Another Evangelical Tragedy
A month ago, the Rev. Paul Barnes of Grace Chapel in Doug las County preached to his 2,100-member congregation about integrity and grace in the aftermath of the Ted Haggard drugs-and-gay-sex scandal.
Now, the 54-year-old Barnes joins Haggard as a fallen evangelical minister who preached that homosexuality was a sin but grappled with a hidden life.
"I have struggled with homosexuality since I was a 5-year-old boy," Barnes said in the 32- minute video, which church leaders permitted The Denver Post to view. "… I can't tell you the number of nights I have cried myself to sleep, begging God to take this away."
[Eric Gorski, "Pastor resigns over homosexuality", Denver Post, 11 December 2006.]
May we see by a show of hands how many still feel that it's vitally important to their own lifestyle and morality that this man cry himself to sleep and beg his God to make him something other than what he is?
In: All, Briefly Noted, Current Events
The Internet Threat
Avedon Carol, making remarks* on a piece by Raul Fernandez about the rising influence of the 'net on politics, and particularly on the recent election, had these perceptive things to say:
I think some people have already realized that the ground-up nature of the Internet is a threat to the prevailing order, which is why they are trying to impose both legal and economic impediments to ordinary people like us being able to do what we do. Make sure your reps know that you regard any opposition to net neutrality as an assault on democracy.
One might add this gloss: they may not think about it consciously — or they may — but many will simply react to anything that threatens their hold on power, and that paranoia is nonpartisan. Thus, while making one's wishes known to the powers-that-be, one should also take note that they are the powers that be and may not always be working in our best interest. Many tend to view democracy in the hands of the people as a dangerous idea.
Thus again, it's in our own best interest to continue to exercise our prerogatives vigorously and visibly in order to keep them our prerogatives.
———
*Avedon Carol, "How we did it", The Sideshow, 9 December 2006.
Still Not Causing Cancer
This late-breaking non-news just in from Bob Park's What's New:
CELL PHONES: FIVE YEARS LATER THEY STILL DON'T CAUSE CANCER.
A study in the current issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute found no increased cancer risk from cell phone use over a 20 year period. This is an update of a Danish study in JNCI five years ago. The Danes keep good records. By just going to the computer they could compare cell phone use with the National Cancer Registry. I was invited to write an editorial in the same issue, JNCI, Vol 93, p.166 (Feb 7, 2001). I noted that cancer agents act by breaking chemical bonds, creating mutant strands of DNA. Microwave photons, however, aren't energetic enough to break a bond. Predictably, fear mongers said there must be an induction period. Still waiting. In 1993, a man whose wife died of brain cancer was a guest on Larry King Live. Her cancer, he said, was caused by a cell phone. The evidence? "She held it against her head and talked on it all the time."
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science
Mind Groans
Last week I wrote about "ear accidents", the occasional problem I have in which my mind scrambles to make sense of something it mishears, thereby scrambling the meaning of what was said. Although "ear accidents" is a useful phrase, it struck me as more a description than a name for the phenomenon. Now I'd like to propose a name: Mind Groans.
Today, while enjoying my lunch at Taco Bell (no green onions, of course), I did not particularly enjoy listening to the Musak program present its unusually insipid cover version of "The Christmas Song" ("Chestnuts roasting…&c.", a song I've never much cared for anyway) — fortunately, I don't know who the woman was performing it, so I needn't mention her name. Anyway, one of the lyrics misfired in my ear and the line ended up in my mind as something to do with "bathrooms", which I don't remember ever hearing Mel Torme singing about.
Although I didn't spend the time to complete the lyric with something that might make some sort of twisted sense, this was almost an example of what is known as a "Mondegreen", the "mishearing (usually accidental) of a phrase in such a way that it acquires a new meaning." Typically, "Mondegreen" is associated with the mishearing of song lyrics, and it is itself a mondegreen.
So, while listening to this tedious performance and thinking about ear accidents and suffering my own near-mondegreen, and thinking about the close relationship between mondegreens and ear accidents in everyday spoken discourse, my mind slipped a bit to the side of "mondegreen" and settled in at the similar sounding "mind groan".
