HystericallyBored
“I don’t need to kill you to get what I want.”
We read that Chinese hackers, once again, are poking around on U.S. government and corporate servers and stealing important data files related to national defense and patented inventions.
I am perplexed. As a computer professional, and a database specialist, I always immediately ask myself how they got in? And then I ask myself, how would I manage a data set that required a very, very high degree of security?
The answer is pretty simple. You don’t expose data like that to an external network.
In the simplest form, this kind of security can be implemented very easily. You locate the files, the applications, the data bases, configurations, libraries, code, whatever, on a local network. You don’t connect it to the internet. All the people working on your project have to be located within your physical network, that is, one or more buildings physically connected by network cable, and not connected to any external modem or line, and certainly without a wireless connection.
I would guess that, from the point of view of industry or government, this might be unacceptable in some way. Anyone working on almost any information technology would need to access the internet often. But what is “unacceptable”? Is opening your information systems to Chinese hackers “acceptable”?
How quickly could we get used to a new acceptable: when you work on a very important project that requires a high level of security, you get off the grid. That’s the way it is. The same way that scientists working in micro bacterial research now have to wear white suits, visors, and gloves and work in sealed rooms, in secure buildings.
I think it can be done. Inevitably, some scientists or engineers will need some information only available on the internet but that can easily be handled by having a physically isolated internet connection to a separate, non-networked computer in the same building. It’s not technically difficult to keep it separate from a LAN. If the information is copied or downloaded, it can be copied onto a flash drive and then transferred to the LAN. Then, even if an employee inadvertently downloaded a virus from the internet, it would have no effect. It won’t be able to connect to a mother ship. The flash drive could be reformatted before ever being used again for extra security. What’s so hard about that?
[It might be argued that all computers nowadays come with built-in wireless connectivity. But it is possible to build computers without it if there was a demand for it.]
I know: the engineers and scientists will insist they need immediate, continuous access to the internet. If you insist, and the government or industry accedes to this demand, they should quit whining about hackers stealing the data: you have made it available to them.
If you want to rent a car and drive to Italy and park it on the street, please don’t come to me with your crisis about someone stealing your GPS out of your glove compartment– I can tell you right now, that is what will happen. If you don’t like it, go somewhere else.
We have bigger problems with China. Today, the “Inside Washington” program with Gordon Peterson and gang decried the fact that the U.S. is not preparing for war with China. Even Mark Shields seemed to believe we should not be conducting war exercises with China while they are trying to steal our data.
I think he’s wrong. I think that is precisely what we should be doing: engaging China, developing relationships, sharing knowledge with them. If you prepare for war, you will have war. If you prepare for peace, you might not.
The great problem with China is caused by us. Walmart, especially, uses China as a vast pool of cheap labour to produce millions of trinkets to be sold cheaply at the mall outside of your town, thereby driving local businesses out of business and driving more and more American workers into minimum wage jobs supporting the dispersal of the products of Chinese productivity and providing the capital China needs to build a navy that can challenge the navy of the country they expect some day to go to war with, the United States. Apple has found a congenial home in China. All the big American corporations are drooling at the possibilities of a billion new customers. That is what drives U.S. foreign policy and anyone who pretends otherwise is running for president.
If you don’t want China to become big and powerful and rich, you will cut Walmart off at the knees. Walmart will then shift their production to Bangladesh or India or Mexico. Maybe a few jobs will come back to America.
Because both sides know two things. Firstly, there is not enough oil in the world for both the U.S. and a future China when it begins to catch up to American industrial might. Secondly, neither country has the moral or rational ability to say: let’s share.
If you don’t like the Internet, get off. I mean it. Who asked you on? Who the hell insisted that corporations should be able to store their data on public networks, advertise their products, and sell their services, online? Get off. Lock your LAN up. Disconnect. Use the telephone instead. Use the courier. Fax your information. Send it by carrier pigeon.
There is no divine ordinance that says that governments and corporations must be allowed to store their data on the internet and should expect that information to be secure.
Get off, get off, get off.
I just think I need to take a moment and remind everyone that Wolf Bitzer at CNN said this about Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech: “She hit one out of the park.”
Let’s not forget.
