Economics of Parenting

Yes! Once again Freakonomics knocks one out of the park!

The Worst Mistake I Ever Made: An Economists’ Parenting Quorum

On Fantasy and Magic

Harry Potter and the Christian Magicians

It's a long-ish essay, not something to pick up when you have 5 minutes of browsing time, but it is a worthy essay that looks seriously at magic, fantasy, occult, technology and how they all interact with each other and Christians.

The comments ... well, they're comments on the Internet.

I thoroughly liked the essay, though I have to admit that I very possibly liked it because several parts of it very nicely matched with how I view books with "magic" in them.

One of the ways he phrased something is something I enjoyed and hadn't formulated for myself nearly so neatly: most "magic" in books is merely technology. It is a new trick that people can learn to use a different set of levers and cranks to make the universe do what you want. It has as little and as much to do with the witchcraft against which the Bible warns as computers do.

Many thanks to DJ for including it in his list of 7 things!

EDIT:
I read my post and realized it didn't actually say much about the essay other than I liked it. I would like to be somewhat more helpful than that, so allow me to give a brief excerpt.

I suggest that the type of story which actually glamorizes occultism or Gnosticism is the type of story that glamorizes the defiance of convention, glamorizes self-centeredness, and tells the moral that you are a special person from a higher world, and says sex is an act of self-fulfillment with no possible bad side effects: in other words, the movie PLEASANTVILLE.
.....
I mean simply that if a parent wishes to spare his child from the lure of occultism and Gnosticism, then let the parent comb through the child’s books and comic books and role playing gamebooks not to see which ones have wizards and unicorns on the cover — it is shallow to judge a book by its cover — but to see which books preach selfishness and promote suspicion and contempt for wholesome things. That is the motive and the leitmotif of occultism: the promise of hidden powers and the contempt for conformity, reason, normalcy.

Trying to lose weight?

Here's a bit of a 'backfire' for those who might be eating the low calorie version of fatty foods to substitute for regular fatty foods.

Do Synthetic Fat Substitutes Make You Fat? Ask the Rats Who Ate Pringles

Good old Freakonomics! Love them!

The study and results are pretty cool, and the posited explanation for why the results turned out to be what they are makes sense. I'll quote here:

The conclusion is that olestra tricks the body with its empty promise of high calories. Foods that taste fatty trigger all kinds of things in your body, including metabolic reactions, in anticipation of a big burst of calories. When the calories don’t come, things get screwy.

Cool stuff!

Objective standard for 'good' writing

It's a topic that irregularly comes up in some blogs I frequent - what is 'good' art/writing/music/etc. Is there an objective standard to which we have access that determines what is good and what is not.

Is Stephanie Meyers a 'good' author? James Patterson? Dean Koontz?

Musicians - are the Black Eyed Peas 'good' musicians? Mozart? Lady Gaga? Katy Perry?

Artists - Warhol? Pollock?

Let's stick with writers for now, though. Is Danielle Steel just as good an author as J.R.R. Tolkien? Better? On what sort of scale is that determined?

The reason I bring this up? I found some good articles on the topic, and wanted to share.

Writing for Dollars Part 1
Book Review: Maps and Legends
(not much review, but more talk about what is 'good' writing)

And, since the first link there is a part 1, here's the second part.
Writing for Dollars Part 2
(focused on difficulties of writing in RPG games)

Unintended Consequences

Weight loss is something a government with government-funded healthcare would want to promote, right? After all, if the government is paying for the healthcare, they want to reduce the costs, and having a population which is not obese certainly helps cut the cots.

So, providing gastric bypass surgery as a government-paid procedure sounds like a good idea since it would cut down on the number of obese people and provide health savings in the future as those no-longer-obese people don't have to have as much medicine for diabetes, joint problems, etc. Right?

Well, here comes the unintended consequences: people purposefully trying to gain weight so they qualify for the gastric bypass procedure.

The Unintended Consequences of Government Sponsored Weight Loss Surgery by Freakonomics.

Spring "Break"?

Maybe for the kids! For me it was more hectic than normal since we had a Users Conference/Training for our project. I had to go in on Tuesday all day and sit through a lot of mostly boring, non-technical talks.

