The Best Exercise

In the same issue wherein Gary Taubes discussed the evils of sugar, the Times ran a couple of other interesting articles on fitness and health. One was on sleep (get enough) and the other on the best form of exercise. The linked article discusses the best form of exercise. The winner: HIT or High Intensity Training. In other words, go hard, very hard, for brief spurts and lightly in between, whether you talking intervals of minutes or days. If you've read Art De Vany, Dr. Doug McGraw, Mark Sisson, or others in the Primal Community, the answer will come as no surprise. Even before this article I'd incorporated this regimen into my time on the stationary bike, and when weight training (high weight, low reps). Also, think of basketball, a form of play with constant movement punctuated by brief intense spurts. Are any athletes more fit that basketball players? It kept me reasonably fit for many years.

The runner up? The squat. "Air squats" as Tim Ferris calls them. They do well in a pinch.

Preview: Karen Armstrong's The Case for God

Here's the opening paragraph of Armstrong's book in anticipation of a more complete review. With this opening, I knew that I would appreciate this book:

We are talking far too much about God these days, and what we say is often facile. In our democratic society, we think that the concept of God should be easy and that religion ought to be readily accessible to anybody. “That book was really hard!” readers have told me reproachfully, shaking their heads in faint reproof. “Of course it was!” I want to reply. “It was about God.” But many find this puzzling. Surely everybody knows what God is: The Supreme Being, a divine Personality, who created the world and everything in it. They look perplexed if you point out that it is inaccurate to call God the Supreme Being because God is not a being at all, and that we really don’t understand what we mean when we say that he is “good,” “wise,” or “intelligent.” People of faith admit in theory that God is transcendent, but they seem sometimes to assume that they know exactly who “he” is and what he thinks, loves, and expects. We tend to tame and domesticate God’s “otherness.” We regularly ask God to bless our nation, save our queen, cure our sickness, or give us a fine day for the picnic. We remind God that he created the world and that we are miserable sinners, as though that may have slipped his mind. Politicians quote God to justify their policies, teachers use him to keep order in the classroom, and terrorists commit atrocities in his name. We beg God to support our side in an election or a war, even though our opponents are, presumably, also God’s children and the object of his love and care.

Favorite Books & Authors About Christianity

I limit this list to authors who lived during my lifetime (Maurice Nicoll just makes it) and who wrote about Christianity. The list has no particular order other than I started with more recent authors I’ve read (or listened to) and then I looked around my study. The list is much longer than I intended, but I can vouch for all of these books.

Mark Johnston, Saving God: Religion After Idolatry. I’ve said a lot about this book, so I won’t say more here except to say that there’s a lot more that I could write.

Karen Armstrong, A History of God and The Case for God. I have said of History that I think that every Christian, Jew, and Muslim should read it. As to The Case for God (which I will review soon), I say simply that everyone should read it. Monotheist, Eastern religious practitioners, non-believers: everyone who wants to understand the religious traditions. This makes the “Christian” list here because it focuses on Christianity more than any other one religion, but it is broadly comprehensive.

Northrop Frye, The Double Vision. See my recent review. In addition, his two books on the Bible, The Great Code and Words with Power are the longer works behind The Double Vision that are most worthwhile. By the way, Professor Frye, one of the great literary critics of the 20th century, was also Rev. Frye, an ordained minister of the United Church of Canada.

Gerald May, Will and Spirit. I have several of his books, and they are all worthwhile. Like most of the authors on this list, he relies heavily on the mystical tradition of Christianity for his inspiration. In addition, he was a practicing psychiatrist.

Helen Luke, From Dark Wood to While Rose. Helen Luke was grounded in the Jungian tradition, and this book of hers on Dante’s Divine Comedy is a superb guide for beginners and those who want to contemplate some of the choicest morsels of this great work (not just the sensational punishments of hell that seem to attract so many readers). A truly lovely book.

