Faith, Beer, and Other Things That Interest Geoff

But let's say I claim: "You know, using the logic you've just given me, if that 'proves' for you that homosexual practice can be okay for some people, you would also have to logically concede that incest could also be okay for some people." That statement is using a logical analogy: If it's "true" for instance X, by analogy it must also be "true" for instance Y, which is analogous.

I can tell you the response to this that I get at least half the time: "How dare you say that gay people practice incest!"

The problem is that the responder has confused analogy with identity. Homosexual practice isn't identical to incest. No one has even intimated that it is, or that homosexuals practice incest. But if the criteria used for moral propriety is only two committed people who love each other, then the reason for approving incest would be analogous to the reason for approving homosexual practice.

Prof. Adams of Hamilton's McMaster University says, he and an international team of colleagues fit into place a significant piece of the puzzle of human history in the Middle East -- unearthing information that points to the existence of the Bible's vilified Kingdom of Edom at precisely the time the Bible says it existed, and contradicting widespread academic belief that it did not come into being until 200 years later.

Their findings mean that those scholars convinced that the Hebrew Old Testament is at best a compendium of revisionist, fragmented history, mixed with folklore and theology, and at worst a piece of outright propaganda, likely will have to apply the brakes to their thinking.

Because, if the little bit of the Old Testament's narrative that Prof. Adams and his colleagues have looked at is true, other bits could be true as well.

The relationship between the phenomenon of terrorism in our society and culture is like the relationship betweenthe cause and consequence. A thorough study of this phenomenon shows that the … real reason behind the mobilization of a handful of young men by this deviant group is purely cultural. This means that these youths were brought up in a special cultural atmosphere which finds its roots in astereotyped understanding of religion. This understanding serves as a basic incubator to this group. This may explain the reason why some youths belonging to richfamilies and others who are well positionedin the state's civil service hierarchyare implicated in terrorist crimes.

This [means] that financial and economic factors can not be associated with this group. Therefore, it is a cultural and religious factor that motivated them [to kill] innocent people and destroy the country's infrastructure.

"We have an obligation to admit that anti-Semitism is still with us," Pera said. "Today, it also feeds on such subtle and insidious distinctions as are often made between Israel and the Jewish state, Israel and its governments, Zionism and Semitism. Or, it crops up when the struggle for life led by the Israelis is labeled 'state terrorism.' "

Even Europe's Constitutional Treaty cannot make reference to the continent's Judeo-Christian roots, he railed.

"If we believe that our core values are no better than others; if we start thinking that the cost of defending them is too high; if we give in to the blackmail or fear, then we have no more instruments to counter the anti-Jewish racism which continues to poison us than we have to counter the fundamentalist and terrorist racism which puts peaceful co-existence at risk."

Whether the one-sided reporting of the war in Vietnam was a factor in the American defeat there used to be a matter of controversy. But, in recent years, high officials of the Communist government of Vietnam have themselves admitted that they lost the war on the battlefields but won it in the U.S. media and on the streets of America, where political pressures from the anti-war movement threw away the victory for which thousands of American lives had been sacrificed.

Too many in the media today regard the reporting of the Vietnam war as one of their greatest triumphs. It certainly showed the power of the media -- but also its irresponsibility. Some in the media today seem determined to recapture those glory days by the way they report on events in the Iraq war.

It is shocking that so few democratic governments support the Iraqi people. Where are French and German and Spanish protests against the terror being inflicted on voters in Iraq? And it is shocking that around the world there is not wider admiration of, assistance to and moral support (and more) for the Iraqi people. The choice is clear: movement towards democracy in Iraq or a new nihilism akin to fascism - Islamist fascism.

Election officials in King and Pierce counties say voter-registration procedures are designed to make it easy for people to vote. Instead of employing a rigorous screening process, they rely on people to be honest when registering or voting. Still, state officials say they are working to improve the system.

At first, a lot of people thought, 'Oh Coors is doing this brewery and the beer is going to suck, blah blah blah.' But no. For the most part, we don't. It's real gratifying when most people come into town for the GABF and they try the Barmen and are like, 'Oh my god. I can't believe this is a Coors product.' People who know what they're doing and what they're tasting respect Coors. It's usually the novice beer snob who thinks, 'Coors is piss water.' But you know, that's a really tough style of beer to make. Whether I like them or not, I respect them and the American Light Lagers. That's a tough nut to crack. There's no room for error. The analogy we always use with people is, 'Making a beer like Coors Light, or like our helles or our pils, is like wearing a Speedo on the beach. There's nowhere to hide.' If you're flabby or have a little excess body hair, it's not going to look good. Now, if you're making a stout or an IPA, there's roast malts and tons of hops covering up any errors. It's kind of like wearing baggy shorts and a big t-shirt. Or if you make an imperial stout, it's like wearing a sweat suit on the beach.

Unfortunately, this sort of incomplete reporting has become the norm for the media, whose poor job of presenting a complete picture of what is going on in Iraq borders on being criminal.

It's the classic fairy tale: The boy gets the girl, and they live happily ever after. But modern society has offered a new twist on the story: The girl is expected to play the aggressor, "hook up" and move on.

Movies such as "Mean Girls," TV shows such as "Desperate Housewives," women's magazines and pop music all celebrate female romantic aggression as "girl power," but critics say these portrayals fail to show what such power leaves behind: physically and emotionally scarred women.

Investigators from the House International Relations Committee said several current and former officials in Iraq's Oil, Health and Transportation ministries have told them that U.N. staffers assigned to the "661 Committee" — the U.N. Security Council group that oversaw sanctions and approved oil-for-food contracts — regularly took bribes and kickbacks from suppliers of aid to Iraq during the program.

