Cormac McCarthy

I have lots I want to post about…but no time to really flesh it all out. So instead, here’s an interview the NYTimes did with Cormac McCarthy, the author of All the Pretty Horses, Blood Meridian, The Road, No Country for Old Men, Suttrey, and others. Blood Meridian is among my top 3 books I’ve ever read. Right now I’m reading All the Pretty Horses and am in love. Check it out:

Life After Death … from the perspective of a 7 year old…

After I finished reading James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, I went on goodreads to rate it (I think I gave it 3/5 stars), and while there, started reading other people’s reviews… [note: if you want to see my goodreads account, go here]

I stumbled upon the following… no words can describe how awesome this is:

I had an unusually long conversation with my daughter Georgia (also now a Goodreader) once when she was seven years old (she’s now 14) and the matter of eschatology came up, so I asked her directly – well, what does happen when you die? So she laid out what she thinks happens, and I was so taken by the stuff she came out with that I wrote it down. As it’s a variety of religious experience I thought it appropriate to include here.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DIE

Heaven has different parts to it. In one part there are monsters, but they’re good. In another part they’re like orcs but they’re good. In the third part there are dinosaurs, and they’re bad.
Jesus is not in heaven. He is above heaven. He was a normal man but he went on the cross and died and he became magic. He was alive again and turned into an angel. Now he can listen to anyone on the earth just by thinking of their name.
When people die they all go to heaven. It could be the good part or the bad part. When you die you turn into a zombie, but then quite quickly you turn into a skeleton and that’s when you go to heaven. The skeletons in heaven can’t see the Earth at all, but to the good orcs Earth appears like the brightest star in the sky. But they have to look down to see it, because they are all upside down.
If you are cremated your ashes float up and turn into your soul. It goes up into a purple porthole. It meets a sorter who asks you what age you want to be and that’s what you stay at from then on. In this world everything is slightly see-through. You only spend 1000 years here and then you go to the graveyard and sleep. But one day in each 10 years you come alive again. But this world is not heaven so jesus is not there. The bad people who die become good. For five years out of 1000 they are punished in a house sized prison cell by having to eat all the food they really hate and listen to all the music they really hate.
There is a feather of truth and a catch up course, but I can’t remember what they are for.
People have gone into space in rockets but they haven’t seen heaven because it is very small.
When animals die, if it’s on concrete they fade away and become invisible. If it’s on soil, they sink bit by bit into the earth and they become animal zombies. Our hamster Lucy became an animal zombie, but all animal zombies are good, not bad.

Note : don’t blame me for any of this, I never allowed her to watch any zombie films intil she was 12! I don’t know where she’s got any of this stuff apart from orcs

The Varieties of Religious Experience

I’m currently reading William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience. William James, for those who don’t know him, was an early psychologist and an early pragmatist. He’s also the brother of Henry James. The book concerns the nature of religion and the neglect of science, in James’ view, in the academic study of religion. I’m only 1/3 of the way through, but I started reading up on it on the internet, and came upon a neat commentary that I thought I’d share.

[note: I also want to point out how similar William James and (the late) Christopher Hitchens are: while they had very different professions, they were both academics, highly literate, very eloquent, and are famous in part for their interest in religion (although they share opposite views). Finally, although they're both very academic and argue from an objective standpoint, they both seem to have their personal reasons for taking the views they have: James may have put off insanity with biblical passages (see below), and Chris's mother killed herself in a suicide pact with a former Anglican minister (and embraced the teachings of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the same guru who had earlier bewitched the Beatles. *)]

Klosterman’s “You Say You Want a Revolution”

This is (in my opinion) a great article by the pop-culture write Chuck Klosterman about how daunting of a task it would be to have a revolution in America. Written in 2007, I feel it’s very relevant today…what with all the occupy brouhaha.

Here it is, in all it’s glory (stolen from here):

Sousveillance: Wikileaks and reverse Big Brother

I am an unabashed fan of the practical philosopher Peter Singer. Recently I found an article he wrote for Harper’s, titled Visible Man: Ethics in a World Without Secrets. Essentially it’s about reverse Big Brother – instead of the future becoming a world where only the government sees our every move, technology (cell phones) have made it such that everyone is watching everyone, including the people watching the government.

