Scientology dupe, quack remedy shill and award-winning dwarf Tom Cruise has been in the news lately, not only for his complicity in the Hollywood butchering of a perfectly good H.G. Wells story, but for lashing out at psychiatry in favour of Scientology. So Blogger Bachem Macuno cuts him down to size.
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The Boston Review brings us an insightful essay by Howard Zinn, entitled The Power and the Glory: Myths of American exceptionalism. Zinn delivers a punchy overview of America’s history as warmonger, along the way explaining why Americans don’t always realise this. This includes the belief of manifest destiny, something the current administration embraces wholeheartedly.
In 1945, at the end of World War II, Henry Luce, the owner of a vast chain of media enterprises—Time, Life, Fortune—declared that this would be “the American Century,” that victory in the war gave the United States the right “to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.”
So, Jesus made me do it.
Even Madeleine Albright, mostly considered a liberal voice in the conservative wilderness, is quoted as saying that “if possible [America] will act in the world multilaterally, but if necessary, [America] will act unilaterally.”
According to Zinn, the problem could be a superficial system of education, as “the history of American expansion in the world is not a history that is taught very much”. History doomed to be repeated, or an ignorant populace led by an idealist few?
Popularity: 10% [?]
Scott Ritter, former UN weapons inspector in Iraq and credible expert on the real situation in the Middle East, writes the following in an opinion piece for Aljazeera:
President Bush has taken advantage of the sweeping powers granted to him in the aftermath of 11 September 2001, to wage a global war against terror and to initiate several covert offensive operations inside Iran.
The most visible of these is the CIA-backed actions recently undertaken by the Mujahadeen el-Khalq, or MEK, an Iranian opposition group, once run by Saddam Hussein’s dreaded intelligence services, but now working exclusively for the CIA’s Directorate of Operations.
It is bitter irony that the CIA is using a group still labelled as a terrorist organisation, a group trained in the art of explosive assassination by the same intelligence units of the former regime of Saddam Hussein, who are slaughtering American soldiers in Iraq today, to carry out remote bombings in Iran of the sort that the Bush administration condemns on a daily basis inside Iraq.
The war on Iran has been under way for a while now, and still most media sources refuse to take notice.
Popularity: 8% [?]
Worth1000 do Escher, a lot of them arguably better than Escher did Escher
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Neal Stephenson writes about geek love for Star Wars in the New York Times:
I lap this stuff up along with millions, maybe billions, of others. Why? Because every single one of us is as dependent on science and technology – and, by extension, on the geeks who make it work – as a patient in intensive care. Yet we much prefer to think otherwise.
Scientists and technologists have the same uneasy status in our society as the Jedi in the Galactic Republic. They are scorned by the cultural left and the cultural right, and young people avoid science and math classes in hordes. The tedious particulars of keeping ourselves alive, comfortable and free are being taken offline to countries where people are happy to sweat the details, as long as we have some foreign exchange left to send their way. Nothing is more seductive than to think that we, like the Jedi, could be masters of the most advanced technologies while living simple lives: to have a geek standard of living and spend our copious leisure time vegging out.
Popularity: 13% [?]
Arthur C. Clarke novel turned to crap in a badly acted, over-dramatic cliché of astronauts trapped in space and rapidly running out of oxygen. Strange how a civilisation capable of inter-planetary freight transport and artificial gravity isn’t smart enough to factor in redundancy in oxygen supplies, carry emergency communication systems or develop effective protection against flying debris.
This barely warrants a 5 / 10.
Buy it at Amazon
Popularity: 17% [?]
Kuro5hin denizen localroger reveals that Orson Scott Card has always been an asshat. In addition, he might not have been the sole author of some of his best work.
Card made it very clear in interviews in the 1980’s that he was doing God’s work with his writing. In essence he was the anti-Iain Banks; instead of reclaiming SF for liberalism, he was reclaiming it for moral absolutism.
There’s a lot of speculation in localroger’s article, but you don’t have to be one of the SF cool kids to enjoy his recollections of Card and the trouble he’s caused. However, Elaine Radford, around whose essay a lot of this revolves, refutes a couple of the “facts” in localroger’s article.
Popularity: 10% [?]
You could be excused for having certain expectations of a site called www.premaritalsex.info. Birth control, venereal disease, the things teens especially should know about but don’t. Right? Well, no, wrong.
This page is dedicated to those who are committed to premarital sexual abstinence and to maintain sexual purity.
The other pages on the site also appear dedicated to the same highly ambitious mix of purity and chastity, something that worked so well in other great civilizations like the Roman and Greek cultures that it can’t possibly fail in these enlightened times. Could it?
