Cardinal Dolan and Stephen Colbert at Fordham

Despite a media blackout, the media have managed not to be blacked out from “The Cardinal and the Comedian” a Friday-night event at Fordham that drew a crowd of 3000 students. Humorist James Martin, S.J., moderated an evening conversation between New York Archbishop (and Cardinal) Timothy Dolan (also President of the USCCB) and Stephen Colbert, host of Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report.”

By all accounts it was a terrifically funny evening. The New York Times, America Magazine, The Jesuit Post, CatholicMoralTheology.com, and the National Catholic Reporter have all had great coverage (and others, I’m sure – it was blurbed in my local paper), so read more about it there. NCR is particularly good for “Storifying” a lot of the social media that came out, so definitely look at that to see some direct accounts.

What I really like about this event is not only that one of my friends helped make it happen, not only that it had “real” authentic people speaking of their faith, not only that it allowed social media to shine… What I really like about it is that it gets to the core of the “Good News.”

The goal of our life is happiness, a natural happiness in this life and a supernatural happiness in the next. That is our endpoint, that is what is drawing us in – the happiness of God. Ask St. Thomas about it, Summa Theologiae I-II Q 1-5. That’s right, God made humanity for the sake of our happiness, for the sake of joy and delight. We weren’t put here as slaves or to act as monsters. We are capable of being those things, but we are here to LIVE! and live fully.

That is a beautiful thing, and ought to bring us to thinking about our lives and how to be better people. Because in becoming better people we become happier people, more who we are meant to be.

A bit has been made of this event as an example of “the new evangelization” that Pope John Paul II talked about. Well, I think it was better than that. Leave out the word “evangelization,” to some people that has overtones of instrumentalization, of using others to get yourself into heaven. And there is no need for big words anyway. Just call it life. Just call it real people being honest. Just call it Good News.

Yes, there was a media blackout on the Good News. But the Good News got out anyway. Somehow it does that. So good job to all involved. You made something that burst its way into the world despite the lid on it. Something so good that regular people just couldn’t contain themselves, they had to speak up. And that is something pretty amazing in itself.

My thoughts on those who rally around Chic Fil-A

We live in a world where eating unhealthy junk food is an expression of one’s Christian beliefs. Putting aside that one’s body is one’s temple, I think this sort of expression demonstrates the poverty of popular theology in the U.S. For those who believe that there was something more substantial to the overall message attributed to Jesus as depicted in biblical stories, such as service to those who are less fortunate (e.g., widows, prisoners, and others who live in the lower ranks of society), such demonstrations of piety are simultaneously laughable and pathetic. It is really no wonder that there is an increasing number of religious “nones” (or non-affiliated) in national surveys on religion.

(And don’t even get me started on the reason for this celebration of deep-fried, pink slime … people currently exalting Chic Fil-A are those who revel in throwing the first stone.)

Brian’s Links 2012 June 1: SpaceX and the Return of Adventure

SpaceX did it. Off the Earth, up to the ISS, and back again. The era of private spaceflight is really here. And what is SpaceX’s long range goal? Elon Musk wants to go to Mars. Not just his company – him, personally. And, while he’s at it, he’s going to save the world.

If you haven’t heard of Planetary Resources, you should. They’ve got billionaire backing. And they want to gobble up asteroids for their platinum. (Well, and their other elements too.) Between these guys and SpaceX, exploration is actually becoming really interesting again. And why should Christians or ethicists care? (go here to find out) Because, in the words of Alfred North Whitehead “Without adventure, civilization is in full decay.” And I think these folks are proving that we are not nearly dead yet.

Now, from air to water, literally. For areas with fresh water shortage this is brilliant: a wind turbine that condenses water from the air.  It would be perfect for the Marshall Islands, where is is windy, humid, and fresh water is unreliable. And if you were an ancient Greek, this could count as elemental transmutation.

And how about a new kind (not just a new use) of wind power while we are at it?

Every wonder about what the future was supposed to look like? Well here’s a funny one: kids carrying around computers in a museum. A cowboy using at what looks like an iPad. Kids using computers in school (wearing Atari helmets!). All from back in 1982.

Fascinating maps of America’s invisible borders. Like whether a soda is a “pop” or a “coke” (its a soda).

The USCCB’s and CDF’s document on the LCWR.

Ever wonder where ketchup came from? Wonder no longer.

Yes, Chinese medicine can be dangerous.  Lots of medicines can be dangerous. The early chemist and pharmacist Paracelsus (real name: Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim – you can see why he went by Paracelsus) is noted for his phrase “the dosage makes the poison.” But seeing as many forms of Chinese medicine have never actually been scientifically tested to see what they do – in any dosage – taking them can be especially dangerous.

