Bring on the demons!

The increasing encroachment of Christianity upon government is something we Canadians like to think is an American phenomenon. Well, here’s a story that indicates we just might have a problem here, too:

On Monday, the school board that encompasses Kitchener and the surrounding environs, the Waterloo Region District School Board, voted to let Gideons International in Canada [...] distribute Bibles to Grade 5 students. [....] “A public school needs to educate the whole child ... It seems to me if we want to see students survive in life and make the correct decisions they have to have some knowledge of religious feeling," said Colin Harrington, a trustee who voted in favour of Bibles being handed out.

Public schools do not need to educate the whole child, if that means indoctrinating him into a faith-based belief system. If fact, because the schools are public — i.e., funded through involuntary payments by all taxpayers and attended by all children whose parents can't afford to pay twice for education — they must not allow any interference from religion. Government schools, as long as they exist, must stick to facts — objective truths that objective people can agree upon. There are grey areas (literature comes to mind), but it’s clear that a book that says “Blessed are they who did not see and yet believed” has no place in an education that is forced upon our kids by the state.

We ought to give credit to Mr. Harrington, though. He is admirably forthright in his stating his goals:

The important message religion has to tell you is about compassion and love and caring for your neighbour and not being simply selfish to one's desires. The programs in the schools are not cutting it. If you deny the religious experience in your education system you open the door to the demonic experience.

In other words, he wants to create subservient followers who sacrifice themselves to others and the public schools are not helping him enough. I say, “Bring on the demons!”

Fixing messed up text file encoding with BBEdit

Since I couldn’t Google up a good answer to this problem, I am recording my solution for posterity.

The problem: A text file full of odd garbage like ’ and — where characters like ’ and — should be. Mine was a huge database export. I could have just done a find-and-replace on all the different characters, but I was worried I’d miss some.

The root of the problem: As this page explains:

[T]he text is encoded as UTF-8 but the declared encoding is Windows-1252. The typographically correct apostrophe (or right single quotation mark, U+2019) is encoded as E2 80 99 in UTF-8. In Windows-1252, E2 is â (lowercase a with circumflex), 80 is € (Euro) and 99 is ™ (trade mark).

The solution: Super easy:

1. In BBEdit, choose Save As and choose Western (Windows Latin 1) in the encoding drop-down menu.
2. Choose Reopen Using Encoding → Unicode (UTF-8).

There is no Step 3. All that garbage is now restored to its proper representation.

Objectivist Round Up #174

The latest roundup of posts from the Objectivist blogosphere is at Sacred Ego. Don’t be afraid. There’s not a damn word about that subject.

Two weeks of the Whole30

Two weeks ago, on the spur of the moment, I started the Whole30. It’s a strict (“Don’t tell us you ‘slipped’. Unless you physically tripped and your face landed in a box of Krispy Kremes, you DID NOT SLIP.”) 30-day no sugar, no grains, no dairy, no alcohol regimen. Actually, I started two weeks ago yesterday, but I had to restart after reading the ingredients on the bacon I’d had for breakfast: sugar!? I had no idea.

It’s been going quite well. I just got back from a four-day trip up north, and while these getaways are normally an excuse to have a holiday from healthy eating and go through a couple of six-packs of beer, I stayed with the plan. My cottage-mate had been worried I'd be a grump due to the reduced caffeine and no alcohol, but we had a great time.

I hesitate to say I have cheated, since these are gray areas of an otherwise clear-cut set of rules, but there are a few things I could improve on:

• At the cottage I had a whole (300g?) package of prunes. Yum. Sugar.
• I love nuts. Like, a lot. And I eat them compulsively when they’re in the house. The solution is not to buy them, but I got some up at the cottage.
• Caffeine. I’m no longer routinely pouring a cup of coffee at 6PM, but I have strayed beyond the recommend noon cut-off time into the early afternoon.

I basically have two meals a day—lunch from a salad bar near work and dinner made at home. For dinner, I’ve discovered how easy and yummy Thai curries are: Add two or three tablespoons of curry paste to a can of coconut milk, bring to a simmer, add meat (chicken thighs, stew meat, hamburger) and veggies (Brussels sprouts are so good!) and simmer until done. The big revelation for me was how good it tastes over riced caulifower. Just whiz some florets in the food processor and microwave the rice-sized bits for two to three minutes—no water added. Who needs starch? Not me! (I am annoyed that I can’t find any yellow curry paste without soybean oil, but the green tastes fine.)

As for effects, at roughly the half-way point I don’t feel markedly different except for that pleasant aura of virtue vibrating around my person. The scale says I’ve lost 5 pounds, which is OK, but not spectacular.

Anyway, if you're looking to kick-start or reinvigorate a healthy paleo lifestyle, I would so far recommend the Whole30!

I picked a bad time to start a blog

There are several posts I’ve been thinking about writing over the past week, but there are too many other things going on in my life right now to find the time for them. I’ll be off for a few days at the end of the week, so I hope to have time then for bloggage. In the meantime, here are some things I think you should know:

• Rob Ford is the mayor-elect of Toronto and there are exploded head remains (including those of a Barenaked Lady) all over downtown.
• I’m a week into the Whole30 and doing fine, despite my inability to find bacon that meets all the exacting criteria that would allow it to pass my lips legitimately.
• I remember, too, but is the choice (a) more Obama Democrats or (b) more Bush Republicans? No, it is not. The Tea Party doesn’t advocate more of the same, it (for the most part) advocates smaller, less-intrusive government. And there are some candidates out there who agree.
  
• I just ordered this for my iPad. It’s gonna be great!
• There were 325 articles posted at Randex in October. And, boy, are my mouse fingers tired!

Thanks for stopping by, and I hope to have more for you by the weekend.