Disney’s Three Little Pigs Aristotelian from start to finish
via Arts and Letters:Postmodern at Bedtime
Nothing to fear?
Nothing To Fear
Misreading Muslim immigration in Europe
John R. Bowen
This is an important challenge to the slew of Islamophobic (so-called) books on Islamic immigration into Europe.
Keeping a focus those books it is nonetheless worth reading those books, at least those not caught up in a right-wing mindset. We have been critical of the leftist confusion created on this issue.
The issue is relevant here because the Dawkins-style New Atheism is a concealed ‘Islmophobic’ (let’s think of a better term or charge, however)initiative.
If you want to read a European book decrying Islam and Muslims, you have many to choose from. The dominant style on the continent is memoir, recounting the horrific experiences of a Muslim (or formerly Muslim) woman in her Islamic milieu. Infidel and The Caged Virgin, by former Dutch parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali, are the most familiar in this genre. The best-selling French titles speak for themselves: Dishonored; Mutilated; The Sold Ones and The Fatiha (both on forced marriages); Disfigured; Souad, Burned Alive; and Latya, Her Face Stolen.
Europe’s anti-Islam sentiment may be expressed most visibly in memoirs because Europeans have been reticent to condemn Islam—or religion more generally—outright. Americans, however, seem to prefer a less subtle approach. In the United States, alongside the autobiographies, we find two kinds of direct attack on Islam: as a “gutter religion” (Robert Spencer’s The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran) and as a threat to our fundamental values—a threat that has already overrun Europe and is now heading this way.
I am interested in the second style. They’re asleep; we’re next—so we are warned in Bruce Bawer’s While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within. We hear a similar message in his Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom; in Brigitte Gabriel’s They Must Be Stopped; and Mark Steyn’s America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It.
Perhaps these books are innocent, less about an animus against Islam than an expression of Americans’ secret delight in knocking weak-kneed French and English politicians. Or maybe we simply prefer displacing our anxiety about Islam from the nice Pakistani surgeon next-door onto jihadists invading European cities.
What Will be the 21st Century’s Theory of Origins?
What Will be the 21st Century’s Theory of Origins?
Darwin’s God (blog) discusses Fodor
Atheism book
Godless and Free
by Pat Condell
http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback/godless-and-free/7864233
from dawkins site
Did Darwin get it wrong?
So why would Jerry Fodor (philosopher) and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (cognitive scientist) be so concerned to refute aspects of Darwin’s theory? Their book makes it very clear that an academic turf war lies behind it all. The stimulus was the outrage Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini felt for what they see as the misuse of Darwinism in the social sciences. Evolutionary psychology, in particular, gets their goat.
Read the rest of this entry »
Booknotes: design
It’s time we took design seriously
By Edwin Heathcote
Glimmer: How Design Can Transform Your Life and Maybe Even the World
By Warren Berger
Random House £20, 332 pages
FT Bookshop price: £16
Woman as Design
By Stephen Bayley
Octopus £50, 336 pages
FT Bookshop price: £40
Design in Britain: Big Ideas (Small Island)
Edited by Dejan Sudjic
Octopus £45, 272 pages
FT Bookshop price: £36
Dansk Design (English Edition)
By Thomas Dickson
Murdoch Books £30, 580 pages
FT Bookshop price: £24
Limited Edition: Prototypes, One-offs and Design Art Furniture
By Sophie Lovell
Birkhäuser £45, 255 pages
Design is a word that is increasingly diffuse in its application, used in myriad contexts, occasionally spurious, occasionally absurd. From the “designer” jeans and must-have lemon-squeezers of the 1980s, to “designer” drugs and “process design”, the word has been applied liberally to branded consumables and management-speak. Its most recent high-profile use has been in the notion of intelligent design, which transforms God into a creative. En route, we have become familiar with fonts, web layouts and graphic techniques that were formerly the preserve of trained graphic designers. In the astonishing array of “design” objects we now own, from iPhones, shoes and handbags to coffee-makers and cars, we consume design at an unprecedented rate, and are intimately familiar with its vocabulary and its tropes. You can now even buy “design art”, a weird hybrid of the useful, the useless and the very, very expensive.
Double risk
Smokers at Risk from Their Own ‘Second-Hand’ Smoke
ScienceDaily (Jan. 30, 2010) — It is well known that smokers damage their health by directly inhaling cigarette smoke. Now, research published in BioMed Central’s open access journal Environmental Health has shown that they are at additional risk from breathing environmental tobacco smoke
Dinosaurs and birds
Dinosaur Discovery Helps Solve Piece of Evolutionary Puzzle
ScienceDaily (Jan. 29, 2010) — A George Washington University expedition to the Gobi Desert of China has enabled researchers to solve the puzzle of how one group of dinosaurs came to look like birds independent of birds.
Truth or hype?
Climate sceptics distract us from the scientific realities of global warming
Is the goal of climate sceptics to lead us into greater scientific truth – or merely to sow doubt about the temperature record?
