The rescue of the trapped miners in Chile is a truly wonderful story. The careful plan put together by international teams seems to be working smoothly in bringing the stoic miners back to the surface and 21 of the 33 all have been rescued so far, after spending over two months trapped half-a-mile below the surface. See here for how the rescue was carried out. It is a triumph of perseverance, endurance, cooperation, patience, technology, and science.

But apparently three different Christian denominations are claiming it was their prayers that resulted in god intervening that resulted in the successful rescue and are vying to claim credit for the successful rescue. They did not explain why if god wanted the miners rescued he didn’t simply lift them out of the mine himself or why their gods were silent when the 29 miners died in the West Virginia in April. It is pathetic to see people so desperate for a sign from god that they clutch at these straws.

In another footnote to this story, NPR depended upon an al-Jazeera reporter to get an on-the-spot report from the mine site earlier this week. NPR frequently uses reporters from other news services like the BBC but al-Jazeera is used only for stories in which either al-Jazeera itself is the story or because there are some situations (like the Gaza aid flotilla) where only they venture to send in reporters. This was the first time I had heard NPR using them for a ‘neutral’ story. It signals the long-overdue recognition that al-Jazeera, which provides excellent news coverage, is being seen by US news outlets as a legitimate source.

The show on the Pew religion survey has been re-scheduled and will not occur at 9:00 am on Tuesday, October 5 as I said before.

I’ll post the new date when I hear it.

He just turned five.

I wrote sometime ago about the veneration that Americans had for their flag that bordered on fetishism. This contrasts with the liberties taken with the national anthem. While Americans jump to their feet, remove their hats, place their hands over their hearts, and do all manner of things to show respect, the singers of the anthem are allowed to take all manner of liberties with it.

At any public event, for example, you are never sure if you are going to get a jazz or blues or classic version. The variations that I have not heard so far consist of rock and disco, though maybe even that was done in the 70s. Has anyone ever heard a rap version? Are their some music modes that are considered inherently disrespectful and so are not even attempted for fear of causing outrage?

I can’t imagine that this freedom to interpret the anthem broadly always existed and I wonder when people in the US began allowing the anthem to be varied this way.

By contrast, whenever I hear the national anthem of other countries, they always seem to do it straight.

Update: In the comments Scott reminded me of Jimi Hendrix’s version at Woodstock in 1969. That counts as a rock version and was pretty wild.

Here is the final comments policy. I will repost it periodically for the benefit of new arrivals to this blog.

1. In the comment box that says ‘Name’, you must insert a person’s name only. The name can be a pseudonym but inserting the name of a product or company or service is grounds for deletion. So ‘Ann Jones’ or ‘Joe’ or ‘Genghis Khan’ is allowable, but ‘Acme Roofing Company’ or ‘Diet Coke’ or ‘essay writing services’ or ‘Joe the plumber’ is not.
2. If a comment seems genuine but violates the above rule, I reserve the right to delete it entirely or simply replace the name with a made-up name of my own choosing.
3. You can continue to insert a link to a company or product or commercial service site in the URL box and this will make the name in the name box into a hyperlink to that site. This will be the only means by which to advertise or drive traffic to a site or product.
4. Any link inserted in the body of a comment is also grounds for deletion of the entire comment unless the link is pointing to information relevant to the post.
5. Even if a comment meets all these criteria, I still reserve the right to delete it if I think its chief purpose is to advertise and not advance the discussion. So comments like ‘Great post!’ and ‘I would like to read more on this topic’ will get the boot.
6. The comments will continue to be unmoderated, so almost all genuine comments on recent posts should continue to appear almost immediately, just as before. If your comment does not appear immediately or even after a few minutes, it means it has been flagged as potential spam because of the appearance of some words that trigger the filter (words which in isolation can be quite harmless but in combination with other words can cause the filter to sit up and take notice) and it will appear only after I have got around to checking in on the filtered comments board.
7. If a comment contains language that might offend, I reserve the right to censor specific words using the common practice of replacing selected letters with hyphens.

Because of some personal commitments, the long posts will continue on their regular schedule, but I will not be able to respond to comments until Tuesday.

Thanks to everyone who made suggestions in response to my earlier post about how to manage the spam comments menace. There were some very useful ones from people on all sides of the issue.

The problem that I faced was that people sometimes use the comments feature of blogs seemingly purely to insert hyperlinks to their commercial interests in order to gain visibility for some product or service and to drive up their website rankings, and these pointless comments were cluttering up the boards and wasting the time of people who were trying to follow a discussion. [Read more…]

On this Labor Day I want to wish everyone a great holiday, at least to my American and Canadian readers who are the only ones who celebrate workers on this day, while most of the world does it on May Day (May 1st).

Ironically enough, May Day has its origins in the US as the day that commemorates the Haymarket Riot in 1886 in which police in Chicago fired on workers who were striking for an eight-hour workday. The international worker’s movement adopted a resolution in 1891 to use the anniversary of the Haymarket event to celebrate workers rights. Following another bloody suppression of workers in 1894, again in Chicago, in which federal troops were sent in to break up the Pullman strike and in which over a dozen strikers were killed, the US government sought to try and make peace with US workers by granting a holiday to celebrate workers. But since they did not want to remind people of its history of brutal opposition to worker rights that a May Day holiday might trigger, the US government and Congress in 1894 made the September Labor Day a federal holiday.

So I am taking the day off somewhat but want to flag some minor changes in the blog that will take place immediately.

Long time readers of this blog know that there is a routine here in which I post a single essay of around 1000 words on some topic each weekday at around 9:00 am Eastern time in the US. My goal of writing a daily long form essay serves largely a selfish purpose. Writing about things in some depth sharpens my thinking about them and forces me to look up sources and evidence for my views and not toss off glib, gut-level reactions. It is remarkable how much I learn by doing this and how often that process makes me realize that what I remembered as having happened or said is not correct and forces me to revise my views, as well as serving as a useful reminder of the fallibility of even strong memories. The essay form also keeps me writing regularly and thus improves my writing skills.

But I am finding that my self-imposed rule is too constraining. In the course of keeping up with the news and researching topics there are many interesting, funny, and quirky things that I come across (or are sent to me) or updates to earlier postings that I want to share with readers. I usually collect them and keep them until I can make them part of a later essay, either in the body of the text or, if it does not quite fit, as a post script. The catch is that there are many such interesting items that do not merit a long essay and which do not relate to anything that I am likely to write about at length. I still include some of those things as post scripts but they keep accumulating faster than I can use them and sometimes even go out of date, which seems a waste.

Since I want to preserve the weekday essay feature of the blog, I have decided to supplement it with occasional short postings that will appear randomly as needed.

From the point of view of the readers, the upside is that there will be more content than before (at least I hope that is viewed as an upside). The downside is that it is only the weekday essays that will appear on a regular schedule and the appearance of other items will be unpredictable. I assume that many people have RSS subscriptions that alert them whenever new content appears.

Due to technical problems with my computer, I will not be able to post anything until it is fixed, which I hope will be later today.

One of the interesting things about a blog is the comments section that enables readers and author to interact. The problem, as I have written before, is spam comments that just clog up the boards and waste people’s time. I have an open and unmoderated comment system which means that anyone can comment without registering or getting my prior approval but the catch is that it can be exploited by spam. The people who run the servers have filters for detecting and eliminating or quarantining spam but it is not foolproof and sometimes genuine comments may be excluded while spam comments may be allowed.
[Read more…]