keystone

We've been in Keystone, Colo. since Friday evening for some speed events. We skied super G Saturday and Sunday and trained downhill today; tomorrow is another downhill training day before two days of downhill racing. These are able-bodied junior races, so we're basically here just for training purposes — which is great, because believe it or not, we haven't gotten a single day of speed training in with the U.S. team this season. As it turned out, the super G races the past two days did count for more than that, because our head coach Kevin convinced the Austrian guy who runs the disabled race circuit worldwide to score the races for ASD points. Results from those races (as well as Park City, finally), are available here.

A couple nights ago I was flipping through TV channels and I caught an author named Sam Harris speaking on C-SPAN 2's Book TV. Harris was speaking about the destructive role that faith-based religion (as opposed to meditation-based religion) plays in the world, and his controversial argument about the complicity of religious moderates in the fundamentalist-led Muslim and Christian jihads really gave me pause, because I've had similar thoughts but had trouble articulating them. If you have a fast-ish connection, you can watch the entire program online by clicking here. I was even inspired to order Harris's book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason; you can read the first ten pages of it online here (html) or here (pdf).