ricketyclick

From a gallery of beautiful libraries, the Biblioteca do Palacio Nacional da Ajuda Lisboa III, in Lisbon, Portugal:

[click on any picture for full-size; they're all well worth it.]
Not by any means the most gorgeous, just the one that for me strikes closest to the right balance between books, architecture, and art.

For pure stunning gorgeousness, there’s the Abbey Library at St. Gallen, Switzerland:

Then there’s the Vatican’s library, in which the books are completely overwhelmed:

How could you possibly read there? It’s hard to resist making parallels between this Library’s presentation of its books, and the Church’s presentation of its theology.

The legend on this photo says the books used to be chained to prevent theft:

However, fans of Terry Pratchett’s Librarian at the Unseen University’s Magical Library know better: the chains keep the books from escaping, or even attacking other books or unwary readers. (The Librarian himself is a victim of such an attack, and now presents as an orangutan. He’s resisted all efforts to change him back.)

Check out the entire gallery; there are some beautiful, beautiful pictures.

There’s a paper floating around [PDF, 935 KB] alleging that Barack Obama is hypnotizing his followers using the techniques of “Neurolinguistic programming”, aka NLP.

You know, it’s tempting. Obama has captured so many otherwise intelligent, educated, sophisticated, well meaning people, and convinced them to believe things that simply do not hold up when examined closely (or even casually). At the same time, he’s managed to keep people, including virtually the entire press corp, from examining closely not only his ideas, but his past associates, words, and actions.

Discredited socialist, central-planner politics aside, I find Obama profoundly creepy, and don’t really understand what people see in him.

I absolutely agree that “this unaccomplished man’s unnatural and irrational rise to the highest office in the world [is] suspicious and frightening”.

However, scanning through this paper — no. I can’t easily identify it, but it has the faint reek of crank to it. The crowded formatting, the lack of a by-line on the first page, the exhortation to read the table of contents….

The command to “READ THIS DOCUMENT IN ORDER, FROM BEGINNING TO END, AS DEFINITIONS ARE BUILT ON TOP OF ONE-ANOTHER, AND UNDERSTANDING OF THESE DEFINITIONS IS NECESSARY TO FOLLOW LATER INTERPRETATIONS AND ANALYSIS”.

Sigh. All-caps, in an extra-large typeface. It might as well have more than three exclamation points at the end, the inarguable sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head!!!!

There’s the desperate footer, “EXPOSING OBAMA’S DECEPTION MAY BE THE ONLY WAY TO PROTECT DEMOCRACY”. Again, note the all-caps.

Then there’s this video:

Here’s the give-away: many, many vaguely threatening clips of Obama, but not one clip of him actually speaking, nothing demonstrating the techniques allegedly in use.

Notice the oddly cadenced narration (”Why, it’s almost as if the narrator wants to hypnotize us to bypass our rational…Oh.”), and the vaguely threatening background music straight from the X-Files.

Oh, yes, Hitler and his rallies put in an extended appearance.

Not proof that this is crackpot work, but there’s simply too many signs to take it seriously.

Obama is indeed a dangerous demagogue, but he is using techniques that have been used for centuries, not some weird modern mind-control.

Via M. Simon’s Classical Values. I do recommend Simon’s article on “The Cult of Personality” at his other blog, Power and Control.

Update:
The Language Log has another skeptical article on Obama and NLP, with excellent comments on the history of NLP.

From Eliezer Yudkowsky at the very challenging and stimulating Overcoming Bias:

This fallacy gets its name from an ancient sci-fi TV show, which I never saw myself, but was reported to me by a reputable source (some guy at an SF convention).  Anyone knows the exact reference, do leave a comment.

So the good guys are battling the evil aliens.  Occasionally, the good guys have to fly through an asteroid belt.  As we all know, asteroid belts are as crowded as a New York parking lot, so their ship has to carefully dodge the asteroids.  The evil aliens, though, can fly right through the asteroid belt because they have amazing technology that dematerializes their ships, and lets them pass through the asteroids.

Eventually, the good guys capture an evil alien ship, and go exploring inside it.  The captain of the good guys finds the alien bridge, and on the bridge is a lever.  “Ah,” says the captain, “this must be the lever that makes the ship dematerialize!”  So he pries up the control lever and carries it back to his ship, after which his ship can also dematerialize.

And from there, Yudkowsky goes on to discuss the quicksand foundations of psychology and Artificial Intelligence. Well worth the time and skull sweat.

