Books

Jon Ronson, the author of the excellent books Them and The Men Who Stare At Goats, went on a cruise with Sylvia Browne. He tells the story at the Guardian Online, and it’s a good read. An excerpt: Famous anti-psychics, such as Richard Dawkins, are often criticised for using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Dawkins’ last television series, The Enemies Of Reason, was roundly condemned for making silly, harmless psychics seem too villainous. This criticism might be true were it not for the fact that, when the likes of Sylvia Browne make pronouncements, the police and desperate parents sometimes spend serious time and money investigating their claims. ...

Young-earth creationist and Discovery Institute Fellow John Mark Reynolds has written a pair of articles arguing that Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling’s outing of her character Dumbledore as gay doesn’t make him so, since the text is silent on the issue. I actually think he makes a reasonable argument, except that he heads in a personally dangerous direction when he writes: What if Rowling writes a guide to her characters in which she gives new “back story” to the characters? ...

Chris Hallquist takes a look at the different versions of Josh McDowell’s testimony about being a former atheist who set out to disprove Christianity only to become a Christian, a finds some reasons to doubt its accuracy, as well as the quality of McDowell’s research. UPDATE (January 2, 2009): Vinny at You Call This Culture? notes that McDowell doesn’t appear to have actually been converted to Christianity on the basis of evidence: Commenting on the Hallquist post, self-identified Christian apologist Kevin H said that he had spoken with McDowell about the matter:He’s the kind of guy who is amused at all that is said about him. I noticed he was quick to correct falsehoods. For example, he told me that the evidence for Christianity was a “foot in the door” that kept him from immediately closing it. But it was the love of God that drew him. It seems he knows, whether his fault or the fault of the swirling influence of his books and speaking tours, that people have the conception that he was forced into faith by irresistable arguments. ...

I’m in the process of reading Akhil Reed Amar’s America’s Constitution: A Biography, and just came to the portion about the 16th Amendment, which instituted a federal income tax. I had already known that the tax was a very low percentage, but I hadn’t realized that only the top 1% of income earners paid any income tax. It would be a nice model to go back to, but not possible without dramatically reducing federal spending–the wealthiest Americans wouldn’t tolerate an extortionate percentage of taxation that would be required on the current level of spending, and given the huge amounts of money that are now a part of political campaigning, nobody gets elected without the support of at least some of the wealthiest Americans. (And those levels of spending are tied together–there’s huge money riding on political campaigns because there’s huge money and power in the hands of the federal government. The only way to reduce the former is to reduce the latter.) Here are the two paragraphs where Amar describes pre-Civil War and post-16th Amendment income taxes in the United States: Prior to the Civil War, at least seven states had adopted income taxes. High exemptions and graduated rates–the basic features of a progressive tax structure–were commonplace in these states. Congress followed this pattern when introducing a federal income tax in the 1860s. For instance, the 1865 federal tax code exempted all persons who made less than $600, taxed income between $600 and $5,000 at 5 percent, and subjected all income above $5,000 to a steeper 10 percent rate. Later federal laws tweaked the specifics but preserved the basic structure, under which more than three-quarters of federal revenue came from the seven wealthiest states: New York (which itself generated more than 30 percent of the total national intake), Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Under the law struck down in Pollock, incomes over $4,000 were taxed at 2 percent, all others were exempt. According to Treasury Department estimates, less than 1 percent of the population had been subject to this levy. … In the first income-tax statute enacted after the new amendment was in place, Congress once again opted for a progressive tax structure that exempted a large swath of low- and middle-income persons and taxed the rest at a sloping rate, beginning at 1 percent for an individual making $3,000 and topping out at 7 percent for income over $500,000. The $3,000 minimum threshold effectively limited the tax to the top 1 percent of the economic order. In 1916 the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the new tax law, expressly rejecting the notion that the “progressive feature” of the tax somehow rendered it unconstitutional. The American People had spoken and–this time, at least–the Court listened.

Blake Stacey is maintaining a list, at Science after Sunclipse.