Nader: state of the union
Published on Saturday, January 30, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
On the State of the Union
by Ralph Nader
The President’s State of the Union Speech is the Big Speech of the year. Yet there is never an opportunity either for the press or the citizenry to promptly follow up with any questions or requests for clarifications. As a result, doubt and misunderstandings fester.
I, virus
gnxp
Tiny invaders have been making themselves at home in our DNA for millions of years – and now we can’t live without them
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527451.200-i-virus-why-youre-only-half-human.html
Age and exercise
gnxp
A series of independently conducted studies on the effects of exercise in healthy older adults, published on Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine, confirms that logging time at the gym not only helps maintain good health but may even prevent the onset of chronic diseases, such as heart disease, osteoarthritis and dementia
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1956619,00.html
Mendacity of hope
RG mail
Harper’s Magazine February 2010
The mendacity of hope
*By Roger D. Hodge
Roger D. Hodge is the editor of *Harper’s Magazine.*
A year and more has passed, yet we have not been delivered. Some believed
that Barack Obama had come to restore the Republic, to return our nation to
the righteous path. A new, glorious era in American politics was at hand.
If only that were true. We all can taste the bitterness now.
Smothering America’s Future
Johann Hari: This Corruption in Washington is Smothering America’s Future
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/01/29-1
Public option
Jane Hamsher: List of 51 Senate Democrats Who Support a Public Option: What’s Stopping Them Now?
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/01/29-11
GM seeds
EU Farmers Face Genetic Contamination of Seeds
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/01/29-1
World Social Forum (vs Davos)
In Brazil’s WSF Many Still Believe Another World Is Possible
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/01/29-2
Defiant Blair
Defiant Blair: ‘No Regrets’, Audience Member: ‘You Are a Murderer!’
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/01/29-6
01.29.10
Fourth Edition coming soon!
The fourth edition of World History And The Eonic Effect is coming soon!
Be sure to get your fill of the third edition, which is going offline very soon.
A Glimpse of Evolution
Booknotes: Towers of Deception
Looking at: Towers of Deception: The Media Cover-up of 9/11 (Paperback)
~ Barrie Zwicker
This book is a good summary of the 9/11 question, and also an indirect presentation of David Griffin’s views.
Neuro-Inspired Computers
Organic Transistor Paves Way for New Generations of Neuro-Inspired Computers
ScienceDaily (Jan. 29, 2010) — For the first time, CNRS(1) and CEA(2) researchers have developed a transistor that can mimic the main functionalities of a synapse(3). This organic transistor, based on pentacene(4) and gold nanoparticles and known as a NOMFET (Nanoparticle Organic Memory Field-Effect Transistor), has opened the way to new generations of neuro-inspired computers, capable of responding in a manner similar to the nervous system.
More comments on 9/11 post
More comments on Debunking 9/11 Debunking
We should be wary of getting distracted by the question of Israel, but I find it hard to believe that a complot on 9/11 wouldn’t have been known by Mossad.
But that issue is going to confuse the discussion.
It was also my original feeling, pace Jim Buck’s statement, that there might have been an awareness of a plot forming, with a resulting decision to simply let it happen.
But David Ray Griffin, who also started out with this feeling/hypothesis, came to see that it is refuted by the facts. For example, conspirators coudn’t have manipulated the American air force system, or the world trade center buildings.
Read the rest of this entry »
Laser fusion
Laser fusion test results raise energy hopes
by Jason Palmer – BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8485669.stm
from dawkins site
A major hurdle to producing fusion energy using lasers has been swept aside, results in a new report show.
Dawkins, Robertson, Haiti
Hear the rumble of Christian hypocrisy
by Richard Dawkins – TimesOnline
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article7007065.ece
from dawkins site
This is an expanded version of the article already published on the Washington Post’s ‘On Faith’ blog under a different title.
Did Darwin get it wrong?
Did Charles Darwin get it wrong?
After all the Darwin celebrations, a controversial new book aims to undermine major parts of his scientific legacy. Peter Forbes looks at the arguments and asks scientists if the critics have a case
–
So why would Jerry Fodor (philosopher) and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (cognitive scientist) be so concerned to refute aspects of Darwin’s theory? Their book makes it very clear that an academic turf war lies behind it all. The stimulus was the outrage Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini felt for what they see as the misuse of Darwinism in the social sciences. Evolutionary psychology, in particular, gets their goat.
Darwin and the Two Crime Scenes
Darwin and the Two Crime Scenes
Much of the conflict between the modern Darwinian and Intelligent Design communities pertains to what each claims and what each can prove about the supposed undirected formation of life. This origin of life question along with proposed explanations of consciousness and other issues often cause the Darwinist to claim that just because science hasn’t yet discovered the cause of something doesn’t mean that it won’t. For the Intelligent Design advocate to claim otherwise is therefore said to embrace a default “God-of-the-gaps” sort of argument that offers no further explanation.
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