So I’m moving this over to WordPress.com and deleting my old hosted account. Everything is screwed up because they don’t support markdown, which I had been using.

Speaking of stupid, it’s not just limited to the authorities in Boston.

The issue came to light Thursday when the Star reported that the NFL had told Fall Creek Baptist Church in Indianapolis that its plans for a Super Bowl watch party in front a big screen TV would be illegal. How dumb is this? The reason they claim is that the Nielsen ratings don’t count large gatherings. But the NFL makes an exception for sports bars.

Hmm… Could it be because the biggest advertisers are beer companies? And those companies don’t care about the exact Nielsen numbers – they know that there’s a huge audience for the NFL and they are willing to pay… I somehow doubt that the NFL would have to charge less for their ads if people watch the Super Bowl at church. Especially because they’re going to at least get some (probably a fair amount actually) of bad publicity out of this… There has to be a more satisfying solution. Or they’re just dumb. More from the AP at Sports Illustrated.

That Dark Helmet was right:

Now you see that evil will always triumph, because good is dumb — Dark Helmet, *Spaceballs*

Seriously, could the authorities in Boston be any more stupid? And now they have to press on, even though they sound increasingly ridiculous:

“It’s clear the intent was to get attention by causing fear and unrest that there was a bomb in that location,” Assistant Attorney General John Grossman said at their arraignment.

I’ve never seen the show (we don’t have cable actually) and probably never will. No matter – I think it was a creative advertising stunt, and any authority with a piece of brain should have realized it. And they put them up (hundreds across the country) two weeks ago, and people just noticed now? And we are safe? I more and more feel like people in government are just, well, dumb. Here’s the video of how they put these things up:

Fake Steve on the iPhone…

I had one of these when I was a kid:

I always thought it would be valuable. I wonder what happened to it? I’ll have to ask my mom…

This is a great idea! Maybe the absolute giganticness of it kept it from catching on…

I don’t think Michelle would like it too much though.

I’ve always wondered how bacon was made…

Here’s a fascinating take on the current mini-wave of atheist literature (by Dawkins, et al) that’s come out recently. The author describes a series of challenges of atheism to theism – and shows how these can be used to strengthen a theist’s position, and faith. For example:

Virtuous atheists actually have a stronger claim to real goodness than virtuous Christians, Jews, or Muslims, because there can be no taint of cupboard love in their obedience to the moral law. They do not believe in a reward for goodness, and thus must love goodness for its own sake. The challenge to religious people is that they ought to do the good as if there were no afterlife, no heaven, no reward. God does not get a reward for all the good things he does, and if we are supposed to become as much the image of God as we can, as we are told in the scriptures, then we should seek out that life of love and service that is its own reward.

The author of the piece is also the author of a book called Natural Religion. It looks a little far-out, and I have not read it, but the description sounds like an interesting insight into the different ways truth is manifest.

wow