Richard Stursberg came to the CBC about six years ago, hired some American consultants who told him that people want more weather, more banter, more light news, more trivia in theirs newscasts, and systematically destroyed the least worst news broadcast in Canada.
My wife and I now watch PBS news from the U.S. I’ve tried out CTV occasionally. Incredibly, it is better than the CBC National. I didn’t think I would ever be saying that.
So here’s the CBC: Nancy Wilson is the hostess on the weekend. She is a perfect little hostess and I think she should take time out from her busy hosting gig to maybe hock a little Tupperware or Avon on the side. In the meantime, she conveys to the viewer just how remarkably trivial the world is out there. One minute it’s a tornado or earthquake or war killing thousands of people, the next it’s chilly out there– did you bring a sweater, Mark? Might be a good day to curl up with a warm book. Did I mention the airplane crash? Let’s go to the reporter in the news room– look! He’s got his sleeves rolled up! He must be working very hard, and you can tell he’s incorruptible because, for God’s sake, he has his sleeves rolled up. And he’s moving! He’s walking from one desk to… where-ever. The camera is moving with him. By golly, this is real news I care about, not some mere journalist. And now, let’s cut to Diane to explain how we can keep our kids safe from meteorites– Diane? Diane has moved to the same desk as Nancy– they are having a conversation about the news, just like people you know.
I’ll admit, the PBS Newshour seems a little dry in comparison. There is a ten or fifteen minute lead story, explored in depth, then the news headlines, then three more stories, usually, each allotted about 15 minutes. Fifteen minutes, compared to most news broadcasts, is a lot of time. Stories can be explained and analyzed in depth. The expert guests often look rather plain– you immediately suspect they were recruited for their expertise rather than their looks.
Stursberg has now resigned, with no explanation. I hope the CBC realizes they made a big mistake and chooses to head off in a different direction. The first step should be to unmakeover the National.
Am I the only one who does not like the National makeover? No, not by a long shot. Ratings are down between 30 and 40%. More on Richard Stursberg.
The idea was that even if old fogies like me get pissed off, the new format would attract young people. One prays for future generations if they’re right.
So, when do they admit failure and move on to something more interesting?
By the way, CTV News ratings are currently about double the CBC’s.
The CBC makeover into a pale clone of CNN is not a coincidence. The chairman of the CBC, Richard Stursburg, openly wanted the CBC to be more like the big American stations.
So that’s why we also got absurd programs like “The Border” and “Dragon’s Den” and “Battle of the Blades” and “All for one with Debbie Travis”.
In today’s Washington Post– and all over the place, actually– several right wing pundits are weeping their little eyes out because the Mainstream Media is so biased that it gave overwhelmingly favorable coverage to Obama and overwhelmingly hostile coverage to McCain. McCain, in fact, stopped talking to the media early on in the general election campaign because he thought they were all “for Obama”.
Is it true?
And if it’s true, does it matter?
1. If it matters, how come Bush was able to win two elections without the slightest assistance from the MSM? How come McCain didn’t complain about bias when he was the media’s darling? And how dare the MSM disapprove of John Hagee anyway, or Gordon Liddy, or James Dobson, just because they are crypto-fascists?
The fact is that even if there was a conspiracy, it couldn’t work: the internet has made it impossible for anyone to effectively suppress news. If a story really was suppressed– that would become the story, as it often does, when you see even liberal columnists bemoan the alleged bias of the media. (They somberly note that more favorable stories have appeared about Obama than about McCain.)
But what if Obama is the better candidate?
In short, McCain says it’s snowing and Obama says it’s raining, the media is biased if they look outside. [With thanks to Campbell Brown, CNN Editor, in Time Magazine this week.]
2. What about Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, ABC, and all the other conservative outlets? I could almost buy the bias argument without choking if any of these whiners would actually think to mention that Fox News is at least as biased– and, more reasonably, actually far more biased– than CBS or the New York Times. We often accuse our enemies of the flaw we most recognize in ourselves.
3. If the MSM really unfairly ignored the William Ayers story, then Fox News would most certainly have uncovered any relevant facts. But Fox News and conservative columnists kept ranting about William Ayers without providing the slightest evidence of anything about the matter that was relevant to the election. What Fox News did do was give air time to some of the most poorly documented and scurrilous stories circulating among the fanatical fringes. Obviously, they can safely assume that most of their loyal readers and listeners don’t read very widely.
