The New Yorker Festival - Richard Dawkins: Disciple of Darwin by Richard DawkinsMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
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Friday, December 26, 2025
Review: The New Yorker Festival - Richard Dawkins: Disciple of Darwin
The New Yorker Festival - Richard Dawkins: Disciple of Darwin by Richard DawkinsMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
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Thursday, December 25, 2025
Wednesday, December 24, 2025
Review: The Action Hero's Handbook: How to Catch a Great White Shark, Perform the Vulcan Nerve Pinch, and Dozens of Other TV and Movie Skills
Tuesday, December 23, 2025
Review: Better than Sex
Better than Sex by Hunter S. ThompsonMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Narraged by Scott Sowers
...if you want to get elected, it is better to be Mean than to be Funny.
Casual racism
...As for fleet movements—they’re not essential in that every other ordnance (weapons, bombs, boats, etc.) except hospital ships is already in place over there … and they won’t really need hospital ships, anyway.
Not to take Saddam’s head … Shit, even a phoney head would look good for a South Lawn photo op on October 15. Who’s going to call the president a liar when he’s parading around in public with a rotting human head that he says is Saddam Hussein’s?
Not me, James. And probably not you either. Because there will be a certain resemblance. And you know how those sand-niggers are about using body-doubles. Hell, they all look alike, anyway …
...
And let me remind you that there are laws against kidnapping and brutalizing famous journalists—even if you are the next president. You could do that, but it would be wrong. Remember what happened to Tex Colson.… Indeed, putting me on a subhuman Arkansas chain gang might send a demoralizing message to many decent Americans of all ages, James, and would almost certainly get a Clinton administration off on a wrong karmic foot.
Jack Kennedy was a warrior. So was his brother, Bobby. They were more than just politicians: They were political professionals, high rollers. They saw the enemy as just another set of gongs to be beaten savagely. And they were very good boys to have on your side in a bad fight—and all fights against Richard Nixon were bad. He was criminally insane. George Bush was a punk, compared to Nixon. The quality of the opposition has steadily declined since the sixties.
That is the real lesson of presidential politics in the nineties. Never admit anything, except where you were born. Of course Bill Clinton never inhaled when he put the bong to his lips. Of course he never knew Gennifer Flowers.
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Sunday, December 21, 2025
Saturday, December 20, 2025
Saturday, December 13, 2025
Review: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan CainMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Jerome Kagan Galen's Prophecy: Temperament In Human Nature
Kagan has given us painstakingly documented evidence that high reactivity is one biological basis of introversion (we'll explore another likely route in chapter 7), but his findings are powerful in part because they confirm what we've sensed all along. Some of Kagan's studies even venture into the realm of cultural myth. For example, he believes, based on his data, that high reactivity is associated with physical traits such as blue eyes, allergies, and hay fever, and that high-reactive men are more likely than others to have a thin body and narrow face. Such conclusions are speculative and call to mind the nineteenth-century practice of divining a man's soul from the shape of his skull. But whether or not they turn out to be accurate, it's interesting that these are just the physical characteristics we give fictional characters when we want to suggest that they're quiet, introverted, cerebral. It's as if these physiological tendencies are buried deep in our cultural unconscious.
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Friday, December 12, 2025
Thursday, December 11, 2025
Tuesday, December 9, 2025
Sunday, December 7, 2025
Saturday, December 6, 2025
Wednesday, December 3, 2025
Sunday, November 30, 2025
Saturday, November 29, 2025
Review: If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left
If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left by Out Of PrintMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
The difference is that my interpretation presupposes the good intentions and psychological soundness of those involved (when I think other-wise, as in a few instances, I indicate as much). One need not have been suffering from any psychological disturbance to have been ap-palled by the prospect of nuclear war, or the conduct of the Vietnam War...
Resistance to something was the law of New England nature; the boy looked out on the world with the instinct of resistance; for numberless generations his predecessors had viewed the world chiefly as a thing to be reformed, filled with evil forces to be abolished, and they saw no reason to suppose that they had wholly succeeded in the abolition; the duty was unchanged. That duty implied not only resistance to evil, but hatred of it. ... Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, had always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
-The Education of Henry Adams
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Thursday, November 27, 2025
Wednesday, November 26, 2025
Review: Chasing Evil: Shocking Crimes, Supernatural Forces, and an FBI Agent’s Search for Hope and Justice
Chasing Evil: Shocking Crimes, Supernatural Forces, and an FBI Agent’s Search for Hope and Justice by Robert HillandMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book chronicling the career of former police officer and FBI Special Agent Robert Hilland includes several cases, first and most prominently that of murderer John Smith. What ties the cases together is that this is about Psychic John Edward and Agent Hilland's crime-solving partnership. That's a lot for me to take. I am a skeptic and while I have to say if all the experiences recounted here were my experiences, I certainly would be a believe in contact with spirits of the deceased. Now, I wish Joe Nickell was around to give an investigative side to the Hilland-Edward claims specifically as he has with Edward in "Hustling the Bereaved", etc.