One mild demurrer: If you look over at my Categories, you’ll see that I deride psychology as “Witch Doctoring”. This is in response to claims that psychology is in any way a science; it is not, because it lacks underlying mechanisms and testable hypotheses.

However, it’s easy to ridicule the field in hindsight, without viewing it in its historical context.

Imagine, to use the opening metaphor, that you live on a ship, have been raised on a ship, where nobody has ever been in the bridge; indeed, no one even knows the bridge exists. The ship simply flies around the universe, completely out of control. The origins of the ship, and the technology and science underlying its operation, have been forgotten so long ago, no one even remembers the ideas of technology and science. It is not unreasonable that all sorts of bizarre superstitions should arise as to how to direct the flight of the ship.

Then one day an ignorant, superstitious, but curious savage, fellow by the name of Freud, finds this rusted-shut hatch….

Sounds like a great idea for a science fiction story, eh? The idea of a colonial ship carrying crew and passengers who have forgotten their origins is indeed a popular one, although I don’t recall this particular issue being explored.

A couple of the best examples are Alfred Bester’s novel The Stars My Destination, and Gene Wolf’s tetralogy Book of the Long Sun (Actually, a long cycle of novels). There’s another novel (which I read in high school, so pre-1972) about a militaristic religion, with enforcers based on the Spanish Inquisition, deliberately set up to control the population of a colony ship; damned if I can remember its title or author, though. Then there’s The Starlost, a disasterous TV series disowned by its creator, Harlan Ellison.

The Power of Dill Compels You:

PZ Meyers at Pharyngula sez:

Christianity is like sticking [forks] in your face and your rectum and plugging them into a wall socket. Your insides will smoke and sizzle, you’ll glow, sparks will shoot out of you, and you’ll become a cooked vegetable.

Ooo-kay, then.

“Don’t try this at home.” Right, so much for all those living-room Bible study groups, then.

P.Z. Myers is exasperated over at Pharyngula.

There are days when it is agony to read the news, because people are so goddamned stupid. Petty and stupid. Hateful and stupid. Just plain stupid. And nothing makes them stupider than religion.

Here’s a story that will destroy your hopes for a reasonable humanity.

It seems that a Mr. Webster Cook attended mass and accepted Communion, but instead of chewing up the Host the bread crumb, swallowing it, digesting it, and pooping it back out again, he walked out of the church with Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ the cracker.

An obvious “hate crime”, effectively a “kidnapping”.

As far as I can tell, Cook wasn’t being disruptive at first; unfortunately, another worshiper there noticed him take the wafer out of his mouth, and church officials struggled with him to get it back.

Cook has apparently received death threats over the incident. He faces disciplinary action at the college where he is a student if his attempts to, I can’t believe I’m saying this, return the cracker and apologize are not deemed adequate by the diocese or the church.

Read the whole thing; PZM has done a good job of summarizing and linking, and I see no need to duplicate his effort.

I’ll point out that I believe that when you enter someone else’s house, or house of worship, following their rules is simple courtesy, and you may expect them to be offended if you break those rules. He apparently partook of the ceremony under false pretenses. I gather, though, that he did not intend to disrupt proceedings or insult worshippers; he was simply trying to satisfy the curiosity of a fellow student.

I’ve also got to say, if he had insulted Muslims this severely, there would be riots in the streets, and he would have received a death fatwa, not just anonymous death threats. By the standards of religious intolerance, the reaction here is restrained, if not exactly sane.

Still, PZM is essentially right.

“It’s just a goddamned cracker.”

Oooh, just as a matter of scientific inquiry:

For fun, obtain thousands of the exact same cracker from the manufacturer, and then add said stolen cracker to a pile - then invite the clergy and the concerned parishioners to pick out which it is.

If it’s special, surely there’s some way of discerning that?

Yeah, if only we could round up a vampire, say, or some kind of demon, the Sanctified Hosts would burn it, but the crackers would do nothing. Of course, it would have to be a double blind study….

I’ll also point out that I’ve never, in years of searching, found a skeptics’ curse as satisfying as “goddamned”. We need to fix that.

Another piccie from Michelle.

The picture links to one of the many, many articles sneering at the report of the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology on “The Dignity of Living Beings with Regard to Plants”, which declares that plants have rights, too, honest they do, really, and we cruel brutal humans should be nicer to them, pretty please with a cher–um, pretty please.

I love Malkin’s filename for this pic: “massey-fergucide”.

[I should note that Malkin's satirical pictures are just eye-catches on her main-page sidebar link and do not appear in the articles themselves; since the sidebar changes frequently, you may not see the pictures at the links.]