All in all it went well for the project. For me it meant I was missing a day with J since this was his spring break time and he was with me this weekend as well as Monday through Wednesday. Monday had a meeting that I couldn't miss, though thankfully it was in the morning (an hour earlier than I thought it was) and I got to work a couple hours early and left by 11:00. And I had to be at the conference on Tuesday. Bleh. There went two and a half days.

On the positive side though, what did we do?

• Taking J to Home Depot to pick out paint for his room


• Sword fighting with the paint stirrers at Home Depot!


• Sanding and washing his walls.


• Flying kites!


• Hauling the trailer for church


• Lunch with the B family -


• AWANA for J while I hit the Sunday night Bible study


• Painting J's room a nice "army color" of green.


• Pizza with J and I think 6 "Police Mouse" stories all together


• Runescape and Total Annihilation computer games with J
• 
  
• Making a blanket-tent on the sofa for J to sleep in away from paint fumes


• Having my mom down here


• Clogging at the Cherry Blossom Festival!


• Seder meal for Bible study on Wednesday

And to wrap things up, how about a couple of outside posts from a couple blogs I like:

The Gentlemen's Standard - .. But Who Watches the Gentlemen ...
This is a combo of a few things, my favorite was the embarrassing things kids say.

So You Want My Job - Private Investigator | Art of Manliness
I'd swear I've seen this guy before! Some fun info on being a Private Eye.

Some physical fitness suggestions

While these are excellent and easy things one can do to develop a fitness regimen, I suspect that most people will use these once or twice, massively overdo it, and drop them after being too sore to get out of bed the next morning.

5 Gut-Busting Football Conditioning Drills

Here were my favorites.

This one is simple. Mark off 40 yards and sprint it 50 times. Rest 1 to 2 minutes in-between each sprint.

1. Start on one goal line and mark off 40 yards and sprint the distance 6 times.

2. Mark off 60 yards and sprint the distance 4 times.

3. Mark off 80 yards and sprint the distance 2 times.

4. On the last set, run 100 yards from goal line to goal line, 1 time.

Rest 1 minute between sprints.

Mars Hill blog again

Having read a particularly virulent diatribe yesterday against megachurches in general, and Mars Hill in particular, I just want to post this as a purely self-satisfying exercise.

My War Against God

Particular quote: "I loved the church [Mars Hill] and wanted to learn everything about God. I learned about why God put all these rules on us—why I can’t have sex with my boyfriend, why I can’t get drunk. These weren’t just empty Christian morals; I read the Bible and learned about God’s great love for us. He wanted to protect me and keep me pure, because he was a true Father. He was the Father I had always wanted. I learned that Jesus died for all our sins, and that through Him I was forgiven. He was the Savior I always needed."

Now, I know there are people who see Mars Hill as teaching Law and Works Salvation, but that wasn't what this commenter was accusing. He was accusing Mars Hill of never teaching the "Godly truth of righteous living" and stated confidently that they were "tickling audience ear with feel good **** straight from HELL!"

After reading that commenter yesterday and then catching this post today, I just had to laugh!

Delays, delays, delays

At work this week, then entire focus has been on getting some software out. Focus, focus, focus. I'm the last step in the process and I spent all week getting ready because the deadline HAD to be today.

Y'all see where this is going.

I got it yesterday afternoon. I packaged it up. Worked out a couple bugs. It was ready to go by 2:30 today. About that time, I start hearing rumblings from the cube next to mine - problems.

Yup, the commercial software we are packaging together with our custom software just spit out a couple more bugs. Release is put off. Who knows when it will actually be released.

Just to give a hint of the type of "quality" of this software, their documentation that goes out with the segment is all entitled "9.2 for Solaris". We are working with version 9.3 for Linux. Copy and Paste errors on primary documentation. Yeah. Gotta love all the quality checking that must have gone into that.

I'm too depressed, I think. Here are some good things:

Harvard Researchers See Exotic Force for the First Time Maybe some of you have heard of sub-atomic attractions, or Casimir force. When two parallel, non-conducting plates get REALLY close, some of the quantum fluctuations that exist in all of spacetime can't "fit" between the plates, and so don't happen there. However, the fluctuations are happening outsides the plates, and the extra radiative pressure of the higher level of fluctuation outside the plates pushes them together - a quantum "attraction" between things that are REALLY close.

Well, this is the opposite. A quantum repulsion. So far the quantum repulsion has been theory, but no more! This has some very sweet applications in nanotechnology, and might even move things along toward Casimir motors which generate usable energy from the until-now unusable energy in the quantum fluctuations of spacetime.

