Author Archives: The Night Writer

Hey Thirteen

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Breaking news…

There’s about to be another teenager in the world as Tiger Lilly turns 13 on Saturday.

Who knows what she’ll do next, but age has never been much of a hindrance to her. She’s a blue belt in Tae Kwan Do and on the demonstration team for her dojo, has tested at college levels on her SATs, has a couple of works of fiction she’s writing (and keeping under wraps so far) and is the star pupil at the Stewart Academy for Girls. She’s also already been to China on one missions trip and is scheduled to go to Romania this summer on another, this time without a parent. Oh, and she’s a blogger (visit the Tiger Lilly link in the right sidebar)!

There appears to be little left for her to accomplish, but I’m sure she’ll think of something. Happy birthday, Sweetie!

Another reason to shiver

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There’s an interesting article this week entitled Global Warming: The Cold, Hard Facts? in the Canada Free Press by Dr. Timothy Bell, one of the first Canadians with a Ph.D. in Climatology (University of London), a former climatology professor at the Univesity of Winnipeg, and someone who claims an extensive background in reconstruction of past climates and the impact of climate change on human history and the human condition. Dr. Bell provides an illuminating “behind-the-scenes” look at the methods (sadly, not the Scientific one) being used to promote global warming pronouncements and suppress dissent. An excerpt (emphasis mine):



Since I obtained my doctorate in climatology from the University of London, Queen Mary College, England my career has spanned two climate cycles. Temperatures declined from 1940 to 1980 and in the early 1970’s global cooling became the consensus. This proves that consensus is not a scientific fact. By the 1990’s temperatures appeared to have reversed and Global Warming became the consensus. It appears I’ll witness another cycle before retiring, as the major mechanisms and the global temperature trends now indicate a cooling.



No doubt passive acceptance yields less stress, fewer personal attacks and makes career progress easier. What I have experienced in my personal life during the last years makes me understand why most people choose not to speak out; job security and fear of reprisals. Even in University, where free speech and challenge to prevailing wisdoms are supposedly encouraged, academics remain silent.



I once received a three page letter that my lawyer defined as libellous, from an academic colleague, saying I had no right to say what I was saying, especially in public lectures. Sadly, my experience is that universities are the most dogmatic and oppressive places in our society. This becomes progressively worse as they receive more and more funding from governments that demand a particular viewpoint.



…(snip)…



Another cry in the wildenerness is Richard Lindzen’s. He is an atmospheric physicist and a professor of meteorology at MIT, renowned for his research in dynamic meteorology – especially atmospheric waves. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has held positions at the University of Chicago, Harvard University and MIT. Linzen frequently speaks out against the notion that significant Global Warming is caused by humans. Yet nobody seems to listen.



I think it may be because most people don’t understand the scientific method which Thomas Kuhn so skilfully and briefly set out in his book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” A scientist makes certain assumptions and then produces a theory which is only as valid as the assumptions. The theory of Global Warming assumes that CO2 is an atmospheric greenhouse gas and as it increases temperatures rise. It was then theorized that since humans were producing more CO2 than before, the temperature would inevitably rise. The theory was accepted before testing had started, and effectively became a law.



As Lindzen said many years ago: “the consensus was reached before the research had even begun.” Now, any scientist who dares to question the prevailing wisdom is marginalized and called a sceptic, when in fact they are simply being good scientists. This has reached frightening levels with these scientists now being called climate change denier with all the holocaust connotations of that word. The normal scientific method is effectively being thwarted.



Read the whole thing. (HT: Dodgeblogium and Watcher of Weasels).

Fundamentals in Film: Black History Month

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I’ve been leading the bi-weekly “Fundamentals in Film” class for the current group of teenage boys for about a year now, and my focus has been to feature movies with strong, positive male role models demonstrating character, honor, courage and grace under fire (physical, mental, spiritual fire) and especially an ability to put others ahead of themselves. Many of the movies we’ve watched also opened a door for our group to discuss the larger social and historical context of the events depicted in the movie.

