Zephyr Dear

George Clooney Is The Best Part Of ‘Gravity’ Because He Is Literally Real-Life Buzz Lightyear

Fact: Buzz Lightyear is kind of actually really sexy. The problem is, he’s a cartoon and has purple hair and a swirl goatee. But OMG. You may have no realized it until now, but George Clooney is basically Buzz Lightyear. ANNND, in the movie Gravity, he plays a really hot astronaut. Hot. But hotter. What makes George Clooney in Gravity hotter is: A. He’s real. B. He’s a legit astronaut with an actual brain. C. He doesn’t have a swirl for a goatee. He also has a jetpack which is cool. And brown eyes. Big, beautiful brown eyes. Now here are some random pictures from Gravity because it’s hot. Right here, we have astro George making close contact with Sandy. Also astro George’s name in the movie is Matt Kowalsky. That is a hot name. Space sucks… except it wouldn’t if you were with George Clooney who was an astronaut. Floating in space, on the verge of instant death, tethered to Sandra Bullock never looked so good. And in all honesty, the best part of Gravity was when George takes his helmet off. Jesus Christ. Save me. Now a word from Tina and Amy because they’re always right. Thank you for your time.

I may revisit this later. Consider this a late draft. I’m calling this done.

“Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.” — Stan Kelly-Bootle

Sometimes somebody says something to me, like a whisper of a hint of an echo of something half-forgotten, and it lands on me like an invocation. The mania sets in, and it isn’t enough to believe; I have to know.

I’ve spent far more effort than is sensible this month crawling down a rabbit hole disguised, as they often are, as a straightforward question: why do programmers start counting at zero?

Now: stop right there. By now your peripheral vision should have convinced you that this is a long article, and I’m not here to waste your time. But if you’re gearing up to tell me about efficient pointer arithmetic or binary addition or something, you’re wrong. You don’t think you’re wrong and that’s part of a much larger problem, but you’re still wrong.

For some backstory, on the off chance anyone still reading by this paragraph isn’t an IT professional of some stripe: most computer languages including C/C++, Perl, Python, some (but not all!) versions of Lisp, many others – are “zero-origin” or “zero-indexed”. That is to say, in an array A with 8 elements in it, the first element is A[0], and the last is A[7]. This isn’t universally true, though, and other languages from the same (and earlier!) eras are sometimes one-indexed, going from A[1] to A[8].

While it’s a relatively rare practice in modern languages, one-origin arrays certainly aren’t dead; there’s a lot of blood pumping through Lua these days, not to mention MATLAB, Mathematica and a handful of others. If you’re feeling particularly adventurous Haskell apparently lets you pick your poison at startup, and in what has to be the most lunatic thing I’ve seen on a piece of silicon since I found out the MIPS architecture had runtime-mutable endianness, Visual Basic (up to v6.0) featured the OPTION BASE flag, letting you flip that coin on a per-module basis. Zero- and one-origin arrays in different corners of the same program! It’s just software, why not?

All that is to say that starting at 1 is not an unreasonable position at all; to a typical human thinking about the zeroth element of an array doesn’t make any more sense than trying to catch the zeroth bus that comes by, but we’ve clearly ended up here somehow. So what’s the story there?

The usual arguments involving pointer arithmetic and incrementing by sizeof(struct) and so forth describe features that are nice enough once you’ve got the hang of them, but they’re also post-facto justifications. This is obvious if you take the most cursory look at the history of programming languages; C inherited its array semantics from B, which inherited them in turn from BCPL, and though BCPL arrays are zero-origin, the language doesn’t support pointer arithmetic, much less data structures. On top of that other languages that antedate BCPL and C aren’t zero-indexed. Algol 60 uses one-indexed arrays, and arrays in Fortran are arbitrarily indexed – they’re just a range from X to Y, and X and Y don’t even need to be positive integers.

So by the early 1960’s, there are three different approaches to the data structure we now call an array.

• Zero-indexed, in which the array index carries no particular semantics beyond its implementation in machine code.
• One-indexed, identical to the matrix notation people have been using for quite some time. It comes at the cost of a CPU instruction to manage the offset; usability isn’t free.
• Arbitrary indices, in which the range is significant with regards to the problem you’re up against.

So if your answer started with “because in C…”, you’ve been repeating a good story you heard one time, without ever asking yourself if it’s true. It’s not about *i = a + n*sizeof(x) because pointers and structs didn’t exist. And that’s the most coherent argument I can find; there are dozens of other arguments for zero-indexing involving “natural numbers” or “elegance” or some other unresearched hippie voodoo nonsense that are either wrong or too dumb to rise to the level of wrong.

The fact of it is this: before pointers, structs, C and Unix existed, at a time when other languages with a lot of resources and (by the standard of the day) user populations behind them were one- or arbitrarily-indexed, somebody decided that the right thing was for arrays to start at zero.

So I found that person and asked him.

His name is Dr. Martin Richards; he’s the creator of BCPL, now almost 7 years into retirement; you’ve probably heard of one of his doctoral students Eben Upton, creator of the Raspberry Pi. I emailed him to ask why he decided to start counting arrays from zero, way back then. He replied that…

As for BCPL and C subscripts starting at zero. BCPL was essentially designed as typeless language close to machine code. Just as in machine code registers are typically all the same size and contain values that represent almost anything, such as integers, machine addresses, truth values, characters, etc. BCPL has typeless variables just like machine registers capable of representing anything. If a BCPL variable represents a pointer, it points to one or more consecutive words of memory. These words are the same size as BCPL variables. Just as machine code allows address arithmetic so does BCPL, so if p is a pointer p+1 is a pointer to the next word after the one p points to. Naturally p+0 has the same value as p. The monodic indirection operator ! takes a pointer as it’s argument and returns the contents of the word pointed to. If v is a pointer !(v+I) will access the word pointed to by v+I. As I varies from zero upwards we access consecutive locations starting at the one pointed to by v when I is zero. The dyadic version of ! is defined so that v!i = !(v+I). v!i behaves like a subscripted expression with v being a one dimensional array and I being an integer subscript. It is entirely natural for the first element of the array to have subscript zero. C copied BCPL’s approach using * for monodic ! and [ ] for array subscription. Note that, in BCPL v!5 = !(v+5) = !(5+v) = 5!v. The same happens in C, v[5] = 5[v]. I can see no sensible reason why the first element of a BCPL array should have subscript one. Note that 5!v is rather like a field selector accessing a field in a structure pointed to by v.

