Sambal

Apparently there’s some priest who likes to play in traffic and assault distance runners in order to promote world peace.

Normally it would not be necessary for sensible people to explicitly say that this guy is probably a wacko. For what it’s worth, he sounds like a wacko to me.

My real reason for posting about this is this line of Colby’s: “Some reports have described Fr. Horan as ‘defrocked’, which is correct, but it’s worth remembering that he remains a member of the clergy nonetheless.” Yes, he remains a member of the clergy in the sense that the sacrament of ordination leaves a character (”a mark or seal on the soul that cannot be effaced”). Horan is not allowed to preach or perform any sacraments.

One would think that this would be easy enough to understand. But people do insist on reasoning as if the Church were a man-made institution with arbitrary rules. That’s fine for them, and I certainly can’t prevent them. But nobody should expect to convince a lay Catholic, let alone members of the hierarchy, that Church doctrine should be changed when the argument includes “You made these rules up; they’re arbitrary; there’s no reason not to change them.”

As I read on message board recently (attribution withheld):

Absolutely….if in fact God does not exist and Catholicism is a manmade religion it certainly would be nothing but a poor excuse. I can totally understand where you’re coming from. My answer is coming from the standpoint that this sacrament was in fact instituted by Christ rather than made up by man. In order to understand that, one would have to consider beliefs outside of their own, just briefly.

Via Volokh, negative campaigning through the ages:

Who rules us with an iron rod?
Who moves at Satan’s beck and nod?
Who heeds not man,
Who heeds not God?

One of the neat things that the government of Alberta does with the money it steals from me is conduct surveys and post the results on the web for free. For example, there’s WageInfo, the 2003 Alberta Wage and Salary Survey.

This year the survey includes “skills shortage information.” They’re trying to project a vacancy rate in each job category, and also to determine how difficult it is to fill these positions.

I had some fun looking at my current job description — “Software Engineer”. Apparently software engineer positions are pretty easy to fill — only 6% of employers report difficulty.

If the software market crashes, I could always get a job in the field I trained for — I could be a chemist. But check out that vacancy rate — 0%. Maybe not.

Unfortunately you can’t search the database by hiring difficulty or vacancy rate — at least not yet. But I played a hunch and tried “journalist”. Look at that! Vacancies at 4%, 50% of employers report hiring difficulties. It must be a great gig to be a journalist! Or maybe not.

Yesterday I found and read this article in Slate. Today my liberal friend (see, I have at least one!) sent me a link to the same article.

That basically resolves my “dumb lie” problem with Cambodia. My current opinion is that all these things happened to Kerry -

At least in Australia. It seems to me that the mainstream media were ignoring the swift vets in the hope that they would go away; then after a couple of days, they felt obliged to cover the story; finally, they started to cover the story by covering the lack of coverage, and here we are today.

I haven’t read the detailed criticisms of Kerry’s decorations. I don’t intend to, and I don’t think they’re very important. Kerry did serve; he did command a swift boat; he did get wounded; he did pull some guy out of the water, at least once: all good. I’m not interested in quibbles about comma placement in the after-action reports, or whether he ever exaggerated when telling war stories.

I do want to hear about this Christmas in Cambodia thing, though. Here’s a summary of his statements.

From a New York Times Op-Ed today:

Imagine if one company controlled the card catalog of every library in the world. The influence it would have over what people see, read and discuss would be enormous. Now consider online search engines.

ARGH! The sheer idiocy of this opening paragraph is giving me chest pains. “Imagine if one company controlled the card catalog of every library in the world.” Wow, sounds awful. Orwellian, even. One company — presumably, one EVIL MULTINATIONAL CORPORATION — controlling all those card catalogs.

“Now consider online search engines.” OK! I am considering them! Let’s see — they are companies whose websites attempt to index the vast diversity of content on the web. Unlike card catalogs, they aren’t naturally monopolistic.

Few people realize that 95 percent of all Web searches in the United States are handled by two companies, Google and Yahoo, either directly or through other sites that use their technology. In the case of Google, whose shares started to trade publicly last week, the company holds the world’s largest index of Web content, at more than four billion pages, and handles more than 200 million searches a day. The influence of search companies in determining what users worldwide can see and do online is breathtaking.

“The influence…is breathtaking.” Breathtaking — because with Google people actually get useful results, whereas the web was much less useful under Altavista’s crapgorithm.

The purpose of this article is to complain that Google is a very successful company in the search engine market. I guess this means Google has really arrived: they’re getting the Microsoft treatment.

How about giving it back to the newspapers?

“Imagine if one company controlled the only broadsheet newspaper distributed in the nation’s largest city. The influence it would have over what people see, read and discuss would be enormous.”

Thank God for the web and Google News — it protects us from the otherwise-monopolies of the New York Times and Los Angeles Times.

Kerri Dunn was found guilty today of attempted insurance fraud and filing a false police report. Dunn, you may remember, was a visiting professor of psychology at Claremont-McKenna College when her car was vandalized. She was later accused of causing the damage herself.

Her attorney will appeal, apparently on the grounds that she may not have filed an insurance claim at all.

LA Times story (registration required)

One of the things that really disturbs me about Kerry is what I will just call his “dumb lies.” We had an administrator at my college who had a bad habit of telling dumb lies. She once told two inconsistent stories about the same events, one to me, one to my wife (then-girlfriend). Apparently she didn’t expect that we would compare notes and catch her out in the lie.

And John Kerry does the same thing.

First is the Christmas in Cambodia thing. Kerry read into the Congressional Record in 1986 that he spent Christmas of 1968 in Cambodia. But there is no corroborating evidence for this claim, and the Kerry campaign issued a sort-of retraction. (”Perhaps it wasn’t Christmas 1968 that he was in Cambodia”). (UPDATE: see this later post)

One barely-plausible explanation is that Kerry was in Cambodia on a mission so secret that none of the other people who usually whould have known about it (e.g., other swift boat commanders, the overall commander of swift boat operations, etc.) knew. But in that case, if the mission was so secret, why was Kerry blabbing about it in 1986?

Second is his attendance at the Kansas City VVAW meeting, where Scott Camil proposed assassinating certain pro-war senators. Did Kerry go or didn’t he? Originally he claimed to have resigned beforehand, but subsequently a different story came out:

according to six eyewitnesses interviewed by the Sun, the plan was discussed and voted down, with Mr. Kerry speaking out against it, although there is disagreement about how narrow the margin of defeat was. On the third day of the meeting, Mr. Kerry and three other people resigned from their posts as national coordinators of VVAW. Historian Douglas Brinkley says Mr. Kerry told him he quit because of “personality conflicts and differences in political philosophy.”

I’m not sixty-one like John Kerry, but I distinctly remember the circumstances of my leaving every organization I’ve left — especially when there was anything heated going on. I’m sure I would remember if I quit over my disagreement with a proposed assassination attempt, even thirty years later.

So what concerns me is that Kerry seems to want to tell a good story, and that desire overpowers his caution and leads him to say things that can be refuted by the record. Why doesn’t he keep his mouth shut?

Here’s a language question that I don’t know the answer to.

In English, we usually name a fruit tree by the name of its fruit plus the word “tree”. So: “apple tree”, “orange tree”, etc. But we have some exceptions. The only one I can think of is “acorn” — “oak”. The fruit name is not obviously related to the tree name. (Reference here amid an interesting but otherwise irrelevant discussion of “eggcorns”)

In Czech they have “

Apparently my weblog is linked to by this site as a source of “One Life To Live Spoilers”. Nope.

http://www.wotbox.com/search?q=one+life+to+live+spoilers&o=7&l=10