It’s called “Blood Falls.” It’s a blood-red frozen waterfall in Antarctica. Now if only there were monstrous creatures at its source, the story would be complete. But wait! There are!

These next two stories are both from God and the Machine, my new favorite blog for theology and technology. First, a young man finds his lost home and family, a home he lost when he fell asleep on a train when he was 5. How did he find his way home? Google Earth!

Second, someday you will be able to buy your own tricorder, just like in Star Trek.  Seriously.  This guy is making them and they work!

And lastly, poor static dog. Cats have a reputation for getting all the lols, but dogs can do it too.

Brian’s Links 12 May 2012: Science, Space, Cardinals, and Ennui

Robotic support brings freedom to paraplegics – Tek RMD. More really cool technology.

A Stanford scientist conducts an experiment on himself, producing “an integrative personal omics profile (iPOP) [that] combines cutting-edge scientific fields such as genomics (study of one’s DNA), metabolomics (study of metabolism), and proteomics (study of proteins).” And he discovers a link between viral infections and type-2 diabetes, among other things.

Elon Musk, billionaire founder of Paypal, Solar City, Tesla Motors, and Space X, wants to save the world. He wants to get humans off-planet, on Mars, to “back up the biosphere.” Sounds like a good idea to me. Here’s a fascinating interview from CBS’s 60 Minutes.

A “seed vault for culture.” From the folks at The Long Now Foundation.

Yes, there are even invasive plant species in Antarctica.

George Monbiot tells us what he really thinks about Ayn Rand’s objectivist philosophy. Hint: it includes the word “psychopath.”

According to these guys women can be Catholic Cardinals. How interesting.

Panera restaurants make paying for food voluntary. And it works! At CatholicMoralTheology.com and USA Today.

The South Korean scientists who faked his human-cloning data is off to redeem his reputation. By trying to clone a Woolly Mammoth.

So the Galactic Empire in Star Wars has leadership troubles. The Sith really need to work on their “people skills.” Here’s how you can learn from their failures.

Grass fed cows! They still exist? Yes! And they can be environmentally friendly? Well, yes. Moo.

The NSA is watching you. And You. And you, and you, and you, and…

Okay, near the end of the links I try to be funny. Here’s research about sexually rejected fruit flies turning to alcohol to cheer themselves up. No joke! Gives a new meaning to “bar flies.”

Lastly, Henri, Cat of Ennui.

Brian’s Links 16 April 2012: Can You Find a Theme?

“Riding the Booster.” This video is simply amazing – the solid rocket booster goes up and it comes back down again. I must say, I got a bit dizzy after booster separation. But worth the ride!

Benedict XVI has been dubbed “The Green Pope” for his environmental concern. I like it, and not just because my last name is Green. Here’s a report from the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on Climate Change.

Ever wondered if your brain was messing with your ability to judge and reason correctly? Well, it is: here is a list of cognitive biases. And the bias I address in some of my research, teleological bias, isn’t even on this immense list. (Teleological bias is the tendency to infer purposes where there are none, e.g., the lightning striking your dog really was a random accident, not because you named your dog Zeus.)

The thought experiment of “ethical autocorrect.”

So, all your traceable purchases are being traced and compiled in myriad computers.  The easy way to stop store-centered ones is to pay cash (like a criminal) and never use those store “clubs.” But the internet is tracking you too! Here are some more sophisticated responses for the internet. And if you tell your Facebook friends to warn them, it just gives the trackers more info on you!

The Nobel Peace Prize committee is under investigation for straying from the prize’s original purpose…

Contagious twitching. A very strange case.

Muggers just need a nice dinner and some conversation.

The case of the Millionaire Metaphysician. For more info see Ammonius.org.

The Guerrilla Grafters, surreptitiously turning non-fruiting city trees into fruiting ones. I like it.

Is it wrong to father 400 children through sperm donation? (And if not, then where is the cutoff? Is there one?) Because of sperm banks, some guys are “fathering” (in a biological sense only) an immense number of children.  This is not insignificant; this is the human gene pool being altered here, not to mention people’s lives.

English Muslim baroness warns Christians to stand up for their religion.

And how to prove the absurdity of the Supreme Court case “Citizens United”? Colbert is on it. Because Mitt Romney is a serial killer. Corporation are people. Bain Capital repeatedly bought and broke up corporations, killing them. Therefore Romney’s a serial killer. I love absurdity. This link to the Colbert Report will get you the video in case the embedded video below has failed. (The embed is a mirror copy of the original (removed for some kind of YouTube terms violation) and likely won’t be alive for long.) This is a few months old, but still just as pertinent.