This is interesting for a number of reasons, though I’ll leave their enumeration to your discretion. The one that I find most striking, though, is that this is the earliest example I can find of the understanding that a programming language is a user interface, and that there are difficult, subtle tradeoffs to make between resources and usability. Remember, all this was at a time when everything about the future of human-computer interaction was up in the air, from the shape of the keyboard and the glyphs on the switches and keycaps right down to how the ones and zeros were manifested in paper ribbon and bare metal; this note by the late Dennis Ritchie might give you a taste of the situation, where he mentions that five years later one of the primary reasons they went with C’s square-bracket array notation was that it was getting steadily easier to reliably find square brackets on the world’s keyboards.

“Now just a second, Hoye”, I can hear you muttering. “I’ve looked at the BCPL manual and read Dr. Richards’ explanation and you’re not fooling anyone. That looks a lot like the efficient-pointer-arithmetic argument you were frothing about, except with exclamation points.” And you’d be very close to right. That’s exactly what it is – the distinction is where those efficiencies take place, and why.

BCPL was first compiled on an IBM 7094 – here’s a picture of the console, though the entire computer took up a large room – running CTSS – the Compatible Time Sharing System – that antedates Unix much as BCPL antedates C. There’s no malloc() in that context, because there’s nobody to share the memory core with. You get the entire machine and the clock starts ticking, and when your wall-clock time block runs out that’s it. But here’s the thing: in that context none of the offset-calculations we’re supposedly economizing are calculated at execution time. All that work is done ahead of time by the compiler.

You read that right. That sheet-metal, “wibble-wibble-wibble” noise your brain is making is exactly the right reaction.

Whatever justifications or advantages came along later – and it’s true, you do save a few processor cycles here and there and that’s nice – the reason we started using zero-indexed arrays was because it shaved a couple of processor cycles off of a program’s compilation time. Not execution time; compile time.

Does it get better? Oh, it gets better:

IBM had been very generous to MIT in the fifties and sixties, donating or discounting its biggest scientific computers. When a new top of the line 36-bit scientific machine came out, MIT expected to get one. In the early sixties, the deal was that MIT got one 8-hour shift, all the other New England colleges and universities got a shift, and the third shift was available to IBM for its own use. One use IBM made of its share was yacht handicapping: the President of IBM raced big yachts on Long Island Sound, and these boats were assigned handicap points by a complicated formula. There was a special job deck kept at the MIT Computation Center, and if a request came in to run it, operators were to stop whatever was running on the machine and do the yacht handicapping job immediately.

Jobs on the IBM 7090, one generation behind the 7094, were batch-processed, not timeshared; you queued up your job along with a wall-clock estimate of how long it would take, and if it didn’t finish it was pulled off the machine, the next job in the queue went in and you got to try again whenever your next block of allocated time happened to be. As in any economy, there is a social context as well as a technical context, and it isn’t just about managing cost, it’s also about managing risk. A programmer isn’t just racing the clock, they’re also racing the possibility that somebody will come along and bump their job and everyone else’s out of the queue.

I asked Tom Van Vleck, author of the above paragraph and also now retired, how that worked. He replied in part that on the 7090…

“User jobs were submitted on cards to the system operator, stacked up in a big tray, and a rudimentary system read, loaded, and ran jobs in sequence. Typical batch systems had accounting systems that read an ID card at the beginning of a user deck and punched a usage card at end of job. User jobs usually specified a time estimate on the ID card, and would be terminated if they ran over. Users who ran too many jobs or too long would use up their allocated time. A user could arrange for a long computation to checkpoint its state and storage to tape, and to subsequently restore the checkpoint and start up again.

The yacht handicapping job pertained to batch processing on the MIT 7090 at MIT. It was rare — a few times a year.”

So: the technical reason we started counting arrays at zero is that in the mid-1960’s, you could shave a few cycles off of a program’s compilation time on an IBM 7094. The social reason is that we had to save every cycle we could, because if the job didn’t finish fast it might not finish at all and you never know when you’re getting bumped off the hardware because the President of IBM just called and fuck your thesis, it’s yacht-racing time.

There are a few points I want to make here.

The first thing is that as far as I can tell nobody has ever actually looked this up.

Whatever programmers think about themselves and these towering logic-engines we’ve erected, we’re a lot more superstitious than we realize. We tell and retell this collection of unsourced, inaccurate stories about the nature of the world without ever doing the research ourselves, and there’s no other word for that but “mythology”. Worse, by obscuring the technical and social conditions that led humans to make these technical and social decisions, by talking about the nature of computing as we find it today as though it’s an inevitable consequence of an immutable set of physical laws, we’re effectively denying any responsibility for how we got here. And worse than that, by refusing to dig into our history and understand the social and technical motivations for those choices, by steadfastly refusing to investigate the difference between a motive and a justification, we’re disavowing any agency we might have over the shape of the future. We just keep mouthing platitudes and pretending the way things are is nobody’s fault, and the more history you learn and the more you look at the sad state of modern computing the the more pathetic and irresponsible that sounds.

Part of the problem is access to the historical record, of course. I was in favor of Open Access publication before, but writing this up has cemented it: if you’re on the outside edge of academia, $20/paper for any research that doesn’t have a business case and a deep-pocketed backer is completely untenable, and speculative or historic research that might require reading dozens of papers to shed some light on longstanding questions is basically impossible. There might have been a time when this was OK and everyone who had access to or cared about computers was already an IEEE/ACM member, but right now the IEEE – both as a knowledge repository and a social network – is a single point of a lot of silent failure. “$20 for a forty-year-old research paper” is functionally indistinguishable from “gone”, and I’m reduced to emailing retirees to ask them what they remember from a lifetime ago because I can’t afford to read the source material.

The second thing is how profoundly resistant to change or growth this field is, and apparently has always been. If you haven’t seen Bret Victor’s talk about The Future Of Programming as seen from 1975 you should, because it’s exactly on point. Over and over again as I’ve dredged through this stuff, I kept finding programming constructs, ideas and approaches we call part of “modern” programming if we attempt them at all, sitting abandoned in 45-year-old demo code for dead languages. And to be clear: that was always a choice. Over and over again tools meant to make it easier for humans to approach big problems are discarded in favor of tools that are easier to teach to computers, and that decision is described as an inevitability.

