A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee WilliamsMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
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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
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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
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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 ...
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