Frozen Donkey Wheel

LOST is awesome. I thoroughly enjoyed the 2 hour finale for season 4. A lot of questions were answered and other questions surfaced, most particularly concerning Jeremy Bentham. Rather than spoil the mystery for those of you who sadly haven't had the pleasure of watching the episode, I'm going to talk about LOST in general.

I like how LOST has mysteries and twists that make you go "what!" Despite this, If you go through the show you will discover that the weird stuff on the island clearly has rules. Sometimes these rules are unknown to the audience, but it is clear that all the weird things are governed by some laws. It seems that each time something way bizarre happens it shows you that your assumptions about what the rules are is wrong. For example when we found out that the Others and the Dharma Initiative were not the same thing it brought up the question "Well then who the #$%^ are the Others?" We thought we knew their origin but clearly we did not. LOST is all about making people get to know a little about events only to realize later that their assumptions were wrong as they learn more details. When we learn about characters' back stories through flashbacks we often draw the wrong conclusion about them. Take Sawyer for instance, at first you think he was a con artist who got a kid's parents killed. Later you realize that he was the kid and became a con artist later. This helps you understand why Sawyer does things the way he does. All characters on the show progress and our understanding of them changes. This is at the heart of what LOST is about. I was going to go on in this train of thought, but I want to change to what I was originally going to write about instead.

I want to list some mysteries that I am really looking forward to finding answers to. Most of these permeate all the seasons and are obviously really important to the show. Here's the list:

1. What are the whispers? What do they say and why? We know they often show up before the Others appear. I was thinking today that Miles is kind of psychic. It seems like he can hear the dead. I wonder if this has a connection to the voices?

2. What is the smoke monster? The last two seasons we learned a lot about what rules the smoke monster follows and Ben clearly knows a whole lot more than he is telling. Also we need to know if a smoke alarm would really be set off if the smoke monster was near :)

3. What's up with Jacob? Who is he (I hope the actor has creepy eyes, that would be cool). Why is Christian Shepard (several people have named him the Grim Reaper) speaking in his behalf? Is he the creepy black Oceanic guy with the creepy eyes?

4.How does Richard keep his eyes always looking that dark? Does he have mascara tattoos? The actor had the same cool eyes when he played Batmanuel on The Tick.

5. Of course there is the question of how the island moved and where to. This will be shortly answered (at least the where to part). I think that the island also moved in the season 2 finale when the button wasn't pushed (or possibly just when the key was turned). The sky effect was similar and everything shook. Remember that Ben was manipulating Locke into not pushing the button in season 2. Well surely Ben knew that this would cause the hatch to implode and everything else to go crazy. So why did he tempt Locke? I'm guessing he needed the island moved and knew this would move it. Then again he did say that moving the island was a last resort, so this may be all wrong.

6. Are the undead characters immune to garlic?

7. What is the sickness? None of the plane crash survivors have caught it but Rousseau 's crew all died from it. Vaccines were given out by the Dharma Initiative for it, although it is unclear if these were just placebos. Desmond had some sort of temporal sickness in The Constant; is this the same sickness? Pregnant women keep dying on the island so this may have something to do with the sickness.

Well that's a list of important questions. There are a few thousand less important questions as well. I love LOST.

Baptisms for the Dead

So today I read another letter in The Salt Lake Tribune about baptisms for the dead. For those of you who don't know, the Catholic church recently told its parishes to stop letting the church copy parish records (marriages, christenings, deaths, etc.) because the church uses these records to record genealogy and then uses the genealogy to do baptisms for the dead. The Catholic church doesn't believe in baptism for the dead so they don't want it done. This is not new. Jews complained about holocaust victims being baptized posthumously. I think this debate has more to do with a misunderstanding of the practice in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints more than anything. The church itself will respect the wishes of those who don't want ancestors baptized posthumously and has asked that holocaust victims not receive this ordinance. Some still do because church members are not always aware of the policy and sometimes make mistakes.

I'm getting a bit sidetracked here. The Tribune article I read complained that by doing baptisms for the dead that meant that the dead didn't have the right to practice their religion. This argument is flawed for several reasons. First, it assumes that the baptisms for the dead (done by proxy) will be recognized by God and be in force and valid on the dead person. The problem is that this would require God to agree with the practice (otherwise he could just nullify or never recognize it). If this is the case then why do we care if God is approving of it. Someone who doesn't believe in the LDS church and its teachings should therefore not care about the practice. Next, the argument assumes that the person posthumously baptized would have no choice in accepting the baptism. The problem with this is that by LDS church doctrine the person must accept the baptism and is free to refuse it. This means that what is really being done are possible baptisms for the dead. If the person doesn't want it they can refuse it by LDS doctrine. So there really isn't an argument for the dead being forced into baptism.

People can still be annoyed at the practice. Perhaps they think by using an ancestor's name the person is being dishonored. I can say that the practice is done respectfully. Also, the names submitted are usually from descendants meaning the person's family is usually requesting the baptisms for the dead. It may help to think of the practice in the same way you'd think about someone praying for you. If someone prays for their neighbor's wellbeing and that neighbor isn't of the same faith they could become offended. If someone dies and you pray for their soul one of their relatives could get offended. Yet in each of these circumstances people would generally see the offense as being a little silly. It is the same way with baptisms for the dead. The people's names are used (just as you might use someone's name in a prayer) but it is respectful and is not binding on them at all if they don't want it to be (and if you aren't LDS you shouldn't believe it will be binding on them even if they wanted to be LDS because you wouldn't believe in baptisms for the dead).

One last thing. I looked at the comments on the article. If a comment gets too many negative votes it becomes hidden. Well almost all of the pro-LDS and pro-baptism for the dead comments (no matter how respectful) were hidden whereas very few of the opposite side of the argument were hidden because of negative votes. This disappoints me. It looks like some people don't want to hear anything but their point of view.

Finally a republican wants to do something about climate change. I hope McCain isn't joking.

So I read an article about a speech John McCain gave on climate change. The speech was actually pretty good. You can read the actual speech here or you can read an article about it here.

Basically McCain proposes doing a cap and trade program where emission limits will be set and anyone who doesn't use theirs can trade them. This gives an incentive for companies to cut emissions so they can sell credits. Also the cap will be reduced each year effectively reducing U.S. emissions. He also talked about working with China and other countries to get them to reduce emissions, but this part was less well designed. Still the intentions are good and I hope McCain is serious about this and that it is not just a campaign promise he hopes everyone will forget.

Recently I've seen a lot of appeal with the Democratic party. They support some issues I am against (abortion, socialized medicine) but they also support other causes like education and the environment. It is nice to see a Republican finally recognize the problems we are facing with global warming. I do have other problems with McCain so we'll see what happens in November, but I like this development.

RSL addition

Here is another article that goes along with the last one. This one is a little different. It is about the fact that the county is going to continue contributing $300,000 a year to the Sandy Amphitheater even though those payments were supposed to end this year. The argument is that by paying that it helps the city pay for the RSL stadium, so in a round about way it is a trick by Sandy to get stadium funding. Anyways, here is the article.