This isn’t just Worse Is Better, this is “Worse Is All You Get Forever”. How many off-by-one disasters could we have avoided if the “foreach” construct that existed in BCPL had made it into C? How much more insight would all of us have into our code if we’d put the time into making Michael Chastain’s nearly-omniscient debugging framework – PTRACE_SINGLESTEP_BACKWARDS! – work in 1995? When I found this article by John Backus wondering if we can get away from Von Neumann architecture completely, I wonder where that ambition to rethink our underpinnings went. But the fact of it is that it didn’t go anywhere. Changing how you think is hard and the payoff is uncertain, so by and large we decided not to. Nobody wanted to learn how to play, much less build, Engelbart’s Violin, and instead everyone gets a box of broken kazoos.

In truth maybe somebody tried – maybe even succeeded! – but it would cost me hundreds of dollars to even start looking for an informed guess, so that’s the end of that.

It’s hard for me to believe that the IEEE’s membership isn’t going off a demographic cliff these days as their membership ages, and it must be awful knowing they’ve got decades of delicious, piping-hot research cooked up that nobody is ordering while the world’s coders are lining up to slurp watery gruel out of a Stack-Overflow-shaped trough and pretend they’re well-fed. You might not be surprised to hear that I’ve got a proposal to address both those problems; I’ll let you work out what it might be.

NC GOP Precinct Chair not racist just needs Voter ID law because of "lazy black people that wants the government to give them everything."

What do you look for in a man?

He gets his coverage from his wife’s Goldman insurance policy, which, like all employer-sponsored insurance, is given a juicy tax break. His office does not seem to grasp this elementary fact:

“Ted is on my health care plan,” said Mrs. Cruz, who has worked in Goldman’s investment management division for eight years. Catherine Frazier, a spokeswoman for the senator, confirmed the coverage, which Goldman said was worth at least $20,000 a year. “The senator is on his wife’s plan, which comes at no cost to the taxpayer and reflects a personal decision about what works best for their family,” she said.

No cost to the taxpayer? Nuh-huh:

In fact, the Senator and Mrs. Cruz are probably* getting a bigger tax break than the cost of coverage of a typical, non-elderly Medicaid beneficiary, or even two … (* I don’t know the Cruz’s income with certainty. I think it’s safe to assume it puts them in one of the higher marginal tax rate brackets. A Senator’s salary is $174,000. Ms. Cruz is a managing director at Goldman Sachs.)

Having put the knife in, Austin Frakt wiggles it a bit. Read the whole thing.

Update from a reader:

Ted Cruz released his tax returns during his Senate primary campaign. In 2010, his wife made $360,290 working for Goldman Sachs. Ted made well over $1 million as a partner in his Houston law firm.

So he’s almost certainly costing the taxpayers more than a typical Medicaid beneficiary. Worth knowing.

(Photo by Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Clare Algar thinks it’s possible:

Thirty-two states retain the death penalty in the U.S., but a new obstacle is making it increasingly difficult for them to carry it out. Pharmaceutical companies are taking a moral stand. The manufacturers of the drugs required by state departments of corrections for executions are saying they will not allow their products to be employed in this way. Manufacturers in the UK, US, Denmark, Israel, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, and India have taken steps to prevent their drugs being used in executions.

This has had an astonishing effect. Shortages of lethal injection drugs and attendant litigation have resulted in moratoria—an official halting of executions—in Arkansas, California, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oregon, and Tennessee.

The Energy and Commerce Committee is now a bit more than two hours into its hearing on HealthCare.gov. If you've missed it, this tweet pretty much sums up the proceedings:

To be fair, that's not just true for Republicans on the E&C Committee. It's true for the Democrats, too. Most Republicans have spent the hearing showing that they've spent little or no time trying to understand HealthCare.gov's problems and they're even less interested in fixing them. But most Democrats have spent the hearing accusing Republicans of bad faith and reminding people that the GOP just shut down the government. For the most part, the assembled contractors have retreated behind a haze of acronyms, optimistic spin and uncomfortable silences.

(Two quick exceptions: Fred Upton, the Republican chairman of the committee, has done an excellent job. And Diana DeGette, one of the top Democrats on the committee, actually seemed upset about the problems of HealthCare.gov rather than about the Republicans trying to take political advantage of those problems.)

And that's not surprising. The problem with this hearing is that the parties have the wrong incentives for it. Democrats have a policy interest in fixing HealthCare.gov's problems but a political interest in downplaying their severity. Republicans have a policy interest in seeing the problems fester — and in creating new ones — but a political interest in hyping them. The result is that the party that wants to talk about what's wrong with HealthCare.gov doesn't want to actually figure out how to fix it while the party that wants to fix it doesn't want to talk about it.

On the bright side, Frank Pallone, a New Jersey Democrat, did tell Michigan Republican Joe Barton that he "will not yield to this monkey court!" So at least that happened in Congress today.

spybrarian:

erikawithac:

a-golden-lasso-of-my-own:

Yay! Feminist Anthropology time!

Prehistoric Cave Prints Show Most Early Artists Were Women

Alongside drawings of bison and horses, the first painters left clues to their identity on the stone walls of caves, blowing red-brown paint through rough tubes and stenciling outlines of their palms. New analysis of ancient handprints in France and Spain suggests that most of those early artists were women.

This is a surprise, since most archaeologists have assumed it was men who had been making the cave art. One interpretation is that early humans painted animals to influence the presence and fate of real animals that they’d find on their hunt, and it’s widely accepted that it was the men who found and killed dinner.

But a new study indicates that the majority of handprints found near cave art were made by women, based on their overall size and relative lengths of their fingers.

"The assumption that most people made was it had something to do with hunting magic," Penn State archaeologist Dean Snow, who has been scrutinizing hand prints for a decade, told NBC News. The new work challenges the theory that it was mostly men, who hunted, that made those first creative marks. 

Another reason we thought it was men all along? Male archeologists from modern society where gender roles are rigid and well-defined — they found the art. "[M]ale archaeologists were doing the work," Snow said, and it’s possible that ”had something to do with it.”

I added the emphasis in bold, but the “that” was already italicized in the article, and it’s probably my favorite part. I love this article, although I’m not a huge fan of the fact that it’s considered so incredibly shocking and radical to imagine that women possibly participated in society 40,000 years ago.

In other awesome feminist anthropology news: it is now somewhat accepted that the venus sculptures, rather than being depictions of female beauty by male artists, were self-portraits by women looking down at their own bodies. The paleolithic figurines lose their distorted proportions and acquire representational realism if we understand that they are self-portraits created by women looking down at their own bodies. 