And for those of you who aren't science geeks, I'll stick in some Christian stuff. An excellent blog post from the Mars Hill church's blog: I Made God in My Image. Really, the only reason I stuck this in was that I've been irritated recently by a variety of bash-Mars-Hill church nuts. Finding a good statement of Christian life and practice is good. Posting it is something of a poke-in-the-eye to a lot of those fanatics. The pastor of the church, Mark Driscoll, isn't perfect and has a variety of flaws, but he's a public figure and draws all sorts of really asinine sniping from fellow Christians.

And then, for those of you who found absolutely nothing of interest in any of that, how about this: baby stuff. I was able to make it to C's recent pregnancy appointment and got to listen to baby Beta's heartbeat - from 156 to 164 bpm. I'm thinking we're having a girl if various reports of heartbeat rates are correct. Higher = girls, lower = boys. Sounded like a little steam train chugging along. I tried to listen in later just with my own ear up against C's tummy, but I could only year a couple of stomach gurglings and C's heartbeat.

A bit of everything

No Jer this weekend, which was switched for having him two weekends in a row the previous two weekends. (R said she had something she wanted to do with him this weekend.) The silver lining to missing Jer was that I was able to judge at the debate tournament at PHC on Saturday!

The topic was whether or not the US government should significantly change its policy toward Cuba. Affirmative cases tended to focus on recent oil discoveries off the coast of Cuba, or just a general opening of trade and travel.

By an large, I tended to be in more agreement with the Affirmative side of things, though I think my decisions came down 50-50 between Affirmative and Negative. It was a long day since I started judging the first round at 8:00 and didn't finish judging my final round until 7:30. Poor C was working in the library that whole time, while I had several breaks in there.

In other news, Rick Warren wishes he could preach as well as Pastor Ray! (I'll provide the link to the podcast as soon as it gets posted.) Pastor Ray mentioned that he had hit a serious block when working on the sermon for this week, so he used the outline from one of Rick Warren's sermons, but adjusted some of the points. Proper citation and credit was given. Final result - Rick Warren needs to contact Ray to get a copy of the adjusted sermon. Seriously. I haven't heard this particular sermon by Warren since I've only listened to a small few of Warren's sermons, but I'm pretty safe saying Ray improved it with his adjustments.

In vaguely related news, InternetMonk put up a post about picking out the ONE TRUE CHRISTIAN CHURCH and depression. It had a great section to it:

Now, if I am convinced that one Denomination is right, my problem is going to be this: I still have to belong to a congregation, and a congregation is the place where the "essentials" are worked out in real life, not just in my head.
....
If I believe the Southern Baptist Convention is the church Jesus started... here’s this wonderful statement of faith, and a great missions network, and Al Mohler and those fine Calvinistic Ascol boys. But at my church... doctrine has been replaced with “How to be a great parent” sermons, the deacons have fired the last three pastors in less than 4 years, the music is a cross between an 80’s metal band made up of fat 45 year old men and the senior adult choir singing from the 1956 hymnal. We haven’t baptized a convert since 1993....
That’s your church. Oh sure, you can drive elsewhere and you can improve. (I drive two hours each way.) You can work for improvement. You can do all that stuff. But here’s my point: You chose the one true denomination, you still have to deal with your local church. It is the place you do or don’t hear the Bible. It’s the place you do or don’t start churches and do evangelism. It’s the place you are or are not taught the faith you read about on that great web site.

That's one of the things that perfectly describes why I attend a church which is part of a denomination that has several points of doctrine and practice which I disagree - this particular visible church body congregation of the Church universal is distilled awesomeness! There are issues with the people, with the church as a whole, and all that, but it is still a wonderful expression of good teaching and practiced love and fellowship.

And ... my lunch break is about over, so it's back to work.

As far as more important stuff goes - C and Beta are doing wonderfully well. C is looking especially fine with just the hint of a bulge starting to show. I've gotten Bro started on Necromunda (a small-group, tactical version of Warhammer 40K) along with NinjaSniper. I'm hoping to start a long game of risk today with Bro and his housemate - we'll drop in and make moves whenever we're around. We'll see how that works out.

Christmas is coming, so I hear

We're coming down to the last couple days before we head out to Kansas for Christmas, and I think we've finally managed to take care of just about all of the presents. I think. Maybe. Hopefully.

