@78, 80, and 81: As I understand it, the US now recognizes dual citizenship (which it didn't fairly recently; i.e. as far as the US was concerned, our kids' Canadian citizenship didn't exist). But it still requires people who are *acquiring* US citizenship to renounce other citizenships, so if my wife wanted to become a US citizen, she'd have to renounce her Canadian citizenship as part of the naturalization oath.
Now, at the moment, the US does not formally inform Canada when a Canadian becomes a US citizen, nor (as I understand) does Canada currently recognize the renunciation involved in that process; that is, they'll still consider you Canadian unless you renounce it to them more directly. But if you do naturalize as a US citizen, with the required renunciation clause, my understanding is that the US will *not* consider you a dual citizen thereafter.
(And I can fully understand that many folks would not want to take an oath renouncing their original citizenship, if they want to keep it, even if their original country considers the oath non-binding.)
If I'm wrong about any of the facts above, though, I'd love to know.
Unfortunately, the Canadian debate Mycroft refers to did result in the creation of second-class Canadian citizens of a sort, in changes to Canadian citizenship law that took effect this year.
In particular, our kids, born in the US, now cannot pass along their Canadian citizenship by birth, even if they move back to Canada and live there for decades. (Those hypothetical grandchildren of ours would be Canadian if they were born in Canada, but that would because of where they were born, not because of our kids' citizenship. If our kids spent a year abroad, and gave birth there, their children would not be Canadian, unless the other parent was native-born Canadian.)
If our next door American neighbors move to Canada for long enough to become a citizen, they can pass on Canadian citizenship by birth after they naturalize. But our kids, who are already Canadian citizens by birth, cannot (re)gain the ability to pass on citizenship by birth.)
To give another "how did this get published?" headscratcher, Language Log reports on a HarperCollins writing guide that shows repeated cluelessness about what the subject of a sentence is.
"Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!"
"Germans?"
"Forget it, he's rolling."
Re PNH's "When You Marry" particle: There's a complete copy of an earlier edition at the Internet Archive, for anyone who wants to see what it looked like ca. 1953.
Erik @850:
"Do any of our resident experts on vanity presses know whether there are such things operating in other media? People who will make a movie for a gullible aspiring actor or author, for example?"
I was once emailed by someone who wanted to "hire" me for a talk radio program. On a little digging, I saw that it was basically a vanity press operation; what they didn't tell me up front is that you're expected to pay for your slot (and also buy or lease from them the equipment you'll need to produce the broadcasts). The primary "broadcast" was online streaming, though I think they might have also bought some paid programming blocks from obscure AM stations.
Likewise, there are companies that will contact the parents of small children, and "offer" them work as a photo model, because they're so adorable looking. What they're really offering is the opportunity for the parents to pay for an expensive "modeling class" from the company, rather than a paying gig.
I wouldn't at all be surprised if such schemes exist for other media as well, such as films. Caveat emptor.
Zelda@99 writes:
"Rather, investigate what businesses *do* have decent customer service, if you can find any in your area. Cherish them."
Yes. I suspect that many good independent businesses have a similar sort of "invisbility" problem, where potential customers don't think of them but just pay attention to the big chains, even where they'd get better service and value with an independent.
Well-populated areas tend to have a fair number of hardware stores. Plugging "hardware stores in Brooklyn" into Google Maps turns up lots of hits, many with reviews. Where I live in Philly, they aren't quite as dense, but there is a very good independent store a couple of miles away (closer than the big boxes) that we get to fairly regularly.
But there are a number of other shopping categories where we don't regularly use independent stores, but default to the big boxes. Sometimes this may make sense, but I'm sure that sometimes we're overlooking good, valuable local businesses. Maybe next time I think of going out to a big box to get a neodoohickey, I'll first plug "neodoohickeys in philadelphia" (or "near my-zipcode") into Google maps and see what stores and reviews come up.
#428 points to the revised copyright-2004 edition, but the incident can also be found in earlier editions of the book. Go to this page and click on "Search Inside!". In this edition, which Amazon identifies as being from 1992, the incident with the dog starts on page 4 and continues into page 5 (with some details omitted in the quote upthread).
In both editions, the analogy to children is drawn on the following page.
I wonder if we can pull the corporal punishment subthread away from the people involved (both here and absent) and back to the theme that ties it in to the starting point of this thread: how practices recommended or conducted without appropriate limitations can get out of control and seriously hurt or kill the people involved.
That's what really troubles me about the snippets I've seen quoted here from Dobson's book; in particular the bits about beating the dog to the extent of "threaten[ing] it with destruction", and then analogizing that to what to do with one's child.
Whether or not Dobson *personally* thinks that's also a good idea with children doesn't worry me as much as what Dobson's *readers* might conclude. If you advocate a course of action that could easily be dangerous and harmful (particularly if you illustrate it with examples like that of the dog that clearly tend that way), you have a responsibility to make clear to your audience about dangers and limits that should be taken into account, and make some reasonable attempt to pull back elements of your audience that you notice are taking things too far.
Ray, by all accounts I've seen so far, didn't do any of this, and that's part of why he bears culpability for the deaths and injuries that took place under his watch. My question is: Does Dobson do so, in his books discussing corporal punishment? If so, are there examples that can be shown?
Debra Doyle writes on the Nicene Creed:
"It's meant to be a summary of the core points of mainstream (at the time it was written, and to a large extent still today) Christian doctrine."
More precisely, it's meant to be a summary of the *distinguishing* points of orthodox Christian doctrine; that is, the main ways it's different from other teachings. So there isn't anything in it, for instance, about the two great commandments to love God and to love neighbor. Those are important, and core to Christianity, but they're not *distinguishing* characteristics; other religions and traditions teach them too.