See also: This quote by Sandy Toksvig

When I was a student at Cambridge I remember an anthropology professor holding up a picture of a bone with 28 incisions carved in it. ‘This is often considered to be man’s first attempt at a calendar’ she explained. She paused as we dutifully wrote this down. ‘My question to you is this – what man needs to mark 28 days? I would suggest to you that this is woman’s first attempt at a calendar.’

It was a moment that changed my life. In that second I stopped to question almost everything I had been taught about the past. How often had I overlooked women’s contributions? How often had I sped past them as I learned of male achievement and men’s place in the history books? Then I read Rosalind Miles’s book The Women’s History of the World (recently republished as Who Cooked the Last Supper?) and I knew I needed to look again. History is full of fabulous females who have been systematically ignored, forgotten or simply written out of the records. They’re not all saints, they’re not all geniuses, but they do deserve remembering.

the willendorf sculpture and others like her were /the first selfies/ and its amazing

The paleolithic figurines lose their distorted proportions and acquire representational realism if we understand that they are self-portraits created by women looking down at their own bodies.

I really, really love this sentence.

tbh i am not 100% buying the sculpture thing just because i think women would have access to seeing other womens bodies, not merely their own by first person. but that doesn’t mean they weren’t the carvers. idk.

greybanshee:

stfueverything:

bspolitics:

amprog:

The value of the minimum wage is LOWER than it was in the 1960’s.

Remember this next time someone tries to say those pushing for a higher minimum wage are “whiny” or “entitled”.

cost of living goes up…. while wages literally go down.

Mind-bogglingly insane.

devojka:

my semester’s design project

'REACTIVE DYNAMISM'

A dynamic “second skin” which articulates a wearer’s need for personal space by responding to and exaggerating his body language. The piece changes position depending on the movement the wearer makes with each arm.

We used a combination of digital fabrication techniques and handcrafting to get this result.

owlsintophats:

I’d like to tell you about my new puppet, but city council insists that it doesn’t exist

The number of families with children living in deep poverty has gone up 130 percent since 1996

shoomlah:

So I was chatting with the lovely Justin Oaksford yesterday, and he casually asked if I used photo reference for my recent Rolemodels piece- not as a bad thing, but because the pose and the camera angle read well.  Pretty sure I grinned like an idiot when he brought it up because, goddammit, I’m proud that the work shows!  I’ve felt like my work has been somewhat stilted as of late- I could feel myself subconsciously trending towards easier angles, easier poses, easier expressions just because it’s slightly less frustrating for my brain to process- so getting that confirmation from a colleague was pretty damn satisfying.

I think there’s a tendency for artists to take pride in being able to draw out of your head, and, while that’s an admittedly important skill, what’s actually important is what that skill implies- it implies that you’ve internalized reference.  That you’ve spent so much time looking at the world around you, studying it, drawing from it, breaking it down, that you’ve amassed an extensive mental library that you can draw from.  You are Google reborn in the shallow husk of a human being.

But heck, the world’s a big place- what are the chances that you ever get to a point that you’ve internalized all of it?  Internalized it AND ALSO are never going to forget it ever?  Probably no chance at all.  Sorry buddy.  So rather than bemoaning the fact that we don’t have impenetrable search engine cyborg brains- yet- you sure as hell better still be using reference to fill in/refresh those empty shelves in your mental library.  You shouldn’t have worm-ridden books about dinosaur anatomy from the 60’s in there.  Stegosauruses with brains in their tails?  CLEAN THAT SHIT OUT.

So my general process for using reference of any sort is:

1. loose thumbnails and brainstorming.  If you have an idea, get that raw thing- unadulterated in it’s potential shittiness- onto paper.  Good art is a combination of both instinct and discipline, so you don’t want to entirely discount those lightning strikes of brilliance.  Or idiocy.  Happens to all of us.
2. research and reference.  Start gathering and internalizing whatever reference is pertinent to your piece- could be diagrams, art, photos, good old-fashioned READIN’, whathaveyou.  Please note that this doesn’t mean find one picture of a giraffe- this means find tons of photos of giraffes, read about giraffes, understand giraffes, and learn how to incorporate that knowledge into your art with purpose and intent (Justin uses the word “intent” a lot so I’m stealing it).  Don’t blindly copy what you see, but understand how to integrate it in an interesting and informed manner.
3. studies and practice.  Could be lumped in with the previous step, granted, but it’s worth reiterating- if you’re drawing something new, it’s worth doing some studies.  You discover things that you wouldn’t otherwise by just staring at them.  It’s weird how I’m still learning this- “Gee golly, six-shooters are way easier to draw now that I’ve drawn a ton of them!” Yes wow Claire BRILLIANT.  Gold star.
4. go for the gold.  Finally, I’m sure it goes without saying, you integrate all of that research and knowledge into your initial thumbnails.  If you learned something about anatomy, or fashion, or color, or butts, now you can drastically improve your original idea with this newfound knowledge.  Also, per the images above, this is also your chance to improve on the reference- photos are a fantastic tool, but trust your instincts.  Cameras can’t make informed decisions.

…So that’s my soapbox- it’s pretty easy, and it’s totally worth it.  Research and reference lets you stand on the shoulders of giants- it lends legitimacy, specificity, and allure to your work that wouldn’t be there if you were just drawing out of your head 100% of the time.  To put it simply- it makes your work ownable.  It makes you stand out.

It makes you a better artist. :)

-C

Wonderful! One of my least favorite excuses during critique was when the artist would say “but that’s how it looked in my reference photo!” when called out for something in their piece looking awkward or wrong. Reference is a helpful tool, not a rigid map for what the final should look like.

The end of the night is a little like the end of the world sometimes, when you wake up from your dream or your nightmare, when you wake up from the daze of love and find you were in love with a ghost, when you realize that you’ve been working for eight hours straight in the dim shadows of the early dawn. It’s over. Ready or not.

Lately, I’ve been pulling a lot of late nights and all-nights, working on my paintings and writing, deep in the wonderful trance that artwork and writing generate, and nothing else exists for a while. Next to my art table, I’ve got a few prints of Mondrian’s trees, and I like to look up at them sometimes, while I work.

If you’re thinking “Trees? Wasn’t Mondrian that guy who exclusively painted rectangles in primary colors?” then you’re in for a treat: Mondrian’s early work was startlingly different from his later obsession with rectangles. If you follow the early work (the trees in particular) chronologically, you can see how he got into geometry. He is clearly preoccupied by the way the trees divide and fracture the sky behind them. The spaces between the branches become more and more dominant until they swallow up everything else.

