Dad, can you tell us another story?". J-Dawg was four, A-Roq was three. I was flattered, in a way; this must mean my stories are pretty good, I thought. But other times, staggering in mentally exhausted from the studio, I would sometimes think, What am I, Hans Christian Andersen? I need some peace - please!

But I figured that those enchanting days wouldn't last, and so I always tried to indulge my two little boys. I was a pretty new dad - not the grizzled veteran I am now (:P) - and hell, I was enjoying the adventure. So I was always on the lookout for new story ideas - in the paper, in magazines, on TV. I'd get an idea and adapt it so they would understand.

Sometimes the stories were true; most of the time, I would invent stories, about little boys with a pet dinosaur, or performing some heroic mission as a soldier, or sailing off in search of lost treasure. I remember one story series from when J-Dawg and A-Roq were six and five, which I entitled "The Silver Dragon". It was about a boy who became the assistant to a samurai warrior in medieval Japan. The boy's master was the most fearsome warrior in the whole army; but then the master fell desperately ill and couldn't fight anymore. Knowledge of this would cause the army to lose heart, and their enemies to gain confidence, so it had to be kept secret. The master tried to get better, but only got sicker, with the army continuing to send messages for him to come and help them.

Fearing death and worried about the fate of the army, the master finally came up with a plan. He had seen his assistant's devotion and intelligence. In fact, the boy seemed very special indeed - the master had never seen his equal. So he decided there was only one way to help the army: teach his young assistant all the secret tricks to being the ultimate samurai swordsman, and then send the boy out wearing his armour (disguised as his master) to fight in his stead.

Each night, the story advanced; it just seemed to write itself; and J-Dawg and A-Roq, along with T-Bone, who was just getting old enough to understand, would listen in rapt silence as the master taught his pupil everything. "To be fast, you must be slow"; "to be strong, you must be weak"; "to succeed, you must fail": the master would always start his lessons with a contradiction, but would then go on to explain just what he meant, and how it really made sense.

Finally, one day as the boy sparred with another servant, the master realized the boy was ready. End of the story is, the boy goes on to be a hero, and becomes known as the "The Silver Dragon", etc.

But that was not the most successful story I ever came up with. It was one night, after dinner, when the boys began clamouring for another story, another story, another story...I just couldn't think of anything else. I'd exhausted every last story idea I had floating round in my head, and I was totally blank. And then I remember very distinctly, just starting yet another one with no idea where it would go:

"Okay, here's another one. Once upon a time there was a boy named..."

And in that split second, a word came out:

"...there was a boy named Pizza".

I remember the look on the boys's faces. They were suddenly dumbstruck, their eyes wider than ever in excitement and anticipation. Total silence.

Wow. Maybe I have something here...

"Pizza was five years old, with red hair and freckles. And....um....Pizza was a very, very naughty boy".

I glanced at them. A-Roq sucking his thumb, eyes still wide, J-Dawg, riveted gaze...

"One day, Pizza went out to the garage where his dad was working on the car. All of a sudden, the phone rang. Pizza's daddy said, "Okay Pizza, I have to go get the phone. Make sure you don't touch anything in here. Just stay right there and I'll be back in a second. Okay?'"

"'Okay', said Pizza".

"Pizza's dad walked through the door and into the kitchen. Pizza was now all alone in the garage...and he started to think about how cool it would be to drive a car around all by himself. 'I can hardly wait till I grow up', he thought to himself".

"And the more Pizza thought about how cool it would be to drive, the more he wanted to sit in the front seat of the car and pretend, until finally, he decided that it would be okay if he just snuck into the front seat, just for a second, to pretend to drive the car. So he opened up the door and slipped in. 'Vrrrm vrmmm!', said Pizza. He moved the steering wheel back and forth. He had seen his dad turn the car keys a bunch of times, and decided he was going to pretend to start the car just like him."

"But.....just as Pizza put his fingers on the keys, he sneezed; his hand shook and he turned the keys by accident - and the car started!"

The boys remained rapt.

"And then Pizza got super scared. Maybe he was going to get in trouble. So he tried to turn the keys so as to turn the car off, but as he was fiddling around, he accidentally knocked the car's gear shift into reverse! The car started going backwards! Pizza tried to put his foot on the brake like he'd seen his dad do, but by accident, he put his foot on to the GAS! And the car suddenly jolted backwards and smashed right through their garage door! OH NO!"

By the end of the story, Pizza had smashed over fire hydrants, driven off a bridge, been chased by sharks, gotten hit by a passing freighter, got taken to a hospital where he disobeyed the nurse's instructions by hanging out the window to look down below, whereupon he fell into the back of an open garbage truck and was then deposited at the city dump covered in rotting slime, had to walk home freezing and injured all night, had broken his left arm, bleeding lip, and all because he hadn't obeyed his dad (subsequent stories would include mom).

I finished the story with Pizza lying his bed with a cast on his arm, bandages around his head, with a black eye, with his mom and dad saying, "Pizza...we love you, but you must remember: when we ask you to obey us, it's for your own good. Please be a good little boy now, and go right to sleep. Please don't try to walk around - your leg is injured. Call us if you need something, but whatever you do, don't get up and try to walk around".

I stopped talking.

About five seconds passed. And then, all hell broke loose.

"DAD CAN YOU TELL US ANOTHER STORY ABOUT PIZZA WANNA PIZZA STORY DAD PLEASE WHAT HAPPENED NEXT DAD PLEASE TELL US ANOTHER PIZZA STORY CAN YOU TELL ME A STORY ABOUT PIZZA PLEASE"

And as God is my witness, I was hounded by those two for like the next, I would say, three solid years, for more Pizza stories. It never got old (for them anyway). It was really the same story over and over: Pizza's mom or dad would ask him to do something perfectly sensible, his curiosity would get the best of him, he would decide it was okay to disobey, one thing would lead to another, and by the end of the story, he would have been grabbed and taken away by gigantic eagles, been framed for a bank robbery, captured by Malaysian pirates, drafted into the Iranian army, would have crashed a motorcycle into a train, slipped down eight flights of stairs and knocked his teeth out...and J-Dawg and A-Roq's appetite for cosmic retribution for disobedience (or maybe I should just say, their appetite for perversity) seemed limitless, and we ended up spending hours laughing at how ridiculous the stories got.

And now, a decade later, my little boys Sno-cone and Trixta, six and three, continue to pester me to tell them Pizza stories (my little girls aren't as keen on Pizza stories...).

One day, maybe I'll write up a few and pitch them to a publisher...but then, it's hard to believe I'd ever get anywhere. What school librarian would ever recommend books about a really bad boy who winds up strapped to the outside of a submerging submarine, or being trampled by a herd of goats, or falling down a manhole into the city sewer?

Cicero's Dust

2009-01-18T22:31:00.000-08:00

Are we who he says we are? It seems
Both true and untrue, sane and insane
Yet all the same, beyond the power to deny

For...

There is a stillness at the heart of being
A quiet awe, a reverence amidst the clash
Of battles, sorrow, anguished falls
And prizes lost and blood that runs
A quiet spanning back and deep
Inside a tunnel round and endless
Where light never fades

There is a memory, only shadowed, flick'ring
A glimpse within each cell, within each mind
Apart from any stilted credo
In and through each everything we are
Forlorn and distant from that place
Preceding hour or day

And all those notions that we can't but scorn
When thinking thoughts in rightest, sharpest mind
Well up from under reason's gloss
Like clovers through a mortared stone
Who can shout them down, or chase
Them into nothingness?

We come, he says, from out there, from the stars
From gods who created us, some race of unknowns
Yet known through echoes of intuition
We live, he says, forever, somehow,
Some way, more than dusty dust
He says, "We have some other sort
inside" -

A diamond dust of the divine
For all our madness. He says
He knows it, feels it, knows it,
Knows it, knows it, knows it.

I feel it, too, but do not know it
I sense it, but cannot grasp it
I see it, but cannot describe it
I love it, but cannot fathom what it is
That stillness at the heart of being

Ten Worst Things

2009-01-15T02:11:00.000-08:00

10.) The worst picture of Hilary Clinton: See left.

9.) The worst fast-food restaurant: Burger King.

8.) The worst Beatles song: "Revolution #9".

7.) The worst car: AMC Gremlin.

6.) The worst NBA executive: tie between Isaiah Thomas and Stu Jackson.

5.) The worst make-up: now that Tammy Faye Bakker is dead, Gloria Allred.

4.) The worst hair on a male TV personality: Ted Koppel.

3.) The worst non-fiction best-seller of the past five years: "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins.

2.) The worst big movie of the year: "Twilight".

1.) The worst NHL team name: tie between The Predators (you're supposed to pick a specific predator) and The Senators (who names a sports team after politicians?).

Post your ten worst things below!

Ten Best Things

2009-01-13T00:48:00.000-08:00

10.) The best peanut butter: Jif Extra Crunchy.

9.) The best acoustic guitar for the money: Yamaha FG-720S (and 730S).

8.) The best overall temperature: 68 degrees (no wind chill).

7.) The best fitness magazine: Men's/Women's Fitness RX.

6.) The best wheat ale: Widmer, from Portland, Oregon.

5.) The best birthday activity: paintball.

4.) The best NHL captain: Jarome Iginla of the Calgary Flames.

3.) The best actor under forty: Leonardo DiCaprio.

2.) The best men's clothes manufacturer: Boss.

1.) The best overall cut of meat: rib steak.

Add your suggestions below.

A Sad Day for British Columbia: Two Mormon Fundamentalists Indicted for Polygamy (Revised)

2009-01-07T17:07:00.000-08:00

Wally Oppal, pompous buffoon and British Columbia's current Attorney General, has finally caved in to the hysterical demands of illiberal ideologues and charged two of BC's Mormon fundamentalist men with polygamy. Words cannot express how I loathe this sort of thing, and I don't even know where to begin in trying...everything about it is totally wrong. It is totally outrageous.

Where to begin?

Canada passed a law in 1892 banning "conjugal" relationships, though not sex, with more than one person. This the anti-polygamy law under which BC polygamists are now being charged.

So...it is okay for Mr. Jones to have a wife but also a revolving door policy towards girlfriends. It is okay for him to sire kids with a bunch of them. It is okay for him to have a mistress, or 100 mistresses. But if Mr. Jones, with the full consent of all the women involved, lives with any of them as a husband, even sporadically, and/or supports them and his children financially as as a husband would, he ought to go to jail.

I don't get that. Can someone explain it to me? If government in fact has some compelling interest in, or some viable argument for, maintaining a monopoly over the legitimation of certain social/sexual relationships between consenting adults, I can't imagine what those might be. Certainly I've never heard any sensible account of either; and why government should worry about who hooks up with whom, or for how long, when it cannot even stop us from killing, maiming, raping, and stealing from each other, is quite beyond my comprehension.

Even granting that government could make some sort of sensible claim over monopolizing the legitimation of certain human relationships, I'm curious to know how they came up with the "one man-one woman" "one true definition of marriage" conclusion. After all, the Mormon fundamentalists they're charging are certain that they know the "one true definition of marriage", and that it is "one man, many women".

In truth, neither the province of British Columbia, nor the religious believers they are now prosecuting in the most bigoted fashion, knows anything about a "one true definition of marriage", because no such thing exists. There are only people; and in different cultures and different times, and according to their own desires or needs, they engage in all sorts of different marital relationships...and as far as I can see, the only thing that matters is that the participants consent, and that they are old enough to know what they are consenting to.

Every time anyone starts saying any of this, there are always people who pipe up and say, "What about the underage marriages?". But in reality, underage marriages have nothing to do with any of this - they can, and should be, prosecuted in polygamous contexts as much as in monogamous contexts. There is no, and never has been any, dispute about that. But it is not even what we are talking about here.

What we are talking about here is a form of relationship which, in its essence, is actually identical in nature to that practiced by many British Columbians, but which is being prosecuted in only one case: when a certain type of religious believer practices it on religious grounds.

And that is total BS, the definition of government bullying. I don't really see how some man-about-town with eight or ten ladies who he "sees" is doing anything essentially different than some guy who lives in Bountiful with eight wives. That the latter talks about Mormon founder Joseph Smith while the former talks about Hugh Hefner, makes, or should make, no difference. You can't punish a guy for committing Act X just because of the religion he belongs to, and then turn a blind eye to everyone else committing just the same Act X only on grounds that they're not religious at all.

Wally Oppal should be ashamed of himself. As the attorney-general, he is supposed to ensure that BC law is applied fairly. With this act, he is actually spearheading an effort to apply it in the most bigoted fashion.

If men and women wish to remain celibate, be monogamous, be gay, be straight, be in "open marriages", act like sluts, enter into polygamous or group marriages, and do so for whatever reason...who cares? What business is it of Wally Oppal's? He doesn't crack down on homosexual promiscuity. He doesn't crack down on everday heterosexual promiscuity. He doesn't crack down on all his buddies who have mistresses. But he cracks down on religious believers who do the same thing?

Not fair. Wally Oppal is a weak-willed bully who ought to be replaced by someone with respect for provincial and Constitutional law, and their fair application.

Roland Burris Should Be Seated

2009-01-07T01:27:00.000-08:00

Under Illinois law, the governor has the legal authority to appoint a new senator in the case of a vacated seat. So to fill Barack Obama's seat, Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich appointed Roland Burris. Yet Senate Democrats today refused to allow Burris to take his seat.

The argument seems to be that because Blagojevich is under suspicion of having tried to sell the Senate seat, no candidate he appoints should be seated. This is ridiculous. Blagojevich may very well be corrupt and guilty, but he has not been found guilty and is still serving as governor. More importantly, there is absolutely no evidence that Burris has in any way purchased his seat.

This whole episode has been a farce, right from Patrick Fitzgerald's ham-fisted (if not unethical) handling of the whole case, to the Democrats's preference for public image over fairness and the presumption of innocence. Good on Dianne Feinstein for publicly voicing her disagreement with her party's leaders. I think that's the first thing she's ever done that I agree with...!

Who Invented Romantic Love?

2009-01-04T10:46:00.000-08:00

For many decades, at least in the West, the most prevalent view of man/woman romantic love has been that it is a very recent invention, emerging along with the code of chivalry sometime in the Middle Ages, being most forcefully introduced into modern consciousness by the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the late 18th century.

I first heard this as an undergradate years ago, in a political philosophy class funnily enough, and have since heard or read it numerous times. The last time was only a few weeks ago, in an Intellectual History class at the University of Victoria.

But...I've always thought it was nonsense. It requires believing that there has been some mammoth reconfiguration of human brain circuitry in just the last eight or nine centuries, such that no one ever fell in love 2000, or 5000, or 15,000 years ago; or even worse, that no one fell in love in a non-Western country until "we" invented and exported the concept. It requires believing that all of those obsessive thoughts, all the spectacular feelings of ecstacy and longing and even worship, are culturally conditioned, like deciding to wear trousers rather than a toga. Like I said, nonsense.

A more plausible view is that while the world's different cultures have mediated (and continue to mediate) the formal expression of man/woman attraction in many different ways, that no culture is, or could ever be, strong enough to eradicate the human propensity to fall in love, which is innate, or biologically rooted. In a word, I think that boys and girls, men and women, have fallen in love for many, many thousands of years. And thank God, finally someone with academic clout is making a hard case for this view.

Helen Fisher, an anthropologist from Rutgers, writes in her 2004 book "Why We Love":

"Thousands of romantic poems, songs, and stories come across the centuries from ancestral Europe, as well as the Middle East, Japan, China, India, and every other society that has left written records...from Siberia to to the Australian Outback to the Amazon, people sing love songs, compose love poems, and recount myths and legends of romantic love. Many perform love magic - carrying amulets and charms or serving condiments or concoctions to stimulate romantic ardour. Many elope. And many suffer deeply from unrequited love...