Well, I thought, that seemed an appropriate way to arrive at a new phrase to describe ear accidents with hearing the spoken word. "Mind groan", in addition to being a sort of ear accident itself — although it took place entirely silently in my own mind — is closely related to the "eggcorn", in which cliches, already nearly devoid of useful meaning, slip unnoticed into complete meaninglessness via a sort of mondgreen process. However, there might be some dispute whether "mind groan" is really an eggcorn, since it is in no way accidental or unintentional.
"Mind groan" does, however, make a sort of sense to describe its phenomenon in a bad-pun sort of way, and what could be more appropriate than that?
Beard of the Week XXIII: A Natural Selection
This week's beard is worn by none other than Charles Darwin (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882), the infamous, the reviled, the namesake of the dreaded Darwinism, author of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.
Quite without my really meaning for it to happen, the past month or more has been my Darwin month: I've been reading books with Darwin and Darwinism (or, perhaps more precisely, "post-synthesis neo-Darwinism") as their themes, and it's been a rewarding period of Darwinian immersion. The books in question are The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, by Daniel Dennett, and "The Reluctant Mr. Darwin", by David Quammen. The Dawkins is the only one I've finished so far — the others are in progress. Sometime after they're all finished I expect I'll write some Book Notes about them.
The Dawkins and the Dennett book both have very similar goals, namely, to elucidate the central idea of Darwinism* at some length to reduce the mystery, misunderstanding, and hostility that it engenders. They both do a good job in markedly different voices: Dawkins is a high-energy, exuberant acolyte, Dennett a more deliberate and philosophical adherent. Quammen's book, it seems, intends to be an intellectual biography of how Darwin came to his theory about evolution and what happened when he finally arrived there; I'm still near the beginning but it promises to be a good trip.
In his introduction, Quammen touches on those famous polls by Gallup and the Pew Research Center that keeps finding that some 45% of the American people believe that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so"; only 13% agreed that humans have developed from other life forms without any intervention from God! He writes:
Maybe the polls are invalid. Maybe the numbers would be much different in England or Sweden or India. Maybe the same distinctly American mixture of skepticism and evangelicalism that led to the Scopes trial, in 1925, continues to animate many citizens who would simply rather take their biology from scripture than from science. Maybe the question of human evolution is misleading and inordinately touchy; maybe Gallup and Pew should be asking whether God created, let's say, tree kangaroos in their present form. Or maybe … who knows? I don't claim to have any definitive explanation for such an extreme level of skepticism and willful antipathy toward such a well-established scientific discovery. Frankly, it mystifies me. But certainly those Gallup results–combined with the continuing political offensive against teaching evolutionary biology in public schools–testify that Charles Darwin isn't just perennially significant. He's also urgently relevant to education and governance.
I have agree with Quammen when he says "Frankly, it mystifies me." Although I didn't do it because of Darwinism as such, or to fight specifically against creationist incursions, this mystification is certainly part of the reason I founded Ars Hermeneutica, Limited. Now, whether we'll be able to understand or do anything about the problem is an entirely different animal, but we intend to try.
———-
*That species are not persistent and unchanging, but that species evolve from other species through the agency of natural selection.
In: All, Beard of the Week, Books
Welcome the Sun!
This is the day of the year, 7 December, when I celebrate my own festival of light to welcome the return of the sun.
No, it is not the shortest day of the year, the day with the least amount of sunlight where I am (about 39 degrees north, 76 degrees, 46 minutes west — but the effect only depends on latitude), because it is not the Winter Solstice, which occurs about 21 December.
It is, however, the earliest sunset of the year, a more interesting inflection point. Since I rarely experience sunrise, at least by choice, this is psychologically much more important. Beyond today, the day will appear to me ever so slowly to be getting longer again because after today the sun will start going down later in the evening.
The effect is hardly noticeable at first,* but by the time we get to the Solstice the day-to-day change in sun-setting time will be noticeably larger. I was happy when I learned about this, the pre-Solstice early-sun-setting day, because it explained for me the feeling I'd always had that once we got past the Solstice it seemed as though the days started getting longer very quickly.#
The reason for the phenomenon is tougher to explain than to comprehend; I looked at three different versions (one, two, and three), none of which struck me as entirely satisfactory, but feel free to have a go. To make a long story short, I can point out that if the earth weren't tilted then this curious misalignment of times wouldn't happen. But then, neither would the seasons, and neither would the apparent position of the sun's zenith in the sky** change from day to day.##
Regardless of all that, I'm always happy to see the sun starting to linger longer at the end of each day.
———-
*For those with a calculus vocabulary, the curve of earliest sunset times as a function of date has just passed an extremum and the derivative is still very near zero.
#Finally, this gives you something to do with those previously useless reports in the newspaper or in the nightly weather forecast that give you sunset and sunrise time: plot the curves for yourself and see when the minima and maxima in sunset and sunrise occur at your latitude.
**Known as the "analemma", the figure-8 shape found on precision sun-dials and on globes of the Earth.
##How much it changes day-to-day depends on one's latitude and is described by the grandly named "Equation of Time".
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, The Art of Conversation
Iraq War or Lesbians?
The Pavlovian right-wing reaction to the news that Mary Cheney and Heather Poe are having a child — that Ms. Cheney is pregnant — is predictable, but I thought this was a dangerously slippery slope to head down:
"They're deliberately bringing a child into the world without a father, leaving a great gaping hole. Father absence is the biggest problem we're facing in this country," she said, and "the root cause of all sorts of negative outcomes drug use, juvenile delinquency. You name it."
— Janice Course of Concerned Women for America, on ABC*
since one can easily undermine that position by pointing out that the Iraq war is a far bigger cause of father absence than all the child-bearing lesbian couples in America.
———-
*Quoted at: Pam Spaulding, "The swift wingnut attacks over Cheney pregnancy", Pam's House Blend, 7 November 2006.
The Xmas Quagmire
As a dedicated secular humanist, I must regretfully acknowledge that the War on Christmas has not been going well. Some would use the word "quagmire," and urge a phased redeployment to other fronts, like Easter and Mardi Gras. Others argue that we simply need more boots on the ground, and that our allies, such as the ACLU, have not been fielding sufficient troops. I say we have only ourselves to blame, and that – however noble our intentions – we haven't been putting up much of a fight.
[excerpt from: Barbara Ehrenreich, "The War on Christmas: An Exit Strategy", Huffington Post, 6 December 2006.]
A Feast of Footnotes
I am reading a delightful book by Nichola Fletcher, called Charlemagne's Tablecloth: A Piquant History of Feasting (New York : St. Martin's Press, 2004). Fortunately for my taste, since I always enjoy a good footnote, she has a number of amusing examples that have attracted my attention. Herewith a few choice morsels.
First, the one I first noticed. There was another note nearby, so while my eyes were at the bottom of the page, I went ahead and read this note. Without its context I found it a very curious statement:
5Eels don't have ears, so they must have resembled people who sport eyebrow and navel rings.* [p. 49]
Now, who among us has not wondered by "Spring Rolls" are called that? This note addressed the question.
6These were originally a [Chinese] New Year specialty: New Year is also called Spring Festival since it marks the end of the winter.** [p. 63]
Elsewhere, a typographic gloss:
4It looks as though either the writer or the typesetter became overwhelmed with this lengthy and exotic menu since the spelling is rather erratic.#
Finally, in text from the body of the book, an interesting description of a profession — napkin folder — that was once a social necessity, but whose necessity has since disappeared so completely that it sounds utterly ridiculous:
Two seventeenth-century books (Antonio Latini's Lo Scalco Moderna and Mattia Geigher's Tratto) show the art [of napkin folding] at its pinnacle: an array of napery folded into ships, castles, whales, peacocks, crabs, griffins, dogs, and startling abstract patterns. Such complicated constructions usually needed a stitch or two to secure them; simpler versions perfumed with rose-water were used by the guests. In 1570 Bartolomeo Scappi, chef to Pope Pius V, describes concealing song-birds in the napkins for his dessert course so that a burst of twittering and a flutter of little wings charmed the guests as the birds made their escape. These creations were so popular that some artisans earned a living by going from house to house folding napkins. By the seventeenth century, the fashion had filtered through to middle-class England where Samuel Pepys notes, with his customary attention to cost, that the man who created his napkins for the following day's dinner, 'in figures of all sorts, which is mighty pretty … gets much money by it'." [pp. 134–135]
———-
*She is telling stories about the variety of eel called Muraenae, and writes: "Muraenae were also kept as pets: one Roman lady decorated hers with golden earrings,5 others gave them pearl necklaces and the plutocrat Crassus wept, went into mourning and built a monument when his beloved eel died."
**Speaking of Chinese New Year feasts: "There must also be some deep-fried food — probably crisp spring rolls6 with a soft moist filling — …"
#In a chapter about the first annual dinner of the British "Acclimatisation Society" on 12 July 1862, the author reproduces the menu for the event, which occupies two pages of text with its many dozen exotic dishes. The purpose of the society was to introduce to diners odd, unusual, and rare foods with the hope of expanding tastes and relieving boredom.
In: All, Food Stuff, The Art of Conversation
Just Sing Along
Frank Schaeffer reflects on his childhood as an evangelical:
By the early 1970s the evangelicals had come up with a whole alternate America—"Christian" education, radio, rock, makeup, publishing, schools, weight loss, sex manuals, and politics. It wasn't about being something but about not being "secular," about not having nudity, sex, or four letter words. What it was for no one knew.
[…]
What is so strange is how evangelicals learned to use all those worldly tools that I was once forbidden from even seeing. As a young child I was living in a strict "separated-from the-world" environment. By the time I was in my late teens my parent's rejection of the culture changed. My parents and other fundamentalists took to calling themselves "evangelicals" and began to use the culture's methods against the culture. We went from no "jazzy music" (let alone rock!) to Christian rock, and from no "worldly politics," to taking over the Republican Party.In effect we became Muslims. We went from preaching the Kingdom-Of-God as being in heaven, to proclaiming Christ as the King of this earth. It was our mirror image of a radical Islam that proclaims God's law as earthly law.
Later in this story, he tells about visiting his mother, now 93 and without sight because of macular degeneration. She lives in Switzerland. When they go out, a favorite destination is a hotel with a resident pianist.
When the pianist sees Mom he starts playing Cole Porter tunes. Mom—diminished and frail—stands by the baby grand and dances a freeform old lady version of the Charleston. Everyone in the bar watches and applauds. Breathless and happy, Mom doesn't talk about the music as something that might be "used for the Lord," let alone denounces it as "worldly," she just sings along, somehow remembering the words.
I wish Mom had danced when I was a child. During my early childhood she always said: "Real Christians don't dance. It isn't pleasing to the Lord." I never knew how sad that belief must have made her.
[excerpts from: Frank Schaeffer, "This Blood's For You!", Huffington Post, 4 December 2006.]
Presidential Destiny: The Sequel
Nearly two years ago, while wondering why in the world any electorate would actually elect the second president Bush to a second term (all the while wondering whether we'd ever know whether he was actually elected by a majority of votes cast) I wrote*
I suspect that the current president's [i.e., G.W.Bush's] destiny is to go down in history as the worst president we've ever had; the second term is just the means to cement that destiny against pretenders and wanna-bes like Nixon, for example.
Vindication is at last mine! In today's Washington Post# historian Eric Foner writes
Historians are loath to predict the future. It is impossible to say with certainty how Bush will be ranked in, say, 2050. But somehow, in his first six years in office he has managed to combine the lapses of leadership, misguided policies and abuse of power of his failed predecessors. I think there is no alternative but to rank him as the worst president in U.S. history.
———-
*"Presidential Destiny", Bearcastle Blog, 7 December 2004.
#Eric Foner, "He's The Worst Ever", Washington Post, 3 December 2006.
Beard of the Week XXII: Artistic Celebrities
Recently I read a very nice essay by Bryan Appleyard* about literary biographies, which he describes as "one of the dominant forms of our time". He establishes his theme right at the beginning:
Jane Austen had a lesbian affair with her older sister, Cassandra. It’s obvious, really. There was “the passionate nature of the sibling bond” so evident in the letters. There were her descriptions of women, betraying “a kind of homophilic fascination”. And, of course, there was her fascination with the “underlying eros of the sister-sister bond”. Case closed, I’d say.
Well, no. All these quotations come from a 1995 article in the London Review of Books by Terry Castle, an American academic. Castle was simply noting certain important preoccupations in her writing. An eager subeditor, however, had other ideas. “Was Jane Austen Gay?” was the headline. The LRB had barely hit the newsstands when Newsnight went on air with an earnest discussion of the sexual proclivities of one of our greatest novelists. Good grief! Was Mr Darcy really a woman, the bulge in his breeches a clumsy prosthetic? We had to know. But why?
Why, he asks, do we want — insist that! — our writers be celebrities? (The subtext: what is the big fascination with celebrities — people well known for being famous — anyway?) Does it really enhance our enjoyment or understanding of their work?
I suspect not really, although it's useful for literary criticism. On the other hand, humans are a nosey lot and not much interests us with such limitless fascination as other humans. It can be fun to know about Jane Austen's secret life (if she had one) even if it doesn't lead to a deeper understanding of Pride and Prejudice. Then, does it spoil the book if one finds out she had a sordid lesbian affair? Why should it since not a single word changed in the book? In a caricatured way it's the same problem people have had for years deciding whether they should be disgusted by Wagner's music because Wagner happened to be a favorite of Hitler's. The attitude might suggest, however, that a lot of literary criticism is more about us than about the text.
The fascination, and its fall-out, can easily go to far for my taste. I remember discussions in an all-gay mailing list about someone in the news, let's say a newspaper publishes a photo of a man accused of shooting and killing a dozen people at a shopping mall. Someone comments: "I think he's cute." Someone else: "Eeeuw! How could you think that? He's a murderer?" And so it would go, back and forth with a large pinch of meta-discussion thrown in. I always wondered why it mattered so much — or maybe they argued over it because it mattered so little.
Mr. Appleyard comments on the matter in his essay:
Orwell wondered if we’d feel any differently about Shakespeare if it turned out he was in the habit of assaulting little girls. Well, would we? The answer, it seems, is yes.
Oddly so.
Which brings us to our beard of the week, belonging to French composer Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921).** Famous in this country largely for his "Carnival of the Animals", the "Symphony No. 3 in c minor, The Organ Symphony", and perhaps some of his piano concerti, he was a prolific and stylish composer of significance.#
His relevance to this theme? There is the persistent rumor that Saint-Saëns had a taste for young boys; we don't know whether it's true, or what he may have done about it, or what the reaction may have been in 19th century France. Does it alter our perception of his music? Should it?
Oh dear, I nearly forgot that I was going to comment on the perennially inscrutable (to most Americans) pronunciation of Saint-Saëns' name. My thought had been to say something helpful, pointing out that it's like saying "Slant Swans" without the "l" and "w" but with one of those nasal-y French accents, but that's a bit ungainly. So, let's end with this small poem written by Ogden Nash as the Introduction in a set of poems to accompany a performance of "Carnival of the Animals":
Camille Saint-Saëns
Was wracked with pains,
When people addressed him,
As Saint-Sanes.
He held the human race to blame,
Because it could not pronounce his name,
So, he turned with metronome and fife,
To glorify other kinds of life,
Be quiet please – for here begins
His salute to feathers, fur and fins.
———-
*Bryan Appleyard, "Just Their Type", The Times [UK], 19 November 2006.
**Painting of Camille Saint-Saëns by A. Rossi, from 1903; reproduced at Warszawski's biography of Saint-Saëns, referenced in the next note.
#A very nice biography with a comprehensive list of works (all in French) is Jean-Marc Warszawski, "Saint-Saëns, Camille", musicologie.org.
World Aids Day
I am reading blog articles about World AIDS Day, people taking the occasion to put forward facts and figures (nearly 50% of AIDS cases worldwide are women, >950 people a day die from AIDS complications in Africa each day) and talk about hope for the future. Here are some of the things I'm thinking about.
AIDS first appeared around 1981 with small clusters of gay men dying from an obscure type of pneumonia. The pneumonia was typically an opportunistic disease, which led to the understanding that the problem was with a severely compromised immune system. Finally, "The Gay Plague" was given a "real" name: Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, or AIDS.
The emerging story was very well covered in the press in those early days, provided it was the gay press you read. Otherwise, the story got very little attention.
One of the best AIDS jokes appeared early on, when there was still widespread belief that only gays, hemophiliacs, and Haitians got the disease — hemophiliacs, by the way, were the only "innocent victims". It went like this: "What's the hardest thing about learning you have AIDS? Trying to convince your mother that you're Haitian."
Most of us who are gay and lived through the time were keenly aware of every minute of every day of every week of every month of every year that passed while "the great communicator" who occupied the presidency at the time failed to mobilize public-health forces to combat the disease, failed even to mention its name.
I remember watching the first episode on TV of a "Quarterly AIDS Report" in which Tom Brokaw solemnly promised they'd be there every 3 months to do a report and give an update until the epidemic was over. The show lasted for two, maybe three installments.
When we speak of "Gay Pride", some wonder very loudly what there is to be proud about. Among the many reasons, this is one: when no one wanted to help, the gay community helped itself. With the unstinting support of our lesbian sisters, we worked to understand and to educate, we took steps that reduced the spread of the virus in our community, we took action to find treatments, we took care of our sick and dying, and we honor our dead.
That's enough to make me proud.
Straw-Farms & The Estate Tax
Avedon Carol offers up* this quotation which she says is from Dean Baker's The Conservative Nanny State. I haven't looked at the source, but I liked the quotation.
Of course, in reality the battle over the estate tax is an issue that is almost exclusively about wealthy people who don't want wealthy children to be taxed on their inheritance. In the spring of 2001 a New York Times reporter called the American Farm Bureau, one of the main groups lobbying for repeal of the estate tax, and asked to speak to a family that had lost its farm due to the estate tax. The Farm Bureau was unable to identify a single family in the entire country who had been through this experience.
———-
*Avedon Carol, "Money, money, money", The Sideshow, 28 November 2006.
Procupines & Ear Accidents
Mark Liberman, in a piece* at Language Log, wrote with the title "Ear Accidents" about a visit to England and a discussion with one Jock McNaught, who kept talking about "Ear Accidents". Liberman wondered whether McNaught might be referring to something like ear piercings gone bad or some such, when he discovered that it was a pronunciation/hearing issue and that McNaught was actually talking about "air accidents" — airplanes flying into other airplanes and the like.
Which was a shame. I was convinced that I had finally found someone ready to talk about my idea of "ear accidents", a good phrase really to describe a phenomenon I occasionally experience along the lines of creative mis-hearing. With somewhat more frequency than I might like — although the results can be entertaining enough — I mis-hear some phrase and, as my brain tries to understand it creates some near-sounding phrase which makes some sense grammatically but almost never makes sense in the speaker's context.
Constructing the substitute phrase takes a bit of time, naturally, and usually I just go on the assumption that when I don't quite hear something being said to me, if I wait a little bit the meaning may finally appear. But those times when it doesn't ultimately appear, I'm left with asking the speaker: "please, could you repeat what you said two sentences ago?" Typically, they've forgotten by then anyway.
One of the oddest ear accidents I can remember happened more than a decade ago. Isaac and I were at the wedding of a long-time friend of mine. The preacher was talking to the betrothed, and rather to my surprise said "Today, XY and XX, you are unique among porcupines."
Well! That struck me as an odd locution. I glanced around, but the rest of those congregated appeared to think nothing was amiss — they must have thought he said something else. However, I couldn't think of a more-usual alternative to his missive. I asked around and everyone claimed that they couldn't think of any likely answer.
A few years passed and then XY and XX came to visit. To my delight, they brought the videotape of their marriage ceremony! At last, we'd have incontrovertible evidence: either the preacher said "you are unique among porcupines", or else he was recorded saying something else that sounded enough like it for me to recognize my error.
