Dan Pinchbeck, upset at Mark Dery:
I do not think that there will be a “multidimensional realm of hyperspace triggered by mass activation of the pineal gland.” That quote was taken out of context, I can only presume intentionally.
Onnaccounta this.
Category Archives: religion
Journalistic ethics, NYT edition
under architecture, art, economics, education, energy, environment, government, international, language, law, media, medicine, military, neighborhood, religion, science
Randy Cohen, who currently “writes the The Ethicist for The New York Times Magazine” and will write another weekly column (“Moral of the Story”) “examin[ing] a news story from an ethical perspective,” shows either (a) sloppy writing, (b) a complete disregard for national sensibilities, or (c) a sort of carpet-bombing ignorance of the arts and sciences when he writes:
There’d be no reason to visit Pere Lachaise if it did not provide a physical link to Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison.
Except for, say, Abelard and Heloise, Apollinaire, Balzac, Bernard, Bichat, Bizet, Bourdieu, Champollion, Colette, Comte, Corot, Daumier, Delacroix, Vivant Denon, Doré, Duncan, Éluard, Ernst, Fontaine, Fourier, Fuller, Gay-Lussac, Haussmann, Lyotard, Marceau, Méliés, Merleau-Ponty, Modigliani, Moliere, Nadar, Nerval, Ophuls, Piaf, Pissarro, Proust, Rossini, Roussel, Saint-Hilaire, Seurat, Signoret, Stein, and Toklas. And the Mur des Fédérés.
(photo: agramainio)
Culture Waterloo
under government, law, religion, trend
Cultural warlord James Dobson, ~10 Apr ’09:
“We tried to defend the unborn child, the dignity of the family, but it was a holding action,” he said.
m3t00, 21 Aug ’08:
White male cultural conservatives have every reason to whine: for the last century, everyone else—all those others—have been mopping the floor with their imaginary entitlement.
Go team!
Chariots of the Gods 2: the Keynes Generation
Right on schedule—for example, WRT the decline and fall of Western Civilization currently underway—comes a host of “Atlantis experts” who believe they’ve found the object of their expertise:
“The site is one of the most prominent places for the proposed location of Atlantis, as described by Plato,” the Atlantis expert said. “Even if it turns out to be geographical [sic], it definitely deserves a closer look.” Bernie Bamford, 38, of Chester who spotted the “city”, compared it to the plan of Milton Keynes, the Buckinghamshire town built on a grid design. “It must be man made,” he said.
The “perfect” rectangle “is around the size of Wales,” which means that the subdivided lots were so immense that obviously Atlantis had reached an advanced state of oligopoly before it collapsed or was inundated or whatever.
Maybe now that economico-political collapse suggests we’re due for an efflorescence of irrationalism, we can finally break the studied silence that scholarly and pop commentators have maintained about early-1970s schmysticism. And figure out, for once and for all, what’s really up with all those Lincoln–Kennedy coincidences, for example.
What about Hell?
under environment, government, religion
Hugo Chavez, denouncing GWB, tells the UN General Assembly “it smells of sulfur here” (20 Sep ’06; money quote at 5:37):
GWB shows a profound interest in the subject (12 Jan ’09): ”The Sulfur Cauldron, a pool of liquid sulfur, is found at the Daikoku submarine volcano. The only other known location of molten sulfur is on Io, a moon of Jupiter.”
Markets in bears, not in bulls
A curious detail in the NYT’s survey of the Madoff malware (“Madoff Scheme Kept Rippling Outward, Across Borders,” 19 Dec ’08):
The only thing that struck the Swiss banker as odd was the bull memorabilia strewn about his office. “It seemed strange for a guy to have all these bulls, little sculptures, paintings of bulls,” he recalled. “I’ve seen offices with bears. This was bulls.”
So is it explicit knowledge (for example, among Swiss bankers) that bears surround themselves with fetishes but bulls don’t? Another anthro dissertation waiting to be written. (See also: “Reduce, reuse, recycle.”)
It
under government, network, religion
“When Republicans say that Democrats ‘just don’t get it,’ this is the ‘it’ to which they refer.”
So what about when net-heads said it about bell-heads?
(the muted horn)
Allah on oil prices
under economics, international, religion
From Peter Arnett’s ’97 interview with bin Laden:
REPORTER: Mr. Bin Ladin, if the Islamic movement takes over Saudi Arabia, what would your attitude to the West be and will the price of oil be higher?