Garry Wills. Here it’s hard to pick. I’ll start with one of the two first books by Wills that I read: Bare Ruined Choirs about the (then) contemporary Catholic Church. It’s Wills at his journalistic (as well as philosophic) best. Since then, I’ll pick out only two more titles: Heads and Hearts: American Christianities about the history of Christianity in America and What Jesus Meant, his take on the significance of the life, death, and teaching of Jesus. Very short, but quite worthwhile. (See also his What Paul Meant and What the Gospels Meant.

Jacob Needleman, Lost Christianity and What Is God? The former is his investigation, reflection, and fantasy of the possibilities of Christianity from his perspective, and his perspective is greatly influenced by the tradition of Gurdjieff. His more recent (2010) book, What is God? is an autobiography of his struggle with the idea and practice of God. As always with Needleman, he writes for a general audience, not trained philosophers, and he always incorporates his personal experiences and those of his students.

William Johnston, The Mirror Mind: Spirituality and Transformation. This, and other works by Jesuit William Johnston reflect his time in Japan and his encounter with Zen practice there. In a theme that will run throughout this list, I believe one of the truly fertile encounters in the 20th century has occurred when Buddhists and Christians have shared perspectives. Although Thomas Merton doesn’t have a work on this list, he is certainly among the most well known person in this dialogue, but Johnston, I believe, along with others, has added a great deal in this and several other books.

Kenneth Leech, True Prayer: An Invitation to Christian Spirituality. This book, by an Anglican minister, takes the reader into the world of the earliest Church Fathers to find some essential insights.

Anthony De Mello, Awareness. Like his fellow Jesuit William Johnston, De Mello published a number of books. De Mello spent time in India, and so his perspective is flavored more by his Hindu and Moslem milieu. However, De Mello is a delight to read. I think several years after his death and after the publication of this book, someone at the Vatican decided that De Mello was too far out and put some kind mark against his book. Yeah, it’s that good.

Alan Watts, Myth and Ritual in Christianity and Behold the Spirit. Alan Watts, when he wrote both of these books, I believe, was an Anglican (Episcopalian) priest. This eventually proved too confining for the free-spirited Watts, but these two books delve deeply into the tradition. Already heavily influenced by his reading of Eastern traditions, these books shed great light on the Christian tradition. If you want to understand what’s going on in the Trivium, read Myth and Ritual.

Stephen Mitchell, The Gospel According to Jesus. By now, Mitchell, a poet and translator, has translated and commented upon just about every major spiritual classic from around the world. His take on Jesus is sensitive and well considered. He, too, is greatly influenced in his reading by Eastern perspectives.

Polly Berends, Whole Child/Whole Parent and Coming Home. In both books, Berends is first and foremost a mom. She studied under the tutelage of European émigré Thomas Hora, who brought to Berends a unique blend of psychotherapy, existentialism, and scriptural understanding. Throw in Berends very down to earth experiences of parenting, and you receive a unique and enlightening spiritual perspective.

Dom Aelred Graham, Zen Catholicism. After our friend Hedecki stayed with us, I started reading about Buddhism, and I began through books by Roman Catholics. Graham’s book was one of the first, if not the first, that I read about Buddhism. (Actually, Huston Smith’s chapter in his book, The World’s Religions was the first book that I turned to.) This Benedictine shared an insightful perspective on the two traditions that I’ve always found very useful.

James W. Jones, In the Middle of This Road We Call Our Life and The Mirror of God: Christian Faith as a Spiritual Process—Lessons from Buddhism and Psychotherapy. Although we might call these psychology books (too literate for self-help), their perspectives are deeply informed by Christianity and other traditions. If a spiritual practice doesn’t touch our daily life, what’s the point? Jones brings this perspective to light with clinical accounts.