The movie that probably had the most profound affect on our young men was Glory, the story of the first all-black regiment in the Civil War. The discussion following the film drew the strongest reactions and the most spontaneous questions from the guys of any that we’ve had. Some months later we watched The Tuskegee Airmen, a similar story but brought “four-score” years into the future with the first U.S. squadron of black fighter pilots. Back at the beginning of the football season we also watched the original TV-movie version of Brian’s Song (gotta love Netflix!), the Gale Sayers/Brian Piccolo story, set in the late 1960s against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement.

All three films were based on true events (with some dramatic license) and as we bumped through the century or so that the movies spanned it was useful and interesting to see what things had changed, and what things remained the same, in our society and in the lives of the men profiled. I believe this has been especially beneficial for my group of young men who have grown up with little knowledge or exposure to the events that have led up to today and helped them to get a sense that, while it seems like certain events happened a long time ago, they really represent a relatively short and intense period in history (and it isn’t over yet). While the movies have been useful in describing and discussing this time, the history of the struggle wasn’t my main reason for introducing these films into the series.

For me, the essence of these movies still comes down to bedrock issues of honor, duty, respect and being willing to do the hard thing even at great personal cost for the greater good. The lessons of being a man that can be counted on, of being a man that can be a true friend, are universal and go beyond race.

The thing I’ve stressed with our group is that fear and hate are also universal and that no matter who you are or what “group” you belong to, there are always going to be those who have a degree of power and authority over your life that are going to look down upon and even hate you because of the way you look, the way you talk, the things that you believe or, especially for these young men, their age. Lynching and flogging may not be part of their lives but they are still going to be judged and dismissed because of what they appear to be. Their challenge, like those faced by the men in these movies, will still be to live their lives with courage and integrity and not give in to (and live down to) the lower expectations that others might have of them.

If they can do that I am confident that they will have little trouble in extending the consideration to others they meet, even if they appear to be different from them.

Give them that old time religion

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Just what are the Democrats invoking?



From Debbie Schlussel in the New York Post (via Michelle Malkin, go there for more links):



THE Democratic National Committee made a strange choice to deliver the invocation last Friday at its winter meeting: Husham al-Husainy – an extremist who has a long record of support for prominent Islamists at war with America and Israel.

Al-Husainy’s words before the Democrats – asking God to “help us stop . . . occupation and oppression” – were jarring enough, since he was likely referring to either American soldiers in Iraq or Jews in Israel.



But his past statements and activity make those words even more ominous.



Al-Husainy heads the Karbalaa Islamic Education Center mosque in Dearborn, Mich., one of the largest Shiite mosques in North America. He is an open admirer of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini – under whose rule Americans were held hostage for 444 days.



During last summer’s Israel-Hezbollah war, al-Husainy led rallies in Dearborn in support of the Lebanese terrorist group. Protesters displayed swastikas as well as anti-American and anti-Semitic posters.



I attended one rally, at Dearborn’s Bint Jebail Cultural Center – named for the stronghold in south Lebanon from which Hezbollah rockets rained on Israel. Al-Husainy was among several who delivered hate-filled, anti-American rhetoric. He cheered as others called for the hastened destruction of the Jews.




There was light, and it was good

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The Mall Diva is interested in just about any movie that features Elijah Wood so awhile back I placed Everything is Illuminated in our Netflix queue. I hadn’t heard of the movie when it came out in 2005, the on-line synopsis didn’t tell me much and the cover art was kind of weird, but I put it on the list and it eventually worked it’s way up and arrived at our house a couple of weeks ago. Last Saturday night my family got around to watching it. Perhaps because the film had come in “under the radar” so to speak, it’s affect was more powerful (at least for me).