4. Nobody tied Sarah Palin to a chair and forced her to provide Katie Couric with inane answers to sensible questions. Nobody forced her to chat for six minutes with a bad imitator of French President Sarkozy. Nobody forced her to identify white rural citizens as “real” Americans.
5. Did the MSM largely ignore Biden’s gaffes? I don’t know of any gaffe by Biden that would have caused anyone to doubt his knowledge, abilities, or competence. Even his comment about Obama being tested by America’s enemies soon after taking office wasn’t even really all that controversial– does McCain really believe he won’t be?
6. Would you really go to Fox for actual news over the New York Times, Washington Post, or L.A. Times? Okay– the Wall Street Journal and Globe & Mail– conservative papers– provide a fair bit of real journalism. But then, you don’t hear their columnists ranting on and on about liberal bias. The most conservative columnists, like the most conservative politicians who never seem to actually serve in any wars (McCain is the exception), never actually seem to do any reporting– just opinions.
7. As even many conservative columnists agree, Obama ran an absolutely superb campaign, perhaps one of the best in recent history. He was supremely well-organized and efficient, and he raised enormous sums of money. He was consistent and prudent and unflappable. The MSM accurately reported. That’s not bias: that’s journalism.
8. The conservative press assumes that all Americans share their anguish that Obama doesn’t seem very eager to blow things up, bomb foreign cities, or spend trillions on obsolete, ineffective weapons systems. How dare he. They are even more astonished that any sane person would have the slightest concern for the environment at a time when Wall Street Investors actually have to bear some risk for their investments.
Everyone talks as if there is a common understanding of what “bias” looks like. Take the example of Obama’s alleged association with William Ayers. This issue puzzled me. I heard from conservative pundits that there was something nefarious afoot here and the MSM was not reporting it. All right, I thought. Let Fox News– biased the other way– report it. So I went to Fox News, and Charles Krauthammer, and George Will, and the others, and waited to be enlightened with information the MSM had ignored or concealed. What was that information? What new evidence of a covert relationship did they have? What shocking story did they have to tell?
Well, it turns out that the shocking story they had to tell was that the MSM didn’t find anything particular sinister about Obama’s relationship with Ayers. They met a few times and Ayers, who lives openly in Chicago and, in fact, was voted “citizen of the year” by the City of Chicago for his extensive work promoting educational programs. Here’s CNN’s take on the issue.
The “bias” here is expressed as the conclusion drawn by responsible journalists that the Ayer’s story has no real significance or relevance to Obama’s candidacy. They worked together on two boards of charitable organizations that were clearly active promoting progressive social causes. They probably served together on a panel addressing juvenile justice issues. The odd thing is that one might reasonably argue that Obama’s association with this community activist has flattering implications. Think about it. Ayers was a radical in the 60’s, but he grew up, he matured, and learned to work within the “system”. He clearly is dedicated to working with disadvantaged youth in the City of the Chicago. How awful is it that Obama, a community organizer, would end up working with him on several worthy projects?
Now the pundits over at Fox News seem to perceive something dangerous in this activity. But that’s not because biased MSM reporters ignored important details. It’s because they don’t share the same extremist values of the conservative pundits who find the very idea of “progress” hysterically frightening because it applies to the lives of working Americans instead of the portfolios of investors.
So what the hell is going on here, with this “bias” argument? Is this all there is? Is this typical of the conservative arguments against Obama? Now I understand what they mean by “bias”.
It should surprise no one that at least some Republicans are immediately presenting the bullshit argument that somehow Obama didn’t really win a mandate. When Republicans win the election by concealing their real policies of shifting wealth from working people to investors, it’s because voters want them to govern. When Democrats win by campaigning on policies that benefit the middle classes–as Obama clearly did–, the voters were “deceived or misguided”. So John Boehner wants you to believe. That justifies the Republicans in Congress being as obstructionist as possible. Precisely the kind of politics the voters rejected by choosing Obama.
If Obama wanted to get his way more efficiently, he could just do what Bush did to get his way on Iraq: lie through his teeth.