"From reading the poems, songs, and stories of people around the world, I came to believe that the capacity for romantic love is woven firmly into the fabrice of the human brain. Romantic love is a universal experience".

Yeah baby. You're preachin' the gospel.

Fisher marshals a lot of evidentiary support for this view. For example, she begins Chapter One by quoting from a poem written by a Kwakiutl from southern Alaska, translated into English in 1896:

"Fires run through my body - the pain of loving you. Pain runs through my body with the fires of my love for you...consumed by fire with my love for you. I remember what you said to me. I am thinking of your love for me. I am torn by your love for me...I am told you will leave me here. My body is numb with grief. Remember what I've said, my love. Goodbye, my love, goodbye".

She then retells a fable from 12th century China, in which Meilan - a pampered fifteen year old princess - falls in love with a charming lad named Chang Po. The problem is that Chang Po is from a lower class: their love is forbidden by the whole structure of Chinese society. Nevertheless, the two meet secretly in a garden, where on one occasion the boy tells the princess, "since the heaven and earth were created, you were made for me and I was made for you, and I will not let you go". Meilan and Chang Po then decide to run away together. They are pursued by Meilan's family; Chang Po escapes, but Meilan is captured. As punishment, and as a warning to other youngsters, she is buried alive in her father's garden. So...it's not that romantic love "didn't exist" in ancient China; only that other values were considered far more important. And certainly Meilan's punishers would not have made an example out of her unless they were well aware of the propensity in others to fall in love just as she had.

In the rest of the book, Fisher presents evidence from fMRI studies, endocrinological studies, survey results, etc., for the thesis that romantic love is rooted in the hardwiring of the human brain, not contingent upon purely cultural accident.

So...to the question of who invented romantic love?, I think we can answer - not Rousseau (as if Alaskan natives were secretly reading Swiss philosophers in between hunting polar bears and building igloos, or the Persian love poet Rumi had a time machine...), and not medieval knights...

It was the same force which "invented" sympathy, patriotism, religious feeling, or maternal instinct...if not a deity, then nature through eons of natural selection. It is just part of who we are as humans.

More on this later. I'll try to make the next segment on this less boring!

T.

Life's Little Twists of Fate, Part I

2009-01-03T00:31:00.000-08:00

Something happened when I was twelve. It changed my life, but sometimes I'm not sure it should have.

You see...I was very curious and read constantly. I also was totally into sports: baseball, football, and while soccer wasn't very popular in those days, I liked playing at school, and was thrilled one day when I heard my PE teacher introduce me to some kids as one of the best soccer players he'd ever had (those days are over - I stopped playing after we moved back to Canada, and I'm pretty lousy now as a result).

It's not that I wasn't into music: I listened to music constantly, too. It's just that it wasn't an exclusive obsession. I was into loads of different things.

But as it happened, one day when I was in the seventh grade, Mr. Bertrand, the band teacher, approached me in the hallway (this was down in Lynden, Washington). He invited me to join the concert band and play the baritone.

"I don't know how to play the baritone", I said.

"It's easy. Come and try. There's no pressure, and we need the people. And I know you have a good ear".

Prior to this, I'd had a beginning guitar class with Mr. Bertrand. (Our big hit was "Silver Bells"). Maybe he thought my guitar playing was alright. Or maybe it was just his desperation...

I say that because I heard rumours afterwards that a bunch of the concert band had quit due to Mr. Bertrand's bad temper. I heard once that he'd even thrown his baton at one of the kids in a fit of rage. I do know that a lot of kids joined around the time I did, so maybe it was true.

But I never saw any of that from Mr. Bertrand. In guitar class he'd been pretty cool - if we were good, he would sometimes put on The Who's "Who Are You?" at top volume for the last few minutes of class, which always sent all the boys into an air-guitar playing frenzy, and got all the girls dancing. This, I think, was fairly daring given that Lynden was a small, extremely conservative, extremely Christian, farming town. Especially daring given the "F" word in the song! In concert band he was the same. Cool guy.

Anyway, I showed up at concert band one day, fairly nervous. Mr. Bertrand got me set up with a baritone, showed me how to blow into it, and then gave me an instruction book with the fingerings for each note. I brought it home each day to practice, and pretty soon I was alright.

Now what made this pretty cool for me was that Mr. Bertrand was fairly ambitious - one of the pieces he wanted all of his twelve year olds to play was a piece by Tchaikovsky which, if I remember right, was called "March Entracte", though I've never been able to find it listed anywhere since (I presume it was a segment from some larger piece). Another piece was an arrangement of Haydn melodies. This sort of approach was right up my alley. Why fool around with mediocre pieces written by nobodies, when we could learn how to play some of the greatest music ever composed? Yeah baby!

This started my band career. In Washington, I ended up playing not only in the concert band but in the marching band as well. When we moved back to Canada, I played (at various times) trombone, tuba, and baritone in concert band, guitar and drums in jazz band, and sang in the madrigal choir (great tunes), jazz choir, and concert choir. At lunch times, I'd grab my Gretsch and hit the band room with Blair, the drummer, where we'd blow our faces off playing Hendrix and Zeppelin tunes. As I was friends with most of the other kids in our high school (which was quite small and very close knit), it never occurred to me that I was in any sort of clique, or that there was anything geeky about being involved in music. In fact, I think the first time this ever occurred to me was when I was being interviewed live once on the Vicki Gabereau television show. She asked me how I'd learned how to sing, and I said, "Well...I don't know really. I guess it was just always singing in the choirs at school". And she snorted derisively and made some little crack!

Anyway, I wonder sometimes what would have happened if, instead of Mr. Bertrand approaching me that day, someone else had. Like, say, the basketball coach, or the football coach, or the wrestling coach. Or what would have happened if, once back in Canada, someone had invited me out to play hockey or rugby. I'd ended up doing well at baseball, making the high school team my last year in Washington (ninth grade)...but once I got into band, sports fell by the wayside.

Maybe the worst thing that could have happened is if no one had ever invited me to do anything, since it probably would never have occurred to me to go try out for something brand new all on my own.

It seems to be a strange fact of life that often, very little things end up making big differences for us. If one little thing doesn't lead to another little thing, and to another little thing after that, some other little thing doesn't happen to you, and you end up...not meeting someone who becomes very important to you, or not doing something which changes your life, or becoming someone different from who you are. And disconcertingly, it often seems a lot like chance, whether something happens or doesn't...

And all this makes me wonder how much effect little things which I do might have on others...

Delusional Atheism: A Reply to a Reader

2008-12-30T19:51:00.001-08:00

A reader named Guy Monty posted the following on "The True Meanings of Christmas, Part II". I want to respond to it in detail, because I think it is a good example of delusional atheism. Guy's comments are in italics.

Although I am not affiliated with any group, movement, or cadre, I am an atheist. From what I have witnessed and learned in 44 years here on planet Earth, I have to agree that religion is stupid, offensive and that it does actively erode man's quality of life. Why? Because it requires one to accept things for which there is no evidence, as if there is. As soon as one sets foot on that path, the mind is left open to all kinds of nonsense. This can manifest itself in a fairly benign form of delusion (crystal and faerie worshipers for instance), but it is delusion nonetheless. Any creature which chooses to allow fantasy to take the decision making reigns, is a creature which will eventually get itself into trouble. With social animals such as humans, this inevitably leads to getting ones fellows into trouble as well. The moment when your argument against atheism fails, is when you assume that atheism is some form of dogma, theology, or even an ideology. It's not. It simply means that one does not believe in a deity.

Ready Guy? Here goes.

You conclude by summarizing your version of atheism in this way: “it simply means that one does not believe in a deity" (call this [ND]). This is what most atheists usually say, but it is a flattering delusion, as you yourself show.

Consider what else you have written in this paragraph:

1.) "Religion is stupid”

2.) “Religion is offensive”

3.) “Religion actively erodes man's quality of life";

4.) “Religion actively erodes man’s quality of life because it requires one to accept things for which there is no evidence, as if there is".

5.) “Accepting (any) things for which there is no evidence eventually gets us, and others, into trouble”.

These five beliefs go far beyond (ND), don’t they? So, your belief (ND) is false, isn't it? And, you are unable to see this fact, aren't you? Indeed, it is remarkable how you can type out all five of those specific beliefs – about the nature of religion, the nature of the best sort of belief, etc. – and then type out (ND) without noticing that it cannot possibly be true given what you'd typed mere seconds earlier.

Moreover, those five beliefs very much appear to serve as the anchors of a genuine ideology. Yet you write that your version of atheism doesn’t constitute an “ideology”. That seems to me like another instance of a sort of delusive blindness.

But let me get more specific. Take belief (3). It is a universal claim. As such, it is a denial that there is, or could ever be, a single case in which religion would not erode the quality of a person’s life. On that basis alone, I would say this extreme belief looks very much like dogma. More to the point is that your belief has absolutely no evidence for it. By your criteria, it is therefore a delusion.

Worse, though, is that (3) is contradicted by the positive results of innumerable psychological studies which show that by a number of criteria, religious belief and activity enhance the quality of life of certain people. (3) also betrays a gargantuan presumptuousness, in that, on no evidentiary basis whatsoever, it denies the validity of the first-person-reported experiences of many tens of millions of religious converts who claim that the quality of their lives has improved as a result of their religious adherence. In other words, (3) constitutes an assertion that you, Guy, know far more about the quality of people’s lives that you have never met, and never will meet, than the people in question do.

Yet the lack of evidence for (3), and the abundance of evidence showing it to be incorrect, has not induced you to revise (3). The point is - if this all does not constitute some serious dogmatism, some serious delusions about the knowledge you posess, I don’t know what does. That alone should be enough to show that there is something totally wrong with this sort of atheism. But let me mention something more.

Notice (5). It expresses the belief that there can be no such thing as an adaptive unjustified belief. There is also absolutely no evidence for this belief – it is therefore an unjustified belief (a “delusion”, according to you).
But even worse is that this belief of yours is in conflict with the Darwinian principles of evolution that all good atheists subscribe to. After all, what Darwinian evolution says is that the human brain has evolved so as to form beliefs which confer survival advantage - a claim which obviously allows that such beliefs may very well have no supporting evidence, and very well may not even be true. Darwin makes this pretty explicit in his famous passage from "The Descent of Man":

"There can be no doubt that a tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to give aid to each other and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over other tribes; and this would be natural selection".

In this passage, Darwin contemplates that the following sorts of beliefs would confer survival advantage on to groups:

"My tribe is the very best tribe in the whole world" (patriotism);

"I ought to suffer inconvenience, or more, to relieve the suffering of a fellow tribesman" (sympathy);

"I ought to run toward enemy lines to distract them while my tribe escapes, even though I will die doing so" (sacrifice for the common good);

Etc.

And what is key here is that none of these beliefs can muster any sort of evidentiary support. So, these are "unjustified beliefs" which Darwin says are adaptive. That is, Charles Darwin believes that there can be such things as adaptive unjustified beliefs, but you don't. Hm.

Now, let's introduce the elves which you mentioned in your note, since these would push these beliefs away from being merely unjustified, toward being false.

So let's say our tribesman believes the following:

"There is a small green elf named Burkle who lives inside my head. Burkle has told me that I should exercise and be strong, instead of remaining lazy and growing very weak and fat".

That is a false belief. We could crack open our tribesman's head, and we would find no green elf there at all. Yet one result of this false belief will enhance the tribesman's ability to survive. It doesn't matter that the green elf portion of the belief need not be there; the fact is, it could very well be there, and if it is, then this is just one of innumerable beliefs which are both false and adaptive. We could easily replace the green elf in the head with Jesus living in the sky; the belief would stay the same: an adaptive unjustified or false belief, that is, a religious belief which does not "erode" the quality of a man's life, but enhances it. And the fact is that most religions have quite a few beliefs as beneficial as this one. Duh. "A bearded man who lives in the sky wants you to be chaste" may be a false/unjustified belief; but chastity confers real health benefits in an era of sometimes lethal STDs, like HIV. Doesn't it? How could this be any more obvious?

Your denial of the possibility of adapative unjustified/false beliefs, and by implication adaptive religious beliefs, is, I think, very blatantly wrong; and certainly it is at odds with evolution as Darwin conceived of it. And funnily enough, whether a belief contradicts Darwinian evolution seems to be an important standard for atheists when evaluating theist beliefs. Yet here you have shown you have an atheist belief which also contradicts Darwinian evolution. Why should it not be regarded as just as delusional, by your own standards?

Although it would be offensively wrong to argue that no atheist ever committed a crime (I've yet to hear that from anyone who professes to be a theist), I cannot agree that the presence of an atheist within a morally bankrupt political ideology amounts to "crimes committed in the name of atheism". In the case of the atrocities committed by Bolsheviks, the heinous crimes against humanity were committed in large part to consolidate the power of madmen, not in the name of "atheism".

Here's one problem with this, Guy. You cannot make this argument without disallowing atheists from making their favourite argument for "crimes committed in the name of theism"; for following your example, and with as little justification, we could just glibly assert that "the heinous crimes against humanity were committed in large part to consolidate the power of madmen, not in the name of theism".

But the bigger problem is that this statement about theism would be no truer than your own about atheism; for atheism is as crucial, as fundamental, to Marxism, as theism is to Catholicism. There is no way around this. That atheism is a disbelief in God, rather than a belief in God, makes no difference. The point is that fanatical devotion to each has helped inspire people to commit heinous crimes.

By the way, your statement that "I cannot agree that the presence of an atheist within a morally bankrupt political ideology amounts to 'crimes committed in the name of atheism' is shocking in how grossly it distorts the fundamentality of atheism to Marxism. This isn't about "the presence of an atheist" in a "morally bankrupt political ideology"; it is about a political ideology which itself is fundamentally, crucially, officially, irrevocably atheist. As I said in my earlier post, for this reason crimes committed by Marxists to advance the Marxist cause are - unavoidably - crimes committed in the name of atheism, just as unavoidably as are crimes committed to advance Catholicism crimes committed in the name of Christianity. The belief that they are not, is just another example of the delusions to which atheists of your stripe are prone.

When a political entity attacks a specific religion because they are trying to gain sole political power, I can hardly see where this constitutes an atheist Jihad. So would the world be better if without religion? I think it would. I don't feel the need to toss anyone into a lake of fire for all eternity if they don't agree though.

---Again, your belief that the world would be a better place without religion is a belief without any evidentiary warrant, especially given the atrocities committed in the name of an ideology for which atheism was a crucial pillar just in the past century. Moreover, your belief seems to rest on the assumption that "a human race without religion" is even possible – which I would say is itself a total delusion, given that innumerable findings from anthropology, psychology, history, sociology, etc., are that religion is endemic to human brains.

And that you can "hardly see" how crimes committed in the name of a fundamentally atheist ideology are no less crimes committed in the name of atheism, as are crimes committed in the name of a fundamentally theist ideology crimes committed in the name of theism, is precisely the point. You can't see it even though it is as plain as day; and you just repeat the same sorts of defensive slogans that theists repeat when guys like you start talking about how religion is the primary cause of evil on the planet.

This whole business, this sort of contemporary orthodox "Dawkins-style" atheism, goes far beyond mere disbelief in the existence of God. That is its problem. It prides itself on being an expression of "critical thinking" and science-based skepticism, when in reality it has nothing to do with critical thinking or science-based skepticism at all. It is nowhere near critical or skeptical enough. It is, rather, mostly a pile of bigoted, dogmatically-held, false knowledge claims - delusions - about the supposedly evil nature of religion, about how to save humanity from itself, about what is possible in human affairs, etc. - slopped on top of a blinding, self-congratulatory disbelief in God, and which is no different in principle from a pile of delusions which just happen to be theist. It is just the other side of the same coin.

This type of atheism, in short, is no less delusional, no less unjustified, no less false, no less dogmatic, no less ideological, than the religions it claims to be superior to.

I welcome your reply, Guy.