Dorothy Sayers, Dante’s Divine Comedy: Translation and Commentary and The Mind of the Maker. This woman, most famous as an English detective novelist, provided a fine translation and a first-rate commendatory on Dante, among the greatest of poets. To understand his Christian masterpiece, you would be hard-pressed to find a better commentary and notes to guide through a reading. The Mind of the Maker is a series of very literate essays.

Maurice Nicoll, The New Man. Nicoll died in 1953, so he just made it to the wire. This book is deeply influenced by the perspectives of Jung and Gurdjieff that Nicoll made his own. Nicoll attempts to make sense of the Gospels as a guide to real metanoia (change of mind/heart). Very interesting and thought provoking. See also his book The Mark.

Andrew Greeley. Unsecular Man and No Bigger than Necessary. Greeley was a prolific writer, not all of it top quality, I think. However, these two books proved to have a lot to inform me. Unsecular Man is about the abiding human quality of religious expression and ties. Remember, Greeley is a professional sociologist (UChicago trained, I believe), as well as a born writer. As to No Bigger, it’s a defense and promotion of Catholic social and political thought, which I found quite persuasive. As a guide to economic, social, and political arrangements, Greeley argues the Catholic tradition has a lot to offer. I found it quite eye-opening back when I read it around 1980.

Robert Short, The Gospel According to Peanuts and The Parables of Peanuts. The first book (Gospel) I received from someone named “C” for Christmas, 1970, and the second one is inscribed to “Spook” from this same “C” July 1971. (Isn’t it wonderful to have girlfriends who buy you books?) These books were fun in one sense because they were filled with Charles Schulz’s Peanuts cartoons, but strange and wonderful because they spoke of Karl Barth, Kierkegaard, Elliott, Luther, Bonhoeffer, and Camus, among many others (and innumerable Biblical references). This theology was deeply rooted in the Protestant tradition of the mid-20th century. Heavy and serious stuff, lightened with wonderful cartoons. High and popular culture complimenting each other.

Rene Girard. I will just share his name here, as I’ve read many shorter pieces by him about Christianity and his unique take upon the significance of Christianity. (See earlier posts.) I haven’t carefully read his Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, his big work on Christianity. I should. Beat me to it and you’ll be the better for it.

Chris Hedges, I Don’t Believe in Atheists. Hedges is a modern-day prophet. He thunders against war and oppression, American fascist religion, and he scoffs in this book at the “New Atheists” for their naiveté as much as anything. (Johnston calls them—Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris—the “undergraduate atheists” because they base their arguments on texts read as undergraduates and have skipped crucial texts that would have come in graduate school). In any event, Hedges pulls no punches on any topic, and he does confront you, even as he goes after the subject of his book or article. He is a modern prophet, and you don’t think that you’ll read him for casual consideration. Sometimes I find him too much of a downer, almost too cynical, but maybe that’s how prophets have to be.

Jack Miles, Christ. The former Jesuit brings his erudition, following his Pulitzer prize-winning God: A Biography, to the Gospels. Mile presents a compelling consideration of the Gospel message and its meaning.

Reinhold Niebuhr. Moral Man and Immoral Society and most else of what he wrote. You thought I was going to forget Niebuhr? I think that he is in some sense the 20th century reincarnation of St. Augustine. His perspectives of politics and society are unparalleled for their insights. He, too, is not easy in the sense you can step away from reading him feeling smug and self-satisfied. I don’t know if Niebuhr’s voice would be heard today, as he’s too unwilling to suffer the foolishness of both the Right and the Left. Always highly recommended.

Special Addendum:
Two Buddhist get a special shout out:
1. Thich Nhat Hahn, Living Buddhist, Living Christ. This Vietnamese Buddhist monk, who now lives in France, I believe, but who travels and teaches throughout the world is a wonderful voice of love, compassion, and mindfulness. In this book, he displays those traits in comparing the traditions of Buddha and Jesus. A wonderful work.
2. Alan Wallace, Mind in the Balance: Meditation in Science, Buddhism, and Christianity. Wallace is a former Tibetan Buddhist monk who also has studied physics and holds a Ph.D. from Stanford in Religious Studies. He is among the foremost Buddhist scholar-practitioners around. He wrote this book for his stepdaughter, who’d been raised and practiced as a Christian. He undertook this book to show the intersection of these three traditions (as well as some philosophy) to show how all can contribute to a deeper interior life.

