thoughtsignals

Here’s something different. Hustler publisher Larry Flynt has published a rememberance of Jerry Falwell in the L.A. Times:

It was the first time since the infamous 1988 trial that the reverend and I had been in the same room together, and the thought of even breathing the same air with him made me sick. I disagreed with Falwell (who died last week) on absolutely everything he preached, and he looked at me as symbolic of all the social ills that a society can possibly have. But I’d do anything to sell the book and the film, and Falwell would do anything to preach, so King’s audience of 8 million viewers was all the incentive either of us needed to bring us together.

Link.

Yesterday, we went down to the Haw River Festival in Bynum, in Chatham County. We used to live in Chatham County, so on the way back we thought we’d drive by our old house just to see if there was anything new that had been done to the exterior or the yard. Instead of a new flower bed or a different paint job, though, we found crime scene tape and several Chatham County Sheriff’s Department vehicles. Our old home had been turned into a crime scene.

The News & Observer this morning has some details:

Deputies were called to 29 Red Pine Road about 9:10 a.m. to check on a woman whose parents hadn’t heard from her in a week, police said. What they found was the body of Tracy Lynn Baldwin, 38. Investigators consider her death a homicide.

We sold the house to Tracy in the summer of 2003, and I remember seeing her twice: Once when we closed on the sale, and again a few months or perhaps a year later at a restaurant in Chapel Hill where she was waitressing. She seemed happy with the house.

Our hearts go out to her family today.

Link.

Creative writing teachers across the country are now trying to grapple with the question, more important than ever, of what to do when students write disturbing prose. You might think that you could somehow tell the truly disturbed students from those who merely want to be the next Stephen King. But maybe not.

“Lots of great literary works are deep and dark and disturbing — that would be Kafka,” says Deborah Landau, director of the creative writing program at New York University, who plans to discuss university protocol with her staff in the wake of Monday’s massacre. Yet teachers increasingly are being expected to distinguish between students’ pushing their creative boundaries or showing frightening warning signs. That’s a tall task, especially when students routinely hand in twisted texts dripping with bloodshed, cruelty, perversion and extreme sex scenes, say teachers.

Link.

Dinesh D’Souza asks the somewhat silly question “where is atheism when bad things happen?” A Virginia Tech atheist professor replies:

You can find us next week in the bloodied classrooms of a violated campus, trying to piece our thoughts and lives and studies back together.

With or without a belief in a god, with or without your asinine bigotry, we will make progress, we will breathe life back into our university, I will succeed in explaining this or that point, slowly, eventually, in a ham-handed way, at risk of tears half-way through, my students will come to feel comfortable again in a classroom with no windows or escape route, and hell yes we will prevail.

You see Mr D’Souza, I am an atheist professor at Virginia Tech and a man of great faith. Not faith in your god. Faith in my people.

Link.

Almost as soon as N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper announced that he was dropping all charges against the former Duke lacrosse players, the News & Observer had a promo up announcing a five-part series on the case beginning Saturday. The screenshot below is from this morning.

Mainly, this demonstrates that most people, including reporters, involved in the case were expecting it to be dropped. And it suggests, at least to me, that the N&O has been working on a big project about the case in anticipation of it being dropped. I imagine they have most of the stories written and ready to go.

The Bynum General Store, the last store in the tiny former Chatham County mill town of Bynum has closed. The N&O, justifiably, has given the town a nice Sunday story:

They still call Bynum a mill town, even though the old textile factory burned up a long time ago. These days it’s more of a 250-person village, held together by a few twisting streets and an impossibly quaint neighborly spirit.

I used to live just a few miles up the highway from Bynum, and I’ve visited the town once a year or so the last few years for the annual Haw River Festival. The story of Bynum is the story of a lot of North Carolina towns, especially in the last couple of decades. These communities, once driven, for good or bad, by the state’s textile industry are fading into the history books.

Up-and-comer country star Tift Merrit has written about the town, where she used to hold regular concerts in “Laid a highway.” (The N&O story quotes several verses from Merritt’s song, but in the online version they don’t do a very good job of distinguishing those quotes from the rest of the story.)

They laid a highway a few years back
Next town over by the railroad track
Some nights I’m glad it passed me by
Some nights I sit and watch my hometown die.

Link. There’s an audio slide show here that accompanies the story. Also, there’s a short clip of Merritt’s song accompanying the story (look in the column immediately to the right of the story for the Flash player). You can listen to the entire song on Merritt’s web site (click on “music” in the menu).

The New York Times has a lengthy piece about the growing body of regulatory exemptions and tax breaks that religious organizations have won across the country. In many cases, these special provisions give churches a competitive advantage over secular nonprofits in providing services such as child care.

In recent years, many politicians and commentators have cited what they consider a nationwide “war on religion” that exposes religious organizations to hostility and discrimination. But such organizations — from mainline Presbyterian and Methodist churches to mosques to synagogues to Hindu temples — enjoy an abundance of exemptions from regulations and taxes. And the number is multiplying rapidly.

Some of the exceptions have existed for much of the nation’s history, originally devised for Christian churches but expanded to other faiths as the nation has become more religiously diverse. But many have been granted in just the last 15 years — sometimes added to legislation, anonymously and with little attention, much as are the widely criticized “earmarks” benefiting other special interests.

An analysis by The New York Times of laws passed since 1989 shows that more than 200 special arrangements, protections or exemptions for religious groups or their adherents were tucked into Congressional legislation, covering topics ranging from pensions to immigration to land use. New breaks have also been provided by a host of pivotal court decisions at the state and federal level, and by numerous rule changes in almost every department and agency of the executive branch.

The special breaks amount to “a sort of religious affirmative action program,” said John Witte Jr., director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at the Emory University law school.

Link.

On a somewhat related note, here’s how one atheist respond’s to the question “Why do atheists care about religion?” in a video on YouTube: Link.

A Maryland parent has gotten his daughter’s school to excuse her from reading the Ray Bradbury anti-bookburning classic “Fahrenheit 451.” Now he wants the school district to remove it entirely from the curriculum.
The irony in this is incredibly rich, but apparently totally lost on the father in question. He has not read the book, but he’s looked through it, he says, and “found the following things wrong with the book: discussion of being drunk, smoking cigarettes, violence, ‘dirty talk,’ references to the Bible and using God’s name in vain.”
Link.

Do we need this?

From the New York Times:

A consortium of major universities, using Homeland Security Department money, is developing software that would let the government monitor negative opinions of the United States or its leaders in newspapers and other publications overseas.

Aren’t there U.S. embassies and professional diplomats stationed around the world who already monitor the press in other countries? Just wondering.

Link.

Remember that passenger jet that went down last week over the Brazilian jungle? Turns out it hit another jet. There was a New York Times writer aboard the other plane, and he writes about what happens in today’s paper.

Link.