In the end, Mondrian throws out everything but the math and the primary colors: elementary particles of the world of the artist.

Ten years ago, I painted the last of the major arcana cards, The World. At the time, I was mad about abstract mathematics (not that I’m not still, I simply have learned to be less heavy-handed about it). I was just

beginning the process of designing and painting my tarot cards, and I was still having trouble figuring out a method. My head was always a confusing tumult of images and ideas, and I usually didn’t know how they would fit together until I put it all down on paper. I would sometimes go through four or five unsatisfactory card paintings until I got it right (energetically tearing up an unacceptable card, catharsis suffusing me with each shred of paper that fell to the floor). I was in the process of teaching myself how to use watercolors. I had never done a large-scale art project before. So, there was a great deal of trial and error, but by the time I had gotten to the World card, I had refined my process to a gracefully attenuated point.

As much as I was inclined towards the final card of the tarot’s major arcana, I found (and still find) the World a challenging card to interpret. After all, it is a word that is meant to encompass everything. Where are we even supposed to begin? Going through the knucklehead prehistory of our current understanding of the universe is of little assistance. Both the Rider-Waite and Thoth images of the World are symbolic representations of the human experience (which, actually, is what all the science we have on the subject amounts to as well), so I decided to begin with us—specifically, with the foundations of identity: our place within our environment. As the Fool is a blank card, depicting an entire lack of experience or identity (and the Angel is the Fool’s transformation from an empty vessel into a divine being), the World must be about the acquisition of a self, and of a relationship with the universe outside the self.

The first version of the World was made of math: two trees composed of infinity signs (and whose shadows reveal them to be the Trees of Life and Knowledge), with a child in the space between them (demarcated as human and therefore finite by the “1” inscribed on her hand), orbited by a cluster of zeroes or planetary bodies. This is one story of the original bitten apple: how our species acquired almost godlike powers of understanding and control over our environment (though, as anyone can see, without any of godlike powers of foresight which comes along with the dubious ability to live indefinitely).

Which brings us (somehow, but you’ll see, just you wait) to a tiny little jewel of a poem by ee cummings, from his book “95 Poems”.

wild(at our first) beasts uttered human words
—our second coming made stones sing like birds—
but o the starhushed silence which our third’s

Within the jumbled flavors of human evolution, religion, sound, and sex, the poem has always seemed to be about the arc of creation and destruction. Language, technology, and a strange cosmological quiescence at the end: the human body, the human race, the planet, and the whole universe will ultimately destroy itself, much in the same fashion in which, in the beginning, it created itself.

I did not have a clear notion of this when I painted my first version of the World (beasts uttered human words) back in 2004, but the velvety black shadows of the trees and the fury of the child between them seem to me to

portend the last two versions, which I painted only in recent months (each painted all at once, in two

isolated all-night electrical storms of artistic energy).

The second World (stones sing like birds) has several of the same elements: the trees and the orbital band of

planets. The human child has vanished, and in its place is a black snake (or is it a serpentine hold in the fabric of the universe, through which the great eye of some god or monster shines?) The moth of the swords

suit (the same moth first introduced in the clothing of the pregnant, masked figure in Death) hovers above the trees, whose roots and branch tips intermingle in a

continuous ring. In the third World (but o the starhushed

silence), the trees are replaced by golden serpents (a duplicate version of the

Ouroboros world

serpent, eating its own tail, a representation of a primordial and eternal unity). The death

moth has vanished, and no central figure exists between the trees and their orbiting

planetary belt.

What began as a human child and transformed into a black serpent with a human eye has ended in simple darkness, as though it is an open portal into some other world, brand-new and unknown.

As though the world had already ended and nothing was left but a cloud of postexplosive, poststellar material gathering itself along the last remaining vectors of gravitational and electromagnetic forces. As though nothing was left but the mathematical principles behind the grand set of the physical laws of the universe.

The World card, last of the major arcana, is really the end of the world. Only upon the conclusion of the bigger story do we discover its meaning.

This post is part of a series about my deck, the Cheimonette Tarot.

The Kickstarter to fund its publication is currently live! Pre-order a deck or the artwork here.

In the New York Times today, John G. Taft, who is the grandson of Robert Taft, makes his contribution to the growing “Oh, conservatives used to be so moderate, now they’re just radicals and crazies” literature that The Reactionary Mind was supposed to consign to the dustbin of history. (You can see how successful I’ve been.)

Having written about and against this thesis of conservatism’s Golden Age so many times, I don’t think it’s useful for me to rehearse my critique here. Instead, I’ll focus on one important tidbit of Taft’s argument, in the hope that a little micro-history about his grandfather might serve to correct our macro-history of conservatism.

Here’s what Taft says:

This recent display of bomb-throwing obstructionism by Republicans in Congress evokes another painful, historically embarrassing chapter in the Republican Party — that of Senator Joseph McCarthy, chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, whose anti-Communist crusade was allowed by Republican elders to expand unchecked, unnecessarily and unfairly tarnishing the reputations of thousands of people with “Red Scare” accusations of Communist affiliation. Finally Senator McCarthy was brought up short during the questioning of the United States Army’s chief counsel, Joseph N. Welch, who at one point demanded the senator’s attention, then said: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” He later added: “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

…

There is more than a passing similarity between Joseph McCarthy and Ted Cruz, between McCarthyism and the Tea Party movement. The Republican Party survived McCarthyism because, ultimately, its excesses caused it to burn out. And eventually party elders in the mold of my grandfather were able to realign the party with its brand promise: The Republican Party is (or should be) the Stewardship Party.

According to Taft, McCarthy’s “anti-Communist crusade was allowed by Republican elders to expand unchecked” and it was ultimately forces like his grandfather who put that crusade in check.

Let’s turn to the Wayback Machine, shall we?

First, it’s important to remember that in 1946, the year McCarthy was elected to the Senate, Taft was the leader of the conservative Senate Republicans who were eager to use redbaiting to help Republicans get elected. Taft had no compunction about claiming that the legislative agenda of Democrats in Congress “bordered on Communism.” That kind of talk helped put the entire Congress back in Republican hands for the first time since 1930. So forceful—and out there, ideologically speaking—was Taft’s leadership that after the election the New Republic editorialized that “Congress…now consists of the House, the Senate, and Bob Taft.”

