I just have three minor, mostly unrelated thoughts to discuss tonight. It’s pretty hard to weave them into a coherent picture, but 0f course, I’ll “go down trying”.<\/p>\n
First \u2013 here\u2019s a nice little article<\/a> from the NY Times about the end of outdoor skating during the winter on frozen ponds. Unless you are up in Canada or in the middle of northern Minnesota, it just doesn\u2019t get cold for long-enough periods anymore. Also, because of human development, there is too much road salt and other pollutants that keeps lake water from freezing. That\u2019s a shame. Outdoor skating was a part of my youth here in New Jersey. I was never very good at it, but it could be fun nonetheless. But no, it just doesn\u2019t happen very much anymore. The world has changed.<\/p>\n Second \u2013 about that spy satellite that the US military is going to shoot down in a week or so. I can\u2019t help but wonder if they would normally ride something like this out, but now have itchy trigger fingers because of that Chinese anti-satellite test in January 2007. It\u2019s not like the thing would require evacuation of hundreds of square miles of land. It wouldn\u2019t spray toxic rocket fuel for more than a city block or two. They could track it and give advanced warning to any populated areas that it might hit (chances still greatly favor its coming down in the ocean). It\u2019s not some huge crisis. <\/p>\n So I can\u2019t help but wonder if the dramatic response is a message to the Chinese<\/a> \u2013 i.e., you guys managed to hit a satellite in a controlled test with a missile launched from a special base. We can hit a satellite from one of our regular warships in international waters. On any day we want (assuming that the interceptor missile works). Admittedly, there are some technical differences \u2013 they hit a satellite up around 500 miles up, whereas we would hit ours at around 100 miles or less. Our situation won\u2019t cause the big space-junk mess that the Chinese caused. But still, I think the intended but unspoken message to China and the world here is that the USA is still the big khahuna with regard to space and military technology. <\/p>\n Third \u2013 is competition between religions a good thing? The March Atlantic has an article written by Alan Wolfe about this. In many instances throughout history, competition between differing religious viewpoints led to war, torture, and other bad stuff. Today, in some places, this still happens (e.g., Nigeria). But in the USA, the effects of religious Darwinism will arguably be more peaceful. Since we are a rich nation, there\u2019s not much danger of warfare breaking out between, say, the Mormons and the Pentecostals. But what we are seeing is the \u201cWal-Mart-ization\u201d of religion. <\/p>\n In the US heartland, the mega-churches seem to be growing at the expense of small, traditional Protestant congregations (actually, there are signs of early mega-church formation here in NJ; e.g., not far from me, a newly formed generic Christian group<\/a> meets every Sunday in a local Boys Club gym). These big churches offer a variety of worship forms, some featuring modern entertainment, and a wide variety of services including job seekers clubs, social outreach groups, sports teams, study groups, parents\u2019 support ministries, etc. Other types of churches will hang on, but only by finding specific targeted audiences, e.g. gays (at some liberal Episcopalian parishes), educated agnostics (Quaker and Unitarian churches), struggling immigrants (probably where the Roman Catholic Church in America is heading), poor people looking for support (e.g., urban Pentecostal and Islamic congregations), cultural niches (Judaism, Islam, Hindu temples), etc. <\/p>\n