I've been having a frustrating time with Warhammer - relatively little time to play with all the moving and fixing. I managed a huge victory, but just barely in my last Mordheim game (a very small-group fight with the Warhammer units). He massacred two of my three close-combat heavy hitters, but I managed to kill two of his smaller peons. Since his dwarven warband was only 6 characters, he had to do a demoralization check and he failed and fled. Whew! I made off with a ton of money and I'm itching to use it, but I won't have a chance until after we get back.

We also played a Warhammer 40K game - I ran the Space Orks against his Space Marines. I wasn't thinking and put my VERY powerful close combat commander in with my shooters. :-P Everyone but him got killed, but then he finally got in to fighting range and opened a can of KABOOM on the Marines! Not enough to snatch victory, but very satisfying to have a pile of wreckage lying around his corpse. In the "real life" version of what the dice rolls meant, he took a 15' tall Dreadnought Walker (think the Star Wars two-legged walkers), smashed his powered fist the whole way through it, spun it around his head a few times, jumped up with a full front tuck, and spiked it down between his legs. Then, being a vicious ork, he stomped on it a few times and ate the drivers. Yeah, the dice were good to me on that attack!

Let's see, we're still moving the dribs and drabs over. The biggest things left are two empty sets of shelves that had our canned good and boxes of food stuffs. Saturday, J and I unpacked almost the entire store of cans and boxes, and packed them away into one of the kitchen pantries. We also got most of the books and bookshelves set up, as well as setting up the computer and having our Internet service installed. Lots of stuff done!

And to wrap things up, just a couple quick links.

While We're Talking About Interpreting the Bible from the InternetMonk. I've seen more than a few instances of teaching "verse by verse" when actually it's just putting a pre-made topic on a couple of verses. I'd like to get a couple of the books listed.

How Matthew 16:18 (the "this rock" verse) should TRULY be interpreted (humor!!!!!!!!!) I laughed like crazy!

Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar 2008 I've been doing lessons on Advent for the kids in youth group. Hopefully trying to illuminate to them that Advent is more than just a countdown to Christmas or a box with a bunch of little windows with chocolates inside. This calendar doesn't have anything to do with my lessons, but they are absolutely incredible photos!!! (warning - the images are LARGE, so give them a while to download, Mom)

Just for giggles

And, if you can giggle over this, you're nuts. However, I am putting it up here just for giggles.

Want a wonderful little topic to debate at Bible study, one that isn't a "safe" topic? I'm not talking about Calvinism, End Times, or even Creationism. Sure, those all might make a heated argument, but there's precious little chance that they'll destroying one's faith. Despite the claims, doubts about God making the world ex-nihilo aren't a common cause given for leaving Christianity or for people to reject Christianity. Try this one on for size, from the InternetMonk:

Open Thread Discussion: Group Punishment/Blessing in the Bible
December 11th, 2008 by iMonk

In my Bible classes, I often will come up with a topic that relates to what we’ve been studying, and I’ll ask the students to prepare to debate either side of a proposition related to what we’ve learned.

I thought this week’s topic would make for an interesting topic of discussion. Our students, like any group of students, really dislike group punishment. So now that we have completed most of our study of the Old Testament, I’ve got them working on debating the following proposition.

“God’s use of group punishment and group blessing in the Old Testament is inherently unfair.”

Groups in this case are families, cities, nations, tribes, even the whole world.

So, what do you say? What would be your criticism, defense, questions, examples or insight? What would you contribute to our discussion?

Some news and stuff

This post has been sitting around getting moldy for a while. Time to put it out even though there's not much beyond the links.

George P Wood doing a book review on Greg Forster, The Contested Public Square: The Crisis of Christianity and Politics (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2008).
I know some very politically active people, many of whom have long since decided that Obama is going to be one of the worst things that has happened to this country, politically, since .... well, since ever!

Tied to that above link, are some parts of a generally good post by the InternetMonk about legalism and its different forms.

On the climate side of things is La Nina! It's back after gracing us last year, which means a cooler, dryer time ahead for many areas in the US. Actually, if I understand other sources correctly, La Nina has never technically stopped from last year. Definitely some non-standard weather. Non-standard weather that seems to be influencing a cooler global climate.

666 Number of the Beast - a surprisingly good article that isn't in the Left Behind vein of nuttiness. He's usually good, so I guess it shouldn't be surprising.

