Sparing these two?

Wolf Blitzer always turns my stomach but this is worth watching just for what a great ambassador for the godless this woman is.

Saw this excellent talk from Sam Harris last night recorded at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas (great name). Sam makes a pretty good case, and particularly for the practical side of what this implies. In short, free will is an illusion and it matters. The reason it matters is that our society does a lot of unnecessary harm in response to the belief that individuals are responsible for their thoughts and actions. It’s highly non-intuitive to most people raised in the retribution-based ideologies of monotheistic religion, but it doesn’t make it any less true. What strikes me as interesting is how well-aligned this is with Buddhist thought, particularly that of “not-self.” Buddhists believe that the concept of self is itself a delusion, so it directly implies that there is no responsible entity to be blamed or credited for bad or good behavior. Sam’s main point is that the delusion of free-will causes us to misdirect our reaction to harmful behavior on punishment rather than protection against the bad effects of such behavior. A murderer, for instance, should be kept away from society not because he or she must be punished for the deed, but because they have demonstrated a dangerous pattern and there is a significant likelihood that they will murder again.

From Sam Harris’s excellent analysis of the strange justifications for highly respected scientist Francis Collins’ religious beliefs:

1. Jesus Christ, a carpenter by trade, was born of a virgin, ritually murdered as a scapegoat for the collective sins of his species, and then resurrected from death after an interval of three days.

2. He promptly ascended, bodily, to “heaven”—where, for two millennia, he has eavesdropped upon (and, on occasion, even answered) the simultaneous prayers of billions of beleaguered human beings.

3. Not content to maintain this numinous arrangement indefinitely, this invisible carpenter will one day return to earth to judge humanity for its sexual indiscretions and skeptical doubts, at which time he will grant immortality to anyone who has had the good fortune to be convinced, on mother’s knee, that this baffling litany of miracles is the most important series of truth-claims ever revealed about the cosmos.

4. Every other member of our species, past and present, from Cleopatra to Einstein, no matter what his or her terrestrial accomplishments, will be consigned to a far less desirable fate, best left unspecified.

5. In the meantime, God/Jesus may or may not intervene in our world, as He pleases, curing the occasional end-stage cancer (or not), answering an especially earnest prayer for guidance (or not), consoling the bereaved (or not), through His perfectly wise and loving agency.

Loonies every one.

writing a novel just now.

The 911 call

The story

I first titled this post simply “Hero” before reading the New Yorker piece and realizing that Amanda Berry was even more heroic for what she did. Amazing story.

Sorry to step down from the ethereal beauty of recent posts, but this is just priceless. A little NSFW.

Source

read more…

which should be featuring…

• The ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner and the codpiece he wore ten years ago when he declared that major combat operations had ended in Iraq even though they continued for the rest of his presidency.

• The chair in which he sat, frozen, at Booker Elementary School on 9/11 after he was told “America is under attack.” Also his dog-eared copy of “The Pet Goat.”

• A bag of pretzels, of course.

• On a continuous loop in the lobby: a recording of the push-poll question his campaign used to destroy John McCain in 2000…

“Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?”

…just to show visiting school kids what a classy guy Bush is.
• A piece of the birthday cake he shared with John McCain in Phoenix as the levees were busting open in New Orleans.

• The golf club he swung immediately after vowing to “stop these terrorist killers.”

• The 2005 “Can I go pee?” note he scribbled to Condi Rice at the United Nations.

• The Segway he fell off of in 2003.

• A credit card bill forwarded from the White House to “The People of the United States of America” with a balance of $10 trillion.

• The August 6, 2001 PDB: Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside US.

• Some aluminum tubes.

• The vial of baby powder Colin Powell used to scare us to death at the United Nations.

• The best of FEMA Director Michael Brown’s Katrina emails, including “I am a fashion god” and “Can I quit now? Can I go home?”

• A photo collage of the U.S. soldiers who died during the Iraq war underneath a sign that says, “Oops!”

• The shoes that were thrown at him by a journalist during his last visit to Iraq.

• The shirt Bill Clinton was wearing in Haiti when Bush used it as a rag to wipe a commoner’s cooties off his hand in 2010.

Stolen from DailyKos

The guy with the rifle is my bank teller. This piece just debuted in the Sacramento Film Festival.

You know, I’ve got a hundred things to say about this film, but it makes me want to write and shoot a small film, and that’s gotta be good.