Second, Taft was the author of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, one of the most infamous rollbacks in twentieth century American history. (Far from being a genteel defender or “steward” of tradition, as Taft the grandson suggests, Taft the grandfather aggressively sought to counter the New Deal. When he ran against Eisenhower for the Republican nomination in 1952, Taft was the candidate of domestic rollback, not accommodation, including rollback of such policies as the Fair Employment Practices Commission, which required companies receiving government contracts not to discriminate on the basis of race.)

Among Taft-Hartley’s many provisions was the prohibition of closed or union shops, which paved the way for states to pass “right to work” laws and other anti-union legislation of the sort that we’ve seen many right-wing state legislators pushing since 2010—particularly in those states where both elected branches of government were suddenly in the hands of the Republicans, thanks in no small part to support from the Tea Party.

In addition, the anticommunist provision of Taft-Hartley was one of the more potent pieces of legislation contributing to the developing atmosphere of Cold War hysteria around communism. That provision mandated that all unions seeking the protections of the Wagner Act had to have their leaders take an oath affirming that they were neither members nor supporters of the Communist Party or any other organization seeking the overthrow of the United States government. That provision provoked a wave of red-baiting and red-hunting within and around the labor movement, which proved to be a kind of social corollary to what the government was doing in and around the executive branch.

Taft was not the opponent or even just the helpmate of this repression; he was a leading agent of it. More than three years before anyone outside of Wisconsin had even heard of Joseph McCarthy.

But on the question of McCarthy himself, the record is clear: Taft did not merely “allow” the man and the ism to dominate; Taft actively coddled, encouraged, and supported him and it at every turn.

As early as March 23, 1950—four weeks after McCarthy’s famous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia—Taft gave McCarthy his firm support, telling McCarthy, “If one case [accusing a State Department official of being a Red] doesn’t work out, bring up another.” And added, for good measure, “Keep it up, Joe.”

When Truman attacked McCarthy’s speech—no amateur when it came to red-baiting, Truman called McCarthy “the greatest asset the Kremlin has”—Taft responded in kind, accusing Truman of being “bitter and prejudiced” and of “libeling” McCarthy, who was “a fighting Marine.” (Asked whether he had indeed libeled McCarthy, Truman responded, “Do you think that is possible?”)

While the Tydings Committee conducted its hearings about Communists in the State Department, Taft denounced the hearings as a “farce” and a “whitewash,” and pushed for even more aggressive inquisitions into subversion of the executive branch. As late as 1952 Taft would be harping on the issue of Communists in the State Department. He claimed that Dean Acheson had welcomed the Communist takeover of China because “in the State Department there’s been a strong Communist sympathy, as far as the Chinese Communists are concerned.” Sensing a major political opportunity in the coming presidential election of 1952, Taft said, “The only way to get rid of Communists in the State Department is to change the head of the government.”

In 1951, however, Taft pulled back —after it seemed that McCarthy had gone too far, accusing George Marshall on the Senate floor of aiding the Communist cause. That was in June. In October, after temporizing for months in response to a wave of negative publicity, Taft inched away from the senator from Wisconsin. He said:

I don’t think one who overstates his case helps his own case.

There are certain points on which I wouldn’t agree with McCarthy. His extreme attack against General Marshall is one of the things on which I cannot agree.

But within weeks, Taft reversed course. In response to a wave of letters from complaining fans of McCarthy, Taft issued a correction in which he downplayed his disagreements with McCarthy (“I often disagree with other Republican senators”) and reaffirmed his support: “Broadly speaking, I approve of Senator McCarthy’s program.”

Just in case there was any doubt about that, Taft personally endorsed McCarthy’s reelection bid during the Wisconsin primary of 1952, claiming that “Senator McCarthy has dramatized the fight to exclude Communists from the State Department. I think he did a great job in undertaking that goal.” He even campaigned for McCarthy—despite the fact that McCarthy never returned the favor by endorsing Taft.

And on at least one occasion (there might have been more), Taft quietly passed information to McCarthy about possible subversion in the State Department, suggesting to McCarthy that one employee deserved “special attention.”

By the time McCarthy was censured by the Senate in December 1954—not because of Robert Joseph Welch’s eloquent pleas but because he had turned on the Republican leadership and the Eisenhower administration, who no longer needed him—Taft had been dead sixteen months.

This was the man they once called “Mr. Conservative” who is now being held up as the paragon of moderation. To paraphrase Woody Allen: a moderate Republican is a right-wing reactionary plus time.

(I should clarify that this post is not meant to pin the entire blame for McCarthyism or the larger atmosphere of redbaiting on conservatives; liberals and Democrats more than contributed their fair share, as I argue in my book Fear: The History of a Political Idea. I just wanted to set the record straight here regarding the GOP.)

In this video from Low Pay is Not OK, we hear some of a recorded conversation between a ten-year McDonald's employee and the company's "McResources" helpline for employees in financial trouble. Nancy, the employee, explains that she can't make ends meet for her family on her McDonald's pay, and the company representative counsels her to enroll in federally funded welfare programs (low-paid fast-food employees account for $7B in welfare payments) to help her eat and get medical care.

The folks at Low Pay Is Not OK, one of the campaigns seeking the ability to unionize fast food workers and increase their pay, has posted the above video of a 10-year McDonald’s vet (who earns $8.25/hour and has never received a raise) placing a call to the McResources hotline, which the company advertises to cash-strapped employees with statements like “Getting Help is Easy” and “Free help when you need it!”

The recording is admittedly edited by the video-makers, so we don’t know the full content of what the hotline operator said. However, it is clear from the call that the operator does suggest that the employee seek out food pantries, look into SNAP (food stamps), and Medicaid.

McDonald’s McResources Help Line Tells Worker How To Get Welfare Benefits [Chris Morran/Consumerist]

serenescientist:

claudia-cher:

History of fashion from the Tracy J. Butler

And with accurate period dance poses/moves? Fuck yes.

Wow.  I guess I should follow through and color these sometime.

Long-time math teacher Gary Rubinstein confesses that he would “gleefully chop at least 40 percent of the [math] topics that are currently taught from K to 12″:

Two hundred years ago, students who finished high school learned about as much mathematical content as modern fifth graders learn today. And over the past 200 years, topics were gradually added to the curriculum until the textbooks have become giant bloated monstrosities. And though the modern high schooler ‘learns’ algebra, geometry, algebra II and trigonometry, statistics, and maybe even precalculus and calculus, the average adult still only remembers about as much as the adults from 200 ago did, or about what the average fifth grader is supposed to have learned.

