Evening Edition is an Open Thread

1 Unchecked migration would see Singapore swell, Haiti halve

by Jordi Zamora and Karin Zeitvogel, AFP

20 mins ago

BP Oil Spill Settlements Likely to Shield Top Defendants

By IAN URBINA, The New York Times

Published: August 20, 2010

WASHINGTON – People and businesses seeking a lump-sum settlement from BP’s  $20 billion oil spill compensation fund  will most likely have to waive their right to sue not only BP, but also all the other major defendants involved with the spill, according to internal documents from the lawyers handling the fund.

…

“To be clear, it is BP’s position, consistent with this indemnification, that any settlement between Transocean and any of its injured or deceased employees must include a full release of all BP entities from any and all claims or liability in connection with the Deepwater Horizon incident,” said the letter, from John T. Hickey, a lawyer for BP. “This full release of all BP entities would indeed bar any subsequent claims against the fund being established by BP and the claims facility that will be administered by Mr. Feinberg.”

Thursday Night Throwball- Patriots @ Falcons.  Last Chance for our Boys until Monday.  I’ll be surprised if Rachel is back from Iraq yet.

• Comedy– Futurama (premier @ 10)
• Food– Extreme Cuisine With Jeff Corwin (Season Premier)
• History– Time Travel and Stan Lee’s Freaks (Umm… why do they call it History again?)
• Lifetime– Project Runway (premier)
• Turner Classic– Man Hunt, Madame Curie (Walter Pidgeon night)
• Discovery– Mythbusters and Pitchmen (Season Premier)
• TLC– Sr. v. Jr. (Last week’s season premier and new), BBQ Pitmasters (why isn’t this on Food Channel?)
• Toon– Repeats of Monday’s premiers
• Travel– Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations (Repeats from the 18th and the 16th, what kind of schedule are they running?)
• USA– Burn Notice, Royal Pains (premiers)

At 10 pm Disney is running some Phineas and Ferb.  I ♥ me some good trainwreck, guess what I’ll be watching.

Later-

• AMC– Repeat of Mad Men and Caddyshack
• FX– The Departed
• SciFi– WCG Ultimate Gamer (Season Premier, if you like watching other people play video games)

Jon has Jennifer Aniston, Stephen Jon Krakauer.  Did I mention new Futurama?  Alton does Wontons.  Now You Museum, Now You Don’t (thought this was last night, can’t tell you for sure because my cable was partly down for maintainance).

So I jump ship in Hong Kong and I make my way over to Tibet, and I get on as a looper at a course over in the Himalayas.

A looper?

A looper, you know, a caddy, a looper, a jock. So, I tell them I’m a pro jock, and who do you think they give me? The Dalai Lama, himself. Twelfth son of the Lama. The flowing robes, the grace, bald… striking. So, I’m on the first tee with him. I give him the driver. He hauls off and whacks one – big hitter, the Lama – long, into a ten-thousand foot crevasse, right at the base of this glacier. Do you know what the Lama says? Gunga galunga… gunga, gunga-lagunga. So we finish the eighteenth and he’s gonna stiff me. And I say, “Hey, Lama, hey, how about a little something, you know, for the effort, you know.” And he says, “Oh, uh, there won’t be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness.” So I got that goin’ for me, which is nice.

Yahoo TV Listings

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

1 Scores expelled in French crackdown on Roma

by Isabelle Wesselingh, AFP

Thu Aug 19, 11:08 am ET

Mormonism is no more ‘Christian’ than Islam.

Now the things I’m going to tell you about Mormonism may seem unfair, but they are core principles of the faith and I personally don’t think they’re more ridiculous than any other religion.  I’m using Wikipedia as my source where I can because, however much you may despise the depth of its scholarship, its contentious nature means that what is presented is generally agreed on (except for temporary aberrations like Colbert’s Elephant).

First of all, Mormons worship the God of Abraham, just like Jews, Christians, and (gasp) Muslims.

Like Islam, it is a Restorationist religion which believes that priesthood authority was lost and the text of the Bible changed.  This condition of Apostacy was rectified by a special revelation to a new prophet succeeding Jesus of Nazareth.

The story of the Mormons starts about 600 BC when a man named Lehi, his family, and several others are led by God from Jerusalem shortly before the fall of that city to the Babylonians in 586 BC.  After some wandering around the Arabian Peninsula they travel by sea to a new promised land- the Americas.

There’s some serious debate among scholars of Mormonism whether the events described take place in Central or Northern America and there is also a description (the Book of Ether) of an earlier migration by a group of Jews from Babylon called the Jaredites around 2500 B.C.  “The Jaredites grew to become a civilization that exceeded two million people just prior to their destruction.  They finally destroyed themselves about the time Lehi and the other refugees from Jerusalem arrived in America.”

Lehi and his refugees soon divided into two camps, the Nephi and the Lamanites, and they were almost constantly at war.

In the 3rd Book of Nephi there is a description of a miraculous visitation by Jesus of Nazareth after his death, resurrection, and assumption where he personally communicates the ‘Good News’ of the Gospel to the Nephi and for several generations after that there is peace.

The Book of Mormon as a whole is an account of the life of Mormon, the last great warrior king of the Nephi who is said to have written most of it (some transcribed from other records), and his son Moroni who finished it and hid it after the final defeat of the Nephi around 350 AD.

The chronology of Jesus of Nazareth’s visitations to America (North or Central) is somewhat confused as he appeared not only around the generally accepted dates of his life (say 33 BC to 50 AD) but also to the Jaredites some 2500 years previous and to Lehi and his followers shortly after their arrival some 600 years before he was even born.

It’s a miracle.

There is no God but God and Mohammed is his Prophet.

