jrosenhouse | October 15, 2008Tough one to call. At the beginning I was a bit glum, since I thought McCain had the better of the early exchanges. The Joe the Plumber stuff was pretty effective (the first time). I felt McCain seemed forceful and confident, and he was pretty successful at fitting his criticisms into his answers. Obama took his usual supercool, do not engage approach, but this left him on the defensive.
But the tide definitely turned toward Obama as the night wore on. It became more and more obvious that McCain was struggling to remember his lines, and his tone was frequently snide, condescending, and…
jrosenhouse | October 15, 2008Two games down in the big chess match. The results?
Two draws.
And not the exciting type of draw with lots of thrust and parry and two lone, bruised kings remaining on the board at the end. I'm talking about boring draws.
But no need to despair! This is just the feeling out period. I suspect the real match will begin shortly.
Kramnik and Anand tend to be fairly conservative players, and that has certainly been clear in these first two games. Bobby Fischer was gleefully playing technically dubious but highly exciting opening like the Benoni Defense and Alekhine's Defense in his WC…
jrosenhouse | October 15, 2008Damon Linker reviews Religulous for The New Republic.
Let's see, TNR is a left-leaning publication, so they will tend to be sympathetic to Maher's message. But they also fancy themselves very high-brow, which means they have to be turned off by Maher's in-your-face tactics.
The review practically writes itself. Let's start at the end:
Not only is this approach to religion intellectually fraudulent and morally sloppy--equating as it does scientifically literate believers with God-intoxicated scriptural literalists--but it is also asinine as a practical strategy. In the early 18th…
jrosenhouse | October 14, 2008A few days ago I linked to this essay by Christopher Buckley, announcing his intention to vote for Barack Obama.
Buckley seems not to have realized that modern Republicans politics has nothing to do with arguments and ideas. It has to do with extreme stupidity and mindless hate for dissenters. National Review was so inundated with negative responses to Buckley's column, that he was effectively forced to resign. Buckley explains the situation:
I had gone out of my way in my Beast endorsement to say that I was not doing it in the pages of National Review, where I write the back-page column…
jrosenhouse | October 13, 2008Ohmigod ohmigod ohmigod! Just try to guess why I am so excited right now. I dare you, just try.
I'll even give you some time...
Okay, so maybe the title gave it away.
The long awaited (among chess fans anyway) match between Viswanathan Anand of India and Vladimir Kramnik of Russia begins today. To fully understand the importance of this match, let me lay some history on you.
In 1972 Bobby Fischer played defending champion Boris Spassky for the title. After twenty-one of the scheduled twenty-four games the match was mathematically over. In the weeks that followed Fischer was appearing on…
jrosenhouse | October 13, 2008Following on the heels of Christopher Buckley's surprising endorsement of Obama, now Hitchens comes on board:
On “the issues” in these closing weeks, there really isn't a very sharp or highly noticeable distinction to be made between the two nominees, and their “debates” have been cramped and boring affairs as a result. But the difference in character and temperament has become plainer by the day, and there is no decent way of avoiding the fact. Last week's so-called town-hall event showed Sen. John McCain to be someone suffering from an increasingly obvious and embarrassing deficit, both…
jrosenhouse | October 13, 2008With Obama in the Naples role, of course:
The Estero High football staff gathered in head coach Rich Dombroski's office late Friday, almost in stunned silence.
Earlier that night, Estero lost to Naples High by 13.
Not by 13 points. By 13 touchdowns. That's right: Naples 91, Estero 0.
The rout fallout has been growing since the game ended.
'“Hey,'” offered Estero defensive line coach Pat Hayes after the one-sided affair, '“I didn't even know 91 was a multiple of seven.'”
With that, the coaches all got a much-needed laugh.
jrosenhouse | October 10, 2008Sorry for the sporadic blogging lately. I have a really good excuse though: haven't felt like blogging.
But this article got me thinking. It seems that Christopher Buckley, son of William F., is voting for Obama:
John McCain has changed. He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, “We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us.” This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the…
jrosenhouse | October 7, 2008In the first debate I thought McCain had slightly the better of it. Basically a draw, but McCain seemed a bit more forceful and confident. Then the polling over the next few days showed that most people thought Obama was the clear winner. Yay!
I hope, though, that I am not similarly out of touch with my country on this one. I thought McCain made an absolute fool of himself in this debate. Carnage. The calculus exams I was grading while watching were less gruesome than McCain's performance.
