Monkey-Boy In a Suit

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Strange dream...

Monk is working in an office. No, he is not a lawyer or anything. He is like a general assistant - monkey-boy in a suit, or at least a starched white shirt and dress pants. On his first day, they tell him to get lunch. He takes their orders without writing it down, acting like it is no big deal for him and he can easily handle it. However, not only is he unable to recall the orders, he cannot even figure how to get the phone number of the place to order from. Everyone goes without lunch, and they regard Monk as some kind of retard and he feels it.

This dream had one touching element, though. When Monk ran down the hall looking for help with the order, he gets a little help from someone: Connie, the Connie of McDonald's days, the girl who helped him during his struggling days there. She straightens out some of the orders for him and smiles.

Yeah, "Hi, Connie, it is nice to see you again, too. It's... been a long time."

xXx

Monkey-Boy In a Suit

♠
Strange dream...

Monk is working in an office. No, he is not a lawyer or anything. He is like a general assistant - monkey-boy in a suit, or at least a starched white shirt and dress pants. On his first day, they tell him to get lunch. He takes their orders without writing it down, acting like it is no big deal for him and he can easily handle it. However, not only is he unable to recall the orders, he cannot even figure how to get the phone number of the place to order from. Everyone goes without lunch, and they regard Monk as some kind of retard and he feels it.

This dream had one touching element, though. When Monk ran down the hall looking for help with the order, he gets a little help from someone: Connie, the Connie of McDonald's days, the girl who helped him during his struggling days there. She straightens out some of the orders for him and smiles.

Yeah, "Hi, Connie, it is nice to see you again, too. It's... been a long time."

xXx

The Romans Knew Hot To Do Fear

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Nicholas Kristof gives a nice encapsulation of America's policy on the War on Terror:

After 9/11, the focus of America’s response to terrorism has been mostly on using military force to destroy possible threats in places like Iraq and intimidate just about everyone. The ethos was borrowed from the ancient Romans: “Oderint, dum metuant” — “Let them hate, so long as they fear.”

Of course, the Romans were better at it.


(Source: Nicholas D. Kristof for The New York Times)

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The Romans Knew Hot To Do Fear

♠
Nicholas Kristof gives a nice encapsulation of America's policy on the War on Terror:

After 9/11, the focus of America’s response to terrorism has been mostly on using military force to destroy possible threats in places like Iraq and intimidate just about everyone. The ethos was borrowed from the ancient Romans: “Oderint, dum metuant” — “Let them hate, so long as they fear.”

Of course, the Romans were better at it.


(Source: Nicholas D. Kristof for The New York Times)

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Fahrenheit 451

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“Look! Firemen - that means there's going to be a fire.”

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Monk is taping "Fahrenheit 451." One is wary of the mistake of noble intentions and taping impressive high-brow features, but this tribute to books and reading has a welcomed place in our primate-protagonist's heart. A good dystopia is always good, too, as it is not difficult to think you are living in one, or that your country is at least well on its way to becoming one. And there is the lovely Julie Christie to add a little sweet to the scenes. The movie bears watching again and again.

xXx

Fahrenheit 451

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“Look! Firemen - that means there's going to be a fire.”

~
Monk is taping "Fahrenheit 451." One is wary of the mistake of noble intentions and taping impressive high-brow features, but this tribute to books and reading has a welcomed place in our primate-protagonist's heart. A good dystopia is always good, too, as it is not difficult to think you are living in one, or that your country is at least well on its way to becoming one. And there is the lovely Julie Christie to add a little sweet to the scenes. The movie bears watching again and again.

xXx

Boredom and Its Fixes

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Boredom, the sociologist Robert Nisbet wrote, is among the universal and insistent forces driving human behavior. Mankind's nervous system evolved during millions of dangerous years (saber-toothed tigers, etc.). Now, however, mankind has suddenly, in a few millennia, encountered the monotony of orderly life, which bothers human brains formed by and for hazardous circumstances.

Among the cures of boredom that Nisbet listed are war, murder, revolution, suicide, alcohol, narcotics and pornography.

-- George F. Will for The Washington Post

Works for me!

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Boredom and Its Fixes

♠
Boredom, the sociologist Robert Nisbet wrote, is among the universal and insistent forces driving human behavior. Mankind's nervous system evolved during millions of dangerous years (saber-toothed tigers, etc.). Now, however, mankind has suddenly, in a few millennia, encountered the monotony of orderly life, which bothers human brains formed by and for hazardous circumstances.

Among the cures of boredom that Nisbet listed are war, murder, revolution, suicide, alcohol, narcotics and pornography.

-- George F. Will for The Washington Post

Works for me!

xXx

Max Blumenthal Disses the Conservative Movement

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It's a bit lengthy, but Mr. Blumenthal gets in a very nice exchange with our Ann Coulter at the end. It's worth a looksy.