Okay, enough now. Go read a book.

Mark Johnston: More on the Significance of the Passion & Crucifixion

Because I find it one of the most thoughtful and thought-provoking meditations on the meaning and significance of the Passion, I’m going to post more quotes from Mark Johnston’s Saving God: Religion After Idolatry. I’m jumping around a bit for my quotes, but all of them are from pages 172-174 in the chapter entitled “Without Spiritual Materialism”.

Why did Christ have to suffer and die at the hands of the legitimate religious and political authorities? Why wouldn’t the viper have sufficed? [This references an earlier discussion of replacing the Crucifixion with a fatal viper bite in the Garden of Gethsemane.] Not, pace Girard, because only then could the suffering and death of Christ be a reduction ad absurdum of scapegoating sacrifice, but because only then could it expose the mechanisms at the heart of false righteousness, this secret love of self-love trying at all costs to put down the anxiety of how we live, even to the point of murder. The Crucifixion discloses how far we are prepared to go in order to defend out idolatrous attachment to one or another adventitious form of righteousness.

. . . .

Of course, it not that the psychological power of self-love and false righteousness is actually diminished by the Passion and Crucifixion. Instead, self-love and false righteousness—that is to say, the central elements of the characteristically human form of lie—no longer make up a defensible realm.

. . . .

Contrast the death of Socrates . . . . Crucially, Plato’s Socrates recognizes the legitimacy of the Athenian state; he accepts its claims upon him and so does not flee even in the face of an unjust sentence. In this way the death of Socrates secretly valorizes the false righteousness of Athenian respectability, by showing that even someone who really understands virtue will bow to this false righteousness in the end. Human ways of going on are secretly redeemed by Plato’s Socrates. The Kingdom of self-love and false righteousness remains legitimated.

 The ordeal of Christ’s Passion and Crucifixion is not at all like this. There is nothing noble or “humanly redeeming” about it, beginning as it does with his desperation in the Garden and ending with his despair on the Cross. It is not a cathartic tragedy. It leaves us at a total loss. We can return to human ways of going on only if we forget what happened. If we do not forget, we need to find a way to love that is not some form of self-love and false righteousness. And if we do not forget, we know that we cannot find this in ourselves. Then, and only then, are we prepared to take the two commandments*, the salvation from without, seriously.

. . . .

*Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all they soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength; this is the first commandment. And the second is like it, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.

There is it is. That is the choice. Make the safe bet, the one for which you cannot be blamed, because all the others are doing it; take upon yourself some form of ready-to-wear righteousness and gradually have it adjusted to your own proportions. Or radically abandon yourself to the will of God. 

Worldly wisdom says: better to hand one’s life over to a respectable conception of the good.

There you have something to meditate upon this Holy Saturday.

Mark Johnston on Rene Girard: Reflections for Good Friday

Last year I posted a review and extended quote from Mark Johnston's supurb book, Saving God: Religion After Idolatry. Since this book is packed with insight, I can't think of anything better for the occasion than another extended quote. But I'm going with a two-for-one deal here, as the following quote is an explication by Johnston on the work of Rene Girard, whose thinking has become important for many considering the human condition and Christianity's response to that condition. Johnston about Girard's take:

To thus assimilate the significance of Christ’s suffering and death would mean that we can never look at victims, even the victims of so-called legitimate violence, including the juridical violence of the state, in the same way. After the Cross, the face of God incarnate looks back at us from the image of the victim. Victimization, sacrifice, and religious violence have been forever unmasked as illegitimate strategies by which our murderous envy of each other is temporarily discharged, and yet preserved as an ongoing psychological orientation.

