The Theology of Penn & Teller

Here's a video where Penn & Teller help you "read the Bible"...

Bob Harris' "Who Hates Whom"

This book is categorized by the publisher a "humor" but it is really history/contemporary affairs. It is a good historical review -- leavened with humour -- of the world's hotspots and the story of what's behind these conflicts. It's a mad dash, but a good overview. It hammers home the point that so much of the turmoil in the world is idiotic, but gruesomely relentless in its violence. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book.

Here's a taste of some of the humor:

Prepare to be confused. The UK is a union of four countries -- England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland --- three of whom are the largest remnants of a once-global empire. But 80 percent of the population lives in England, so people often confuse "England" with "UK," which it isn't.

"Great Britain" isn't the UK, either; it's the island where England is. The "British Isles" would be Great Britain plus Ireland, except the phrase annoys Ireland, which isn't British. But a "Briton" is from anywhere in the UK, including Northern Ireland. Which, if you look at a map, doesn't include the northernmost part of Ireland. And when a British person says "Europe," they mean Europe except for the UK, even though the UK is part of Europe.

Another example that isn't humourous, but shows the light hand he uses to retell history:

Guatemala spent the early 20th century built around the interest of United Fruit (now Chiquita), its biggest landowner. But a 1944 revolution led to the election of Juan José Arévalo, who supported labor unions, universal suffrage, and workers' rights. His successor, Jacobo Arbenz, went further, legalizing the communist party (among others) and attempting a clever land reform: claiming that United Fruit had cheated on its taxes by pretending its land was worth a fraction of its true value. Arbenz proposed to buy the land for exactly what they said it was worth.

To Washington,this might as well have been a Soviet invasion. The newly formed CIA set up a propaganda apparatus to freak out the locals, hooked up rightist Col. Carlos Castillo Armas with some half-competent rebels... and lucked out. Although Armas' men got their butts kicked at first, Arbenz's generals believed a full-scale U.S. invasion was imminient, so they weenied out. Armas, the CIA, and United Fruit were in.

The Power of "Logic"

The following video is quite amusing. It is seriously put forward as an argument to prove God's existence as "the Designer". But the "evidence" is so funny, it comes across as a seriously funny comedy piece. Too bad the author's didn't intend it to be a comedy. I wonder if this lack of "design" proves the non-existence of Ray Comfort, the purported originator of this video entitled The Atheist's Nightmare:

Slimeball Politics

The following is a perfect example of how politicians will not give a straight answer and how they will always paint the other guy as bad while ignoring any blemish on their own side. This, for me, is a perfect example of how ugly, disgusting, and vicious the "professionals" of politics are:



And if the above isn't enough to drive you crazy, consider these details about how the DNC rules committee meeting went. Especially, listen to the last minute of this tape to see how the Hillary Clinton crowd played the issue of "rules are rules" vs. "count every vote":

Margaret MacMillan's "The Uses and Abuses of History"

This book collects a number of essays about history, how it is written, how it is ignored, why it is useful, etc. Nothing truly revelatory or astonishing. Just craftsmanlike essays. It is nice to read a book by a Canadian. For me the key point was how badly people botch things because they don't know their history. I, for one, have been trapped many times into believing the propaganda put out by the US as it starts out on another of its disastrous adventures. I know the history, but I keep falling into the trap. So, it is easy enough to say that you need to know history. For me, knowing isn't enough. I need to be less credulous, more cynical. Oh well.

Here's a bit that I enjoyed that in a way sums up the book for me:

In 1893, the British naval commander in the Mediterranean, Vice-Admiral George Tryon, decided to take personal command of the summer naval maneuvers. When he ordered an about-face of two parallel rows of battleships, his officers tried to point out that there would be a collision. A relatively simple calculation demonstrated that the combined turning cirles of the ships were greater than the distance bewteen them. WHile his officers watched in dismay, his flagship Victoria was rammed by the Camperdown. Tryon refused to believe that the damage was serious and ordered the nearby vessels not to send their lifeboats. The Victoria sank, taking him and 357 sailors with it.

I take heart from this. Why? It show me that England managed to struggle on for another 50 years before it collapsed under the gross incompetence of its upper class, so I guess the US can struggle on another 20 years after the Reagan/Poppa Bush/Shrub Bush debacle. Using history as my measuring stick, it will take decades before the US finally collapses under the gross incompetence of its ruling mob, an amalgam of Wall Street "smart guys", fanatical neocons, and rabid fundamentalist Christians.

Jonah Lehrer's "Proust Was a Neuroscientist"

This is a wonderful set of essays that examine the interrelationship between science and art. Specifically it claims that "This book is about artists who anticipated the discoveries of neuroscience. It is about writers and pointers and composes who discovered truths about the human mind -- real, tangible truths -- that science is only now rediscovering." It looks at eight artists: Walt Whitman, George Eliot, Marcel Proust, Paul Cezanne, Igor Stravinsky, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Wolfe. Apparantly the author worked as a doctoral student in a neurologist's lab before deciding that a PhD in the field was not for him, so his science is excellent. Remarkably, his artistic knowledge and sensibility is first rate as well. This makes an excellent read.

The following fails to give you the delightful artistic insights of the book. But I find it interesting as a bit of debunking of expertise:

In 2001, Frederic Brochet, of the University of Bordeaux conducted two separate and very mischievous experiments. In the first test, Brochet invited fifty-seven wine experts and asked them to give their impressions of what looked like two glasses of red and white wine. The wines were actually the same white wine, one of which had been tinted red with food coloring. But that didn't stop the experts from describing the "red" wine in language typically used to describe red wines. One expert praised its "jamminess," while another enjoyed its "crushed red fruit." Not a single one noticed it was actually a white wine.

The second test Brochet conducted was even more damning. He took a middling Bordeaux and served it in two different bottles. One bottle was labeled as a fancy Grand Cur. The other bottle was labeled as an ordinary vin du table. Despite the fact that they were served the exact same wine, the experts gave the differently labeled bottles nearly opposite ratings. The Grand Cru was "agreeable, woody, complex, balanced, and rounded," while the vin du table was "weak, short, light, flat, and faulty." Forty experts said the wine with the fancy label was worth drinking, while only twelve said the cheap wine was.

Nutty US Politics

At the end of the primary elections Hillary Clinton appealed to her "white" voter base (i.e. racist whites) to come on strong and nearly overcome the deficit she had created by her earlier refusal to acknowledge a challenge from Barack Obama (i.e. the failure to plan for a campaign past Super Tuesday). Now a large vocal segment of her followers, this white working class segment of the Democratic Party, are threatening to bolt and vote Republican because their "gut" tells them there is something unacceptable about Barack Obama. This is incredible. They will vote against their economic and political interests because of a "gut feeling". They will do this despite having suffered for eight years under a President who rejected rational thinking in favour of his "gut feelings" and thereby led the US into major disasters.

Here's an example of this thinking. Judge for yourself: