Verizon Ad / Art / Coming to America

Main Street Arts Festival



The Main St. Art Festival starts today. It costs nothing to walk around and look and you get to see some really good art. There is a long line of artists who want to display at this show and very few are selected. This is one of my favorite Fort Worth events of the year. Remember, it's good food, entertainment and art, too. http://www.mainstreetartsfest.org/home.aspx

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Hey Brad!

It's official. After one year of posting, the one post to receive the most comments is the Verizon ad post. I still get about one comment a day. The last comment, in case you're not keeping up with it, asked about the background music. I like it, too, but don't know where it's from. I love the tuba.

Commentor Anonymous, I'm sorry, you're wrong, this is a great advertisement (hey, my weblog, my rules).

The ad doesn't play much anymore. Too bad, for me. If you didn't get enough of it, here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gpxEdRPttk&feature=related

Last thought: today the post received three comments, for a total of 24. if you want to read them go back to April's posts.
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A comment on Pope Benedict XVI.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected by the College of Cardinals to lead the Roman Catholic Church this month 3 years ago. He succeeded a Pope who had served for over 25 years and who almost single-handedly threw the burden of the Church on his shoulders and carried it through the troubles of the post modern age. It's difficult to talk about John Paul II without using words like greatness and saint, both as person and as a man of accomplishment.
Cardinal Ratzinger was by JPII's side as head of the Prefect for the Congregation of Faith for 24 years. When he was elected Pope he did so with respect for his immediate predecessor's calling, and with a vision of addressing the consequences of modern theology and philosophy, especially in Europe. Read his address to the Italian Parliament reprinted in a book titled, Without Roots. John Paul 2 was a very bright man, few will attempt to match wits with Pope Benedict in theology, philosophy, Church doctrine and history, and especially European history. That given, his first papal encyclical was Deus Caritas Est, (God is Love). Thanks for coming to America Pope Benedict XVI.

What's Wrong With Majorities:

A minority may be right, and a majority is always wrong.
Henrik Ibsen

If the commonly held notion, that the majority opinion is, ipso facto, the right opinion, are we to assume that evils of the past, such as human slave trading as a commercial activity, were good while a majority of voters considered them so?

If there was one idea that I wish would regain popularity in media discourse, it is the notion that the the rule of law protects the minority from the majority, mob-rule is restrained by a higher law. An idea, by the way, Americans adopted from the Romans, the Greeks, the Jewish Torah, a few Teuton tribes, the French (well some of them, as in baron de Montesquieu), and the Brits (Common Law, Magna Charta, etc). Americans just got lucky with their parents, so to speak.

Which leads me to the point (like I always say, it helps to have a point). To wit:

I keep hearing on the news shows and reading in the newspapers the use of the majority argument against the war in Iraq, that is, polls showing a vast majority of Americans "against the war in Iraq." Therefore, I suppose I am to conclude that it is wrong. The war in Iraq may be wrong, I do not know if it is or isn't, but the "majority argument" has nothing to do with it, unless it is a majority of Congressman who rule that we should get out.

That is our system of government, and it is called a Republic.

(Andrew: comment, por favor)

Who Put the Salt in Salt Water?

photo by Patchouly/Flickr

I read once of the possibility, in odds, of the millions of variables necessary to keep life sustainable on earth, just happening as it were, accidentally. It wasn't a bet my bookmaker buddies would make.

It computed out-in-space factors like earth's distance from the sun, the sun's size and temperature, the existence of earth's one moon, the numbers and sizes of planets in our solar system that have gravitational pull on earth, and other more minute aspects of everyday things, like the air we breath, its finely regulated chemical composition, and the fact that the atmosphere protects us from dangerous solar rays.

Then at the beach the other day looking out into the ocean I thought of salt water.

What if the oceans weren't salty? What if they were like lakes? What would that do to the earth's ecosystem? And where did the salt come from? How did nature know what proportions of salt and H2O to use?

We don't appreciate the complexity of things whether distant or near, because like breathing air, many of our actions are involuntary and we don't have to understand them to benefit from them. I just open my eyelid, and I see, and I understand. I never say to myself, open eyelid - see - interpret object. It just happens. It's kind of magical really. But get one teeny chemical disproportion, anywhere in the body, and like a tiny grain of sand in your eye, the whole system breaks down.

I think one can deduce with some intellectual honesty, that a First Cause or Prime Mover is a good bet. The question of who or what that First Cause is another question. But that there is something greater than the universe seems perfectly plausible to me.