The True Meanings of Christmas, Part III

2008-12-27T21:41:00.000-08:00

So, Christmas.

In almost every sermon in almost every Christian church each December, speakers encourage their listeners to remember "the true meaning of Christmas".

But there is no "true meaning of Christmas" in any objective sense. The closest thing we have to that are the facts of history:

Despite the holiness attrributed by Christians to this celebration, the fact is that there is no virtually no feature of Christmas which has a Christian, as oppposed to a pagan, provenance, other than the idea of it as a celebration of the birth of the supposed founder of Christianity. "Christmas" is a thoroughly pagan celebration with some Christian mythology imported in - the equivalent of giving some new Christian name to the old Roman drinking festivals called the bacchanalia, and then claiming that "Christianalia" is henceforth "really" a celebration of Jesus's first miracle (turning water into wine at the wedding in Cana). Nothing's changed; it's just that some mythology was retroactively inserted, and a new label stuck on top of the thing.

The tree, the gift-giving, the merrymaking, the foods, the holly, the lights, the charitable activity, the yule log...all these beloved features and more of Christmas existed in European winter celebrations (Roman Saturnalia and New Year, German and Scandinavian solstice celebrations, etc.) long before it ever occurred to Christians to start celebrating the birth of their religion's supposed founder sometime in the latter part of the 4th century A.D. In fact, it was the almost thoroughly pagan character of Christmas which, historically, motivated devout British and American Christians (the Puritans) to oppose Christmas for many years. In the 17th century in Boston, the Puritans even succeeded in legally banning Christmas for a few years altogether. A contemporary Christian might take theological issue with the Puritan view that Christmas, as but a thinly veiled pagan winter festival, is blasphemous; but they could never take issue with the historical basis of that judgment. It is just a matter of fact.

This all makes the ongoing fuss from Christians about "the world trying to take Christ out of Christmas" seem even sillier. They've got some nerve, don't they? Cynical politicians and party-loving Christians in a former age hijack a winter celebration spanning back innumerable centuries, which never had anything to do with a Jewish religious reformer which certain superstitious fanatics took to worshipping, and now their descendants complain that pagans are trying to hijack the "Christian" holiday of Christmas? AND, they complain about it when they themselves are still enjoying all the pagan features of that celebration?

Like I said, some nerve. The Puritans had a point: if Christians are serious about making Christmas as Christian as possible, they should stop mixing it into a pagan Winter Solstice celebration in December, and start celebrating it sometime in spring, which is when almost all scholars now believe Josh Josephson was born. AND, they should reject Christmas trees, holly boughs, mistletoe, gift-giving, Santa Claus visits, etc. They should reject every last feature of current Christmas celebrations which has a pagan provenance (basically all of them), and redo Christmas from the ground up. But...they'll never do that, so I can't take any of their complaints about the de-Christianizing of Christmas seriously. Just by celebrating it as they do, they themselves support a "deChristianized Christmas" nearly as much as any pagan.

Even more ignorant is the Christian fuss over the usage of the abbreviation "Xmas" for Christmas. It was, after all, educated devout Christians who started abbreviating "Christmas" in this way, hundreds of years ago. And no wonder - the "X" comes from the Greek letter X (which we transliterate as kh- or ch-), which is the first letter in the common Greek word Χριστός (christos), which we anglicize as "Christ".

"X" is Christ's initial, for Pete's sake. Evangelical Christians drive around with bumper stickers that say, "WWJD?", for "What Would Jesus Do?". "J" here is the initial for "Jesus" - in English. In Greek, the language of the New Testament, "X" is the initial for "christos". So Christians - why get upset over a Greek initial, but not an English initial? Another bizarre thing - Christians drive around with fish stickers on their car. But the fish represents an acronym, with each letter of the Greek word for fish (ΙΧΘΥΣ, or "ichthys") standing for the phrase "Ἰησοῦς Χριστός, Θεοῦ Υἱός, Σωτήρ": "Jesus Christ, God's Son, Savior".

So, Christians drive around with a Christian fish symbol on their back window, which only exists because the letter "X" is in the word "i(ch)thys" and also is the first letter in the word "Christos". But when they see a sign that says, "Merry Xmas" - the exact same initial - they see it as "an assault on Christianity"...Not sure how that makes any sense.

On the other hand, I'm also not sure, given all this, what sense it makes for anti-Christians to think they're scoring some big point by using "X" instead of "Christ" (though perhaps the fact that the usage antagonizes most Christians is really what matters to the anti-Christians). Besides, linguistically, there isn't anything unique about the word "christos" at all. It's just a word meaning "anointed". And if Joshua Josephson was a talented itinerant preacher but no more (which is what anti-Christians believe), there is nothing even historically or theologically unique about the word when applied to him, either - many people could have been anointed for all sorts of reasons. So there's no reason for anti-Christians not to use "Christmas". Moreover, their replacement of it is easily viewed by Christians as an inadvertent indication by anti-Christians that "deep down, they know there is something sacred about Jesus"; that is, as betraying some intuition similar to the belief which motivates orthodox Jews to refuse to spell out the word "God" (they write "G-d"), which they do to indicate reverence.

And lastly, as I mentioned last year on this blog, if anti-Christians use "X" instead of Christ because they don't want to dignify the concept of a supernatural deity, then they should start saying "Xbye", since "Goodbye" is a contraction of "God be with ye".

Hmm...where was I before I started upsetting everyone? :P Oh yes - the true meaning of Christmas.

Where I'm going with this, if it is not already screamingly obvious, is that as far as I can tell...there IS no "one, true meaning of Christmas". There are only true meanings of Christmas, of winter celebrations...as many meanings as there are individuals to discover and create meanings. In a sense, all the history I mentioned above doesn't really matter (except maybe insofar as it calms the fanatics down...).

I think what matters vis-a-vis Christmas is what matters every other day of the year...and I think what that is, is...

Who we really are, and what our lives are about...who we share them with, and more importantly, how we share...and how we find and create love and trust, joy and light, friendship and solace, meaning and purpose, in a world which does not seem to readily provide those things.

A famous musician friend of mine - a lifelong bachelor - pulled me aside one day a few years ago when I was feeling low about a personal situation, and said, "Tal - you know it's all about you, don't you? You do what you need to do to be happy, and that's what it is".

I said, "What about when you have kids?"

He repeated, "It is all about you".

Is it? I was not able to believe that then, and I can't believe it now, notwithstanding the selfish things I have sometimes done. And I guess, in a way, I don't want to believe it. I want to believe "it" is about far more than me. I want to believe life is about doing great things with others, and for others, and belonging and "being a part of"...

Christmas, for me, has become a time to stop to evaluate all those things, and especially, where I am going with my children...who they are, and how I can help them grow and be everything they can be. It's become a time to hang out with them, reading stories and going out for adventures, hiking or skating or swimming, planning for the year to come, and keeping everyone close. What else is there?

For me, that has become "the true meaning of Christmas"....And I know that, facts of history aside (which ultimately probably don't matter anyway), that everyone else has their own "one true meanings", which are sacred to them, which help them live their lives as best they can...

And now that I think about it, maybe that is "the one true meaning of Christmas" :)

Merry Christmas, Solstice, Yule, etc.

T.

The True Meanings of Christmas, Part II

2008-12-25T06:50:00.000-08:00

So, if we are Christians, but then come to see that there is just no more reason to believe the claims at the heart of Christianity than the claims at the heart of Hinduism or Sufism, what about Christmas? What about Christianity in general?

There seems to be three main options. I'll call them Strategic Commitment (SC), Anti-Christian Animus (ACA), and Skeptical Stoicism (SkS).

In the Strategic Commitment option, you recognize at least that there is something fundamentally awry at the heart of Christianity, something outlandish which cannot and should not be taken as literally true...but you decide not to let it bother you, because all sorts of other valuable things are built on, or emanate out of, continuing commitment to it. So, as one of my evangelical Christian friends said when I pressed him on a few of these things, "In the end, it doesn't really matter to me if it's true or not. My family is happy, I feel happy when I go to church with them, my kids have lots of nice friends in our church, so it just doesn't matter". My friend - who attends church every Sunday - told me he never reads the Bible for just that reason.

I am a huge fan of Dostoyevsky, though I can't say I'm any sort of expert; but my own reading of him makes me think he falls into this category. In books like "The Brothers Karamazov", "Crime and Punishment", and "The Devils", he argues obsessively (though not always explicitly) that Western civilization is doomed to anarchic fracture - to a horror-ridden, nihilist dystopia in which anything and everything will be permitted - unless it remains thoroughly within the Christian tradition. A similar argument ran through my friend Mark Steyn's recent book, "America Alone". But it is still entirely unclear to me whether Dostoyevsky (or Steyn, for that matter) themselves really believe the story at the heart of Christianity - the one with divinely-required murder and symbolic cannibalism, with Galilean Josh Josephson as the disguised creator of the entire universe or the product of non-sexual "miraculous" conception, etc. If I had to guess, I would say no, they don't actually believe it. They just see a huge value in everyone at least committing to it.

Anyway, I guess the bottom line is that Strategic Committers would pretty much celebrate Christmas with as much fervour and joy as any sincerely believing Christian. They would just, at their core, be indifferent to whether Christianity was the product of human invention.

The Anti-Christian Animus option goes like this. You begin by seeing Christianity as the product of human invention, but you don't stop there: you end up subscribing to the notion that Christianity, or maybe "organized religion" - is the cause of almost all wars, all oppression, all poverty, all racism, etc. Make Christianity go away, or "organized religion", and most of the world's problems would go away. Thus, in your own little way, you declare war on Christmas, and on Christianity altogether. It is your service to humanity.

This is, by far, the dumbest option. Consider that what it's all about is the transformation of an initial skepticism into a gullibility about as extreme as that required to believe in talking snakes, stationary suns, and staffs which turn into serpents. I am saying you have to be totally gullible to believe that human evil requires an organized (theist) religion, or Christianity, for its existence. You also have to be extremely ignorant, or extremely bigoted, to believe it; there are, in fact, innumerable instances of people committing all manner of evil not on any sectarian ground at all, and they are all around us. Each one of us, ourselves, knows that we have done plenty of things we shouldn't have done, but that they were not motivated by any particularly religious belief at all. Our motives in many instances, were - need I say it? - purely selfish.

Neither Sam Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens, or Dennett have ever satisfactorily answered the tens of millions of objections - in the form of human corpses - which our past century gives us against their claim that the world would be a much better place without any religion (as if that's even possible). Atheist responses to these objections range from utterly incoherent to pathetically inadequate; and they can offer no explanation as to how a crime committed in the name of communism is not, by inevitable extension, as much a crime committed in the name of atheism, as is a crime committed in the name of Catholicism a crime committed in the name of Christianity, or "organized religion". Nor, in saying things as ludicrously bigoted as "religion poisons everything" (as does Hitchens), can they account for the many good things which religious belief can and does bring to the lives of its adherents.

Atheists like those mentioned above, and for all I know, some of those reading this, always pride themselves on their critical thinking skills. But any type of thinking which metasticizes into an historically and evidentially unsupported Utopianism is not, by definition, critical thinking. It is delusional. It is no different than the type of "thinking" which accepts that God will torture us forever unless we torture him.

In any case, there is not even any reason to believe that religion can be eradicated without eradicating all of humanity, since all indications are that it is endemic to the human mind. And certainly there is no reason to believe that the world would be a better place - war-free, poverty-free, etc. - if everyone were an atheist.

Skeptical stoicism, as far as I can figure, makes the most sense, though I cannot say it would most satisfy emotional needs. I think, for example, that there must be something extremely satisfying emotionally in adopting the Anti-Christian Animus option. Its popularity suggests as much. That position, after all, allows its adherents to think they know something very important about the world (that religion is the main source of evil); it allows them to think that their anti-religion activism is a form of humanitarian service - that they are "making the world a better place for our children";, etc. It allows them to share camaraderie with other religious bigots (just like hating Jews does for Klansmen, who evidently love their group picnics). In a way, I sort of envy them, just like I do the religious believers they think they're so much different than: the sheer power of belief within a community of believers can facilitate the satisfaction of a lot of human needs.

Skeptical stoicism feels quite lonely, speaking from personal experience. It regards the atheism of Harris, Dawkins, and to a lesser extent Hitchens, as unspeakably crude and about as delusional as the religions those guys think are so - well, delusional. It also regards religious beliefs like, say, that the communion wafer actually "transubstantiates" into the flesh of Jesus or that Mohammed flew to Mecca as delusional. And...there just isn't really a community for that, that I know of. I pick up "Skeptic" and "Skeptical Inquirer" magazines every once in a while, but they too seem quite in thrall to the Utopian atheism of Dawkins. Every issue there's some new barrage of attacks on religion as evil, and how it must be eradicated for the good of the world. But this just nonsense...So what I'm saying is that "Skeptic" and "Skeptical Inquirer" are not skeptical enough.

So....what I'm saying is, there is absolutely NO reason to believe that religion is anything other than a permanent facet of the human experience, and second, that there is NO reason to believe that "the world would be better without (theist) religion". In fact, this past century suggests the contrary. AND, if we take Darwinism seriously, it becomes quite impossible to fathom how theism could have been selected for over atheism, if it is inherently as rotten, dangerous, and crazy-making as the Dawkins's fanatics say it is. Dawkins himself can't even answer this objection, judging from "The God Delusion".

Putting it another way, true skepticism sees the demonization of theism by atheists as no less delusional than the demonization of atheism by theists. The purpose of these delusions seems to be to blind us to the disturbing conclusion that good and evil are an ineradicable part of human existence; that is, to the conclusion that neither atheism nor theism in the end can offer a means of saving us from ourselves.

The stoicism comes in when contemplating what to do about this. It allows for attempts to improve things, but it cautions against expecting too much from the efforts; and it tries to find peace with the world nevertheless.

I can't say I am a great skeptical stoic; it is hard at times for me to feel wholly at peace with the world. And that there don't seem to be a lot of others out there makes me kind of long to be some other way sometimes.

But then...I don't seem to have any choice. I can't make myself believe what I see as atheist or theist delusions, and there's nowhere else, for me anyway, to go.

Oh yes, I forgot: Christmas!

Next time.

The True Meanings of Christmas, Part I

2008-12-21T14:55:00.000-08:00

Christmas used to mean something different to me than it does now.

You see, I once believed devoutly that for human beings to avoid eternal torment (just by virtue of having been born), we had to torture and murder God/God's son, and then in commemoration, had to symbolically eat his flesh and drink his blood. Christmas was the day we celebrated the birth of our victim.

Of course, I didn't use this language. Like other believers, I employed a wide variety of self-deception techniques (like euphemisms) to shield my conscious mind from the grotesque, and I might say, truly profane, nature of the story I had based my life on. But at its core, the story is just as I have written it above.

Anyway, I now believe something different. It goes like this.

"Jesus Christ" is the anglicized version of the words "Iesous christos", Greek for "Joshua the Anointed" (the New Testament was written in Greek). "Joshua the Anointed"'s real name (in Aramaic, his first language) was Yeshua Bar-Yosef - Joshua Josephson, in plain English.

Josh Josephson grew up in the Galilee area, and was one of many Israelite reformers of his time. Like them, he performed miracles, attracted disciples, developed a set of teachings, and was viewed with suspicion by Roman authorities and Jewish elders.

Unlike his depiction by most modern (Protestant) Christian artists, who like to paint him as tall, blazingly handsome, with Nordic features, longish, golden hair, and disposed to gleaming, sparkling white robes, Josephson looked pretty much like his disciples - dark-skinned, short-ish, short-haired, and dressed in the same rough clothing (the painting included on this entry is an educated guess about what he would have looked like). At least, this is what the Bible (as opposed to our imaginations) indicates. After all, why else would Judas Iscariot have to identify his leader to the Roman authorities with a kiss, if he didn't look like everyone else? If he had long hair - which would have been extremely unusual anyway for that time and place - why would Paul [who claimed to have seen Josephson in person, and who knew many people who had known him in person] say in I Cor. 11 that long hair on a man was a disgrace? The modern Christian image not only has no warrant, but is actually contradicted by the text of the Bible, and by everything we know about the customs of the time.