The story is simple to summarize: Elijah Wood plays a young, introverted Jewish man obsessed with collecting artifacts of his life and his family’s history. He travels to the Ukraine to try and find the woman who helped his grandfather escape from the Nazis in World War II. He hires an interpreter, Alex, a young man who fancies himself a Ukrainian John Travolta ala Saturday Night Fever, and gets Alex’s grandfather in the package. The grandfather is a bitter, bigoted old man who imagines he is blind (even though he is the driver for the group) and has a demented seeing eye dog named Sammy Davis, Jr., Jr. (yes, two “Jrs.”). The story is essentially a road movie as they search for the lost village of Trachimbord, only this road runs through the nearly deserted Ukrainian country-side and their vehicle is a rattletrap Trabaunt. To say the film is a little quirky is like saying Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow is little swishy — but in both cases this works in a delightfully surprising way.

The film moves at a slow but not heavy-handed pace, “illuminated” by brief, almost surrealistic dialog, comfortable silences, perfect facial expressions, fabulous cinematography and Alex’s distinctive narration. It begins as an off-beat comedy and gradually morphs into an affecting drama. In the same way, you start out thinking the movie is one character’s story and it actually turns out to be another’s. Even the smallest roles are very well acted, leading to memorable scenes that still come back to me unexpectedly several days later.

The story doesn’t have the slam-bang plotting of so many movies today, but it still grips you and draws you in — if only to see what’s going to happen. Because it deals with the events of World War II we know there are going to be elements of tragedy in the story and in what is uncovered, but these are handled deftly without graphic and extended violence. Almost all of this is left to your imagination, and is all the more powerful for it. The story isn’t exactly heart-warming, but it is heart-stirring. I highly recommend it if you’re in the mood for a reflective, well-crafted movie with an extremely satisfying story. The language and some references are a little coarse in a couple of instances but the movie is generally appropriate for the family though it is not likely to resonate very much with younger viewers.

An inconvenient truthiness

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Even knowledge has to be in the fashion, and where it is not,
it is wise to affect ignorance.
— Baltasar Gracian

“Truthiness” is the recent colloquialism that describes things that are thought to be facts merely because they “feel” right. The word is new, but the phenomenon isn’t, as reflected by the Mark Twain quote at the top of this page all this week: “We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking.” I knew I was going to throw that quote up there as soon as I saw the Super Bowl commercial on Sunday claiming that 50,000 (or whatever) people die of second-hand smoke this year, and wondering if I was “alright with that.” It actually made me wonder how many billions of dollars was going to be burned due to second-hand statistics this year in the name of politically-correct junk science.

Actually, it is in the name of an ever-more-grasping (and brazen) attempt to choke off individual freedoms and liberty, supposedly for our own good, whether the issue is city-wide, state-wide or nation-wide smoking bans, or the latest global warming power-play. The strategy is all-too-familiar; get yourself some “science”, declare it reflects a consensus and then shout-down any opposition in an effort to intimidate or marginalize scientists with differing views and evidence and in the hopes of the public can be beaten into such a stupor that it can’t think or reason for itself. The effort is so obvious it is almost comical except that it the stakes are getting far too high.

The scientific method of observation, hypotheses, prediction, correction and ultimately verification by repetition to determine facts is being readily replaced by obfuscation, hypocrisy, perversion and political correction ultimately verified by repeating the lie over and over again. For centuries we’ve been told that religious fanatics are those who cling to their dubious “facts” in the face of scientific evidence to the contrary, yet the anti-smokers and the global-warmers often do the same thing today and will go after those who differ with them with a fervor and vitriol that Galileo would recognize. Whether it’s out of religious fervor, a desire for political power or something as prosaic as profit, there is no shortage of those who apparently picked up their scientific knowledge while staying at a Holiday Inn Express. They’re even going so far in some places in Europe to outlaw anyone who dissents from the global-warming consensus (which will come in handy when they try to squelch the reporting on how poorly Europe is doing in meeting its own Kyoto-mandated objectives).

Facts, as they say, are stubborn things, and they aren’t illegal yet. There is, in fact, some significant evidence mitigating or even opposing the new flavors of scientific consensus, whether it’s the effects of second hand smoke or the causes for changes in the environment (and whenever one side accuses the other of having an agenda, it’s useful to look at which group is trying to examine the facts and which is exercising personal attacks). By all means, check out the American Lung Association on second-hand smoke, but then look at Dave Hitt’s site, The Facts to see how the ALA’s studies hold up (Dave, too, has an agenda, it’s listed here).

