I haven’t written a movie review in quite a long time. But I felt that since one of the main characters in this film is openly atheistic, I couldn’t help but provide some discussion on it’s content.
The film is called The Ledge and it begins with the atheist character, Gavin, walking along the roof of a building and stepping out onto the ledge preparing to jump to his death. How he got to this point is revealed through flashbacks as Gavin discusses his situation with the police officer there to talk him down, played by Terrance Howard. What Gavin ultimately does and why is the message of the film.
Check out this video of Rick Perry trying to defend the Texas school policy of teaching abstinence only sex education in public schools.
This is one of the reasons why I can never vote for this guy…no matter what the facts are, he won’t change his views. It doesn’t matter that abstinence only sex education doesn’t work, to him that’s the only way to teach it. It’s not effective, but he doesn’t care. No amount of evidence will change his mind.
I don’t have an issue with trying different approaches, but once it is determined an approach doesn’t work, it’s time to try something else. If you’re not willing to look at the data and make modifications, then you’re not interested in solving the problem.
So what is his goal? To prevent teen pregnancies? To prevent the spread of STD’s? No, he either doesn’t want to ruffle the feathers of the religious voters in the state or he truly believes it’s okay to withhold vital information that can in all reality save young peoples lives.
My daughter went through the sex education program last year in middle school here in Texas. At the end of it, I asked a simple question. Did they talk to you about condoms? She said yes they did. Ok, I said, what did they tell you about them? She said “that they didn’t work”.
If Texas was smart and paid attention to the facts, it would realize that abstinence only education isn’t the answer. If it were, Texas wouldn’t be #3 in teen pregnancies. I would prefer Texas have a comprehensive sex education program to insure out kids know the facts and how to protect themselves from what they inevitably will do at some point in their young lives. But that just makes me a godless liberal in Perry’s eyes.
So Texas will continue with a program that has failed over and over again expecting a different result in the future.
When I first started this blog years ago, I posted quite a bit about some home theater construction and equipment decisions as I was putting together a new home theater in my house. One of those purchase decisions was a new TV. I went for a DLP TV from Mitsubishi, the WD-57833 to be exact, and it’s been a great TV…until recently.
I noticed the problem a few weeks ago. It started innocently enough with one white dot almost directly in the center of the screen. On closer inspection my fears were confirmed…a stuck pixel. As I inspected the screen I began to see others, although they were black dots and as such less noticeable.
Over the next week the number of white dots grew from 1 to 3 to 5 to 8. I couldn’t deny it any longer. The DLP chip at the heart of my TV was dying and I haven’t had the TV 4 years yet.
I’ve certainly been known to have strong opinions, but during a recent trip to Denver I stopped to get some breakfast and parked next to this guy. I think he puts me to shame.
You really need to click on the image and view it at full scale to get the impact. Not only are there stickers on the bumper, but even more on the rear window. Obviously, not an Obama supporter. The one tame bumper sticker shows his Oklahoma roots.
I like thinking about the scale of the universe. It’s basically unfathomable how large it actually is, at least for humans anyway. So when I get an opportunity to try to put it into some kind of perspective, I’ll write about it.
That opportunity has come recently when the Astronomy Picture of the Day posted about the Voyager 1 spacecraft and where it is now. Why did they mention it? Well, Voyager 1 has the distinction of being humanity’s most distant spacecraft. But this distance pales in comparison to cosmic scales. First some background.
The Church I drive by going in and out of my neighborhood changed the message on their sign recently and I couldn’t help think that I’d seen it before.
Then I though to myself, why would they need to recycle their messages? With the plethora of information available to them from their Bible, there should be an almost endless supply of messages they could proffer. So I did a little checking and found that between the Old and New Testaments there are something like 66 books in the Bible. These books contain thousands upon thousands of verses. I can’t imagine they would have a need to repeat themselves and so soon to boot. Either they think it’s a really important message or they’re just getting lazy.
Now I’m curious what the next message will be and if this is the start of a trend to recycle their messages. Only time will tell and of course I will if they do.
I’m just going to say it. It’s kind of strange that the rapture is supposed to happen the day after Draw Mohammed Day, both of which are less than 2 weeks away.
May 20th is Draw Mohammed Day. This is the second year for this event started in response to threats against the creators of South Park for supposedly depicting Mohammed in their show…even though he was in a bear suit and you never saw him.
We’ve only been waiting over 2000 years for this day to finally come. The disciple Paul thought it would happen in his lifetime. He was just off by a few millenia. Some guy named Harold Camping has been studying the bible for over 70 years and come up with May 21st, 2011 as the date of the rapture. He originally said it would happen back in 1994. Well that didn’t happen, so now after further study he’s refined his calculations. I guess 50 some years of study just wasn’t enough to figure it out.
I sat stunned as I watched the President announce the death of Osama bin Laden.
I wasn’t sure how to feel about this. Sure, this was the man who headed the organization that rammed planes into buildings on 9/11/2001 killing thousands of innocent people. And he certainly had a hand in many other terrorist attacks around the world, but should I now be happy that he is dead? and that the United States had killed him?
The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) ruled last week in an Arizona case involving tax credits for donations to religious schools. In this case, citizens who donate money to school tuition organizations (STO’s), which in turn use the funds to provide scholarships to students attending private schools, most of which are religious schools, get a tax credit from the State for the full amount of their donation. Arizona credits dollar for dollar contributions to STO’s up to $500 per individual or $1000 per couple.
The court ruled 5 to 4 in favor of the tax credit. The five in the majority were justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Kennedy. In the minority were Ginsburg, Breyer, Kagan and Sotomayor.
As you can probably guess, I’m not too thrilled with this decision.
