An interesting side-by-side comparison of the debate using publicly available sources and information. Ultimately, this data makes it apparent that the skeptics are primarily reliant on misapprehensions about the data, the effort to garner that data, or outright misinterpretations.
Mishmash
A collection of sorts + a reading log.
About the author
Writer. Bookseller. Ourobourus.
Nations need identities, and these identities are based on stories, not facts
Charles Bowden
Years ago, I concluded that all concentrated forms of energy in human hands become dangerous. The state mutates into the tsar, the lane becomes the sterile corridor of the freeway, the fire morphs into the nuclear pile, the songs go corrupt and become propaganda. Freedome becomes slavery and valor descends to shock and awe. God becomes the church.
Charles Bowden, The Wisdom of Rats.
Sumerians Look On In Confusion As God Creates World
End of the year hilarity from the Onion.
According to the cuneiform tablets, Sumerians found God’s most puzzling act to be the creation from dust of the first two human beings. “These two people made in his image do not know how to communicate, lack skills in both mathematics and farming, and have the intellectual capacity of an infant,” one Sumerian philosopher wrote. “They must be the creation of a complete idiot.”
The progression of an economy such as America’s from agriculture to manufacturing to services is a natural thing.
Ronald Reagan, 1985.
Who Stole Hitler's Corpse?
I would have just assumed that Hitler’s corpse was with Geronimo’s skull, used in occult rituals at Skull and Bones’ keggers. But, it was only the KGB using their patented “Rasputin” method.
Help others get ahead. You will always stand taller with someone else on your shoulders.
Bob Moawad
Local Bookstores, Social Hubs, and Mutualization
An interesting article about the future of the bookstore. With Amazon eating bookstore’s lunch at the top and middle, and Walmart and Costco eating at the bottom, it’s only a matter of time before one of the large bookstore chains fails.
"An obituary does not propose a solution."
From Harper’s Magazine “Final edition: Twilight of the American Newspaper” by Richard Rodriguez:
We will end up with one and a half cities in America—Washington, D.C., and American Idol. We will all live in Washington, D.C., where the conversation is a droning, never advancing, debate between “conservatives” and “liberals.” We will not read about newlyweds. We will not read about the death of salesmen. We will not read about prize Holsteins or new novels. We are a nation dismantling the structures of intellectual property and all critical apparatus. We are without professional book reviewers and art critics and essays about what it might mean that our local newspaper has died. We are a nation of Amazon reader responses (Moby Dick is “not a really good piece of fiction”—Feb. 14, 2009, by Donald J. Bingle, Saint Charles, Ill.—two stars out of five). We are without obituaries, but the famous will achieve immortality by a Wikipedia entry. National newspapers may try to impersonate regional newspapers that are dying or dead. (There have been reports that the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal will soon publish San Francisco Bay Area editions.) We already live in the America of USA Today, which appears, unsolicited, in a plastic chrysalis suspended from your doorknob at a Nebraska Holiday Inn or a Maine Marriott. We check the airport weather. We fly from one CNN Headline News monitor to another. We end up where we started.