Grandma was right: Men won’t buy the cow if they can get the milk free. What does this mean?
Yes, but what does this mean, exactly? Is there bestiality implied? Because I might be rusty on some of your more obscure limitations on having fun, as laid down in the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, but I’m reasonably solid on the Ten Commandments, and I’m pretty sure this is covered by coveting your neighbour’s ass. Perhaps if Grandma lent you the cow, just for a taste of the good stuff, and you didn’t really want it, like a frog green sweater for Christmas, would that be acceptable?
Why marry if the sex is free.
Because she won’t do the cooking and cleaning otherwise?
Ahh yes, the sexual revolution. Turns out it was a draw, after all.
Popularity: 7% [?]
Richard Dawkins writes on the religious right, Intelligent Design and the deceit of the neo-creationists. Read it in the Times Online.
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Skeptic supremo Michael Shermer reviews Jon Ronson’s book The Men Who Stare at Goats for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
[James] Randi confirmed my skeptical intuitions about all this paranormal piffle, but I always assumed that it was the province of the cultural fringes. Then, in 1995, the story broke that for the previous 25 years the U.S. Army had invested $20 million in a highly secret psychic spy program called Star Gate (also Grill Flame and Scanate), a Cold War project intended to close the “psi gap” (the psychic equivalent of the missile gap) between the United States and Soviet Union. The Soviets were training psychic spies, so we would too.
Popularity: 8% [?]
Michel Houellebecq’s new book on HP Lovecraft once again opens up the debate on whether Lovecraft was a brilliant author, or a pseudo-Victorian hack. Houellebecq is a great (if also greatly controversial) author, and not easily given to fanboy gushing. This adds credence to Houellebecq’s endorsement of Lovecraft’s apparent nihilism, in magnitude probably only matched by Houellebecq’s own, quoted in the Guardian:
Lovecraft, for his part, knew he had nothing to do with this world. And at each turn he played a losing hand. In theory and in practice. He lost his childhood; he also lost his faith. The world sickened him and he saw no reason to believe that by looking at things better they might appear differently. He saw religions as so many sugar-coated illusions made obsolete by the progress of science. At times, when in an exceptionally good mood, he would speak of the enchanted circle of religious belief, but it was a circle from which he felt banished, anyway.
In fact, Houellebecq even displays some sympathy for the anti-hero he sketches:
Paradoxically, Lovecraft’s character is fascinating in part because his values were so entirely opposite to ours. He was fundamentally racist, openly reactionary, he glorified puritanical inhibitions, and evidently found all “direct erotic manifestations” repulsive. Resolutely anticommercial, he despised money, considered democracy to be an idiocy and progress to be an illusion. The word “freedom,” so cherished by Americans, prompted only a sad, derisive guffaw. Throughout his life, he maintained a typically aristocratic, scornful attitude toward humanity in general coupled with extreme kindness toward individuals in particular.
The New York Times famously called Houellebecq’s Atomised a “deeply repugnant read”. Repugnancy and a love for Lovecraft in the same author, who would have thought it possible?
Popularity: 10% [?]
High school graduates, coming of age, start of the rest of their lives, blah blah blah. Like American Pie, but without the jokes and not so much intellectual depth. In American Graffiti George Lucas sets the precedent for the crapfest Star Wars was doomed to become. Only the French are allowed to make movies where pretty much nothing happens for two hours.
I would rate this a 5 / 10, if only because it’s a technically decent production and Johnny Weissmuller Jr. plays Bad Guy #1.
You can buy this at Amazon
Popularity: 18% [?]
Part Blade Runner, part Matrix, featuring pole dancing cyborgs and hot human on cyborg action. Min Byung-chun’s high budget Korean production offers a traditional Hollywood scifi theme: asshole cop turns out to be a decent chap after all, has to choose between his love for a pretty hot but after all not human cyborg, and saving the life of a skanky teenage fortune teller cum prostitute. There may or may not be a subtext, depending on what you’re smoking.
All things considered, I would rate this a 7 / 10.
Buy it at Amazon
Popularity: 19% [?]
The Cynical Traveller tells it like it is, at least like it is for those of us underawed by the wonders of the globalized travel experience. Why go to foreign climes to be ripped off by immigrant con artists if you can pretty much do that close to where you live, wherever you live? Because it’s much more fun to mock someone else’s immigrants than it is to mock your own, of course. So click on over and enjoy the Cynical Traveller’s visits to far-flung places and exotic climes.
Favourite quote (on the Amsterdam red light district):
Personally, if I wanted to have sex with a depressed, exploited, underpaid drug addict, I’d masturbate.
Popularity: 8% [?]