Josephson's miracles? Devout Christians seem to forget that, historically speaking, miracles - or maybe better, "miracles" - are a dime a dozen. There are thousands of accounts from all over the world, from all different religious traditions, of people flying, or turning into wolves, or sprouting wings, or coming back from the dead, or seeing the future, or fighting devils, or talking to angels and fairies and ghosts, of healing and being healed, of visiting the underworld, of turning into different people for awhile...just last night I re-read the account of Athena turning into Menthes so as to infiltrate the dinner party at Odysseus's house in The Odyssey (Book One). Such accounts are not unusual; they are the way that our ancestors, living in a pre-scientific age, interpreted the world.

After all, they had no other explanation available to them, did they? When a man suddenly drops to the ground, wets himself, starts shaking violently and foaming at the mouth in an era when no even knows that the brain controls such things, let alone has ever conceived of such a thing as epilepsy, then "possession by evil spirits" makes a sort of sense, doesn't it? Especially when you already believe in spirits. At least it's something. And when the seizure stops, you want an explanation for that, too. And on it goes.

Besides this, the propensity to "improve" stories in the re-telling, especially when they involve a person we are precommitted to believing has extraordinary powers, is too widely acknowledged, even now, to warrant me defending. Everyone knows it. I myself have been the fortunate object of just such "improvement". When I was in Argentina years ago, I learned a number of phrases in the aboriginal language of Toba. Everytime I visited a settlement of Toba natives, I'd trot them out: "how are you?", "It's a nice day, isn't it?", etc.

A year after I returned home, I called back down to my old apartment to talk to the missionaries about how my old friends were doing. Upon hearing my name, the missionaries fairly freaked: "you - you're - you're THE Elder Bachman?! I - I - wow. We've - heard TONS OF STORIES ABOUT YOU, MAN! I mean, like, wow! Yeah, the aborigines down here have told us ALL ABOUT HOW YOU TOTALLY LEARNED THEIR LANGUAGE, and you were, like, RAPPIN' WITH THEM ALL THE TIME, just like you were a native Toba! Total gift of tongues, dude! It's an honour to speak with you!", etc.

So...that was exactly one year after I left the area. Miracle-making, or at least one form of it, is sort of like planting a seed: do a little something out of the ordinary amongst certain people who like you and who are prone to superstition (cut up some bread and fish, perhaps), and with time, your little something grows, and grows, and grows in the fertile soil of human imagination, until it becomes some fantastic, even supernatural, feat that only someone with "something extra special" could ever have done. So, in my case, a few phrases in Toba multiplied by a year and the power of human imagination equalled a genuine miracle. Think of how the story would have (or has) grown over five years? Ten years? Fifteen? Twenty?

WELL - the stories recorded in the four gospels were passed on orally for at least four decades before being written down - and it is likely it was more like five and six decades. How drastically might they have been "improved"? AND, except in the case of John - who wrote, it must be said, almost a century after Josephson's birth (supposing that the book's author really is who he says he is) - there is no reason to believe that the writers of the other three gospels (whoever they actually were) could even pretend to have been eyewitnesses to the events. No wonder there are so many troubling discrepancies and contradictions.

Moreover, even just taking the gospels seriously as the founding documents of Christianity (since they purport to be biographies of its supposed founder) gives us another problem: there is simply no indication in the four gospels of Joshua Josephson wanting to start a brand new religion. He says over and over that he is devoted to the law of Moses. He never mentions changing the Sabbath. He never mentions the mass invitation of Gentiles into the tribal religion he wished to reform. He never mentions abolishing Jewish dietary laws. He wants to reform - not start a brand new religion apart from Yahwehism. It is just not there. It is Peter and Paul, according to the Bible itself, who essentially invent a brand new religion or cult based on the worship of their deceased leader. But where Paul and Peter are recorded as contradicting the plain teachings of their leader...who should Christians follow? If they follow Josephson, they would be simply be a certain sort of practicing Jew. If they follow his disciples, then they are following what the Bible itself suggests is a religion at odds with the whole mission of Josephson as recorded in the gospels.

Much more could be said, but just one more thing. Even if we can make ourselves believe that some loving God would create us at the same time he doomed us to eternal torment unless we tortured, murdered, and symbolically ate him (or his Son), or that the Israelite religion was somehow God's "one, chosen religion", how in the world can we imagine that this sacred murder could have rightly been performed not by the properly designated Israelite priests according to the prescribed mode of ritual slaughter, but by Roman pagans nailing the sacrifice on to wooden planks? True Yahwehism would not have viewed the Roman crucifixion of a wee little lamb as an efficacious Israelite atonement sacrifice. Why, then, the crucifixion of Joshua Josephson, who, after all, is supposed to be, as the human "lamb", the ultimate atonement sacrifice? It makes no sense.

At least, it makes no sense, unless we assume that the cosmology built over the past two millenia, and helped along in many instances by government lackeys masquerading as "priests", is the product of primal human needs and desires, human creativity, and political convenience, rather than - well, rather than something true.

More soon.

Soccer Sucks

2008-12-17T06:37:00.001-08:00

Yes, there are soccer players of incredible skill. Some of the highlights are fantastic. But overall, soccer as a sport sucks.

It sucks, okay? You have to go back to the days of Georgie Best (who I watch on the classic games channel on the satellite dish) to find anything like tolerable games.

Okay, I need to be more specific. Here's why it sucks.

1.) The referreeing is wildly inconsistent/poor, probably because there's one guy - ONE guy! - on a giant pitch trying to keep an eye on 22 guys all by himself. Impossible. No wonder there's so much diving - when you're thirty feet away, a dive looks exactly like a trip. How many games have we seen, especially in World Cups, decided on some dubious penalty shot call? I mean, the England-Argentina semi-final game at the '86 World Cup is probably the best game of the last thirty years - and the first goal in that game was the result of a totally blown call by the ref. Maradona punches the ball into the net with his chubby little hand, and it stands?! What the...?

And by the way - does pro soccer have video replay yet? I don't think they do. And if they don't...SHOCKING! They won't put an extra ref on; they won't introduce video replay even though your average soccer game contains more dives than the dolphin show at Sea World...than a Greg Louganis birthday party...oh wait - more dives than downtown Detroit. What is up with the FIFA referree people?

When the universal soccer strategy seems to be, "get into the penalty area and then fall down and roll around clutching your ankle", why not do something? That leads me to the second reason why it sucks.

2.) Soccer players are, with almost no exceptions, total babies. That reminds me of a little joke: What's the difference between soccer and rugby? Soccer players spend 90 minutes pretending they're hurt, and rugby players spend 80 minutes pretending they're not.

The rolling around, the clutching, the diving, the theatrics, the pouting and arguing when the ref doesn't fall for their bogus dives...you'd think these guys just had a shiv jammed into their left gerbil with all the waterworks...it is embarrassing! And the best is, after rolling around for two minutes clutching their leg like it's being sawn off in a World War I medic's tent, they magically get back up and - "all better!" - take their free or penalty kick. Magic! Or else...no, it couldn't be...it couldn't be acting, could it?

3.) Not enough scoring, and not enough good, genuine scoring chances. For that, they'd need to throw two or three more balls out on the pitch, which of course, would turn it into a different game altogether.

Anyway, there has to be some explanation for the popularity of soccer around the world (alcohol?) which does not posit that it is exciting to watch, because where it is not infuriating for its manifest unfairness, it's as boring as watching grass grow.

I mentioned rugby above.

I think it can safely be said that if any rugby player were ever caught taking the sorts of pathetic dives that soccer players attempt literally in every game, that his own teammates would probably kick the crap out of him. That's one reason why rugby's a better sport than soccer - it's a sport, not a theatrical performance. Soccer players increasingly look like they've graduated from the Bob Fosse school of choreography, just completed the Stanislavsky method acting course or something...

Don't believe me? Think I'm exaggerating? I just looked on YouTube for a video illustration of what I'm talking about. Check this out. Or this. And note, these clips are not extraordinary at all. One can find similar dramatic excursions in any game, and the higher up the league, the worse it gets. This is why it's more entertaining watching your 13 year old play than watching Premier League schmucks - your thirteen year old, at least not the ones around here, aren't faking when they go down.

Anyway, I have no reason to doubt that soccer was once a great game, back in the days, I imagine, of Matt Busby, Pele, Jackie Charlton, Georgie. Now, it is not so much a sport as an alternately boring and infuriating theatrical performance by prima donna metrosexuals who wouldn't last four seconds on a rugby pitch, yet who strut around like they've just descended from Valhalla.

Soccer - so 90's (as my brother Brigo always says).

Rugby - so the future. I hope anyway.

Out,

T.

Patrick Fitzgerald, Attention Hound

2008-12-17T03:52:00.000-08:00

People

No, strike that

Some people get to a point in life where they come to believe that the percentage of angels and demons, geniuses and blockheads, and the normal bell-shaped distribution in between, is about the same in every field, in every club, in every everything.

Take me, for instance. I used to think prosecutors were the good guys. Now I don't think they're any better on the whole, in terms of competence (the OJ trial convinced me of that) or more importantly, virtue, than defense attorneys. Certainly, once one becomes familiar with enough cases in which prosecutors fight against the judicial consideration of rock-solid evidence which exonerates a wrongly convicted man, it just becomes impossible to feel sympathy with "sides" in general.

I guess what I'm saying is, there was a time when I probably would have regarded, without much thought, Chicago-based federal super-prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald as a hero. His behaviour in the Scooter Libby and Conrad Black cases, however, pretty much blew it for me. (And by the way, former Hollinger honcho and book-fixer David Radler, who cut a plea with Fitzgerald, tonight is sitting at home in Vancouver drinking warm cocoa and getting ready for Hannukah, while Conrad Black - whose guilt, such as it may be, to my mind is still unproven - is sitting in a penitentiary, as he will be for the next five years). Anyway, Fitzgerald's behaviour now with the Governor Blagojevich case is the last straw - it shows him to be a man far more interested in fame, scoring points at a personal level against his targets, and in everyone knowing what an "ass-kicking macho man" he is, than getting the job done right.

Getting the job done right, in the Blagojevich case, would have entailed, I think (could be wrong), actually waiting until the guy takes a bribe. You know? Wait till the guy takes the bribe, document that, and then you charge both him and the new Senator for paying the bribe. Bingo, you just two giant fish.

Instead, Fitzgerald gets a bunch of phone conversations on tape where Blagojevich talks about getting something back for a Senate appointment, then BOOM! - he calls another one of his big one-man-show Emmy caliber "Iiiiiiiiit's.....the Patrick Fitzgerald Show!" press conferences, worked up the indignation, called Blagojevich all sorts of names, talked about how outraged Abraham Lincoln, for Pete's sake, would have been...Like, I'm sick of this guy's drama queen theatrics. Enough already. Shut the hell up and do your ***xxxx job, you frigging publicity hound. (Can you believe he actually signed up to be on a radio game show last summer?) He's probably jeopardized the integrity of the case now by prejudicing pretty much every potential juror in the city. Even if he manages to get a conviction, there will now always be that taint.

Anyway, quite beyond the shamefulness of Fitzgerald using the court system as a platform for his rock star pretensions, he has now broken the code of ethics for prosecutors a number of times, and should be officially reprimanded. Victoria Toensing wrote an excellent piece in the Wall Street Journal on just that, and I think she's spot-on.

For the sake of the integrity of the American justice system, I think it's time for Fitzgerald to make his choice: be an ethical prosecutor, or quit law altogether and get your own "shouting head" talkshow on MSNBC.

Somehow, I think I know which one he'd choose...

Not Sure I Can Buy the Prorogation...

2008-12-17T02:48:00.001-08:00

Just re-elected Canadian Prime Minster Stephen Harper asked for the Governor-General Michaelle Jean of Canada to temporarily shut down (prorogue) parliament once it became clear the opposition parties were about to form a majority coalition and force him and the Conservatives (who had only a plurality of seats) out of power. And she granted it on December 4th.

I'm not sure I really get this. I am friendly with a Conservative Party official, and his defence of this move has been off-putting. He keeps saying, "the Conservatives just won a mandate to govern; they won the election; they deserve to rule; this coalition is trying to usurp democracy".

Are they? Between them, they can claim nearly 60% of the Canadian popular vote. How can a coalition of parties with 60%? of the vote be "usurping democracy" by replacing a party with only 40%?

To put it another way: the Conservative Party won the largest number of seats, yes; but they did not "win the election" any more than the potential coalition "won the election". That is the way it works in a parliamentary system: parties have a perfect right to form a coalition government. It happens all the time. It is the way parliaments work. Everyone knows that. There is just no precedent in parliamentary theory for the idea that a mere plurality confers some sort of right to govern over a majority coalition. Yet Stephen Harper keeps repeating that the coalition is trying to "overturn the results of the election"! No - the "results of the election" are going to stay exactly the same, with everyone retaining the same number of seats. It is just that a majority coalition of MPs would govern instead of a minority (plurality).

From what I can tell, all this "usurping democracy" business is all nonsense, and worse, partisan nonsense. And I'm saying that as someone who would never vote for the Liberals, NDP, or Bloc.

I mean, can you imagine what Canadian Conservatives would be saying if they were the ones who had signed a coalition agreement and were about to force out a minority Liberal Party government, and then Iggy or Paul Martin met with Michaelle Jean and got a prorogation based purely on the leader's desire to avoid losing power? I cannot doubt that the Tories would be going absolutely nuts right now, talking about how the Liberals were trampling on centuries worth of parliamentary process and custom, etc. And they'd be right, wouldn't they? AND - what if Iggy, in addition to getting a prorogation of parliament just so as to avoid getting turfed in a non-confidence vote, ALSO announced that during the prorogation, he was going to appoint EIGHTEEN new senators, especially if he had long campaigned against the prime ministerial power to appoint senators? The Tories would be screaming bloody murder!

I can't stand leftism, but still, I just don't get the Tory argument on this. Maybe there's some great one, and I just haven't seen it anywhere. But from here, it just looks like action based not on any regard for principle or custom, but on desperate desire to retain power. I hope I'm wrong.

Guess What I'M Allergic To?

2008-12-07T23:47:00.001-08:00

The more we eliminate things really worth being afraid of, the more trivial are the things which rise up to fill the void.

Take peanuts. Nowadays, any mommy who happens to pack along a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with Junior may very well get an indignant letter back from the elementary school control-freak principal about how "we have many children in the school who are deathly allergic to peanuts. PLEASE REFRAIN FROM SENDING THIS TOXIC LETHAL POISON TO OUR SCHOOL" - even though there has never been a recorded case of someone having a lethal allergic reaction to peanuts without...actually ingesting peanuts. (The way these hens cackle, you'd think kids were force-feeding handfuls of anthrax to their classmates...).

Here's the thing: lots of people are allergic to lots of things. If you happen to be allergic to something, you don't eat it. It's really simple. If Suzie's allergic to strawberries, she shouldn't eat Timmy's strawberries. If Timmy's allergic to seafood, he shouldn't eat Suzie's sushi. You don't insist that everyone in the entire school district never again bring sushi or strawberries or bananas or orange juice or a peanut or whatever. Besides, it is far from certain that most of the kids reputed to be allergic to whatever substance actually are - there are no bounds to the things some mommies can manage to feel worried about.