We watched the entire tape, listening carefully, and heard nothing untoward or suggestive. However, there was one portion of the tape, lasting about 18 seconds (it made us think of the 18 minutes "accidentally" erased out of those Nixon tapes all those years ago), where the sound quality was disrupted and we couldn't make out anything at all. Was that where the phrase was uttered, whatever it was? We'll probably never solve this riddle.
Anyway, I think "ear accident" will serve quite well to describe this affliction.
———-
*Mark Liberman, "Ear Accidents", Language Log, 16 November 2006.
In: All, Reflections, Such Language!
In the Public Interest
Our story thus far: Ars Hermeneutica, Limited is the nonprofit company that Isaac and I formed on 15 November, 2004 (the official date when the Articles of Incorporation were filed and stamped by the Maryland Department of Assessments and Taxation, at 11:11 AM to be precise). We formed the company for the purposes of pursing scientific research and science education. When performed in the public interest, the income from such activities is exempt from taxation according to the Internal Revenue Code, section 501(c)(3). Note this distinction: the IRS does not confer tax-exempt status, it recognizes tax-exempt status. To apply for recognition of tax-exempt status, one merely fills out IRS Form 1023 and sends it in with the appropriate fee.
I sent the application 14 months ago; our's was some 50 pages long. Four months ago our application was finally assigned an examiner. After a three-month process of questions from our examiner and our answers (totaling another 27 pages of documentation), we finally received our answer last week, 21 November 2006.
Ars Hermeneutica, Limited is now recognized as a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt corporation. Here's the opening paragraph of the letter (the "determination letter" is easily worth its weight in gold) from the IRS:
We are pleased to inform you that upon review of your application for tax exempt status we have determined that you are exempt from Federal income tax under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Contributions to you are deductible under section 170 of the Code. You are also qualified to receive tax deductible bequests, devises, transfers or gifts under section 2055, 2106 or 2522 of the Code.
We were pleased, too. By the way, all of the documentation and correspondence that I mentioned above is available on our website: we are required by law to make it publicly available. I can't imagine why anyone would want to look at it, but there you go.
Our education focuses on developing novel ideas for casual public education about science and technology* with the goal of making science less intimidating and more welcoming; I want to invite nonscientists to enjoy science for themselves. One of those projects, which we started on to create a demonstration website last year, is Science Besieged.
I don't yet have any online mechanism to accept donations, but I expect I will soon, and I expect I'll mention it when I do. At last, I get to point out that all contributions (alas, only in the US) to Ars Hermeneutica are fully tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.
———-
*I just realized today that there is no suitable, all-encompassing word to describe the sciences and allied fields. Around government agencies it's usually referred to as STEM: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics — ungainly as an acronym, particularly without context, and less than all-encompassing.
I'm entertaining suggestions. At lunch the best I could come up with was "The Rational Arts", which has a certain poetic appeal but doesn't really convey anything very accurately. Do let me know if any of you four think of something.
In: All, Reflections, Speaking of Science
The SAT Mega-Think-Tank
I was reading today, and probably over tired while doing it (I had to get up at 7am to sing Schütz this morning — twice!), so my mind was wandering and I tend to have odd ideas when that happens.
Anyway, I was reading blog articles about great, seemingly intractable problems like global warming, what to do about Iraq, how to keep our elections fair…. The usual stuff. Then I read another article that mentioned the SAT (you know: that Scholastic Aptitude Test that most high-school seniors take) for some reason when it hit me all of a sudden how to find the solutions to these difficult problems: make them questions on the SAT!
Just think. Every year millions of fertile, flexible, creative young minds could tackle the country's — the world's! — toughest problems. Out of all those millions of possibilities, surely somewhere, someone would think of some useful ideas. The winners could be awarded with with extravagant scholarships and it would still be exceedingly cost effective. The questions for each year's exam could even be published a year ahead of time — but let's save at least one slot for the last-minute, quick-on-your-feet, spontaneous question — so that the talent pool have plenty of time to think over their ideas.