Over the telling, Hilland gets his own spirit guide of sorts in Smith's wife and victim Fran. He even has photographic evidence, but we don't get to see it?
I flipped back and forward, checking photos 17 and 19. They were clear. But frame 18 looked like an entity had stepped in front of my lens as I snapped the picture. The shape of a head, a face. It was Fran, looking directly into the camera lens at me.
Well, I am reading an ARC edition, so maybe it will be printed in the final edition.
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Saturday, November 22, 2025
Friday, November 21, 2025
Thursday, November 20, 2025
Thursday, November 13, 2025
Sunday, November 9, 2025
Friday, November 7, 2025
Wednesday, November 5, 2025
Review: Brain Droppings
Brain Droppings by George CarlinMy rating: 0 of 5 stars
I'm happy to tell you there is very little in this world that I believe in. Listening to the comedians who comment on political, social, and cultural issues, I notice most of their material reflects an underlying belief that somehow things were better once and that with just a little effort we could set them right again. They're looking for solutions, and rooting for particular results, and I think that necessarily limits the tone and substance of what they say. They're talented and funny people, but they're nothing more than cheerleaders attached to a specific, wished-for outcome.
I don't feel so confined. I frankly don't give a fuck how it all turns out in this country-or anywhere else, for that matter. I think the human game was up a long time ago (when the high priests and traders took over), and now we're just playing out the string. And that is, of course, precisely what I find so amusing: the slow circling of the drain by a once promising species, and the sappy, ever-more-desperate belief in this country that there is actually some sort of "American Dream," which has merely been misplaced.
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Sunday, November 2, 2025
Saturday, November 1, 2025
Review: Cults on Trial: A Cross-Examination of Jim Jones, Charles Manson, Hitler… and Donald Trump
Cults on Trial: A Cross-Examination of Jim Jones, Charles Manson, Hitler… and Donald Trump by Lance MooreMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Narrated by Virtual Voice, which does a pretty good job on this one with only occasionally mispronouncing or oddly pausing.
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Review: The Holographic Universe
The Holographic Universe by Michael TalbotMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Mystical
The holographic model has been accepted by scientists as a possible explanation for various paranormal and mystical experiences, including telepathy, precognition, and psychokinesis.
But the most staggering thing about the holographic model was that it suddenly made sense of a wide range of phenomena so elusive they generally have been categorized outside the province of scientific understanding. These include telepathy, precognition, mystical feelings of oneness with the universe, and even psychokinesis, or the ability of the mind to move physical objects without anyone touching them.
Indeed, it quickly became apparent to the ever growing number of scientists who came to embrace the holographic model that it helped explain virtually all paranormal and mystical experiences, and in the last half-dozen years or so it has continued to galvanize researchers and shed light on an increasing number of previously inexplicable phenomena.
Real 'Sybil' Admits Multiple Personalities Were Fake - NPR
https://share.google/cjRuJ9q7o6s25nxbY
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley...
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Placebo
...treatment include migraine headaches, allergies, fever, the common cold, acne, asthma, warts, various kinds of pain, nausea and seasick-ness, peptic ulcers, psychiatric syndromes such as depression and anxiety, rheumatoid and degenerative arthritis, diabetes, radiation sickness, Parkinsonism, multiple sclerosis, and cancer.
Clearly these range from the not so serious to the life threatening, but placebo effects on even the mildest conditions may involve physio-logical changes that are near miraculous. Take, for example, the lowly wart. Warts are a small tumorous growth on the skin caused by a virus. They are also extremely easy to cure through the use of placebos, as is evidenced by the nearly endless folk rituals-ritual itself being a kind of placebo-that are used by various cultures to get rid of them. Lewis Thomas, president emeritus of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, tells of one physician who regularly rid his patients of warts simply by painting a harmless purple dye on them. Thomas feels that explaining this small miracle by saying it's just the unconscious mind at work doesn't begin to do the placebo effect justice. "If my unconscious can figure out how to manipulate the mechanisms needed for getting around that virus, and for deploying all the various cells in the correct order for tissue rejection, then all I have to say is that my unconscious is a lot further along than I am," he states.