Yes, I'm saying I think it is very possible to imagine that one is - or one's children are - allergic to something. Consider lactophobia, due any day to be replaced by...heck, probably hydrophobia ("I used to think it was milk - now I know I'M ALLERGIC TO WATER!"). There are millions of people out there who have become convinced that they, or their children, are allergic to dairy products, when there is no good evidence that they are. The most "evidence" the lactophobes ever seem to have is that they once went to an allergy witch doctor (they're all over, but if you can't find one, just ask any homeopath, iridiologist, etc.; they're all lactophobes and will all tell you the same thing) who gave them his little bogus skin test, and who then who solemnly informed them that they're allergic to milk, and "that's what explains all the things wrong with you". Okay, great, lactophobes - I couldn't care less if you never drink milk again - or orange juice or soy or rice, for that matter. Let's just not pretend that your local allergy quack is a reliable source of information about lactose intolerance. And let's not pretend that the odds of you actually being lactose intolerant, especially if you're a caucasian, are not extremely low.

Lactose tolerance, by the way, is a fantastic benefit - the ability to consume large quantities of dairy products conferred such a survival benefit on to the people of northern Europe, that the ability to do so spread like wildfire through the population. There is a fascinating little section in Nicolas Wade's "Before the Dawn" on this subject, but maybe that's a subject meriting its own entry.

Where was I? OH. Yes. Here's the greatest one of all: COLOGNE.

Who would have ever thought that cologne - a splash of aftershave, for Pete's sake - would one day be identified as a vicious bio-hazard? More and more I see signs in public saying, "PLEASE DO NOT ENTER IF YOU ARE WEARING ANY PERFUME OR COLOGNE AS THESE MAY TRIGGER ALLERGIC REACTIONS". Well - all "perfume" or "cologne" is, is a type of fragrance. So let's talk about fragrance.

Almost every soap out there now has fragrance added. So why don't the signs say, "Please do not enter if you have washed any part of your body in the past week with soap"? Actually, forget bodies. What about washing the dishes? The liquid detergent and anti-static dryer sheets have fragrance added, too. And so does your laundry detergent. And toothpaste has mint flavour added to it, as do breathmints (and there must be people out there allergic to mint). So does hair gel and hair spray. And shampoo and conditioner. And deodorant and anti-perspirant. And by the way, certain types of make-up, like rouge and lipstick, give off an odour, too. But why only focus on deliberately added fragrance? What about all the foods which impart a lingering smell? Garlic, onions, curry, chile peppers, etc...and what if someone's allergic to the odour of pepperoni pizza!!! OH MY GOD!

So, I want to say to all the the hypochondriac control freaks out there posting signs about perfume and cologne, be consistent, and put a big sign that says, "Do not enter if you bathe, brush your teeth, shampoo or condition your hair, wear laundered clothing, wear make-up, use deodorant or anti-perspirant, apply any sort of hair product, or eat or drink anything". Basically, the sign should say, "ONLY HOMELESS PEOPLE ALLOWED INSIDE". Or they could have a little picture of Charles Manson by the front door, with a sign that says, "Unless you look like THIS, KEEP OUT!".

Anyway, I have come to conclude that what I am most allergic to is the capricious, hypochondriac, narcissistic paranoia of the allergophobes.

Okay, next time I'll try to post more of a pleasant one :P.

The Maple Leafs Can Have Him: Hype vs. Reality in the Case of Brian Burke

2008-12-01T00:59:00.001-08:00

Brian Burke was the General Manager of the Vancouver Canucks for six years. In all that time, the Canucks won one - one - playoff series.

One playoff series in six years? How did that happen?

Well, I'm sure Brian Burke would say it happened because he didn't have the necessary autonomy from ownership to develop the Canucks into Stanley Cup contenders. But you can bet your booties that no one from Orca Bay Entertainment (which owned the Canucks at the time) told Burke to stick with hapless goalie Dan Cloutier year after year after year. Yet he did. Why? A man-crush? No one that I know can imagine why. There's an old saying in rock n' roll: a good band with a mediocre drummer is a mediocre band; a good band with a great drummer is a great band. With a few notable exceptions, it is the same with hockey teams and their goalies, and why neither Burke nor Crawford (the coach) could ever get that about Cloutier is unfathomable. A hundred injuries, a hundred chokings under pressure, a hundred bad goals...and bad goals at the worst times, too: in the 2002 playoff quarterfinals, when the Canucks were up two games to none against Detroit, Cloutier in the third game let in a fifty foot shot from Niklas Lidstrom, and that was the turning point. The Red Wings got pumped and won the next four games, and blew the Canucks out.

And this whole business about thirty win seasons with Cloutier - it was all nonsense. What matters in evaluating goalies is save percentages, not wins per se. After all, if you have a fantastically prolific scoring line like the Canucks did during those years (Naslund-Bertuzzi-Morrison), you can let in four goals and still win. Mere wins just don't tell you all that much about your goalie...And in terms of save percentage, Cloutier's was always near the worst of any starting goalie in the NHL. His playoff save percentage was even worse - I remember checking once during the 2003 season, and it was in the mid-eights!

And while this was all going on, year after year of choking in the playoffs, Burke strutted around town undaunted, popping off as though he were the greatest hockey genius since Toe Blake. But it's just a lot of talk, a lot of attitude, a lot of soundbites and bluster.

Ah, you say, but what about the Cup? Well, Burke deserves credit for bringing in Niedermayer and sending prima donna Fedorov to Columbus...but the bottom line is that the Anaheim Ducks were pretty much in place when Burke arrived. Kevin Lowe (who, by the way, knows about winning Stanley Cups - he's won six of them) only said what everyone already knows (no wonder Burke got so mad - the truth hurts). It's like Marc Crawford's much-vaunted Cup with the Avalanche in 1996: his team featured Adam Foote, Sandis Ozholinsh, and Uwe Krupp on defence, Joe Sakic, Peter Forsberg, Owen Nolan, Adam Deadmarsh, and (loathsome cheap-shot-artist) Claude Lemieux as forwards, Chris Simon for toughness, and Patrick Roy in net. I'm sorry, but that team could have won the Cup with my eight year old daughter coaching it. A good measure for a coach is if he can replace a team's coach and elevate its performance without major personnel changes over a period of time. Crawford had that chance with the LA Kings after being fired from Vancouver, and did jack squat. And since LA fired him, he's been doing TV commentary. That's the guy Brian Burke left in place for six disappointing seasons as the coach of the Canucks. Again - why?

The GM career of Brian Burke reminds me of the career of Richard Dawkins as a public intellectual or Daniel Dennett as a philosopher; all they do is shout the loudest. In terms of actual contributions, they are no better than many others, and in many ways, far worse (Dawkin's "The God Delusion" is probably the most ridiculous book I have read in the last ten years; Dennett's entire career has spent trying to convince people they're not actually conscious).

Anyway, I'm getting off track here. All I'm saying is, I will be the first to congratulate Burke on success in Toronto. Hell, that team has been so bad for so long, that if he can turn them into a Cup-contending franchise for any length of time, then he should be considered a very good hockey man. And actually, it is hard to see any real downside to the Toronto job for Burke: if he can't make steady progress, he can always blame it on the decisions of his predecessors (traded away draft picks, poor prospects and scouting, etc.). But even getting the Maple Leafs to the point where they consistently make the playoffs would make Burke look like a genius, so starved is the franchise for consistent success.

Anyway, the point is, everywhere Burke's been, even when he worked in the NHL head office, his performance has been very average at best (the only extraordinary aspect of his performance has been his unusually invincible ego). I just do not see anything in his last ten years as a GM that should make Maple Leafs honcho Richard Peddie view Burke as "the one guy in the world who can save us!!!". He got lucky with Anaheim. Other than that, what? Mediocrity (yawn), year after year. I just don't get it.

My advice to the Maple Leafs: prepare to enjoy Burke's Cowardly Lion schtick ("I'm as tough as nails! Our teams needs to be BIGGER and STRONGER! We need hitting! We need smashing! We need to beat these people up! I make no apologies! We'll rip 'em to pieces - send 'em to Kingdom Come!"), because if the past is any guide, that's about all you'll be getting: it will take more than Brian Burke (or Burke plus his Man Friday Dave Nonis, now evidently trying to move from Anaheim to where Master now works) to make the Maple Leafs into a consistent Stanley Cup contender.

Of course, I could be wrong. For the sake of a once great franchise, I hope so.

The Best Sport You've Never Heard Of: Rugby League

2008-11-29T01:20:00.000-08:00

Rugby league is the best sport that North Americans have never heard of.

It is not quite the rugby that we are vaguely familiar with over here. That sort of rugby is actually called rugby union. It is also a great sport. Rugby league is a different thing, though.

The game is simple (much more so than rugby union). In league, two teams of thirteen players each try to score more points than the other by either moving the ball down the 100 meter, rectangular pitch, and across the try line (that is, into the end zone) and laying it down on the ground (called scoring a "try", worth four points), or kicking the ball through the uprights (either as a conversion kick after a "try" for two points, a drop goal [where the ball bounces off the ground prior to foot contact], or a penalty kick).

Each team, upon getting possession of the ball, has six tackles (equivalent to downs) to advance the ball as far as they can. As in football on the fourth down, often teams choose to punt the ball downfield after the fifth tackle.

Here's how the tackles work. Upon tackling the ball handler, defenders will then back away while the runner stands up, puts the ball down on the ground, and rolls it backwards to a teammate with his foot. The player behind him will then grab the ball and either run with it, or pass it, and so on for each player that handles the ball. The only trick is that there are no forward passes allowed. Passes must be either perfectly lateral, or backwards. However, players may kick the ball forward at any time, and any teammates who were parallel to or behind the kicker may run up and try to recover the ball before the defenders do.

There are no huddles, no real scrums, no rucking, the rules are relatively few - the action is non-stop and the players, wearing no, or hardly any, padding, move very quickly. It requires as much grace as it does toughness, as much finesse as it does brute strength, as much endurance as it does quickness, and as much quick-thinking as it does overall game sense. My guess is that rugby league players (along with the MMA guys) overall are probably the most fit athletes in professional sports.

I first got into rugby league visiting Australia a few years ago. I went to a packed pub with the Sony guys to watch the State of Origin match (Queensland against New South Wales - the State of Origin is sort of the equivalent of the Super Bowl). I ended up thinking, "this is the greatest thing I've ever seen". It had it all: blood, smashing, leaping, diving, spectacular passing and kicking, drama, everything.

It's why I got my satellite dish - so I could watch all the rugby league games on the Setanta Sports. Which I just spent the last nine months doing (the Rugby League World Cup, held once every four years, just ended, with New Zealand upsetting Australia to win the final for the first time ever).

Anyway, I don't really have any story to tell; I just wanted to plug rugby league, the best sport you've never heard of.

See ya,

T.

Quantum of Clarity

2008-11-25T00:09:00.001-08:00

Let me see if I understand this right.

EON Productions takes a moribund James Bond franchise - one almost a parody of itself - which appealed mostly to 60 year old women who just liked cooing over Pierce Brosnan, picks a new, young Bond in Daniel Craig, adapts the first Bond novel for the screenplay, assembles a fantastic supporting cast with a fantastic director, and makes the best Bond movie in years - and arguably, ever - with "Casino Royale". The movie has action, interesting characters like Le Chiffre and Vesper, clear, compelling plotlines, and is beautifully shot. The movie is a smashing success, far beyond what its creators could have hoped. People who never see movies twice (like me) go to see it twice (like me). Ian Fleming's James Bond is introduced to a whole new generation of moviegoers. Everything is in place for a spectacular sequel, and a spectacular resurrection of the franchise.

So, for the sequel, they put together the same team, figuring "why tamper with smashing success?". OH - wait. Sorry. That wasn't them - that was ME, if I'm running EON.

Instead, the geniuses at EON evidently decided to ditch director Martin Campbell, who did a spectacular job with "Casino Royale", and instead hire a guy who has never done ANYTHING to suggest he could successfully direct a Bond movie: young German dude Marc Forster (pictured above). (No doubt the EON folks spent days congratulating themselves on their "bold decision". I wonder if next they'll hire Burt Reynolds to play Prissy in their remake of "Gone with the Wind").

Surprise - the movie is a let-down. Forster is a dud. The photography overall is often irritatingly "jolty" and spastic. The plotlines (what there are of them) are difficult or impossible to make out under all the cinematic "noise" - crashes and chases and fires and shooting and all the crap that Forster puts in to try to (over)compensate for the fact that he has no idea what he's doing here (hint to Forster: those things are supposed to be the icing, not the cake). Worse, dozens of things happen which don't seem to follow from anything we have yet witnessed on the screen, so which are actually fairly confusing (why was Mathes shot? What happened? I went to the movie with six other people, and none of us had any clear idea about what a whole bunch of things meant in the movie). And oh yeah - why is there a luxury hotel in the middle of the Bolivian desert?

And the characters. I do not get this. The characters in "Quantum of Solace" aren't even one dimensional. I mean...Olga Kurylenko as Camille Montes...a great beauty, a very good actress...what do we get to know about her character except that she wants revenge? She never develops like Vesper did in "Casino Royale". Sad to say, but all Kurylenko is in this movie is a pretty face. I don't get it. A huge opportunity wasted.

And I'm sorry, but Gemma Arterton is quite ridiculous here: wooden, out of place, self-conscious (not that I blame her so much as I blame the Teutonic automaton Forster).

There is a deep sterility to this movie, a lack of human-ness. In the first one, we saw deep emotions - serious love, serious hatred, serious regret, seriously HUMAN elements (remember the scene where Bond starts laughing as he's being tortured, strapped to the chair, in the first one?). In this waste of time, there is no raw emotion, nothing. This movie has no soul.

My advice to people everywhere: don't disassemble your team when it's winning the World Series. And don't hire Marc Forster to direct your action movie.

Did Hitler Have a "Fully Christian Ethos"?

2008-11-19T21:52:00.000-08:00

In the previous post, I typed the words:

"Yet I have shown how easily it is to come to just that conclusion without ever invoking the concept of God. It is only a matter of logic, given once we begin with certain (atheist and utopian) premises.

"And of course, this wasn't really a hypothetical. It was this same reasoning which licensed the persecution of religious believers in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, Cambodia, etc."

(My language was sloppy here; I would never say Hitler was a pure atheist, nor did I; his beliefs were too muddled for that. What I meant was that the rationale for persecuting religious believers was not itself religious or sectarian).

In response, Anonymous wrote:

"Hitler, who claimed again and again in speeches that 'I am a Christian,' who sent his soldiers into battle with their belt buckles emblazoned Gott Mit Uns, 'God With Us,' who in fact derived his borrowed justifications for extermination of the Jews from the New Testament itself, could not rightly be called an atheist, nor could his cause be said to have been championed under the banner of atheism.

"No, his was a fully Christian ethos that he adapted and integrated to become part of his cult of the Third Reich".

So, did Hitler have a "fully Christian ethos", as Anonymous claims? Let's see what the record, and historians, have to say.

First, it is absolutely the case that Hitler often paid public lip service to Christianity; but it is a credulous observer of politics who believes that public expressions always reveal private convictions. The truth is that while Hitler seemed to believe in "providence" and "destiny", he was in no sense a believing Christian. In fact, not only did he not abide by a "fully Christian ethos", he despised Christianity. I think it can be fairly said that the only correspondence between Hitler's program and New Testament Christianity was that Christ and his followers sometimes used vituperative language against Jews. That, and maybe the idea of some destiny to the cosmos (an idea not specifically Christian at all)...but as far as I can see, that is it.

The evidently popular idea that Hitler was actually a believing Christian, or that he had a "fully Christian ethos", or that Hitler's National Socialism was some sort of sincere but misguided attempt to implement a specifically Christian "heaven on earth", is not warranted by any substantial evidence, and in fact is contradicted by almost everything we know about the beliefs of the lead architects of National Socialism. Nor am I alone in the view that, for reasons of political pragmatism, Hitler's occasional public expressions did not represent his private views on this (I have to wonder why anyone would doubt that Hitler would lie in public for political purposes!).