Obama was his usual super-composed self, delivering one solid answer after another to the…
jrosenhouse | October 3, 2008Granted, I'm hardly an unbiased source. But come on folks! I know these debates are decided far more on style than substance, but surely at some point you have to say something. The country just can't be so far gone that ninety minutes of contentless babbling that stops just short of utter humiliation now makes you look Presidential. Unlike in her interviews Palin this time managed to speak in complete sentences and her words mostly cohered into actual thoughts, albeit thoughts that were totally irrelevant to the question that was asked. Who outside a brain-dead contrarian pundit or an…
jrosenhouse | October 1, 2008News first: The New York Times has reached dizzying new heights with today's magnificent crossword puzzle. Sadly, finding a New York Times here in Harrisonburg is rather like finding two identical snowflakes. Hard to do. So I haven't actually seen the puzzle yet. But I know it is excellent because it was constructed by my cousin Barry. This is his second puzzle for the Times.
Now for the Blues: How badly are things going for the McCain campaign? Even the crossword puzzles are out to get them:
On Jan. 8, 2005, I purposefully and unapologetically became the first person to ever…
jrosenhouse | September 25, 2008My friends, I have just read one of the dopiest essays I have ever seen in my life (and regular readers of this blog know that's really saying something.) It is called “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education: Our Best Universities Have Forgotten that the Reason They Exist is to Make Minds, Not Careers,” and was published in The American Scholar. It's author is William Deresiewicz, who, we are told, English at Yale University from 1998-2008. It is the latest representative of a tiresome genre: “You Ivy Leaguers think you're soooooo smart. But you're really just a bunch of spoiled rich…
jrosenhouse | September 23, 2008Over at Discover's blog, Melissa Lafsky has an interesting account of a debate between Christopher Hitchens and Lorenzo Albecete, on the subject of -- what else? -- God. Lafsky writes:
Are you there God, and if so, will you please provide an emissary that can go head-to-head with Christopher Hitchens without getting spectacularly flayed?
That was the pertinent issue during yesterday's “Big Questions conversation” at the Pierre Hotel, hosted by On Faith and the John Templeton Foundation. The luncheon pitted Hitchens, the anti-theist poster child, against Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete, a…
jrosenhouse | September 23, 2008Be sure to have a look at Sam Harris' excellent editorial about Sarah Palin in the current issue of Newsweek magazine:
We have endured eight years of an administration that seemed touched by religious ideology. Bush's claim to Bob Woodward that he consulted a “higher Father” before going to war in Iraq got many of us sitting upright, before our attention wandered again to less ethereal signs of his incompetence. For all my concern about Bush's religious beliefs, and about his merely average grasp of terrestrial reality, I have never once thought that he was an over-the-brink, Rapture-ready…
jrosenhouse | September 22, 2008As a near-perfect corroboration of my assertion, in the previous post, that religion has been pushed straight out of the back seat and into the trunk as a respectable intellectual enterprise, check out the line-up of speakers at a forthcoming apologetics conference in Charlotte, NC this November. Mind you, the conference website bills these folks as the nation's leading Christian apologists:
This year's keynote speaker will be Dr. James Dobson. Other speakers include Chuck Colson of Breakpoint and Prison Fellowship Ministries; Josh McDowell, radio host, author and evangelist; Lee Strobel,…
jrosenhouse | September 22, 2008Steven Weinberg has a characteristically insightful essay in The New York Review of Books on the conflict between science and religion. He writes, with respect to people who insist there is no conflict between them:
Some scientists take this line because they want to protect science education from religious fundamentalists. Stephen Jay Gould argued that there could be no conflict between science and religion, because science deals only with facts and religion only with values. This certainly was not the view held in the past by most adherents of religion, and it is a sign of the decay of…
jrosenhouse | September 16, 2008Yesterday, John McCain said this:
We know there has been tremendous turmoil in our financial markets and Wall Street. And people are frightened by these events. Our economy still, the fundamentals of our economy are strong.
“The fundamentals of our economy are strong,” is a standard cliche politicians use when faced with a shock to the economy. It is one of those useful, empty statements that sounds intelligent and can be used to deflect political blame in the face of bad economic news.
Sometimes it's even true. There are times when a shock to the economy causes short-term hardship, but…
jrosenhouse | September 16, 2008So far I'm really liking Rachel Maddow's new MSNBC show. She reminds me a lot of what Keith Olbermann used to be (and sometimes still is). On last night's edition she had a nice summary of precisely how pathetic the McCain campaign has been recently:
See, saying “It's not fair the way I'm losing,” translates to the American people roughly as, “I'm a loser.” That's the dilemma facing Barack Obama's campaign right now, as the McCain campaign keeps lying over and over and over and over again. No, Sarah Palin did not say thanks but no thanks to that bridge to nowhere. People making $42,000…
jrosenhouse | September 15, 2008Update (9/16/08) : I forgot to include the link to the evolution carnival mothership! Please go here for more information.
Its carnival time! Thanks to everyone who sent me submissions for the big party. There were too many, alas, to respond to each one individually, but I appreciate the opportunity to sample so much good writing. How about we go sample the merchandise...
Aydin Orstan, who writes the blog Snail's Tales, gets pride of place. He serves up a fascinating post about, I kid you not, the reproductive organs of snails. Doesn't sound like your cup of tea? Give it a try anyway…