BIN LADIN: We are a nation and have a long history, with the grace of God, Praise and Glory be to Him. We are now in the 15th century of this great religion, the complete and comprehensive methodology, has clarified the dealing between and individual and another, the duties of the believer towards God, Praise and Glory be to Him, and the relationship between the Muslim country and the other countries in time of peace and in time of war. If we look back at our history, we will find that there were many types of dealings between the Muslim nation and the other nations in time of peace and in time of war, including treaties and matters to do with commerce. So it is not a new thing that we need to come up with. rather, it already, by the grace of God, exists. As for oil, it is a commodity that will be subject to the price of the market according to supply and demand. We believe that the current prices are not realistic due to the Saudi regime playing the role of a US agent and the pressures exercised by the US on the Saudi regime to increase production and flooding the market that caused a sharp decrease in oil prices.
Bin Laden’s interview is noted with a green line in the chart below, based on one from the BBC. The last “sharp decrease in oil prices” followed the Gulf War, which suggests that bin Laden’s rather shallow theology was formulated in mid-’91 or soon thereafter (an aspect that could have been exploited, if US intelligence had been more deliberate).
In addition to His ninety-nine attributes, then, Allah, Praise and Glory be to Him, seems to be a garden-variety free-marketeer.
Vague allegory
under architecture, media, religion
Cellphone pic of pig and rooster talking on the phone, carved into the capital of a column near a bank of payphones in Riverside Church.
Pope condemns relativism, changes mind, wishes he’d taken notes but decided not to because immaterial office has a smaller carbon footprint
The NYT has an article that says today (20 July) it was published tomorrow (21 July), reporting that the pope—formerly Herr Ratzinger—will have criticized materialism yesterday:
It seemed like only last week he was denouncing moral relativism too, and that it was reported in the NYT. But, according to the NYT, he didn’t do anything of the sort:
Google news disagrees, saying that the NYT said that he “assailed moral relativism” on 17 July...
...while giving a link to a report a day later (18 July, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/18/world/asia/18pope.html). But when you follow it, you find that Mr. Google misread the article or got confused, because the former Herr Ratzinger was really “warning” us about the “environment”:
Apocalypse async
under religion
Bruce Schneier’s 15 June 08 Crypto-Gram notes the service youvebeenleftbehind.com, which promises to spam dozens of friends and loved ones “6 days after the ‘Rapture’ of the Church.” Early reports stressed the service’s claim that since “[t]here won’t be any bodies ... probate court will take 7 years to clear”—coincidentally(?) enough time for “the Government of the AntiChrist [to get] your stuff”—but this argument seem to have been scrubbed from the site. In his reply to Kevin Poulsen on WiReD‘s Threat Level, YBLB's maintainer said:
I think that most of the traffic is by angry non-Christians checking it out and venting on various blogs. I have read quite a few of these and politely answered some of them. I have taken some of their negative comments as constructive criticism and ordered a few changes on the site.
Schneier’s commentary is pedantic in that clear, dry, Shneierian sort of way. He mentions YBLB’s operational definition of the Rapture...
when 3 of our 5 team members scattered around the U.S [sic] fail to log in over a 3 day period [plus a]nother 3 days are given to fail safe any false triggering of the system
...but passes up the chance to play out various scenarios in which, this minimal threshold having been met for non-rapturous reasons, Christians prematurely see their wealth transferred—a venerable dynamic in apocalyptic movements. (How many times has Matthew 19:23–24—“it will be hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (RSV)—been cited by those who believe, or at least proclaim, that the end is near?)
Interactions between truculent secular thinking (which is invariably naive about its religious dimensions) and earnest religious thinking (which is invariably naive about its technical dimensions) are a lot more complicated than most people credit. Y2K, for example (see my essay “Le Bogue, petite peur de l’an 2000,“ in Le Monde diplomatique [August 1999]; English version here [pdf, 65k]). Or the widespread adoption of beepers during the early 1990s outbreak of messianism among the Lubavitcher Hasidim:
All day, the Hasidic Lubavitcher Jews in black hats and long coats come to the locked storefront on Kingston Avenue in Crown Heights, wait to be buzzed in, then pronounce the words in Yiddish that have become rote among this religious people. “Ich vil kayfun ah Moshiach beeper,” said Rabbi Joshua Pinson, pulling out his checkbook. Or: “I want to buy a Messiah beeper.”
They need the beepers so they will know immediately when the Messiah has arrived. “There’s an expectation that any moment there will be a revelation,” said Chaim Halberstam, the audio-visual expert who oversees Messiah beeper sales. “People are very tense waiting.”
When the cognitive dissonance clears up, the issues are more mundane—and more interesting.