Atheists Don't Have No Songs

Steve Martin has to be one of the most creative people alive, not to mention one of the funniest:

How Apple Is Spending Your Money

I've been a loyal Apple/Mac user since 1984—have never owned a PC and hopefully never will. But Apple has crossed the line when it comes to using its clout and capital.

Yes, Apple is a private company that answers to no one except its shareholders (which I am not). But it is also dependent on not arousing the ire of its ever-growing consumer base to continue expanding its presence and profit in the marketplace. And they have awakened a sleeping giant of conservative, fair-minded citizens who want Apple to back off their social engineering efforts and stick to technical engineering.

What did they do? Over the Thanksgiving holidays they quietly withdrew the iPhone/iPad app for the Manhattan Declaration citing "objectionable content." Apple had previously given the MD app a strong rating ("no objectionable content") and all was fine -- until Change.org mounted a petition to force Apple to remove the app because of its "hateful," "divisive," "offensive," "pro-life," "pro-traditional marriage" content. In other words, the extreme left (pro-choice, pro-homosexual) crowd told Apple they were offended that the Manhattan Declaration -- which supports religious freedom, traditional marriage, and is against abortion -- was allowed to have an app in the iTunes store. So when Apple received the Change.org petition with over 7,000 signatures they caved and pulled the MD app.

Manhattan Declaration has mounted a campaign to ask Apple to reinstate the app. So far, more than 39,301 people (as of 1:21 p.m. EST on 12-4-10) have signed the MD petition. If you are in favor of what the Manhattan Declaration stands for I encourage you to sign the petition.

You can read about the Manhattan Declaration and what it stands for on their web site. But recent activity has slowed their servers to a crawl, so you can read the Wikipedia article instead.

You can sign the petition either here (very slow the last two days [update: now seems to be loading fine]) or here (faster). You can also drop Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple) an email to express your views here.

Here's a good summary of the issue written by a Catholic columnist.

Impact of Diet Choices on the Planet

Talia Fuhrman, daughter of nutritarian M.D. Joel Fuhrman, accompanied her father to the recent meeting of the World Preservation Foundation in London, and filed these facts she collected at the meeting about the impact of diet choices on the planet. I can't vouch for the facts or for the World Preservation Foundation, but her list is a good summary of "impacts" being discussed widely these days. (I mean by that last statement that I'm slowly learning that numbers, facts, and statistics, be they ever so authoritatively presented, have to be held lightly. When the Obama administration says "a million jobs were created," or some such thing, I don't believe it for a minute. I treat it as political agenda-speak. That's obviously a round number that is completely unverifiable at a moment in time. Therefore, it's only fair to treat numbers that I want to agree with the same way—as round numbers that are guesstimates based on varying degrees of verifiable research. Instead of taking the numbers literally, I use the "where there's smoke, there's fire" approach—the numbers represent trends that bear looking into. Another way to look at large numbers like these is to say, "If the numbers are off by a fourth/third/half, do we still have a problem?" In the case of the following numbers, I would say mostly "Yes.")

1) Raising livestock and their by-products account for at least 32.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalents per year, or 51 percent of annual worldwide green house gas (GHG) emissions.

2) Thirty percent of the entire land surface of Earth is devoted to livestock production, including plants used to feed the livestock.

3) Replacing meat with plant-derived sources of calories and protein could reduce the land area required to feed the human population by more than 80 percent and recover about 25 percent of the land for restoration, solar energy capture, or other eco-friendly purposes.

4) Between 23-30 percent of our global ecological footprint comes from agriculture, primarily livestock production.

5) Beef takes 70 times more land to produce than vegetables.

6) 80 percent of the world’s soy production is consumed by livestock.

7) About 50 percent of the world’s grain supply is used to feed livestock. This is while almost 11 million children who live in the countries where these feed grains are grown, die ironically of hunger each year.

8) In 2009, for the first time, the number of people suffering from hunger exceeded 1 billion. This doesn’t include people facing hunger shortages from natural disasters.

9) If all 6.78 billion people on Earth began consuming as many animal products as residents of the United States, we would need over 3 planet Earths to meet the demand. If all people on Earth became vegetarians, less than one Earth would be needed to meet food demands.

Spider Man: Tears and Chills

On 60 Minutes tonight, Lesley Stahl previewed the upcoming Broadway production of Spiderman: Turn off the Dark—the most ambitious ($60 million) production in theater history. The director of this piece—a woman named Julie Taymor—is a force of nature. This production has been years in the making, pushing the boundaries of technical special effects (think Cirque du Soleil) and scrambling for financing. But Taymor refused to give up the vision and has reached her goal. And if that wasn't inspiring enough, the score for the production was written entirely by Bono and The Edge.

Watching people collaborate at this level of creativity and expertise was spine-tingling for me. Here's the 20-minute segment: (or here in a bit larger format)

And an additional segment—behind the scenes with Bono and The Edge working out the kinks in some of the music (or here):

Like Julie Taymor says, the biggest and best things always involve a level of risk and fear. I'm amazed by people who step willingly off the cliff of certainty into the thin air of uncertainty.