Getin Jenky With It

I believe Bishop Daniel R. Jenky, CSC lives in the great state of Illinois, and could therefore take a boat to Canada. He might violate a few border laws if he did not get the correct clearance first, and it is a long way by boat. But he could travel the length of Lake Michigan, hang a left at Cheboygan, and be in Canada.

I think Jenky would like Canada. True, it is not as “Christian” as the USA (with only 77% of the population being Christian as opposed to 78.4% of the folks in the USA) but it is close. The big difference would be the amount of Catholics. Roman Catholics in the US only account for 23.9% of the population, but in Canada they are a whopping 43.2 %.

I personally like Canada for a number of reasons. Here are a couple of them:

1. They are the second largest country on earth by landmass, and have a much smaller population than the US. This gives the country tons of wilderness space. Much of it is awesome.
2. They have universal healthcare. Everything that is an approved procedure is paid for by the government.
3. They have no legal restrictions on abortions or vasectomies.

Catholic religious institutions run 87 of the state funded hospitals in Canada. I am lead to believe that, unlike the Santa Creu i Sant Pau Catholic hospital in Barcelona Spain, the Catholic Hospitals in Canada do not regularly perform abortions or vasectomies. In other words the Canadians have figured out how to have a much more comprehensive public healthcare system with fewer legal restrictions than exist in the US, and all the Catholic everything has not been forced to shut down.

Why would I bring this up? Surely Bishop Jenky knows all this? In a recent public religious address (The April 14th homily at men's march and Mass in Peoria- podcast available at: http://www.cdop.org/pages/ABishopPodcast.aspx ) the Most Reverend Danny Jenky compared president Obama to Hitler and Stalin (and Otto Von Bismark for good measure) in his desire to support federal healthcare legislation (Obamacare) which would destroy everything. You think I’m engaging in my usual hyperbole? Perhaps I am a bit, but less than usual. Here is a quote from Dan’s homily:

“This fall, every practicing Catholic must vote, and must vote their Catholic consciences, or by the following fall our Catholic schools, our Catholic hospitals, our Catholic Newman Centers, all our public ministries -- only excepting our church buildings – could easily be shut down. Because no Catholic institution, under any circumstance, can ever cooperate with the instrinsic evil of killing innocent human life in the womb.

No Catholic ministry – and yes, Mr. President, for Catholics our schools and hospitals are ministries – can remain faithful to the Lordship of the Risen Christ and to his glorious Gospel of Life if they are forced to pay for abortions.”

All this shuttering will happen because of some legislation which is considerably less like funding abortions was passed in the US. I don’t think what is working for the Catholic Church in Canada is like them being forced to pay for abortions and vasectomies; it is just that what is happening in the USA is much less like it. I’m trying to figure out where Jenky is coming from in his hyperbolic attack, and then take a couple steps back towards reality (not necessarily all the way back) till I enter an area I like to call “sane”.

It floors me that people for whom a Church pulpit has been purchased spout such vitriol from it, and blame it on their theoretically “loving” god. Because our president has pushed a healthcare package forward that will improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, and may even prevent the untimely death of thousands, he is labeled a mass murderer like Hitler and Stalin?

Go figure; eh?

Murrah

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." – Voltaire

Until September 11th 2001 April 19th 1995 was the date associated with the most horrible act of terrorism perpetrated against United States. This attack was perpetrated by a man who at one point famously stated that: “Science is my religion”. This has been used as proof that Timothy McVeigh was an atheist, and that his atheistic lack of morals allowed him to plan and carry out the deadly attack. Unfortunately this idea is partially true.

McVeigh was certainly confused about his belief system. In addition to the obvious moral shortcomings evidenced by his Oklahoma City attack his statements underscore his confusion. He was raised strictly Roman Catholic and boasted maintaining “core beliefs”. McVeigh also was quoted espousing a very deist god. Since any of these three belief systems would have raised moral questions long before McVeigh’s bomb was detonated he must have used a patchwork morality which he could arrange to justify his actions.

McVeigh was obsessed with the Ruby Ridge and Waco incidents. He even camped out at Waco while the events now synonymous with that town were unfolding. Each of these prior incidents was steeped in cultist-religious absurdities. Randy Weaver was associated with the hate-steeped Aryan Nations and Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord “Christian” churches. David Koresh lead an apparently polygamist sub-cult of the Branch Dravidians. Both groups collected firearms to use against government intrusion, and either would appear to be fertile ground for McVeigh’s terrorist plot to grow to fruition in. McVeigh even timed his attack to coincide with the second anniversary of the Waco event to draw parallels to it. Either group could have provided philosophical motivation.

However, McVeigh’s crippled morality did not spring from either of the groups whose events motivated his attack. He had pieced together a fantasy conspiracy out of fragmentary theories concocted from semi-analyzed evidence. A cottage conspiracy industry has developed in the US, and Timothy McVeigh is its most alarming product.

In 1964, when President Kennedy was shot in Dallas, a simple splotch noticed in the corner of a few frames of film spawned the most famous of all conspiracy theories. In 1992 the Waco standoff yielded hundreds of thousands of frames of potential conspiracy generating video. Phantom gunfire, tanks with trap-doors, secret passages, and more increasingly bizarre evidence. Each second was analyzed, and re-analyzed, by true believers who knew they could find something if they looked hard enough.