Brian’s Links 2 April 2012: Robots, Romney, and More Robots

These little robots are just waiting for Skynet to give them guidance. Someday I am going to have to write a more extensive post on the philosophy (and theology) behind these kinds of inventions, but for now I’ll just say that the militarized versions can’t be too far off. Hang a pistol and camera on them and you’ve got a fleet of unpleasant little drones. They remind me of the mechanical hounds in Fahrenheit 451, except that these fly.

Hey, turns out multicellular life is not so hard to get after all. Just repeatedly select for the yeast colonies that settle fastest and voila! Multicellular yeast. One blogger doesn’t like it though.  If multicellular life is so easy to get, he reasons, then what was once a serious obstacle to the evolution of spacefaring intelligence has been easily past. Which means there must be something else causing Fermi’s Paradox… such as intelligent species always destroying themselves.  I have previously discussed “The Great Filter” here, but I’m not as pessimistic as the fellow at Marginal Revolution. We still have a pretty good chance, I think. Though the robots above are not helping my case right now.

Antibiotic-free meat still has drug-resistant bacteria in it, including deadly MRSA. The bacteria don’t seem to follow our ideas about what they ought to be infecting. And you thought meat was supposed to be safe!

Fascinating article about UX, the “Urban eXperiment” in Paris. A literal underground movement – way ahead of the police, and luckily, also not too dangerous, doing such dastardly deeds as sneaking in and repairing the broken clock in the French Pantheon.

Vibrations on rockets make seeing difficult. An expensive problem and a $5 solution. Good thinking.

Another from Be Scofield at Tikkun: the new atheists and racism.

Old news, but in case you missed it: Romney is not concerned about the very poor. Dana Dillon at Catholic Moral Theology takes Romney down, at least from a Catholic perspective: “for Catholics, being unconcerned with the very poor is not an option.”

And (besides the above disturbing comment) why is Mitt Romney so unappealing? Well, it could be that he’s (like) a robot…

Penultimately, an atheist in Texas thinks about suing to get a Nativity scene removed. But he discovers he’s going blind, cannot pay for treatment, and so has to give up pursuing the case. And then the town Christians come to his aid, donating to help him pay his rent and get the medical treatment he needs.

And lastly, the lil’ Skynet robots play the James Bond theme.  I bet if they got together with the Stayin’ Alive Petman they could really do something interesting.

Brian’s Links 15 March 2012: Money, Meat, and Marvelous Animals

I think this crow is having fun.

Guess what? Ugandans really hate the Kony 2012 campaign. “Towards the end of the film, the mood turned more to anger at what many people saw as a foreign, inaccurate account that belittled and commercialised their suffering, as the film promotes Kony bracelets and other fundraising merchandise, with the aim of making Kony infamous. One woman I spoke to made the comparison of selling Osama Bin Laden paraphernalia post 9/11.” Here’s a good resource for further investigations

The “avoid ghetto” button for your new map directions might also provide a “divert path to nearest advertiser” feature.

Is Distributism a Form of Capitalism? Depends what you mean by “capitalism.”

So, our congress folk are not exactly like the rest of us: “Between 1984 and 2009, the median net worth of a member of the House more than doubled, according to the analysis of financial disclosures, from $280,000 to $725,000 in inflation-adjusted 2009 dollars, excluding home ­equity. Over the same period, the wealth of an American family has declined slightly, with the comparable median figure sliding from $20,600 to $20,500.”

Addressing the issue of whether science and religion are at war, and additionally, whether your story’s characters are unrealistic due to your lack of interest in people you do not like. Written by science fiction author Mike Flynn.

It’s great that this new material can soak CO2 out of the air, but the idea of artificial trees I think is a little too C.S. Lewis That Hideous Strength.

Should we raise the human IQ?

Greek parents abandoning their kids in the streets.

Ever wonder if you should terraform that planet over there? Well, Wikipedia can tell you whether it’s okay or not.

Why are Americans eating less meat? A 12% reduction in 5 years is a pretty big drop. Maybe it’s because of the foaming exploding pig poop problem?

Vegetarians, you are hereby morally obligated to eat laboratory grown meat.

Tuberculosis with no cure, at all. Completely drug resistant.

Honeybee colony collapse disorder may have a culprit: a tiny parasitic fly laying its maggots in live honeybees. San Francisco State University professor cracks the case! Here’s the free paper! (I love free papers.)

A story about getting your email account hacked and losing everything.

It’s like news from The Onion, but it’s The Onion Dome.

From the real Onion: Iran expresses concern that US may be building its 8500^th nuclear weapon.

And lastly, “A 12-year-old girl who was abducted and beaten by men trying to force her into a marriage was found being guarded by three lions who apparently had chased off her captors, a policeman said Tuesday.” Don’t mess with lions fighting crime, seriously. Awesome.

"We'll take it from here."

