• So Friday evening I wound up sitting on my front porch, writing about sex while giving out candy to the children of the neighborhood. Halloween is weird.
• Paul Waldman:
Imagine that a year ago, I told you that a few months hence, west Africa would see the largest Ebola outbreak in history. Then I explained that despite regular travel in and out of the affected countries by health professionals and ordinary people, there would be a grand total of two — not two hundred, or two thousand, but two — Americans who contracted the disease here, and both of them would be nurses who had treated a dying patient who had contracted the disease in Liberia. And I told you that both of them would be treated, and would survive and be healthy. If I had told you that a year ago, would you have said, “Wow, that sounds like a gigantic federal government failure”?
• Well played Seth Moulton. I still wish that back during the Democratic primary campaign in 2008, candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton would have come together to state, unambiguously, “If you’re voting for me instead of her because she’s a woman, then I do not want your vote.” And “If you’re voting for me instead of him because he’s black, then I don’t want your vote.” Kudos to Moulton for refusing to play divide-and-conquer.
• A look at The Princess Bride, “The Movie That Won the Internet.” One thing Caitlin Kelly doesn’t mention about the making of that film was its secret weapon — Bob Anderson. The legendary sword master convinced Rob Reiner to film all the fencing duels last, so that Cary Elwes, Mandy Patinkin and Christopher Guest would have more time to practice. And, according to Anderson (in a “Fresh Air” interview I can’t find online), they did practice, constantly. Maybe that’s why Elwes’ memoir on making the film strikes Kelly as dull — because reading about weeks and weeks of fencing rehearsals might not seem as magical as the end result turned out to be.
• Shorter Elizabeth Stoker Breunig: Libertarians say taxation is theft from the rich. Christians say superfluity is theft from the poor. OK, then.
• Kudos to Randy Brinson of the Alabama Christian Coalition for saying this: “Sharia law is not going to be implemented in Alabama, it just isn’t.”
• In junior high, my private Christian school used an A Beka Books science text. It was awful. We kids were all faithful little creationists then, as we had been taught and trained to be, but it was still obvious to us that the book was full of errors and mistakes.
Like when the book tried to teach Galileo’s experiment by encouraging us to drop a feather and a bowling ball so that we could observe them falling at the same speed. Whoever wrote that had apparently never watched a feather falling. Our teacher was, like the textbook, a product of Pensacola Christian College, and she told us we were just being “rebellious” when we disagreed with the authority of the text, pointing out that this feather-drop would only work in an airless vacuum.
Anyway, I was reminded of that awful, awful A Beka textbook and its bungling of that experiment when I watched this fantastic video from Brian Cox:
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