“Is this war going to make history by being the first to end before it’s cause could be found?” Geoff Meade, Sky News
CNN fielded two broadcast teams during the Iraq War. Why? Because there were two stories? Obviously, there was only one story– the true story of what happened in Iraq. But CNN showed two versions: one to America, and one to the rest of the world, the “international” version.
The American version was sheer boosterism– giving America the war it wanted to see. The Americans were nimble, quick, clean, and moral. Those unscrupulous, outrageous Iraqi’s dared to resist. Every time the military claimed to stumble into weapons of mass destruction: top of the news. The subsequent correction: who cares? When there was a controversy, as when Americans attacked their own reporters in the Palestine Hotel, CNN reporters were quick to excuse their own military, before gathering any actual facts. Reports in the hotel itself reported that there were no shots fired from the hotel, as alleged by the U.S. military in Islamic Disneyland, Doha, and repeated by Colin Powell.
Americans wanted to know if Jessica Lynch had plans for the future. How did she feel about her experience. One picture in front of the flag, please, one more.
No questions about why a recent air force recruit identified as “Marie” was nearly court-martialed for having sex in the dorms after reporting that she had been raped by a cadet, Douglas L. Meester.
“The Company’s core purpose is to enhance society by creating, collecting and distributing high-quality news, information and entertainment.”
As you may or may not already know, I regard mission statements as the quintessential example of middle manager masturbation. A group of executives or managers or board members or whathaveyou meets with an expensive consultant who could not perform a single really useful task if his life depended on it and, with solemnity and reverence, gather around a table to ask themselves the question: what is it we do?
Remember– there are useful things that people do. Install an Oracle Server. Repair a defective furnace. Replace the battery in a car. And then there are consultants.
Now, if a company like McDonald’s came out with a mission statement like “we provide crappy, cheap, non-nutritious food to vulnerable and foolish customers to maximize return on shareholder’s investment in our company, regardless of the social, medical, or cultural cost”, I would be all in favor of mission statements. A mission statement like that could be regarded as a useful piece of information about a company.
Some other possible examples:
“We provide the public with sexually attractive women and men to read ridiculously facile and trivial accounts of news events while maximizing the public tolerance for incessant commercial interruption” (CNN)
“We do extensive research and promotion to find out exactly how to market expensive but dangerous mind-altering drugs to a credulous public that actually believes their problems can be cured with a little pill. If absolutely necessary, we will actually pay for research to develop drugs of dubious efficacy. It is imperative to foster the conviction that if one drug “fails” the solution is always another drug.” (Pharmaceutical Company).
“We sell the public glamourized images of unimportant people who are well-known for being well-known and whom the public aspire to emulate precisely because they can’t be them because they aren’t in the magazine.” (People Magazine)
“We will cheat and lie and defraud people in order to obtain the maximum amount of personal material benefit for our top executives” (Enron Corporation).
“We will attack and invade Iraq so that a plentiful supply of oil will be available for our future needs especially if those bozos in Saudi Arabia fail to keep the fanatic Moslem hoards in check”. (U.S. government).
But look at the New York Times mission statement. Can you believe they used the word “enhance” in their mission statement? That they said “enhance society”? What kind of vacuous tripe is this? Enhance Society? It sounds like something a Grade 10 student could improve upon. “Schools enhance society by providing something for young people to do when they are not on drugs or vandalizing schools.”
Then they use the phrase “high-quality”. “High-quality news, information, and entertainment”. At least someone realized that “quality news” is grammatically incorrect, even if almost everybody, including the Minister of Education in Ontario (“we wish to provide the children of Ontario with a quality education”).. Instead, they fell back upon the merely incomprehensible. What is “high-quality”? The mission statement doesn’t say. If it did say, then it would actually be specific. It would have content and meaning. But the goal of devising a mission statement is to emasculate language of all content and meaning so that everyone can sign on to it.
Whenever someone at one of these meetings actually proposes a specific statement against which any particular activities or achievements can be measured, the consultant, and other participants, are sure to have a panic attack. The danger of specific statements of quantifiable details, of course, is that it be revealed to people that either you haven’t fulfilled your mission, or that you have fulfilled your mission but your mission sucks, or is unimportant, or isn’t something remarkably useful in any case.