Brian’s Links 9 November 2011: Psychology, Economics, Outrage and Death

Quantum levitation.  Not sure what’s quantum about it (at least any more than anything else), but hey, it’s definitely cool.

Cute TV chimps make humans care less about dying wild chimps.

California bans foie gras.

New religious studies journal.

If Dr. Seuss wrote “The Call of Cthulhu.” Seuss and Lovecraft, who would have thought they’re even better together!

FOXP2, a fossil of the evolution of language within us.

A modest malaria vaccine. Modest because only partially effective, but better than nothing, perhaps.

Southern states pay the price of persecuting illegal migrant workers. Well, they got what they wanted, even if it wasn’t what they really wanted…

Graph of how Cain’s 9-9-9 tax plan works for various segments of society.  It’s a long graph… just keep scrolling…

Teenage IQ fluctuates dramatically as their brains re-wire for adulthood. Yes, it really does.

A prominent climate skeptic changes his mind, even though his study is funded by climate-change deniers. Here’s the project website and the Economist magazine’s take on it too.

For when you simply have too much money… Pay people to write your name in the desert so that it can be seen from space.

Story from June: the Saudis behead an Indonesian maid, sparking an international incident and competing bans on workers. “You can’t have our workers anymore!” and then “Oh yeah? Well we won’t take your workers anymore!”

A Chinese commentary on the death of Yueyue. Because running over a toddler, twice, and letting her die in the street – because you are “just minding your own business” (18 people!) – is really not acceptable.

Armless archer setting world records! He wants to be the world’s best archer “hands down.”

Dismantling giant 9 megaton nukes.  Now we only have a bunch 1.2 megaton nukes (and smaller) to protects us from, um, uh, whatever might… hmm.

Looking for the gene for hypersociality. For those individuals with Williams syndrome, everyone is your friend. Extremely interesting from both an ethics and a social theory perspective.

Even National Catholic Register is in on the Jesus and aliens thing! (Which I’ve talked about previously here and here.)

Lastly, giant mysterious Lego man, save us! We know you can.

They are the 97%

Created by Kira Treibergs and Laurel Heibert of the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology, and undoubtedly already appearing on a Facebook page near you.

Links on Occupy Wall Street, Oakland, Distributism, and Police Brutality

OCCUPY OAKLAND and the POLICE

According to this US marine, the Geneva conventions protect enemy soldiers more than the Oakland police protected our own citizens.

Observations from Occupy Oakland chaos, some first hand observations.

Jon Stewart gives his thoughts on the Occupy Oakland mess. Funny and with some bite.

Police brutality charges flood across the US.

DISTRIBUTISM

The Washington Post picks up on distributism! Unfortunately the original is gone from the WP website. Vanished. Only this trace is left on Scribd.

Rod Dreher on distributism.

John Medaille: There Is No Such Thing as a Bank Loan.

John Medaille on Usury. By the way, this crisis is all about usury. (From the Houston Catholic Worker, Casa Juan Diego.)

John Medaille (can you tell I like this guy?) on practical examples of working distributism in the world.

Finally, the Mondragon cooperative in Spain: an 83,000 worker multinational cooperative based on Catholic social teaching. Really amazing, expands on what Medaille discusses in the previous article.

MORE NEWS ON OCCUPY WALL STREET

On how to keep Wall Street occupied. A funny video on mailing in your credit card applications… but with different things in them.

Nashville judges tell rest of government to lay off occupy protesters.

Guess what?  On the social justice index, the USA ranks pretty badly. As a matter of fact, basically at the bottom of the heap (good graphic).

Just keep closing accounts… home owners divest from Wells Fargo.

On Catholic social teaching and Occupy Wall Street. They do overlap in many areas.

More anthropologists on Wall Street please. Really, someone needs to figure that place out, the economists sure didn’t do it.

Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party. Nothing in common, right? Wrong! They are both anti-big. Against big government and against big corporations. Don’t tell NPR, but that means they are distributists! Or perhaps decentralists could be another word for it.

Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world! But seriously, this sounds crazy, except some guys really did do their homework and found the network for how all the companies own each other. There are only 147 major companies; quite interesting. Even Forbes magazine picked it up.

Cornell West gets arrested while protesting with Occupy Wall Street in New York City

Church divests three million dollars from Bank of America.

Jeffrey Sachs on Occupy Wall Street: an interview with NPR.

Who rules America? UC Santa Cruz data on wealth distribution in the US, including a story from a former investments manager.

Paul Krugman on bank bailouts. Actually, not bailing out the “too big to fail” banks can work. Iceland did it. And they are still here, and really not so badly off.

Mr. Jay Smooth, of IllDoctrine, YouTube philosopher, on Occupy Wall Street. He uses the analogy of a three-card monte street hustler to explain the national reaction to OWS.