Millions were spent in congressional investigations spurred by increasingly shrill calls for “truth”. Blame was found, and blame was probably immorally avoided. The great shadowy government conspiracy was not uncovered (it never is; is it?), but it was that conspiracy which Timothy McVeigh attacked in Oklahoma. The limp bodies of children whose lives he snuffed out on that April day were “collateral Damage”.

McVeigh knew that the US government killed people with impunity. He knew this partially because he had done killing for the US government while on active duty in the first gulf war. He referenced the killing he had done when discussing how he became a terrorist. He also spoke about his wartime experiences when he mentioned his desire to commit suicide. He described the Murrah building attack as “State-assisted suicide” at one point.

Despite his sometimes rambling disjointed motivations McVeigh remained resolute on the topic of conspiracy. His attack had the higher purpose of bringing down the shadow-conspiracy that was treasonously defiling the constitution.

His conviction put a six-and-a-half-year damper on the main-stream acceptance of conspiracy theories.

After 9/11 conspiracy theories spewed forth like the contents of a pop-bottle that had been shook for years. The WTC towers may not have been hit by planes. They may have been hit by planes with secret “pods” attached. The planes may have been special cargo-plane missiles, or the missiles may have been fired at the same time the planes hit so their effect could be covered up. Then there is the issue of “secondary explosives”.

The nonsense has found a ready republic. One poll suggested that over a third of the US population believes that the WTC towers came down as a result of a government conspiracy. That is way over 100 million believers.

If each person who believed in the government conspiracy 911 theories donated a thousand dollars to the presidential campaign of one candidate they could probably get them elected. Once they controlled the presidency would they still so adamantly believe in government conspiracies?

Polygamy Polynomial

The other day I received advice on how to increase my “Happiness Quotient”. My immediate thought was: “What the heck* is a Happiness Quotient anyway?”.

I tried to simply ‘understand’ that the person dispensing the advice was trying to be nice –he was smiling- but I had this nagging feeling that something was not right.

Ever seen a vacuum salesman at work? They throw some fake dirt on a carpet and then make a big deal of vacuuming it up. I am usually left thinking: “Fake dirt?”, or: “Is my wallet still in my pocket?”. I had similar mixed feelings of skeptical concern when I heard the term “Happiness Quotient”.

I looked this term up and found out that it is a very popular term. Everyone is trying to increase their “Happiness Quotient”. So the term “Happiness Quotient” must really mean something or it is some powerfully viral bull-hockey*.

I know what a quotient is. If I divide the number 10 by the number 5 then the quotient is 2. In other words a quotient is the number of times one quantity is found in another quantity. In order to understand what a “Happiness Quotient” is I need only find out what these two quantities are.

I immediately thought that pleasant events could be one, and life could be the other. Then the “Happiness Quotient” could be the number of pleasant events in one’s life. This sounds good, but it is more of an enumeration rather than a division problem. If we divide the span of a pleasant event into the span of a life the quotient is the number of potential pleasant events, not a measure of pleasantness. Division is the wrong way of using these numbers to arrive at a measure whose increase is a good thing.

Thinking that I was going at it wrong I searched for some assistance. What quantities does one use to calculate a “Happiness Quotient”? After some searching it appears that a “Happiness Quotient” is simply rated, and subjectively rated at that. There are many studies that apparently correlate perceived happiness with some objective measure, like income. In other words – no division. I get the feeling that someone looked at happiness measures and thought: “I remember quotient is some quantity from math class and math is hard so it sounds really really really cool”, and so the “Happiness Quotient” was born.


Money is a very important part of people discussing the “Happiness Quotient”. This may be because they are being paid to write about it. I make money when people click on the ads put up automatically on the sidebar. So far I have earned in slight excess of sixty seven cents. Trying to calculate that rate of return suggests the creation of a quantity that could be called: “the starvation integral”. Luckily the upshot of what people say about “Happiness Quotient” and income is that one is not needed for the other. The use of old quotes is popular; suggesting that people have known this forever and you need to get on board or be stupid.

“Who is wealthy? The one who is happy with his portion.” -- Talmud

“Money can never buy happiness or love.” -- Ancient Chinese Saying

“A man is rich in proportion to the things he can afford to let alone.” -- Henry David Thoreau

Unfortunately, despite all this pithy ancient knowledge to the contrary, wealthy people (according to these ‘studies’) think that they are happier. I found it interesting that at least one person quantified the amount of happiness that money provided.

“Boosting the frequency of sex in a marriage from once a month to once a week brings as much happiness as an extra $50,000 a year.”

Which made me wonder: “How rich could I be if I put all my effort into it (and –y’know- ate a lot of vitamins E and C)?”. Because of the menstrual cycle of women is happiness from heterosexual sex best modeled by some trigonometric function? Shortly I began thinking –since I live in Utah- that there might be some sort of polygamy polynomial that could be used to boost one’s happiness. If one had two wives would increasing the frequency of coitus make for a happiness quadratic? Could bonding of the sister wives with each other lead to cubic happiness terms?