I’ll bet that none of the reporters at the New York Times had any hand in this mission statement. It’s too incomprehensibly dumb to believe that someone like Seymour Hersh could have signed on to it.
Your mission statement is usually created with the assistance of an outside consultant. The assumption is that nobody on your staff knows what the hell you do, so you better bring in someone who is unfamiliar with the organization to lead the effort.
Is that what the mighty New York Times did? I hope not. It’s something CNN or United States and World Report would do.
Where is the Liberal Media?
I was discussing the long dead Clinton scandal the other day with someone. When she insisted that he really did deserve impeachment, I pointed out that the vast majority of Americans didn’t agree with her. She said, “Oh well, that’s the liberal media…”
The liberal media? What liberal media?
I didn’t want to embarrass this person, but I wanted to ask her to identify a single specific example of “liberal media”. Who can she possibly mean? The New York Times? The Wall Street Journal? The Washington Post? The Chicago Tribune? Who? CBS news? ABC news? CNN? U.S. News and World Report? The New Republic? Who?
The media represent one point of view: profit. The media are, almost without exception, owned by corporations, and most of the owners of these corporations are extremely conservative. (The only exceptions, really, are the CBC in Canada and, to a limited extent, PBS in the U.S. However, PBS has lately adopted a far more conservative slant thanks to threats from the Republican majority in Congress, who constantly whine about the mythical “liberal” bias of the network. Look at how often Pat Buchanan and Robert Novak get their ugly mugs onto the air.)
The objective of most news organizations nowadays is very simple: get as many readers/viewers/listeners as possible in order to generate as much advertising revenue as possible. Most of the media thus merely reflect popular opinion. Right now, it is quite trendy, in the U.S., to give harsh sentences to petty criminals. Can you name a single media outlet, newspaper, or television editorialist in the U.S. that advocates the contrary?
How many news outlets in the U.S., editorially or through the selective rendering of news stories, advocate the following:
Where is this so-called liberal media?
If there was a liberal media, why didn’t it come out in force during the Clinton impeachment hearings and denounce the scurrilous allegations made by Henry Hyde and his fellow hale hypocrites? Where were the stalwart defenders of Clinton’s wildly progressive, activist government?
You must realize that the bias of the media is reflected primarily in the decision of which story to report and how to report it, rather than in overt editorial content. Thus, when Dan Rather, with his monumental ego, raced back from Cuba and the papal visit–the first to that communist country ever–to report on the semen-stained dress, a momentous indicator of media bias was at hand: the important story is a scandal with elements of lurid sex. Why? Because sex sells. That is the “media” bias. And this bias dominated all branches of U.S. media, from radio talk shows to the Washington Post to the New York Times and CNN. All of them made the scandal their headline stories. You could make an excellent case for the argument that the media was exceedingly biased in favor of the conservative point of view on the scandal, except that the truth is that the media simply wanted to sell advertising dollars.
Even so, after watching CNN on a regular basis for a few weeks, I found it astonishing that most Americans continued to resist this overwhelming drive to convince them that Clinton’s “monstrous” act of consensual groping should result in impeachment.
What is even more preposterous is the idea that a defender of Bill Clinton would be a “liberal” because Bill Clinton is a liberal. Bill Clinton is pro-capital punishment, pro-free enterprise, pro-GTO, and his idea of “reforming” welfare consists of booting people off it. This is a “liberal”? Could someone please point out to me a single “liberal” policy of the Clinton administration? Well, he balanced the budget. Judging from the performances of Bush and Reagan, I guess you would now have to regard balanced budgets as a “liberal” value.
Still, it must be confessed, that real liberals generally thought the whole Lewinsky scandal was a cynical plot by the Republicans to oust a president they never believed was legitimately elected in the first place. But they certainly didn’t get any comfort from a “liberal” media (whom the Republicans also blame for Clinton’s election in the first place).
In Canada, I suppose you could argue that, in addition to the CBC, the Toronto Star is “liberal”. That leaves the Globe and Mail and the Post, in Toronto as bastions of conservatism. As for every other major community in Ontario…The London Free Press? The Hamilton Spectator? The Niagara Falls Review? The St. Catharines Standard? Read their editorials. All of them are fundamentally conservative.