Johnston goes on:

Christ offers something more, a new kind of mimesis: “give no thought to the morrow,” that is, abandon the empty life of acquisitive desire, and “love one another as I have loved you”—and so take on the radical risk of being devoured by the others, as Christ was. 

This is the salvation that Christ offers: the naked disclosure of our natural collective hatred and lust for violence, than freedom from the idea of legitimate violence, and finally a new resolution of the internecine mimetic tension, not by way of another temporary sacrificial discharge, but through the availability of a wholly new form of mimesis, the imitation of Christ’s won self-sacrificing love.

For Johnston's riff off of Girard, take a look the quote I posted last year, or better yet, read the book.

Northrop Frye, The Double Vision: Language & Meaning in Religion

My note says I purchased this book in 1992. Unlike some books, it has not simply gathered dust on the shelf while it waited its turn to gather my attention. Instead, this book is full of highlights & pencil notes. I just read it again. In just 85 pages, Frye, in his last published work, provides a grand sense of his vision, his double vision of religion, language, and culture. The title is pulled from Blake, of whom Frye wrote a lengthy book early in his career (and which is well worth reading). Frye takes off from Blake and St. Paul, among others, to give a sense of what the religious books are saying. Not in the literal sense (of only limited importance) but in the moral, allegorical, and analogical senses. (Shades of Dante, here, too.) Religion, like literature, depends on the language of myth and metaphor, while every day language is descriptive of the natural world in what we refer to as a literal sense. The literal, Frye argues, is passive, while the mythical/metaphorical is active. Religion, as opposed to literature, asks "What is to be done?" (using a quote from a less savory character to make the point here).

I don't know if I can think of a book that packs so much perspective, insight, and wisdom into 85 pages. Reading Frye is like reading by lightening flashes, the insights come quickly, almost suddenly, and leave you wondering what you've just seen by this amazing illumination. If the highest compliment that you can pay a book is to re-read it and get something new out of it, well then this book receives very high praise indeed.

David Brooks on Trump

David Brooks writes on Trump in a way that makes some sense out of the Trump phenomenum. Trump is a joke, and I couldn't figure out why anyone would consider him a serious presidential prospect. After all, Sarah Palin only received a nomination for vice-president! If you've been wondering about this as I have, Brooks makes some sense of it. As Brooks notes in his column, Trump himself gave a shout-out to Obama a few years ago (before Trump got into the birther idiocy business). Obama, too, was a brash outsider. Come to think if it, does anyone become president without a high level (although not Trumpian level) of brashness? Probably not. What we need is a real brashness role model, and I have one: TR. Teddy Roosevelt. Almost nuts by most standards, but in a compelling and useful way. Of course, TR was an imperialist, he genuinely seemed to relish war and conflict (his Nobel Peace Prize notwithstanding), etc. TR was no angel. But the energy! My, goodness, the shear Energy! A leader needs a high degree of energy to think outside the norm, and even more energy to drag followers into tow. So, of course, Trump, like Palin, is full of outrageous nonsense, an embarrassment, but I think Brooks is right about the need for brashness.

BTW, if you haven't been following Doonesberry's take on Trump over the last few days, you've missed some great laughs. Here's a sample.

Paul Krugman Against Bipartisanship, and Me, too

Krugman hits it with his take on calls for "bipartisanship". Who are our great bipartisan presidents? FDR railing against "economic royalists"? Harry "Give 'em hell, Harry" Truman? Lincoln, who led the nation through a civil war? Of course, each of these leaders could wheel and deal. I doubt that any of them were rude or went out of their way to mistreat their opponents. However, each knew when to give and when to take. Of course we compromise, but we stake out a strong position first, knowing what we can expend and what we cannot forgo. Like lawyers, we learn not to antagonize over the small insignificant details, but to go all out on the merits. So should Obama. Krugman's providing sound advice here, and I hope that Obama heeds it.