Anonymous claims that scholars view "Hitler's Table Talk" (a collection of anecdotes recorded by private observes of Hitler speaking casually) as largely spurious. This is the opposite of the truth. But for argument's sake, let's ignore that book until the end.

Let's instead go first to Duke history professor Claudia Koonz, who notes that "during (1933-34) Hitler virtually never mentioned the three controversial themes that shaped his covert political agenda: crude antisemitism, contempt for Christianity, and preparation for a war of conquest". (From "The Nazi Conscience", p. 79).

Cambridge historian Richard J. Evans writes:

..."Hitler and most of his leading advocates were aware of the breadth and depth of Christian allegiance in the majority of the population, and did not want to antagonize it in the course of suppressing parties such as the (Catholic Centre Party). They were thus careful in the early months of 1933 to insist repeatedly on the adherence of the new government to the Christian faith."

(From "The Coming of the Third Reich", by Richard L. Evans, pp. 362-363).

University of Sheffield historian Ian Kershaw writes:

"Relations between the Catholic Church and the Nazi Party remained chequered throughout the period of the rise to power. The evident anti-Christian strain in Nazi doctrine, epitomized above all in Rosenberg's writings, evoked stringent condemnation from the Catholic hierarchy...Hitler's own concerted efforts to deny the slur that he headed an anti-religious movement were far from convincing to Catholic opinion-leaders...Despite the high expectations placed in the Concordat with the Papacy, ratified in summer 1933, it soon became obvious that the fears about the anti-Church thrust of Nazi ideology and policy were well-founded".

(From "Hitler", by Ian Kershaw, pp. 103-14).

Richard Overy, professor of history at the University of London, Fellow of the British Academy and winner of the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize for military history, adds:

"Hitler saw the relationship (with the Deutsche Christen church) in political terms. He was not a practicing Christian, but had somehow succeeded in masking his own religious skepticism from millions of German voters...His few private remarks on Christianity betray a profound contempt and indififference. Forty years afterwards he could still recall facing up to a clergyman-teacher at his school when told how unhappy he would be in the afterlife: 'I've heard of a scientist who doubts whether there is a next world'. Hitler believed that all religions were 'now decadent'...

"Hitler, like Stalin, took a very modern view of the incompatibility of religious and scientific explanation. 'The dogma of Christianity', he told Himmler in October 1941, 'gets worn away before the advances of science'...'Scientific truth', Hitler announced in an after-dinner conversation some months later, 'is the indispensable formulation'. There was nothing to offer anyone who looked for 'needs of a metaphysical nature' in the party. Truth lay in natural science, and for Hitler that meant the truth of racial biology - natural selection, racial struggle, 'identity of kind'.

"Hitler was politically prudent enough not to trumpet his scientific views publicly, not least because he had to maintain the distinction between his own movement and the godlessness of Soviet communism. Nor was he a thorough atheist. His public utterancees are peppered with references to 'God' and 'spirit'. For Hitler the eschatological truths that he found in his perception of the race represented the real 'eternal will that rules the univers'' in the infinite value of the race and the struggle to sustain it men find what they might call God, and inner sense of the unity and purposiveness of nature and history'...What Hitler could not accept was that Christianity could offer anything other than 'false ideas' to sustain its claim to moral certitude".

Once again, I am quite unable to understand why anyone would take at face value Hitler's public expressions of piety. It's not like William Shirer's now canonical "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" only came out yesterday. Under the chapter heading "The Persecution of the Christian Churches", for example, Shirer writes:

"The Nazi war on the Christian churches began more moderately. Though Hitler, nominally a Catholic, had inveighed against political Catholicism in Mein Kampf and attacked both of the Christian churches for their failure to recognize the racial problem, he had, as we have seen, warned in his book that 'a political party must never...lose sight of the fact that in all previous historical experience a purely political party has never succeeded in producing a religious reformation'...

"In his speech of March 23, 1933, to the Reichstag when the legislative body of Germany abandoned its functions to the dictator, Hitler paid tribute to the Christian faiths as 'essential elements for safequarding the soul of the German people', promised to respect their rights, declared that his government's 'ambition is a peaceful accord between Church and State' and added - with an eye to the votes of the Catholic Centre Party, which he received - that 'we hope to improve our friendly relations with the Holy See'.

"Scarcely four months later, on July 20, the Nazi government concluded a concordat with the Vatican in which it guaranteed the freedom of the Catholic religion and the right of the Church to 'regulate her own affairs'. The agreement..was hardly put to paper before it was broken by the Nazi government...

"On July 25, five days after ratification of the concordat, the German government promulgated a sterilization law, which particularly offended the Catholic Church. Five days later the first steps were taken to dissolve the Catholic Youth League. During the next years thousands of Catholic priests, nuns, and lay leaders were arrested, many of them on trumped-up charges of 'immorality' or of 'smuggling foreign currency'. Erich Klausener, leader of Catholic Action, was, as we have seen, murdered in the June 30, 1934, purge. Scores of Catholic publications were suppressed, and even the sanctity of the confessional was violated by Gestapo agents...On March 14, 1937, Pope Pius XI issued an encyclical, 'Mit Brennender Sorge' (With Burning Sorrow), charging the Nazi government with 'evasion' and 'violation' of the concordat and accusing it of sowing 'the tares of suspicion, discord, hatred, calumny, of secret and open fundamental hostility to Christ and his Church'". (pp. 324-325).

Well, yes. The Nazi government did possess a "fundamental hostility to Christ". How could it be more obvious?

(Nor was it only Catholics Hitler had contempt for. Shirer reports that about Protestants, Hitler once said to an aide: "You can do anything you want with them. They will submit....they are insignificant little people, submissive as dogs, and they sweat with embarrassment when you talk to them". [p. 329].)

Speaking of Article 24, Overy notes:

"Article 24 of the party programme accepted 'positive Christianity', but also called on the churches to do nothing to offend 'the sense of morality of the German race'. This injunction placed the moral outlook of the party above that of all religions. That moral outlook was rooted in 'the acknowledgement and ruthless exploitation of the iron laws of nature'. The primary law, and the 'source of all genuineness and truth', was the unconditional defence of the race and its blood".

Overy continues:

"From the mid-1930s the regime and the party were dominated much more by the prominent anti-Christians in their ranks - Himmler, Goebbels, Bormann, Heydrich...Religious youth movements were closed down or merged with the Hitler Youth, from which all religious instruction was excluded. In August 1937 Himmler banned all Confessing Church seminaries and instruction. Dissident Protestants were barred from universities. State-sponsored denomination schools were closed by 1939, together with private ecclesiastical school. Religious education by clergymen was eliminated. Religions were prevented from publicly collecting for charity. The new generation of Germans was taught to despise the characteristics of the Christian man as tainted with a degenerate, Jewish effeminacy and to seek within themselves the strength to assert and defend the race.

(...)

"Both Stalin and Hitler wanted a neutered religion, subservient to the state, while the slow programme of scientific revelation destroyed the foundation of religious myth".

(From "The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia", by R. Overy, pp. 280-286).

I submit that we need a lot more than a belt buckle slogan and a few calculated utterances in public speeches to establish that Hitler had a "fully Christian ethos", especially when there are so many evidences that he loathed Christianity.

So, about that ethos:

In his brilliant little book "From Darwin to Hitler", historian Richard Weikart echoes the historians quoted above:

"Hitler's morality was not based on traditional Judeo-Christian ethics nor Kant's categorical imperative, but was rather a complete repudiation of them. Instead, Hitler embraced an evolutionary ethic that made Darwinian fitness and health the only criteria for moral standards. The Darwinian struggle for existence, especially the struggle between different races, became the sole arbiter of morality...He scorned humaneness and Christian morality, which would promote weakness, thereby producing decline, degradation, and ultimately the demise of the human species...

"Hitler's view that morality is purely a human construction undermines any system of ethics claiming transcendence, such as Judeo-Christian ethics or Kantian ethics. Hitler clearly did not believe in the existence of immutable, universal moral standards.

"Hitler derided any morality inimical to the increased vitality of the 'Aryan' race, especially traditional Christian values of humility, pity, and sympathy...In Hitler's mind Darwinism provided the moral justification for infanticide, euthanasia, genocide, and other policies that had been (and thankfully still are) considered immoral by more conventional moral standards". (pp. 210-215).

In his autobiography "Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs", Hitler's architect Albert Speer writes:

"Hitler usually concluded this historical speculation by remarking: 'You see, it's been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn't we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?" (p. 115).

NOW...about the book Hitler's Table Talk. This book is a compendium of private, after-dinner monologues by Hitler, recorded by various scribes under the direction of Martin Bormann, Hitler's private secretary. Hitler's confidante and architect Albert Speer is but one of the many witnesses who have confirmed the authenticity of these notes. Indeed, it is beyond my ability to fathom how anyone, save one blinded by a particular, peculiar prejudice, could ever regard them as spurious. And what, pray tell, might that peculiar prejudice be? Why, exactly the one which has possessed Anonymous: the stupid, completely unhistorical belief that Adolf Hitler was a believing Christian, and National Socialism his way of implementing a "Christian ethos". (There are evidently quite a number of atheists so committed to the dogma that evil is the sole province of religion, that anything showing just how stupid this idea is they immediately regard, on that basis alone, as "spurious". I might also ask, since we're on the subject of prejudice-induced blindness, how different this type of "thinking" is from that displayed by a fundamentalist Christian, who "knows" that carbon dating is wrong because he already "knows" that God created the earth only 5000 years ago?).

I ask readers to judge for themselves, after reading all of the quotes above, whether it is more likely that someone completely invented the following quotes and falsely attributed them to Hitler, or maybe translated them all wrong (as one crank atheist activist has alleged).....or that these are just Hitler's comments:

"The Christian religion is an enemy to beauty" (p. 246)

"Since my fourteenth year I have felt liberated from the superstition that the priests used to teach. Apart from the Holy Joes, I can say that none of my comrades went on believing in the miracle of the Eucharist" (p. 246).

"It was Christianity that brought about the fall of Rome - not the Germans or the Huns" (p. 193).

"While we're on the subject, let's add that, even amongst those who claim to be good Catholics, very few really believe in this humbug. Only old women, who have given up everything because life has already withdrawn from them, go regularly to church" (p. 258).

"I shall never come personally to terms with the Christian lie" (p. 259).

"The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity" (p. 8).

"The reason why the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it knew nothing of the two great scourges: the pox and Christianity. Christianity is a prototype of Bolshevism: the mobilization of the Jew of the masses of slaves with the object of undermining society" (p. 60).

"It's striking to observe that Christian ideas, despite all St. Pauls's efforts, had no success in Athens. The philosophy of the Greeks was so much superior to this poverty-stricken rubbish that the Athenians burst out laughing when they listened to him" (p. 63).

"What is ruining Christianity today is what once ruined the ancient world...as soon as the idea was introduced that all men were equal before God, that world was bound to collapse" (p. 254).

"Kerrl, with the noblest of intentions, wanted to attempt a synthesis between National Socialism and Christianity. I don't believe the thing's possible, and I see the obstacle in Christianity itself...Pure Christianity...leads quite simply to the annihilation of mankind. It is merely wholehearted Bolshevism, under a tinsel of metaphysics" (p. 112).

"When understanding of the universe has become widespread, when the majority of men know that the stars are not sources of light but worlds, perhaps inhabited worlds like ours, then the Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity...Christianity has reached the peak of absurdity in this respect. And that's why one day its structure will collapse. Science has already impregnated humanity. Consequently, the more Christianity clings to its dogmas, the quicker it will decline" (p. 48).

"It's Christianity that's the liar" (p. 49).

"Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure" (p. 41).

To summarize my own views, and those of the historians quoted above:

Hitler did not have a "fully Christian ethos". Rather, he had a "fully ANTI-Christian ethos". He viewed Christianity as "weak" and "flabby", and for that reason, as an enemy to a National Socialism, the job of which was to preserve the volk through struggle. He had contempt for both Catholics and Protestants, and showed it repeatedly.

Moreover, he did not rationalize his persecution of religious believers with theist arguments, but with secular arguments, nor were his motivations in persecuting religious believers (or anyone else), themselves religious.

The broadest point is that whether we start out with atheist, theist, or somewhere-in-between premises, we can always wind up, seemingly logically, at the conclusion that we may do evil. Neither atheism nor theism in themselves can provide salvation.

Are the Four Horsemen Any Less Deluded?

2008-11-17T04:16:00.001-08:00

Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, and Hitchens all claim that religious believers are deluded. So they may be. But are they themselves any less deluded?

Consider what the so-called "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" believe.

They believe (amongst other things) that:

1.) Religious belief on a large scale can be eradicated;

2.) Religion is what, more than anything, causes evil;

3.) The world would be a much better place if everyone were atheist and embraced a strictly scientific worldview.

But - how is this not obvious? - one has to be extremely credulous, if not actually delusional, to believe any of these three things. The Horsemen want everyone to be more skeptical, but their own beliefs are only possible because they have suspended their own skepticism. In this sense, they are but mirror images of religious believers themselves.

After all, there is no reason to believe that "religion can be eradicated"; for there is no reason to believe that religion arises from anything other than innate features of the human psyche (hence its ubiquity in the human family). So to believe that "religion can be eradicated" is like believing that "sexual attraction can be eradicated" or that "inferring causes from events can be eradicated". It is to believe in magic; the only thing that history and psychology - let alone common sense - tells us is that the only way to "eradicate religion" is to eradicate human beings. (Interesting, given the humanitarian pretensions of all four.)

There is also no reason to believe that "religion" causes evil, or even that that phrase has any real meaning, not least because in the end it is very difficult to pin down how we should even define "religion" (in contradistinction to "ideology", say). Should Catholicism be considered a religion, but Marxism not? What about Buddhism or Confucianism, which have no god figures? What are our definitions? This is not a pedantic point; it is a necessary one when we are talking about causation from a social science perspective, for even under the very best of circumstances it is very difficult to establish causes for human actions. Ambiguous slogans like "religion causes evil" do not cut it.

What may make more sense, I think, especially given the fact that the human brain is seemingly hardwired for creating cosmological narratives (whether theist or non-theist), is to draw a distinction not between "religion" and "non-religion", but between unjustified beliefs (which may be theist or non-theist) or justified beliefs. So maybe it would get us a little farther to say that unjustified beliefs, rather than religion, cause evil.

The problem with this, though, is that whereas the claim "religion causes evil" is essentially meaningless, the claim "unjustified beliefs cause evil" is obviously untrue. There are innumerable unjustified beliefs which may inspire very good behaviour. (It is perfectly possible to be inspired to share our food with the hungry by the belief that elves, or the ghost of Elvis Presley, will reward us if we do).

Worse is that justified beliefs can inspire us, or at least license us, to do evil. Consider that evolutionary theory on its own terms, in the end, makes it essentially impossible to attribute some sort of cosmic value to human life while denying it to, say, slime mould. So, we would kill off bothersome slime mould with a jug of Clorox without a second thought; why then, confining ourselves to a purely biological theory like evolution, should we think think twice about killing off a bothersome human being (other than for fear of incarceration)? Logically speaking, staying within biology, I'm not sure there is a good reason.

Put another way - is there anything at all, in the most justified biological beliefs we can have, that allows us to say that Jeffrey Dahmer did something "evil"? I don't think so - biology, after all, doesn't even pretend to tell us anything about good or evil.

The point here is, I'm not sure how justified versus unjustified beliefs in any way correspond to good versus evil behaviour. And the bigger point is, if they do not so correspond, then neither does science correspond to goodness. The claim that it does is only wishful thinking on the part of people incapable of religious belief, because the alternative (that maybe there is no solution to the problem of human evil) is too horrible for them to contemplate. But this is only as much to say, again, that believing that religion causes evil, or that we can be saved through science (see below), is itself an unjustified belief, if not a genuine delusion.