I’ve said some pretty harsh things about Islam here, believing as I do that among religions, particularly the Abrahamic religions, that it is especially toxic, the creed of a violent warrior’s cult. (Unlike the others, such as Christianity, which can be twisted into advocating violent proselytization, Islam must be twisted into a “religion of peace”.)

But are such ideological attacks wise? Brian Micklethwaite over at Samizdata argues that it is a wise, perhaps even necessary, strategy in the Long War, and that it is beginning to result in massive apostasy.

In this spirit, I at first thought that whereas Soviet communism was ideologically breakable, Islam is not breakable. More than a billion souls believe in it, and however true it might be that it is evil and repulsive nonsense, saying this would accomplish very little. It would merely poke the hornet’s nest with a stick. But slowly, I have been coming round to thinking almost the complete opposite. Not only does denouncing Islam as evil nonsense establish the mere right, of us civilisationers, to denounce Islam - along with our right to say anything else we might want to say - true or false, nice or nasty, sensible or daft. Such talk also, I am starting to believe, strikes a dagger into the heart of the enemy camp, by spreading doubt in it about basic beliefs and hence sewing discord and confusion. I used to think that Islamists were indifferent to such ideological attacks. Now, I am starting to believe that they fear them very much. Hence all the murder threats. They sense that this is one of their weakest and potentially biggest fronts in the struggle. The biggest front of all, in fact.

Yes, yes, read the whole thing.

And follow his pointer to this widely-linked article arguing that apostasy is widespread and on the rise.

Dr. Edwin Leap tells us a story from the ER:

We expect it from a child.  From little ones with lacerations and dog bites, broken bones and IV placements.  ‘Daddy please!  I want to go home!  Can we go home now?’  We’ve seen it untold times in our medical lives.  And there the daddies stand, holding the hands of their precious sons and daughters.  They may be tough as iron, but they tear up as they see the pain and fear in their children’s eyes.  I’ve seen some get angry, and threaten me, or threaten to scoop up their little prince or princess and run out the door, even as they knew it would be the wrong thing.

But yesterday, as I placed the local anesthesia in her gray-covered scalp, and as I placed the staples that would close her wound, my 93-year-old patient cried out, in the mist of her dementia, ‘daddy don’t let them hurt me!  Daddy, help me!’  And then, ‘grand-daddy, help!  Grand-daddy don’t let them!’

I did the math.  Her daddy was probably born around 1880 or so.  Her grand-daddy around the 1850’s.  Their faces were etched into her mind.  She might not remember yesterday, but she remembered the men whose arms held and sheltered her when she was a child.  And there, on that hospital bed, in the bright lights of the year 2008, when the world would have been almost unrecognizable to her father, or to her grandfather, she lay calling to them down the long ages.

Read the whole beautiful thing.

There are times, folks, when I really hate being a cold-hearted skeptic, when I almost despise myself for rejecting the promise of Heaven, of eternal Life after the death of my body’s meat. I understand all too well why people long to believe, and why so many intelligent, educated, compassionate folks do. I wish I could, I wish it were so. I can’t, though.

I recently posted a video featuring the ever-so-honest Mayor Daley voicing his deep and abiding trust of the people he so humbly serves. I should have noted that it opens with praise for “Rev. Pfleger”. Pfleger? you may well ask, who the hell is he?

Short form: Pfleger is a minister who uses his pulpit to make blatant political appeals–an activity forbidden to 501(c)(3) charities. (The state prohibiting the free exercise of religion? Abridging Free Speech? Hey, you take Uncle’s money, you follow Uncle’s rules, dig? Pfleger pays his taxes like the rest of us mortals, he can run his yap all he wants.) He’s openly called for a second-amendment advocate to be “snuffed“.

Today, via 45superman, we see him get puffed by an openly-communistic paper as he tries to disarm those he would deliver to the children of Stalin.

Yes, here’s an irrefutable mathematical proof that Invisible Superherovillain From Outerspace Allah means for me to submit to him.

Irrefutable, of course, for anyone who believes in numerology, or who believes that when you see a horsey in the clouds, it’s because Allah sculpted it as proof of his existence.

I like it that early on, they use “God” instead of “Allah”, and “submission” instead of “Islam”. At first glance, it could be a Christian site.

Via P.Z. Myers at Pharyngula.

Oh, and allow me to re-iterate:

There is no god, not even Allah, and Mohammad, may piss be upon him, was a child-molesting mass murderer.