Visualization: control of future, 221-23; healing, 83, 188-89; Sufis and
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Raw synchronicity
Jungian dream interpretation
Pauli jung nature of the psychedelic
Years later the Japanese attacked China and bombed Wuchang Hospital. The woman sent Meier a copy of Life magazine containing a double-page photograph of the partially destroyed hospital, and it was identical to the drawing she had produced nine years earlier. The symbolic and highly personal message of her dream had somehow spilled beyond the boundaries of her psyche and into physical reality. 24 Because of their striking nature, Jung became convinced that such synchronicities were not chance occurrences, but were in fact related to the psychological processes of the individuals who experienced them. Since he could not conceive how an occurrence deep in the psyche could cause an event or series of events in the physical world, at least in the classical sense, he proposed that some new principle must be involved, an acausal connecting principle hitherto unknown to science.
When Jung first advanced this idea, most physicists did not take it seriously (although one eminent physicist of the time, Wolfgang Pauli, felt it was important enough to coauthor a book with Jung on the subject entitled The Interpretation and Nature of the Psyche). But now that the existence of nonlocal connections has been established, some physicists are giving Jung's idea another look.* Physicist Paul Davies states, "These non-local quantum effects are indeed a form of synchronicity in the sense that they establish a connection-more precisely a correlation between events for which any form of causal linkage is forbidden."
Another physicist who takes synchronicity seriously is F. David Peat. Peat believes that Jungian-type synchronicities are not only real, but offer further evidence of the implicate order. As we have seen, according to Bohm the apparent separateness of consciousness and matter is an illusion, an artifact that occurs only after both have unfolded into the explicate world of objects and sequential time. If there is no division between mind and matter in the implicate, the ground from which all things spring, then it is not unusual to expect that reality might still be shot through with traces of this deep connectivity...
D Scott rogo
McKenna
Lucid dreaming
Rupert Sheldrake
Part I - Mind, Memory, and Archetype: Morphic Resonance and the Collective ...
https://share.google/e1kkAAC5M52dB8BP2
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Friday, October 31, 2025
Tuesday, October 28, 2025
Review: In Guns We Trust: The Unholy Trinity of White Evangelicals, Politics, and Firearms
In Guns We Trust: The Unholy Trinity of White Evangelicals, Politics, and Firearms by William J. KoleMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Evangelicals
Politically, the evangelicals among whom I used to find a home are a force to be reckoned with. Multiple surveys show 80 percent of evangelicals faithfully vote, making them far and away the most dependable electoral bloc in the nation. Their numbers and their turnout have cemented their status as influencers and kingmakers in presidential elections and congressional midterms alike. It's difficult to win the White House without the blessing of the religious right, and in red states, it's practically impossible to gain or defend a US House or Senate seat without their backing.
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Sunday, October 26, 2025
Review: Lincoln's Ghost: Houdini's War on Spiritualism and the Dark Conspiracy Against the American Presidency
Lincoln's Ghost: Houdini's War on Spiritualism and the Dark Conspiracy Against the American Presidency by Brad RiccaMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
In 1926, Houdini Spent 4 Days Shaming Congress for Being in Thrall to Fortune-Tellers
The congressional hearings on the supernatural were very theatrical.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles...
John Slater – Psychic Medium, 1898 - https://share.google/3Kdn1rOk0StCdqw1z
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Charmian London - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charmia...
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Saturday, October 25, 2025
Thursday, October 23, 2025
Wednesday, October 22, 2025
Review: The Brothers Reuther and The Story of The UAW: A Memoir
The Brothers Reuther and The Story of The UAW: A Memoir by Victor G. ReutherMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Next to our pictures contrasting tin-and-tarpaper shacks with Grosse Pointe mansions, under a caption from Goldsmith "Where wealth accumulates and men decay" - we commented on the "homes that a dying social order is providing for its unemployed workers ..."
These unemployed workers had made dugouts along the railroad tracks in the Detroit city dump, using discarded dump truck bodies for shelter, lard cans for stoves, rags and newspapers for beds. We nut pictures of these "houses" next to pictures of the Dodge estate mate
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The other, less rosy side of the international labor story reflects a sad image of some of our countrymen during the decades between World War II and the seventies. The revelations of the Nixon scan-dal even now continue to cast light on some of the more melodra-matic domestic and foreign adventures. Among these are the extended CIA operations, some of which, under the guise of international trade union work, brought corruption and shame, weakness and betrayal to the cause of international labor solidarity.
Soon after I accepted the European directorship in behalf of National CIO (before the merger with AFL) I became aware of a suspicion, pervading European labor and political circles, that some of those acting in the name of U.S. labor were spending money far beyond what normal trade unions would have had available at that time. The activities of the AFL's Irving Brown were especially mis-trusted; it was thought that he was receiving incredibly large funds from some U.S. Government source in an effort to get European trade unions in his pocket and to dictate the foreign policy of both European and African countries. In plainer words, the hysterical fear of Communism that produced McCarthyism in America was being spread, by means of CIA money, first by the AFL and later by the AFL-CIO under Meany's autocratic rule.
