Esquire was kind of a slightly more sophisticated version of Playboy, without all the fold outs and bunnies of course. The writing was a little better (there was writing in Playboy?), and it was a little more intellectual and it had this attitude like ain't we cool. It seems odd that the Esquire which I always thought of as left-leaning would print such an article, but it also liked to be shocking.
The Village Voice was an early alternative newspaper, like the Chicago Reader (which is fast fading as I write) only much more like a real newspaper.
The whole thing invites further investigation, but not for me at this time because my socks were knocked off by The Red Heifer!!! I first remember reading about this maybe twenty years ago in the pages of the New Yorker. That article was told from the aspect of fundalmentalist Christians cozying up to the fundamentalist Jews and in this case hoping to achieve The Red Heifer!!! In the Christian's theology this would bring on the second coming. One of the features of the second coming is that all the Jews who do not convert to Christianity go into the fiery lake, so you have to wonder why the Jews were working so closely with the Christians.
Well I suppose they thought that the Christians were ill informed, not realizing that Christ was just some desert rabble rouser, and what was really going to happen was messiah was going to appear for the first and only time. Not sure exactly what happens there except I think it is the end of the world, and since Jews don't have an afterlife one wonders what they are getting out of it. I would leave that to the bible scholar except I don't think he gets much past the Christian bible.
And I see a philosophical problem here. Wasn't the original assumption that God in His infinite wisdom and patience would one day slip The Red Heifer!!! onto a pasture as a sign that the messiah is just over the hill. Doesn't that negate humans working on this? Indeed aren't they forcing His hand? Isn't that like fooling with Mother Nature? I suppose some would say God is using these humans to advance His plan, but what of free will then? How can God enforce His plan using puny humans who would like as not, seeing as they have free will, decide, ah heck let's just knock this off and go to the ball game?
Speaking of ending the world, there is a story that I can't quite pinpoint, and that may prove to be apocryphal that when they were building one of those colliders one of the math guys pushed his pencil and said hey, I think there is like a ten to the negative twenty-three chance that this could form a black hole that will instantly swallow up the whole earth and indeed the universe. Someone in the press got a hold of this and maybe a politician or two and there was a bit of a fuss. The head scientist said, well um, hmmm, let's just recalculate that, and um, hmmm, there it is, no such chance, so don't worry your pretty little heads about this. We're absolutely sure that no such thing could happen, pretty sure,
And speaking of The Red Heifer!!! I happened to read Old Dog's post just as I was watching a NatGeo show on the Curiosity Rover currently roving the red planet, though I think it may have run into trouble since that show was made, Before that the show was on the current space station. As a kid I loved science, which I lost in my hippy days, but came back to later in life. I love the theories of science, but not so much the practical applications, but both those shows were great, those earnest scientists and engineers, all that planning and testing.
Which you know, something similar must be going on with those guys and The Red Heifer!!! Geneticists and nutritionists wrapped in white coats peering intently at computer screens, and if one little hair goes wrong, one little cyst appears, some tick sucks a little blood, there is a blemish and all that work will have gone to naught, just like if the parachute on the rover opened with an unexpected wrinkle and sent the whole thing spattering across the desert.
Something to think about huh?
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