Mormon Church

Today Graham attended a Mormon Church session, which was only about an hour long, and it took place at about 11am. So right off the bat, it's later in the day so I get to sleep in, and it's shorter so I can go to Wendy's after and not spoil dinner. But fast food and sleep are not the only things I took away from this experience. Gather and listen.

Mormons are 90% really, really attractive people. My girlfriend explained it like this, and I think she said it quite eloquently: "The ugly ones don't get married". So, I spent the morning in a room full of very attractive religiously devout people under the age of thirty and over the age of 18. It was essentially a very quiet dance club with no dancing. They were a little heavy handed on the whole "get married now" thing, but that's to be expected and not a really big deal.

Mormons are really, really cool about church activities. Instead of christian church which I attended for... 3 Sundays when I was 9... I felt that they actually could care less if I didn't attend, but that if I were to attend something Mormon-related, I should at least feel like I wanted to be there, and not that I was obligated. Mormons 1, most other religions, 0. They even have things called "fire-sides" which in my mind is a bunch of people sitting around a fire talking, and eating potatoes, but in reality is probably quite different. Also, most events have a "potato bar" which I assume is a table with a ton of different potatoes on it. Like the head Mormon guy said: "there's a potato bar, you cant lose"

They get cool young people to address the crowd. The guy who spoke first was a little bit intense, and teared up a few times, but all in all he was an excellent public speaker and knew his audience. Cough cough, pope, cough cough.

Mormons are actually totally correct about their lessons. Today I learned that you have to be nice to people, and discuss your problems rationally without anger. Is this what church is actually always like? Because I pictured a lot more preaching, and a lot less... actual valuable life lessons.

I'm still an extreme atheist. But I appreciate the religion a lot more now that I've checked it out. There's some strange stuff in the book of Mormon, but all in all, they get a bad rap. Plus, like I said, you could set up a Mormon modeling agency and make a fucking killing.

An Idea that will never be proven wrong

SI was just going to write this in a comment to Graham's last post, but then i decided it was deserving of it's own post. Graham talked about connecting his idea of 'the absurd' to the particle theory of matter. I don't know anything about science (and i am quite proud of my 14 percent in chemistry 12... which i blame on Josh Mann), but i do realize that good philosophy needs to be based on science.

Immanuel Kant, who was a philosopher/political theorist/ racist german/ genius, put forth some really good ideas. His political theory often rested between a battle between the individual and the state. How can you be an individual, when you need the state to protect you? How can we have an orderly state, when everyone wants to be an individual?

In answering these problems, he based his theories on Newtonian Physics. At his time in the late 1700's, it looked quite clearly that Newtonian Physics explained the universe perfectly. His ideas were held in high esteem, until about 1898 when science similar to Einstein's relativity, proved that Newtonian Physics did not explain the world in a universal way; rather everything was relative. We haven't disregarded Newton's theories, rather we just accept the fact that there are 2 good scientific ideas.

Most people looking for a grand unification theory (a theory that combines Einstein relativity and Newton), want to go to something along the lines of quantum mechanics (or string theory or something like that). We live in really weird times because we don't have a science that explains our world universally anymore. Rather, everything has to be a dualism between these two competing views.


I don't remember where i was going with this.

The Politics of Cool

Earlier this week, Rolling Stone Magazine announced that they would put Barack Obama on next month's issue. This is the first time that Rolling Stone has ever made a cover story out of a nominee for the leader of a party. In the past, they have made cover stories out of Democratic Presidential candidates. But 'the curse of the rolling stone' proved fatal for both Al Gore and John Kerry. Obama will get his issue now, and it would not be surprising to see him get another cover story, during the weeks leading up to the presidential election this Novemberish. Obama has a knack for capitalizing on crowds that are unable to think for themselves. Earlier in January, he got the free-spirited Oprah Winfrey to tour on his campaign trail, and also appeared on Oprah's show, where she fully endorsed him.

Even the elderly Hillary Clinton is trying to find a way to reach out to crowds that are outside her demographic . Last Saturday she made a small cameo on SNL. Lorne Michaels (el presidente of the show) thought it only fair, because he had Barack Obama on the show back in November.

Get with the times Hillary. SNL is so last november. People of today read rolling stone magazine.

Even with Barack's appeal to all these forms of 'cool' media, the race does not seem to be over. Anybody that has followed the Democratic election (meaning anybody bored out of their mind, who has a full selection of cable channels, yet out of complete disrespect for their own intellectual well-being, decides to watch CNN), has been told several times that election is nearly over. All of January, we were told that Super Tuesday (in early February), would determine the Democratic nominee. When that didn't pan out, CNN told us it would be the next state election. And when that didn't pan out, they said it would be the next one; and this pattern continued for quite a while. Well, there have been numerous state elections, and CNN has been wrong numerous times. But for some reason, i keep tuning in.

This is very reminiscent to the 'kiefer Sutherland effect'. Anybody that has watched the tv show 24, knows that at the end of every episode, there is a delightful cliffhanger and then footage from next weeks show. If you own the dvd's, you have no choice but to watch the next show immediately. If it's on cable television, you book off your next tuesday at 9pm. I fell under the spell of the 'Kiefer Sutherland effect' during my final exams at the end of my second year at Uvic. I awoke in a daze, back in calgary, having done very poorly on many of my exams.

After having been decieved by CNN for so long, it has become clear that the democratic nominee will not be decided in any of these state elections. Rather it will not be determined until the convention in August. This will prolong the Democratic race for quite a while longer, while the Republican race seems to be finalized with McCain. Will the longer battle between Hillary and OBama help the Democrats by providing them with more media? Or will it give McCain the chance to build his Republican profile, while the Democrats are still fighting amonst each other? It's too early to tell. But the moral of the story is, don't let CNN tell you anything, because it's beginning to come clear that CNN is even less reliable then Fox. And at least Fox takes a break from it's political news, to bring you quality television like the Simpsons.




Let me get all the politics out of me. Alberta Media tells Albertans that Stelmach is going to lose. They trash his name and drag it through the dirt. They do this all the way up to the day of the election. Yet in the end, Stelmech comes out with an even bigger majority than Klein got last election. How could the media be so wrong? Isn't the media like science in that it's always right? Was Graham Krenz conducting the polls?

Look at Michael Moore's movie Farenheit 911, which came out the summer before the presidential election in 04. Before the movie came out, the polls showed the democrats were ahead of the republicans in the presidential race. Some claim that the movie Fahrenheit 911, got all the right-wing voters worried, so they turned out in bigger numbers to support Bush. I don't buy that, but i do find it fascinating that Bush somehow won that election, amidst the propaganda film that Moore shoved out at the same time.