News Weakly - 11/2/19

Today's Double-Standard
Our current culture says, "If we find your views offensive, we are perfectly within our rights and even applauded if we choose to refuse to do business with you. If you refuse to do business with us for the same reason, expect a legal battle that, according to recent history, you will lose."

Internal Consistency
Okay, I'm not a Catholic and I'm not in favor of Catholicism, so this isn't about them. It's about religion in general and consistency. Apparently Joe Biden attended a Catholic church in South Carolina recently and was denied communion. Joe isn't talking about it, but the guy that actually did it said it was because "Holy Communion signifies we are one with God, each other and the Church" and Biden's stance on abortion (he's for it) is not "one with God, each other and the Church." Biden simply said, "I'm a practicing Catholic. I practice my faith, but I've never let my religious beliefs, which I accept based on Church doctrine ... impose ... on other people." Because not killing babies does not impose on people ... oh, wait ... yes it does! I applaud the Catholic church in question for its consistency, an increasingly rare trait these days (as illustrated by Biden).

Assuming the Obscure
Sometimes we see the obvious and say, "Duh! Clearly this is what's going on." Sometimes ... we don't. Take this report from researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). They examined the method of depth perception by certain spiders and figured out a way to mimic it to give depth perception to robots or people. Interesting! It was interesting in how those spiders can do it and interesting how the scientists adapted it. What was bizarre was their conclusions. The writer of the piece started with, "For all our technological advances, nothing beats evolution when it comes to research and development." The researcher said, "Evolution has produced a wide variety of optical configurations and vision systems that are tailored to different purposes." We're talking a level of complexity and processing that exceeds our full comprehension and they're thinking, "This stuff just happens by accident." Or, as I've been told, "Just because it looks designed doesn't mean it is." Or is it? The obvious conclusion eludes Science ("Puny god.").

I Do Not Think That Word Means What You Think It Means
Nell Irvin Painter wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times about an assault at a New Jersey high school football game. The victims were four African-American middle school girls. The perpetrators were two 17-year-old boys. And, no, they weren't white. They were of Indian descent. Painter threw out the race of the criminals and wrote, "While it’s tempting to see the reported ethnicity of the boys suspected in the assault as complicating the story and raising questions about whether the assault should be thought of as racist, I look at it through a different lens. Instead of asking what the boys' reported racial identity tells us about the nature of the attack, we should see the boys as enacting American whiteness through anti-black assault in a very traditional way." That is, if anyone acts in a racist way, it is because they are "enacting whiteness." Acting out with "anti-blackness" means "acting white." By the way, how does she get here? "It may be less useful to look to clues like complexion, and more to the performance of identity." It's blowback from "how I identify" very, very loosely applied. That and Critical Race Theory that defines racism as "white."

Here's What We Know
As former president Obama praises Justin Trudeau for taking on "big issues like climate change" and teenagers strike because we're not doing enough about it, researchers from the University of Chicago are running simulations that suggest that an increase in Antarctic sea ice could end with an ice age. Something has caused the Earth to "periodically cycle in and out of ice ages." According to Malte Jansen, University of Chicago assistant professor, "We are pretty confident that the carbon balance between the atmosphere and ocean must have changed, but we don't quite know how or why." But .. but ... I thought we were all quite clear on this. You know, global warming, human-caused global climate change, the end of the world as we know it. No?

Consistent Inconsistency
Well known atheist Sam Harris (Salon refers to him as "notorious") wrote the book, "The Moral Landscape" that explains why science should decide morality and not God. In keeping with that idea, he went on record explaining that African-Americans are intellectually inferior to white Americans because of genetics. Nice. Last week he sat down with Nick Bilton of Vanity Fair to explain that there is no free will.

Let's see ... no free will (so you can't choose right or wrong anyway), no God, science decides what is moral, and science is sure that blacks are inferior. Voilà! We have no god and racism is moral. Makes sense, right? And theists argue that there is no basis for morality without the existence of God. Ha! (I pray for Sam Harris.)

Consistent Inconsistency II
A high school principal in Florida was removed from duty after refusing to acknowledge that the Holocaust was a "factual, historical event." (Note: He wasn't fired as the news headlines are claiming; he was reassigned .. as the news stories explain.) The reason he gave was, "Not everyone believes the Holocaust happened" and that he had to be "politically neutral." An educator that decides to teach only what is believed by everyone and will not allow what is not universally believed is not exactly the best choice for an educator and, I'm sure, doesn't actually live that way.

Good News
We were worried about Bernie Sanders' plan for "Medicare-for-all" that they estimated would cost up to $40 trillion. Killer. Luckily, Elizabeth Warren has come up with her own plan that won't cost a penny over $52 trillion over the next 10 years. Now that's an improvement. Okay, I know it sounds bad, but she plans to give $11 trillion back to American families, so that's good, right? I don't think so. It's paid for by federal and state spending, a myriad of " taxes on employers, financial transactions, the ultra-wealthy and large corporations and some savings elsewhere." Oh, no, don't worry, none of those will be passed on to you, the employee or the customer. Trust me.

Good News/Bad News
So, Christians are excited. Their guy in the White House now has a celebrated televangelist pastor on his staff -- Paula White. That's good news, right? To me it is good news like "Trump elected" was good news. Not at all. This year White transferred pastoral leadership of her New Destiny Christian Center church to her son while she moved to "apostolic overseer" role. She has endured "all the tests that God had allowed" including divorce, an alleged affair with Benny Hinn, addiction to medication, and a church staff split. Because she's a good Christian pastor, so we're happy about her taking up with President Trump. You know, except for, like Scripture.

Identity Politics
In an inspiring story a maverick motorcyclist who identifies as a bicyclist set a world record in the qualifying race for the World Road Cycling League. He broke the earlier 100-mile record of 3 hours and 13 minutes by finishing in under an hour. The world applauds this trans-vehicle rider with "Huffy" painted on the side of his motorcycle for his bravery to stand against the unfair "binary bicyclist or not" bigots.

Must be true; I read it on the Internet.