Gary Taubes: The Blood Speaks

In this follow-up post to the article that I cited yesterday, Taubes posts his recent blood test results. Read what he eats, and then look at the results. Having lost both grandfathers and one uncle to fatal heart attacks and having a father who suffered CAD & underwent a CABG, I've followed my numbers over the years and done a fair amount of self-education on the topic. These are great numbers for Taubes and they confirm what others have experienced eating a low-carb (or paleo) diet. Heresy? Yes. Is he on to something? Quite likely. (Although he eats more meat than I think that I can.) Love those Con salads, too!

Gary Taubes: "Is Sugar Toxic?"

Another finding courtesy of Farnum Street (otherwise I would have had to wait until I read the NYT tomorrow morning). Gary Taubes writes again on a topic for which he has become a bit of a crusader. However, unlike the negative connotation of that term, I think he does have a righteous cause. His crusade is based on science, its weaknesses and its strengths. Readers of this blog will note that I've written about his work before, and I highly recommend this newest article. It will give you pause. Should I drink that fruit juice? Should I have a piece of pie or a dish of ice cream? I think that the answer, as Taubes provides it, will prove quite challenging, for me at least. Also, although I'm just beginning to watch it, this talk by Dr. Lustig sounds like it will prove quite eye-opening. Enjoy--the article and that sugary delight--or not--at your own peril.

P.S. I found a < 9 minute interview with Lustig on Nightline that I think summarizes (as only network tv can do) his position.

Farnum Street on Best Books Not Well Known

First of all, although this particular post isn't especially representative, I should give a shout out to Farnum Street, an excellent blog site. It's an aggregator (little original material), but it harvests some of the most interesting pieces on the web about the blog's interests. What are those interests? The blogger describes his project:

I'm a no-name guy who started Farnam Street back in 2009 with the goal of posting the best articles from around the internet that relate to psychology, behavioral economics, human misjudgment, persuasion, and other subjects of intellectual interest.

If you're in my business (advocacy & living life on Earth), you'll likely find something relevant to your life and work here.

As to this post, I can't pass by a good book list. How do I know it's a good list? Because I've read some of the books on it: Tuchman's The Guns of August, Richardson's Mind on Fire, Manand's Metaphysical Club, and Campbell's Grammatical Man. All of these were excellent books. So, a fun list to consider.

Nick Morgan on King's "I Have a Dream" Speech

Public speaking coach Nick Morgan writes about MLK’s “I Have a Dream Speech” which he considers perhaps the greatest speech of the twentieth century. (Competitors? Perhaps Churchill’s oratory, although I’m not sure which one. Others?) What I find interesting about the discussion in this particular post goes to King’s movement away from a prepared text to ad-lib (apparently the peroration was not in the text, or so I understand from this blog). How amazing! Did King pull a rabbit out of the hat? Well, no, or least he’d practiced doing so on many occasions as an African-American preacher (where boring “homilies” are not tolerated). Practice, practice, practice: oratory, writing, chess, tennis, or whatever: if you think about it and then practice it relentlessly and mindfully, sometimes you feel it and perform in a whole new sphere, as King did that day.

Garry Wills: Augustine's Confessions: A Biography

Garry Wills continues his life-long fascination and scholarship about St. Augustine with the publication of this new book. Wills has already written a brief biography of Augustine of the Penguin Brief Lives edition, and he's translated the Confessions. Thus, Wills is a veteran of the Augustine scene. The fact that he receives accolades from the premiere Augustine biographer Peter Brown and fellow biographer and Augustine scholar James O'Donnell reinforces my belief that Wills knows whereof he speaks when it comes to Augustine (and on most topics he chooses to write about, for that matter).