Worse than Illegal
Geoffrey Pullum was discussing* the possibility that soon-to-be former-Senator George Allen, a Republican of Virginia, may well have lost his re-election bid on the strength of his use of a racist slur during the campaign (the infamous "macaca" episode) — or perhaps on the strength of what the electorate saw through the curtain drawn over his racism once the tiny "macaca" tear started ripping open — when he had something very interesting to say about the status of racist language in public discourse, the freedom and responsibilities of speaking one's mind, and the emptiness of an appeal to "political correctness" as mitigation.
This is an excerpt from the original article.
Those who want to get their language use in line with current standards should understand it very clearly. It is not that racism has gone away (good heavens, surely nobody thinks that will ever happen). And it's not that racist talk has been made illegal, or ever could be: the First Amendment is simply not going to allow that. You can speak your opinions in this country, and express anything you want about the racial inferiority or utter subhuman vileness of any racial group you may want to take out after. No, it's not illegal to say racist things, it's not even a misdemeanour; it is something much worse, for racists, that has happened. Racism has become not just unfashionable (itself almost a kiss of death for those in public life) but unacceptably disgusting to most thinking people. And that's much more serious.
If you're a political candidate, then for you to say something on camera that suggests racist attitudes or beliefs is comparable to, oh, something like putting your hand down the back of your pants to scratch your asshole and then sniffing your finger. Nothing illegal there. But your campaign will take a downswing from the moment that video clip hits YouTube.
This is not about the mythical political-correctness "word police" of which the right-wingers disingenuously complain. This is about thinking people simply seeing what you do and turning away in disgust. It if were just illegal to say "nigger" or "spic", a politician could perhaps survive it (politicians do survive drunk driving arrests, and surely drunk driving is enormously more serious and dangerous than having negative opinions about some racial group). But it's worse than illegal. It picks you out as someone to stay away from. It identifies you as disgusting and fit only to be shunned. A person who would never be invited to dinner. And you won't survive that in modern American politics.
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* Geoffrey K. Pullum, "Ill-Judged Word Choice Lost Congress for GOP?", Language Log, 9 November 2006.
A Tiny, Partisan Moment
A few days back, maybe last week, I was at my favorite luncheon spot: Taco Bell. Like most fast-food places these days, they have a wee labyrinth on the approach to their cash register (oops! I mean point-of-sale terminal, of course) to guide the single queue that forms in order to order. The labyrinthine area, arranged of turquoise railings on equally turquoise posts, is far from subtle or easy-to-miss, as some of my four regular readers can attest.
I was standing at the head of the queue in a nearly empty restaurant, awaiting my call to the POS terminal. The doors to the dining room opened and a smartly dressed, rather self-important person strode briskly into the room, stepped smartly toward the order counter, and took up a place in the gap between labyrinth and order counter, in front of me! As he stood, he looked fixedly at the counter and wall to the side, both directions in which his studied gaze would least likely light upon yours truly.
In other words, he adopted a stance and attitude that allowed him to pretend to himself that he simply didn't see me, hadn't seen me, wouldn't see me until he was called upon to order first. With luck, I would say nothing and he could silently usurp my place in line as — his body language suggested — he felt was his due in the natural order of things.
But, he did not know that this was my turf, my Taco Bell, so I felt emboldened to speak. "I was already waiting," I said to his left shoulder.
He pretended that he was surprised to hear a voice from my direction. "Ah! Oh! I didn't know there was a line," he said, rather disingenuously, I thought, but he did allow me to precede him.
I know it was uncharitable of me, since this occurred just a few days after our recent mid-term election, but what I really wanted to ask him was this: "You're Republican, aren't you?"
Israel to Recognize Same-Gender Marriage
n a precedent-setting ruling, the High Court of Justice on Tuesday ruled that five gay couples wedded outside of Israel can be registered as married couples.
A sweeping majority of six justices to one ruled that the civil marriages of five gay couples obtained in Toronto, Canada, can appear as married on the population registry.
[excerpt from Yuval Yoaz, "In precedent-setting ruling court says state must recognize gay marriage", haaretz.com, 21 November 2006; via Towleroad.]