There’s also — at least for now — a wealth of information on global warming that differs from the “consensus”; including a recent, peer-reviewed report that suggests global cooling“>global cooling is on the way. This week Bogus Gold linked a handy reference for Refuting the Climate Goebbels that features a series of articles in The National Post (Canada) describing a series of “Global Warming Deniers” — extremely credible scientists, climatologists, statisticians, and more — who are braving the group-think to focus on the facts. I’ve read through the first couple in the series and I think it’s worth linking all ten here for easy reference.

Canada.com — The Deniers Series
Statistics Needed — Part 1
Warming is real, and has benefits — Part II
The hurricane expert who stood up to UN junk science — Part III
Polar scientists on thin ice — Part IV
The original denier: into the cold — Part V
The sun moves climate change — Part VI
Will the sun cool us? — Part VII
The limits of predictability — Part VIII
Look to Mars for the truth on global warming — Part IX
Limited role for CO2 — Part X

Weathering the big game

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Bad weather usually isn’t a problem for the Super Bowl since the game is always played either in a dome or in some fabulously, and famously, sunny locale. It’s kind of a special treat for me in the middle of a Minnesota winter — I get to watch football and see some nice weather. This year, however, the weather was so bad that it actually started to affect me the day before the game.

Regular readers know that I was looking forward to watching the game on the new High-Def TV I bought last week. I had everything set up and was just waiting for the DirecTV guy to stop by and swap out my standard dish for the HD; the appointment was for Saturday morning. Well, the “high” temperatures in Minnesota the last couple of days were well-below zero with windchills in the area of -40 F. Can you believe DirecTV wouldn’t send someone out to clamber around on my roof and handle stiff coaxial cables? Wimps. Must be some Texas company handling installation for them.

So, no HD for the SB. Ok, I figured, it’ll be “Old School” — just like, say, last week! The new TV is bigger and has a very nice picture even without the HD feed. Bring on the game! Lo, and behold, I turn the TV on around 4:30 o’clock (I don’t have the patience for a lot of the pre-game hoopla and “analysis”) and it’s pouring rain. Not only is the field wet, but so are the players and … the camera lenses! It was foggy as well, making it look as if the game was being played as a weird dream sequence out of a movie. The play-by-play could have been handled by SpongeBob and Patrick from the Bikini Bottom Bowl. The action itself, through the wet and smeary camera lenses, looked as if it had been recorded on an old VCR — and then dubbed off to the eighth generation before being broadcast. Oh well, at least those famous Super Bowl commercials will be sharp.

Unfortunately, the game wasn’t the only thing watered down this year as the commercial offerings were pretty mediocre overall. There were a couple that were funny enough or somewhat interesting but the majority of them were like Rex Grossman — clumsy and trying-too-hard under the pressure. I liked the one with the animals in a pet store trying to get online with a (real) mouse, though I had trouble remembering later who the advertiser was and what I was supposed to be going online for. The Bud Light “Rock, Paper, Scissors” ad where a guy hits his opponent with a real rock was worth a short, hard laugh that immediately after made me feel a little bad.

The GM ad with the fired robot was too creepy and the Snickers “kiss” commercial was obviously contrived for shock value with a clumsy and embarrassing (there’s Rex again!) effort to be funny at the end. I came in late to the commercial where the guy had the beard comb-over, cut-offs and roller skates and never did figure out who or what was being advertised there. Also in the “almost memorable” category was “Connectile Disfunction” commercial for some wireless card provider, parodying ED commercials. I got so distracted wondering who you’re supposed to call if your hard-drive won’t shut off after four hours that I didn’t notice who the advertiser was.