His modest proposal: Make all math instruction optional after 8th grade.

Yes, Krugman got the Internet wrong. But Andrew Sprung rightly notes how much he has gotten right (at times to my chagrin):

He was right about the Euro. He was right about the Bush tax cuts. He was right about the Iraq war. He was right about the housing bubble. He was right about the size of the stimulus.  And, I just accidentally reminded myself, he was right about Obama’s dreams of postpartisanship. On Jan. 28, 2008, with the country in full flush of Obama fever, Krugman posted a warning that Obama ignored for the first 32-odd months of his presidency.

I blogged the site Unfuck Your Habitat, which offers timely, humane, simple advice for people who struggle with mess and disorganization . Today there's "MAKE YOUR BED: excuses are boring" and a brief post on getting sex stains off a comforter, though a more typical bedtime post reads:

Unfuck tomorrow morning

* Wash the dishes in your sink
*Get your outfit for tomorrow together, including accessories
*Set up coffee/tea/breakfast
*Make your lunch
*Put your keys somewhere obvious
*Wash your face and brush your teeth
*Charge your electronics
*Pour a little cleaner in the toilet bowl (if you don’t have pets or children or sleepwalking adults)
*Set your alarm
*Go to bed at a reasonable hour

All of this simple and useful stuff has been packaged into a new Android app that's simple and cute -- good advice, timers for short sprints of cleaning (along with suggestions, room by room, for said sprints), a wall commemorating your achievements, and the same friendly, understanding, compassionate approach to "terrifying motivation for lazy people with messy homes."

If traditional housekeeping isn’t really your style, but your living space needs a little attention, UfYH’s challenges and customizable features will help you get your place back in shape, a few minutes at a time. Rather than encourage marathon cleaning sessions, UfYH gives you the tools to clean up, a little at a time. Unfucking your habitat turns dreaded chores into easy-to-complete tasks, with a hefty dose of “filthy” language to motivate you to clean up.

Unfuck Your Habitat

The story of a woman who spilled coffee on her lap and ended up being awarded $2.9 million in a lawsuit against McDonald's is often cited as THE example of frivolous lawsuits and out-of-control juries. The real story, though, is different from the version you've probably heard. For one thing, the woman suffered 3rd-degree burns to 16% of her body. For another, at the time, McDonald's served their coffee at a temperature 30 degrees hotter than the stuff that comes out of home coffeemakers. Also the $2.9 million was only the jury-recommended award, based on just two days worth of McDonald's coffee sales. This New York Times video is an interesting look at the nuance that gets lost when media, pop culture, and politicians twist an event to better serve their own narratives and ends.

Last we heard of one-time tech pioneer John McAfee he was living out some sort modern day Heart of Darkness fantasy in Belize and suspected in the murder of a neighbor before becoming an international fugitive and doing all sorts of other awesome stuff. Now House Republicans want him to get to the bottom of what happened with the Obamacare rollout.

no matter what happens remember that there is always an alternate universe out there somewhere where this is a story about some hip gay dads who adopt a baby and everything turns out okay

That’s why Jonathan Bernstein is betting against a weeks-long shutdown in January:

All three extended shutdowns in recent American history—the two Newt Gingrich shutdowns in late 1995, and the Ted Cruz shutdown this month—were deliberately planned. In 1995, Gingrich foolishly believed that Bill Clinton was a weak man who would buckle if faced with the risks of an extended shutdown. This year, at least if you accept the surface explanation, radicals believed that a long fight would spark a wave of anger at Obamacare. It’s possible, of course, that Tea Partiers or some other group will decide another long shutdown is the right plan. But don’t expect prolonged shutdown (more than two or three days) to be the natural result of a normal budget stalemate. It doesn’t seem to happen.

Even if we avoid another shutdown, Collender has low expectations for the budget negotiations:

[W]hy does anyone think that the 2014 sequester that will occur on mid-January unless Congress and the White House agree on a deal to stop it will be enough to get everyone to compromise? Everyone also hated it the first time around but it was the best alternative compared to all of the others. Not only will that still be the case in January 2014, it will be even truer this winter with the primaries and general election being only months rather than years away.

That’s not to say that a budget deal can’t or won’t happen in December and January. But it does say that, if there is a deal, it will be much smaller and far more symbolic than significant. It will be the kind of deal where everyone declares victory and goes home.

John McArthur is a very big fish in the sizable pond of white Reformed American evangelicalism. He’s the long-time pastor of a California megachurch and the author of scores of books, including a best-selling study Bible. He’s influential — he’s not just somebody who has thousands of followers, but somebody who has lots of followers who themselves have thousands of followers.

MacArthur’s latest book revisits one of his long-time “concerns” (cue the stock expression of saintly faux-lamentation): He doesn’t much care for Pentecostalism and “charismatic renewal” churches. The new book is called Strange Fire: The Danger of Offending the Holy Spirit With Counterfeit Worship. If that title sounds like he’s accusing Pentecostals and other charismatic Christians of “counterfeit worship” that “offends the Holy Spirit,” that’s because that’s exactly what he’s doing.

There are maybe half a billion Pentecostal/charismatic Christians around the world, but MacArthur doesn’t want you to think he’s dismissing their faith as “counterfeit” lightly. He’s only saying this because John MacArthur speaks for real, true, error-free Christianity. Just ask him, he’ll tell you:

This is for the true church, so that they can discern; so that they can be protected from error; and so that they can be a source of truth for others outside the church. … It is unloving to leave people in darkness and error. … Truth by its very nature is separated from error. And it is far more important to be divided by truth than united by error. …

So if you’re looking for some namby-pamby post-modernist dithering about chastened epistemologies and all that crap from French philosophers who say we see “through a glass, darkly,” or that we can only “know in part,” John MacArthur wants you to know he’ll have none of it. The absolute truth is absolutely accessible to him, and if you don’t see that, well, you’re just denying the Bible.*

Anyway, MacArthur kicked off his new book with a “Strange Fire” conference — a big anti-Pentecostal-palooza attended by some 4,000 people and streamed live on the Web for his fans around the world.

As you can imagine, this hasn’t gone over well with those blasphemous counterfeit Pentecostal types.

