Mosque Burnt Down, Jews Handed Over Keys To Their Synagogue

Story like this does not get highlighted enough, especially during the hate-filled and hateful period since the US Presidential election.

The mosque/Islamic center in the small town of Victoria, TX burnt down under suspicious circumstances earlier this month, right after the President signed the travel ban executive order. This story would have ended there if it were for the generous and kind folks of the Temple Bnai Israel.

"We have probably 25 to 30 Jewish people in Victoria, and they probably have 100 Muslims. We got a lot of building for a small amount of Jews."

One of the mosque's founders, Shahid Hashmi, said: "Jewish community members walked into my home and gave me a key to the synagogue."

There are A LOT of lessons to be learned here. Boys and girls, if you want to promote whatever it is that you believe in, and show to the world how wonderful it is, nothing can be better than showing us your best feature dressed in your best outfit. This is what those people at Temple Bnai Israel have done. They not only reveal to the world how kind and generous they are, but also on the nature of their beliefs and practices.

If you want to sabotage and ruin the reputation of your beliefs, then you form something like ISIS or the Westboro Babtist Church. There's no quicker way to destroy the good name of your belief than to act that dumb.

Zz.

Travel Ban Would Not Have Stopped Previous Attacks

The claim by the Trump administration that the travel ban from these countries would make the US safer and would have prevented previous attacks is quite hollow. The Washington Post has an article that basically said that the current policy would not have stopped those attacks, because the attackers were either US citizens, permanent residents, or were not from one of those banned countries.

This is a table that summarizes the attacks by so-called Islamic extremists since 2001.

“The ban is less about national security and more about advancing a worldview based on religious and racial exclusion,” J.M. Berger, a fellow with the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism at The Hague and co-author of “ISIS: The State of Terror,” wrote in an email Sunday. “It’s not likely to make us safer, and it is far more likely to help our real enemies, ISIS and al-Qaeda. We don’t do ourselves any favors when we make their talking points into reality.”

So instead of making us safer, it has made us even more vulnerable.

Zz.

Happy Birthday, Fred Korematsu

Today, January 30, 2017, Google Doodle celebrates the birthday of activist Fred Korematsu, who fought the US government way back in 1942 on the internment of Japanese US citizens during World War II.

Korematsu refused to comply with the order and fled from his home in San Leandro, California to Oakland. Korematsu was soon captured and convicted, but he appealed the decision. Although the Supreme Court ruled against him 6-3, the decision was overturned in 1983.

In the original Supreme Court ruling, dissenting Justice Robert Jackson said that the only crime Korematsu committed was “being present in the state whereof he is a citizen, near the place where he was born and where all his life he has lived.” Justice Frank Murphy called the executive order “legalization of racism.”

“It is the case of convicting a citizen as a punishment for not submitting to imprisonment in a concentration camp, based on his ancestry, and solely because of his ancestry, without evidence or inquiry concerning his loyalty and good disposition towards the United States,” they wrote. “If this be a correct statement of the facts disclosed by this record, and facts of which we take judicial notice, I need hardly labor the conclusion that Constitutional rights have been violated.”

And now, more than 70 years later, history is almost repeating itself, where whole groups of people are being persecuted not because they did anything wrong, but because they are assumed to already be guilty just simply for who they are.

Zz.

I Started A Food Blog

Yeah, I did! I decided that all the stuff about food that I would have posted in here belongs in a separate blog than this.

http://epicuriousitykillstheschrodingercat.blogspot.com/

So no more food stuff in here! :)

Zz.

Fake News, Faith, And Reason

Whoa! An essay that conveys what I've been thinking of lately!

A dozen or so years ago, I was working on a profile of Zig Ziglar, the famous motivational speaker who died in 2012, and I went to hear him speak at his church in a suburb of Dallas. His topic, as a lay lecturer in adult Sunday school, was the threat of cults, and he began by mocking the creation myth of Scientology — the whole baroque science-fiction epic starting 4 quadrillion years ago and proceeding through the Galactic Overlord, the frozen thetans and the nuclear holocaust on a planet called Teegeeack.

“Now, I ask you,” he said, wrapping up his recitation, “how could any of this fool an intelligent, thinking man or woman who has read the first four chapters of Genesis?”

Well, yes, precisely. Scientology is incompatible with Christianity, or Judaism or Islam; you cannot by any stretch of reason believe in both. What went without saying, to Ziglar and to his audience that morning, was the logical superiority of a six-day Creation and a talking snake, and by extension the flood and the ark, the litany of biblical miracles and the Resurrection.

But from an agnostic standpoint, there’s no inherent reason to believe one account over the other. They are stories written in books that function as their own authority. People believe in the Bible as a matter of faith, because they accept its message of redemption, not because of empirical evidence or the inherent plausibility of the individual stories within it. This has been true as far back as Augustine, who held that faith and reason go together, but faith leads the way: “Seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand.” Or, in the more pungent formulation of Mark Twain, faith consists of “believing what you know ain’t so.”

Does that remind you of something transpiring in American society at this moment? Many Americans subscribe to conspiracy theories as preposterous as anything L. Ron Hubbard could have dreamt up, and — because they relate to current events and real living people — far more dangerous. Just in the past few days, a man shot up a Washington pizzeria, acting under the delusion that it was the headquarters of a child-sex ring involving Hillary Clinton, and a woman who believed that the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre was a government hoax was arrested for making threats against the parents of a child who died there.

