You suck Jonah Goldberg

Dear Mr Goldberg

I read your article on the L.A.Times website that related your feelings about people who display a Darwin or Evolve fish on their vehicles. I found your rambling dissertation to be offensive to me as an atheist and full of the smugness typical of Christians of my acquaintance, the same smugness that you are so quick to find offensive in those unknown and unmet individuals who choose to display their atheism in a place where you (how awful) may observe it and be offended in return. The rather bizarre recursiveness in this amuses me I admit.

You seem to have lost the point that folks make with these symbols. When I am presented with a vehicle hosting one of the many Christian bumper stickers out there, I do not take offense at their message. Of course privately I am dismayed that any modern citizen with a weakness for the superstitious should feel the need to advertise that fact. I feel pity for them that something as personal as faith (if I were to cut them a break) should be prostituted openly so that I am forced to “witness” their anonymous and fundamentally fruitless shout at the Devil. A fact that Christians in North America seem to fail to understand is that they are a majority amongst us only due to apathy amongst those who have inherited a religion from their parents and not yet acted to discard it. Why should my atheists be any less entitled to state their faith (in science) than your Christians? Really?

You ask your reader to believe that we atheists should aim our public arrows at some more worthy target. How very Western of you. The fact that the generic Muslim you wish were targeted by this insult you feel is less likely statistically to be white, American or in a position to write for or read the L.A. Times is perhaps more revealing than you think.

As to your article, well I am embarrassed if this is the best that West Coast journalism has to offer on the increasingly jarring juxtaposition of modern science based thought and 1st Millennium voodoo of either faction. Europe has a major challenge coming in how to adapt to fundamental religious thought inside an increasingly secular society. You could have spoken about that. You could have even tried to opine about the difficulties of maintaining faith in our own society, in the face of continuing scandal that afflicts both traditional and new age Christianity.

Instead you chose to reduce these important and relevant issues and weave them into a poorly constructed and ultimately worthless bit of fluff journalism. What happened? Did the dog eat your homework? Did you sleep late and rush to the press without your notes?

This email is getting too long for my taste, I have no desire to flame you ad nauseum. Suffice it to say that I thumb my nose at you sir.

Evolve
The Dude

click on this link to waste 10 minutes of your time reading his pap, http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-goldberg1apr01,0,5893988.column

When are you going to mock me? she said

Well that sucks

The Wizard of Christchurch, an icon of the city and familiar to me from varsity 30 years ago has decided to roll up his pointy hat and depart the city for good. Such bad news. Link. If you have no idea who the Wizard of Christchurch/Wizard of New Zealand then check his wiki page.

Book reviewed: Beneath the Sands of Egypt by Donald P. Ryan

Okay so just because someone may be an expert in a subject doesn’t mean they are qualified to write about it. Donald Ryan may be a marvelous Egyptologist but he is a terrible writer. You know if the book had focused more on the “hard” topics like preservation or actual archaeology then it would probably have been worthwhile but instead it becomes a really light weight restating of his career and some poorly remembered and badly recounted anecdotes that do not do enough to flesh out the tome. Awful, avoid.

Magnitude 5.5 earthquake shakes Rotorua

A wide area of the North Island was shaken tonight by a deep-seated earthquake close to Rotorua.

Reference Number 3449463/G

Universal Time January 18 2011 at 8:45
NZ Daylight Time Tuesday, January 18 2011 at 9:45 pm
Latitude, Longitude 38.12°S, 176.18°E
Focal Depth 150 km
Richter magnitude 5.5
Region Rotorua
Location

• Within 5 km of Rotorua
• 190 km south-east of Auckland
    
• From Magnitude 5.5 earthquake shakes Rotorua

The Pood as Prey

The Pood as she would appear to a top level carnivore

I got given one of those tree cams that folks use to measure the amount of deer using a trail before they set up a hide to shoot the spot. I was giving it a test run outside the back of the house and noted this snap in amongst the photos it had collected tonight. Apparently Pood was smart enough to know something was up.

Book reviewed: Nazi Empire Building & the Holocaust in the Ukraine by Wendy Lower

After reading Mendelsohn’s book about his family that had been murdered by EinsatzKommando in the Ukraine I decided to educate myself a little and learn more about the Nazi occupation of the Ukraine in general. I had two choices here, the book Harvest of Despair by Berkhoff and this one, by Wendy Lower. All I can say really is that Wendy needs a better editor. The book, while useful, was so disjointed and repetitive that is was almost impossible to read as a complete narrative. It jumped back and forth, in time, in context, horribly hard to read.

This is what happens when you make your book purchasing decision based on available format. Simply put, this book was available as an eBook, the other wasn’t.

Not that it had no redeeming value, I learned about Himmler’s fantasy of SS communities in the East and of Hegewald, his aborted farming community for ethnic Germans. Just that whatever information the author had gathered here was so poorly organised as to be almost useless. Don’t bother.

Book reviewed: The Lost, a Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn

I have read extensively on the subject of the Holocaust and related subjects. Initially I read of it as a companion subject to larger volumes on WW2. Then I spent some time reading more specifically of the German experience of the slaughter through such books as Goldhagen’s one on the Order Police Battalions in the East. It is understandable that most of what I read was related through the eyes of the perpetrators since logically they were the survivors. This book was my first experience of a sustained account of the elimination of the Jews in the Ukraine from the Jewish perspective. The author, Mendelsohn, is an American Jew, one whose family abruptly lost a branch when the Nazis gained control of Polish Western Ukraine. His relatives, a small family consisting of a Great-Uncle, a Great-Aunt and three cousins all perished between 1941 and 1944. This book is more of a story of how he discovered their stories than of the tale of their fate alone.

When I first began to read this book I had a degree of difficulty getting into the cadence of how the author writes. He writes like an old relative speaks. Since his own Grandfather was known in his family as a story teller, one for whom the telling of the story is as important as the story that is told, it made me wonder if the author wasn’t subconsciously using an oral narrative pattern in his writing. Once you get used to it the style is quite engaging, it’s like you are listening to the author tell you the tale, with all of the delays, detours and word play that is usually lost in formal prose. I struggled at first and then I stopped trying to fight the author and just sat back and enjoyed it.

Enjoyed is a tough word to use when describing a book that basically describes the murder of a family and the extinction of a nation. But the book is enjoyable. Not just for the tale but for the journey that the author had to undertake to discover it. There are so many coincidences in Mendelsohn’s tale, chance meetings and off hand comments that lead the author out of a dead end and finally to a concluding chapter that is as revealing as fully as 50 years of time passing can be. The conclusion is absolutely worth working through the book. There is revelation, betrayal, redemption and final loss. Amazing book.

Civilization V, you know it’s just Civilization all over again eh?

So despite knowing exactly what was going to happen I went ahead and bought the new Civ 5. Yeah I said to myself, it will just be like Civ 4,3,2,1 but prettier. And it was. If you want to do this cheaper, just buy Civ 4 and squint.

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Book reviewed: Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman

Chuck is a journalist. Not a novelist. He’s a social commentator, primarily on the music industry. He writes for rags like GQ, Rolling Stone et al. What this means is that what you read in this book is not a coherent narrative but a collection of his short essays from his various publishing outlets. His personal zeitgeist if you will.

But having said that I have to say that he is an interestingly intense character who has a singularly entertaining way of writing. Like most people I get tired of that really fast. So being forced to stay engaged for a short duration of what is effectively a reprint of an online article or magazine column isn’t too onerous.

And just so we are clear, Chuck is a bloody funny guy with some remarkable insights. I wish I had his wit.