Links With Your Coffee - Monday
- Only in Utah
Woman jailed for 'neglected' lawn
(tip to Kirk)
A 70-year-old US woman has been left bruised and bloody after an unexpected clash with police who came to arrest her because her lawn was dry and brown. - Relations Break Down Between U.S. And Them (Onion)
- Christopher Hitchens - God Is Not Great Point of Inquiry with D. J. Grothe
In this conversation with D.J. Grothe, Hitchens discusses his new best-selling book God Is Not Great, which is his contribution to the recent slate of best-selling atheist titles. He also explores various strategies for challenging religiosity in our society, the immorality of the Bible, how religion is bad for one’s health, his many recent public debates with believers, and what he calls the war between the West and Islamism. He also comments on the relationship between atheism and intelligence, atheism and great literature, and the need for a “New Enlightenment.”
- SHOCKER: FRED THOMPSON LEAKED SECRETS NOT ONLY OF WATERGATE, BUT OF SAM WATERSTON!
- Jesus for the Non-Religious
This is not, as the title suggests, a theological riposte to the hugely popular God-denying books by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Rather, as Spong, a retired bishop, explains in the prologue, it tries to answer the 21st-century questions: "Is it possible, Jesus, that we Christians are the villains who killed you? Smothered you underneath literal Bibles, dated creeds, irrelevant doctrines and dying structures?"
- Gore Vidal Sounds Off on Solar Power Caper
Note to public utility companies: Do not cross Gore Vidal. A week after representatives from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power came to his Hollywood Hills home to inspect (and then shut down) his newly installed solar power system, Vidal is still “on the grid,” unable to use solar until the system is fully re-inspected. As his fans would expect, the puissant author and tough customer has let fly with some strong words about the utility company, the state of California and the state of the country at large.
- LAND OF SAINTS AND MORONS
- Audio of RFK Jr. Live Earth
Comments
re: only in utah
norm, i thought I lived in the most insane place on the face of the planet. you trying to steal my thunder?
norm, i gotta thank you for turning me on to this hitchens character. i really, really disliked him the first time i saw him speak (here on 1gm), but your (our) persistance has paid off and, as a great appreciator of "dry, british wit" i've come to find him highly amusing. i often feel that i could rebut specific points of his by going into esoteric details about the jewish religion, but in general i find myself liking the little prick more and more. but about this interview: didn't you (or anyone else) get a little red flag shiver when he described islam as "the religion of the 3rd world, of the brown skinned people"? i mean, i'm all for brutal honesty, etc. but there was something about the tone or cadence when he said "brown skinned people" that made me think it just kind of slipped out accidentally, revealing that imperialist, racist british superiority bubbling just under the surface.
the interviewer was good, for a sychophant. :)
re: only in utah
It's a sad sad world....but isn't it funny that norm goes to the far side of the hemisphere for his local news. =0P
Spong's been a hell-raiser inside Christianity for a long time, since his days as the Episcopalian bishop in Newark, NJ. He's a prolific and florid writer who has long taken the view that Christianity has fallen prey to the same fundamentalist reification as have the other major faiths, and he's also a been a political activist, kind of in the mold of William Sloane Coffin. One of Spong's books that I've read is called "Why Christianity Must Change--Or Die".
The problem with fellows like these is not with themselves, but with their message, which gets rather drowned or garbled or simply ignored because it tends to be too challenging for traditional believers.
So I tend to think that there is no need to even speak of spirituality anymore. The walls erected by belief do us far more harm than good, because they divide the natural unity of the living self into stiff segments of part-being, defined by separate and often opposing ideologies.
Even science often becomes stiffened with orthodoxy; but the time is past where we can afford to wait--in religion, science, and certainly government--for some Kuhnian paradigm shift to occur. Belief must be overthrown, or the next paradigm shift will be the extinction of our species.
Re; the Robert Kennedy speech at Live Earth. It has been removed by YouTube due to a copyright claim by Microsoft Network.
Funny that I read the article in my local paper and promptly forgot about it then Kirk sent me a link to the story, Utah news spreads quickly so I used that instead. Just thought you'd like to know how I got the way I am.
I've replaced the video of RFK Jr. speech with just the audio. It's worth a listen.
Those Mormon moral police give the Saudi moral police a run for their money.
"...imperialist, racist british superiority..."
As a Brit I find that to be a little too close to racism itself sir!
I wonder where the expression "dry wit" comes from, and what "wet wit" would entail?
I would presume it would be the involuntary discharge of sputum while one is being witty.
Ok. that was a bit juvenile, but I couldn't resist :)
craig, you are quite right, and i do apologize. i have no excuse. in any case, racially speaking, i understand mr. hitchens is one of us jewboys, so perhaps i should direct my pc criticism closer to home. i am chagrined. you could have been much harder on me. i commend your british decency. :)
It's nice that you've come to like the prick. Hmm I remember hearing him talking about the 'brown skinned people' and third world but I wasn't paying close attention and it came across as just brutal honesty. Shit now I'm going to have to listen again with my delicate ears atune to the charge racism. I see that I don't need to call you on insulting by British friends. They do a hell of a job of sticking up for themselves. Oh yes, and I'll overlook a lot for a little of that dry wit. Love it, I do.
jb,
And off topic, I'm going to have to reprimand myself I suppose, I enjoyed Fadiman's "Ex Libris"
I used to think hell was in Alabama but now I'm pretty sure it would be in Utah, if it were real. Is Utah for real?
These days I tell the kids, "do what your mother says or you'll go to Utah, and then you'll be sorry."
It sounds like that underground city in "A Boy and His Dog"
Re: Only in Utah
... and Michigan:
www.woodtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=6725421
glad you liked the book, norm. it was one of the best reads i've had in awhile and like ms. fadiman, i've always loved books about books.
what are you, yoda now?:)
http://www.myspace.com/rfkjrfortheusa
In Utah, Hutu?
Only "Pud" goredem!
In Suburbiam (to be Latinesque). Read Thorstain Veblen about the significance of the Greener Pastures to the Aryan Urheimatssehnsucht.
Ah, the little Brownies, hated from all sides. The Bantuoid Hutus perpetrated more than one evil act of axing to death the brown-not-black (just like 1/2 of Africa, and all of the rest of the world except for those homo erectus Pericu in baja california) Tutsi/Watusis. The "lost" tribes "of Israel".
O happy medium.
O Ozone Holy Shi..
..ite Shrine!
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