Most newspapers in Ontario are owned by Southam, which is owned by Conrad Black (the owner of the Post), an arch-conservative who wants to be a British Peer when he isn’t busy clearing up editorial space for his wife, Buffy. The Post is rather extreme, even for Conrad Black. Every story is selectively presented to emphasize a conservative axiom. Every headline invites reactionary scorn for Liberal policy. Editorials hammer at our decadently tolerant society.
The Globe and Mail is reliably conservative, but with good taste. It respects some diversity in point of view. To paraphrase the man who finally stood up to Joseph McCarthy, it has some “decency”.
The CBC certainly leans to the left, but hands the pulpit over to reactionaries on a regular basis, if for no other reason than to prove they are tolerant of all points of view—a bedrock liberal value. In television, that leaves Global and CTV and everyone else—all conservative (especially CTV).
So why, if there really isn’t a liberal media, do conservatives persist in blaming it for Clinton’s success? Well, because, to believe otherwise, is to admit that your arguments have been fairly presented and argued before the public and were not convincing to large numbers of people. Better to argue that they were tricked and deceived than that they believe you were wrong.
Or that the circulation of “The Nation” is a lot bigger than is widely believed.
CNN, the world’s most important news station (and so say all of us!) showed it’s true colours tonight.
Tonight is the 10th anniversary of one of the most significant events of the 20th century, the tearing down of the Berlin wall. Though the end of the cold war was marked by many different stages and events, the tearing down of the wall was easily the most powerful and dramatic. It marked an end to almost fifty years of isolation and hostility, that macabre dance of death between the two lethally-armed super-powers, the exploitation of proxy states in the third world, and the polarization of the globe’s communities. It provided the world with a striking symbol of the failure of communist ideology to satisfy the needs and aspirations of millions of people. It was one of the most important events of the century.
In honor of this event, CNN decided to broadcast an interview… with Princess Diana’s butler.
You know, this is pretty consistent with CNN’s general philosophical point of view, if you can call it that. News is entertainment. That was clear from the early days of “Eyewitness News”, a stylistic innovation pioneered by the masters of trashy tv in the 1970’s, ABC. “Eyewitness News” redefined “importance” to mean “that which provides the most exciting film footage”. The top news story would be that blazing car wreck at Jefferson and Wilson, or a gaggle of high school cheer-leaders holding a car-wash to raise money for fashion orphans, instead of some new disarmament treaty or new labour laws or trade agreements or whatever. Eyewitness news injected humour and trite personal comments by the newscasters. It emphasized the chemically enhanced skin tones of their anchors and their flashy hairstyles.
This is where most Americans ingest their news. Pabulum for the brain.
I was watching Larry King on CNN the other night. He had a theologian from some Southern Baptist Academy on, and Robert Schuller, and the President of the National Organization of Women. They were arguing about women, of course.
I learned two thing. Number 1, I will avoid CNN at all costs. The number of commercial interruptions was excruciating. CNN has no shame, no dignity, no self-respect, no honor, and no class. But if they hire any more of these luscious lips to read the news, I’m investing in the company that makes collagen.
Secondly, I am sick to death of these smug, conservative Christians trying to tell me that anyone who disagrees with their archaic social and political views is, therefore, disagreeing with the very word of God. Because, don’t you know, it says right here in Ephesians 22 that women are to submit to their husbands. Simple. Straight-forward. No interpretation required.
This discussion was a little better than most. From a Christian point of view, most feminists probably don’t spend a lot of time reading the Bible, so they don’t argue very well against people like James Dobson and Pat Robertson. But Larry King knew his bible a little, and Robert Schuller knew it pretty well, and they pointed out that shortly after Paul tells women to submit to their husbands, he tells slaves to submit to their masters. Larry King asked the Baptist theologian whether he believed that slaves, nowadays, should also submit to their masters. Well, the theologian almost came right out and said that he did. He certainly didn’t clearly, unambiguously declare that slavery was wrong.
What ticked me off–pardon the expression– was his insistence that he wasn’t responsible for his own opinions. He was merely obeying God’s infallible word in the Bible and anybody who disagreed with him was going right up against the word of God Himself. That is a load of horse manure. But people like Dobson, Falwell, & Company say it all the time, as if they just happened to read the Bible that morning, and low and behold, it just happened to confirm my very own opinions.
The truth is that these guys are gut level conservatives. They were conservative long before they ever read the bible, and they only seem to read only the parts of the bible that coincide with their prejudices. They pick and choose whatever it is in the Bible they like and ignore the passages that don’t jive with their middle American patriotic right wing free enterprise presumptions.
There were lots of other verses that Larry King or the feminist could have asked Mr. Knowitall Baptist Theologian to explain. How about these. The point is that literal inerrancy– the doctrine that every word of the Bible (usually the King James Version, no less) is infallible– is pure nonsense, and the truth is that even the most conservative fundamentalists don’t act as if they really believe it. There is always a measure of interpretation, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It makes more sense to say that the Bible is an infallible guide to the will of the Lord, while allowing for the fact that none of the writers of the gospels foresaw the massive economic, social, and political changes that were going to occur in the next 2,000 years.
Given the social and economic conditions of first century Palestine, Paul would have been no more likely to suggest that women should take leadership positions in the church than he would have been likely to suggest that they go out and get jobs, or put grandma into a nursing home, or start a beauty salon, or go swimming on Sunday, or wear a pant-suit. These ideas would have been meaningless to his audience at the time. It doesn’t mean that women are forever forbidden from doing any of those things.
How do we know how the word of God applies today, then? It’s not all that hard. We know what Jesus means when he castigates the Pharisees, though, Lord knows, we still seem to put up with a lot of Pharisees today. And we certainly know what he means when he says, “Let he who is without sin throw the first stone”. No, he didn’t say it was okay to sin. But he did tell us a lot about those who are quick to reach for stones. I have a feeling that if Jesus met James Dobson today, he’d ask him a question: “How many hungry children did your $180 million a year ‘ministry’ feed today? How many poor inner-city teenagers have jobs, thanks to you? How many of the sick and destitute have seen the inside of your glorious office building in Colorado?”
I saw something really cool today. In the World Cup soccer match between the Netherlands and Korea: a Korean player was given a yellow card for taking too long to take a penalty kick.
Just think: someone made a rule for this incredibly popular sport that requires players to hurry up and put the ball back into play. And this is a game which never stops for a commercial. If you watch only North American team sports and never watched soccer, I need to repeat that to you: they never stop for a commercial.
TSN, of course, does stop. So what do they do? They split the screen into two ugly boxes, one large one on top, and one tiny one on the bottom. They show a commercial, of course, in the large one, and boost the sound way up over the game.
May you never get used to such outrages. The owners and managers of TSN stink. They are pigs. They are greedy and despicable. There is a special place in Hell for them, where they will be strapped in chairs, their eyelids held open with steel clamps, and they are forced to watch 6,778,569 Tidy Bowl commercials over and over again.
***
I tried watching Larry King on CNN the other day. They had four guests on to discuss the Southern Baptist’s Convention’s decision that women should submit to their husbands. Larry King, by the way, has been married about five times. His latest wife is 14 years old. No, I’m kidding. I think she is 28. Larry King looks like he is about 60.
The theologian who tried to defend the statement was a liar. He said it doesn’t mean what we think it means: husbands have the greater responsibility because they are servants and must be responsible for Christ for the family. Really. Women should be happy that men have gladly undertaken this terribly painful, heavy responsibility. In other words, it means exactly what it appears to mean: men are the boss. Saying that being the boss is a burden doesn’t change that fact one iota.
As I said, the man is a liar. He has poor ethics. He knows very well that “submit” is exactly what the men of the Southern Baptist Convention mean. It is also, probably, what the women of the Southern Baptist Convention mean. They really believe that the immorality of our day and age is largely the result of women living independent little lives without any men around to make them submit to their leadership. Why don’t these people shows some guts and admit that it means exactly what we think it means?
CNN was more appalling than the Baptist. It cut for commercials about every 30 seconds. You might think there is a legal limit to commercials on U.S. television, but that’s not true. U.S. networks can broadcast as many commercials as they want. And if Larry King or any other broadcaster wants to keep his job, he better resist the temptation to look over to his director, drop his jaw, and say something like, “What? Another commercial already? We just had a whole pile of them?”