One of many news articles out there on the topic:
SCOTUS rejects appeal questioning Obama's citizenship (CNN)
High Court Bats Down Petition to Hear Obama Citizenship Case (WSJ)
There are still another couple lawsuits on this topic coming up.

Just a sad post

In my travels to blogs and stuff (still working on the LONG project) occasionally I run across some real gems. Sometimes I run across some real stinkers too. This is from a Catholic commenter.

The Holy Bible without proper guidance can be as harmful as giving a 4 year old scissors and tell him to run around in circles as fast as he can.

Wow. Just wow. I know Catholics who are not like this and I'm not trying to paint Catholics in some way. This statement coming from ANY Christian is just horribly sad.

And then this is an article from the WSJ. You've heard of mystery shoppers? Well, now there are mystery worshipers. I don't have a problem with a church wanting its place to look nice, and because people are so self-blind it can be very valuable to have someone with an outside perspective look at you and give you an idea of what they see.

This though - it doesn't seem like that's what the focus is. It seems like the focus is almost entirely on creating a 'happy' environment to attract people in because the church is a fun or cool place to be. When the focus is so strongly on being fun and cool, then it is assured that the focus is not on Christ.

The Mystery Worshiper

Faces to Blogs

It's amazing what meeting someone that you primarily knew online can do to your mental conception of that person. Last weekend C&I headed over to the college's alumni meet and greet and its president's Q&A session. While there I finally got to meet Dr. Veith of blogging fame! (actually he's also famous for his books)

I'm not sure that anything really changed in my thoughts on his opinions or postings or anything, but I now look at his postings with a bit more ... appreciation? identification? sympathy? familiarity? I'm not really sure how to describe it. It's putting a person with the text on a screen.

Having talked with him for a few minutes doesn't mean I know him any better than I did before, since it was mostly where-do-you-live sort of details, but people are funny creatures. I don't know him any better, but just because I talked with him for five minutes about innocuous details, all of a sudden I'm more interested in what he says.

Just because we talked face-to-face. Huh.

Insert your own pontification on the anonymous nature of online communications and how it changes our interactions and relationships with other people.

The bad and good

First comes an exercise in stupidity. The title really says it all. I really can't improve on it!
PETA Urges Ben & Jerry's To Use Human Milk

Then something a bit better. A couple different good points in here.
If Your Right Eye Causes You To Sin

Massaging climate data

Watts Up With That nails it again.

I'll bet people think that the temperature averages are just that - the average of the temperatures of the recording stations. Ha! Don't be ridiculous. You can't just do that! You have to massage the numbers before they're of any use.

For this and other reasons, I'm beginning to seriously think that ground-based temperature recordings ought to be essentially tossed out of any scientific use. I have no doubt that they could be of use if collected and handled properly, but with all the lousy measurement sites (not a small fraction by any means) and the fiddle diddling that they receive after collection, there's no way that they can be used in anything close to the precise levels that they're being used.

Unfortunately, the fractions of a degree temperature rise (that happen to be well inside margins of error) are being used to claim the world is embarking on runaway global warming. Of course, it's all due to humans too.

What I've read today

Waiting for 1.4 GB downloads is a pain in the neck, even at 600 to 900 KB/s. So, I got some reading done that normally would have waited for lunch time. I guess I'm on a theological bent at the moment, at least that's what my reading seems to reflect. Beyond that, I'm in an anti-political mood too, so that probably trimmed down my reading a bit.

(and then I got slammed with a half-dozen different items and I am just now [5:41PM] restarting this post)

First off, here's some of the update on Orissa, and the violence against Christians that is going on there. The significance of this list is that they've gone through and verified these happenings. The list is impressive, especially considering that there is very likely much more going on than what this lists.

Orissa Christian Persecution Fact Finding Report

On a similar note, IM posts about an African student who was Muslim but became a Christian while at IM's college. The student is worried about heading back to Africa and her family and the possible/probable persecution there. That's why I am glad this gal had much more wise people around her to help than me. Really, how would you seriously discuss that with her?

Since I've mentioned IM, here is a post from him that's an interview with a popular blogger who expressed some dissatisfaction with her church, and with some of the general aspects of Christian, megachurch culture. (a culture even small churches like to emulate) I might as well link over to the blogger's original post. IM suggested reading it first, but I would suggest reading the interview first, and then the original post. (make sure you get them both) The interview was well enough done that the original isn't necessary to appreciate the interview and what is being said.