But, see, the problem here is that those same Pentecostal and charismatic Christians, they’ll tell you that they speak for real, true, error-free Christianity. They’ll tell you that the absolute truth is absolutely accessible to them, and that if John MacArthur doesn’t see that, well, he’s just denying the Bible.

John MacArthur quotes the Bible — the infallible, inerrant, inspired “Word of God” which he says is the ultimate arbiter of absolute truth. And MacArthur says the Bible says he’s right and the Pentecostals are wrong.

The Pentecostals quote the Bible — the infallible, inerrant, inspired “Word of God” which they say is the ultimate arbiter of absolute truth. And they say the Bible says they’re right and MacArthur is wrong.

It’s possible that MacArthur is wrong about the Pentecostals. It’s possible that the Pentecostals are wrong about MacArthur.

But it is undeniable that they are both wrong about the Bible.

Each side proves that the other is wrong about the Bible. Whatever else one wants to claim about the Bible, the fact of this dispute — the very existence of this dispute — demonstrates that the Bible is not and cannot be the ultimate arbiter of absolute truth.

Neither side is able to acknowledge this, of course. They’re both playing their trump card by appealing to the inerrant Bible. “Take that!” they cry in unison, slapping down identical cards. “That’s the ace of spades and nothing beats the ace of spades!” But both sides are shouting too loudly to hear that the other person is saying the same exact thing. Both sides are so supremely confident in the power of their top card that they can’t bother seeing that their opponent is playing the same exact card.

Ace of spades vs. ace of spades. That’s a tie. But that’s not supposed to happen. That’s the whole point of having “biblical inerrancy” as your trump card — it’s the ultimate tie-breaker. When both sides play the same card, that tie-breaker doesn’t work. What good is a deck with 52 aces of spades?

This is usually when things get ugly. The only way to preserve their assumption about the Bible providing clear, unambiguous access to absolute truth is to jump to the conclusion that anyone who reads it differently must be “deceived” or deliberately attempting to deceive others.

That’s where MacArthur goes in that nasty Christian Post piece linked above. Not surprising, since he has a long history of going there and seems to relish the opportunity. I’m sure we’ll see many responses in unkind kind from the other side.

Both sides have to do this. It’s their only hope for preserving this inerrantist model.

You can see this dynamic at work in some of the heated comments to David Hayward’s heartfelt response to MacArthur’s “Strange Fire” attack. One poor guy just keeps insisting that all we need to do to sort out this dispute is to turn to the Bible and see what it says. He even quotes a Bible passage that affirms this approach. The Bible has to provide clarity and certainty — it just has to, or all is lost. He burns “with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite.” Without such an ultimate sure foundation — an inerrant, infallible “Word of God” providing access to absolute truth and a trump card for every dispute — then “our whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses.”

I appreciate that desire. Access to absolute truth — like flight, immortality, invincibility, time travel, and limitless free refills — would be awesome. But it’s not part of the deal for us humans. We’re finite and fallible. We are not gods. We are not God. Even if such a thing as an inerrant and infallible Bible existed, there would be no inerrant and infallible human capable of reading it as such.

This whole “Strange Fire” fight is nothing new. Charismatic and anti-charismatic fundies and evangelicals have been having this same fight for most of the last century.

I’ve written here before about earlier iterations of this same dispute, and how a provisional cease-fire between the two factions in this very same fight was for me a saving grace at the private fundamentalist Christian school I attended growing up. That uneasy truce made me constantly aware that, despite its claims, belief in a self-evidently inerrant Bible did not really provide unambiguous access to absolute truth, and that it could not be relied on to settle all disputes. Here’s a bit, again, from that post:

When I was a student at TCS, I had many classmates and teachers who were members of Pentecostal and Assemblies of God churches. Those churches were just as fundamentalist as my own, and our churches were fully in agreement on many points of fundie doctrine — young-earth creationism, Rapture prophecy, inerrantism, literalism, KJV-onlyism, etc. (This was the late 1970s and early ’80s, so anti-abortionism hadn’t yet arisen to eclipse all of those as the pre-eminent identifier.)

But those Pentecostal and AofG churches also taught the charismatic gifts of the Holy Spirit, including a big emphasis on speaking in tongues, which they taught was the sign of the baptism in the Spirit and a necessary mark for any true Christian.

At my independent, fundamentalist Baptist church, speaking in tongues was forbidden. It was seen as, at best, a heresy, and at worst as evidence of demonic possession. Anything even slightly charismatic-seeming was frowned on at my church. I remember once someone raised their hands above their head during worship. Once.

… The form of fundamentalism taught by our church was utterly incompatible with the form of fundamentalism taught by some of my classmates’ and teachers’ churches. Our church taught that they were not legitimate Christians, and their church taught that we were not legitimate Christians. Both sides took this disagreement very seriously, with the denial/acceptance of speaking in tongues regarded as a theological disaster equivalent to embracing evolutionary science or textual criticism. Each side regarded the other as violating the all-or-nothing package-deal of fundamentalist Christianity.

And yet there we all were at Timothy Christian School. We were studying together, praying together and taking turns sharing our personal testimonies in chapel together. We were agreeing to disagree, respecting one another despite our differences. We’d have shuddered to hear the word, but our practice was downright ecumenical.

We couldn’t both be right. We might both be wrong. We might both be partly right and partly wrong. And those weren’t supposed to be possibilities for people with direct access to the infallible word of God.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

* MacArthur also doesn’t care for Krister Stendahl’s notions of mutual respect. He believes that truth, by its very nature, is separated from respect for error. So he’s not bound to follow Stendahl’s rule about trying to understand another religious perspective by asking “the adherents of that religion and not its enemies.” And he doesn’t seem constrained by Stendahl’s rule saying “Don’t compare your best to their worst”:

If the issue is unclear – as some are claiming – it has only become unclear under the influence of false teachers. It was clear to the apostles. It was clear to the early church fathers. It was clear to the reformers. It was clear to the Puritans. It is clear in creeds like the Westminster confession. It has been clear to reformed theologians like BB Warfield. It was clear to Spurgeon. It was clear, in the more modern times, to R.C. Sproul. Has it now become unclear, because of Aimee Semple McPherson, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker and Kenneth Copeland? That’s a ludicrous idea.

Is MacArthur unaware of the many serious, thoughtful theologians who have defended the Pentecostal/charismatic view? Or is he just being a dick by refusing to engage anyone but the most notorious charlatans? Either way, that’s a big problem.

Maine Gov. '47 percent' of people in our state don't work. "About 47%. It's really bad." Listen.