 Conspiracy theories exist across the political spectrum, but some of the most influential purveyors populate the far right, including the radio commentator Alex Jones, who has claimed that not just Sandy Hook but also the 9/11 attacks and the Oklahoma City bombing were “false flag” operations staged by the federal government as pretexts to expand its tyranny. And Jones has had as a guest on his show Donald Trump, whose campaign abandoned even the pretense of grounding statements in empirical fact. The unemployment rate was whatever he said it was — “probably 28, 29, as high as 35” — and Barack Obama was born in Africa right up until the moment it became expedient to say something else. 

Many of these absurd beliefs originate in “fake news,” clickbait posts whose authors may not even care if they are believed, as long as there are enough suckers out there to click on them. This has led to calls by media figures and other interested parties, Hillary Clinton among them, for a crackdown on the way social media sites abet the spread of nonsense. But the bigger question is, how could someone possibly believe that one of the most visible and recognizable figures in the world, surrounded at all times by aides and security, was sneaking into the basement of a pizza parlor to have sex with children? Who are those people?

By a wide margin, Trump was supported by (white) evangelical Christian voters. And in Brooklyn, N.Y., one of the few areas where he did well was the Orthodox and Hasidic enclave of Borough Park. Obviously, people supported Trump for all sorts of reasons, including some grounded in religious conviction, such as opposition to abortion, but also some that had nothing to do with faith. And, of course, many religious people voted the other way. But, to state the obvious, a precondition for believing, along with Jones, that Hillary Clinton is a literal demon from hell is a belief that demons and hell exist in the first place. It is much easier to ignore evidence about global warming if you believe, with Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., that Earth’s climate is controlled directly by God. More generally, is there something in the mindset of a religious believer — someone who accepts the reality of an unseen deity, based on ancient accounts of events with no parallel in everyday experience — that encourages the acceptance of unprovable claims in the realms of politics or science?

It’s not an easy question. Christians put Scripture in a separate epistemological category: It is the word of God, not subject to the same empirical testing as a weather forecast or an unemployment report. Some highly trained minds — Isaac Newton, for one, and Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project and an evangelical Christian — have managed to maintain a strong Biblical faith while also rigorously pursuing objective truths about the natural world, but most of us don’t have the philosophical chops to pull it off. Conservative churches offer their believers certainty rather than ambiguity, and they attract congregants who are comfortable obeying, and exercising, authority.

 Brain-imaging studies show that doubt requires more mental effort than belief. Credulousness is the default setting for most people, most of the time. That is as true of crystal-gazing New Agers passing along posts about a conspiracy by Monsanto to control the world through genetically modified corn as it is of Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, an elder of the Erath County Cowboy Church, who passed along an unfounded rumor that Clinton had been endorsed by the Communist Party. Miller, who is reported to be under consideration for nomination as secretary of agriculture, told reporters he doesn’t care whether it’s true or not. 

So someone like Miller is essentially treating political discourse as a matter of faith. If your goal is to be saved, you don’t go around looking for logical holes in the Gospels; you leave that to the atheists. If your goal is to elect Republicans, you pass along anything that puts your opponent in a bad light and leave the fact-checking to the mainstream media.

But is that any way to run a country? Maybe it’s a time to reawaken our capacity for doubt, now when misinformation is more readily available and arguably more dangerous than ever before in history. Faith has a place in the lives of many people. But, per Augustine, it can no more stand alone than pure reason; a Christian must call on both to be strong in the world. That’s still good advice.

The problem also comes in when people can't tell the difference between speculative, unverified babble versus something with actual physical evidence. Talking heads on TV tend to ramble on and on about something, and often make guesses and speculation of a piece of news. But listeners often confuse or mistook them as being part of the news.

Or maybe they DON'T want to, or don't care, if it is valid or not, as the article suggests. If this is true, then it is pretty sad. The Spaghetti Monster truly lives!

Zz.

Why Don't We Drop Turkeys Out Of An Airplane?

If you think that was simply an episode out from "WKRP in Cincinnati", think again. It seems that the population of DUMB people are multiplying.

A town called "Yellville", Arkansas is reviving their tradition of, get this, dropping live turkeys out of an airplane. I'm not making this up!

In Yellville (pop. 1,204), they call the turkey drop “an Ozark Mountain tradition” — one that has more or less remained intact for 71 years.

Due to protests and weather concerns, the drops were put on hold from 2012 to 2014. But they’re back and scheduled to resume like old times, and many locals are rushing to defend the practice.

And I almost howled with laughter when I read what the town judge said in defense of this practice:

Terry Ott, a county judge, downplayed concerns about the well-being of the birds during an interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

“They’re not going to crash,” Ott told the paper. “They’re birds. They can fly.”

I swear, this was the script right out of the infamous episode!



The stupidity of some people can be rather astounding.

Zz.

Could "Schikaneder" Be The Next Must-See Broadway Show?

Right now, it is all about "Hamilton". But in a couple of years, could it be "Schikaneder" next? The latest musical by "Wicked" composer Stephen Schwartz is making waves in, of all places, Vienna, Austria.

Here’s a tip for Broadway’s theater owners: Get yourselves to Vienna to see the new musical by “Wicked” composer Stephen Schwartz.

My Viennese spies say it’s sensational.

It’s called “Schikaneder,” and while the title doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue, one source’s description is enticing: “It’s ‘Kiss Me, Kate’ meets ‘Amadeus’ with a score as lush and melodic as Stephen’s ‘The Baker’s Wife.’ This a major show.”

There ya go!

Zz.