Likewise, there wasn't any mention of baptism at all in the original creed adopted at Nicea, even though it was practiced from the start (see e.g. the Gospel accounts of John the Baptist). The "*one* baptism..." phrase was added by a later council, to distinguish the belief of the orthodox church, which held that baptism was a one-time "rebirth", from the Donatists and others who taught that re-baptism was necessary to forgive sins after the first baptism.
So, basically, you can't assume that because something is not mentioned in the Nicene Creed, that Christians consider it unimportant, much less that they're opposed to it.
"Christians clearly do believe in magic (although they don't call it that), so it is perfectly fair IMO to call them on it when they are practicing black magic..."
Orthodox (small o) Christianity doesn't involve a belief in magic in the sense that seems to be implied in #57, where you follow a particular ritual or recipe in order to compel supernatural forces to do your bidding (in that example, pinning people's names on a cross to make something happen to the people named).
There is obviously a belief in the miraculous; we do, after all, believe that our founder rose from the dead, and performed other miracles as well. But we don't believe that we have power over miracles. We do have certain rituals which we believe convey grace, and in some cases even have "miraculous" effects (if normally undetectable, as in the transubstantiation of the Eucharist). But we can't use those rituals for some arbitrary desire; it's whatever God ordains, not us. We can, of course, ask God in prayer for something, as can anyone else, Christian or non-Christian; but we can't *compel* God to do what we want.
That said, there are a wide variety of different beliefs and traditions that people identify as Christian, some of which are pretty far off the traditionally orthodox strains. Slacktivist has posted more than once on the heresy of the "name it and claim it" strain of belief, which is basically The Secret in Christian clothing. Similarly, the "St. Jude" notices you sometimes see in classifieds, that claim whatever you want will be granted by saying the prayer and publishing the ad, are generally treated by Catholic authorities as superstition rather than religion.
So I would guess that Andrew Schlafly is not Catholic now? (His mom is, and apparently he was married in a Catholic ceremony.) His Bible project isn't the sort of thing that would ever get an imprimatur.
There have been a number of individual rewrite-the-Bible projects, including some from fairly well-known figures. See, for instance, Thomas Jefferson's version, which attempted to re-edit the Gospels into a single narrative with all the supernatural elements removed.
I'm wondering whether developer invites might go through the system faster than "nominations" from hoi polloi (which is how my "invites" are presented). If that's the case, and Patrick and Teresa aren't yet on, one of you with developer invites might want to include them even though Eric and I already nominated them.
They seem to be slow about sending out invites; none of my nominations from yesterday seem to have gone through yet.
John Scalzi has some informative early impressions of the service on his blog.
I imagine they'll speed up invitations once they got some of the glitches worked out (There do seem to be some scaling issues). The propagation delay is already causing some problems; Twitter's already warned of scammers promising Wave invitations they don't actually have, in exchange for followers (which helps make spammers look more like real people), or other things of more tangible value.
I just invited pnh (at your panix email; I don't know your gmail address offhand. I see tnh was already invited, by Eric.)
it may take some time for invites to go through. (The one sent to me, from someone at Google, took a few hours from queue to authorization. I made a few other invites this AM; as far as I know they're not authorized yet.)
"I’ve been to Google’s New York City offices. They don’t tell their employees what they may and may not do with social media tools..."
Based on numerous interactions with folks who work for Google, I'm pretty sure Google is rather specific and strict about what they may and may not say in public about what they're doing at Google.
Which includes what they say using social media tools. Google's staff are tech-savvy enough that they might not need to be reminded specifically about that medium, but folks in less tech-savvy groups might.
I don't find it objectionable per se that certain organizations, including newspapers, might impose limits on the public statements of their staff. (For instance, some news reporters are prohibited from endorsing candidates for offices they might cover, to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest.) I haven't seen the full set of the Post guidelines, but general guidelines for news reporters to avoid taking political sides in public aren't unheard of. (It varies by publication, of course; what might be appropriate for a reporter for a partisan weekly might not be for the anchor of a national general-interest news program.)
Trying to control what you can *read* online, as opposed to *say* online, is more dubious, but I didn't see any sign that the Post was doing that. If your employer is doing this, my sympathies.
Philadelphia's center city was designed as a grid, but with spokes leading out from it. The spokes are still there, for the most part, and in the northeast and northwest parts of the city, the grid bends to follow the spokes (which then form the backbones of localized grids).
This can get a bit confusing when the grids have bent enough from the origin. In much of the northwest, the streets marked "east-west", by grid reckoning, are really more north-south by geographic reckoning, and vice versa. It took me a while to get used to this.
Pittsburgh's topography in much of the city is far too three-dimensional for grids to work, or for there to be any guarantee that three lefts will get you anywhere near where a right would take you. After a few lefts, you may well cross under your original street, on a bridge hundreds of feet above you.
I miss biking to work. I did it all the time when I was in Pittsburgh; here in Philly I live far away enough that it's not really practical to do regularly (though I've done it a few times).
Instead, I take the train. Which can also be a kind of mental break, but I don't find it to foster quite the same level of contemplation, since it's a distinctly less solitary experience. On the other hand, it does let me read, which you can't really do on a bike (or when driving a car).
I can still bike outside work when I can make time. Next week I'll be biking with my son and his class from near my house to near the art museum, farther than he's ever ridden before. I'm looking forward to that.
"May I add my good wishes to the celebration of Xopher's demicentenary (have I got that right?)"
Well, I haven't heard that word before, but I like how it sounds. And now I'm looking forward to my kids turning 12 and a half so I can congratulate them on their hemidemisemicentenary.
Happy birthdays, Serge and Xopher!
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