The Garmin “Maposaurus” ad with the paper map morphing into a giant Godzilla type monster that has to be defeated by a Garmin Power-Ranger-Wannabe was visually interesting, but it reminded me too much of the current AMP commercial where a slacker creative-dude — wired on AMP and short on sleep — sees his wadded up concepts come to life out of the trash can. It’s not good when your commercial makes the viewer think of someone else’s commercial —
and kids, energy drinks are not a substitute for proper rest. I did like the Spokes-Lions for Taco Bell, though I’m about to propose a moratorium on talking animal advertisements as the novelty and quality of these has definitely worn off (abundantly demonstrated by all the other talking animal ads yesterday). From past experience, I expect that Taco Bell will be getting a “cease and desist” from Dreyfus Funds any minute now.

Otherwise, I thought the best commercial was Coke’s makeover of Grand Theft Auto for being funny and creative. I will also give special recognition to Revlon’s Colorist commercial; not because it was particularly well done, but because it roused the Mall Diva (herself a professional Colorist) from her stupor in the corner of the couch. She’s normally quite effervescent but yesterday she pretty much stayed curled up in a little ball until that commercial brought her up snorting and sputtering (almost as good as making tortellini come out of her nose).

The half-time show was okay, and made more interesting by the drama of wondering if one of Prince’s back up dancers (who were wearing “wrist-sweaters”, btw) would slip and go flying off of the wet stage. Prince was in good form and paid a Black History Month homage to previous stars such as Ike & Tina Turner (singing “Proud Mary”) and Jimi Hendrix (“All Along the Watch Tower”) — and then pulling off his “doo-rag” to reveal Little Richard’s hair.

Oh well, at least I can start looking forward to next year’s game. Hopefully the DirecTV installer will find weather to his liking by then.

The class of the league

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For what it’s worth, I’m rooting for the Colts in the Super Bowl this Sunday. This has nothing to do with my growing up in Indianapolis, or starting my own football career there. In fact, if my Optimists Club youth football league experiences had any bearing on this I would hate the Colts because the team I played for (the Mini-Packers) missed out on an unbeaten, untied season when the star running back for the Mini-Colts scored the game-tieing touchdown after the whistle was blown by his father, the referee. Thankfully, I’m over that now.

However, while I otherwise have fond memories of Indianapolis and still have many family members living there, my rooting interest is centered around the Indy coach, Tony Dungy. While it’s all too easy to believe the media hype and images of this “genius” coach or another, I have heard and read enough about Coach Dungy’s personal character — and over several seasons seen enough of the way he handles himself on the sidelines under extreme circumstances — to come to the belief that he really is what he seems to be: a great coach and an even better man.

I especially appreciate his faith and I attribute his peaceful attitude and helpful actions to his being able to grasp and keep a long-term perspective even in the midst of perhaps the most intensively short-term focused public environment. Even as he was being passed over for head coaching opportunities he was emminently qualified for, or getting jobbed by replay calls (while coaching Tampa Bay in the play-offs), he has maintained his composure and helped others to see that it’s not all about him. Of course, that’s what the NFL wants us to think about Tony Dungy because it’s a good “story”, but it’s not hard to see what a deep and sincere respect and affection playes and other coaches have for the man. This was never more clear than last year when his son died just as the Colts were about to enter the play-offs. Even in that trauma, where it was obvious he was truly stricken and grieved, he continued to exude peace and class while focusing on the needs of others. What an example and inspiration he is to the rest of us, whether we have anything to do with football or not!

Finally, in a league where people go to great lengths to secure even the tiniest advantage for themselves, and where one high-profile, brilliant mastermind publicly and pointedly snubs his former assistants, Coach Dungy has promoted and championed his assistant coaches for other jobs, even though it might have made things more difficult for himself. In fact, one such disciple or protégé is now the head coach of the Bears and will be one of the key factors trying to prevent Coach Dungy from winning a championship. Somehow I don’t think he’d have it any other way.

Update:

“I’m proud to be the first African-American coach to win this,” Dungy said during the trophy ceremony. “But again, more than anything, Lovie Smith and I are not only African-American but also Christian coaches, showing you can do it the Lord’s way. We’re more proud of that.”

(HT: Lassie at Freedom Dogs)