Lastly, and especially given the history of the last century, there is no reason to believe that the world would be a better place if everyone were atheist. All of the same atrocities and more which have been justified by theist thinking, can be justified with non-theist thinking - and have been. Here is just one simple, not-so hypothetical, example.

If we begin with the belief, as does Dawkins (see the first couple of pages of "The God Delusion"), that:

Premise 1.) Creating heaven on earth (obviously a good thing) is possible;

and then we posit that

Premise 2.) Religion is making the creation of heaven on earth impossible;

we can conclude that

Conclusion 1.) Religion must be neutralized or eradicated - for the good of everyone.

And indeed, this is just what all four of the writers mentioned say.

So then, what would our next syllogism be?

P3.) Religion must be neutralized or eradicated;

P4.) The actions of certain people - e.g., missionaries, priests, publishers of Bibles, activist believers - are impeding our effort to neutralize or eradicate religion/establish heaven on earth;

Therefore,

C2.) The "bad" actions of these "enemies of heaven on earth" must be stopped.

And what would next syllogism be?

P5.) The "bad" actions of these "enemies of heaven-on-earth" people must be stopped;

P6.) Those "bad" actions can be stopped by either punishing the people doing them, or, if it comes to that, killing them;

Therefore,

C.3) Missionaries, priests, activist religious believers, e.g., should be punished or even killed.

Now, if it not an evil thing to punish or kill people just because of their beliefs, I don't know what is. Yet I have shown how easily it is to come to just that conclusion without ever invoking the concept of God. It is only a matter of logic, given once we begin with certain (atheist and utopian) premises.

And of course, this wasn't really a hypothetical. It was this same reasoning which licensed the persecution of religious believers in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, Cambodia, etc.

AND - it is quite close to the reasoning which leads Sam Harris himself, in "The End of Faith", to suggest that there are certain beliefs which are so bad, that people should be killed just for having them. This is the same Sam Harris who wrote an entire book about how rotten religious belief is, not least because it leads to atrocities like killing people for having the wrong beliefs! (This isn't the only contradiction in Harris...).

It is a comforting fantasy that there is an ultimate solution to the problem of human evil. Theists have their preferred solutions (Jesus will come again, everyone should convert to the "one true religion", etc.), and non-theists have theirs (science can rid the world of hunger and oppression, everyone should convert to atheism, etc.).

But neither theist nor non-theist "solutions" have any basis in evidence or experience. The beliefs of the Four Horsemen are no less delusional in this respect than those of religious believers, of which they are but a mirror image. Along these same lines, there does not seem to be any correlation between whether a belief is theist or atheist, and the goodness or evil of the actions it inspires. Although, if there is any large-scale correlation, the 20th century suggests atheists (and religious skeptics) would come out worse. At a small level, the Sam Harris atheist argument for "killing people for their beliefs", which I put in syllogism form, gives a small indication of why. So does the Clorox slime mould example.

So, where does that leave us?

To find out, tune in next time for another episode of "A Lone Ignoramus Tries to Understand Everything in the Entire Universe"!

Shooting for Immortality

2008-10-31T02:03:00.000-07:00

Sure, I'd like people to notice when I die. That would be nice. I can't explain why really, since I'd have to already be dead for people to notice that I was dead. But...still, as irrational as it may be, I'd still like to leave some sort of lasting legacy to the planet.

My achievements so far, I think, have been fairly meager. Yes, I have had some success at radio, but that seems like a long time ago. I'm grateful for it...but in some way, it just doesn't seem like enough.

What would be enough? One thing might be some cool phrase that I invent, which enters common speech and just goes on forever. I thought for a few seconds this past week that I'd finally come up with a good candidate; but four seconds later, after a Google search, I discovered that it was already in common usage. I must have heard it but just not remembered (the phrase was, "who you are is more important than what you know").

There is one phrase I think I might actually have invented which seems to express something true - or at least true to some extent - and which might be a good candidate. It came to me when I appeared on Global TV a few years ago commenting on the Canadian federal election, and in particular, Liberal Party candidate Paul Martin's shambolic campaign. The phrase was, "if you can't run a campaign, you can't run a country". Yes, it was in Canada - but it was on national TV.

Now - I have run a google search on my phrase, and interestingly, what few usages of it all post-date my appearance. Could it be...?

I hope so (even though if I'm not credited, it will be as if I'd never come up with it anyhow). But in the absence of some cool aphorism or slogan or word known as my own coinage, I suppose I should concentrate on what legacy I am leaving for my kids. God knows I've tried...and I did get what for me was a nice "atta boy" one day a couple of weeks ago from my ten year old daughter, Lady Lu (once again, hip-hop nickname).

She said, "Daddy, it's fall again - and that means it's time for all our fall family rituals. Like stew. We have to start making our stews again! With the bread bowls!".

WOW. Someone noticed; someone remembered; someone appreciated; someone saw the stew as more than the stew; someone saw it as 'sacred family ritual'. That's what I was shooting for! Cool!

And so it was that last night, I took Sno-Cone and Lady Lu and Peaches out to the little local grocery store, and we bought chicken, and barley, and bean mix, and lentils, and potatoes, and we washed everything up, and threw it all into the crockpot along with some rosemary and basil and a bay leaf...and today, I picked up some sourdough bread bowls...And tonight, we turned off all the lights, and lit a fire and a bunch of candles, and all gathered round the table to eat our super-duper chicken stew out of our very own sourdough bread bowls, just like we do every couple of weeks every fall, and we drank a special punch that Skinny Dip made...And afterwards, we all gathered in the living room, and I taught all the little kids an old Kinks song about a witch called "Wicked Annabella" (Halloween and all), and then we finished by reading "Hansel and Gretel". And my story sort of went awry - I ended up doing a Bullwinkle imitation for Hansel's voice, and a Rocky imitation for Gretel's, and all sorts of other things which I think only little kids might find hilarious...and we all went to bed feeling cozy and happy...and I dare to hope that maybe they will remember some part of tonight, forever...

And now that I think about it...if they do, it will be far more than enough. :)

Little Miracles

2008-10-26T00:54:00.000-07:00

One of the best things about having children is that through them, we get to see the world for the first time, and feel all those first blushes of wonder, over and over again.

I was reminded of that today. E and I took my three year old son Trixta (I'll be using their hip-hop nicknames for privacy's sake) and my six year old son Sno-cone for a walk up to the University of Victoria library where I had to photocopy an article (E's hip-hop nickname is Skinny Dip).

On the way there, Trixta - a very attentive little chap - noticed that there were no more blackberries on any of the bushes along the trail by our house.

"Where did all the blackberries go, Dad?".

"They're gone now" (ridiculous answer, I know).

"Where did they go?".

"Well, the blackberries stopped growing, and the ones that were there fell on to the ground, and...the birds probably ate them all".

Trixta stopped and investigated the bushes more carefully. I thought I could guess what he was thinking and feeling:

Why do blackberries just start growing all of a sudden, and then just stop growing all of a sudden? How does that work exactly? It seems all kind of strange...kind of mysterious...

And in that moment, I realized just how good those questions were. I didn't have any better idea than he had.

We finally got up to the library. I swore them all to silence and made Skinny Dip promise to not throw the rugby ball around inside (we'd brought it with us to play catch on the way up). We entered and made our way over to the photocopy machine. I didn't realize it, but neither Trixta nor Sno-cone had ever seen one in action. Both were entranced. They took turns pushing the big green button, and "oohed" and "aahed" every time a new sheet of paper popped out. ("WO. That's cool!")

And hearing all their questions about how the machine worked made me realize how little I myself knew about it. The best I could muster was, "it takes a quick photo of the piece of paper". That that was the extent of my knowledge left me, again, feeling quite a bit of wonder myself.

And now I am about to push the "send" button on this laptop computer; and the words I type here will magically float through the air, and - I guess - into an antennae, and through a wire, and into something called "cyberspace", and be instantly available to people all around the globe. And I have no idea how any of that works, either.

And I wonder just how much more, really, I understand about the world, than my kids...

Problems of Philosophy, Indeed

2008-10-26T00:50:00.000-07:00

When I was a little kid growing up in Lynden, Washington, I used to listen to Seattle classic rock radio station KZOK (102.5 FM). What's funny is that if I turn the station on now, the playlist is exactly the same. It's all still "All Along the Watchtower", "Won't Get Fooled Again", "Barracuda", the whole deal. Nothing's changed since 1980.

Philosophy is like that. One day I'd like to write a follow-up to Bertrand Russell's classic "The Problems of Philosophy" called "The Problem with the Problems of Philosophy", and chronicle the inability or pathological unwillingness of modern philosophers to ever ultimately solve, or even want to solve, any of their philosophical "problems". (That reminds me - last year I chatted with a well-known philosopher at the London School of Economics. I asked him if he knew of any philosophical problems that had ever been solved. He acted as though he'd never considered this before, and after a few moments, admitted that he couldn't think of one). Point is, a list of current "problems of philosophy" in 2008 would be pretty much indistinguishable from a list made twenty, fifty, or even one hundred years ago.

So ingrained is the habit of yakking forever about problems is that even if some philosopher somewhere were to "solve" some "problem of philosophy" - like, say, the "problem of induction", the "problem of other minds", or the "problem" of how one thing can be two things and yet one thing at the same time (thanks, Heraclitus) - no other philosopher would acknowledge it.

Perhaps I am putting the matter a tad too harshly. You see, it is not quite that philosophy is characterized by total stasis. There is "progress" of a twisted sort: "progress", in the world of professional philosophy, is when someone, somewhere, thinks of a BRAND NEW unsolvable "problem" for philosophers to yak about. But such "progress" is fairly rare. After all, so many philosophers have been trying for so many centuries to come up with brand new "problems" to talk about, that the creative faculties of the human mind appear to have been fairly mined out. Besides, most folks just aren't that creative to begin with.

That's why most professional philosophers now spend their time yakking about the exact nature of the yakking of other philosophers before them - AND, yakking about the yakking about the yakking of other philosophers. As if the pointless ramblings of Hegel were not pointless enough already, philosophy journals now treat us to articles like "Husserl on Hegel's Teleological Animus Mundi in Light of Heidegger's Theory of Being". Such stuff at worst is one step away from an inmate-written insane asylum newsletter. But what it mostly is, is just pointless.

I'd like to think of some snappy ending to this post, but I can't. Besides, this post is probably pointless itself...

The World Can Go To Hell (and for some reason, that feels great)

2008-10-24T19:10:00.001-07:00

At the moment anyway...I really couldn't care less if the world went to hell.

I don't care who wins the US presidential election (though maybe that's because I can't stand either candidate). I literally didn't spend one single minute paying attention to the just-passed Canadian election. I didn't read a single newspaper article, didn't spend a single minute watching election coverage.

I'm sick of hearing about how McDonald's is the root of all evil, how I should buckle up, how I should go green, how I should only use recycled printer paper, how everything in the world is poisoning me, how I should stop wearing cologne, how "Bush lied", how every bank in the world is collapsing, how I should attend all four thousand PTA meetings they have each year, how I should volunteer for yet another soccer fundraiser and on and on and on. I feel like lighting most of my stuff on fire (I'll keep my book collection and the computer), setting up the Island Kingdom of Bachmania (subjects by invitation only), and staying there for the rest of my life. Or else requesting a transfer to a far distant galaxy from earth's alien overlords (I know they're there because I have had "special spiritual experiences").

All I want to do anymore is hang out with trusted friends (which currently include my children, my brother, and three or four others). Everything outside that bubble seems, now, either rotten or soon-to-be rotten.

Yet strangely, I feel sort of at peace about it all...

A Failed Prediction?

2008-10-11T21:37:00.000-07:00

As I write this, Barack Obama appears to be heading towards a clear victory over John McCain in the upcoming US presidential election. However, I predicted a McCain victory months ago, long before Obama even won the Democratic nomination.

I did so having no idea gas prices would spike as much as they have, and no idea that there would be a massive financial meltdown. And rightly or wrongly, American voters tend to view the Democrats as stronger than Republicans on domestic economic issues: these crises have significantly benefited Obama.

It seems now that for McCain to win, some new issue will have to induce greater fear than these economic crises, and McCain will have to be seen by voters as more likely to erase that fear. That seems to be how it works: which ever candidate voters believe is most likely to remove their most pressing fear, wins. In practical terms, I think this means that the only thing that could get McCain elected now is a brand new Osama bin-Laden video, or God forbid, a terrorist attack.

In any case, if my prediction fails, as it now seems certain to, it will be another testament to the difficulty of establishing an impressive track record of long-term political prediction (by impressive, I mean notably above what random guessing would yield). There is an inverse correlation between the possibility of accurate prediction and the amount of (uncontrollable) variables. And certainly, not just political science but all the social sciences - if indeed it is even accurate to call them "sciences" - labour under the difficulty of trying to understand phenomena which occur as the result of an infinity of uncontrollable, unknowable stimuli. And this is not even to factor in the possibility that humans have something like genuine free will. If we do - if volition in some way is not constrained by physical laws - then the possibility of ever being able to accurately predict social or political phenomena - history maybe I should say - seems even more daunting, if not impossible.

To attempt predictions where the variables are few and the relevant laws may be inferred, as Thales showed with his eclipse, makes sense; but to attempt predictions where the variables are, practically speaking, infinite, and the relevant "laws", if there even are any, are not only unknown but probably in principle unknowable, as in the case of an election many months in the future whose candidates have not even been selected - appears so impossible in principle that only a complete idiot would try :P.

Fasionable Murder

2008-10-01T11:54:00.001-07:00

One might think that murder - arguably the worst crime - would remain taboo. But that would be to presume that human beings are inherently sane, or ethical.

In fact, humans are both sane and insane, ethical and unethical, savage and urbane, a mixture of best and worst motives. There is often no coherence or balance to what we believe, feel, or do; and in my lower moments, I wonder what essential difference there might be between the human and any other animal. Perhaps it is the capacity of some people for self-discipline in conformity to nothing more than abstract ideals of virtue; I don't know of any animal which demonstrates any capacity like that. But a little time on the planet shows that even that trait is in fairly short supply.

But back to murder. A visit these days to any North American university campus will reveal the fashion craze of wearing a black and white PLO scarf, as though it were nothing more than a leather bracelet or earring. Evidently, it doesn't matter that wearing the PLO scarf is only a step away from wearing a swastika armband. Forget Huey Lewis's old "it's hip to be square"; I guess it's now hip to champion murder, and to speak the truth, genocide, since that is what the PLO's founding premises add up to.

The PLO is, and always has been, dedicated to wiping out the state of Israel through murder. Its record of bloodshed includes murdering school children at the Ma'alot School, murdering Israeli Olympic athletes, murdering airplane passengers at Ben-Gurion Airport...the list goes on and on. Its late leader, Arafat, was a corrupt, bloodthirsty, psychopathic virtual dictator, who in no sense could ever be conceivably linked with ANY characteristic of liberal democracy: not rational discussion, not democratic procedures, not free press, not free speech, not checks and balances, not rule of law, nothing.

Yet the same students who constantly chant that Bush is a "war criminal" for "murdering Iraqi civilians", who denounce "Chinese atrocities in Tibet", who feel perfectly free to denounce what they view as "terrorism" anywhere they see it, carve out a big exception when Jews are the victims of the violence. In that case, the murder's great! So great that we all ought to wear PLO scarves to show our solidarity - like wearing a New York Giants jersey the week before the Super Bowl.

As though murder, genocide, and terrorism weren't bad enough on their own, there is also the underlying question of Israel's right to exist. And on that question, I think it can be safely said that if Israel does not have a right to exist, then no country in the world has a right to exist.

But that's probably a topic for another post.

In Defense of Vanity

2008-09-22T16:57:00.000-07:00

All this talk about how much I enjoy gorging myself right before bed has led me to ponder why I don't continue the gorging. The answer, I think, is vanity.

