Episode 24: Give It A Shot

Just for a minute, believers, put aside those deeply-held convictions you haven't really thought about too much. Attend to these excerpts from Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris (Knopf):

"The idea that the Bible is a perfect guide to morality is simply astounding. God's counsel to parents is straightforward: whenever children get out of line, we should beat them with a rod. (Proverbs). If they are shameless enough to talk back to us, we should kill them (Exodus). If a man discovers on his wedding night that his bride is not a virgin, he must stone her to death on her father's doorstep (Deuteronomy). We must also stone people to death for heresy, adultery, homosexuality, working on the Sabbath, worshiping graven images, practicing sorcery."

"A three-day-old human embryo is a collection of 150 cells called a blastocyst. There are more than 100,000 cells in the brain of a fly. If you are concerned about suffering in this universe, killing a fly should present you with greater moral difficulty than killing a human blastocyst."

"While missionaries do many noble things at great risk to themselves, their dogmatism still spreads ignorance and death. Christian missionaries have been known to preach the sinfulness of condom use in villages where no other information about condoms is available. (Given the rampant AIDS epidemic) this kind of piety is genocidal."

"Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, The Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom are among the least religious societies on earth. They are also the healthiest, as indicated by life expectancy, adult literacy, per capita income, educational attainment, gender equality, homicide rate, and infant mortality. Conversely, the fifty nations now ranked lowest in terms of the United Nations' human development index are unwaveringly religious."
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Good Ol' Boys
*The salesman called the front desk in his Kentucky hotel and said "I've gotta leak in my sink." The guy says "Go ahead."

*An Arkansas state trooper pulled over a pickup truck and asks the driver "Got any ID?." The driver said "Bout what?"

*A new Alabama law declares that when a couple gets divorced, they're still brother and sister.

*How can you tell if a Texan is married? There's dried chewing tobacco on both sides of his pickup.

*What do a divorce in Alabama, a tornado in Kansas, and a hurricane in Florida have in common?
Somebody's fixin' to lose them a trailer.

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A Dose of History
Senators don't become President. The last one was Jack Kennedy, 47 years ago. The only other senator to move directly from the Hill into the Oval Office in the 20th Century was Warren Harding, the very model of corruption and incompetence until the current occupant, who broke the mold.
If history is predictive, then, the 2008 campaign will be between Giuliani or Romney and Richardson or Edwards (a former Senator).
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Pity the Poor Reactionaries
You have to feel for the drumbeaters of the far right, such champions of tolerance and understanding as Jerry Falwell of Liberty University, Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation, James C. Dobson of Focus on the Family, Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, Wayne LaPierre of the N.R.A., and free-form freedom fighter Gary Bauer.
See, all the leading Republican candidates seem to them to be suspiciously...moderate. Oh, sure, Giuliani, Romney, and McCain have been sucking up to these influentials every chance they get, but are they sincere? These are the issues that roil the closed-door discussions at the Council for National Policy, the highly secretive cabal to which these guys and like-minded fellow travelers
belong.
They're forced to consider candidates of the second and third tiers - that is, the ones who haven't a prayer of election but might satisfy the demands of more than one or two of the several factions of the ultraconservative wing of the Republican party. There's Senator Sam Moss - um - Brownback, who's against any new concept of morality advanced since the 11th Century, but who supports (gasp!) a temporary guest worker program. Mike Huckabee has impeccable evangelical Southern Baptist bona fides, but as governor of Arkansas he allowed (eek!) tax and spending increases. Governor Mark Sanford has impressed many members of the Council, but he hasn't made a move to run, perhaps because nobody outside South Carolina has ever heard of him.
Lordie, what's a right-wing nut job to do? It's enough to make a feller vote for some liberal like Elizabeth Dole.
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The Soup & Vodka Diet
Geezer wants to take this opportunity to announce that he has lost 26 pounds. Given that he recently entered his 73rd year and his metabolism slowed to a crawl a couple of decades ago, this was no small personal achievement. It was also the first time that his withdrawal from the very edge of morbid obesity was motivated by explicit threats to his health, not his ego. He is now prepared to reveal his secrets of weight loss to an anxious, avid public. They are:
1. Diet 2. Exercise.
He has abandoned, for all practical purposes, white food - sugar, bread, potatoes, pasta, rice.
This is easier than it used to be, given the availability of a widening variety of fairly persuasive fake foods - 35-calorie bread, 25-calorie mayo, 40-calorie hot dogs, 20-to- zero-calorie salad dressing, and 100-calorie soup. Keeping daily totals under 1200 calories is marginally less painful. It helps that he is no longer departing on week-long research trips that involve eating in two to three fancy restaurants a day.
The worst part is daily - yes, daily - visits to the health club. Thirty to 45 minutes every time, aerobics and weights, religiously. Geezer hates it, especially the locker room - all those hairy, flabby, sweaty, smelly guys. He is assured that the women's locker room doesn't resemble the grotto at the Playboy Mansion, either, but that is little compensation.
Never mind. Geezer is working on a four-pack. He can once again sneer silently at the cart in front of him in the checkout aisle that contains donuts, frozen crinkle fries, Cheese Doddles, Twinkies, and Ben & Jerry's Chocolate Mudslide.
His salvation comes with all that Progresso soup and his nightly vodka martini. There's hardly any sugar in vodka, did you know?
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