Augustine is the seminal figure in the development of Western Christianity. From his life in Late Antiquity, except for St. Paul, Augustine probably had the greatest influence on the development of Western Christianity. The Confessions tells the story of Augustine's conversion (very slow in coming) and his attempt to understand the texts of the Bible, especially those of the Creation in Genesis. Wills points out a couple of very interesting thing about Augustine's work that I found unique in this volume:
1. How he wrote. Augustine worked by dictation. As someone who writes by dictation, I have to admire this. My work usually needs extensive revision if the topic is at all complex or lengthy. How you do this with papyrus—well, you don’t. I thought revising with a typewriter was bad. So the work was difficult, yet he wrote a huge amount.
2. Augustine didn’t first learn about silent reading from Ambrose. Silent reading was not a new invention at that time. Another urban legend bites the dust.
3. Now, something important: The Confessions (or Testimony, as Wills prefers to translate the title) is not the first autobiography. Rather, it is an extended prayer. This gives the book a different look and feel when you think of it that way.
4. Wills addresses the reputation of the Confessions since its writing, even into contemporary times. Among those who have written about Augustine, he notes, is Hannah Arendt. I had an intellectual crush on Arendt during my youth. She wrote her dissertation about Augustine and called him “the only true philosopher the Romans ever had”. I wrote a undergraduate paper on Augustine’s concept of community. Thus, I’ve found this conjunction between two of my favorite authors intriguing. Their mutual admiration of Augustine reinforces my own perception of him as a powerful figure in our tradition. Not always right or edifying, but quite a challenging figure. This short book by Wills adds the significant literature on this amazing figure. Highly recommended.

Maureen Dowd on Asking Pointed Questions

If I was a politician, I'd run screaming in the other direction if I saw Maureen Dowd coming to interview me. She can cut to the quick. Thus, the column she writes here shows that even someone like her, who can take on sitting presidents & cut them to ribbons in print, quakes in the face of asking probing questions of doctors and or giving directions to cab drivers. I think that we can share this reticence in some measure. We want to believe that professionals, whether the holder of a hack license or a medical license or a law license or a teaching certificate, means that the holder knows what he or she is doing all of the time. Wrong. Doctors, lawyers, cabbies: we're all human, all too human. I dislike it when a client questions me, but I know it's smart of them and that they really ought to do it. That person is actually a better client. Sometimes I do miss angles or over look possibilities. We ought to--because we need to--ask tough questions. But, if it's hard for Maureen Dowd, then it must be hard for everyone. (Interestingly, I saw her once on the Daily Show and she came across as almost shy, not the tigress that I expected. I attribute it to print versus personal confrontation.)

Niall Ferguson: Technology as a Two-Edged Sword

Niall Ferguson notes that while technology gets some credit for recent democratic uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East, it's not all about sweetness and light. The bad guys (terrorists) use it also, for instance, to recruit, train, plan, and act. Technology make take us to heaven, or to hell (or remain in a sort of purgatory, like watching most television).

The Bane of Iowa: Bob Vander Plaats

This guy is the plague of the Iowa judicial system, and to see him get this kind of publicity disturbs me greatly. His crusade against our judicial system resulted in a vigilante justice for three sitting Supreme Court justices who happened to appear on the ballot last fall. The good news? As I predicted, polling data shows that opposition to gay marriage is not strong in Iowa. Indeed, I maintain that some of the reason for the vote that we saw last fall comes from an I-want-to-vote-out-anyone-I-can attitude. There's a solid 25% or so that will vote against any judge, so it doesn't take a lot to push the number up over 50%. For those of you out of state, Iowa has ilk like this, but it's a close state, and I'm remaining optimistic for the next round of elections.

11 Short Pieces of Wisdom on Health & Nutrician

Courtesy of Art De Vany, I came to this site. De Vany contributed to this piece. Also, Mark Sisson and Frank Forencich, whom I read regularly contributed.I'm an occasional acquaintance of some of the contributors, so some of this is not new, but it packs a lot of good advice in a small space. With the return of warmer weather, the get out in Nature advice sounds even better!