Ramblings & ephemera
From Richard Ben Cramer’s “What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?” (Esquire: June 1986):
Few men try for best ever, and Ted Williams is one of those. There’s a story about him I think of now. This is not about baseball but fishing. He meant to be the best there, too. One day he says [...]
Posted on December 1st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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Posted on November 30th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Jared Jacang Maher’s “DIA Conspiracies Take Off” (Denver Westword News: 30 August 2007):
Chris from Indianapolis has heard that the tunnels below DIA [Denver International Airport] were constructed as a kind of Noah’s Ark so that five million people could escape the coming earth change; shaken and earnest, he asks how someone might go about [...]
Posted on November 30th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Webster U: infosec management, art, history, politics, religion, security, weird | No Comments »
From Glenn Greenwald’s “A tragic legacy: How a good vs. evil mentality destroyed the Bush presidency” (Salon: 20 June 2007):
One of the principal dangers of vesting power in a leader who is convinced of his own righteousness — who believes that, by virtue of his ascension to political power, he has been called to a [...]
Posted on October 11th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, law, politics | 1 Comment »
From Entertainment News, 21 March 2004:
“Zombies Push Jesus from Top of North American Box Office”
(About Dawn of the Dead and The Passion of the Christ)
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Posted on November 3rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Imagining Abrupt Climate Change : Terraforming Earth” (Amazon Shorts: 31 July 2005):
This view, by the way, was in keeping with a larger and older paradigm called gradualism, the result of a dramatic and controversial paradigm shift of its own from the nineteenth century, one that is still a contested part of [...]
Posted on July 28th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, religion, science, technology | Comments Off
From Steve Paulson’s “The disbeliever” (Salon: 7 July 2006):
But it does raise the question, what do you mean by spiritual? And what do you mean by mystical?
By spiritual and mystical — I use them interchangeably — I mean any effort to understand and explore happiness and well-being itself through deliberate uses of attention. Specifically, to [...]
Posted on July 18th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: language & literature, religion | Comments Off
From Steve Paulson’s “The disbeliever” (Salon: 7 July 2006):
In perhaps his most daring rhetorical gambit, Harris seeks to undermine religion by denouncing not just jihadis and fundamentalists, but moderates. “Religious moderates are, in large part, responsible for the religious conflict in our world,” he writes, “because their beliefs provide the context in which scriptural literalism [...]
Posted on July 18th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Laura Miller’s “Everybody loves Spinoza” (Salon: 17 May 2006):
Key to Spinoza’s heresy was his monism, his belief that everything that exists is essentially a single thing, “nature” (that is, the infinite universe), and that this is identical with God. (As a girl, Goldstein was taught that Spinoza wickedly equated God with nature, when [...]
Posted on July 6th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Laura Miller’s “Everybody loves Spinoza” (Salon: 17 May 2006):
Goldstein’s description [of Spinoza's conception of God] reminds me of a passage in Neal Stephenson’s historical novel Quicksilver, in which a fictional character has an intimation about a friend, a real genius and contemporary of Spinoza’s: “[He] experienced a faint echo of what it must be [...]
Posted on July 6th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, history, language & literature, science | Comments Off
From Central Missouri State University’s “Joseph Fouche“:
Moreover, Fouché was not content with merely attacking the aristocracy. He orchestrated a campaign of atheistic fervor never before seen in Europe. He abolished clerical celibacy and ordered priests to marry or adopt a child within a month. Churches were pillaged, and priests were forbidden from wearing their robes [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history | Comments Off
From Geoffrey Gagnon’s “King James I, of Michigan” (Legal Affairs: September/October 2005):
One letter that isn’t on display is the one that James Jesse Strang said he received from Smith just before the Mormon leader was murdered in June 1844. In the letter, which now resides in a university library, Smith bequeaths the nascent Mormon Church [...]
Posted on May 21st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, politics, religion | Comments Off
From Paul Graham’s “The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn“:
We take it for granted most of the time, but human life is fairly miraculous. It is also palpably short. You’re given this marvellous thing, and then poof, it’s taken away. You can see why people invent gods to explain it. But even to people who [...]
Posted on May 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book | Comments Off
From Douglas Rushkoff’s “Faith = Illness: Why I’ve had it with religious tolerance“:
When religions are practiced, as they are by a majority of those in developed nations, today, as a kind of nostalgic little ritual - a community event or an excuse to get together and not work - it doesn’t really screw anything up [...]
Posted on May 9th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, religion | Comments Off
From Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville (270):
Last but not least, this was the Lord’s day; [Stonewall] Jackson would not even write a letter on a Sunday, or post one that would be in transit then, fearing that Providence might punish the profanation.
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Posted on April 23rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history | Comments Off
From Andrew Odlyzko’s “Pricing and Architecture of the Internet: Historical Perspectives from Telecommunications and Transportation“:
British turnpikes were a controversial response to a serious problem. Traditionally, the King’s Highway was open to all. The problem was how to keep it in good condition. As commerce grew, the need to maintain roads became acute. At first, in [...]
Posted on April 21st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, business, history, politics | Comments Off
From Richard Dawkins’ “Time to Stand Up“:
It is time for people of intellect, as opposed to people of faith, to stand up and say “Enough!” Let our tribute to the dead be a new resolve: to respect people for what they individually think, rather than respect groups for what they were collectively brought up to [...]
Posted on April 14th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, religion | Comments Off
From Douglas Adams’ “Is there an Artificial God?“:
Now, the invention of the scientific method and science is, I’m sure we’ll all agree, the most powerful intellectual idea, the most powerful framework for thinking and investigating and understanding and challenging the world around us that there is, and that it rests on the premise that any [...]
Posted on April 14th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, religion | Comments Off
From Gore Vidal, quoted in Richard Dawkins’ “Time to Stand Up“:
The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal — God is the [...]
Posted on April 14th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, religion | Comments Off
From Salon’s “Religious belief itself is an adaptation“, an interview with Edward O. Wilson:
Religious belief itself is an adaptation that has evolved because we’re hard-wired to form tribalistic religions. Religion is intensely tribalistic. A devout Christian or Muslim doesn’t say one religion is as good as another. It gives them faith in the particular group [...]
Posted on April 6th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: religion, science | Comments Off