The meme is to bold the ones you’ve read…. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov Dune, Frank Herbert Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin Neuromancer, William Gibson Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras Cities in Flight, James Blish The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson The Forever War, Joe Haldeman Gateway, Frederik Pohl Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams I Am Legend, Richard Matheson Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin Little, Big, John Crowley Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith On the Beach, Nevil Shute Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke Ringworld, Larry Niven Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks (like P.Z. Myers, I started this one and found it unreadable) Timescape, Gregory Benford To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer ...

This YouTube video is of a talk by Daniel Dennett at the TED conference in 2006, following (and commenting on) Pastor Rick Warren. jpbenney (2007-07-08): The idea that religion is a natural phenomenon is very reminiscent, oddly, of Jared Diamond in books like Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, as well as Phillip Longman. The idea of subjecting religion to serious social study, too, is nothing new. Leonard Shlain's The Alphabet versus the Goddess is a flawed if highly enthralling example.Daniel does seem an interesting person, I must say. He is very articulate and lively, so one imagine him to be a very convincing speaker. ...

Mark Vuletic points out that the March 11 New York Times hardcover bestseller list includes five books of interest to infidels in the top 25: 7. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel 12. Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion 13. Chris Hedges’ American Fascists 21. Victor Stenger’s God: The Failed Hypothesis 24. Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation

During my long plane flights this week, I used some of my time to catch up on reading back issues of The Economist. Here were a few of the stories I found particularly interesting in the January 6-12, 2007 issue: “Medicine at the Top of the World” (p. 65): LYING in an intensive-care ward is a world away from climbing Everest, but a connection will be drawn this spring when 45 scientists and 208 volunteers tackle the mountain to bring back information about oxygen deprivation. The reason they are going is that hypoxia (a lack of oxygen in cells, which can lead to death) is the one thing that links practically all patients in intensive-care wards—and there is no better place to study it than in the thin air of the world’s highest mountain.The story describes the Xtreme Everest expedition, which will take 250 people up Mount Everest, setting up mobile labs at various elevations to study hypoxia. The volunteers will climb up to 5,300 meters, and 16 climber-scientists will ascend to the summit to become the first to have blood drawn at the top of the world’s tallest mountain. The research will be used to try to identify the genetic basis of people’s ability to handle hypoxia, which couldn’t be easily be conducted on patients in intensive care due to not having enough of them in one place at the right time. “The logic of privacy” (pp. 65-66): ...

Guy Kawasaki interviews Jon Winokur, whose books of curmudgeonly quotations are prized possessions of mine. It was Winokur’s The Portable Curmudgeon which inspired me to track down and read the very entertaining autobiography of Oscar Levant. Here’s a short excerpt, chosen because it makes a point that is part of Paul Krassner’s standup act: Question: What are you working on now? Answer: The Big Curmudgeon, an omnibus edition of previous curmudgeon books plus new material, and The Big Book of Irony, a small-format hardcover in which I try to share my delight in the many facets of irony and clear up some misconceptions, because irony is widely misunderstood. It drives me crazy when people say “ironic” when they mean “coincidental.” The classic example is Morissettian Irony, which I define in the book as “irony based on a misapprehension of irony, i.e., no irony at all.” It’s named for the pop singer Alanis Morissette, whose hit single, “Ironic” mislabels coincidence and inconvenience as irony. In the song, situations purporting to be ironic are merely sad, random, or annoying (“It's a traffic jam when you're already late/It's a no-smoking sign on your cigarette break”). In other words, “Ironic” is an un-ironic song about irony. Which, of course, is ironic in itself. But wait, there’s more, a “bonus irony” if you will: “Ironic” has been cited as an example of how Americans don’t get irony, despite the fact that Alanis Morissette is Canadian! By the way, here's a rewrite of lines from Morissette's song to actually make them ironic. Historical Comments Ed Brayton (2007-01-16): Ah, I am also one who treasures Winokur's books, which I've been collecting for a long time. Great stuff. ...