On IM's other blog, Jesus Shaped Spirituality, he wrote a great essay on how he tries to apply Jesus Shape-ness. I have a suspicion that the thread will veer off onto a Lutheran-version-of-Eucharist-is-correct sort of direction, but the essay is excellent.

Interesting expression

The Name of the Wind - awesome book by Patrick Rothfuss. Sequel coming out eventually. He's an very good entertaining writer and I enjoy his blog. He writes about whatever, and recently he posted about a little, freebie game. I thought one of his descriptions was ... interesting, and maybe disturbing.

... Penny Arcade recently put out their own video game titled On the Rain-Swept Precipice of Darkness....

It's like H. P. Lovecraft and Terry Pratchett had some sort of oddly charismatic love child with Tourette's.

Bro, you'll probably appreciate the bizarreness of that particular combination, and the attraction that it would hold for me. Wow. Lovecraft + Pratchett + charismatic Tourettes = Disturbing Awesomeness.

I haven't tried anything yet, but I'm going to have to give it a whirl based just on that description.

Revisited - habits of atheism and smoking

A while back I mentioned link to a posting of an ex-atheist where he talked about giving up his habit of atheism.

An excellent article; not one that is trying to convince others, but rather explaining some of the things he saw as he matured that "failed" in atheism. That summary is woefully inadequate and misses a LOT, but it's the best I can do in a short, single sentence.

He's just followed it up with a follow-up (hmmm, that was redundant redundant, wasn't it) talking about his experience of commenting on an atheist site - friendlyatheist.com. Another good article and one which I will shamelessly use as a segue into a mild rant that is totally divorced from his topic.

Anyone who has ever gone out commenting in a forum that is even mildly controversial will immediately recognize the different types of commenters that he ran across. The ratios vary from blog to blog, but just about every blog has a mixture of the ones he talks about.

In my parlance they are:

Mr. You're Welcome If You Become Like Us
This fine fellow invites you in with kind words about how nice it is to see newcomers and people with different points of view. The welcome starts to wear thin pretty quickly and pretty soon he will be wondering why you even bother coming to a place like this where you obviously don't fit in. This guy is pretty tough to get past because he's one of the few people who say nice things to you if you're in a "hostile" locale and when he starts turning on you it's very discouraging.

Mr. I Totally Disagree In Every Way
This is my favorite. No blarmy about how nice it is to see you - he tells you right out that you're an idiot and immediately goes about showing you why. However, he's relatively nice about it (by Internet blog/messageboard standards) and stays at a pretty decent level of conversation. It's best to treat him in turn, and stay honest and on topic. He'll treat you as an equal as long as you don't start gutter sniping. He's a good guy eventually.

Mr. You Are WRONG, You &*$%#@! Moron
Abusive and nasty to all newcomers, but at least he at least addresses what you're talking about to some extent. Depending on the percentage of the population that this type makes up, you can pretty safely ignore him. If you stick around long enough, he'll start turning into his cousin, Mr. ITDIEW.

Mr. You're An Idiot Who Isn't Worth My Time
A very annoying sort of person. He can either be a very tired and jaded Mr. ITDIEW, or is a college-age arrogant jerk. He'll pretty much just say you're dumb, you're an idiot, and that it's a miracle you manage to pull up your pants. He never goes into giving reasons why. His brother is:

Mr. You're A *bleep*ing *bleep*er, You *bleep*er
Much like his brother above, he'll just call you names, but instead of dropping it there he continues to vociferously castigate you at every turn for being a moron and won't stop.

Mr. Wow! Friendly Company! Yay!
This guy is one of twins who are hard to tell apart at first. The first is an intelligent guy, who for whatever masochistic reasons has gotten himself embedded in hostile territory. The group accepts him and respects him to some extent. He will be your biggest help. His twin brother is a class A1 jerk who happens to agree with you, refuses to leave, and totally embarrasses you by being of the same persuasion as yourself. The longer this guy has been around, the harder it will be for anyone to accept you.

There are a few other types around, but these are the main peoples you will run into when venturing into hostile territory. You can be a Conservative going into Liberal places, Atheist into Christian, or anything else. If you're going into hostile territory, you'll run across these guys.