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https://www.goodreads.com/review/list...
List of books 1930
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Hoovervilles prostitutes
Our frontispiece included a small parody of the opening of the Gettysburg Address:
Fourscore and seven years ago our forefathers brought forth on this continent a new economic system, conceived of the policies of "laissez faire" and dedicated to the proposition that private profit is the sole incentive to progress. Now we are engaged in a great economic struggle, testing whether this nation or any nation so deceived and so dedicated to rugged individualism can long endure.
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This is one of the memoirs of this era that points out there was a Communist and non-Communist Left, generally at war with each other.
"Exposure, not repression, must be our goal. We must get the Communists out of the political back alleys and walk them up Main Street in the full light of informed opinion." It took five years to break their power in the Ford Local 600, mainly because Walter would not use the autocratic methods John L. Lewis had used in dealing with Communist infiltration of his mine workers. The democratic process required time-consuming efforts to educate the rank and file, but that is what Walter preferred.
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John F. Kennedy's election increased the growth of hate crusades and he became the object of systematic vilification, reminiscent of the attacks on Franklin D. Roosevelt. In the world of the right wing, Kennedy had against him his youthful charisma, his wealth, intelligence, New England and Harvard background, his religion, his wife, brothers, advisers, his support of the blacks, his refusal to drop the bomb. He sounded a rational note on the subject of hate-mongers in a speech in the fall of 1961:
In critical periods there have always been those on the fringes of our society who have sought to escape their own responsibility by finding a simple solution, an appealing slogan or a convenient scapegoat They look suspiciously at their neighbors and their leader. They call for a "man on horseback" because they do not trust the people. They find treason in our churches, in our highest court. .. They equate the Democratic Party with the welfare state, the welfare state with Socialism, Socialism with Communism Let our patriotism be reflected in the creation of confidence in one another, rather than in crusades of suspicion - above all, let us remember, however serious the outlook, how-ever harsh the task, the one great irreversible trend in the history of the world is on the side of liberty.
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International
https://www.nytimes.com/1961/06/10/ar...
Experts' Mission Specified
By Damon Stetson Special To the New York Times.
June 10, 1961
"...fund-raising activities are continuing under the direction of Mrs. Roosevelt, Walter P. Reuther, president of the United Automobile Workers (A. F. L.-C. I. O.)..."
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D. Memo to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy: Prepared by Victor G. Reuther, Walter P. Reuther, and Joseph L. Rauh, Jr.
THE RADICAL RIGHT IN AMERICA TODAY
President Kennedy's addresses in Seattle and Los Angeles on November 16 and 18 evidenced both a deep concern with, and a profound understanding of, the serious problems injected into American life by the growing strength of the radical right. A spate of articles in responsible newspapers and peri-odicals reflect this same concern and understanding. Perhaps therefore this memorandum will prove but a repetition and restatement of suggestions al-ready under consideration by the Administration. Since, however, the pub-lic discussion to date concerning the radical right has produced little in the line of suggested policies and programs for dealing with the serious prob-lems raised, this memorandum may have some value in focusing attention upon possible Administration policies and programs to combat the radical right.
Initially, it needs to be said that far more is required in the struggle against the radical right than simply calling attention to present and potential dangers. If the Administration truly recognizes this as a serious problem, as it certainly appears to do, it is most important that President Kennedy's addresses in Seattle and Los Angeles be implemented. Speeches without action may well only mobilize the radical right instead of mobilizing the democratic forces within our nation. It is with this consideration in view that there is set forth below an estimate of the extent of the problem and suggested Ad-ministration policies and programs for dealing with the problem.
EXTENT OF PROBLEM
The radical right or extreme right-wing, or however it may be designated, includes an unknown number of millions of Americans of viewpoints bounded on the left by Senator Goldwater and on the right by Robert Welch. The active component of these radical right millions would, of course, be only a small fraction of the total.
...stronger and are almost certainly better organized than at any time in recent history. ...
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Wednesday, October 15, 2025
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Review: The New Yorker Festival - Richard Dawkins: Disciple of Darwin
The New Yorker Festival - Richard Dawkins: Disciple of Darwin by Richard Dawkins My rating: 4 of 5 stars ...
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1920: The Year of the Six Presidents by David Pietrusza My rating: 3 of 5 stars The presidential electio...
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Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America by M. Stanton Evans My ...
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Trump in Exile by Meridith McGraw My rating: 4 of 5 stars [I read the Audible version narrated by [auth...
