Well, most people I know told me their apartments shook during the night. We felt nothing. One colleague said his stuffed animals all fell of the shelf. He thought it was the cat, up to mischief again. Then he felt the tremors in his seventh-floor abode.
This morning’s death toll in Abruzzo is 179, according to Corriere della Sera.
Things will probably get worse before they get better.
p.s. For those who wish to know all there is to know (so far), with about a gazillion links to choose from, Cricket Diane is obsessively tracking the action.
Ron Rosenbaum has an interesting reflection on the 2012 cult, which I’ve never heard of before (but then again, I don’t really follow these things). It’s typical pseudo-prophetic mishaguss. And many people lap it up.
“Why am I so fascinated with unmitigated full bloom looniness? Shouldn’t we just laugh it off? Unfortunately nonsense like this has led to millions of dead from religious wars over just such clashing idiocies. I think it reminds us that this kind of baseless belief is at the heart of all religions and that man has suffered immeasurably since the beginning of civilization from it and that, it’s looking more likely that it will cause the death of enlightment civilization, just a brief candle in the vast darkness of ignorance.”
I, too, am fascinated by unmitigated, full bloom looniness. Recall The Secret? We all should be so fascinated, because we live in a world full of apocalyptic death cults and nuclear weapons. Also, we should be slightly worried for the future of our planet and our civilization.
Today’s nutjobs might be tomorrows deathmobs. The point is worth making.
I’m no talmudist, and I’m not even capable of reading Aramaic. But from time to time I like to pry open my copy of Abraham Cohen’s Everyman’s Talmud and troll for wisdom. It’s a distillation–one of the first in English–of the oceanic collection of post-biblical Jewish folklore, wisdom, law and other treats (I know this is a poor summary, but I’m rushing through this) which form the underpinnings of modern Jewish culture. I’m assuming there are still people out there who’ve either never heard of it, or have an extremely vague working definition of what the Talmud is. Of course, this is entirely understandable, as it is one of the most maligned books in the history of the world. And one of the most overpraised.
Anyway, what drove me to this post was the skeptical tone of one (anonymous?) rabbi’s remark about charity–one of the great themes of talmudic moral hairsplitting. Should you give to the poor? Of course! It’s a mitzve to give, but a shanda to receive. But I never would’ve anticipated a remark like this:
“We must give credit to the imposters among the poor; were it not for them, if a man were asked for alms and did not give them at once he would be incurring punishment.”
In essence: since a good portion of beggars are misfits and crooks, there is nothing especially evil about casting an incredulous eye when the seemingly downtrodden ask you for change. Like most other things in life, it’s a question of individual judgement.
p.s. There are no links in the post because there is too much to wade through–both good and bad–on the internet. Just type “talmud” into any major search engine and see what I mean.
Deborah Lipstadt brought this to my attention, but I recently had a dream about Ward Churchill. No shit.
He’s on the Chomskyite fringes of public discourse and, like other acolytes of the Dean, has come into hard times for saying really stupid things in public.
He doesn’t matter much, on the whole. He’s not worth getting upset about, even. He’s not well-spoken, like Noam, nor does he have any big achievements under his belt. He doesn’t get invited to speak on Al-Manar or Al-Jazeera–just at my alma mater, VCU. No shit.
So just sit back and dig his style. Straight up, no chaser.
Robert Green Ingersoll had many memorable things to say about a great many topics. He loved Shakespeare and Thomas Paine above all other authors. Most people have never heard of him, but he was one of America’s most famous speakers in the late nineteenth century.
Ingersoll had this to say about Darwin’s then-novel theory of evolution by natural selection:
“I believe that man came up from lower animals. When I first heard of that doctrine I did not like it. My heart was filled with sympathy for those people who have nothing to be proud of except ancestors. I thought, how terrible this will be upon the nobility of the Old World. Think of their being forced to trace their ancestry back to the duke Orang Outang, or to the princess Chimpanzee.
After thinking it over, I came to the conclusion that I liked that doctrine.”
Shmuley Boteach has a worthy rebuttal to Christopher Hitchens in today’s JPost.
As far as the New Atheist lawfirm Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins and Dennett goes, the one I’ve always been half-hearted about is Hitchens. He is an excellent writer, and it is hard not to be persuaded by him, but sometimes he comes out with such screeds that you just want to say, “Stick a sock in it, Hitch!”
Marc Di Martino 