Bad Medical Science

Oh god this video was good:
Briefly, it talks about current issues in Medical Science: things that we’re currently doing wrong. He doesn’t give too many solutions…
He does, however, mention the cochrane collaboration, which is a group that attempts to get all of the negative results that drug companies refuse to publish. This sounds amazing…

I thought I had written on this before, but it turns out I just wrote about the history of the scientific method. Dang…

The TEDtalks description of the video:
“Every day there are news reports of new health advice, but how can you know if they’re right? Doctor and epidemiologist Ben Goldacre shows us, at high speed, the ways evidence can be distorted, from the blindingly obvious nutrition claims to the very subtle tricks of the pharmaceutical industry.”

First Person Survival Accounts

Oh my goodness! I didn’t write anything during all of October? Oh my.
Well, to those who were expecting a post in October, I apologize. I guess I’ve just been busy (one conference in Europe and one convention in Vancouver, plus my PhD stuff).

I don’t know what to talk about today, really, but seeing as I haven’t written anything in so long, I thought I’d just ramble.

History of Poverty and Capitalism: from Colonialism to Neocolonialism

I just finished watching a great documentary about the history of colonialism and neocolonialism. Essentially how the west won all its affluence and lifestyle by taking from the poor. Its a powerful doc, and a must watch, even if you know the story: it never hurts to be reminded.

Here’s a brief description from the site:

Global poverty did not just happen. It began with military conquest, slavery and colonization that resulted in the seizure of land, minerals and forced labor. Today, the problem persists because of unfair debt, trade and tax policies — in other words, wealthy countries taking advantage of poor, developing countries. Renowned actor and activist, Martin Sheen, narrates THE END OF POVERTY?, a feature-length documentary directed by award-winning director, Philippe Diaz, which explains how today’s financial crisis is a direct consequence of these unchallenged policies that have lasted centuries. Consider that 20% of the planet’s population uses 80% of its resources and consumes 30% more than the planet can regenerate. At this rate, to maintain our lifestyle means more and more people will sink below the poverty line. Filmed in the slums of Africa and the barrios of Latin America, THE END OF POVERTY? features expert insights from: Nobel prize winners in Economics, Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz; acclaimed authors Susan George, Eric Toussaint, John Perkins, Chalmers Johnson; university professors William Easterly and Michael Watts; government ministers such as Bolivia’s Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera and the leaders of social movements in Brazil, Venezuela, Kenya and Tanzania. It is produced by Cinema Libre Studio in collaboration with the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation. Can we really end poverty within our current economic system? Think again.

Watch it for free on Youtube (after the bump):

Doing Good…

I was walking with a friend of mine last night, and we were talking about what we wanted to do with our lives. I’ve, for a while now, had this romantic idea of becoming a factotum, someone who has a lot of different jobs. For instance, I would like to at one point: work on a boat for a year; repel from a helicopter and put out forest fires; work in or near the arctic; bring food, water, medicine, or education to rural areas ALL round the world; work with adorable and strange animals; live in a tree (arborist?); fly some sort of flying machine (helicopter would be best); etc. One thing though, that we had in common, was that we both wanted to do good, somehow. Travel the world and do good, whatever that means in practical application. At this point I commented on just how difficult it is to actually do good in the world. For instance, some forms of aid are bad, because it makes people dependent, and when the aid stops, the people may be in a worse position than at first. On the other hand, there’s nothing I (believe I) deplore more than ideas without action. That is, I hope I don’t ever become pessimistic or cynical to the point of never acting: I hope that action rather than passivity is more likely to do good, even though sometimes it does worse.

Rising Up and Rising Down

Well, since I haven’t written in a while, I may as well write something now…even though I don’t have anything grandiose to put down. Perhaps that’s why I’m not writing much anymore: pressure. So this post will (hopefully) be light and care-free.

I’ve been reading a lot lately. Not so much fiction, unfortunately.