It's not really a concern about my health. My short-term craving for shoving my face would definitely overcome any attachment I could develop to a long-term plan for health. And it would also overcome some attachment to an abstract ideal like self-respect. I think, in the end, it's just vanity. And vanity, to my mind, only means one thing for a (straight) guy: appealing to a particular woman, or women in general.

That's right: the only reason I don't gorge myself every night, is that my vanity has managed the spectacular feat of overcoming my gluttonous desire to do so. Put more simply, I just wanted my wife to like me more.

Strangely, losing weight didn't achieve that (but that's another story). But at least I can content myself to some small degree with the idea that however plain I might look, I'd look worse with more weight on. Or something. Hell, I'm not even really conscious of what's going on in terms of motivation, now that I think about it.

But let's just say it is common old vanity. If so, I like it. It makes humans bathe and stay healthy, brush their teeth, be polite, perform feats, do things which others will praise them for. In that sense, vanity clearly has survival value. Maybe we'd all be dead if our ancestors weren't vain.

I know I'd certainly be a lot chubbier!

The Sweet Joy of Laying In Bed Shoving Your Face Full of Food

2008-09-13T23:27:00.000-07:00

This post is in response to comments posted by "anonymous".

First, I should say I hear anonymous's point that there is a natural variation in metabolisms, and that it is much harder for some people to keep fat off than others.

As it happens, I have had some experience with sustained overeating myself. The fattest I've ever been was this past spring - I hit 200 for the first time ever. That is about twenty five pounds over my normal weight, and it was virtually all chub (not muscle). (Also, I should mention I'm six feet).

What I did was shove my face full of food every night before bed, for months. Usually it was three (or more) pieces of my favourite sourdough bread, toasted, with melted cheese on it, with two giant glasses of milk, or a chicken pot pie and fries from the local pub. I also regularly augmented my cheese on toast with fried rib steaks. Every once in a while I'd eat an entire little tub of Haagen-Dazs (vanilla or vanilla bean). Sometimes I'd wash everything down with a Strongbow Cider (or two). Frankly, I friggin' loved it. I'd be eating right now if I could without packing on all that chub.

It's kind of easy to lose perspective on yourself, but I got a wake-up call when I went to the doctor's and weighed myself. "200! 200?! I've got to get myself together", I thought. So, I tried to change my eleven o'clock pig-out habit. It was tough. Laying there in bed, watching rugby on the big screen, whaling like Henry VIII...how could I give that up?

I started to scale down my nighttime meals, and since I wanted to start playing rugby anyway, I also managed to track down the former strength and conditioning coach for the Canadian national rugby team, Dave Smit. He agreed to train me, so I paid for twelve sessions.

These turned out to be extremely intense "crossfit" style sessions, and I often could barely walk to my car after an hour (no exaggeration). By then I'd cut out my midnight mini-medieval feasts, and I was pretty amazed at how quickly I lost chub and started to get toned.

I haven't weighed myself for awhile, but I think last time I did I was 185 or thereabouts, but the extra weight is muscle, not chub, so I guess I'm okay for now.

But dang...I sure miss those feasts!

From Helen to Captain Marvel - and back again

2008-09-13T11:26:00.001-07:00

Three years ago, my son E, then nine, said he wanted to play soccer.

I was excited. After all, E has a lot - a LOT - of energy, and can be a difficult child. Some great passion, I knew, would be great for him, something he could really excel in, give him something to focus on. It would also give him and me something to do together, so we could grow closer. It seemed like it would be a great father/son adventure.

After having so many children, it is rare to feel a lot of shock over things anymore; but E's first game shocked me. And mortified me. He was entirely unable to form any conception of direction or orientation. His coach sent him in to play defence; he began running all over the field, sometimes off the field, trying to score on his own goalkeeper as often as on the other goalkeeper...and all the while, his Chinese-Canadian coach was shouting, "E! Wha' you doo-ing?! E!! You go wrong way!!! NO E - COME BACK - NO, THAS OTHER FIELD!!! You pray DE-fence, E! Go back to your own goal!".

But E couldn't remember which one was his goal. He couldn't remember which direction to go. He couldn't figure out who was attacking and who was defending. It was like watching Helen Keller. It was, without question, the weirdest, most horrific athletic performance I'd ever witnessed in my entire life.

E didn't play much that first game. His coach kept him mostly on the sideline, and when he had a chance, tried to explain to him what was going on. But E, standing there in his gold and blue uniform, only stared blankly, confusedly, out at the chaos of players.

"E", I said when I got home. "We need to go over some stuff". I drew a picture of a soccer pitch on a piece of paper.

"Your team is the X's, the other guys, the O's. Your goalie is here. Which goalie should you score on?"

"That one", he said, pointing to the O goalie. Thank God, I thought. "And that one", he said, next pointing to the X goalie.

"No - you don't score on your own goalie, dude. You only try to score points on the other team". I was trying to keep things calm and light.

"That's weird", E said, in his quick, rapid-fire delivery. "I-think-if-there's-a-goalie-then-you-should-be-able-to-score-on-him-it-would-make-the-game-way-more-exciting-and-"

"E - stop. Stop. Let's just go through the game, step by step. K?"

"K".

And so we did - over, and over, and over, and over. And over. I ended up buying one of those soccer coach whiteboards so we could go over what had happened after every game. And slowly but surely, things started to click in E's head. And he began to practice more and more.

And then all last year, he really, really focused and practiced; and by the end of the year, he had locked down the center-midfielder position, and was setting up plays, regularly scoring goals, calling for the ball, beating guys one on one, taking free kicks, covering the whole center portion of the pitch with a really good sense of the whole game, brimming with confidence and determination, directing the defenders, directing the forwards - a HUGE leap, especially given how shy he has always been. E had finally come into his own.

The club director couldn't believe it. His coaches couldn't believe it. The other parents couldn't believe it. Every game, people would come up to me and say, "I can't believe how much E has improved!". And he finished the season with highlight reel stuff: in the last game, E scored two goals, and set up the third.

"I've told the club director I definitely want E for my gold team next year", said Cecil, the gold team coach, in his east London accent (the league places kids in bronze, silver, and gold according to skill level). "He's brilliant. He reminds me of Bryan Robson (the Manchester United star from a few years ago). They used to call him 'Captain Marvel' because of the way he ran up and down the pitch and controlled everything. We definitely need him".

From Helen Keller to the Gold team's Captain Marvel in three years - wow. That was an achievement! Especially for a kid who still couldn't pour milk into his cereal bowl without spilling it everywhere.

"You did it!", I said to E exultantly after my chat with Cecil. "Can you believe it? You're a lock for the Gold team!". I called up the older brothers and told them to make sure to congratulate E. We talked about it at the table. I even got my brother to call him and congratulate him. E seemed like he was on a high, and the whole family rallied to cheer his achievement.

And then summer started, and E said he wanted to take a break from practicing. Okay, I thought. I can understand that.

The end of June came - but E still didn't want to practice. And all throughout July, he didn't want to play. And he began to say, "I don't think I want to be a soccer player when I grow up". Weird - he's spent the last three years saying that's all he wants to be, and now all of a sudden, right after his break-out year, he changes his mind? "You don't have to be a pro soccer player when you grow up, E. But it's still fun to play, and you might as well do your best. Maybe you'll change your mind again".

But August came, and E still didn't even want to pick up a soccer ball. Formal Gold Team assessments arrived in mid-August. E went, and was horrible. It was as though he'd lost his game sense in the space of ten weeks, and most of his personal skills. Scrimmage after scrimmage, E was non-existent to a liability. He was Helen Keller again.

Finally, after five scrimmages, the club director pulled me aside and said, "What happened with E? He was a shoe-in for Gold, and now he can't play anymore".

"Uh - well - he seemed to lose interest over the summer. I don't really know what to say; he is kind of a strange kid; all I know is he just seemed to totally go off soccer once summer hit".

Long story short is, E has been passed over for the Gold team, and he seems very certain he no longer wants to play soccer. Now I've got coaches, parents, emailing me, saying "what happened? Please try to convince him to play. He turned into one of the best players in the club!".

But how can I force a kid to play a sport he, for whatever reason, has absolutely zero interest in anymore? Even though it kills me - after all, I put in hundreds of hours with him, taking him to the park myself to run drills, watching and dissecting televised Premier Leagues games with him, driving him back and forth to soccer academies, buying him soccer books, drawing up plays, picking out soccer shoes, teaching him to kick, the whole thang...

I guess I will have to cherish in memory those moments for their own sake, rather than as the exciting steps to something more.

"Religion Without Dogma": Uh huh

2008-09-11T17:27:00.000-07:00

I walked past a booth on the lawn of the Univeristy of Victoria advertising the Unitarian Church today; the banner across the booth said, "Religion Without Dogma".

Hm. Isn't that like saying "dinner without food", or "war without conflict", or "sexual intercourse without penetration"?

If we make the definition of religion so elastic as to accomodate both institutions founded on, and thoroughly saturated by, dogma (like, say, the Catholic church), AND an institution virtually inherently free of dogma (like, say, a fire department, or to hear Unitarians tell it, the Unitarian church), then we have defined the word "religion" right out of existence - and then we couldn't even talk about "religion" anymore. As any kind of meaningful concept, it wouldn't really exist. And if that is the case, then the Unitarian slogan really ought to be simply, "Without Dogma".

But that poses another problem, because as anyone who has ever visited a Unitarian church knows, it is not that it is free of dogma - only that it is free of certain dogmas. But that is only to say as much as we would about any other church in the world, including the Pentecostal, Seventh Day Adventist, or Moonie. It's not dogma versus no dogma, but one dogma versus another dogma.

Unitarians, for example, do not believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the saviour of mankind, or that he makes people speak spontaneously in unknown languages. But they do believe in certain "progressive" ideals, like the morality of "eliminating poverty", "eliminating sexism", etc., which, insofar as they turn out to be coherent ideas, have as little rational basis in the end as the belief that Jesus is still alive and living up in the sky watching everything we do. And I'm not sure how to characterize a devoutly-held belief lacking any rational or evidentiary basis as anything other than a dogma...(?).

My conclusion:

Any institution entirely free of dogma does not qualify as a religion (your local poker club, for example, as opposed to your local Catholic church). So, taking the Unitarian slogan seriously, we would be forced to say that Unitarianism isn't actually a religion.

But since the Unitarians are actually deluding themselves by thinking that Unitarianism does not rest on factually and logically unsupportable beliefs (dogmas), Unitarianism does in fact qualify as a real religion. It has just substituted humanist dogma for sectarian dogma.

Sizing Up the "Obesity Epidemic"

2008-09-09T23:22:00.000-07:00

First point:

You wanna know what an "epidemic" is? The Bubonic Plague of the 1340's. That's an epidemic. It came, so to speak, out of nowhere, and killed 75 MILLION human beings, including around half of the European population.

The Spanish Flu outbreak after World War I was another epidemic. It killed many tens of millions of people, possibly as many as 100 million, around the world.

"Epidemic", at least until the last couple of decades, was always a special word reserved for referring to a sudden outbreak, or increase in, the incidence of a particular disease. As such, the word was very useful. Now it has become just another victim of "word definition inflation" by, presumably, people who don't want to hurt the feelings of obese people, or perhaps, by obese people themselves who can't bear the horror of actually taking responsibility for their obesity, and so must imagine that they are as little to blame for adding one hundred extra pounds to their frames, as 19th century London street urchins were for falling dead after inadvertently drinking contaminated water. And there's something really wrong with that.

Obesity is caused by overeating - and overeating is a bad habit. It's not a "disease". One may be predisposed genetically to obesity (see article here); one may experience thyroid gland malfunction; but regardless, obesity requires eating far too much relative to one's expenditure of energy for prolonged periods of time. That is just a fact.

Second point:

But bad habits, including obesity, per se aren't the end of the world, are they? Everyone has them; most are just not as obvious as obesity. And why a collection of schoolboard control freaks, bureaucrats, media people with nothing better to write about, and health food Nazis should care so much about the bad habit of gluttony - versus, say, the bad habit of trying to tell everyone else on the planet exactly how they should live - is quite beyond me. As long as we're not paying for their food or medical bills, and we're not forced by government to hire them to do jobs (like chimney sweeping, rodeo clowning, or teaching gymnastics) which their obesity has rendered them incapable of performing, who cares if they're obese? It's not like they don't know that obesity is bad for them. So why not leave them alone?

I like to stay fit myself, but I'm also sick of hearing about a "disease" which isn't really a disease, and an "epidemic" which isn't really an epidemic, and endless haranguing about how unhealthy obesity is when everyone already knows it, and obese people obviously don't value fitness enough to begin eating and exercising properly. What is there to talk about really anymore?

Well, I Never Saw This One Coming...My Official Response to the PromArt Controversy

2008-08-12T12:13:00.001-07:00

I found out yesterday morning that I was at the centre of a national controversy involving something called the PromArt program. I never saw this one coming...!

Anyway, here is my official response.

******

In early 2005, I received a call from my then-manager, Steve Warden, informing me that my booking agency, Vancouver-based Feldman and Associates, had received an invitation from the Canadian government for me to visit South Africa as part of a two-pronged diplomatic initiative. The trip to South Africa would include both charity work and raising the profile of Canadian arts and culture. Admiring as I did the humanitarian efforts of people like Bono and Angelina Jolie, and excited at the opportunity of officially representing Canada abroad, I immediately accepted.

My trip included performances at a township community hall for underprivileged youths, an outdoor concert for township children, a private "story and song" performance at the Canadian consulate in Pretoria to which other Pretoria-based foreign diplomats were invited, appearances at two music festivals, and a small public performance in Capetown. It also included quite a bit of physical peril and hardship (but that's another story).

The highlight of my trip, however, was the day spent at a large orphanage with which the Canadian consulate was affiliated outside of Johannesburg, in the company of the Liberal-appointed Canadian consul, a Mulroney-appointed senator, and a Bloc Quebecois MP. This orphanage houses several hundred children, quite a number of whom are the orphans of AIDS victims, and I felt privileged to be able to meet with them, share stories, sing and play for them, and hear them sing in return. I am not sure if my visit there made any difference to the kids, some of whom were terminally ill, but I hope so.

In my only interview to date about this story, a journalist asked me about "applying for PromArt funds to serve career interests". The truth, I am sort of embarrassed to admit, is that until this story broke, I'd never even heard of "PromArt", had no idea my trip was part of a formal government program, had no idea that other acts had been invited anywhere under the same program, and had no idea anyone could apply for such funds. Needless to say, I never "applied" for anything from PromArt (I got an invitation, which I thought was from an arm of the Canadian diplomatic corps). That I know of, I haven't experienced any career benefit from my trip, nor was that ever my expectation. Indeed, I didn't even have anything to promote during my trip - I had no CDs commercially available in the country at the time of my visit, nor have I ever had any there since. I didn't even bring T-shirts to sell. My trip just wasn't about that.

For the record, I do not believe that the cancellation of the PromArt program constitutes "censorship", and I very much resent the enduring tendency of artists to so easily and violently misuse this word. Censorship is when a government punishes its citizens for expressing their opinions (as is the wont of, say, provincial "human rights commission" thought police). It is not the mere cancellation of a diplomatic or arts funding program. I should also like to state for the record that if in fact, as has been reported, the PromArt program has been used to fund political propagandizing abroad, rather than for the diplomatic and charitable purposes which motivated the invitation I received to visit South Africa, that I myself wouldn't lament at least its dramatic overhaul.

South Africa is a beautiful and troubled country, and I felt proud to be able to represent Canada there, and hopefully, spread some message of hope and joy to people who struggle with the burdens of disease, crime, poverty, and a legacy of institutionalized racism. Because of the way the invitation was explained to me, and what I actually did on my trip, I never imagined that there might have been anything untoward about it. I thought that I was doing something good.