Max Blumenthal Disses the Conservative Movement

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It's a bit lengthy, but Mr. Blumenthal gets in a very nice exchange with our Ann Coulter at the end. It's worth a looksy.

Losing "Lost Highway"

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I'm going to have to give up on "Lost Highway" and tape over it. Monk was beguiled by Patricia Arquette's tits. They are nice tits, and I don't think she shows them again after this movie. But I cannot stand watching this movie through once, much less over and over again.

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Losing "Lost Highway"

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I'm going to have to give up on "Lost Highway" and tape over it. Monk was beguiled by Patricia Arquette's tits. They are nice tits, and I don't think she shows them again after this movie. But I cannot stand watching this movie through once, much less over and over again.

xXx

The Evolution of Faith

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The Times gives out another hashing of that sexy philosophical question of whether God exists or not. Here is a small sample of that eleven-page discussion:

So many aspects of religious belief involve misattribution and misunderstanding of the real world. Wouldn’t this be a liability in the survival-of-the-fittest competition? To Atran, religious belief requires taking “what is materially false to be true” and “what is materially true to be false.” One example of this is the belief that even after someone dies and the body demonstrably disintegrates, that person will still exist, will still be able to laugh and cry, to feel pain and joy. This confusion “does not appear to be a reasonable evolutionary strategy,” Atran wrote in “In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion” in 2002. “Imagine another animal that took injury for health or big for small or fast for slow or dead for alive. It’s unlikely that such a species could survive.” He began to look for a sideways explanation: if religious belief was not adaptive, perhaps it was associated with something else that was.

SPOILER ALERT: There is no final answer yet. Obviously, this is a developing story. More as it comes.

Actually, it is remarkable how rather heavily the article (as well as the paper) seems to lean toward the atheistic side. Though, the focus is on the belief in God rather than on God himself, and on how this belief could have come to be, survived, and evolved - how was it adaptive? You can get a sense of the poignancy of the assumptions from the closing paragraph:

This internal push and pull between the spiritual and the rational reflects what used to be called the “God of the gaps” view of religion. The presumption was that as science was able to answer more questions about the natural world, God would be invoked to answer fewer, and religion would eventually recede. Research about the evolution of religion suggests otherwise. No matter how much science can explain, it seems, the real gap that God fills is an emptiness that our big-brained mental architecture interprets as a yearning for the supernatural. The drive to satisfy that yearning, according to both adaptationists and byproduct theorists, might be an inevitable and eternal part of what Atran calls the tragedy of human cognition.

Of course, it is my own leaning as well. Though, I am more willing to think in terms of the tragedy of the human condition, and that our religiosity is the adaptive answer to that - the promise of hope.


(Source: Robin Marantz Henig for The New York Times)

xXx

The Evolution of Faith

♠
The Times gives out another hashing of that sexy philosophical question of whether God exists or not. Here is a small sample of that eleven-page discussion:

So many aspects of religious belief involve misattribution and misunderstanding of the real world. Wouldn’t this be a liability in the survival-of-the-fittest competition? To Atran, religious belief requires taking “what is materially false to be true” and “what is materially true to be false.” One example of this is the belief that even after someone dies and the body demonstrably disintegrates, that person will still exist, will still be able to laugh and cry, to feel pain and joy. This confusion “does not appear to be a reasonable evolutionary strategy,” Atran wrote in “In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion” in 2002. “Imagine another animal that took injury for health or big for small or fast for slow or dead for alive. It’s unlikely that such a species could survive.” He began to look for a sideways explanation: if religious belief was not adaptive, perhaps it was associated with something else that was.

SPOILER ALERT: There is no final answer yet. Obviously, this is a developing story. More as it comes.

Actually, it is remarkable how rather heavily the article (as well as the paper) seems to lean toward the atheistic side. Though, the focus is on the belief in God rather than on God himself, and on how this belief could have come to be, survived, and evolved - how was it adaptive? You can get a sense of the poignancy of the assumptions from the closing paragraph:

This internal push and pull between the spiritual and the rational reflects what used to be called the “God of the gaps” view of religion. The presumption was that as science was able to answer more questions about the natural world, God would be invoked to answer fewer, and religion would eventually recede. Research about the evolution of religion suggests otherwise. No matter how much science can explain, it seems, the real gap that God fills is an emptiness that our big-brained mental architecture interprets as a yearning for the supernatural. The drive to satisfy that yearning, according to both adaptationists and byproduct theorists, might be an inevitable and eternal part of what Atran calls the tragedy of human cognition.

Of course, it is my own leaning as well. Though, I am more willing to think in terms of the tragedy of the human condition, and that our religiosity is the adaptive answer to that - the promise of hope.


(Source: Robin Marantz Henig for The New York Times)

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