Now I’ll try not to be as harsh on Joe Smith Jr. as Sam Clemens.  If a man tells me he’s hefted something, I’m willing to believe it.

However.

Accepting the story at face value, the last Nephi and Lamanite died 1000 years before Columbus sailed the ocean blue and 1300 years before Joe Jr. dug up those tablets in Palmyra, New York and translated them from ‘reformed Egyptian’ with the aid of the Ghost of Angel Moroni.

It will take someone with much tougher theological chops than I (and as you can see I have some) to explain to me the difference between that and Mohammed’s revelations in a desert cave.

When you listen to Glenn Beck, or Mitt Romney, or Harry Reid, remember that these truths are articles of faith to them that they believe as firmly as you believe in the Miracle of the Menorah, the Resurrection of Christ, that Mohammed ascended to heaven with the angel Gabriel, or that Siddhartha Gautama sat under a lotus tree.

Ugh.  It’s no wonder why a majority of Americans (well, US Americans, but it’s just not as melliflous) no longer watch first run Television live and instead record it on their DVRs for later viewing.  Tonight certainly makes me envy my SciFi friend and her extensive collection of Pit Boss.

• AMC– Inside Man (a Spike Lee joint)
• ESPN– Giants @ Phillies, Rockies @ Dodgers
• ABC Family- Two Weeks Notice
• Food– The Great Food Truck Race (Series Premier repeat)
• Lifetime– Antwone Fisher (Denzel Washington night)
• Turner Classic– Torrid Zone, Kings Row (Ann Sheridan night)
• Discovery– Man v. Wild (last week’s and new)
• Travel– Man v. Food

Do you want to know what I’ll really be watching?  Probably The Great Food Truck Race and Mets @ Astros now, the new Man v. Wild at 9, and then maybe Kings Row.  Murder, insanity and sadism in a small town at the turn of the century with Ronald Reagan, Ann Sheridan, and Love that Bob.

I mean, Wild Hogs twice in a row?  Not if you paid me.  As far as I’m concerned it’s cruel and unusual punishment of the type that used to be banned by the Constitution and the Geneva Convention before we decided waterboarding and anally raping children with chem sticks in front of their parents was ok.  Even Ronald Wilson Reagan in his best role ever isn’t as eye gougingly bad.

Later-

No Alton, no Dave, not even Jay.

• AMC– The Negotiator
• Turner Classic– The Man Who Came to Dinner
• FX– Tomcats

Jon has Edward P. Kohn (have your people post a Wiki entry, idiot), Stephen Thomas French.  Jon has Back in Black which is usually so nice you want to see it twice.

Now You Museum, Now You Don’t.  For those of you who worry about our Boys, Dr. Richard “Dick” Impossible is voiced by Christopher McCulloch in this episode.  No Colberts attemped suicide by swallowing a bomb during the animation.

Yahoo TV Listings

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

1 Aid begins to flow to flood-ravaged Pakistan

by Marwan Naamani, AFP

1 hr 15 mins ago

No Rachel last night which is ok, Chris does a fine job.  Dave still in repeats.

• ESPN– World Series of Poker! (maybe I should have live blogged it)
• ABC Family– Melissa & Joey Series Premier, also Make It or Break It (premier)
• FX– Made of Honor
• History– Top Shot (finale again, no I won’t spoil it for you)
• SciFi– If it’s Tuesday it must be Warehouse 13
• TBS– More wondering who’s going to replace Steve Carell
• Turner Classic– The Quiet Man, Rio Grande (more Marion)
• Toon– Unnatural History (premier)
• USA– White Collar (premier), Covert Affairs

Later-

• AMC– Spaceballs (probably Mel Brook’s least funny movie)
• SciFi– Haven
• Turner Classic– The Black Swan

Jon has Dick Armey (I can’t even type it without laughing, I wonder how Jon will do), Stephen Barry Levine.  Alton does ‘Power Bars’.  Tears of a Sea Cow (oh the You Manatee).

Well, somebody had to say it.

Is it just me or does Tuesday night TV really suck?  I should join a book club.

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

34 Top Story Final.

1 Afghan president formally orders security firms to disband

by Sardar Ahmad, AFP

1 hr 8 mins ago

The parallels between Mormonism and Islam

I’m going to start by defining my own religious prejudices to which you’ll no doubt add as we continue this discussion and the ones that are not obvious to me become more apparent to you.  I was raised a Methodist of the evangelical/social justice kind rather than the fundamentalist.  Yes, the same church as George W. Bush (we’ll get to his History Major).

What’s the distinction?

The ‘Method’ in ‘Methodism’ is a fundamentalist Protestantism that led to a schism with the Church of England.  About the same time many English colonies in America practiced African Slavery.  These poor heathens weren’t even Christians and needed to be evangelized and taught about Jesus and the word of God.

As a result of the effort by the founding fathers of Methodism, many of them became members of the Church which has contributed to it’s ‘liberal’ positions.  The particular Church where I went to Sunday School and was in the Children’s Choir until the age of 14 is now overwhelmingly Black and Latino in participation.

That’s not why I became an atheist.  My disagreement with Christianity is about free will and supernaturalism.

As weak as they are I believe what my lying eyes tell me.  I believe in the scientific method.  If it’s not duplicatable and predictive it doesn’t exist.

Nor do I believe that humans are born in original sin, that some Platonic Ideal of a chair reflected as a wall shadow diminishes our worth and we have to be redeemed by a supernatural force greater than us so we look more like a chair.

A chair is anything you can sit on.  There is no Platonic Ideal.  There is no God and no ‘after life’.

This is the one chance you get, best to make the most of it.

Next- About Mormonism