The Iraqi ministry officials said the U.N. staffers, based in New York, were paid to accelerate approval of oil-for-food contracts or provide secret information on why certain suspicious contracts with Saddam Hussein's regime were blocked by the 661 Committee, investigators said.

There is a "thinkable" and an "unthinkable" in every era. One era is quite certain intellectually and emotionally about what is acceptable. Yet another era decides that these "certainties" are unacceptable and puts another set of values into practice. On a humanistic base, people drift along from generation to generation, and the morally unthinkable becomes the thinkable as the years move on. Schaeffer, writing in the 1970s, perceptively continued, The thinkables of the eighties and nineties will certainly include, things which most people today find unthinkable and immoral, even unimaginable and too extreme to suggest. Yet - since they do not have some overriding principle that takes them beyond relativistic thinking - when these become thinkable and acceptable in the eighties and nineties, most people will not even remember that they were unthinkable in the seventies. They will slide into each flew thinkable without a jolt.

Schaeffer was not arguing that something is worthy of emulation simply because it was previously done. By itself, Dad and Mom's conduct, while often qualitatively better and more polite than that of their children observed at the local mall, is not an adequate standard for morality. In fact, the point is that the basis of yesterday's morality was of such poor quality that it could not prevent its "unthinkables" from becoming "thinkables" in short order. One of yesterday's unthinkables - the social and moral acceptance of homosexuality in both orientation and act, in both desire and deed - is presented to us today as quite thinkable, and though we are speaking of morality and not the changing tide of fashion, our modern society can seldom tell the difference.

Bush "is getting Canada to do the dirty work" of shutting down a cheap supply of foreign-made drugs that are popular with American consumers but unpopular with U.S. drug companies, charged David MacKay, executive director of an association of Canadian mail-order pharmacies.

Because I think it is improper to ask how a prospective judicial nominee would vote on a specific question, I shall not know how my nominees would rule in the event — an unlikely event — that the court revisits the constitutional foundation of abortion rights established by Roe v. Wade in 1973. However, I will seek judicial nominees disinclined to concoct spurious constitutional mandates for their policy preferences, as I believe the justices did in Roe. On the other hand, the orderly development of constitutional law requires that justices be generally disposed to respect precedents, even dubious ones, if they have been repeatedly reaffirmed for decades.

I believe abortion is wrong, but also that states should have, as they did until Roe, the power to set abortion policy. If states come to conclusions different than mine, so be it. But remember: Were Roe overturned, that would not make abortion illegal; it would merely re-empower states to regulate the practice. And restoring the legal conditions of 1973 would not restore the social context of 1973.

Notice the language of 'trimesters.' How is that demarcation grounded in the text, structure or previous construings of the Constitution? Ask yourself: What would constitutional law pertaining to abortion be if the number of months in the gestation of an infant were a prime number — say, seven or eleven? That the court spun different degrees of abortion rights from the fact that nine is divisible by three reveals that whatever the court was doing was not constitutional reasoning.

Now there were some present at that time who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices. Jesus answered, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered this way? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish. Or those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them - do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.” (Luke 13:1-5)

An enormous and highly profitable international aid apparatus has assembled in Kabul and has largely ignored the input of the Afghan people or their largely American liberators; the latter stand by in disbelief as taxpayers contributions to Afghanistan disappear into outfitting the extravagant needs of European aid community. The UN pays $400 a day (more than a year’s pay for an average Afghan ) plus a generous per diem. This enormous aid infestation has fostered rightful resentment. The UN and associated NGOs ran through years of aid funding in a matter of months. Now when money cannot be found for reconstruction, the UN issues reports criticizing the parsimonious Americans. Meanwhile, the UN and NGOs live like pashas. Hundreds of millions of dollars earmarked for Afghans have been transformed into fleets of top-of the-line Toyota Landcruisers, villas and estates to house their workers complete with swimming pools, an endless supply of underpaid servants, luxurious furnishings (accented with looted antiquities,) the latest laptops, video equipment, cases of Johnny Walker Blue and the bling bling ...perks that might even seem excessive to Ken Lay are justifiable expenses charged off to the US. No accountability, no oversight. They don’t bother cooking the books, they don’t even keep the books!

Afghan citizens fear that vocal objections to this patronizing treatment will result in economic reprisals by the UN....

I will not go into an argument to prove that Congress has no power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. We have the right, as individuals to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity, but as members of Congress we have no right to appropriate a dollar of the public money.

Some eloquent appeals have been made to us upon the ground that it is a debt due the deceased. Sir, this is no debt. We cannot without the grossest corruption, appropriate this money as the payment of a debt. We have not the semblance of authority to appropriate it as a charity. I cannot vote for this bill, but I will give one week’s pay, and if every member of Congress will do the same, it will amount to more than the bill asks.

If ever a single person was living proof that intelligence is a meaningless quality without modest common sense, it was Susan Sontag who died last week.

The UN is taking credit for things that hard-working, street savvy USAID folks have done. It was USAID working with their amazing network of local contacts who scrounged up trucks, drivers, and fuel; organized the convoy and sent it off to deliver critical supplies. A UN “air-freight handling centre” in Aceh? Bull! It's the Aussies and the Yanks who are running the air ops into Aceh. We have people working and sleeping on the tarmac in Aceh, surrounded by bugs, mud, stench and death, who every day bring in the US and Aussie C-130s and the US choppers; unload, load, send them off. We have no fancy aid workers' retreat -- notice the priorities of the UN? People are dying and what's the first thing the UN wants to do? Set up "a camp for relief workers" one that would be "fully self-contained, with kitchen, food, lodging, everything."

The UN is a sham.